Lecture Four
Bhagavad Gita
Lecturer: Wu Shiyu
Outline
I. This session begins with a review of the first
three lectures.
A. Great books are books that speak to us
individually and represent books and authors
that have made history. These books have lived
past their time and can influence our lives and
events today. Great books have a great theme,
are written in noble language, and are able to
speak across the ages.
B. The course is developed around eternal
themes: God, fate, good and evil, the meaning
of life, and how people live their lives in pursuit
of truth. The books discuss duty and
responsibility; law, justice, and government;
love and beauty; courage, honor, and ambition;
our relationship to nature; and our definition of
education.
1. Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers From Prison is
the work of a man in search of truth who found
the courage to resist evil and who gave his life
in the pursuit of good. His ideas have lived on
despite Hitler’s attempt to crush them. The civil
rights movement of the 1960s found special
relevance in this work.
2. Homer’s Iliad offers wisdom to us today in such
central themes as God, fate, and the meaning
of good and evil. It also teaches how to live life
with courage while understanding the virtue of
moderation. It is the first great work of classical
Greek literature that has come down to us.
3. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius represents the
summation of Greek thought on God, fate, and good
and evil. The Roman Empire of Marcus Aurelius, which
was the Roman Empire of the 1st and 2nd centuries
A.D., was the cultural heir of Greece, and Marcus
Aurelius wrote the Meditations in Greek. The writings of
Marcus Aurelius represent the culmination of the
transformation of the god Zeus from the capricious and
lecherous master found in the poetry of Homer to a god
who is associated with absolute truth and good and who
is equated with nature, is all-powerful, all-knowing, and
all-seeing.
C. In the same way that the Romans were the
cultural heirs of the Greeks, the United States of
today is the cultural heir of Europe.
II. The culmination of an image of god as a
vision of truth can be found perhaps as early as
500 B.C. in the Bhagavad Gita, the “Song of
God.” This work was a product of classical
Indian civilization.
A. Around 1800 B.C., the flourishing
civilizations around the Indus River were
overrun by invaders from the west.
B. The language of these invaders was Sanskrit,
also the language of the Bhagavad Gita.
Sanskrit was related to Persian and more
distantly to Greek, Latin, and the Germanic
languages.
C. These invaders, who called themselves
Aryans, meaning “nobles,” imposed their rule by
conquest. From warfare and destruction came a
new civilization that produced rich poetry,
including the Bhagavad Gita, in an epic form.
D. The religion of this people was Hinduism, a
polytheistic religion that rejects the notion that the world
of the gods is finite, but is willing to recognize any new
divine power capable of rendering supernatural benefits
to the community of worshipers. All nature was seen as
a manifestation of the divine. Sacrifice is fundamental to
this worship; it can be used to offer homage to the gods
in return for their blessings and to avert evil. Individual
gods can take many forms. As in Homer’s Iliad and the
writings of Marcus Aurelius, this polytheistic notion of
the divine can foster an image of one all-powerful and
universal god.
III. The Bhagavad Gita is part of a longer work, the
Mahabharata
A. It is a poem that presents an epic story of warfare.
B. Its author is unknown
C. The warfare in the Bhagavad Gita is a symbol of the
ongoing conflict of life and the struggle for the wisdom
to live life in a way that is meaningful to us as
individuals. It is the struggle between two warring tribes;
it is also a struggle between right and wrong and
between good and evil.
D. At the beginning of the story, Arjuna, the hero, does
not understand the nature of his struggle and wishes to
withdraw from the war.
IV. Truth is a central idea of the Bhagavad Gita.
A. The first word of the Bhagavad Gita is
dharma, or “truth.”
B. In this allegory, Krishna, the charioteer of
Arjuna, is also the image of the supreme god of
the universe; Arjuna is everyman, the soul.
Krishna explains to Arjuna how he must travel
the battlefield of life.
C. Gandhi’s statements reflect the theme of the
Bhagavad Gita. Gandhi said that it is more
important to believe that truth is God than that
God is truth. Truth comes first.
D. Krishna’s message to Arjuna is that Arjuna
must be steadfast in the truth and must fight the
battle of life understanding what truth is.
V. The Bhagavad Gita also explains that behind the
changing formations of the divine, there is one
underlying divine being who is all and that Krishna is
one of his manifestations.
A. God’s presence is everywhere throughout all things
in the universe.
B. In the Bhagavad Gita, God makes himself visible in
his true form to Arjuna. This God is everywhere
throughout the universe. The universe is contained in
one atom of this divine being, and in every person, there
is a part of this divine being.
VI. After this glimpse of the majesty of God and
the understanding that God is all, an individual
can come to an understanding of his or her role
in the universe that God has created. That role
is our soul.
A. This idea contrasts with the viewpoints seen
in both the Iliad and the Mediations. Marcus
Aurelius was unsure of the existence of the soul;
if it did exist, he believed that it came to an end
at death. For Homer, this life is what we have
and we must live it.
B. In the Bhagavad Gita, the soul endures, is
eternal, and is divine. The task of mankind is to
purify the soul and gain wisdom and truth so
that the soul can gain ultimate liberation.
C. This ultimate liberation is the next step. The
body is seen as a prison; bodily desires are the
result of false knowledge and false wisdom (for
example, the desire for power and wealth).
Wisdom enables a person to begin to shed
false desires.
1. The path of wisdom is to lead us to a stage that frees the
soul for eternity from the bondage of the body.
2. Power leads to no ultimate liberation; after death, an
individual becomes some other creature.
3. The fate an individual earns through making choices
affects that individual for many cycles of death and
rebirth.
4. The Bhagavad Gita is about making the correct choices
through wisdom. Earthly actions are good or evil and
have enduring consequences. Choices using true
wisdom allow a person to ultimately gain eternal
liberation.
D. Wisdom consists of understanding karma,
which means the task that an individual has
been assigned by God. Karma is the role and
the task of the individual. The choice to accept
karma must be made with full realization of the
difficulty of performing one’s duty. Krishna
teaches Arjuna that his duty is to fight this war.
1. A person who renounces his or her assigned task is
2.
3.
4.
5.
doomed to eternal reincarnation and suffering.
Accepting the assigned task with fear also leads to
endless cycles of reincarnation.
Accepting the task with a whole heart allows a being to
rise a step or two.
Accepting the task with supreme spirit and a fully dutiful
conscience and understanding can lead to ultimate
liberation and the pure bliss of unification with God,
which is ultimate freedom.
The decision to follow the assigned way can bring a
being to liberation. Even the greatest sinner can be
liberated by doing his or her task to the utmost.
VII. The religion of the Bhagavad Gita is not a
renunciation of life. It is the call to learn the
ultimate meaning of life. The Bhagavad Gita
answers the questions of God, good and evil,
and fate. It also deals with truth, duty, justice,
and love.
A. God is all, God is eternal and everlasting, and God
pervades the entire universe.
B. Good is following the mission of one’s life.
C. On the subject of fate, the Bhagavad Gita indicates
that every individual and particle of the universe has a
destiny. An individual must have the wisdom to know his
or her destiny.
D. Truth is everything and all things.
E. Duty and responsibility are assigned by God and may
lead away from what other people recommend.
F. Ultimate justice lies in every particle of the
universe willingly and joyfully carrying out the
will of God. The Bhagavad Gita does not
separate the world, God, fate, life, and
government. They are all mingled in the total
vision of the world and justice. Justice is not of
men but is part of the divine order. The person
of justice is unshakable and steadfast in the
truth.
G. Love led Krishna to take form in this world so
that Arjuna could see him. An individual’s love is
to become absolutely immersed in the divine; to
do that, one may forsake all things and put
oneself on God’s path.
VIII. The ultimate message of the Bhagavad
Gita is that God has created many roads to the
truth; each person must find his or her own road.
A. These roads may include ritual sacrifices, a life of
religious piety, contemplation and study, or struggle for
liberation. Gandhi understood that his path was to
struggle for the liberation of his country.
B. The Hindu never seeks to absolutely define the world
of the gods. There are many different forms of God, and
each one may have a role in leading one individual to
an understanding of truth.
C. The form or ceremonies of God are not important.
What is important is the understanding that God is truth.
That understanding gives one the courage to live life
and follow karma.
IX. The Bhagavad Gita, like the Divine Comedy,
is one of the greatest works of education ever
composed. It leads from the darkness of a life
without meaning to the clarity of God’s wisdom.
X. The civilizations of classical Greece and
classical India may have had some contact with
each other. However, classical Indian civilization
has little regard for history or for concrete
knowledge of the past. Although similarities
exist between the vision of divine glory in
Dante’s Divine Comedy and the Bhagavad Gita,
the classical Indian view would be that these
similarities represent eternal and enduring
wisdom that is deeper than history.
谢 谢！