Whenever righteousness decays

"Religion and the Anthropocene" met this morning, just as reports of Biden "inching" his way to a slim majority in swing states Georgia and then Pennsylvania were trickling in. Looks like we might have a winner, if barely a mandate, but I'll happily take it. We're a long way from knowing when or how this will happen, of course, and half of our small-group discussions were about the sense of vertigo and fear which these next days and weeks of uncertainty induce in us. In the larger class, though, students were eager to lose themselves in coursework. 

Our reading for the week? The Bhagavad Gita, which I'd scheduled for this week half expecting us not to have class. It might seem to speak to a similar moment of calm before a storm, as the assembled armies of the Pandavas and Kauravas - a family divided against itself by a series of foolish and unfair episodes - face each other for battle. The god Krishna has offered his counsel to one side and his army to the other, and the Kauravas chose the army. Arjuna, leading the Pandavas but recoiling at the thought of entering battle against his own kin, is advised by Krishna, who has taken the form of his charioteer, why he must do his duty as a warrior. Arjuna must fight, and eventually does, vanquishing his misguided relatives as was foreordained.

It's a little frightening a spectacle to contemplate at a time when so many of us are breathless with worry that violence awaits our fractured national family. But we also read from Gandhi's interpretation of the Gita, which argued that it is only superficially about war. The message is really about the transformative potential of "selfless action" and ahimsa (non-violence), just as the Mahabharata, of which the Gita is a part, is really about the futility of conflict. We'll be reading more Gandhi next week, and his understanding of how the right kind of selfless action can break cycles of violence. To bridge the two weeks I shared a recording of the final scene of Philip Glass' Gandhi opera, "Satyagraha," whose text is all taken from the Bhagavad Gita.

            ‘Arjuna, you and I have had 

many births which have passed away;

I know all of these births, but you 

do not, O Scorcher of the Foe.

 

            ‘Though I am unborn and deathless,

and the Lord of All Creation,

superior to my own nature, 

I create myself by magic.

 

            ‘Indeed, whenever righteousness 

decays, O Son of Bharata, 

and unrighteousness increases, 

then do I manifest myself.

 

            ‘In order to project the good, 

and to destroy evildoers, 

and to establish righteousness, 

age after age, I come to be.' (IV.5-8)

There's some kind of hope in these words, and comfort in Glass' music gently, nonviolently changing the world. Have a listen; you'll feel it too. 

trans. Gavin Flood and Charles Martin in The Bhagavad Gita: A Norton Critical Edition (2015), 24-25