What I've been reading
Jan. 4th, 2005 08:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
forsythSo, the other weekend, I read the Bhagavad Gita. It's renowned to be one of the greatest poetic epics of India.
Which is why I can't get past the feeling I must be missing something. Maybe it's not a very good translation, or maybe it's something that sounds better spoken, or maybe I just came into it with too many of my own attitudes (but how else can you come into something? Whose attitudes should you have?), because I didn't get much out of it. There were a couple general impressions I got through the whole thing, one was Krishna going "Oh m3, I r0x0r," the prince going "You r0x0r, Krishna, tell me more about how great you are." Another was, not unsurprisingly, justification for the caste system of India, telling people to be happy where they are and do the jobs they've been told to do, which doesn't really make it unique.
Then there's the third, which is also shared with a lot of other kinds of religion and philosophy, and I think has done a lot of damage to things. There was constant emphasis through the whole thing on the world being fake, just an illusion, something to be denied and transcended. Denial of the world as real and putting "us" as separate from it is one of the things that helps lead to mindsets that end up with people treating the world like something to be used up, not somewhere we have to live. We're not separate from the world, we're a part of it. It's not something for us to just use however we want, we need to live here, too. Denying the world, or your body, as real, or as "you" is, I think, one of the worst separations that's happened in thought and has caused a lot of harm throughout the ages.
So, maybe I'm just biased. Or did I miss something? Or just have a bad translation?
[meta: mindscribbles]
Which is why I can't get past the feeling I must be missing something. Maybe it's not a very good translation, or maybe it's something that sounds better spoken, or maybe I just came into it with too many of my own attitudes (but how else can you come into something? Whose attitudes should you have?), because I didn't get much out of it. There were a couple general impressions I got through the whole thing, one was Krishna going "Oh m3, I r0x0r," the prince going "You r0x0r, Krishna, tell me more about how great you are." Another was, not unsurprisingly, justification for the caste system of India, telling people to be happy where they are and do the jobs they've been told to do, which doesn't really make it unique.
Then there's the third, which is also shared with a lot of other kinds of religion and philosophy, and I think has done a lot of damage to things. There was constant emphasis through the whole thing on the world being fake, just an illusion, something to be denied and transcended. Denial of the world as real and putting "us" as separate from it is one of the things that helps lead to mindsets that end up with people treating the world like something to be used up, not somewhere we have to live. We're not separate from the world, we're a part of it. It's not something for us to just use however we want, we need to live here, too. Denying the world, or your body, as real, or as "you" is, I think, one of the worst separations that's happened in thought and has caused a lot of harm throughout the ages.
So, maybe I'm just biased. Or did I miss something? Or just have a bad translation?
[meta: mindscribbles]
