I seem to be losing some readers – maybe partly because I haven’t been doing a very good job spell-checking my posts, and partly because my parsing of the Upanishads just isn’t very intersting to a large audience. I guess I am one of the very few who actually likes poking around in these super ancient texts and making sense of them. Ah well. But I admit that some of these entries just aren’t that interesting. So I’m going to skip around and skip ahead. And I will try to be more careful about the spelling.
February 15, 2009
I’ve been reading the Katha Upanishad, formally belonging to the Black Yajurveda. Olivelle says that it is obviously a late work and never formed an integral part of the Brahmana of that school. The text has an episode that relates the establishment of various ritual fires that he thinks was originally part of the Kathaka Brahmana but is now housed in the Taittirya Brahmana. It’s pretty cool, even though it is extremely confuising and without the commentary would make no sense to me.
It ends up being a conversation between Naciketas, a boy, and Yama, Death. Naciketas’ father sends him to Death’s abode in a kind of fit of pique; Death isn’t home, and because the rules of hospitality to a Brahmin are violated (no food, drink, etc. offered), Death owes him something, and he grants him three wishes.
Clever boy, Naciketas asks for knowledge. Well, first he asks to be returned alive to his father. Second he asks how to construct the fire altar that leads to heaven, which is also asking how to make sacrifices and good works not decay. For his third he asks how to exit the cycle of birth and re-birth. How to get beyond dying just to live, just to die again, just to live again, etc.
Death begs him to ask any other question, have any other wish fulfilled: lust, wealth, power, greed . . . Naciketas asks, “What good are any of those things when one knows one is just going to die? And then live again? What is the solution? What is beyond all of that?”
Death praises his wisdom and insight and begins to speak about brahman. From here through the rest of the chapter this really sounds a lot more like the Gitas. It is poetry, for one thing, but much of the phrasing and the ideas are the same.
February 16
Just wanted to record this verse for myself, from KaU 6.11
When senses are fully reined in,
That is Yoga, so people think.
From distractions a man is then free,
For Yoga is a coming-into-being
As well as a ceasing-to-be.
Not by speech, not by the mind
Not by sight can he be grasped.
How else can he be perceived
Other than be saying “He is!”
February 21
I am so in thrall to this novel [Stones From the River] that it is hard to do anything else. There is so much we forget, or just don’t know, about the Holocaust. But in the last 20 years all of these books and movies have been coming out to fill in the picture. At first, I guess the first 40 or 50 years, it was all we could do as a world to absorb the images of the concentration camps. The reality of them. The large-scale, totalitarian, bureaucratic brutality. Uncovering the details of the work camps, the starvation, medical experiments, torture, varieties of mass murder and experiments in extermination. Learning how it all unfolded and whose ideas were whose, who gave tho orders, holding people responsible – that came next.
And then trying to understand how an entire nation went along with this. That’s what is really difficult. At first the blame settled on the Gestapo, the SS, Hitler’s elite. Then spread to his army. But as more was known, it had to be faced that it took an entire country to vote for, applaud, allow, cheer, turn in, look the other way, inform on neighbors, parents and friends . . . the whole nation was guilty. But now we’ve gone one step further and realized that can’t be true, either. Because people escaped. People were hidden through the entire war and longer. From the roundups in ’37 and ’38 all the way to the Allied Liberation. It is so much more complicated.
These books – like Hegi’s and Lost and others – paint pictures of hundreds of small towns and cities across Germany and Poland and the Ukraine in which people of different ethnicities and religions lived and had lived for centuries. They’d had their problems and there might have been tensions between groups, but for the most part the towns were functioning pretty well, and there were a great many cross-ethnic, cross-religious economic and social ties, including ties of marriage. There was also room for people who didn’t fit in, and who were unproductive. There almost always is in small-ish groups. Like the town drunk, or the woman who lost her mind when she miscarried, or that little man who drools and was never “right” from the day he was born.
I mention these misfits because one of the things we so conveniently forget in our retelling of the actions of Nazis in the US is that they didn’t just go after Jews. Jews were first, sure, because they were the most obvious “cause” of the nation’s economic problems to Hitler. They were the most obviously different, the easiest to target and they had a larger pool of wealth. Plus whatever personal hatred and pathology you want to throw in and the ancient beliefs about Jews killing Jesus and eating Christian babies, etc. It seems important to note that children were taught in school – even Jewish children – these beliefs about Jews, yet before 1937 it didn’t stop Jewish and Christian children from playing and being friends together.
What we forget is that by the time they’d pretty well rounded up the Jews, they had an efficient work and death camp system going. They weren’t going to just stop. Plus the economy hadn’t gotten magically better, and they still needed to rationalize and fight the war. You know what else isn’t rational and efficient? A town supporting blind, deaf, crippled, mentally retarded, and psychologically disturbed people. Adults for sure, but children will just grow up to be burdens. Off they go. Homosexuals are not only sinners but traitors, since they aren’t producing children for the state. How long would it have taken them to get around to barren women? Women past menopause?
The people on the internet forums here in Wisconsin make me shudder because they sound just like this. Every month it is a different group of people they want to “round up” and “send away” or “get rid of.” No, they aren’t proposing concentration camps . . . that I know of. But they have the same idea that it is okay to label a group you believe is unproductive or unhelpful to the community and have them taken away. They seem to have no inkling that once you begin that, it never stops. The process becomes itself insatiable and sooner or later they will come for you.
February 22
In relation to Stones . . ., although not intended, I don’t think, as an indictment of the Church, or not entirely, there were many times while reading the novel that I became so angry at the Catholic Church I was almost shaking. The number of lives it has twisted and bent, deformed and maimed, retarded and delayed, not to mention the millions of lives it has outright stolen, ended and murdered. The teachings of that Church, I believe, since it has been able to become a as powerful, widespread, influential and long-lived as it has, have done more than any single institution in the history of humanity to destroy humans – what is best in us. They did it by labelling the very parts of us that make us human sinful, so that people would have no choice but to recognize their “original sin” and thus their need for the Church. If you have curiousity, questions, which is doubt, desire, a thought for yourself, anger, envy – all of which are part of human nature – then you have to confess them to a priest. You might even have to pay for that privelege. Then there will be someone who will always know the dark secrets of your heart and be able to make you feel shame whenever they feel like it.
Of course it isn’t a bad thing in itself to have a system that encourages people to be unselfish, avoid envy, etc. All religions do that. What is so evil about the Catholic Church is that it infused people with shame for just being who they are. For being human. For feeling things and experiencing things it is normal and natural to feel. No, of course it would be better if no one experienced envy. But it is normal to feel envy. Shaming those who feel envy is NOT HELPFUL!!! It simply compounds the problem and makes them feel worse. How about instead providing instruction for what to do when you feel envy? Saying envy arises from th ese causes, it is perfectly natural, but since it feels bad, here is how to avoid the causes and thus avoid the feeling. No shame, just compassion and good directions. Oh yeah, that’s Buddhism and Hinduism.
And in fact, it isn’t the God of this religion, as I thought for a long time. It is to a certain degree, but look at the difference between how Jews experience Him and how Catholics do!
That shame – inscribed on the souls and embodied by children as soon as they begin to understand what is going on, along with the teachings of exclusion. “Only we are right. Everyone who believes even slightly differently is going to burn in hell for eternity” makes for very frightened, lonely people. And what do frightened, onely, shame-filled people do? They hate. They strike out. They find ways to attack anyone who is different. Or they attack themselves. They subject themselves to terrible mortifications and they deny themselves all the pleasures of life because they don’t deserve them. Often, in the meantime, deforming their children in the process.
It is sick. Sickening, disgusting, hateful. Evil. Yes. The Nazis would never have been able to do their work if the Catholics hadn’t set the stage, prepared the ground. Here in the US today, what prevents teens from getting the information they need to protect themselves from unwanted pregnancy, cervical cancer, and deadly disease? A Church that believes if you talk to teens about sex they will go and do it. And if they do, these same teens, who swear their parents love them, will be terrified to go home; ashamed now and sure their parents will “kill them” because of their sin. These same parents will vote against their conscience on every single issue: war, taxes, education, healthcare, the environment, etc., because their priests say they must vote for the anti-abortion candidate or risk mortal sin. So the Church is saying that all the dead who would result from a longer unjust war, a truly exploitative and faulty health care system that denies coverage, practices that are destroying the very planet and will eventually kill us all – these do not matter whe weighed against abortion being legal. That is the only law God cares about. The only lives God cares about are the unborn, apparently.
Well, I need to stop ranting. My anger and hatred of the Church serve no purpose and get me nowhere. I just wish it was possible to expose children to choices, so they would be free to decide for themselves which philosophy they wished to be indoctrinated with. I doubt the version the Church espouses would last very long, in that case.
My SU reading is very cool, very interesting. It is the Svetasvatara, Chapter One, and it begins with a kind of list of questions that people always ask about brahman: What is its cause? Why were we born? By what do we live? Governed by whom? Do we live in pleasure or pain? And in the questions it summarizes a lot of the positions taken up by different schools in the other Upanishads. “Should we regard it as time? As inherent nature, as necessity, as chance, as the elements, as the source of birth, as the Person?” 1.2
Then it gives an answer, which I’ll have to consult footnotes to get all of. It starts by saying that those who have meditated have seen God, the self, the power, all hidden by their qualities (gunas?). Meaning – we don’t need to convince you of this part, because you have all seen it? That’s kind of how it reads to me. Then our expertise says brahman is:
A wheel that is one-rimmed and three-fold
Wheel is implied, not stated. One rim = primal nature or prakrti. Three-fold = the gunas of Samkhya (sattva, rajas, tamas)
With sixteen tips and fifty spokes
16 tips = five elements , five organs of perception, five organs of action and the mind
50 spokes = 50 dispositions (bhava) of Samkhya listed in Samkhya Karika
Twenty counterspokes
10 organs of perception and action and their respective objects
Six sets of eight, whose single rope is of many forms
1) Five elements, intellect, ego, and mind
2) Eight elements of the body: outer skin, inner skin, blood, flesh, fat, bone, marrow, semen
3) Eight yogic powers: very small, very large, very light, obtain anything, freedom of will, subdue one’s will, lordship, supress desire
4) Eight dispositions: righteousness and unrighteousness, knowledge and ignorance, detachment and non, superhuman power and lack of it
5) Eight divine beings: Brahma, Prajapati, Devas, Gandhavas, Yaksas, Raksas, Ancestors, Prsacsas
6) Eight virtues: compasion, forbearance, lack of jealousy, purity, ease, generousity, auspiciousness, absence of desire
One rope = desire or “glittering”
That divides itself into three different paths
Footnotes say – righteousness, unrighteousness and knowledge, but provide an alternate interpretation. Johnston (1950) has argued the rope image refers to the 3 paths to liberation – knowledge, yoga and devotion (bhakti). I’d like to read that or someone, because that seems to make sense.
And whose delusion regarding the one springs from two causes.
The two causes are good and sinful actions and the one is the one from above who governs all causes. Johnston sees this as a reference to the samkyha ignorance where the self regards the 2, purusa and prakrti as just one. He may be right.
This is pretty cool imagery; in just a few words it summarizes all that has been laid out and argued about in the previous texts and foreshadows the Gitas. But there is more. One image isn’t enough. In case the wheel doesn’t work for you, the SU offers another: [Several more pages follow of analysis]
. . .
“The one God rules over both the perishable and the self. By meditating on him, by striving towards him, and further, in the end by becoming the same reality as him, all illusion disappears.”
We yearn toward God in the same way Christians do. But the end result is so different. Instead of a Judgement Day where some will be thrown into an everlatsting punishing fire or worse, and some will get to go praise yet still be separated from their beloved, we will come to “share the same reality, become the same reality as him” and “all illusion of separation will disappear” forevor. Certainly no room for punishment and shame and other ugliness like that.
The next chapter is really playful and fun. It is kind of an ode or a prayer but it has double entendres and insider jokes; its playful. For tomorrow!
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