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A review by savaging
The Bhagavad Gita by Simon Brodbeck, Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
2.0
It feels hugely disrespectful to rate a founding religious text. Saying Oh, this is the most important thing in your world? I give it two stars!
So consider this a caveat that I am wholly ignorant of Hinduism, and a Content Warning: Irreligion.
Friends, warn me against taking personal advice from Krishna. That Beautiful-Haired One has some unsound suggestions. For instance:
Arjuna: I don't want to kill my family
Krishna: But it's your duty. You're a warrior. And anyway battle's fun!
Arjuna: But how will I live with my grief?
Krishna: take a cosmic view. I am the great destroyer -- I've already killed everyone. So how could you really be killing them? (Also, think what the others will say about you if you run away)
I prefer the pre-enlightened Arjuna, with his questions and his grief, to the triumphant warrior with his answers. This text, along with the Bible, strengthens my belief that if I ever taught a class on Maltheism I wouldn't need any text besides the religious works themselves.
And I probably didn't get much out of the cosmic ontology and suggestions of how to be enlightened. Krishna says I should be "neither acquiring nor keeping, self-possessed," and I'm completely on-board. But then I find myself too interested in the impure and unholy. Something so lovely in the women and dogs and other lesser beings. And the demonic:
Demonic men
recognize
neither exertion,
nor its cessation,
neither purity
nor even good action.
There is no truth
found in them.
They do not have truth,
and have no place to stand.
They say that
the earth is godless,
not created
in causal succession.
How else is it caused? They say:
‘It is caused by desire!’
So consider this a caveat that I am wholly ignorant of Hinduism, and a Content Warning: Irreligion.
Friends, warn me against taking personal advice from Krishna. That Beautiful-Haired One has some unsound suggestions. For instance:
Arjuna: I don't want to kill my family
Krishna: But it's your duty. You're a warrior. And anyway battle's fun!
Arjuna: But how will I live with my grief?
Krishna: take a cosmic view. I am the great destroyer -- I've already killed everyone. So how could you really be killing them? (Also, think what the others will say about you if you run away)
I prefer the pre-enlightened Arjuna, with his questions and his grief, to the triumphant warrior with his answers. This text, along with the Bible, strengthens my belief that if I ever taught a class on Maltheism I wouldn't need any text besides the religious works themselves.
And I probably didn't get much out of the cosmic ontology and suggestions of how to be enlightened. Krishna says I should be "neither acquiring nor keeping, self-possessed," and I'm completely on-board. But then I find myself too interested in the impure and unholy. Something so lovely in the women and dogs and other lesser beings. And the demonic:
Demonic men
recognize
neither exertion,
nor its cessation,
neither purity
nor even good action.
There is no truth
found in them.
They do not have truth,
and have no place to stand.
They say that
the earth is godless,
not created
in causal succession.
How else is it caused? They say:
‘It is caused by desire!’