Dharma

[Vaska Tumir]

Back to Sanjay before I take off for Ithaca: 

>Re the caste system, it is unobvious that Hinduism is a "repressive
>system."  

Depends which caste you happen to belong to, no?  

>	Karma as justification for caste system?  I assume you're thinking,
>something like, you done wrong, so now you're pissed on.  Maybe but again
>not quite fair.  Karma becomes an important idea with Krishna's
>_Bhagavadgita_, a lecture on action and its consequences.  This text is in
>many ways very anti-Brahmin or anti-ritualistic; Krishna really takes
>morality out of the hands of the priests and introduces an idea called
>karmayoga -- dicipline-of-action. Difficult to summarize but the idea is,
>yes, you can attain salvation through meditation, listening to the priests,
>ritual.

The best bits of demystification I've come across in the Hindu tradition are
in certain of the "Upanishads" actually, *way* before the "Mahabharata" epic
[and what a tour de force that is] and the "BhagavadGita" section thereof --
no listening to the priests, no rituals, no Krishna-whorship, no bhakti-yoga
[frequently associated with Krishna, but not exclusive to his cult] -- or
any other type of worship either.  

"Not anything to fear or adore" in one English translation.  Amazing stuff
really, and extremely close to what the Stoics came up with much, much
later.  Spinoza never came up with anything anologous to the Upanishadic
method of meditation I'm referring to, but his God, too, was/is "nothing to
fear or adore."  Natura naturans, something like a cross between Brahma and
Vishnu [functionally speaking], sans any athropomorphism, though.

Shantih, shantih, shantih....
Vaska