Dharma

[Sanjay Krishnaswamy]

At 11:07 AM 9/19/97 -0300, Vaska wrote:
>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? 

Not at all!  Please check out the paragraph I wrote again and I'll clarify
if it's not there. [Aside: just for purposes of revealing biases I am
Brahmin and read Sanksrit extensively].
>
>>	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.
>
I don't like where you clipped this!  The follow-up was something to the
effect of, or you can ignore all that and simply act.  [In fact, Krishna
even says that, for those who act well, all of scripture is as useful, as a
small canteen when there's water all round, or some such -- don't have the
text at work obviously]  But OK.  

>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, no, no!  Because the Mahabharata is _very much_ an epic that was
reworked and reworked to effect political/cultural agendas -- a great epic
nontehless but very programmatically edited.  In some ways it amazes me
that the Bhagvadgita section survived.   Be warned also -- mistranslations
of all these things abound; Sanskrit is impossibly tricky.

>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.  
>

This is not my interpretation, nor my teachers'.  Not to question you --
there are many many schools of vedanta and they get where they're going a
lot of ways.  I am really interested in where you are getting this idea and
would be grateful if you could send me some particular passages/refs you
are following. Hinduism just _isn't_ Stoicism.  Again, do be careful --
Sanskrit is very subtle and mistranslations abound becuase it is can be
insanely hard to translate, and if the translator "thinks he knows" what
the passage intends to say, then, well, he shortcuts.  (Come to think of it
I have an English Bhagvadgita at home, which translates the thing about
water I have above, to say that the scriptures are like a great big
nourishing tank of water --- rather opposite to the actual sense of the
thing!) For this reason it is very traditional among Hindus that you try to
have some experienced teachers with you as you tackle this stuff.

Thanks for your ideas.
					SK
____________________________________________________________________________
Sanjay Krishnaswamy
sanjay at visidyne.com