Thoughts on the East (New Directions Bibelot) by Thomas Merton

Author:Thomas Merton [Merton, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2416-1
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2014-08-22T16:00:00+00:00

THOMAS MERTON ON ON HINDUISM

The Significance of the Bhagavad-Gita

The word gita means “song.” Just as in the Bible the Song of Solomon has traditionally been known as “The Song of Songs” because it was interpreted to symbolize the ultimate union of Israel with God (in terms of human married love), so the Bhagavad-Gita is, for Hinduism, the great and unsurpassed song that finds the secret of human life in the unquestioning surrender to and awareness of Krishna.

While the Vedas provide Hinduism with its basic ideas of cult and sacrifice and the Upanishads develop its metaphysic of contemplation, the Bhagavad-Gita can be seen as the great treatise on the “Active Life.” But it is really something more, for it tends to fuse worship, action, and contemplation in a fulfillment of daily duty which transcends all three by virtue of a higher consciousness: a consciousness of acting passively, of being an obedient instrument of a transcendent will. The Vedas, the Upanishads, and the Gita can be seen as the main literary supports of the great religious civilization of India, the oldest surviving culture in the world. The fact that the Gita remains utterly vital today can be judged by the way such great reformers as Mohandas Gandhi and Vinoba Bhave* both spontaneously based their lives and actions on it, and indeed commented on it in detail for their disciples. The present translation and commentary† is another manifestation of the living importance of the Gita. It brings to the West a salutary reminder that our highly activistic and one-sided culture is faced with a crisis that may end in self-destruction because it lacks the inner depth of an authentic metaphysical consciousness. Without such depth, our moral and political protestations are just so much verbiage. If, in the West, God can no longer be experienced as other than “dead,” it is because of an inner split and self-alienation which have characterized the Western mind in its single-minded dedication to only half of life: that which is exterior, objective, and quantitative. The “death of God” and the consequent death of genuine moral sense, respect for life, for humanity, for value, has expressed the death of an inner subjective quality of life: a quality which in the traditional religions was experienced in terms of God-consciousness. Not concentration on an idea or concept of God, still less on an image of God, but a sense of presence, of an ultimate ground of reality and meaning, from which life and love could spontaneously flower.

It is important for the Western reader to situate the Gita in its right place. Whereas the Upanishads contemplate the unconditioned, formless Brahma, the Godhead beyond created existence and beyond personality, the Gita deals with brahman under the conditioned form and name of Krishna. There is no “I-Thou” relationship with the unconditioned Brahma, since there can be no conceivable subject-object division or interpersonal division in him, at least according to Hindu thought. In Christianity, too, the Godhead is above and beyond all distinction of persons. The Flemish and Rhenish mystics described it as beyond all form, distinction, and division.

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