Why would one want to study the Bhagavad-gītā?
Is the world just an accident, or is there meaning behind it? Does my existence itself have a purpose? What is the point of struggling so hard to live if, ultimately, everyone has to face death?
« The Song of God—Volume 1, chapters 1-6
Why would one want to study the Bhagavad-gītā?
Every human being at some point looks around and wonders: Where did all of this come from? What is the purpose of this world, and what is my role within it? We may often be absorbed in our daily routine, with our plans and duties, but in the background, the same silent question remains: Is the world just an accident, or is there meaning behind it? Does my existence itself have a purpose? What is the point of struggling so hard to live if, ultimately, everyone has to face death?
The Bhagavad-gītā begins from this very human search for meaning. The background is dramatic: Arjuna is torn between performing his duty as a warrior, fighting in a war against his own kinsmen, and abandoning everything in despair, confused about what his ultimate duty is in such a situation and how to find the inner strength to fulfill it. Our situation may not be as dramatic, but we all face our own share of struggle, and the fundamental questions are similar.
When it comes to questions, however, especially the important ones, there is something essential: context. Without context, it is not possible to give accurate answers to practically any question.
Here we come to the greatest trap of modern times: the sources we turn to for answers often give us the wrong context, and this leads to mistaken conclusions. Modern science reduces reality to matter, energy, and mathematical laws. Cosmology tells us that the universe structured itself by chance, without a designer; biology tells us that life developed as a result of blind evolutionary forces, without any fundamental purpose; neuroscience tells us that consciousness is merely a product of brain chemistry, while psychology tries to explain love, morality, faith, and other complex human emotions as the result of instincts, hormones, traumas, social conditioning, or evolutionary pressures.
In this way, one field after another tries to explain the higher by reducing it to the lower: intelligence to matter, love to chemistry, morality to survival, and religion to emotional need. We are asked to believe that, somehow, galaxies, living cells, beauty, intelligence, conscience, and the search for eternity all emerged from blind particles and unconscious forces.
Here is a way to consider it: Let’s imagine a friend arriving with a brand-new BMW. You ask where he got the car from, and he answers that it was the product of an explosion in the junkyard: a meteor fell, creating a huge explosion that made all pieces of metal rise high in the sky. Somehow, by chance, all the pieces fell into the right places, creating a beautiful car; coincidentally, the last model.
Most of us would not be very impressed by such an answer. We might even feel offended, concluding that he is belittling our intelligence. Similarly, we could imagine someone telling us that a beautiful book, complete with illustrations, hardcover, and a dust jacket, came out of an explosion in the stationery store. One could consider that there could be a small possibility that all the papers, paints, and glues would fly into the air and land exactly in order to create a book with letters and illustrations, but most people would not be very satisfied with this explanation.
In both situations, our rational side automatically rejects this kind of explanation, considering it absurd. Even unconsciously, we understand that anything with purpose and function must have been produced by someone. There is no case in recorded history of a car appearing out of an explosion in a junkyard or a book emerging as a result of papers and paints flying through the air. A book is not just paper, ink, and glue. It is a creation of intelligence, a carefully arranged sequence of words meant to convey meaning. One may argue that today a book may be written by AI, but this doesn’t invalidate the argument, because AI also did not appear by chance: it is also a human creation. The existence of a system complex enough to write books only strengthens the argument.
In every case, someone needs to work hard to design and manufacture the car or to write, print, and bind the book. Computers are the fruit of decades of technological advancement; modern AI systems were developed through millions of hours of work by people from different fields of knowledge, and so on. Things don’t appear by chance.
We may not know who designed the project, who was involved in the production or development, as well as the different technologies employed or the challenges they faced, but we can assume that talented people were responsible for it. Unconsciously, we understand that every creation has a creator. We may not understand who made it or how or why, but we understand that it was made by someone.
However, when we speak about the universe itself, the same common sense appears to get suspended somehow. We are told that the universe itself, the totality of all planets and stars, including all the books, cars, computers, and human beings, appeared from matter organizing itself, without the guidance of a superior intelligence.
Modern cosmology describes the universe as expanding from a singularity. As the universe expanded and cooled, energy and particles are said to have gradually formed the first atoms, which later gathered under the influence of gravity into stars and galaxies. Inside stars, heavier elements were produced, eventually making possible the existence of planets, and so on. Biology then tries to explain that the conditions in the early earth’s atmosphere gave rise to self-replicating RNA molecules, which, conveniently, found themselves encased within membranes, forming protocells that gradually developed into the first living organisms. From there, through an evolutionary process that took billions of years, these primitive organisms are said to have evolved into the complex forms of life we see today, including cows, elephants, and human beings. In this explanation, consciousness appears only later, as a product of the body; intelligence comes after matter; and meaning is something invented by human beings after a long chain of accidental events.
It may appear to be logical at first, because it is clothed in technical language, but the central thesis remains the same: the assumption that order appears from chaos, life and consciousness from dead matter, and meaning from a mechanical process that serves no ultimate purpose.
However, chance is not a satisfying explanation for complex creations. An earthquake may create a pile of rocks, but how long would a chimpanzee randomly typing letters on a keyboard have to type before producing an Encyclopedia Britannica? One year? One thousand years? One billion years? Would it not be more rational to accept that the encyclopedia didn’t appear by chance, but through the hard work of a team of human beings?
“Chance” is just a word; it is not the cause of anything. It just means I don’t know the cause, but don’t want to admit it. If I don’t understand how my house was built, I may just honestly say that I don’t know, but if I say that it appeared by chance through the action of rain, wind, erosion, and other natural processes, my explanation becomes childish. Not knowing the builder or having no register of his work does not prove that there was no builder.
Everything with order, purpose, and function has a cause, and the more complex the creation, the more intelligence its creation must involve. A book may be written by a single author, but a car requires a team of engineers, designers, workers, managers, and others, organized into a complex system. What then can be said about the whole universe, which includes all the books, all the cars, and all the people who created them?
A rational conclusion is to presume that just as every object around us has a creator, the universe itself also has a creator. It is also logical to presume that this creator is more intelligent and powerful than us, since His creation is much more complex, including even self-replicating intelligent beings capable of questioning their own existence.
Now, if we conclude that there is such a highly intelligent creator, would it not be logical to presume that He would communicate with us? And if so, would we not want to hear what He has to say? If He were to give us a book explaining who we are, why we are here, why we desire and suffer, what our duty is, and how we can attain perfection, would such a book not be the most important book we could ever study?
This is exactly the premise of the Bhagavad-gītā. The word “gītā” means “song,” and Bhagavān is the Sanskrit word for the Supreme Being, the one who possesses all opulences. Therefore, “Bhagavad-gītā” means “The Song of the Supreme” or “The Song of God.”
The Bhagavad-gītā gives the missing context we need to understand life and find our path through it. It explains that we are not these imperfect and temporary bodies, but the eternal souls living within them. It explains that the universe is not just an accident, but an orderly manifestation, working under the supervision of the Supreme. It explains the difference between matter and spirit, karma, duty, the action of the three modes of nature, the causes of desire and suffering, the nature of the mind, and the path of spiritual advancement that can free us from this material bondage. Most importantly, it reveals that the Absolute Truth is not just an impersonal force, but the Supreme Person, with whom we have an eternal relationship.
The Supreme can be understood in three aspects, defined in the Vedic literature as Brahman, Paramātmā, and Bhagavān. The Brahman aspect is impersonal and vague. One who realizes this aspect sees the divine as a spiritual force that is beyond this material cosmos. One who realizes the Paramātmā aspect understands that, apart from being the source of this impersonal spiritual force, God also has a form and is present everywhere as the Supersoul. Finally, one who realizes the Bhagavān aspect can understand that the Supreme Lord has an unlimited spiritual form, which is the source of all that exists, and that He is the supreme friend, with whom we can develop a transcendental relationship. God has many names, but His original name is Kṛṣṇa, the all-attractive.
This supreme Bhagavān aspect is defined by the term “Supreme Personality of Godhead,” coined by Śrīla Prabhupāda. This term indicates that, although unlimited, He has a personal form. This form, however, is fully spiritual, eternal, and not bound by material limitations and imperfections, as in our case. Originally, we are also pure like him, as His parts and parcels, but this original, eternal nature has become covered due to our identification with the material body. The Gītā teaches us how to become free from it.
Chronologically, the Bhagavad-gītā was spoken by Kṛṣṇa to Arjuna 5,000 years ago, just before the beginning of the Battle of Kurukṣetra, and was recorded by Vyāsadeva as part of the Mahābhārata. For thousands of years, it has accompanied humanity as one of the most profound spiritual and philosophical texts ever known. It has been studied by philosophers, reformers, kings, scholars, householders, and spiritual seekers from many cultures and backgrounds. The Gītā’s influence is not limited to one nation, one class of people, or one historical period, because it deals with universal questions. Thoreau, for example, wrote that “In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad-gītā, in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial.”
But what is the proof of the authenticity of the Bhagavad-gītā? How could we be sure that it was not just some old philosopher who, lacking anything better to do, decided to fabricate something that would fool everyone? What would be proof of the Bhagavad-gītā’s authenticity?
This could be answered with an example: suppose someone comes to you with a cake. How could you be sure that this is a real cake and not just a plastic imitation? There is an easy way to ascertain it beyond doubt: you just need to taste it. By the taste, consistency, etc., we can easily understand whether a cake is real or not. As they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
Similarly, the best way to be sure of the authenticity of the Bhagavad-gītā is to study it. When we do so, we quickly find that the Bhagavad-gītā is not an ordinary book. It speaks to the householder dealing with practical problems with the same gravity with which it speaks to the philosopher. It is relevant both to the student and the renunciant, the worker and the leader, the self-realized and the person overwhelmed by suffering. One who is confused finds guidance; one who is disturbed finds discipline; one who is afraid of death finds information about the immortality of the soul; one who is searching for God finds the path of devotion, and one looking for answers finds the ultimate purpose of life.
This is something unique in the Bhagavad-gītā. Different books serve different people: there are books for physicians, engineers, computer science students, etc. An engineering book will not be very useful for a cardiologist, for example. In the case of the Bhagavad-gītā, however, we are offered a complete framework for understanding reality. It teaches us how to see ourselves, the world, our actions, our happiness and distress, our relationships, and everything else in the context of the supreme source behind everything. In this way, the Gītā gives us not simply answers to fixed questions, but the whole context in which all important questions can be understood.
Here, we will study the topics of the Bhagavad-gītā with this purpose: not merely to accumulate information, but to understand life and its ultimate goal. We will also see how the teachings of the Gītā can be applied in practical life, helping us not only to solve our immediate problems but also to progress toward the ultimate perfection.
Read the entire book:
« The Song of God—Volume 1, chapters 1-6
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