Comments
of Jack Hawley
Professor of Religion and Chair of the Department
Last Tuesday's attack on the World Trade Center
attacked us all, wherever we were. Wendi Adamek
and I, with our wonderful teaching assistants
Annabella Pitkin and Paul Weinfield, were getting
started with the introductory course on Asian
religions. We were preparing the way to read
the Bhagavad Gita. It's a text about
equanimity in times of war--the worst war imaginable,
world war. Part of the Gita's painful
message is that you learn the hardest, deepest
lessons from a time of extremity. What are they?
One
first-year Barnard student in my section Wednesday
said she thought they were about balance--a balance
of three kinds of yoga, or discipline. One yoga
is not enough. First, there's a yoga of knowing,
or insight. The Gita talks of this in
reflexive terms, designating it atman,
a word usually translated "self," but self not
just as the immutable core of things but as
reflexive process, as in self-knowledge. In
the Gita's plot, this really only occurs
when you know that it's your family and relatives
who are arrayed against you: the Gita's
hero is asked to kill his cousins.
And
so are we. We in New York feel ever more pride
in our global linkages, our diversity, our miscegeneation.
It's the strength of New York and the very definition
of America. So who is "us"? Who is "them"? The
great virtue of this troubling text is that
it names our war as a war within the family,
a very extended family. That's the field where
real self-knowledge becomes possible.
The
second yoga or discipline is a yoga of action,
karma yoga. The Gita talks about learning
to act disinterestedly, without regard for the
fruits of one's actions. It's a chilling lesson
when you think of religious suicide as a main
strand in what we're calling "terrorism" these
days. But the Gita's hero is no suicide
killer. He's depicted as having the problem
of too much compassion, so he shrinks from battle
when it's actually necessary.
Is that our problem? I wonder if it isn't that
we still need first to learn compassion, and
let that teach us where the battle is. The President
took a step in that direction last night when
he voiced the question, "Why do they hate us?"
Of course, he didn't go any further, he didn't
answer it. His only answer was they hate us
because we're good. No, people around the world
hate America because it's rich and powerful,
and because it uses its wealth and power far
too often in arrogant, destructive ways. That's
where at least one battle is--self-restraing,
maybe even modesty.
Then
there's a third yoga, the yoga of feeling, the
discipline of intense personal attachment--love--which
gets balanced in with the rest. In the Gita
this is focused on Krishna, the deity associated
with that love, who's hiding in the midst of
the awful battle that's about to begin. Hiding:
he's there in the subtle things, in the twists
and turns, even the infractions of morality
as we know it. What sense to make of this? I
confess: at some basic level I'm stumped. But
maybe it's at least worth remembering that Hindus
have often understood that devotion to a deity
is in some way greater than the deity itself.
Yesterday,
just before it rained, I went down to Union
Square to see the memorial created by hundreds
of New Yorkers on the south side of the park:
flowers, candles, posters, prayers, flags--expressions
of love and grief on ground that became sacred
because of them. A lot of people have asked
how God could allow this catastrophe to happen.
Others go further: How could God have caused
such a thing to happen? These questions are
embedded in the Gita too. Krishna reveals
himself as death with a capital D--kalosmi:
death, that is, life-and-death. But the text
doesn't end on this note. It ends with Krishna
appealing to his human counterpart, our hero,
to be "me-minded," as he says (Bhagavad Gita
18.65): to focus on the transcendental "me"
who is present everywhere. I got a glimpse of
that yesterday at Union Square, as hundreds
of people reached out to the lost ones who had
said to them, "it's me." They answered back,
"It's me." And in that place, at least, they
also reached out by begging for self-discipline
and restraint.
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