Unit 5

English 203:  Literature of the NonWestern World

Review:

Ramayana: You should remember the plot of the Ramayana.  Rama is entirely divine.  He comes into the world to illustrate the virtuous life; a life that perfectly follows the dictates of dharma.  Because of jealously, Rama is exiled from Ayodhya to spend 14 years as an ascetic in the forest.  While in exile Ravana, the 10-headed demon king of Lanka, abducts Sita.  Rama no longer has command of an army to rescue Beauty (Sita).  Human beings -- deluded as they are -- fail to recognize God/Rama & evidently care nothing for beauty.  We are shamed by the a langur monkey, Hanuman, who recognizes God & is instantly devoted to him.  Hanuman leads a monkey army against Lanka which enables Rama to rescue beauty & brings it back to our world -- an event celebrated by Divali, the Hindu festival of lights.  Somewhat like the luminarias in New Mexico, Hindus put clay pot lamps on their flat roof houses to welcome beauty back into the world.  Gossipers malign Sita, saying that she must have been sexually molested by Ravana & is therefore no longer unsullied.  Sita jumps into a fire, which does not burn her, to prove her purity.  The trait that Rama exhibits above all others is ahimsa (non-violence), which is the same thing as total self-control.  Hindu heroes are not like Homer's Achilles who can conquer every other warrior but who has absolutely no self-control.  Hindu heroes conquer their own emotions.  Rama is the model of this.

You should remember the names of the chief characters: Rama, Sita, Laksmana, Bharata & his mother Kaikeyi, king Dasaratha, Ravana, Hanuman.

Bhagavad-Gita:  You should know the outline of the story.  Prince Arjuna is caught up in a civil war.  He is understandably grieved to be put in the position of having to kill his relatives: uncles, cousins.  Luckily his chariot driver is Krishna who reveals Hindu truths to him.  He says that Being/Atman is.  It cannot cease to be.  The Atman is what makes us alive.  It resembles the Christian notion of the soul.  The body perishes but the soul/Atman is eternal.  Because it is "imprisoned" by karma (by desire) when the body perishes the soul moves into a new incarnation & will continue to do this until it no longer thirsts for the things of this world.

Krishna tells Arjuna that his fundamental obligation is perform his caste duty (varna-dharma) with a detached attitude.  He is suppose to do his duty without emotionally investing in the outcome, which is simply maya (illusion).  The important thing is that dharma presents situations that allow us to burn up karma.  Life should be lived as though it were a stage play.  One is given a costume & lines to say (i.e., a social identity).  It is important to perform the play well, but you would be foolish to take the dramatic situation & the lines you have to say as though they really mattered.  They don't.  Only your performance (ritual or sacrifice) matters.

To help people concentrate on what is important & to help them ignore what is not important, Krishna tells Arjuna to perform his duties in the world, but to concentrate on him (God/Krishna).  This path or technique or outlook is called bhakti.  Muslims borrowed & adapted this technique in an outlook called Sufism that we will study later.  So did Arjuna kill his cousins?  Ah, you forgot the lesson already.  It doesn't matter if Arjuna is forced to kill an enemy in the performance of his duty.  What matters is Arjuna's emotional state.  Is he filled with hate & rage?  Is he inconsolable with grief?  Is he in such a funk that he will run away from his duty & his life?  Or is he self-possessed in the knowledge that all the duties in this life are only games & stage plays that offer him an opportunity for lila (divine play)?  These are the questions that matter; not who won or lost an inconsequential game.

Hindu Outlook: Westerners often express confusion about the Hindu outlook on life.  I think much of it comes from the Asian penchant to put things in a kind of negative way.  Instead of building something like the ego up in a positive way, focusing on accomplishments, Asians talk about reducing anxiety & ultimately being released from the ego.  At this point Westerners are likely to forget that when the jiva (the ego, karma, anxiety) dissipates, this is not some kind of suicidal loss.  It is liberation (moksha).  The Atman is freed from distractions, anxieties, fear, & illusion.

Hindu culture also seems exotic to Westerners because it is not reductive.  Western culture is reductive.  We always want to get down "to the bottom line" in regard to money, ethics, or physics.  We take a strange pleasure in reducing complex, interesting, & often aesthetic structures to a periodic table, cash price, or stark moral demand.

Homer told us that life is a battle & nearly every Westerner continues to believe it.  Hindus do not think that life is a battle, nor are they interested in some kind of Last Judgment that will settle every question.  They think that life is divine play & that all the trouble arises because we forget this to invent all kinds of petty complications & worries.  Hinduism prescribes various methods to exhaust our interest in the petty games we play or to see them for what they are in order to liberate us, to allow us to live the divine life.

Next week we read an elegant, high-brow Sanskrit play, which I hope will remind you of the formalism of the Ramayana.  We will also read bhakti poetry that derives from the influence of the Bhagavad-Gita.  These poems will offer you an opportunity to contrast India with China (because you know some of the great poems by Li Po, Tao Ch'ien & others).   See you next week.