Godsong Read online

  ALSO BY AMIT MAJMUDAR

  Dothead (poems)

  The Abundance (a novel)

  Partitions (a novel)

  0°, 0° (poems)

  Heaven and Earth (poems)

  Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now (editor)

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2018 by Amit Majmudar

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Majmudar, Amit, translator, commentator.

  Title: Godsong : a verse translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, with commentary / by Amit Majmudar.

  Other titles: Bhagavadgåitåa. English.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2018. | “This is a Borzoi book”

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017025404 (print) | LCCN 2017036363 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524733476 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781524733483 (ebook)

  Subjects: | BISAC: POETRY / Inspirational & Religious. | POETRY / Ancient, Classical & Medieval. | POETRY / American / General.

  Classification: LCC BL1138.62 .E5 2017 (print) | LCC BL1138.62 (ebook) | DDC 294.5/92404521—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017025404

  Ebook ISBN 9781524733483

  Cover design by Janet Hansen

  v5.2

  a

  For Ami

   My Listener

    My Guide

     My Goddess

          My Song

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also by Amit Majmudar

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Multiplicities: A Foreword to the Bhagavad-Gita

  A Note on the Words I Didn’t Translate

  A Note on the Proper Nouns

  Godsong

  SESSION 1 Arjuna Despairs

  SESSION 2 Samkhya

  SESSION 3 Karma

  SESSION 4 Renounce Through Knowledge

  SESSION 5 Renounce Through Works

  SESSION 6 Concentrate

  SESSION 7 Know and Discern

  SESSION 8 Brahman the Imperishable

  SESSION 9 Royal Wisdom, Royal Secret

  SESSION 10 Expansive Glories

  SESSION 11 Envision the Universal Form

  SESSION 12 Devote Yourself

  SESSION 13 The Field and the Knower of the Field

  SESSION 14 Tell Apart the Three Gunas

  SESSION 15 The Highest Human Godhood

  SESSION 16 Tell the Divine from the Demonic Inheritance

  SESSION 17 Tell Apart the Three Kinds of Faith

  SESSION 18 Free Yourself Through Renunciation

  Listener’s Guides

  LISTENER’S GUIDE TO SESSION 1

  LISTENER’S GUIDE TO SESSION 2

  LISTENER’S GUIDE TO SESSION 3

  LISTENER’S GUIDE TO SESSION 4

  LISTENER’S GUIDE TO SESSION 5

  LISTENER’S GUIDE TO SESSION 6

  LISTENER’S GUIDE TO SESSION 7

  LISTENER’S GUIDE TO SESSION 8

  LISTENER’S GUIDE TO SESSION 9

  LISTENER’S GUIDE TO SESSION 10

  LISTENER’S GUIDE TO SESSION 11

  LISTENER’S GUIDE TO SESSION 12

  LISTENER’S GUIDE TO SESSION 13

  LISTENER’S GUIDE TO SESSION 14

  LISTENER’S GUIDE TO SESSION 15

  LISTENER’S GUIDE TO SESSION 16

  LISTENER’S GUIDE TO SESSION 17

  LISTENER’S GUIDE TO SESSION 18

  A Note on Technique

  A Note About the Author

  MULTIPLICITIES:

  A FOREWORD TO THE BHAGAVAD-GITA

  1

  When I was a teenager, I wanted to know the truth. I was always hearing how “all religions say the same thing,” but that clearly wasn’t the case. In two of the religions, I was going to be reborn after I died, while in the other three, I was going to hell. This divergence filled me not so much with fear as with puzzlement.

  After all, the basics in science and medicine enjoy a fair deal of consensus. To this day, I can see the genuine controversy about the best treatment regimen for this disease, or the genuine uncertainty about the etiology of that one. But scientists and laypeople agree wholeheartedly even on the most counterintuitive truths. Our senses tell us the planet is flat and stationary, the sun moves across our sky, and solid things are solid. Our sciences tell us the planet is round and moves around the sun, and solid things are mostly empty space—so many tiny nuclei, each separated from its electrons by a relatively vast emptiness. Our sciences won out rather quickly. Even the Catholic Church’s resistance to modern astronomy seemed brief, considering. Eventually they just gave up and went along with it.

  When it came to the basics of metaphysics, all I found were quarrels. Why were there so many religions, anyway? Just as bafflingly, why were there religions at all? Atheism, the absence of evidence on its side, had stayed on message since before the days of the Buddha, but atheists accounted for only a sliver of the world’s population. I didn’t feel a resistance to it—materialism makes pretty good sense, after all—so much as mere disinterest. To this day, I feel for atheism and agnosticism the same unaccountable detachment I feel from poems and paintings that don’t move me.

  Maybe that was the explanation, I recall thinking. People loved their own religions and diverged in their opinions the same way they loved some kinds of music or art and not others. It was a matter of taste. There was no disputing religion for the same reason there was no disputing taste. I couldn’t “learn” religious truth, like a hard science; I could only experience it, like a work of art, or else study it, like the history of art and aesthetics: different cultures, at different times, finding different speculations beautiful. Beauty was “truth,” but only in the Keatsian sense, not in the Gaussian sense. Mathematical beauty was universally, absolutely, literally true. Religious beauty was true, too, but only in a private, almost figurative sense.

  Unless one false assumption underlay all these contradictions, within and between faiths. Maybe there wasn’t one truth to know. Maybe there were many absolute truths—as many truths, as many ideas of the divine, as there are human beings.

  I simply had to keep seeking until I found my own. I would know it when I found it.

  This song of multiplicities, the Bhagavad-Gita, is my truth.

  2

  What does it mean to “know” the truth, anyway?

  What the Gita taught me—or tried to; it took me years of rereading before this hit me—is that its own assertions aren’t as important as the relationships among its characters. The Gita itself has stretches of dry, somewhat complex exegesis. I’m not saying those parts don’t matter, but they gain their power through their place in the larger drama.

  If you look at religions in practice, the claims they make are almost irrelevant. Whether the dead go to heaven or hell, or get reborn, or go to heaven or hell transiently and then get reborn, or get weighed on a scale against a feather, or simply vanish from existence—“knowing” this means less to us than we think.

  We go to a religion to meet a God. We don’t actually want to know the t
ruth the way we know facts. We want to know the truth the way we know a loved one, personally and intimately. After Arjuna sees the cosmic form of Krishna, notice how he begs Krishna to return to his earlier form.

  As father would son, or friend would friend,

  As lover would lover, please, God, bear with me!

  God, let me see you again in that [human] form—

  The most common relationship, across religions, is that of Lord and Servant, or King and Subject. Krishna himself, though never a king, is usually painted with a golden crown on his head. Hindus look back to the Rama-Rajya, or Kingdom of Rama, the same way Muslims look back to their religion’s early days under the Prophet. Allah’s own ninety-nine most beautiful names include Al-Malik, “The King,” and Malik-ul-Mulk, “The Owner of Sovereignty.” The Bible is full of references to the LORD, to “serving” God, to the King of Kings, and the kingdom of heaven on earth.

  Other relationships have always flourished besides this one. The Upanishads, a set of Hindu scriptures that come before the Gita, show us the Guru and Student. The word Upanishad itself means “to sit near,” as a student might at the feet of a teacher. For most of the Gita, Krishna speaks and Arjuna listens: The Gita is, after all, the world’s most famous didactic poem. Eastern religions other than Hinduism tend to favor this teacher-student relationship exclusively: The Buddha and Lao Tzu presented their truths in the form of teachings, not commandments. In the New Testament, too, disciple comes from the Latin root word for “to learn.”

  Our first teachers are our parents. The -piter in Jupiter, etymologically, comes from pater, “Father.” The Father who is part of the Christian Trinity has antecedents as far back as the Sky Father, Dyaus Pita, of ancient Vedic religion. Ishtar and Demeter may be dead, but in Hindu India, the Mother Goddess thrives—and commands, in my ancestral Gujarat, nine nights of dancing every year. She has many names: Durga, Shakti, Gayatri, Amba…Astride her tiger, with her sword and mace and crown, She remains history’s earliest feminist.

  In that relationship, God is the father or mother. The soul is the mother, and the God the child, in the stories of Yashoda and her mischievous changeling Krishna. Orthodox and Catholic Christianity treasure this relationship in the cult of Theotokos, the “God-Bearer,” the Virgin Mary. The human “serves” the divine as caregiver. It’s an inversion worth pondering: this idea that truth is vulnerable and needs us to protect it.

  Motherhood isn’t the only relationship religion has conceived for women. Catholic nuns call themselves brides of Christ, and theirs is a sexless marriage—but in classical Hindu poetry, a youthful Krishna and Radha play out the metaphor between physical union and mystical union. The Gita may be austere in this regard, but much of classical Sanskrit religious poetry is not for prudes. Hinduism went on to conceive of unconsummated romance, too, between female soul and male God. The saint-poet Mirabai composed songs that called out to Krishna as her longed-for husband (to the indignation of her worldly spouse). Although this relationship is absent from mainstream Islam, the Sufis used to write poems about the “Beloved,” once upon a time; and the Arabic word exactly analogous to “atman,” nafs, remains feminine in gender.

  The would-be bride of a God, across these traditional cultures, was subordinate to her Husband. What all these relationships have in common is a hierarchy. The Lord has more power than you; that’s why He is the Lord. The Guru has more knowledge than you; that’s why you’re sitting at his feet.

  The Gita imagined a relationship in which the soul and God are equals. It’s a relationship mostly missing from every other scripture: friendship.

  3

  What made this friendship conceivable?

  One of the great paradoxes of Hindu religious thought is that it undermines, quite radically, Hindu India’s own social structures. India the society had, and has, stark divisions of caste, wealth, tribe, and language. Some developed over time, and some were there at the beginning and worsened over time, but the earliest Hindu thinkers conceived all forms of life to be more than just equal. They conceived of them as identical.

  This holds true not just for people but for “the fish of the sea and birds of the air.” In Genesis, these are created for Man to name and dominate. In the Upanishads, human beings are merely part of a continuum, forever risking slippage, through rebirth, into nonhuman forms of life. For this reason, the atman is similar to but not equivalent to the soul. Soul is an English word, and it fits in the Biblical tradition. It was created apart from the divine. The atman is not separate from, or created by, the divine. It is divine; it is equal to Brahman because it is identical to Brahman. Tat tvam asi, “You are That,” is the Sanskrit memory-phrase that encapsulates the idea. (I have since found the truth coded into my own first name: I am It.)

  The Gita inherited this idea, and it’s this idea that makes the friendship possible. Vishnu enters almost every kind of relationship over the course of his life as the avatar Krishna. He becomes Yashoda’s son, Balarama’s brother, Radha’s lover, Rukmini’s husband—and Arjuna’s best friend (as well as teacher). After witnessing, in the immensities of Sessions 10 and 11, Krishna’s cosmic secret identity, Arjuna cries out for forgiveness:

  Whenever—rashly, thinking you a friend—I’ve said,

  “Hey, Krishna! Hey, son of Yadu! Hey, friend!”

  Carelessly, or even if affectionately,

  Not knowing the majesty of you,

  And if I disrespected you—for the sake of a joke,

  Or at play, or in bed, or sitting and dining,

  Alone, or before the eyes of others—boundless ever-

  Enduring Krishna, I beg your forgiveness for that!

  The Gita enacts for us the slippery nature of being. Krishna becomes Vishnu becomes All, and then, quite effortlessly, runs the transformation in reverse. The whole revealed cosmos reverts to Krishna. Because the Secret really is Identity—from the Latin root word idem, meaning “same.”

  Living beings are forever slipping among mortal forms. We call this death. Live through one death, and what was human in this life may well become an animal; live through another, and that animal may well become a human being again. Because the atman is Brahman, the self is the other. “You are That” gives immediacy to our relationship with the living things around us. Human beings aren’t just part of an ecosystem. We have been, or may become, any of the other species that constitute it.

  You can plug this idea, like a trigonometric identity, into that broad-minded old saying of the Roman playwright Terence: “I am divine, nothing divine is alien to me.” Every creature, in its atman, is divine, and so no creature, no foreigner, no tribe or caste or sect is alien to us. We really should do unto others as we would have them do unto us. After all, we are each other.

  4

  This is how the Gita balances multiplicity and unity—and transcends them. “Monotheism,” “polytheism,” and “pantheism” are scholarly simplifications that do not apply here. We don’t really have the grammar to express such ideas. The process breaks language. Of Brahman we would have to say things like “It are manyone.” Or else, “It selved ourself into myselves.” The purer my fidelity, the more corrupt my grammar. Until I recall that Brahman, by definition, is Neti, neti, “Not this, not that”—not gendered, not neuter, not self, not other. Yet the temptation to speak of Brahman never goes away. (Not sayable, granted, but at the same time: not unsayable…)

  The thousands of Gods and Goddesses of the Hindu pantheon—and all other religious figures—are seen as diffractions of Brahman into imagination and history. Syncretism is the wrong word. Hinduism does not syncretize, it devours and incorporates. That is why the Buddha, after a long period of rivalry, got absorbed into the sequence of Vishnu’s avatars, and why Mahatma Gandhi used to quote Jesus at every prayer meeting but had no interest in converting to Christianity. The scripture central to Gandhi’s life was the Gita—he translated it, prepar
ed a commentary on it, and recited or heard it daily—and the Gita teaches your center to hold by delighting in diversity, in multiplicity.

  Devotees of Gods go to the Gods;

  Devotees of forefathers go to forefathers;

  Devotees of spirits go to spirits.

  The Gita is a scripture which, in spite of its military setting, stays clear of the lust for universal domination. This verse, for example, shows the Gita embracing and authorizing forms of worship thought of as “primitive” or “outmoded.” Theism, even then the most common form of worship, shares space with ancestor worship and animism. Ancestor worship venerates a tradition and gains wisdom and strength from the dead, or a partly imaginary idea of the dead. (Today you can see it in the American veneration of the Founding Fathers—that is, of the white male landowning oligarchs who serve, today, as the inspiration for a purer, more inclusive democracy.) I picked the word spirits to translate bhutani, a Sanskrit word that could be Englished equally as beings and as creatures. This choice connected bhutani with the Latin anima, which became, etymologically, the root word of animism. According to Vedantic thought, the living atman is divine, in trees and animals as in Gods and Goddesses. The animist lighting incense before a local tree, therefore, does something metaphysically valid. Modern-day environmentalism is an attempt to return to the mindset that once held trees and rivers sacred. It justifies itself with reasons but gains its fervor from this instinctive faith, suppressed for generations.

  This is not the Gita’s only multiplicity. The three yogas of knowledge, action, and devotion offer more than one way of “yoking,” or (re)joining, the human to the divine. Our behaviors are not the results of the angel and the devil sitting on either shoulder. The three gunas, Purity, Power, and Darkness, braid themselves into a personality, and each guna branches out, in Krishna’s description, into a dozen or so characteristics. This embrace of multiplicity reflects itself structurally in the variety of tones and strategies Krishna uses with Arjuna—strict and berating, detached and philosophical, tender and personable.