THE NEW ETHIC OF THE BHAGAVADGITA (Hindu Ethics)
THE NEW ETHIC OF THE BHAGAVADGITA (Hindu Ethics)
We have noted how in the Rig Veda there were to be seen what might have been the beginnings of a truly ethical religion, had not the stream of religious thought been diverted into other channels. In later literature we have seen an almost complete severance of morality from religion. This severance was not absolute, for we have seen in our study of the Upanishads how much of their ethical teaching was the outcome of their peculiar metaphysical and theological position, and down through the history of early Indian thought ethical doctrine was influenced in various ways by religious and philosophical conceptions. But the prevailingly pan the is tic philosophy which had become dominant in India had little place in it for morality in the usual sense of the term. In the highest flights of religion morality was simply tran scended. Moral as well as other distinctions were resolved in that experience in which the individual soul realized its unity with the Supreme Soul.
Hinduism, however, has always been mindful of the needs of all who have belonged to its fold, and also of the needs of the various sides of human nature, and it has not failed to provide practical guidance to man. In the Law Books we have teaching regarding practical life in all the varied relationships into which men enter, and in all the various stages of its development, It is not the business of the expounders of the Law to deal with ultimate questions, and, as we have seen, they contradict themselves or one another when they attempt to estimate the relative values of different expressions of human activity.
So, though the legal literature is in one sense our most important source of information regarding Hindu ethics, it is so chiefly indirectly as furnishing us with knowledgeof the forms of conduct actually practised. For it is important to observe that the duties inculcated in the Law Books have buta remote connexion with the true end of oneтАЩs being. In thevarious lines that philosophical speculation has taken, the thoughthas remained constant that manтАЩs true being is not realized inworldly activity, that man, in so far as he is absorbed in finite experience of any kind, is missing his true vocation, is deludedand ensnared, and that his true goal lies in deliverance from the bonds of finite existence and realization of his identity with the Absolute. Accordingly, the ethical belongs to a sphere essentially distinct from that in which manтАЩs true end is attained. It has its value for men at a certain stage of development, but the tendency is to hold that when one attains to the higher the ethical is simply negatedтАФone rises above good and evvil So in the Law Books while the details of the moral life are expounded, the significance of the moral life in itself is left in obscurity.
The various details of good conduct are laid down with great exactness, but one is left wondering what is the meaning of the whole. Religious sanctions, no doubt, are offered for moral actions, but this fact only serves to bring into clearer light the essential unsatisfactoriness of a religious position which admits of two standards not simply related to each other as higher to lower, but implicitly contradicting each other. To the Western student such a way of regarding the ethical seems thoroughly unsatisfactory. To use a phrase of the late Professor James, the moral struggle ^feels like a real fightтАЩ. If there be expei'iences of a higher order than the ethical, they transcend the ethical not by way of simple negation but by way of fulfilment. There must have been thinkers from an early date in India who felt that in ethical experience they were more closely in touch with reality than a logical interpretation of much of the teaching of the philosophers would admit. Even in the Upanishads the validity of moral distinctions is frequently emphasized. But, at the best, good deeds only help the soul on towards a state of being from which the attainment of emancipation becomes easier.
They contribute to the acquisition of merit, but in no way to the breaking of the wheel of karma, which is the true goal. That is to say, morality is, strictly speaking, non-essential to emancipation ; in the highest religious experience it has no place. The tendency to take morality more seriously expressed itself perhaps earliest and most definitely in the Bhagavadgita. This is a work the origin of which remains to this day known with but little certainly. It has come down to us as an interpolation in the great Sanskrit epic, the MahabJidrata^ where it is set forth as a conversation which took place between Arjuna and Krishna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra. ┬л Krishna was acting as ArjunaтАЩs charioteer, and before engaging in battle the latter paused, appalled by the prospect of slaughter, and put to Krishna the question whether it was right to engage in the slaughter of his fellow-men.
Many questions have been raised regarding the origin of the work, and to most of these no certain answer has as yet been returned ; but Professor Garbe has made some suggestions, which the latest scholarship has rejected, but which have this gi'eat value that they have served to bring into clear light the lines of contradiction running through the work. Put verybriefly Garbers position is that the Bhagavadgltd in the form in which we now have it is a composite production. The original work which was composed possibly in the second century B.C., and which represented the faith of the Bhagavatas, modified by the introduction of elements from the Samkhya Yoga, was overlaid, probably in the second century A.D. by Vedantic doctrine, the result being that in the work as we now have it there is an irreconcilable confusion of theistic and pantheistic ideas. He thinks it is quite easy to separate the later additions from the original work, in which we have Bhagavata doctrine presented from the author's peculiar pointof view. If GarbeтАЩs theory be sound, then the thought of theBhagavadgitd becomes comparatively consistent and intelligible.
If it be unsound, he has at least done us this service that far more thoroughly than any preceding writer he has analysed the work for us in such a way as to make clear to us the diverse elements which in it have been confused together, so that we can study them in isolation as actual tendencies thought. We need not accordingly commit ourselves to any judgement as to the merits of the case, not even to an expression of opinion regarding the prior question of the compositeness of the work, a question raised by other writers before Garbe. The glaring inconsistencies which it contains seem to be best explained on the hypothesis that it is composite, but if the truth be otherwise we should still have to say that the author had a definite and intelligible doctrine, in his exposition of which he was hampered by the fact that he had failed to free his mind from the influence of the teaching of another and contradictory philosophy.
