Nagaraj/Friends,
I am not familiar with what Sri Gundappa has said regarding the Gita,but from the Introduction by Prof Sharma,I infer that it is more as a Practical guide and inspiration for day to day living within the Socio,Economical Structure,with a humane and philantrophic element,and a harmonious living as the aim.May be there are other aspects and It is not presented in the introduction.
I am presenting an Excerpt from Sri Aurobindo's Essays on Gita here;I will remove this post from this section and move it to the 'Rough Note Book' thread subsequently;at the moment,thought that this would present a perfect backdrop to post this excerpt:
Excerpt from The Essays on The Gita-Sri Aurobindo:
"At the present day, since in fact the modern mind began to recognise and deal at all with the Gita, the tendency is to
subordinate its elements of knowledge and devotion, to take advantage of its continual insistence on action and to find in it
a scripture of the Karmayoga, a Light leading us on the path of action, a Gospel of Works. Undoubtedly, the Gita is a Gospel
of Works, but of works which culminate in knowledge, that is, in spiritual realisation and quietude, and of works motived by
devotion, that is, a conscious surrender of one’s whole self first into the hands and then into the being of the Supreme, and not
at all of works as they are understood by the modern mind, not at all an action dictated by egoistic and altruistic, by personal,
social, humanitarian motives, principles, ideals. Yet this is what present-day interpretations seek to make of the Gita.We are told
continually by many authoritative voices that the Gita, opposing in this the ordinary ascetic and quietistic tendency of Indian
thought and spirituality, proclaims with no uncertain sound the gospel of human action, the ideal of disinterested performance
of social duties, nay, even, it would seem, the quite modern ideal of social service. To all this I can only reply that very
patently and even on the very surface of it the Gita does nothing of the kind and that this is a modern misreading, a reading
of the modern mind into an ancient book, of the present-day European or Europeanised intellect into a thoroughly antique,
a thoroughly Oriental and Indian teaching. That which the Gita teaches is not a human, but a divine action; not the performance
of social duties, but the abandonment of all other standards of duty or conduct for a selfless performance of the divine will
working through our nature; not social service, but the action of the Best, the God-possessed, the Master-men done impersonally
for the sake of the world and as a sacrifice to Him who stands behind man and Nature.
In other words, the Gita is not a book of practical ethics, but of the spiritual life. The modern mind is just now the European
mind, such as it has become after having abandoned not only the philosophic idealism of the highest Graeco-Roman culture from
which it started, but the Christian devotionalism of the Middle Ages; these it has replaced by or transmuted into a practical
idealism and social, patriotic and philanthropic devotion. It has got rid of God or kept Him only for Sunday use and erected in
His place man as its deity and society as its visible idol. At its best it is practical, ethical, social, pragmatic, altruistic, humanitarian.
Now all these things are good, are especially needed at the present day, are part of the divine Will or they would
not have become so dominant in humanity. Nor is there any reason why the divine man, the man who lives in the Brahmic
consciousness, in the God-being should not be all of these things in his action; he will be, if they are the best ideal of the age, the
Yugadharma, and there is no yet higher ideal to be established, no great radical change to be effected. For he is, as the Teacher
points out to his disciple, the best who has to set the standard for others; and in fact Arjuna is called upon to live according to
the highest ideals of his age and the prevailing culture, but with
knowledge, with understanding of that which lay behind, and not as ordinary men, with a following of the merely outward
law and rule.
But the point here is that the modern mind has exiled from its practical motive-power the two essential things, God or the
Eternal and spirituality or the God-state, which are the master conceptions of the Gita. It lives in humanity only, and the Gita
would have us live in God, though for the world in God; in its life, heart and intellect only, and the Gita would have us live in
the spirit; in the mutable Being who is “all creatures”, and the Gita would have us live also in the Immutable and the Supreme;
in the changing march of Time, and the Gita would have us live in the Eternal. Or if these higher things are now beginning
to be vaguely envisaged, it is only to make them subservient to man and society; but God and spirituality exist in their own
right and not as adjuncts. And in practice the lower in us must learn to exist for the higher, in order that the higher also may in
us consciously exist for the lower, to draw it nearer to its own altitudes".
Namaskar
