Chapter 4
Core of the Teaching
True Essence of Gita Beyond Dogmas
▀ ▄ ▀ Clear Conception of the Doctrine of Gita
By this time we have known about the divine Teacher. We have also seen the human disciple. Now it remains to form a clear conception of the doctrine.
A clear conception fastening upon the essential idea and the central heart of the teaching is especially necessary here. Gita is susceptible, even more than the other Scriptures, to one-sided misrepresentations born of a partisan intellectuality.
This happens because Gita is having
▀ Rich and many-sided thought
▀ Synthetical grasp of different aspects of the spiritual life, and
▀ The fluent winding motion of its argument
People have the habit of unconscious or half-conscious wrestling of fact and word and idea to suit a preconceived notion or the doctrine or principle of one’s preference. The Indian logicians have attributed this tendency as one of the most fruitful sources of fallacy. Even for the most conscientious thinkers it is most difficult to avoid this temptation.
The reason for this difficulty lies in the incapability of the human reason to always play the detective upon itself in this respect.
It is the very nature of human reasoning faculty to seize upon some partial conclusions, idea, principle and become its partisan. It then makes it the key to all truth. Interestingly, it has an infinite faculty of doubling upon itself so as to avoid detecting this necessary and cherished weakness in its operations. The Gita lends itself easily to this kind of error. It is easy to turn Gita into a partisan of our own doctrine or dogma
This is achieved
▀ By throwing particular emphasis on
one of its aspects or
even on some salient and emphatic text
and putting all the rest of the eighteen chapters into the background, or
▀ By making them a subordinate and auxiliary teaching,
We can see following different viewpoints on Gita by people having a partisan approach :
1 Renouncement of Life and Works, ‘Sannyasa’
Circumstance in favour of the doctrine
There are those who make the Gita teach, not works at all, but a discipline of preparation for renouncing life and works. The indifference performance of prescribed actions or of whatever task may lie ready to the hands becomes the means and the discipline for achieving this purpose.
The final renunciation of life and works is the sole real object. It is quite easy to justify this view by citations from the book.
It can be done by a certain arrangement of stress in following out its argument. This is especially true if we shut our eyes to the peculiar way in which it uses such a word as sannyasa, renunciation.
･ﾟﾟ･:.｡..｡.:ﾟ::✼✿ - *▀ ▄ Chapter Four - Core of the Teaching ▄ ▀ ✿✼:ﾟ:.｡..｡.:･ﾟﾟ･
End of Note One
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