█ What we intend to learn from Gita - 1.a
Interpretation of Scriptures - Part 1
Before we make an attempt to understand Gita, we must first have a clear understanding of some preliminary foundation of our study. As a first step, we will try to understand the different ways of interpreting the scriptures.
As a preliminary to our study of Gita, let us first make our ground level understanding clear.
Different types of scriptures
We have plenty of scriptures which are sacred or profane (profane = not sacred). They contain full or partial revelations. They promote religions or discuss philosophy. They may relate to sects, schools of thought or systems of thought and knowledge.
We have diverse range of scriptures covering a wide canvas of thoughts.
Humanity’s past attitude towards these scriptures
The immature or partially mature minds of humanity attach a certain kind of exclusivity to one of these scriptures.
With full passion and zeal they call a Scripture as the one and the only ‘Word of God’.
They treat other scriptures as false. In some cases, even if they may attach some value to other scriptures, they call it imperfectly inspired. They treat their preferred scripture as the last word of the reasoning intellect. All the other scriptures are treated as either errors or as containing only a fragment of truth.
This tendency of thought often leads towards a philosophical cult.
Even the material science has fallen prey to this type of thinking. The material science then becomes a creed and refuses any place to religion or spirituality in the life of humanity. It treats spirituality as ignorance and superstition.
This habit of excluding all the others to the selection of one is universal in the community of spirituality, religion, philosophy and material science.
Sometimes even the wise men seem to fall prey to this type of thinking. They are misled by the spirit of darkness that has overshadowed their intellect. They are overtaken by intellectual egoism or spiritual pride.
Has this attitude now changed?
Happily, we have now progressed by a little bit to a higher level of understanding and maturity.
We have become more modest and wiser. We no longer hold extreme views. We do not kill other human beings in the name of God’s Truth. We do not persecute others who have their minds differently trained or differently constituted from ours. We do not jump to the action of cursing or abusing or severely criticising our neighbour because he has committed the crime of having a different opinion than ours. We do not call others wicked or presumptuous if they are following different paths. We are even ready to admit the all pervasiveness of the Truth and relinquish our sole monopoly on the Truth.
The purpose of our study of other religions has now become the search for Truth in these religions.
Earlier, we used to study other religions and philosophies solely for finding faults in them so that we can damn these religions and philosophies, criticising them for their errors in our view point.
Faults in our current attitude
So far so good.
But we still fall prey to the temptation to declare that only our religion or philosophy offers The Supreme Knowledge.
We claim that all other religions and philosophies have either missed or partially or imperfectly grasped the Truth. We claim that the other religions and philosophies deal with subsidiary and inferior aspects of the truth of things. There is also a sense of ‘superiority complex’ in us. We believe that all these other religions are for less evolved souls. Egotistically we feel that our religion is for more developed souls.
Some of us are of the ‘puritanical’ types for being stubborn in our insistence that every dot and comma and underline contained in the original Scripture should remain unchanged as they all are part of the Eternally Valid Truth.
It is as if the original inspiration of the prophets while teaching these philosophies contained full details of the dots and commas and the underlines. Even the dots and commas and the underlines and bolds and italics are all sacred and part of the divine inspiration ! This may sound absurd, but unfortunately it represents the fact.
.......... to contnue
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