Quest for the Historical Gita

What we see is almost a specialized evolutionary history exploring the factor of self-consciousness in man. This tends to be mechanized in the prodigious labors of history. One needs to withdraw from the greater stream to realize the latent potential arising in man from earliest times and whose evolutionary source is unknown. Our approach to India will start with the equivalent of the Western Biblical Criticism, to review the historiographical confusions in the received accounts. Tracing the layers in the Bhagavad Gita virtually gives us a history of the Indian passage.

But in India, if we care to set aside our western viewpoint, we find one of the most remarkable periods of the entire historical sequence. Before the emergence of monotheism, the impulse of the sacred was preparing to leap beyond the notions of the transcendental or the conceptions of divinity to base religion on inquiry into consciousness.

The tendency of Westerners to see a single linear track of civilization, the ‘rise of the West’, and forgets that the modern transition in its sudden unbalancing westward of the eonic sequence, is a very recent phenomenon in a once relatively backward zone of world civilization. It is almost impossible to sort out the emergence of, and relationships between, the forms of the classic yogas as they appear already before the Aryan entry into India, and reappear blended with Vedism and its issues of sacrifice, polytheism, and caste in the later Hinduism. The sudden eruption of Jainism and Buddhism, in period, is a clue to the later loss of the correct picture.

The earliest period of Indian history has already seen the civilization of the Indus come and go as the entry of the Vedic Aryans finds their religious culture to be typical of the proto-Iranian, and proto-Germanic spiritual cultures and the elements of the divisions into castes that are still visible in some aspects of Greek and Roman culture. The mystery is where the elements of the great yogas come from if not from the Vedic culture that shows a completely different character. Already these elements are visible in the famous cylinder seal of the meditating yogi found in the Indus archaeological nexus. A considerable revisionist literature is now challenging the standard version of the Aryan invasion. But the picture is still unclear.

For our account, we can remain neutral, but the eonic context clarifies at once the way in which Buddhism suddenly appears in still another example of the ‘relative transform’ effect applied to an incoming t-stream. In essence, and in exactly the same time frame we see localized cultural elements turn into a global religion rendered independent of cultural context. By the time of Ashoka we see the same passage to ‘oikoumene integrator’ in the early mixed forms that are characteristic of the Persian Empire. This eonic isomorphism with the Judaic case is entirely remarkable, and explains why Buddhism seems to stand out from its Hindu background. The great Hindu comeback against the Axial Buddhist ‘revolution’ produces the world of the misleading Bhagavad Gita.

The emergence of Buddhism in the standard accounts is just after our divide, ca. –600. Some scholars now put this date forward, which would be appropriate also, since we can see that Buddhism is appearing about the time of the Ezra era in Israel. Our actual transitional era is almost lost to us, in detail, and produces the sources of the remarkable Samkhya, and a great deal more in a great flowering. All this is almost perfectly matched to our eonic model, which should allow us to stand back and put this era in perspective. Please note the appearance of another classic example of the relative transform (of a religion) that we have seen already in the steps of the eonic sequence. That is, the stream of Indian history already contains what the Axial Age will amplify and turn into the exteriorizing world religion of Buddhism.

The interruption of the rationalistic Buddhism between Vedism and the later Hinduism is the giveaway, however indirect, of the redirected stream so evident in the synchronous world of Israel and Greece.[ii]

Notes: Lokayata The Upanishadic age was a close cousin, that is, temporal parallel, of the world of the Pre-Socratics and Sophists, and its spirit was extraordinarily broad. Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery of India describes the contemporary rescue of over fifty thousand Sanskrit manuscripts on what, given the extensive destruction, must have been the extensive quantity of ancient literature. “Among the books that have been lost is the entire literature on materialism which followed the period of the early Upanishads.” This is the lost world of the ‘lokayata’, reflected in the Samkhya.

Zoom target: history of the Gita The history of Indian religion is a highly difficult swamp laced with the propaganda of the Hindu reaction to Buddhism. The Gita As It Was, Rediscovering the Original Bhagavadgita, by Phulgenda Sinha, attempts to uncover the text of the original non-theistic Gita from the layers of distorted interpolation that brought it to its present state. The idea of a Buddhist revolution is partly an anachronism, but we do see in the contrast of Buddhism and Hinduism another smoking gun example of an ‘eonic effect’. As Prem Nath Bazaz notes in The Role of the Bhagavad Gita in Indian History :

The seventh and sixth centuries B.C. witnessed in India, as in Greece, an intellectual ferment. Dissatisfaction with the Vedic natural religion gave rise to speculations about the origin of the universe and things contained in it…There arose early in the sixth century B.C. an order of paribrajakas (literally ‘wanderers’) who were intellectuals devoted to search after truth…The movement of paribrajakas spread far and wide in Northern India; they were accepted as harbingers of a new age…[iii]

The views expressed in this flawed and highly charged but useful book suggest the fact that Buddha was not only a religious founder, but a social revolutionary, a view with a bit of its own myth perhaps, but the account gives an apt descant on the Axial period compared with the later destruction of Buddhist India. It is time for some fact checks on all accounts until the record is straight. The stage of the Bhagavad Gita represents the reactionary phase of Neo-Brahmanism that came later. This history deserves an account by a modern leftist, and may cure our contemporary New Agers of sentimental views of the history of guruism.

East and West? There is no ‘philosophic’ East and West, although over time a kind of misleading differentiation arises. Those who find a something called ‘Western civilization’ are really speaking about an artificial construct built around two transitions, whose final effect is a transmission of this mainline out of Sumer back onto the full Eurasian field. The mutual influence of East and West is continual throughout the classical era. Thus, many are the speculations about the interactive influences, viz. the influence of Buddhism on Jesus. We can hardly spot the exact blends, yet we can easily discover the overlap in the Indian, Judaic-Persian, and Greek-Roman cones of diffusion.

[i] Diana Eck, in Banaras: City of Light (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982) describes the 2500 year history of this Eastern equivalent to Athens and Jerusalem, and quotes a nineteenth century account, “Twenty five ceturies, at the least, it was famous. When Babylon ws struggling with Nineveh for supremacy, when Tyre was planting her colonies, when Athenswas growing in strength, before Rome had become known, or Greece had contended with Persia, or Cyrus had added lustre to the Persian monarchy, or Nebuchadnezzr had captured Jerusalem, and the inhabitants of Judea had been carried into captivity, she had already risen to greatness, if not glory”, M. Sherring, The Sacred City of the Hindus (1868).

[ii] And why is it that Buddha and Mahavir are of the Kshatriya and not the Brahmin caste? This is one of the strangest facts of Indian religious history, the grafting of an older or indigenous spirituality onto the Vedas. Cf. N. R. Peat, in The Origins of Indian Psychology, discusses Heinrich Zimmer’s view of Indian spirituality in Philosophies of India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), that the Vedic tradition was merged with an indigenous spiritual tradition. As Peat points out, the doctrines of the immortal soul, rebirth, and spiritual release are nowhere apparent in the ancient Vedas. The source of this earlier tradition, and its relation to an equally ancient Goddess worship, is a mystery, although the presence of yogic seals in the Indus civilization stretches the mystery backward one step.

As Professor Paul Deussen remarked in his classic discussion of the Upanishads, “When it is considered that in these passages on the knowledge of brahman as atman, of atman as the all-ensouling principle, and of the destiny of the soul beyond death, the most important points of the doctrine of the Upanishads are announced, and that in these not only are the kings portrayed as the knowers, but the Brahmins specifically shown to have been the non-knowers, but the Brahmins specifically shown to have been the non-knowers or wrong-knowers (the texts, moreover, being communicated by the Vedic schoolmen, who were Brahmins themselves), then one can only draw the conclusion—if not with absolute surety, at least with considerable likelihood—that the doctrine of the atman, which is actually opposed to the whole spirit of Vedic ritual lore, even though it may at first have designed by Brahmins, nevertheless was taken up and cultivated not in the circle of Brahmins, but of Kshatriyas, and only later adapted by the Brahmins.” As Joseph Campbell remarks of this passage, “Deussen wrote in the late nineteenth century, before anything was known of the Indus Civilization; yet he recognized already-as no Indians seem ever to have seen—that between the Vedic and Upanishadic views the difference is so great that the latter could not possibly have been developed out of the former.” N. Ross Peat, The Origins of Indian Psychology (1990), p. 2, Campbell (1962), op. cit., p 203. For quite another view, in the more recent challenge to Aryan Invasion theories, cf. Georg Feuerstein et al. In Search of the Cradle of Civilization (Wheaton Ill: Quest books, 1995).

[iii] Prem Nath Bazaz, The Role of the Bhagavad Gita in Indian History (New Delhi: Sterling, 1975), p. 82.