Dilemmas of a 'Global' Core: Reading the Bhagavad-Gita with First-Year Students (part 1 of 3)

by Nathan Rein

Most of us in Religious Studies are accustomed to teaching with texts in translation. And most of us, accordingly, know that translations -- especially translations of major primary texts -- can differ from one another in significant ways. Even so, I sometimes find myself surprised at just how significant those differences can be. Recently, discussions at my institution over the use of the Bhagavad-Gita in our required first-year seminar provided a glimpse of both the pedagogical implications and the ideological dimensions of choosing a translation for a course.

Compare the following two translations of teaching VII, verse 25 of the Bhagavad-Gita:

 A. Veiled in the magic of my discipline, I elude most men; this deluded world is not aware that I am unborn and immutable. (tr. Barbara Stoler Miller, p. 76)

B. But I do not shine for all, wrapped as I am in the creative power of yoga. The confused world does not perceive me, as I am – unborn, and imperishable (tr. Laurie Patton, pp. 90f.)

In this line, the speaker -- Krishna -- is providing his disciple with an explanation for the fact that most people fail to comprehend Krishna’s own true, divine nature. The explanation is that Krishna continually projects an illusory, phenomenal, ever-changing procession of images (maya) into the world, which most mistake for reality. Only a devotee can receive and recognize, in his or her own consciousness, the real manifestation of Krishna as unchanging and undying. The first quotation, from Miller, has a poetic resonance marked by the echoing words “elude” and “delude.” With the terms “magic” and “discipline” it evokes an atmosphere of mystery and esotericism.  The second, from Patton, coalesces around the words “shine,” “wrap,” and “yoga,” yielding a more convoluted, conceptually and metaphorically difficult structure.

I begin with these two quotations because I think their differences exemplify a dilemma we face when teaching core texts, namely, the choice between making the strange familiar (version A, by Miller) and, with apologies for butchering T.S. Eliot, making the strange even stranger (Patton's version B). While we face this dilemma with many, or even all, of the texts we teach, it is intensified in the context of what I’m calling a “global” core. Those scare quotes are intentional, since the jury is still out on whether spending three weeks in a semester reading ancient Indian and Chinese texts in translation really does much to heighten our students’ awareness of the wider, non-Western world.

At my institution, all students spend their first semester taking a liberal studies seminar that examines twelve texts over fourteen weeks. Three of those weeks are devoted to the Bhagavad-Gita and to selections from Mencius (one and a half weeks each); the rest, to a greater or lesser degree, are recognizably Western, going from Plato all the way to Descartes. I say the the dilemma is heightened in the case of “global” texts because I think instructors inevitably find themselves, intentionally or not, presenting these texts to students – and students end up absorbing them – as if they represented the “non-Western world” in some broad, totalizing sense. Thus the Gita, the text I’m interested in here, is pressed into double duty: on the one hand, as a self-contained text and in its own right, it offers students a complex narrative full of challenging philosophical and religious claims, while on the other, it is supposed to provide a salutary and enlightening excursion into the bewildering but rewarding landscape of global, i.e. non-Western, cultures. In our classrooms, we end up repeatedly choosing between trying to ease our students into some, perhaps minimal, level of comprehension of the Gita, on the one hand, and making them sit with and confront their incomprehension and bewilderment on the other. By extension, the same could be said about other texts that serve (however unjustifiably) as proxies for foreign or exotic cultures, and indeed, about any text at all that speaks to us across a great historical or cultural distance. (As an aside, I want to underscore that I’m not arguing that the Gita, by virtue of being from India, is in and of itself necessarily more challenging, or more “different,” or more exotic and strange than, say, Aeschylus or St. Augustine; I think, however, that we – our students and ourselves – often burden these texts with associations of foreignness and strangeness as a result of their place in the curriculum.) This is, to an extent, a pedagogical choice between comfort and discomfort, and it is one that we make in our classrooms daily. Perfectly skilled teachers, I imagine – if they exist – can maintain a level of student comfort that lets them feel safe enough to engage, explore, and take intellectual risks, while administering just enough shock and discomfort to stave off complacency and stasis.

(Part two available here.)