Tag: Bhagavad Gita

The Bhagavad Gita in Old Age

There are many reasons to study the Gita in our old age – just ask Gandhi.  Verse 36 of Chapter 4 of the Bhagavad Gita encourages us: “Even though thou be the most sinful of sinners, thou shalt cross the ocean of misery by the boat of knowledge.”  In Gandhi’s commentary (recommended), the Mahatma addresses this passage from the standpoint of old age:

For me, the Gita is the ship, not because it is a learned work but because I have liked it, it has appealed to me in my old age, and verses in it have been a great support to me.

I agree with Gandhi on this, but with caveats.  The Gita is a tricky document.  It would seem to be the story of a strange blue God (Krishna) exhorting a young warrior (Arjuna) to get out on the battlefield and kill people, and yet Gandhi found his doctrine of non-violence in it.  It is a war story that describes the war within us.

Again, the Gita is a little slippery, and many people have gotten it wrong.  There was a popular book a few years back that assumed that the Gita was telling us to follow our bliss.  That might be good advice, but it is not what the Gita is saying.  The Gita’s message is more complex; it is more nuanced; it is more like life.  I hope I can convey some of the complexity and the relevance of the Gita to aging – but, of course, you must read it for yourself.

I recently watched a golf movie that was based on the message of the Gita called The Legend of Bagger Vance.  Good movie (directed by Robert Redford), but it didn’t quite hit the mark.  However, the movie was close enough to get me to read the novel that it was based on, and that was indeed fortuitous.  The novel, by Steven Pressfield, is somewhat drenched in the intricacies of golf.  (I admit to skipping the long paragraphs in the sand traps.)  I noted, when I have written about the Gita before, that Krishna values devotion of any kind – perhaps even devotion to the game of golf?  The author has Bagger (the Krishna figure) tell us that “all sport is holy, for it embodies the objectified search for the subjective experience of yoga, meaning the union, union with the divine.”  But golf is even better because:

In other sports the opponent is regarded as the enemy.  We seek by our actions to disable him…This is not the way to salvation, or more accurately, it is at one remove.  The golfer on the other hand is never directly affected by his opponent’s actions.  He comes to realize that the game is not against the foe, but against himself.  His little self… (121)

Read The Legend of Bagger Vance, but please read the Gita first.

The Gita pops up in unexpected places.  Thoreau took Emerson’s copy with him to Walden.  Emerson’s poem “Brahma” is all but lifted from the Gita.  Whitman scribbled in his copy.  Philip Glass wrote an opera using only the words of the Gita.  Such references abound – there is even a Gita for the CEO.  And I recently found another interesting citation.

It is my daily practice to read the lectionary of the Episcopal Church, wherein are noted feast days for people of note.  Being curious, I often look up the souls honored there and thus came across the rather incredible Vida Dutton Scudder, whose feast day is on October 10.  An American scholar, philanthropist, sometime pacifist, and activist, she also wrote a book about old age called The Privilege of Age, which I have been unable to find.  I did, however, find her autobiography, On Journey, which was written in her seventies.  In it, Scudder chronicles how, born in India as a child of Christian missionaries, she returned to England as a toddler when her father died in a swimming accident.  He left her his books, among which was an early translation of the Gita.  In Scudder’s long memoir, we get much about her participation in the Christian church, her development of settlement houses and retreat centers and the teaching of the principles of social work – her exemplary life goes on for hundreds of pages.  But she reserves the precious last few paragraphs for the Gita.  Specifically, she talks about how the Gita has prepared her for old age (Scudder lived into her nineties), and how the Gita’s admonition to care about the work, but not the results of the work. has taught her to let go of what went before.  It also taught her courage:

…I turned to the Gita in the Great War, to dispel hesitant scruples.  Then it taught me fearlessness, and gave me courage to accept the moral risks in action.  Now the days of action are passed, does the somnolence of age creep over me?… The Gita shall say the last word; it is a word of comfort, it is still better, a word of hope:

“Following the Rule, cleansed of spirit, victorious over himself…his self becomes the Self of all born beings…. Putting away utterly all loves born of purpose, little by little, he shall win stillness [quoted from Gita 6].

The second chapter of the Gita famously tells us that “Thy right is to work only, but never to its fruits.”  In old age, it is often hard not to live in mourning for the fruits of our actions – individually or collectively.  If we do so, we are not meeting the challenge of the moment, not facing the work that is before us of aging and death.  And we must use what energies we have left to do the work that is left to us, while not relinquishing the stillness and peace that is our right.

If you have never read the Gita, please read it.  Read it for the first time without many annotations.  If you want to go further, there are some wonderful commentaries out there, including those by Gandhi (based on his talks) and Eknath Easwaran.  Easwaran has a one volume translation with an excellent introduction, as well as a separate three-volume commentary.   And if anyone has a copy of Scudder’s Privilege of Age, please let me know!  She published an essay of that title in the Atlantic in 1933 which I have, but the full book was published in 1939.

“Hopelessly Devoted’ – Dedication in Old Age

Devotion is much to be admired.  I am not necessarily talking about religious devotion, but single-minded dedication in any form tends to sanctify both the object of worship and the devotee.  We often trivialize the devotion of other people when it differs from our own, but true devotion – be it to a person, a god, an art, an animal – is often admirable and surely gives many lives their meaning.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna (a god in disguise) tells Arjuna, “Those who worship other gods with faith and devotion will also come to Me, Arjuna, but by other paths.”  The paths are many, and in older people we sometimes see devotion take forms we may find silly – devotion to a grandchild, a cat, a favorite cause, a collection of coins or favorite recording artist.  But there is nothing silly here.  In a few cases, devotion to bad causes can have evil results, but true love is almost always life-enhancing.

My favorite story of this kind of devotion is Flaubert’s “A Simple Heart” (Une Cœur Simple).  Félicité was a servant who spent her early life devoted to people – a lover, the children in the house where she was employed for half a century, a nephew – who did not return her love.  She became practiced at such love, and when she was given a parrot, she had a captive object for her boundless affection.  In her old age, when the parrot dies, she has him stuffed.  He is her most prized possession, her object of adoration, the center of her life.  Again, from the outside, this looks silly, inane – but as Félicité grows old, it is the parrot that grounds and centers her life.  When she dies peacefully, “she thought she could see, in the opening heavens, a gigantic parrot hovering above her head.”

There are other tales of old folks and their devotions.  We have the cliché of the old woman carrying around pictures of her grandchildren, of the old man telling and retelling tales of his favorite baseball team.  There is Silas Marner, the old miser, who finds happiness in his attachment to the child Eppie; there is Hemingway’s old fisherman Santiago and his devotion to bringing the big fish out of the sea.  Such devotion is sometimes tragic in the end (as it is for Santiago), but it vitalizes life.  For the elderly, it is often what gives long life meaning.

We had a neighbor who was in his nineties when we moved into the neighborhood.  During the time he lived next to us, his wife’s health failed and she died.  He took wonderful care of her.  He also took wonderful care of a mangy old dog, whom he walked daily and found endless pleasure in.  When he decided he had to move out of his house, the only criteria for a new home was whether old Lucky could come.  I don’t know which of them will live longer, but I do know they have enriched each other’s lives. At a particularly desperate point in my life, a therapist suggest that I get a pet.  I thought that, in my current state, a pet to take care of was the last thing I needed.  But I adopted a cat, and I felt better.

Simone de Beauvoir, in her book on old age, said that all old people need “projects” that we are devoted to:

There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning – devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work.  In spite of the moralists’ opinion to the contrary, in old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in upon ourselves.

In her philosophical and scholarly manner, Beauvoir imagined these “projects” to be special people, creative endeavors, worthy causes, or political activities.  I think she is right that we need something to be dedicated to, but I would take a broader view.

Of course, devotion can go wrong.  If zealous attachment is motivated by fear or power lust, it can be deeply destructive, and we can all think of many examples – from the Nazi hierarchy to the witch burners.  The January 6 insurrection was a prime example in recent times, but we all know cases of misplaced devotion.  All the best of human emotions possess a shadow side, and once in the grip of a cult, a tribe, a powerful personality, it is hard to see our way out of the fog.  How to know?  I think that true devotion does not expect a return on investment, the return is the investment.

I wrote a story (“Shrines”) about three old women who are devoted in their own ways, ways that might seem to have little meaning from the outside.  One could ponder whether their various dedications enriched their lives.  I tried not to reach any conclusion in my story.  I still have not reached a conclusion.

Answers?

My generation spent our young adult years being fascinated by all the new technology cascading to the market. We knew television from our youth, but soon it was color television, then there were VCR’s and cable TV, video games, there were computers in the office and then computers at home – and then the internet and cell phones arrived! Scanners, digital pix, e-mail, social media, texting, news on demand, ipads, smart phones, search engines – all of this was a long way from the US Postal Service and the Encyclopedia Britannica. We were fascinated, seduced, enamored, and then we were… suspicious, and sometimes overwhelmed.

I remember the first time I was exposed to a spread sheet program (Lotus 123) and realized those ledgers and blue and red pencils could go out the window. But the initial joy was followed by the realization that the answers we got from the spread sheets were only as good as the data and formulas that we put into them. The word processors produced gorgeous copy – error-free with justified margins, but the content was if anything diminished by the speed with which it could be produced. We learned the acronym GIGO – Garbage In, Garbage Out. We found that we could reach anyone in the world from our cell phone or computer, but that there weren’t that many people we wanted to talk to. (Remember Thoreau? “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate!”) Google answered our questions, but we weren’t at all sure what questions to ask. Maybe Picasso spoke for all of us when he stated that “Computers are useless. They only give you the answers.”

Of course, computers and rational people can answer what are called convergent problems – ones with definitive answers that are the same across time and individuals. How do you build a bicycle? How far is it to the sun? But what are the important questions? For you? For me: “What should I do? How should I live? And (as I got older): Why haven’t I figured this out before now?” Ah, but maybe the problem is a blind belief in rationality itself and that we (or our computers) can “figure it out.” The best literature is written about the big questions of life. I just finished Richard Powers wonderful Prisoner’s Dilemma (and see here for a description of the philosophical problem for which the novel is titled) and the question that Powers asks is “what, if anything, can one private citizen do to make the shared scenario less horrible?” This is a great question for our time. A good exercise in reading is to attempt to ascertain what questions the author is asking and what – if any – alternative answers are presented to these interrogations.

Questions and answers. For all the rationality of Socrates, he is surely better at questions than answers. And wisdom literature of the religious variety is not much for definitive answers. In the Bhagavad Gita, we open with Arjuna asking Krishna why he must engage in battle. Krishna tells Arjuna that it makes no difference, in the end friend and foe are the same, and that Krishna himself is both the sacrifice and the sacrificer. Try to figure that out rationally. Arjuna learns a level of acceptance – “You have dispelled my doubts and delusions and I understand through your grace,” says Arjuna finally. “My faith is firm now, and I will do your will.”

Job asks God three questions: “Why did I not die at birth, come forth from the womb and expire?” “How can a man be just before God?” and “If a man die, shall he live again?” As far as I can see, God never answers any of these questions. After trying to argue rationally with his friends and with God, poor Job comes to the same conclusion: “Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.” God also takes Job’s “friends” to task for thinking they had “figured things out” and for giving Job false information. These friends end up needing to make big sacrifices and have Job intercede for them to stay on the right side of the Big Guy. The Book of Job and the Bhagavad-Gita are stories of acceptance, not stories of answers.

Computers have both absolute rationality and answers; it might appear that both are, in many ways, useless. Like Job’s friends. Computers give us answers, but answers – especially easy answers – are something of which we should be very suspicious.

But the questions, the questions are important. How do we interrogate our own lives to avoid GIGO? What are your questions? Think about it. And when you decide on your questions, run them through Google for a laugh.

This week’s story, “Don’t Eat the Pink Ones,” has more mysteries than answers, but it is appropriate for the end of the blueberry season.