Ravi Gupta Wonder of Scripture Lecture

Transcript

Ravi Gupta: Thank you so much for that very kind introduction. I thought the first half was what I have done, and the second half seemed to be what I have to live up to. And sometimes in introductions, you learn what you're meant to be, and it can be quite intimidating. So anyway, thank you. I'm very happy to be here today. Thank you all for showing up. We have a short one hour together, and I want to make sure that there's time for questions and discussion as well. So let's see here. The title of my talk, "'Pearls Upon a Thread', The Bhagavad Gita, Deep Reading, and the Ingredients of Wonder'’.

I'm honored to be part of this series on the wonder of scripture. I know many distinguished speakers have gone before me and will come after as well. My gratitude to the Maxwell Institute and to my colleagues there who I've now gotten to know over the years for various kinds of events beginning with the invitation to serve as a fellow for one term at the Maxwell in 2020, as Kristian mentioned. So thank you for having me back here to speak about the wonder of scripture.

The text that I want to talk to you about is called the Bhagavad Gita, and it is probably the most well-known of Hindu sacred texts, written in Sanskrit from India. Thousands of years old and today, when Hindus are pressed to tell what their Bible is, which is kind of an odd question for a Hindu, but when pressed, typically they will mention the Bhagavad Gita as the one text that today most widely unites Hindus together on a personal level, this is a text that I have been studying from before I can remember. It's a text that has, like for many Hindus, has been part of my fabric of life, my growing up right from childhood. And verses from this text come back to me from before a time I can remember memorizing them. I've also studied it academically for the past two decades and studied it in terms of its Sanskrit language. Sanskrit is India's ancient language, and a elder sister to Greek and to Latin. They're all related together in the Indo-European family of languages.

So we'll look a little bit about this text, and I want to share with you what it is about this work that is wondrous to me, right. What is it that makes it wonderful, and hopefully I can convey a little bit of the text itself, but also my experience of the text today. But before I do that, I want to take a step back and think about the process of reading itself and what is it when we read a scripture, and why does that possibly bring about wonder in the reader? Under what conditions, under what circumstances does reading a text produce wonder? You see, a lot of the reading that we do today tends to be rather consumerist in nature. We look at a work for what we can get from it. Even academic reading, I'm sad to say, is often consumerist in nature. So I'm writing an article about a topic, and I need to know what else has been said about that topic, both that agrees with me and that which doesn't agree with me. So I scan the literature, and I'm mining it. I'm harvesting it for little nuggets of things that confirm or conflict with my perspective that I can then use and pull into my paper. And in that way, I have now used that reading and then I'm done with it, right? And when we produce writing as well in academia, we often do so with that same intent, that we recognize that this idea may not be my life's magnum opus, it may not be profound, it may not be earth shattering, but I need to get it out there. And someone will use it for something. And if it's cited, then my recognition, my numbers go higher in Google or in Scholar, Google Scholar or whatever metric that you use, right?

So it's a very consumerist approach to reading. We do much the same with our personal reading as well. My kids might be reading an adventure novel and once they get through it, then they're onto the next thing, right? And so these are published cheaply. The publisher expects that they will be read and passed on or disposed of, and then on to the next new stimulation that we might need. So, so much of our reading today is of that consumerist mode. And rarely does that kind of reading produce an experience of wonder. It might unexpectedly, when we stumble across something that we didn't expect would be, surprise us, would inspire us. But there's another kind of reading that is better suited to this type of experience. And Paul Griffiths, a professor of, now retired, professor of religious studies or theology, speaks of this as religious reading. He's got a great book called Religious Reading, in which type this genre of reading that is non-consumerist in nature. And I like this quote so much that I want to just read it for you. And you're welcome to follow along on the screen here.

He says, “the first and most basic element in these relations between religious readers and their sacred texts is that the work read is understood as a stable and vastly rich resource. One that yields meaning, suggestions or imperatives for action, matter for aesthetic wonder, and much else. It is a treasure house, an ocean, a mine. The deeper religious readers dig, the more ardently they fish, the more single-mindedly they seek gold, the greater will be their reward. There can, according to these metaphors, be no final act of reading, in which everything is uncovered, in which the mine of gold has yielded all its treasure, or the fish pool has been emptied of fish. Reading for religious readers ends only with death. And perhaps not then. It is a continuous, ever repeated act.”

No religious reader of the Bible. or the Bhagavad Gita has ever said, well, I've read that now, what's next? There's always more to be gained and more to be applied. Perhaps a really extraordinary instance of this type of reading, which we could call religious reading or we could call simply deep reading, a very extraordinary case of this is what commentators do on sacred texts. They will read to a depth that even most religious readers don't. And when they read a text, they bring certain assumptions about that text to their reading. There's another professor of Confucian commentaries, Confucian exegesis, who studies Chinese classics, John Henderson, and he says that there's three assumptions that are universally found among commentators, and by universal he means outside of China as well, in various parts of the world. And these are the three he mentions. The first is that commentators or deep readers or religious readers regard their text as comprehensive. That is, it has something to say about everything, right? There's always any situation can be illuminated by that text. Secondly, he says that they understand that their texts are coherent, namely they're well-ordered. There's some internal logic to them. They're not just a random collection of old tales and sayings and ideas. And thirdly, that they are internally consistent. There's a logic that holds it together. Their ideas come together, there's a place for everything in it, and everything is meaningful, right? So no commentator ever says, well, this verse in the Bhagavad Gita is really odd, it's a misfit, it doesn't really mean anything, it's not supposed to be there, I don't know why it's there. No, that's not the mindset of the commentator, of the religious reader, or the deep reader. I would add maybe one more item to his list of three, which is to say that deep readers see their texts as perpetually relevant. There's always, it never goes out of date. It always has something to say about every circumstance, even if that circumstance is thoroughly new from a historical perspective.

Okay, so the Bhagavad Gita as a text has hundreds of commentaries, many hundreds of translations just in the English language. It's one of the world's most translated texts alongside the Bible and the Tao Te Ching, the Bhagavad Gita. And so we find that religious readers Paul Griffiths here is talking about biblical readers mostly, but we find that this description of how Hindus or Vaishnavas in particular, that's the tradition of Hinduism I belong to, that's the largest branch within Hinduism, those who worship Vishnu or Krishna as the supreme deity. So for them, this approach to reading sounds very familiar. When I read this, I thought, oh yeah, that, that sounds right to me. That rings about true for me as well. So this describes very well the stance of religious readers towards their texts. But there's also certain characteristics about the text themselves that lend themselves to this kind of reading. So in other words, I want to look at it from both sides. The reader goes in with a mindset that allows them to fish, to dig deep, to engage in an endless process of reading, and to find new meaning. But also the texts are also reaching out to the reader because of certain characteristics in them. Some texts are better suited to this kind of process than others.

David Tracy, a now retired theologian from the University of Chicago, the Divinity School, wrote a text called Plurality and Ambiguity, and in that he attempts to describe what it is that makes a particular piece of literature a classic. What makes something classical literature? What makes it an unusual example of the type of literature that it offers. And this is what he says. He offers a few different characteristics. And I just want to mention them briefly. So much can be said about each one, but we don't have time for that. He says, “first of all, a classic is a work that helps form an entire culture.” So its impact is really broad. This doesn't mean that everyone in that culture agrees with what the text says. The point is simply that it impacts everyone. You can't really avoid it. It shapes the foundations of that culture. So it serves as the basis that we compare with, that we reject, that we accept. Second, he says that “they're particular in their origin, but universal in their effect.” I think this is a very nice way of putting it. If someone sets out to write a classic, it usually doesn't go well. Right, like if they say, I'm going to write a text that appeals to everyone. Right? Those texts typically don't appeal to anyone because they're too bland, right? They're too generic. So he says, no, they're particular in origin. They begin at a specific moment in history. They speak to a particular people. They're a product of a specific culture. And yet, their effect goes well beyond that particular historical origin. And that's what makes them so powerful. Next he says “they withstand the test of time.” This is probably the most intuitive one. Someone asked you what a classic was, you'd probably say, well it has to last some time, right? People across time have to feel that it has something, there has to be a permanence of meaning to it. This next one I love very much. Classic texts are those that “contain an excess of meaning.” They overflow with meaning. In other words, Tracy says they “resist definitive interpretation.” So someone comes along, as they always do, and says, I've got the ultimate, total, precise, complete meaning of the Bhagavad Gita for you. And followers agree, and people get so much out of it. And sure enough, a generation later, someone else shows up and says, and I've got a little more to say, about the same thing that you said you had said everything about.

And this is true even within the same traditions and the same institutions, right? What's particularly striking is that the person who comes next, to try to contain that excess of meaning that overflowed. The person who comes next doesn't even deny the definitiveness of the person who came before, if it's in the same tradition. They'll say, of course, that person is my teacher. They are the founder of my tradition. They have said everything worth saying. And then I have something else to say in addition to that. I've got something to add to it. So, it's always overflowing with meaning. There's no point at which you can contain it all and say, now we've done it. Then something slightly more technical, it serves as a test case for any interpretive theory or interpretation theory. So whether this is in the realm of religion or theology or literary studies, whatever one's theory is about how texts work and why they're effective, if they don't work on the classics, then you really got to think carefully about it. You have to wonder, right? Why isn't it working here? And the last one, I think, is perhaps the most important for our topic today, which is that “these texts command our attention.” If we think through the meaning of what it means to wonder, right, if we, what is it to talk about the wonder of scripture, then perhaps the foundation of wonder is attention, wrapped attention. There is no wonder at something that fails to command our attention. Something that we could miss, right? Oops, I missed that. Right? That's not usually a ground of wonder. Wonder is that it begins, there's so much more, but it begins with something that grabs our attention, that forces us to look at it. Whether we wonder, as in we're struck with wonder, or we're wondering because we're not quite sure about it. There can be the wonder of scripture and you can also wonder at scripture. Either way, it's commanding your attention, right? It's very difficult to ignore. You can't sleep through it. It forces a response.

Okay, so. We've got, on the one hand, on one side, we've got religious readers who approach a text with a particular mindset. And we have a text that lends itself to that kind of deep reading. You put the two together and you have then the ingredients of wonder, right? So this, these both of the sides of this formula have to be there. In other words, on the one hand we need readers who are willing to approach a text with certain, certain, qualities of character, right? So we need readers who are attentive to the text, who are willing to quiet the mind's agenda long enough to listen carefully, right? Who are willing to acknowledge that they may not understand everything immediately, a certain humility in our approach to it. Who have a sense of exploration, even playfulness in relation to that text and who are willing to ask incisive questions, raise doubts, engage and wrestle with the text. So you need someone who's willing to do that, right? And on the other side, you need a text that inspires astonishment, that has an overflow of meaning, that has a relevance to the present moment. A depth of meaning that resists definitive interpretation, that has an element of surprise, maybe even a little humor. You take those two things together, the characteristics of a classic and the mindset of a deep reader, and there you have the ingredients, not the guarantee, but the ingredients of wonder. You can't guarantee it as any cook knows, right? You're trying out a new recipe, you've got the recipe, you've got all the ingredients, you put it together in the way it's supposed to, and it may not inspire anyone at the dinner table, right? including the cook. It may be a flop. And that too is part of the mindset of the deep reader, that patience with the text. Sometimes that same text, read in the same way, falls flat and we just, we don't feel it. It's not producing that wonder. And other times it shows up when we don't expect it. But we've got the mindset the text is the same and ta-da, it's powerful and it's evocative and it's challenging to us.

The Bhagavad Gita is this kind of classic. It's a text that has had both of these ingredients for centuries, for millennia, and continues to have this type of deep readers and these characteristics that elicit wonder within them. It's, if you're not familiar with the Gita, It's the sort of text that has not only inspired Vaishnavas or Hindus in general, but has been read across the world. It's shaped a good, it's been part of the character of this country as well in the works of Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and its influence on Gandhi and through that on Martin Luther King Jr. And T.S. Eliot, right? So it's much more deeply embedded in the character of this nation than we often realize. It's something that's withstood the test of time, right? And it's shaped an entire culture, but many cultures along with it as well.

Okay, so if that's what it takes for wonder to happen, let's now move from the generalities to a couple of specificities, right? Let's look at the specific, because that's where the magic happens, right? No one reads a resume and feels wonder, maybe a little, but so far I've given you the resume of the text, right? I've given you the situation, the context for how wonder is born, not just for the Gita, but for any text. Now, let's see that at work. And I want to share with you, I mean, there's so much one could imagine to do here, but I want to share with you just one little piece, one little nugget of beauty and wonder that I have found in the text. And I'm hoping that we can read this together. This is just a single verse that I'll share with you from the Gita. As I mentioned, it's in Sanskrit, India's ancient language. The Bhagavad Gita, the word Gita means song. Bhagavad means God. The Bhagavad Gita is a, the setting of the Gita is a very unusual one for religious scripture. Bhagavad Gita is spoken on a battlefield. Just before the beginning of the largest war ever written about in the Hindu epics, the war of the Mahabharata. Two large armies, one more or less on the good side, one more or less on the bad side. They're complex characters, so it's not a fairy tale. There's no clear good, clear bad with, it's interesting, right? But one definitely more righteous than the other.

And Krishna is there as the chariot driver. Krishna is, God himself descended to earth, avatar. He's God descended to this earth and has walked the earth and is a friend to the main warrior on the good side. His name is Arjuna. And the Krishna is the teacher, the speaker of the Bhagavad Gita to Arjuna, but also his charioteer. He's the one driving his chariot, four very beautiful white horses. This setting of the Gita has been an important part of the Gita's message for Hindus. It's been an important metaphor for life itself, for Hindus to think through the struggle of life, the battle of life, the challenges that we face, and to hope that Krishna or God might drive our chariot through it, right? Like he might be the one who directs our horses in the right direction. So that's the setting of the Gita, and Krishna, the verse in question that I wanted to mention begins, it's in chapter seven, which is at the beginning of the middle six chapters of the Gita, it's 18 chapters, the middle six, which the middle six are this beautiful process of self-revelation that Krishna offers to Arjuna. In these chapters shows him, describes to him who he is, who divinity is, culminating in this grand, rather frightening theophany in chapter 11, and finally, the intimacy and closeness of relationship in chapter 12. So there's this process of self-revelation that happens in the Gita from Krishna to his friend, to his student, to his disciple Arjuna. This verse occurs just at the beginning of that process, where Krishna is introducing who he actually is. Let's read the verse together, and then I have a question for you to think about alongside me.

So, here it is. Chapters, actually I didn't list the verse number, did I? I think it's 7 verse 21 is this one here. I'll read it in the Sanskrit for you because it's quite beautiful. [Sanskrit]

This is a verse with 32 syllables, eight syllables in each quarter. And the last few syllables of each quarter are determined in a specific pattern, giving it its distinctive rhythm, which allows the Gita to be actually sung, which is how it's normally recited. It's very rarely just said. It's usually sung. So, oh conqueror of wealth, Arjuna, there is no truth superior to me. Everything rests upon me as pearls are strung upon a thread. Two halves to the verse, the halves correspond basically with the two sentences in English. In the first one, Krishna makes a rather grand claim, there is nothing superior to me, there is no other thing superior to me. But in the second one, he clarifies, tempers, articulates what that superiority means. He says, everything. Why is he the most superior? Everything rests upon me. The way pearls are strung. So my question for you is this, and something I'd like you to think about and talk to each other about for just a few minutes is, If God is the thread and we, all beings in this world, are like the pearls upon that thread, what does this metaphor, one of the beautiful things about the Gita are its metaphors. They show up every few verses and this is one example of them. Okay, what does this metaphor tell us about the nature of God, about our nature, about us and about the world that we inhabit. What does it tell us about the relationship between these three things? Everything rests upon me as pearls are strong. So let's just take a few minutes, maybe three, maybe four, maybe five, talk to the person sitting next to you, or if you're in a cluster of three, three people can talk, beyond that it's going to be difficult with seating facing this way. So take a few minutes to think about it, I'll bring you all back together, and I want to hear your insights, and I want to share some of my thoughts in regard to this verse as well. Okay, so please. That's the question.

Thank you. So, we don't have time to get to everyone, of course, but would anyone like to share maybe one thought that they had? You may have had many, but one thought about this verse and what in particular this metaphor might suggest about the relationship of God and the world and us. My friend over here said something really cool, he said how they’re like, the pearls upon a string are strung together, it’s stringing us together, it’s uniting us, so this is part of the role of God, is providing that unity and cohesion among his children, you know? That's wonderful. That's, your friend is brilliant. And I think that's one. That's at the heart of this metaphor, right? Like that thread, what is that function of that thread is to hold together. And holding together means that each one of those pearls, of course, is beautiful in its own right, but the necklace is so much more beautiful when all those pearls come together, right? When they're held together, then you see their beauty individually, but also collectively. And that work of bringing together is God's work, right? Not to divide, but to hold us together. Wonderful, thank you. Yes. Yeah, we discussed a little bit, kind of going along that same thing, also how the string, It's fascinating how it kind of plays a hidden role in stringing those together. And also thinking about how those pearls each individually have beauty and also like it is an opportunity for pearls to shine even though the string is what really makes it possible. And so it's beautiful to kind of show how God's role in allowing us to grow and through this life to learn and experience, but he plays this kind of hidden role while also being the fabric that keeps it all together. Wonderful, wonderful. I love your focus on hiddenness because I think it says several things and you've said several things. One is that the better made a necklace is, the less of the thread you see. And if we might think of God as the perfect craftsman, then clearly his presence is going to be both essential to this world and hidden from it. And Krishnak says exactly that elsewhere in the Gita. He says, I know past, I know present, I know future, and I know all beings, but me, no one knows. Right?

So, speaking of texts continuing to be relevant over time, this aspect of this metaphor becomes very important in a world where we get a lot of wisdom and guidance from science, right? That looks around and says, I see laws and I see nature and I see all kinds of things, but I don't see God. There's no instrument that can pick up his presence and Krishna's saying, yes, that's because I am both essential and invisible in the nature of this world like a thread. So that says something important about his role in the world ontologically, but it also says something about his stance towards the world morally. Right? To me, it says something about his humility in relation to the world. And I think you were touching upon that as well. That how he's very happy to let the pearls shine and take the credit. Right? A thread that demands credit makes for a very unpleasant looking necklace. Right? Everyone should be noticing me. It's like, no, that's both painful around your neck and it doesn't look very good, right? So he's like, no, this is okay. This world is about all of you, and each of you should shine together, and I will simply facilitate from behind the scenes. So something even in this rather, shall we say, arrogant statement, right? I am the supreme truth, something we come to expect from God, of course, but there's also a humility embedded in it where he's saying, I'm the supreme truth, and yet I take a step back behind everything. Wonderful. Thank you. Maybe one more thought here. Yes.

Wonderful, wonderful. And I think that complements the first comment very well because in this metaphor we find unity but also diversity, right? And this is one of the characteristics of the Gita as a whole is that Krishna is always doing this dance between unity and diversity and this metaphor captures it very well. Yes, God is the one who holds us together. And yes, those pearls look so much better together than they do scattered. They're so much more functional together than they are scattered across the ground. And yet, what makes them beautiful is the fact that they are not all the same, right? If you had one long pearl, you'd have a stick, not a necklace. And if they were not individually sized and individually colored, that necklace would have less to offer, right? It's the individuality, the uniqueness, the diversity of the pearls is precisely what makes them look better together. Makes them more beautiful together.

Thank you. So much can be said about that. And I think just this, you sharing this with me, I think demonstrates something very valuable, which is that religious reading, that type of deep reading we talked about, it can cross religious boundaries. The fact that you were able to read this text and share insights that inspired me and said something very distinctive and and truthful about the Bhagavad Gita, despite the fact that I'm guessing many of you have probably not studied this text very deeply. That says that religious reading, deep reading, can cross religious boundaries. That experience of wonder by reading a classic, when we approach it with that similar mindset, even if we're not used to approaching the Gita with it, or not used to approaching the Bible or the Book of Mormon or whatever. But if we approach it with that mindset and that text is responsive to us, that we might still experience that kernel of wonder, that moment of wonder, even if that text maybe is not ours in a more restrictive sense. And I think that becomes clear when you see what I put down to share with you, which I don't really need to go through because you just shared it.

First, each pearl is unique and therefore, irreplaceable. Just the third comment said this very well. Second, our beauty increases when we are together. The first comment was making this point very, very well. Third, it's the thread that holds us together. This is God's work in the world, right? That was also said by all of you. And finally, the better made a necklace, the less of the thread we can see. God is hidden in the world, which was our second comment, right? I promise those people were not planted today. This was all something that you brought out from the text itself. It's something that has always, always been a moment of wonder for me in reading this particular verse. It is one of my favorite verses in the Gita for the reason of this metaphor in particular. And there is yet more about this metaphor that I could share with you if there were a little more time.

So let's just wrap up by, I want to say one thing, or two little things. Just, we started with the big picture, we went more specific, let's end by taking a step back and asking ourselves, what do we learn? What do we learn from all of this? And there's just two things I want to share with you as sort of nuggets to take away. Why is it that this deep reading is so important for us today? Why is it so important for us today? The first, I might say, is that it allows us to keep sacred texts relevant. Keeping sacred texts relevant is important, both for the text and for us. It's important for the text because this is how we preserve sacred texts. This is how we keep them alive. This is how we keep them. Living is by reading deeply. We find meanings and applications of that text . It's crucial for the survival for the flourishing and for the relevancy of sacred texts. It's also important for us because it is Deep reading is essential to help us address the problems of our time the challenges of our time The motivation for change whatever change we need to find in the world the motivation for change very often comes from within the traditions, the stories, the convictions that people hold dear. And so when we want to see something change, we need to find that inspiration in the texts. The old often inspires the new, and it's that relationship that we find when we engage in deep reading.

So let me say that in order to experience the wonder of scripture, we need to allow ourselves to wonder about scripture, to allow ourselves to engage in questioning, to engage in doubt, to ask ourselves, why does this still mean anything to me today? I can see how it meant something to people hundreds of years ago, but why today? Secondly, and this is the last thing I'll say, we should engage in deep reading because it's fun. It's enjoyable, it's playful. So much of our life is structured around the metrics of productivity. We are asked in every profession, including now academia, to measure our productivity. How much did you progress? How much did you gain? How much did you produce? What are the metrics of impact that you can show? All that is fine. I'm not really against that. All I'm saying is that we still need a space in our lives where things are not measurable, where impact is not about productivity, where we are not able to articulate why it is useful, why it is joyful, why it is fun, why it's playful. We are there just because we are there. Such spaces in our life are precious few. We're always driving towards productivity. Even as we walk across campus, I'm trying to catch up on that one more email, right? That'll make all the difference in my life, right? So where's that space for playfulness, for non-productivity? So for this one, we might say, if we want to experience the wonder of scripture, then we have to let ourselves wander within it. Scripture, wandering, the act of wandering, is by its very nature pointless. You don't wander when you're heading towards a destination. Then you're traveling, right? Wandering means that you allow yourself to see what strikes your wonder.

And so I'll end with that, our thought for deep reading and modernity. Perhaps we can experience the wonder of Scripture if we allow ourselves to wonder about it and to wonder within it. Thank you all so much for your attention today. I appreciate it very much.

Download the transcript here.