Jeyamohan is conducting classes on 'Hindu philosophy' (as he himself calls it) under the aegis of his new initiative, "Unified Wisdom". Recently he has taken to publishing short videos every day and in one such video he raised the question of whether one can "learn" philosophy by reading texts and answers in the negative saying that one needs to attend a class structured in an academic manner. I don't completely disagree with that. I welcome his initiative and as a long time reader of his essays on these topics I am sure he has much to contribute.
Jeyamohan's short video did bring some memories. Many years ago, writing on Nataraja Guru, he cited Guru's harsh objection to S. Radhakrishnan's interpretation of Gita as primarily religious and not a philosophical treatise. It is from Jeyamohan I've come to know of Nataraja Guru and for that I thank him. Nataraja Guru, for those who don't know, was a disciple of Narayana Guru and was trained in Sorbonne in philosophy and was a student of Henri Bergson.
I've been, since my college days, an avid reader of Radhakrishnan and I am still in awe of the breadth and depth of his scholarship. Radhakrishnan spanned the East and West with a felicity that, to my knowledge, no one else has surpassed. If one wants to sample his encyclopedic range I'd warmly recommend reading his "Idealist view of life", a collection of his Hibbert Lectures.
Both, Radhakrishnan's (1948) and Guru's (1961), versions of Bhagavad Gita, with their prefaces, is available online. Print version of Radhakrishnan's book is still sold By Oxford University Publications, print version of Guru's book is sold by a nondescript publisher. To the reader, I'd recommend Richard Davis's, professor of religion at Bard College, exceedingly well written book, "The Bhagavad Gita: A biography". Davis admirably traces how a compact text evolved into the conscience of a religion and a people over many centuries, I've reviewed the book in my blog (see first comment for link).
I am no expert, nor an academic, to plumb the merits and demerits of Guru's criticism of Radhakrishnan's approach or to attempt a detailed comparison of both books and therefore I will defer to professional reviewers. From reading the prefaces of both books I can say, though, that Guru was uncharitable to Radhakrishnan and doesn't take into account Radhakrishnan's larger view of Hindu philosophy and it's necessity, as he saw it, in the then historical world wracked by two world wars. Jeyamohan accepts, axiomatically, Guru's criticisms. I am happy to note that Radhakrishnan's book is still discussed in academic circles while Guru's book is barely noticed. Of course Jeyamohan might attribute it to some vested interests in Western academia. I'd not.
Radhakrishnan writes:
"The Bhagavadgita is more a religious classic than a philosophical treatise. It is not an esoteric work designed for and understood by the specially initiated but a popular poem which helps even those “who wander in the region of the many and variable/' It gives utterance to the aspirations of the pilgrims of all sects who seek to tread the inner way to the city of God...it serves even today as a light to all who will receive illumination from the profundity of its wisdom which insists on a world wider and deeper than wars and revolutions can touch.
...The teaching of the Gita is not presented as a metaphysical system thought out by an individual thinker or school of thinkers. It is set forth as a tradition which has emerged from the religious life of mankind. It is articulated by a profound seer who sees truth in its many-sidedness and believes in its saving power.
.......The realm of spirit is not cut off from the realm of life. To divide man into outer desire and inner quality is to violate the integrity ofjruman life. The illumined soul acts as a member of the kingdom of God, affecting the world he touches and becoming a saviour to others. 1 The two orders of reality, the transcendent and the empirical, are closely related. The opening section of the Gita raises the question of the problem of human action. How can we live in the Highest Self and yet continue to work in the world? The answer given is the traditional answer of the Hindu religion, though it is stated with a new emphasis. (My comment: This is exactly Gandhi's twinning and braiding of spirituality - not religion- with politics)
The Gita does not give any arguments in support of its metaphysical position. The reality of the Supreme is not a question to be solved by a dialectic which the vast majority of the human race will be unable to understand. Dialectic in itself and without reference to personal experience cannot give us conviction. Only spiritual experience can provide us with proofs of the existence of Spirit."
Contrasting with Radhakrishnan Guru argues that Gita is dialectic and writes:
"Throughout the Guta we are able to recognize a certain antique and somewhat outmoded yet time honored type of reasoning known as Dialectics......the key to the proper appraisal of the Gita consists in the recognition of the Gita as a dialogue between wisdom teacher and a disciple.....if in spite of its clear character as a wisdom text some persons still persist in calling the Gita a religious book of obligations it must be because of their inability to separate the painting from the canvas..."
So, how were the two books received? Let's see the professional reviews in reputed journals of the time.
Review of Radhakrishnan's book
Leo Robertson reviewed Radhakrishnan’s for “Philosophy”, published by The Royal Institute of Philosophy, in the issue dated April 1949. Robertson’s review perfectly captures and affirms why Radhakrishnan considered Gita a religious text
“Professor Radhakrishnan's work stands in a class by itself”. “All the requisites for the production of the ideal translation of the Bhagavadgita accompanied by an authoritative commentary are here, and Professor Radhakrishnan has not failed in producing what I, for one, feel sure will hold its own as the best work of this class in English.”.
“Though Professor Radhakrishnan rightly regards the Bhagavadgita as a brilliant synthesis bringing apparently conflicting currents of philosophical and religious thought into harmony with each other, the unity achieved is not such as to satisfy the strictly philosophic enquirer. Below the surface the fundamental metaphysical problems remain unsolved, and differing schools of thought in regard to them still confront each other unyieldingly. The integra- tion seemingly achieved by the Bhagavadgita is one of facade merely. Sankara, the idealistic-monist, and Ramanuja, the realistic-dualist, keep to then- respective camps and the questions which each in his own way attempted to answer are still the same old classic philosophic questions perplexing the minds of the thinkers of to-day.”
“Professor Radhakrishnan, though impressed by and speaking in terms of praise of the work of unification so admirably performed by the Bhagavadgita for the masses, is, of course, well aware of the deep fissures in the meta- physical ground on which it stands.”
“The plain man, representative of the masses, for whom the Bhagavadgita was primarily intended is, however, easily satisfied on questions of metaphysical import, for with a delicate sense of intellectual propriety fortunately lacking in the truly philosophic-minded and in small children, he does not press for answers beyond a certain point. The earth rests on a tortoise, the tortoise on an elephant. Beyond this in such profound matters it would be unseemly to go. It is obviously for this reason that Professor Radhakrishnan is careful.to stress the essentially religious character of the Bhagavadgita, and to point out that its doctrine is not presented as a metaphysical system originating from some individual thinker or school of thinkers”
Review of Nataraja Guru's book
Nataraja Guru’s book was reviewed by J.C. Wright in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (October 1963)
“The author seeks to out-Sankara Sankara in interpreting the Gitd as a work of pure metaphysics, advaita in its conception, but Cartesian in its rationalism (the guru-sisya dialogue acting, rather like the Cartesian monologue, as the vehicle for absolute logic).”
“The work is marred by a translation too close to the Sanskrit for elegance and occasionally for comprehensibility, and by the absence of any attempt at textual criticism”
Bayly on Radhakrishnan
Historian C.A. Bailey in “India, the Bhagavad Gita and the World”, published in the journal “Modern Intellectual History” (2010) surveys the influence of Gita and draws special attention to Radhakrishnan’s text and approach to Gita.“On the one hand, Radhakrishnan used the tools of Western philosophical analysis to confer what he saw as scholarly rigour on the Indian classics. His commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita (1948), the Upanishads and Brahma Sutra are said to be the most exact. On the other hand, he sought equivalence between the Western and the Indian tradition by insisting that Western philosophy and political theory itself, despite its claims to objectivity, was essentially a product of the Christian and Jewish theological traditions.”
“..many analysts would now agree with Radhakrishnan about the importance of implicit ideologies of salvation even in the Marxist, Nietzschean and Durkheimian traditions. Alongside his philosophical universalism, Radhakrishnan insisted on the importance of instinctive thinking as opposed to the purely rational, a concept which was perfectly compatible with the idea of devotion to the Lord in the Gita.”
“Radhakrishnan conceived himself as a warrior for immanent religion in a world degraded by materialism and human arrogance. This was the theme of works of his such as The Religion We Need (1928) and his Hibbert lectures of 1932, published as The Idealist View of Life (1932).46 But perhaps the most striking (if philosophically less rigorous) of his works arguing this case was his Kamala lectures in Calcutta University of 1942, published as Religion and Society (1947).”
“Radhakrishnan’s religion was not a soteriological form of devotion to a loving external Creator. It was instead in the Vedantist tradition, the “god in man” which had to be released from the arrogance of the “herd animal”, which he had become.48 He quoted the Gita: “when men deem themselves to be gods on earth . . . when they are thus deluded by ignorance, they develop a satanic perversity that proclaims itself absolute both in knowledge and power”.”
Bayly adroitly locates Radhakrishnan’s approach to Gita within his worldview of arguing for spirituality in the larger sense as an antidote to a world gone mad. It is not for nothing that Radhakrishnan stands the scrutiny and continues to strike a chord in modern academics. Nataraja Guru has received scant notice and when noticed the judgments were harsh. Of course one could argue that Radhakrishnan’s popularity was due to his stature in public life and even to his views of Hindu scriptures that hews close to a Western view. It is a debate beyond the purview of this post.
Lastly
It is, however, telling that Radhakrishnan, Nataraja Guru, S.N. Dasgupta were all products of Western academia and not sprung from any traditional Vedic school. This highlights a huge vacuum in the intellectual tradition of Hinduism unlike its Abrahamic counterparts.
I should add the following from my review of Richard Davis’s “Biography of a book: The Bhagavad Gita”:
“Amongst the modern commentaries and translations Davis selected Dr S.Radhakrishnan's and Prabhupada's books. Amongst the many operatic performances of Gita, mostly Western, Davis cites warmly a rendition by South Indian singer K.J. Yesudas.
Out of curiosity I checked out Jeyamohan's website for his blogs on Gita before I wrote this blog. Davis's book and many of what Jeyamohan wrote are in consonance. That is a testimony to Davis's, a western academic, research credentials. I've not read Jeyamohan's commentary on Gita as a book but where Davis scores is in the lucidity, preciseness and, however few, his academic quibbling in places.
On one count Jeyamohan undoubtedly scores over Richard Davis. The Gita was a later addition to the Mahabharatha, that much everyone agrees. Davis does not dwell at length on that issue beyond a simple discussion on the probable dates of composition. Davis, being an academic and teacher of religions, is crimped by his discipline to stick with historical analyses. Jeyamohan, a towering presence in contemporary Tamil literature as author and more importantly as student of philosophy tutored by Nithya Chaitanya Yathi, brings to bear his literary acumen to the debate of whether Gita was an addition in tune with the larger corpus of Mahabharatham or an intrusive inclusion with a hidden agenda as Marxist Indian historians allege. Jeyamohan points out that Arjuna behaves post-war as he was pre-war as if the epochal tutoring amidst a battlefield never happens. Considering the Mahabharatha as a work of literature Jeyamohan contends that such characterisation of Arjuna proves that the Gita was a latter day addition. He however rejects that it was an ill-fitting intrusion by pointing out rhetorical and philosophical continuity.”
References:
1. The Bhagavad Gita: S. Radhakrishnan
2. The Bhagavad Gita: Nataraja Guru
3. Review of Nataraja Guru''s book
4. Review of Radhakrishnan's book
