Bhagavad Gita
: The Beloved Lord's Secret Love Song
An
Interview with Graham M. Schweig, Ph.D.
Printed in Integral Yoga Journal, Spring 2007
Dr. Schweig's brand new book,
Bhagavad Gita: The Beloved Lord's Secret Love Song is
described by Huston Smith (the internationally recognized
authority on world religion) as a "beautiful and accessible
translation of the Gita." In this interview, Dr. Schweig
explains that while the Gita is about divine yearning, "at
a deeper level, it is a song issuing forth from the heart
of God. It is the secret call of the divinity for all souls
to love him, to take the journey to him, to be blissfully
united with him."
IYM: What is
the Gita's relationship to Yoga?
GS:
The Gita is the
book on Yoga par excellence. The narrator himself calls
Krishna's teachings, and the whole dialogue between Arjuna
and Krishna, "the supreme secret of Yoga" (18.75). Yoga, in
its ultimate form, is the natural outpouring of hearts to
one another, the human heart and the divine heart: this is
the supreme secret of Yoga. We learn in the Gita that the
divinity practices his Yoga through his amazing
manifestations, one of which is his full presence within
the inner region of our hearts. Humans, on the other hand,
are to practice a Yoga that allows them to enter fully into
the heart of divinity. When you realize you are drowning
yourself in Krishna's heart, you are not cognizant of your
individuality, though you remain an individual. You lose
yourself completely to gain yourself fully. For the Gita ,
Yoga is the mutual loving embrace between humanity and
divinity - this is the supreme Yoga.
IYM: Gita means song. Why a song?
GS:
Most wondrously, we
learn in the Gita that the heart of God passionately
desires to connect with the hearts of humans, and he
expresses this through a "gita ," a song of love that he
keeps secret. It is not a song in the lyrical sense, but it
is a song coming from the divine heart to us. As I say in
the introduction to the book, "It is a song issuing forth
from the heart of God. It is the secret call of the
divinity for all souls to love him, to take the journey to
him, to be blissfully united with him." Our Yoga is
ultimately meant to hear this secret song.
IYM:
You reference three
secrets in the text. What are these?
GS:
The supreme secret
is revealed as having three layers and is most fully
described in the 18 th chapter: the secret, the greater
secret, and the greatest secret of all, and these
correspond to how we should act in the outer world of
conflict, what we should expect to find in the inner world
of transcendence, and finally in the innermost world of the
heart, respectively. The great secret is that we should act
out of love. We should act in the way in this world that
best expresses our heart. This is said in verses 1-49. The
greater secret is revealed in verses 50-63. Krishna tells
Arjuna to know him as Brahman and as the Purusha ,
embracing him from within one's own heart. A running theme
throughout the Gita is the instruction to experience one's
self as it is embraced by Brahman and Purusha. The greatest
secret of all comes in verses 64-66 in which Krishna
reveals his own heart's divine passion: "You are so much
loved by me!" Here the divine heart so passionately desires
the love of the human heart and is inviting the human heart
to embrace his.
IYM:
Why keep this a
secret?
GS:
The greatest
impoverishment in the world is the impoverishment of the
human heart. If the heart would be nurtured it would take
care of all other impoverishments. Krishna keeps his love a
secret simply because we are just not ready to hear it. If
we would hear it, we would be filled with his love. He's
already embracing us with all his numerous manifestations,
but we may not respond. He is therefore a passive lover at
this point, an eternally patient lover. It is important to
note that Krishna is not a judgmental deity or a god of
punishment, condemnation or guilt. He doesn't want an
atmosphere of obligatory love: I love you and if you don't
love me you go to hell for eternity. He waits for us
forever. His love is so beautiful and perfect because it's
unconditional and he wants our love to be just as
unconditional. It's therefore the secret call of the
divinity.
IYM: That sounds exactly like
Gurudev! He always said that kind of "love" is not love,
it's business!
GS: Yes! In the West we have an obligatory, a pressured
love. What Gurudev is talking about and what Krishna is
addressing is a special kind of love. The way I translate
bhakti is "the offering of love," an offering of the heart.
It's active and dynamic, not passive. Right now Krishna is
actively offering us his embrace as the antaryamin ("The
Indweller") within our hearts. Thus the Gita is a
scriptural love letter. What's important in any
relationship is balance. Without balance, a relationship
cannot grow. I can love someone and say you are my best
friend but that is not balanced because you haven't decided
if you want to be my best friend. When balance is achieved
in any relationship, relationships are nourished and the
love within them grows. Otherwise they become stuck in
their unbalanced state. When we rise to the level of
unconditional loving in relation to the divine, there is
Yoga and an eternal fullness of hearts.
IYM: Could you give us a sense of
how the greatest secret is translated from the Sanskrit?
GS: In
Sanskrit, you don't have bold italic or double
underscoring, nor do we have things like smiley faces. So
let's see how Krishna expresses this divine yearning so
emphatically. As I just mentioned, the greatest secret of
all is most dramatically announced in verse 64 of Chapter
Eighteen:
sarva-guhyatamam bhuya
shrinu me paramam vacahah |
ishto 'si me dridham iti
tato vakshyami te hitam |
Hear still further
the greatest secret of all,
my supreme message:
"You are so much loved by me!"
Therefore I shall speak
for your well-being.
(18.64)
Sarva-guhyatamam : "the
greatest secret of all." There is no other way to translate
this. The most secret thing. It's unquestionably a
superlative. Shrinu me : "listen to me." Listen to my
supreme word, paramam vacahah : "my supreme message." Can
you get more emphatic than that? He doesn't anywhere else
in the Gita . Yet he further expresses emphasis has he
places his secret in quotation marks. Ishto 'si me dridham
iti : "You are so much desired by me!" Most immediately,
"You are loved." The word ishtah expresses that it is a
desired, passionate love, a longing. "I need you!" These
are verses worth having on one's dying breath. This is a
secret to be discovered by the devotee. It's a direct
message from Krishna to our hearts and ultimately has to be
received by the heart of a devotee. Krishna is embracing us
constantly and in so many ways and eternally waiting for
us. He will always be there for us. He offers his
unconditional love. He gives himself and the highest part
of himself. As I spoke above, the beauty of the Gita is
that Krishna demonstrates his love, kindness and patience
throughout and in his very teachings. This is so poignantly
expressed in the very notion that he's not at all a jealous
god; he states that if we want to worship other divinities
he will help us:
Whoever, with faith,
has offered love
to whatever form that
person desires to worship—
Upon every such person,
I bestow this
immovable faith.
(7.21)
IYM:
We don't tend to
think of the Gita as being so universal! I'm reminded of
Gurudev's saying "Truth is one, paths are many."
GS: Yes, he quotes the Rig Veda here. Gurudev always struck
me as the most understanding and encouraging Guru! He
powerfully impacted me in the early days. Yes, Krishna is
very open and generous. There are many philosophical
arguments people get into about the Gita and whether it is
about Karma, Jnana, or Bhakti Yoga. It's not an issue of
which one of these is correct. Krishna is saying that we
attain a "Yoga" with the divine by "acting" out of love for
the divine; by "knowing" the heart of the divine; and by
"offering our hearts" to the divine. These three primary
ways are all ultimately constituent processes in the
highest form of Yoga.
IYM:
Apart from the
challenge of translation, how do you present the Gita in
your book?
GS: Each verse is worthy of endless
contemplation, a veritable meditation. Therefore, the
translated verses are meant to stand on their own. I
present the verses so that if one reads nothing but the
verses, one can get through with a reasonable amount of
understanding. There are also footnotes that allow the
reader to appreciate the verses without having to leave the
page for further consultation. However, with anything
beautiful, it deserves a frame. Since the verses of the
Gita are exquisite, I give them a frame in the form of
introductory words that provide the unseasoned reader with
just enough of what they need so they may dive into the
depth of the Gita's message. Then, I continue to frame it
with a section that follows the verses, called textual
illuminations, where I go deeper. Following this section, I
present the English transliteration of every verse and
instructions on how to recite the verses accurately and
beautifully. Then, I have a twenty-four page index to the
verses. If they want more of a cross-reference to the
verses or footnotes there is the index to which the reader
can refer. It's unusual to find an index so nuanced and
detailed for the Gita's verses.
IYM:
Can you talk a
little about the Karma Yoga of the Gita in the context of
Bhakti Yoga?
GS: The
whole message of the Gita is embedded in the question: how
should we act in this world of conflict? I translate the
word karma as action. It comes from the Sanskrit root to
act or to perform. In the Gita we see God is acting out of
love for us and it is natural that we act out of love for
him. The very first verse of the Gita poses the question:
"How did they act?" The word "act"is a seed, a bija , a key
to the whole text. It's not what we do on our own
battlefields of life; rather, it's how we act - this has
ethical, moral, emotional and spiritual implications. The
question is not about seeking a business report, a news
summary; the Gita is all about the issues of right action,
proper action. How should we act? The short answer is that
we should act from the heart - that's the highest way to
act. The achievement of the heart is the only thing that we
can take with us at the time of death. We can transcend
death by living fully within and acting through the depths
of our hearts.
These are subtle themes in the Gita . The soul is something
that is dynamic, that ultimately offers itself. When one is
in love, one's attention is dynamically and actively
focused on a single object. This is action or karma that
constitutes a Yoga in the bhakti of the Gita.
IYM:
What was your goal
in doing this new translation?
GS: After reading and teaching the
Gita countless times and contemplating its verses for over
37 years in both translations and in the original Sanskrit,
a few years ago I was struck, after speaking to a colleague
of mine, how much there is a need, despite the dozens of
available translations, for a precise and beautiful
translation of this sacred masterpiece. I started with the
assumption that the Sanskrit author was not impoverished,
and thus my translation was to be literal, and a very
precise translation. But, I didn't stop there—I had to go
deeper to see how each verse could begin to resonate, to
sing. I looked at each verse as a special jewel that if you
polished long enough it would start to glow. I attempted to
do this with every verse. That is how I wound up spending
day and night on the verses. They became an obsession.
I wanted the reader to be able to experience this text as
if they could read it in the original language, to get some
sense of the beauty of the original and the philosophical
power of its words and phrases. Each verse projects its
very own special drama, with its own play on words if you
can preserve them—which is what I tried to do. Most
translators don't bother to preserve this, but are more
concerned about transmitting meaning. But I found, as with
all poetry, that one can't divorce what the language does
from the meaning. Very few try to incorporate the poetic
sense and beauty of the text - a sense of the literary
motifs, structures, and repetitions. Very few try to convey
the sense of the philosophical power through the literary
quality of the translation. If you can bring out something
special that's embedded in the original but is not
necessarily quite so available to the ordinary eye, it's
possible that the soul of these verses can be presented in
a powerful and compelling way, amazingly, through the
translation itself. The very gifts of these verses await us
now. How much do we absorb them? That's a matter of how
ready we are to receive the secret love song.