This practical commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, one of the
greatest scriptures of the world, has grown out of the weekly
talks given by Sri Eknath Easwaran
[1]
to a group of his devoted students and friends in Berkeley. The
talks, beginning in May 1968, have been carefully recorded and
transcribed weekly with the help of many members of Easwaran's
âshram, or spiritual family. The transcribed lectures were
compiled and edited under Easwaran's close supervision.
The Gita class,
like all of Easwaran's classes, is primarily a preparation and
inspiration for the practice of meditation as well as a
commentary on a particular scripture. Group meditation follows
the hour-long talk, in which Easwaran usually covers one or two
verses from the Gita. In these impromptu talks, he may apply the
verse to the biggest challenges facing the world today or direct
his comments to solving the personal problem of a friend in the
audience. But whether talking about local incidents in Berkeley
or international issues, his unchanging purpose is to inspire
his listeners to practice the Gita in their daily life and to
make the Gita a driving force in their consciousness. The
purpose of this book is to enable Easwaran's readers, also, to
translate the timeless values of the Gita into their daily
living through the practice of meditation.
Easwaran began
studying Sanskirt, the language of the ancient Hindu scripture,
at the age of ten in his village school in Kerala state, India.
He also studied Sanskirt at his ancestral Shiva temple under a
priest from a community which is well known in India for its
pure Sanskirt tradition. Thoroughly familiar with the Gita in
the original Sanskirt, Easwaran is also perfectly at home in
English, though Malayalam is his mother tongue. In interpreting
the scriptures, however, he relies on neither his Sanskirt nor
English scholarship, but on his experience in meditation and his
personal practice of the spiritual life. He grew up in a large
joint family in the matrilineal tradition of Kerala, and he
considers his mother's mother, the flower of the Eknath family,
his spiritual teacher.
It is said that
every spiritual teacher has a particular context in which he or
she flourishes best. Easwaran is an educator. Formerly, he would
say, it was education for scholarship, education for degrees;
now it is education for living. Before he came to the United
States he was chairman of the Department of English at the
University of Nagpur and was devoted to his students and the
literature he taught them. After coming to this country on the
Fulbright exchange program in 1959, Easwaran began giving talks
on meditation and spiritual life, and the response was so great
that in 1960 he established the Blue Mountain Center of
Meditation in Berkeley to carry on his work of teaching
meditation. Since that time, except for one return to India, he
has been giving ongoing classes each week on the practice of
meditation and commenting on the writings of the great mystics
of all religions, including the Yogasûtras of Patanjali,
the Little Flowers of St. Francis, the writings of
Meister Eckhart, the Upanishads, the Bhaktisûtras of
Nârada, the Dhammapada of the Buddha, the Sermon on the Mount,
Thomas a Kempis's Of the Imitation of Christ, and the
Bhagavad Gita. He also teaches courses on meditation and on
Mahatma Gandhi for the University of California Extension,
Berkeley. In Nagpur, he likes to tell us laughingly, he had a
reputation for always dragging Sri Ramakrishna into his lectures
on Shakespeare and Shaw. Now, in these talks on the Gita, it is
Shakespeare who illustrates the teaching of Sri Ramakrishna and
St. Francis. The content has changed, but the context in which
Easwaran flourishes cannot be very different: a small but
extremely devoted group, perhaps eighty to a hundred, mostly
young people of the sort who gravitate to a university town,
gathered around in a semicircle to drink in the words of a man
who is talking not about something he has read or something he
has thought out, but about something he has experienced in his
own life.
So this is a very
special kind of book. Easwaran likes to say that it has grown
like a tree because it issues directly from his life, which is
so completely rooted in the Gita that every day he gains a
deeper understanding of its teachings during even the most
commonplace experiences: sharing ice cream with the âshram
children in Santa Rosa, walking with friends down Telegraph
Avenue in Berkeley, watching a mime with his wife in San
Francisco's Union Square. Every Tuesday night in class this tree
would flower, and we would hear these incidents retold as
precise, profound illustrations of the Gita's applicability to
our modern world. You can follow these incidents in this book,
week by week, and at the same time you can trace the growth of
the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation itself: the long months
of looking for an âshram site, the building and remodeling when
Ramagiri Ashram was acquired, the arrival of Easwaran's mother
and nieces from India. The resulting is a living document which,
as Easwaran says, is still growing even now and which will
continue to grow as it is read and absorbed by others into their
own lives.
Easwaran has
chosen to comment on the eighteen chapters of the Gita in three
volumes, each volume covering six chapters. It is said that
these three parts of the Gita illustrate the glorious truth of
the Upanishads Tat tvam asi, "That thou art." The first
six chapters are an exposition of tvam, 'thou,' the Âtman, and
reveal the nature of our real, eternal Self. The second six
chapters concern Tat, 'That': Brahman, the supreme
Reality underlying all creation. The last six chapters explain
asi, 'is,' the relationship between tvam and
Tat, between the Self within and the supreme Reality which
unites all existence into one whole. The Gita develops this
truth of the Upanishads Tat tvam asi, "That thou art": by
discovering out real Self we become united with the Ground of
all existence and realize the indivisible unity of all life.
Easwaran would
like to convey his appreciation to everyone who has helped with
this book, including those who have attended the Gita talks with
sustained enthusiasm over the years. He wishes to express his
deep love to all the members of his spiritual family who have
assisted in translating, recorded, transcribed, editing, and
printing this commentary on the Gita.
In turn we, the
editors, speaking for everyone who has helped, feel that working
on this book has been a great privilege. Nachiketa, the student
in the Katha Upanishad, tells Yama, "A teacher of this, another
like you, is not to be had. No other boon is equal to this at
all." And as the reader will see, such a combination of
enlightenment and practical, effective teaching as is found here
is rare indeed, difficult to find in the modern world.
__________
[1]
Easwaran is the given name by which he is known among
his friends; Eknath is the name
of his ancestral family. Sri is used in India as
a respectful form of address.
__________
Easwaran,
Eknath, The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living: Chapters 1
Through 6.
(Preface: "A Living Tree," by Ramagin Ashram), (The
Blue Mountain Center of
Meditation, Berkeley, California, 1975), pp. 7-10.