Neel Burton's 3 favorite reads in 2024

The Mahabharata epic, composed in around 200 BCE, is the longest poem in the world, and about eight times as long as the combined Iliad and Odyssey. The most famous section is Chapters 25-42 of the sixth book, known as the Bhagavad Gita (Song of God) in which the god Krishna appears to the archer Arjuna in the midst of the Battle of Kurukshetra. Counterintuitively, Krishna advises Arjuna not to succumb to his scruples about killing his enemy cousins, the Kauravas, but to do his duty and fight on.

The themes of the Gita suggest that it is rooted in a time of religious flux, when even great warriors like Arjuna took to questioning the ethics of war. And what it represents is an attempt to resolve the tension between competing strands of Hinduism, including Vedic ritualism (Karma Yoga), Upanishadic wisdom (Jnana Yoga), and the likes of Buddhist and Jain asceticism (Raja Yoga), by integrating them into devotionalism (Bhakti Yoga) and bringing this to the fore. This also served to democratize the religion, which, to ordinary people not given to ritual sacrifice, study, or meditation, must have seemed remote and elitist. The devotional theism advocated in the Bhagavad Gita is the form assumed by modern, popular Hinduism—epitomized in the West by the Hare Krishnas.

Vishnu appears, in avatar form, in both the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. But unlike Rama, Krishna knows that he is Vishnu, and on the battlefield, reveals himself to Arjuna in his sublime yet terrible universal form. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the ‘father of the atomic bomb’, had read the Bhagavad Gita in the original Sanskrit and been profoundly affected by it—to the point of nicknaming his car Garuda, after the eagle-like vahana of Vishnu. He recalled that, upon witnessing the first nuclear detonation on July 16, 1945, he thought of Vishnu in his universal form, and of these verses in particular: 'If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendour of the mighty one … Now I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds.'

The content of the Upanishads is very diverse, and may include mantras, rituals, creation myths, lineages of teachers, historical narratives, and the like. But at their best and most original, the Upanishads take the form of a philosophical dialogue, not unlike those of Plato, with named interlocutors presenting and debating various viewpoints.

For example, in the Great Forest Upanishad, the sage Yajnavalkya engages in philosophical debate with, among others, his wife Maitreyi, the sage Gargi (another, rare, woman), and King Janaka of Videha—who salutes Yajnavalkya with “namaste”.

In the Chandogya Upanishad, the sage Uddalaka Aruni—the guru or teacher of Yajnavalkya—engages in debate with his son, Shvetaketu. Uddalaka Aruni, Shvetaketu, Yajnavalkya, Maitreyi, and Gargi are among the first philosophers in recorded history.

This being philosophy, there is a tendency to abstraction, to grasp at 'the truth behind the truth' (satyasya satyam). The central vision is one of pantheism (all is God) or panentheism (all is in God), with the Creator dissimulated in nature 'even as the silkworm is hidden in the web of silk he made'.

God is Brahman, and the part or aspect of Brahman that is in us is Atman. The aim then becomes to achieve the knowledge and unity of Atman and Brahman, which is wisdom, salvation, and liberation.

Before the Upanishads, Brahmins sacrificed to the gods for society to prosper. After the Upanishads, Brahmins turned instead to the God within, to achieve their own liberation.

Some two hundred years later, Socrates would make a similar turn. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates tells Phaedrus that he sees no point in being curious about myths or anything else which is not his concern: 'I must first know myself… to be curious about that which is not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous.'

More popular even than the Dhammapada, and often illustrated in Buddhist architecture, are the Jataka Tales, a collection of stories from the previous lives of the Buddha. The jatakas (‘birth stories’) are premised on the night of the Buddha’s enlightenment, during which he remembered hundreds of thousands of former births.

In these past lives, he was not yet a Buddha, but a bodhisattva, which, in the Theravada tradition, is someone who has resolved to become a Buddha and received this confirmation or prediction from a living Buddha. Thus, in the Jataka Tales, the bodhisattva, having been inspired by his encounters with past Buddhas, makes a vow before the last Buddha Dipankara to himself become a Buddha by postponing his enlightenment until such a time as he be ready to teach others. He then spends many lives trying to fulfil this vow—supplying the material for the 547 jatakas in the Theravada collection.

The Jataka Tales are one of the oldest and largest collections of stories in the world, and the only one to trace the development of their central character over hundreds of births. Many of the tales are adapted from the immemorial fabularies of India and the world, often by replacing a character with the bodhisattva.