Thursday, December 9, 2010

The Bhagavad-Gita

In English class this semester, my class was assigned to read the book The Bhagavad-Gita. This book was pretty interesting, but raised a lot of questions for me and I ended up not agreeing with it's teachings. The book describes many traits of Hinduism and dives deep into the Hindu culture. The main character, Arjuna, is being taught by the god Krishna the ways to find enlightenment. One point Krishna makes is that one must be nonattached to their actions. This is the only way they can fulfill their dharma, which is basically what a person is destined to do. For example, a teacher teaches, a mailman delivers mail. I had a problem with this idea though. How can somebody do their dharma and do it well without being attached to their actions? Could Michelangelo have created the David without being completely absorbed by what he was doing and being 100 percent passionate about being an artist and creating something beautiful? I don't think so. But in Hinduism culture he could have. This opened my eyes to how vastly different people are across the globe. For someone like me, Hinduism is completely odd and doesn't make sense, but to many other people in the world it makes total sense, and many live by teachings of Krishna.

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