In reading the Bhagavad-Gita
from chapter four on, it may be tempting to collapse all of Hinduism into a
monotheism in which Lord Krishna is God. Even in the context of bhukti being
directed exclusively to Krishna, other deities are alluded to in the text. To
claim that those other deities came out of Krishna, and even that Krishna
surpasses even Brahman, which is infinite being that is
imperishable awareness, thought (but not mind), power, and bliss, in terms of
ultimacy does not mean that the Gita is a monotheist scriptural
faith-narrative. Not even Krishna’s unmanifest form by which the deity’s
creative energy gives rise to the cosmos transcends form itself, and thus
reaches the unmanifest and formless Brahman. To be sure, that Krishna,
as the Supreme Person metaphysically and ontologically, is ultimately Self renders
the deity identical to brahman, but this does not mean that Krishna transcends
brahman. Regardless of where the Krishna-Brahman debate lands, and
there are admittedly shlokas in the Gita that support the ultimacy
of Krishna and shlokas that favor the ultimacy of Brahman,
Krishna need not be more ultimate than Brahman for a devotee of the
deity to be able to experience a lot of transcendence from ordinary experience.
In fact, because either referent that is the Absolute lies beyond the
limits of human cognition, perception, and sensibility (emotion), according to
the Christian theologian Pseudo-Dionysius, the human experience of
distinctly religious transcendence is where our attention can fruitfully
be directed. This is not to say that a referent (i.e., a divine, transcendent
object) is thereby relegated or even discarded in favor of the quality of
experience as its own referent. Rather, it is to say that we can know a lot
more than we do about distinctly religious, and thus transcending, experience,
and that such knowledge is part of the human condition—part of being human as homo
religios as distinct from being a political, economic, and social species.
First I investigate the question of whether the Gita is monotheist,
after which I argue that Arjuna’s vision of Krishna in chapter 11 of the Gita
is can be viewed as the “event horizon” of sorts in terms of how much we
can transcend as we approach the limits of our faculties.
The full essay is at "Arjuna's Vision of Krishna."
