Agape and Bhakti with Bataille and Mark at Loyola and St. Francis. David L. Goicoechea
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      of his person, the gradual way in which

      the disciples reach an understanding of him

      which remains hidden from the crowds.”

      Even the disciples have a hard time

      understanding that he must die out of love.

      At Mark 8:31 we get the first prophecy

      of his passion and Peter cannot grasp it

      and at Mark 9:9 Jesus tells them again

      to keep it a secret that he will be killed

      but then be resurrected from the dead.

      At Mark 9:30 he repeats the secret and

      only slowly do they come to understand

      the relation between agape and being

      killed out of love for others and then

      this strange mystery of rising from the dead.

      They are being taught the great mystery

      that Christmas can be everyday

      especially on Good Friday because of

      Easter Sunday and it wasn’t until

      he died and rose from the dead

      that they would begin to understand.

      Three times Jesus predicts his passion,

      death, and resurrection and each time

      he is misunderstood by his followers.

      How to redeem suffering and let it be

      even joyful is the mystery of agape

      and is central to the mission of Jesus.

      Bhakti

      The Bhakti of the Bhgavad Gita

      We now get to explore the Hindu love of bhakti

      and the Christian love of agape in their differences,

      their likenesses and how they might complement each other.

      The Bhagavad Gita is a beautiful, wonderful poem

      that can introduce us to the varieties of Hindu mysticism.

      It is part of humankind’s longest poem, the Mahabharata,

      and in it Lord Krishna is explaining to Arjuna,

      who is a member of the warrior caste,

      why it is his duty to kill some of his relatives

      in a just war to maintain the Kingdom as it should be.

      Lord Krishna shows three paths to Arjuna as to why

      he should fight; the paths of knowledge, action, and devotion.

      The path of knowledge is metaphysical and teaches

      Arjuna not to worry because persons do not really die

      but continue on with rebirth and become other beings.

      The path of action is ethical and shows Arjuna that

      he should act out of duty alone and not for self-gain

      and then he will receive a good rebirth.

      The path of devotion teaches him how God loves him

      and gives him the grace to love God so that he is

      no longer motivated by freedom from the wheel of rebirth

      but rather by the salvation to love God forever.

      Thus there are two main mystical ways in the Gita.

      The metaphysical and ethical paths take us beyond illusion

      so that we see that each person is Atman, the great world soul,

      and Atman is Brahman or pure Being-Consciousness-Bliss.

      The devotional path of Bhakti believes that each person

      can love the supreme spirit of the personal God

      here on earth and then be happy with him

      for ever in a heaven of eternal love or bhakti.

      From Bhaj to Bhakti

      The etymological root of bhakti is the word bhaj

      which means “to share,” “to partake of” and “to participate.”

      The ancient Sanskrit word for love is Prema which

      means affection, eros, friendship, and devotion.

      Prema and bhaj in the variety of their meanings

      were synonyms for each other and from earliest times

      in the great hymns of the Rig Veda there was

      an outpouring of reverence, devotion, friendship and love

      so that a scholar like Raj Singh can claim that

      bhakti was already there throughout the whole history

      of the Indian culture in all of its art and literature.

      But the bhakti that is in the Bhagavad Gita

      is very different in its world view from

      the Advaita Vedanta view that is in the Gita also

      and that developed in the Upanishadic times.

      Scholars like Dhavamony see a great difference

      between bhakti in the Gita and anything that

      came before it in the entire Sanskrit tradition

      and they ask where this bhakti came from.

      They show why they think it came from

      the Dravidian culture of the Tamil people in the south.

      They have a special kind of literature which

      is often written from the woman’s point of view.

      Whether this view of God’s love for humans and

      God’s grace that lets humans love God came from

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