Turning the Wheel of the Dialectic: Bhagavad Gītā (India, after 5 c. BCE); Ajith, “A Critique of Brahmanist Ethics”

We have seen how D.T. Suzuki’s take on zen was a very modern thing, tailor made in Illinois as a bourgeois ideology. This time, under the guidance of Ajith’s dialectical materialist critique of Brahmanism, we take up the Bhagavad Gītā (India, post 5th c. BCE), especially its modern bourgeois idealist interpretations as represented by Tilak’s Gītā Rahasya, a foundational text for India’s comprador Brahman classes and their English masters. We notice here the emphasis on karma yoga, the spiritual practice of carrying out one’s varṇa dharma or caste destiny, within an absolute monist worldview of advaita, non-dualism. Is this “class rule as spiritual practice”—relatively obscure in the premodern Japanese Buddhist tradition but so beloved of the Anglo-American bourgeoisie for similar reasons to their enthusiastic embrace of the Gītā—the secret ingredient in D.T. Suzuki’s zen? And what happens when we read the Gītā from the dialectical materialist perspective which accords so much better with South Asian thought?

Critiquing Brahmanism https://foreignlanguages.press/new-roads/critiquing-brahmanism-k-murali-ajith/

K. Muralidharan (Ajith) on Medium https://ajithspage.medium.com/

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