Interpreting the Gita

[Lynken Ghose]

Arun Gupta states the following:

My comments are below. They just address the portion of Dr. Gupta's message
which I have included -

>If you have not by direct experience understood the following, then,
>with no disrespect intended, I don't care if you are all the current
>and future Sanskritists of Chicago and Harvard rolled into one, you
>have not understood a thing, in my opinion :
>
>2.40 swalpam apy asya dharmasya trAyate mahato bhayAt.
>
>A scholar of Sanskrit is one who knows the language very well.
>To draw an analogy, it is someone who can identify the origin of
>the pigments in a painting, how the paints were made, the origin of
>the canvas, the order in which brush strokes were made, what the brush
>was made of, etc.  But that does not make one into a competent art critic.


I think I agree with what I see as the spirit of this. The scientific study
of religion is good for certain types of analyses but somewhat limited when
it comes to interpreting religious ideas. If you grapple with an idea with
too much scholarly distance or in too "objective" a fashion, you begin to
ask the wrong kinds of questions.

However, as scholars and teachers, we are sometimes put into the position
where we have to give it our best shot: so, I empathize with the scholarly
plight at times too.

Lynken Ghose


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