Dharma Studies

If the grand story of the Mahabharata is the Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet, then the Bhagavad Gita is “Street Fighting Man.” It gets all the ubiquitous radio play; maybe you’ve even heard it in a commercial, definitely in a Martin Scorsese movie. You likely know the words, even the harmonies, without having had to try at all to memorize them.

Buddhism is a vast, sprawling heterogeneous and internally inconsistent tradition dying and flowering over and over in various times and places over around 2500 years. Anyone who tells you its “core” teachings or practices is ignorant or lying. This is okay; as long as you know it is so.

The teachings on emptiness (Sanskrit sunyata or shunyata) find their most articulate development in the Kadampa branch of Mahayana Buddhism (Madhyamika Prasangika philosophy). To the Kadampas, nothing exists ‘inherently’ or ‘from its own side’.

According to Buddhism, the basis of reality consists of ever-changing processes rather than static ‘things’. If any ‘thing’ is analysed in enough depth, and observed over a long enough timescale, it can be seen to be a stage of a dynamic process, rather than a static, stable thing-in-itself.

The Pali/Sanskrit word for “intention,” cetanā, derives from two words meaning “to think” or “thinking,” and it can also just mean “mind.” But it also carries some less static meanings. Two of these, “intention” and “volition”, are arguably the most commonly known among both scholars and Buddhist practitioners alike.

When the great universal teacher Shakyamuni Buddha first spoke about the Dharma in the noble land of India, he taught the four noble truths: the truths of suffering, the cause of suffering, the cessation of suffering and the path to the cessation of suffering.

Siddhartha Gautama’s story, across its many forms and translations, is remarkably consistent in the details. Like all stories of great teachers, some details have become mythologized as they cross cultures. Stories change to fit cultures, times, and populations as quickly as they arrive. But when trying to weave together the historical and mythological elements of Siddhartha Gautama (more familiarly known as the Buddha)’s story, we quickly learn that truth (that which is historically verifiable) and reality (living and lived traditions) are different; yet at the same time, completely inseparable.

By examining the Gita alongside the Enlightenment-era philosophy of Immanuel Kant, I argue that we can illuminate both texts’ relationship to ethics, aesthetics, and violence.