A man whose chosen Hindu name is Vridavanath
spoke at Harvard’s Bhukti Yoga Conference in 2025 on the plight and ultimate
aim of an embodied soul as described in the Bhagavad-Gita. A conditioned
soul/self (atman) that has entered the material realm and is thus
subject to karmic consequences can come back to the divine source of all: the One
that is in all. As material, embodied beings while alive, that is, as both biological
and spiritual, we are prone to getting locked into dualities of attachment and
aversion, which in turn play right into suffering. We forget that we are
wearing material masks, and that our real identity (atman) is greater
than our material roles that we assume in our daily lives. Through our actions,
we bind ourselves by the law of karma. Before being born into the material
realm, a person’s unembodied soul (atman) knew Krishna, but as embodied,
the soul/self relates to other corporeal bodies rather than to other people as
spiritual beings and thus in compassion. Why does Brahman or Krishna—the respective
impersonal or personal notions of Absolute Truth—create the world with
separateness from the divine included? Furthermore,
how is a devotee of Krishna to navigate working in business, given the
separateness woven into the very fabric of our daily existence as material and
spiritual beings?
Body, soul, and matter are the
three fundamental elements in the created realm. Fundamentally, we are free
beings but we are subject to attachments in the created realm. Honoring the
free will of the soul, Brahman or Krishna creates separateness in Creation; it
is not that conscious being or the supreme deity wants us to be in a condition
of separation from the divine. Rather, the embodied soul is guided in part out
of its inclination to live separately from the divine, and Brahman or Krishna
use creative energy to accommodate the inclination and thus human free-will. It
follows that not only goodness, but also passion and ignorance are the fundamental
elements of the soul’s material (embodied) existence in the material world.
As the Supreme Soul, according to
Vridavanath, Krishna leads embodied souls to goodness even though Krishna (and
Brahman) transcends goodness. Similarly, liberation (moksha) is achieved
when there is no longer any residue from good and bad karma. In Fear
and Trembling, Kierkegaard makes the same point: that the divine command
that Abraham gets to sacrifice his son Isaac trumps the ethical verdict of
murder (and even attempted murder, as Abraham is commanded by Yahweh to put
down his knife at the last minute). From the standpoint of the (ethical) good,
Abraham is guilty of attempted murder. Yet from a theological standpoint, the divine
command is to sacrifice rather than murder Isaac. This can only be
viewed as absurd to other characters in the story, for they do not have access
to the divine command that is given exclusively to Abraham. The ultimate goal
in a faith narrative is theological rather than ethical, for such a
narrative lies squarely in the sui generis domain of religion, even if
that of ethics is related.
In his talk, Vridavanath said that the ultimate goal of the embodied soul/self in the Bhagavad-Gita is to know Krishna, by using the faculty of buddhi, which is the enlightened use of the reasoning faculty of the mind to know the source of the created realm. However, does knowledge exhaust devotion? It seems that the former is better suited to Absolute Truth being impersonal than to it being assumed to be personal, as a Supreme Person. In the Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna, "Whatever you do, whatever you eat, whatever you sacrifice, whatever you give, whatever austerities-you-perform—do that . . . (as) an offering to Me. Thus you will be freed from the bonds of action (whose) fruits are auspicious (or) inauspicious. Released, (with) the self-yoked by the Yoga of renunciation, you will come to Me."[1] The goal thus surpasses good as well as bad karma, and thus ethics, as the world itself must be renounced in terms of being attached to it for a person to be liberated. This does not mean non-action, according to the Gita; rather, renunciation means non-attachment to consequences of actions. The embodied soul/self is to do one’s duty in actions without being concerned about the results. Krishna also advocates meditation, as well as bhakti-yoga, the path of offering love by infusing each activity with love of Krishna and all creatures.
The inclusion of "whatever you give" includes offering in devotion to Krishna the fruits of one's labor (i.e., monetary compensation) yet without being attached to the consequences of our actions, including whether there will be a monetary bonus. Rather than desiring wealth, being duty-bound to perform one’s job and giving of one’s compensation to charity in devotion to Krishna and compassion to other people is the way to avoid accumulating bad karma from being greedy and ultimately to return to Krishna, and thus be liberated from any future rebirth (samsara).
The approach corresponds to the Christian social-ethic paradigm whose dominance replaced that of the one wherein having wealth is tightly coupled to greed, regardless of how the wealth is used.[1] That other paradigm is epitomized by Jesus’s saying that a rich person getting into the kingdom of God is like a camel getting through the eye of a needle (I have trouble even putting a thread through a needle’s eye).
In the Gita, a devotee of Krishna can and in fact should fight in battle, and by implication, be a highly paid CEO of a company, but without being attached to the resulting fame and wealth, respectively. As in the “pro-wealth” (i.e., uncoupled) paradigm of Christianity, a devotee of Krishna does not have to renounce accumulating wealth, as long as at least some of it is given away in charity, in order to avoid serving two masters—Krishna and mammon. That Christian paradigm is, however, less strict because the Jesus-devotee does not have to be detached from the consequences of one’s work, including the prospect of getting a bonus.
I submit, therefore, that the Christian “pro-wealth” paradigm is more
suspectable to the onslaught of greed. This may be why Jesus in the Gospels is
firm in demanding that the rich man give away all of his wealth to
follow Jesus. It can be concluded that the susceptibility to succumb to greed
is treated as higher in the “pro-wealth” Christian paradigm that in the Bhagavad-Gita.
2. Skip Worden, Godliness and Greed: Shifting Christian Thought on Profit and Wealth and God’s Gold: Beneath the Shifting Sands of Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth.
