Does religion help provide sound ethical guidance in the face of hard choices or when one is pulled in different directions by various obligations? Jonardon Ganeri, visiting professor of philosophy at the New York University Abu Dhabi attempts to throw some light on Hinduism's take on this and other subjects in an recent interview with The New York Times.
Taking about how the Bhagavad Gita teaches through the choices faced by Arjuna, the protagonist in the epic Mahabharata, Ganeri takes us back to the scene where Arjuna has to choose whether to go to war against members of his own family. "This is the moment when Lord Krishna guides him with the philosophical advice that the moral motivation for action should never consist in expected outcomes, that one should act but not base one’s path of action on one’s wants or needs,” he explains. "There are ongoing debates about what sort of moral philosophy Krishna is proposing... No escape route from moral conflict by imitating the actions of a morally perfect individual is on offer here... Krishna, unlike Christ, the Buddha or Mohammed is not portrayed as morally perfect, and indeed the philosopher Bimal Matilal very aptly describes him as the “devious divinity”," he says.
Ganeri, who is also the author of The Lost Age of Reason: Philosophy in Early Modern India 1450–1700, further engages in a discussion about the sources of Hinduism and also critiques the Indian Caste System. “I think it is important to see that Hinduism contains within itself the philosophical resources to sustain an internal critique of unjust social practices that have sometimes emerged in Hindu societies,” he says.
Ganeri states that a few prominent Hindu philosophers were also atheists who believed that "no sacred religious text such as the Veda could be the word of God, since authorship, even divine authorship, implies the logical possibility of error". Explaining the belief of life after death and the notion of incarnation, he highlights how every philosophy has their own understanding of death. He compares how Christianity focuses on the single conception of self as immortal soul, while Hinduism has a wide range of individual accounts.
Drawing from the Upanishads he adds, “The Upanishadic idea that all selves are equal, and one with brahman, for example, can be drawn on to challenge the system of caste.” The rich Hindu philosophy allows an individual's social identity as a Hindu as something “actively fashioned” rather than being simply “inherited”.
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