This book has a curious history. It grew out of a workshop called “The Yogas of the Bhagavad Gita” that Ram Dass taught in the summer of 1974. He presented the workshop as part of the curriculum for a summer session at the newly established Naropa Institute (now Naropa University) in Boulder, Colorado.
Naropa was founded by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a Tibetan Tulku and Vajrayana master. Trungpa was trained in the philosophical and meditative traditions of two branches of Tibetan Buddhism—the Kargyu and Nyingma sects—and he was one of the first teachers to begin introducing Tibetan practices to the West.
Naropa’s aim was to explore the teachings of Eastern religious traditions within a rigorous, Western academic environment. The program for the summer session announced, “The purpose of Naropa Institute is to provide an environment in which the Eastern and Western intellectual traditions can interact and in which these disciplines can be grounded in the personal experience and practice of staff and students. All of the staff members are involved in the practice of some discipline related to psychological and spiritual growth. It is this direct experience which can form the sound basis for integrating the complementary intellectual and sensory-intuitive approaches to living in the world.”
In other words, Naropa set out to meet the Western academic establishment on its own terms, to become an accredited, degree-granting institution of higher learning, but one that would offer degrees in fields like “Buddhist Studies, Exploration of Self and Society, and a cross-cultural, inter-disciplinary combination of the two.” Courses included “not only the more intellectual disciplines—the humanities and the social and physical sciences—but also meditation, sensory awareness, dance, t’ai ch’i chuan, theater, art, and music.” You could get credit toward a B.A. from Naropa for taking Ram Dass’s workshop.
Ram Dass supported the establishment of Naropa because he was interested in the experiment that such an institution represented. But more than that, Ram Dass honored the teachings and traditions of Trungpa Rinpoche, and wanted to help them take root in the West. And so, in June and July of 1974, he joined the faculty for the summer session that would inaugurate Naropa.
That summer at Naropa brought together an outstanding cast of teachers. Besides Ram Dass and Trungpa Rinpoche, the faculty included Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Bateson, José Arguelles, Jack Kornfield, Ben Weaver, and some two dozen others. Ram Dass’s own staff of teaching assistants included Krishna Das, Joseph Goldstein, Rameshwar Das, Mirabai Bush, Paul Gorman, and Ram Dev. Mirabai called that summer at Naropa “the seedpod” for the teachings that would shape the growing presence of Eastern spirituality in the West. There were courses in Tibetan and Theravadan Buddhism, in the Sanskrit and Mongolian languages, in Tantric literature and Japanese art—even in artificial intelligence (which was distinctly cutting edge in 1974!). One of the participants called that summer at Naropa “the Hindu-Buddhist Woodstock.”
And in the program for the summer session, under the heading “Modes of Self-Exploration,” was listed Ram Dass’s course, “The Yogas of the Bhagavad Gita.” The course description read: “The Bhagavad Gita (The Song of God) is both one of the most sacred books in India and also one of the most profound statements of yoga. In the West many of us find that karma yoga is the most suitable practice, and the Bhagavad Gita is unparalleled as a statement of this form, i.e., the yoga of conscious service. Through reflection on the text and the many commentaries (Krishna Prem, Gandhi, etc.), we can evolve a perceptual framework which allows us to transmute daily life experience into a vehicle for liberation.”
Ram Dass’s workshop was held in a building on Pearl Street in downtown Boulder. Photos and videos show a plain, whitewashed, cement-block building. There was a big stage, Ram Dass recalls, to accommodate the many musicians who took part in the program at one time or another (including K. K. Sah,1 an extraordinary kirtan singer, who came from India for the workshop).
Naropa essentially offered Ram Dass free rein as to the topic for his workshop; so why did he choose to teach about the Gita? Ram Dass says, “Maharajji was always giving away copies of two books:The Ramayana and the Bhagavad Gita. Since those were the books he seemed to think were most important, I felt it behooved me to learn as much as I could about them. Through being around Maharajji and spending so much time at his temples, I felt I had absorbed at least some understanding of the Ramayana. Teaching this course at Naropa seemed like an opportunity to plumb more deeply into the other book, the Gita.”
Ram Dass had a second motive for focusing on the Gita, as the course description suggests, and that was his appreciation for its unique appropriateness to our own cultural circumstances. The philosophy of the Gita is one that turns out to be especially suitable for us in the West, because instead of encouraging us to turn away from the world, it turns our lives in the world into our spiritual work. We don’t have much room in our society for wandering mendicant monks, or many caves where sadhus can hang out. We’re a culture of “doers,” and so, as the course description pointed out, “Many of us find that karma yoga is the most suitable practice.”
Ram Dass prepared intensively for the seminar. He had an old school bus, which he’d outfitted as a camper,2 and he spent the two months before the workshop living alone, out in the desert, immersing himself in the Gita. He spent his time reading the Gita, meditating on the Gita, studying commentaries on the Gita. He had with him some half dozen or so different translations of the Gita, and he read and reread them all. He typed out the text of the Gita, with big spaces between each of the verses, where he wrote comments about the slokas. He stayed at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Arizona for a while, and then at Joshua Tree National Park in California; he said, “I gave the first version of the Gita lectures to the jackrabbits that were hanging around the bus.”
At Naropa, Ram Dass’s class alternated evenings with a class called “The Tibetan Buddhist Path,” taught by Trungpa Rinpoche. Although Ram Dass and Rinpoche deeply respected one another, their teachings were widely divergent in style and approach.Trungpa’s teachings were rooted in his lineage, and they followed a traditional Buddhist intellectual approach, with exact categories and precise definitions. Ram Dass’s teachings were devotional, rooted in the intuitive and less tightly structured. Ram Dass said, “Trungpa was teaching about meditation and emptiness, and I was teaching about devotion and the guru. The students felt like they were at a tennis match!”
There were over a thousand registered students in Ram Dass’s workshop. Although students were supposed to register for one course or the other, there were many “crossover” students who came to Ram Dass’s workshop and vice versa; and while most of them came simply to hear what Ram Dass had to say, some were Trungpa partisans who came to needle Ram Dass. Ram Dass remarked at one point that he had received “lots of letters from you, with many qualitative judgments about me.”
There were no ill feelings between the two teachers; in fact, at the end of the summer Trungpa offered Ram Dass a place on the Naropa faculty. Trungpa said that that kind of diversity was good for the students. But the students themselves were more factional in their feelings; the conflicts came to be known around Naropa as “the Holy Wars.”
In an interesting way, those circumstances turned out to be uniquely fortunate for Ram Dass’s workshop. Rameshwar Das wrote, “The confluence of Buddhism, Hinduism and America in Boulder that summer was chaotic but profoundly unifying. Trungpa and Ram Dass teasing each other on stage provided great humor and lightness, and the contrast between Buddhist clarity of intellect and the Bhakti heart has never been better illumined.” The situation imposed a more rigorous standard of expression on Ram Dass’s teaching. If preparing for the workshop deepened Ram Dass’s understanding of the Gita, teaching the workshop honed his formulation of that understanding.
In teaching about the Gita, Ram Dass was exploring one of the most significant and influential books in Indian culture. Mahatma Gandhi wrote of the Gita, “When doubts haunt me, when disappointments stare me in the face and I see no ray of hope on the horizon, I turn to the Bhagavad Gita and find a verse to comfort me, and I immediately begin to smile in the midst of overwhelming sorrow. Those who meditate on the Gita will derive fresh joy and new meaning from it every day.”
The influence of the Gita has not been limited to India; it has touched the West as well. Henry David Thoreau said that in comparison with the Gita, “our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial.” Ralph Waldo Emerson called it “the first of books . . . the voice of an old intelligence.”
It is believed that the Bhagavad Gita was written sometime during the first millennium B.C., and later inserted into a much vaster and probably much older work, the Mahabharata.The Mahabharata is not, strictly speaking, Hindu scripture (as are the Vedas and the Upanishads), but one of some twenty Indian epics, called the Puranas. The Puranas contain the stories of the lives of the various incarnations or living manifestations of God: there is the Brahma Purana, and the Garuda Purana, and the Linga Purana, and so on. And among those are the two so-called Mahapuranas, or Great Puranas: they are the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. The two Mahapuranas are woven so deeply into the culture, life, and thought of India that one pundit said, “The Mahabharata and the Ramayanaare India.”
In the middle of that great tale of the Mahabharata we find the Bhagavad Gita, said to contain “the essence of Hinduism.” Historically speaking, the Gita did, in fact, represent Hinduism’s response to certain Buddhist ideas that were exerting increasing influence on Indian thought at the time. The Gita specifically addressed the Buddhist emphasis on disengagement from the world as the primary path to God. In place of that, the Gita offered a practice of action in the world as a method for coming into unity.
The Gita is at once an instruction manual for living a spiritual life and a profound, ecstatic vision of the ultimate nature of God. There are many beautiful English versions of the Gita, but the one chosen for the Naropa workshop was the translation by Juan Mascaro. Ram Dass said, “I picked the Mascaro text because it’s delightfully easy to work with. It is, in some ways, wanting in its profundity of interpretation, its sophistication from a Sanskrit point of view; but it doesn’t seem to have as many axes to grind as some of the other translations do. And I confess: I also chose it because it was the one that happened to be available in the temple where I lived in India in 1969, and so it was my first introduction to the Bhagavad Gita. And you know how you always get hooked on your first love!”
Although Ram Dass’s lectures at Naropa (and by extension, this book) were based on the Gita, it would be a mistake to think that they were about the Gita in the usual sense. What Ram Dass offered at Naropa was not a scholarly exegesis on the Gita, or an analysis of its text, but a series of riffs on the Gita’s major topics.The themes of the Gita were the launching pad for what turned out to be Ram Dass’s quintessential teaching on applied Hinduism. His premise is that the Gita outlines a series of practices that taken together comprise a complete yoga for living our lives as a spiritual act. Ram Dass’s accomplishment in the workshop was to shape those practices into a form that we as Westerners could understand and adopt.
This book is derived from transcriptions of the lectures Ram Dass gave at Naropa. It is both historical document and perennial philosophy. The workshop was a unique blend of metaphysics and methods, and so this book is also a rich weave of philosophy and practice. Ram Dass presents a vision of where we’re going, and he also teaches us about the path for getting there.
Ram Dass’s lectures were only part of the participants’ experience of the workshop. Each student received a copy of a syllabus (see pages 247–281), which presented a series of experiential exercises, through which the participants could begin “bringing the Gita back home,” so to speak. The introduction to the syllabus stated, “In addition to the lectures, this course includes a number of exercises designed to provide experiences which can evolve into a complete sadhana (a program of spiritual practices), based on theGita.”Participants set up puja tables in their rooms; they made their own malas and chanted with them. They took silent meditative walks, and they practiced hatha yoga asanas. There were eating meditations, and journal-writing exercises, and all-night chants. And every afternoon there were discussion circles, led by Ram Dass’s staff of teaching assistants. In short, what the workshop provided was the opportunity and the encouragement to focus intensively for a time on cultivating the spiritual side of things; it provided a space to plunge deeply into spiritual practice.
Emerging as it did from the workshop, which was a participatory experience, this book presents you with a choice. The first possibility is to take it simply as a book to read. Great!—you’ll find it’s a wonderful book. It’s Ram Dass’s most profound teaching on the nature and practice of Hinduism, and his insights and observations will deepen your understanding of the Gita and its message.
But you’ll find there is another option available. You can engage with this book in a way that makes it personal.You can take it to be a kind of do-it-yourself workshop; it can be a path to enter, a way of coming into a new relationship with your life. Taken that way, you’ll discover that the book presents you with a delicious array of opportunities, with descriptions of practices, and little samplers of various techniques. Should you find yourself drawn to one or another of the methods, there is a wealth of resources to help you get started. The syllabus from the workshop is one such resource. There is also a supplementary syllabus (pages 283–305), comprised of some instructions and examples of practices presented during the workshop. The resources guide (page 319) will lead you to books, CDs, tapes, videos, and websites. It’s a rich offering.
So what started life as a series of lectures given to a family of jackrabbits in the California desert has morphed into the book that you are holding in your hands. It’s a book that represents Ram Dass’s deepest wisdom about one of India’s most profound spiritual texts. It shows us the way those of us here, in this contemporary Western culture, can translate the yogas taught by the Bhagavad Gita into a living spiritual practice of our own.
Marlene Roeder, editor
Offer in thy heart all thy works to me,
and see me as the End of thy love,
take refuge in the Yoga of reason,
and ever rest thy soul in me.
Bhagavad Gita, ch.18, verse 57
Ram Dass’s Lecture Notes: A portion of Ram Dass’s handwritten notes, with an overview of some of the themes of the course.