The Fruits of Our Desiring: An Inquiry Into the Ethics of the Bhagavadgita for Our Times.

• Author: Deutsch, Eliot
• Position: Review

Edited by JULIUS LIPNER. Essays from the Inaugural Conference of the Dharam Hinduja Institute of Indic Research. Calgary, Alberta: BAYEUX ARTS, 1997. Pp. 121.

The Fruits of our Desiring consists of "Prolegomena" by the editor Julius Lipner and seven essays by various scholars that were presented in June and July 1995 at the Inaugural Conference of the Dharam Hinduja Institute of Indic Research. The Institute was established at Cambridge University earlier that year with the support of the Hinduja Foundation (UK).

In the "Prolegomena," Julius Lipner, director of the Institute, explains the reasons why the theme was chosen for the conference, namely its "bearing on a tradition [Hinduism] that is a prime focus of the Institute, and on a text with an established history that has played and continues to play a most significant role in the lives not only of countless individuals but also a great many communities, a text which raises acutely questions of interpretation and the transmission of knowledge, of the relevance of meaning and the determining of right action. . . ." Lipner goes on to advocate a kind of pluralism in the study of the Gita which takes into account both the striving of the scholar for academic objectivity and the need for a certain self-consciousness regarding the "selective criteria" that one brings to bear on one's professional work, "such as one's particular academic conditioning, temperament and personal prejudices, and the current political environment in which one must function." This hermeneutic, it is said, lends itself nicely to the study of the Gita insofar as the text is a "multilayered product"; the "legitimate object of study" for theologians, Indologists, philologists and, I would add, philosophers.

The work is organized in such a way as to take further into account the many, often contending, interpretative views that have developed over the ages regarding the primary "metaphysical" commitments of the text, the social and soteriological values it espouses, and the varied ways in which these values may be realized. It begins from a premise, outlined in the opening essay by Professor Nicolas Lash. who identifies himself as a Christian theologian, that the fundamental tension that informs the Gita is that between the suppression or abolition of desire and its purification or cleansing, which translates ultimately as the conflict, within the schema of human purposes or goals (purusartha), between the renunciatory...