Action without Attachment

Written By Andrea Hiott

Conversational Care and the Bhagavad Gita with Keya Maitra

Keya Maitra is the Lenney Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hawai’i Mānoa.

Keya joins Andrea to talk about the Philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita. They discuss this text as a living philosophical conversation. They move from ‘action without attachment’ and ‘yoga as a redirection of attention’ to why the Gita’s dualism isn’t the mind-body split we know from Descartes. Per navigational mind, they also discuss how holding tension (rather than dissolving it) opens an expanding circle of care. By the end, they’re calling it a love story: not romance, but caring, vulnerability, and the way real conversation itself becomes a form of care.

  • How Keya came to the Gita. Growing up in a Bengali-speaking Hindu household, first encountering it via her mother and also in a middle-school Sanskrit class, then never in an Indian philosophy classroom—through a PhD on Hilary Putnam and philosophy of language, before finally meeting it academically while teaching Joel Kupperman’s comparative philosophy course in Connecticut.

  • Philosophy as “being one’s whole self in writing.” Keya draws on feminist philosopher Naomi Scheman to describe her journey as coming to be her whole self with philosophy, with the Gita quietly anchoring that path.

  • What the Gita actually is. A 700-verse, 18-chapter conversation set on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, narrated by Sanjaya, unfolding between Arjuna and his charioteer Krishna (who is revealed to be reality itself).

  • Why another translation? Keya’s modest but pointed goal: a Gita that works in a Western philosophy classroom. Why she keeps every name for the characters (relationality matters—Arjuna as “son of Kunti” keeps his mother present) rather than flattening them the way some translations do.

  • Action without attachment. Not indifference, not Kantian action-for-action’s-sake, but how you act—without being consumed by the fruits of action (karma phala) while still holding your relationships close.

  • Yoga as a redirection of attention. Why Keya refuses to translate yoga as “discipline,” and how Krishna’s call to “be a yogi” points toward union at multiple levels—self and body, self and Krishna, self and everything.

  • Beyond dichotomy. The dualism of the Gita isn’t Cartesian mind-body dualism but self-body dualism—opening room for embodied cognition, embodied relationality. And Krishna’s repeated call to “go beyond dualities” of good and bad, not by transcending them but by understanding them.

  • Prakriti and Purusha. The Samkhya framework of nature/action and consciousness/witness, and how the Gita folds them under Krishna as “lower” and “higher” nature. Equanimity (samatvam) as groundedness that isn’t experience-lessness.

  • Tension as potency. Reframing tension not as a negative but as possibility—and caring itself as a kind of tension we learn to hold without dissolving the paradox.

  • The Gita’s difficulties, honestly. Its problematic verses on caste, B.R. Ambedkar’s scathing critique, and how the same text can hold radically different readings—including those of Gandhi (who called it his “eternal mother”) and of the people who killed him.

  • The expanding circle of care. Why going inward, on Keya’s reading, doesn’t make us less socially responsible—it widens responsibility, because the “self” one turns toward is not a private inner space but something that dissolves the limits between self and world.

  • A love story. Not a romance, but love as deep caring, vulnerability, and growing together—including Krishna’s own vulnerability in telling Arjuna, in the end, to “do what you think is the right thing to do.” And conversation itself as an act of care.

  • Philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita: A Contemporary Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2018)

  • Related to the Kant thread in this episode — “Comparing the Bhagavad-Gita and Kant: A Lesson in Comparative Philosophy”

  • Feminist Philosophy of Mind (co-edited with Jennifer McWeeny, Oxford UP, 2022) — background for the care/feminist threads

About Keya: “Her intellectual journey bridges continents and traditions. Trained in both India and the United States, she holds two Ph.D.s—one in Philosophy of Language from the University of Hyderabad and another in Philosophy of Mind from the University of Connecticut. She has been a professor at the University of North Carolina Asheville, where she also served as the director of the Humanities Program and Thomas Howerton Distinguished Professor of Humanities (2018-22). Her research and teaching facilitate critical conversations across cultural and disciplinary boundaries....”

Mentioned: The Bhagavad Gita: A Contemporary Introduction (Keya Maitra); Barbara Stoler Miller’s translation; Joel Kupperman; Daniel Kolak / Wadsworth Philosophers Series; Hilary Putnam; Naomi Scheman; the Mahabharata; Vyasa; Gandhi; B.R. Ambedkar; Thoreau and Walden; Samkhya philosophy; care ethics and non-ideal theory.

Here is the post on Substack. Join there to support us.

TRANSCRIPT AND INFORMATION:

Love & Philosophy, with Andrea Hiott and Keya Maitra

Open [00:00]

Keya Maitra: I think we sometimes assume tension always means something negative, but tension can also mean a potency, a possibility. It's a love story, if love means caring, deeply caring, which also means a kind of vulnerability. Loving is giving a part of yourself, an opening, a vulnerability. Of course we see Arjuna's vulnerability. But maybe we could also speak of Krishna's vulnerability, because Krishna doesn't say to Arjuna, "You need to do this." At the end he says, "Do what you think is the right thing to do." That's what makes it a conversation. Conversation requires a kind of vulnerability, a kind of growing together.

Introduction [00:01]

Andrea Hiott: Hello everyone, this is Andrea Hiott. Thank you for listening to Love and Philosophy. As you know, I promised to do these intros improvised, wherever I am, off the cuff and from the heart. So for those of you here for the first time, that's why this might sound a little in the moment: it is. I want to speak with heart.

Today I'm talking with Keya Maitra about the Bhagavad Gita, a very important text in Hinduism. We'll tell you all about it in a bit. Some of you already know that I'm trying to think of a constellatory approach to what we've thought of as dualisms. Those are big words, but think of things like either/or, like mind/body. We often think through those either/or contrasts. A lot of this show is about how we can let those be: not dissolve them into each other, but see what else they constellate with, what other constellations are part of that either/or.

This conversation gets into that in a very beautiful way. I think the conversation itself becomes a way of doing it. We also talk about the power of conversation, what conversation is, and how it's a kind of portal. This relates a lot to the Gita, because the text itself is a conversation, and also to the way Keya translates and discusses it in her book.

It's funny, because I fumble a little at the start and call her book a philosophical commentary, since that's what you usually call translations that include a section discussing each part. But as she corrects me, it's definitely not a commentary. It's what she calls a Philosopher's Corner. That little fumble is actually wonderful, because it opens us into talking about what really matters: what's so philosophical about this text, and how we can think of texts in ways that still relate to us. This text has kept going for a very long time. There's obviously a reason. So why? And what does it mean for how we think about who we are in the world?

An important phrase associated with the Gita is action without attachment. How do you act without being attached? If you've ever felt really attached to something, you know how much pain comes with that: wanting a certain outcome, or loving someone very much and then going through some kind of loss. What we get to here is that you're not getting away from the feeling, the care, and the love. Instead, you can act in a way that actually feels expansive. Action without attachment isn't about cutting yourself off. It's about realizing that what you are is beyond what you had thought, that you're more expansive.

I've been going through a lot lately (I'll tell you about it some other time), and what's helped me, in this conversation and in reading through the Gita, is thinking about how what I see in the world and the people around me are part of something I'm also part of. When you let go of your attachment to what you think you are, you feel more of this wider, bigger, moving, amazing… some would say spiritual, you could also think of it as philosophical; think of it however comes naturally to you. This bigger movement that we are literally in, and as, and part of. What I might think of as way-making. A movement you can't really describe, but that we're all part of.

So a lot of what we discuss is about rethinking our connection to that more powerful, but also part-of-us, ecological world or multiplicity, whatever you want to call this force, and how we can become more specific within it. We talk about how, in her translation, she kept many of the very specific names. Connecting to that expansive nature that is ours is also about being more precise and more specific in each moment. There's always a truth in each moment, but that truth changes as we change. That's another theme that comes up a lot on this show: how to be more specific and also more expansive.

I know this is getting abstract. That's the danger of me talking while I'm on the road about to go to the airport. But this is what comes up: this conversational aspect, how messy and nested and kaleidoscopic our relationships to ourselves and one another are, and how that's the beauty of it. It's like a ladder that goes in all directions, and we can explore ourselves and our connections to each other and this deep love that is conversation. If you really think about what conversation is (and it's one reason this is Love and Philosophy), it's a kind of care. If you really care about something and you're trying to explore it together, you're trying to learn, you're listening. Listening is a very big part of it. And as you do that, you move beyond the either/or.

I think Keya expresses this in her philosophical work on consciousness and the Gita, and in the book we talk about here. That's one reason I wanted to have her on. You can also tell she really cares about people, about her students, about these ideas, and about being a philosopher. She started in analytic philosophy and wrote her dissertation on Hilary Putnam, a wonderful philosopher I'll have to tell you about another time. I love her work because it doesn't stay within the usual bounds, but it respects them, and it's very rigorous.

I hope you'll check out her work; I'll put some in the show notes. Mostly I hope you enjoy this conversation, and that it helps you connect to what is more expansive around you, which is also you. I hope it helps you care more about yourself and realize that you're not just in your head. You are part of an ongoing, co-creating, embodied, beautiful world. It can be very painful and very hard, and that's why we need conversations and need to help one another: conversations that help us better understand this powerful, sometimes very difficult flow-world we're part of.

So wherever you are today, if you love someone, think of it, feel it, let it be. Let yourself expand with it. Maybe tell them, or show them, or just look at them with that love in your heart. It makes a big difference in the world. If anything, it's the reason we're here; we just don't understand it yet. The more we can do that, the more potentials open in the world. And everybody has it, no matter who you are or how you define yourself. You have this power just by being alive, by being a body.

I send you lots of love today, and good feelings and strength to get through whatever you might be going through. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

The Conversation Begins [00:08]

Andrea Hiott: Hello, Keya. It's so great to have you on Love and Philosophy today. Thank you for being here.

Keya Maitra: Thank you, Andrea. It's beautiful, and I'm so happy and honored to be here.

Andrea Hiott: Thank you. Today we're going to talk about Philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita: A Contemporary Introduction, published by Bloomsbury in 2018. It's a translation with philosophical commentary, and so many connections could come out of that. But to start, I'd love to think about this work, and about you growing up: how you came to write dissertations on philosophy in different countries, and what this work meant to you as you were discovering yourself and discovering philosophy.

Keya Maitra: Thank you. One thing I do want to say: it's not a philosophical commentary.

Andrea Hiott: Oh, okay.

Keya Maitra: I call it the Philosopher's Corner.

Andrea Hiott: Right, the section at the end of each chapter.

Keya Maitra: Right. The reason I say it isn't a philosophical commentary is that the Gita has had extensive commentaries written on it, starting at least in the medieval period in India. I'm not doing that kind of Gita scholarship.

But to your question about growing up: I grew up in a Hindu household, a Bengali-speaking household. My mom didn't know Sanskrit, but that didn't stop her from memorizing the Gita in Sanskrit, and she would read some verses in the morning. My first encounter with the Gita was in my middle school Sanskrit class. We read some parts, chapter 11 actually, for translation. But honestly, doing philosophy in India, I didn't encounter it at all in a philosophy classroom: not in undergraduate, master's, MPhil, or PhD. I knew the Gita existed. I had heard it sung and recited, and I had read some of it. But academically, I really met it when I was doing my second PhD in Connecticut. As a grad student I was asked to teach Introduction to Comparative Philosophy for Joel Kupperman, and he taught the Gita. I was using his syllabus, and I said, "So you do the Gita?" And Joel said, "Yes, of course." That was my philosophical encounter with the text.

Since then I've done a lot with it. I don't know whether I want to call it a love story, but I do want to call it a story of discovery. Every time I go back and read it, I find something. I don't agree with everything in it.

You also asked what I was doing in India, if not the Gita. Even in my master's, I was introduced to Western analytic philosophy. I had a professor who had just come back from, I believe, a year in Boston, so we studied the history of analytic philosophy. I went on to write a PhD on Hilary Putnam, so very much philosophy of language. I always loved philosophy. Maybe I'm a slow learner, but what philosophy means, and what it means for me, still intrigues me, and that's why I love your angle: love and philosophy. The feminist philosopher Naomi Scheman wrote about philosophy as being one's whole self in writing. I feel my journey with philosophy is about coming to be my whole self with philosophy. I love philosophy of language, I've done philosophy of mind, and now I'm also trying to do virtue epistemology. And the Gita has somehow anchored this journey for me, knowingly and unknowingly: this coming to be my whole self. I spoke too much, so I'll stop.

Andrea Hiott: No, that's beautiful. You can keep going if you want, because there's so much richness there. Maybe we should tell people what the Gita is, for those who don't know. One way to do that might be to think about what's different about what you're doing with it. I like that you corrected me about the commentary, because I was a little flustered and basically reading from my notes. But that's actually a really important point about your book: the way it's translated, and that you have a corner. So maybe we could say a bit about what the text is, and then why you wanted to do a different sort of translation, because in my very limited experience this is a very different sort of translation.

What the Gita Is, and Why Another Translation [00:15]

Keya Maitra: That's a very good question. It's a conversation, written in Sanskrit. It's part of one of the Sanskrit epics, the Mahabharata, in its sixth book. It's a very dramatic setting. Two sets of cousins are trying to figure out who has the right to the kingdom. They couldn't work it out, especially for one side, so they're getting ready for war at Kurukshetra, where the battle will happen. Krishna is serving as the charioteer of Arjuna, one of the major fighters. They are all Kshatriyas, and Arjuna is a renowned archer, among other things.

We don't get all of that in the Gita itself. As the Gita starts, the characters we hear from are, interestingly, a narrator called Sanjaya. There is an author, Vyasa, but in the Gita we don't hear the author. We hear Sanjaya narrating to the king on the throne, Dhritarashtra. He is blind, so Sanjaya has been given divine eyes; he can see anything that happens, and he narrates. What he's narrating is this conversation between Krishna and Arjuna. Krishna starts out as a human being, the charioteer, but in the course of the Gita it's revealed that he is the supreme god. He's reality, basically.

The Gita is an 18-chapter conversation, 700 verses. It's kind of funny that everybody stood still until these two worked it out over 700 verses!

Andrea Hiott: That's true.

Keya Maitra: Some Indologists, at least the ones I've read, argue that the epic's storyline circulated in various parts of India in various versions before we got a critical edition. One argument is that it used to be very much a Kshatriya story: warfare, and of course ethics, right and wrong. And the Gita is a kind of insertion by the Brahmins: it's about thinking and contemplation, and questions about why we should do what we do. So that gives your audience some idea of what the Gita is.

As a separate point, I'm just starting a project on what we teach in Indian philosophy, what an Indian philosophy curriculum typically includes, and I'm finding all kinds of interesting things about how that has evolved, why some things have come in and others gone out.

But why my translation? If anybody reads my introduction, I open with that question, because I think it's a very important one. The Gita has been translated hundreds, maybe thousands, of times, in all languages. My mom read it in Bangla. It's in all the Indian languages and in European languages. And every year there are two, three, or four new English translations. So why mine? I had a very modest aim, and I still do. I was teaching the Gita in a Western classroom in America. When I first taught from Joel Kupperman's syllabus, he used Barbara Stoler Miller's translation, so I did too. It's in poetic form, beautiful and accessible, students loved it, and it has some of the drama. But having grown up in India, I knew more of the storyline and context, and I wanted more from the Gita. Then there are translations plus commentaries that are more involved than I would like. So my goal was to translate the Gita so it would work in a philosophy classroom. That's why the Philosopher's Corner comes after every chapter.

One thing I can point out right away: Krishna uses all kinds of different names for Arjuna, Arjuna uses different names for Krishna, and Sanjaya also uses different names. Barbara Stoler Miller essentially says, "Yes, they're different names with different meanings, but it doesn't matter to us." For me it does matter. Whether you call somebody one thing rather than another in a particular context: I want to at least give the reader a sense of that relationality. For example, Arjuna is often called the son of Kunti, referring to his mother, and it was important to me that that relationality comes through. So I kept all the names. And the Philosopher's Corner is where I wanted to show, especially for the Western classroom and for cross-cultural purposes, how the Gita is still philosophically relevant for people who haven't studied Indian philosophy for years and years. I do think it's very philosophically relevant. That doesn't mean everything in it has to be agreed with, or shouldn't be critically engaged. But it's a text with a lot of potential for philosophical engagement.

Andrea Hiott: Wonderful. I love how it feels conversational, if you agree with that, and I wonder if that's how you teach too, with a lot of dialogue and discussion. I also think it fits the text itself, even in the way you described it: that situationality, even the example of the names. In a way that's a conversation with time and with the past that we're respecting, and it becomes part of the book. I can see how a translator might think, "That's not important; no one will get it." But part of it is getting how important it is. So there's almost a nested conversational quality that you carried into your translation. Does that make sense to you, and do you teach that way too?

Keya Maitra: That's beautiful, Andrea. When I'm successful, I think it's because I never lose that sense of conversation. And for the role of conversation in philosophy, you don't have to look further than Plato and his dialogues.

Andrea Hiott: Exactly, that's what I was thinking. It's a beautiful blend with what you're doing in relation to the Western tradition, and that conversational aspect is a very natural place for it.

Keya Maitra: Yes. I'm so thankful Joel gave me that opportunity to teach, and then that I published my own translation. It seemed like an audacity. My mom was alive at the time, and when I told her I was going to publish it, she was horrified. For her this was a very religious text, and I'm not very religious. She said, "How can you translate something like that? It's not just some kind of philosophy."

Andrea Hiott: That fits these themes so well for me, because as you were talking I was thinking a lot about your mom, and the mother part of all this. It can seem very masculine, but it really isn't. I was picturing you as a child listening to it, and wondering whether that was a conversational experience of a different kind, more situated, even bodily. You said it's affected you in ways you're only starting to realize, and I wonder whether growing up with it, and it being so important to your mom, is another conversational layer of all this for you.

Keya Maitra: Yes, I agree there are all these layers. People sometimes say that with certain texts, you turn every corner and something comes to you. It feels that way with this one. It was very important to my mom. And there was serendipity in my translating it. Daniel Kolak used to edit the Wadsworth Philosophers series, and I was writing something on Putnam for him. He learned that I read Sanskrit and was also a philosopher, and he said, "You have to translate the Gita." I said, "No." He said, "Why not? It's true the Gita has been translated many times, but for Westerners, for a philosophy classroom, why don't you? Please do it." That's how I started, and it's how I've kept my focus. The people who have translated it over hundreds of years: I can't measure up to them in terms of Gita scholarship. But for me it's an amazing text.

So how do I teach it? It is a conversation, though Krishna does most of the talking. Arjuna talks for all of the first chapter, but after that it's mostly Krishna. That's true in some ways of Plato's dialogues too. But what I've seen in the Gita is that there are moments where Arjuna asks a very potent question. So you don't already know where it's going. In the conversational element there's flexibility, receptivity, an openness to where it goes. Henry David Thoreau, apparently, took only a few books with him to Walden Pond, and a translation of the Gita was one of them. This book has spoken to people from all walks of life, not just philosophers. Why? I think one reason is that different people can see themselves in it and become part of that conversation. So the conversational element you point out is essential to this text.

Action without Attachment [00:31]

Andrea Hiott: It is. And that gets into dialectics; there are many ways to think about how that opens worlds. It's especially interesting in this book because there are, in a sense, two parts, and we often think of that as a dualism. It's mirrored in a way, but it's a very different kind of dualism, and we can get to that in a minute.

First, I want to say that even the way you tell the story of coming to translate this, and of coming into philosophy, reminds me of the feeling I get reading the book: learning action without attachment, openness. Even the way you said, "No, I can't do that," and the people in your life who maybe wouldn't have expected you to do it. You said serendipity, and that feels like part of it. So why don't we think about action without attachment? It relates here, and it can lead us into the dualism theme. Is that the main theme you've seen people remember or pick up on from this book in the Western world, or any world, really?

Keya Maitra: I think so. In Indian philosophy, and the Gita is very much situated there, action, karma, produces residue for which you have to be reborn. So one argument could be: I should stop acting. Then I'm not producing any more residue. The Gita is very clearly not impressed by that argument, because Krishna is asking Arjuna to take part in this war, not to go off into the forest.

Early on, Arjuna essentially tells Krishna, "You're telling me all these things about the self being real and the body not being real, and then you're asking me to do this violent act?" Because these were two sets of cousins. Arjuna goes onto the battlefield and sees his cousins, his teachers. They grew up in the same royal court. So he says, "These are people I should be worshipping. How can I take up a weapon against them, fight them, possibly even kill them?" It's a very compelling argument.

Andrea Hiott: Very intimate. And I think we all feel that in different ways: maybe not this exact situation, but feeling like we have to do something that doesn't feel right.

Keya Maitra: Exactly. It's a moral dilemma. In response, Krishna says, "Of course you have to act." And he develops a huge ontology for why: the nature of the body is such that, like it or not, you will act. You don't have much control there, because you have a body and the body acts. But where you do have some control is the attitude with which you act. Do you act attached to the fruits of action, karma phala, the results, the outcome? Can you act without being consumed by a particular result? So action without attachment means not being attached to the results or outcomes of action, versus acting simply because you need to act.

I published something a while ago on this, because people often think it's somewhat like Kant's deontology: action for action's sake. And there's something to that, but it misses the point. Krishna is saying: do your action, but not by abstracting away all your relationships. Hold on to your relationships, but see that you can act without being consumed by, or fixated on, a particular result. That's where the whole yoga he's talking about comes in. He tells Arjuna to cultivate yoga, and I think that yoga is a kind of redirection of attention. Maybe I'll stop there; I don't know if I'm answering your question.

Andrea Hiott: Oh, there's so much. It's so exciting to me, because I really want to talk about yoga and attention. But this also makes me think again about why the conversational aspect matters so much, and the relations, the way you kept the names. Because it's not abstract, as you said. It's not that we're just letting go. It's so intimate, so bodily, so unavoidable, that we're learning to hold the tension. You talk about this in the book, and I'm having to stop myself from going into all of it or we'll run out of time.

Here's a generalization: we often think, "Oh, we just go with the flow," maybe something like the Dao in Chinese thought. And, like you said with deontology, there's something to that. But I feel part of why this text has lasted so long and affected us so much is the conversational aspect. It's too messy. We understand that there's always tension, always another way to look at it, always another connection coming in, and you can't get away from it. So it becomes something else, which I'm not quite sure how to handle. But I think the way yoga is used is doing it: the conversation itself becomes how we hold this and transform. Does that make sense?

Keya Maitra: Yes.

Andrea Hiott: Okay. You can comment on that, but I also want to look at the word yoga, and karma too, because these words are so popular now that I feel we lose the tension in them. But I get it reading what you've written. Even the way you leave certain words untranslated, I feel the tension in that, and I wonder if you felt it too, and whether these words are as important as I'm so excitedly proclaiming.

Letting Go, Equanimity, and Tension as Potency [00:39]

Keya Maitra: This is lovely. There's so much in what you said. I want to mention two things. One is letting go, and tension. People often say, "The Gita tells you to let go." Yes. In that way it's like a Daoist text, though I'm not commenting on Daoism here. But for the Gita, what you are letting go of is also very important. One could argue it's even more important.

As a side note, in my most recent work I'm working a lot on equanimity, samatvam, which the Gita talks about. I think it's such an important concept. Samatvam is letting go, but not letting go such that you don't care. You care a lot, but not simply about particular selfish outcomes. So yes, the Gita says let go, but what you let go of matters, and how. I think the beauty of the Gita is its focus on how you do it.

And then the tension you mention, which is beautiful, Andrea. The setting itself is one of huge tension. Arjuna is a renowned fighter, and he says, "No, I'm not going to fight." Mahatma Gandhi did his own translation and read the Gita every morning. He called the Gita his mother, his "eternal mother." Elsewhere he said the Gita is like the Hindu Bible. In Hinduism you don't have one text; you have many, and the Gita is one of them. But he thought it was so approachable that a practicing Hindu mired in a moral dilemma could go to it, the way he thought a practicing Christian might go to the Bible. So the Gita has that potency, because it's a relatable conversation. And conversation itself has a kind of tension in it. I think we sometimes assume tension always means something negative, but tension can also mean a potency, a possibility.

Andrea Hiott: Yes, I think about that a lot.

Keya Maitra: I want to hear what you think, and then I'll talk about yoga, since you asked.

Andrea Hiott: I was going to go to yoga too. But exactly: that's what I meant by tension with a T, since we'll also talk about attention, and the two sometimes sound alike. I often think of caring as a kind of tension, and I know you bring that out a lot. Not in a bad way. It's getting away from thinking of things only as good or bad. That we're connected is hard. Loving the people around me, my family, everyone: it's not easy, and yet it's wonderful. We talk a lot on the show about how to hold that, how to hold the paradox without dissolving it. I think that's a common confusion, and it's what I find really exciting about this text and your work with it, both in terms of the dualism I mentioned and in the way yoga matters so much.

I'm still figuring out how to articulate this, but in the way it's already helped me, the yoga as it's presented is a way of holding the tension so that we recognize ourselves in Krishna, or in what's around us. And that's how we can act while still caring. For me that's a huge revelation. It's so different from it all being about me letting go. I think that has to do with yoga, and also with this very different idea of what we'd call dualism. That's a lot, so take it wherever you want.

Yoga as Union, and a Different Kind of Dualism [00:45]

Keya Maitra: The text has so much. Let me try to touch on each of your points. Yoga is very important. It's mentioned throughout the 700 verses, maybe more than 150 times. One reason I kept the word yoga rather than translating it (Barbara Stoler Miller, for example, translates it as "discipline," and that's the typical choice) is this: if you translate it as discipline, you get the popular meaning of yoga today, physical exercises and stretches, maybe with some pranayama or meditation, as in some yoga studios. But when Krishna keeps telling Arjuna, "Be a yogi; once you're a yogi you won't be so bothered by this," he isn't telling Arjuna to learn to stretch. Arjuna was in very good shape, I think! I'm being flippant, but I think it's important to point out.

Andrea Hiott: No, it is.

Keya Maitra: What Krishna has in mind is yoga as union, an ultimate union. I love your phrase "holding together," because the tension itself isn't simply erased. At the end of chapter 18, Arjuna says all his doubts have been answered and he's ready to fight. Remember, the Gita begins with Arjuna Vishada Yoga, Arjuna's despair or dilemma. So there is a resolution, but it doesn't come from denying the question. It comes from understanding it. It isn't necessarily pure transcendence. It's holding things together while also seeing them clearly, seeing your relationship with Krishna and everything else.

So, yoga as union. In many verses you can see almost two levels of union, or perhaps an awareness of union and then a comprehension of it, which are different things. One union is that the self is in me. The body has things that are mutable, that will die. But there are also parts of me that are undying, eternal. That's one union. Then there's the union in which that same self is in Krishna and in everything else. So union works at multiple levels. Yoga here isn't just physical exercise. Physical practice might help you understand some kind of union, but you also need philosophical clarification.

That brings me to the dualism. There's a beautiful verse in chapter two. Arjuna has just said, "Krishna, I'm not going to fight, because this is horrendous. Yes, our enemies want to fight. But if I give in and fight too, how am I any different? The result won't be good." Then early in chapter two, Krishna says, in effect, "You sound wise, but you're grieving for those who should not be grieved for. Our bodies change. We were children. We change clothes." And in this system you also believe in rebirth: when one body ends, you become somebody else. So why is that so worrisome? There's something in you, in me, in all of us that no weapon can touch.

I'm not suggesting this is a foolproof argument. My students often say, "But he doesn't answer Arjuna's worry about killing his revered teacher," not just anybody, but a particular person. People make arguments like that, and I think Krishna doesn't do a great job there, or maybe doesn't think he needs to. But the argument is: why are you so worried about killing? If you think killing ends someone's existence, well, these people go on existing. You'll kill their bodies, yes. But in chapter 11, Krishna says, "Guess what? They have all already been killed by me." And he says, essentially, "Be my instrument." What does that mean? People have said many things about it. I think maybe they are killed by their own actions: the karma they've created, the decisions they've made and how they made them. This is the accumulated effect they have to face.

So, the dualism. In Western philosophy of mind, usually from Descartes (not so much Aristotle or Plato, though Descartes scholars might disagree with me), we have mind-body dualism: mind is one thing, body another, or mind versus the physical. Interestingly, that distinction appears in other Indian philosophical schools too. But in the Gita, mind, body, everything goes into one category, and then you have the self: eternal, undying, unchangeable. So there is a dualism, but it's not mind-body dualism. It's self-body dualism, or self versus the physical. And here's the consequence: if you go with mind-body dualism, how do you explain psychophysical interaction? I think of saying X, and then I physically say it. Mind and body seem intimately connected, but how is that possible? The Gita doesn't have that worry. You've mentioned embodiment several times, and I think the Gita can embrace embodied cognition, embodied action, even embodied relationality, in a way that the typical understanding of mind-body dualism may not have the conceptual resources for.

Prakriti, Purusha, and the Witness [00:55]

Andrea Hiott: These are words I can't really pronounce, so you can help me: prakriti and purusha?

Keya Maitra: Purusha. Prakriti and purusha.

Andrea Hiott: So one of them is what you were describing: almost everything we'd put into mind and body. I don't know if you'd call it nature. And the other side is the self. This seems to be what I was trying to get at with what yoga helps us feel into. It's beyond the body, but it also sort of is the body, isn't it? It contains it. I don't feel a separation where there's a cut.

Keya Maitra: That's my reading, though of course people often read their own philosophy into it. There's a school of Indian philosophy, Samkhya, that talks about this dualism of prakriti and purusha. And you're right: prakriti is often translated as nature. That's one meaning of the Sanskrit word. But nature here doesn't just mean the beautiful ocean or a tree. It means basically everything; in Krishna's usage, everything that changes or can change. Mountains and all.

Andrea Hiott: Sorry to interrupt, but is it everything that's active? Is it all action, in a way?

Keya Maitra: Yes. All action.

Andrea Hiott: That's very helpful for me, because this dynamism is such a big part of all this.

Keya Maitra: Yes. And in Samkhya, purusha is the seat of consciousness. In the Samkhya school, liberation comes through discriminative knowledge: realizing that our troubles, our ignorance, arise because we confuse these two.

Andrea Hiott: So it's a kind of discernment? Could we even call it a feeling of witnessing, of growing in the capacity to notice? Which leads us toward attention, I guess.

Keya Maitra: That is in the Gita. It gets confusing because the same words are used. What I was trying to say is that in the Samkhya system, the dualism of prakriti and purusha actually remains.

Andrea Hiott: I see.

Keya Maitra: In the Gita, Krishna does say, "That is my prakriti," the three gunas, and so on. And he identifies himself as the highest purusha. But there are also verses where he says, "This is my lower nature; this is my higher nature." So most of the time they're subsumed under him.

The idea of the witness is very much there, because of the atman that remains in all of us. Is it something that simply witnesses and doesn't experience anything? I'd argue it does experience. Witnessing is where samatvam, equanimity, comes in. What does it mean to be duḥkheṣv anudvigna-manāḥ, sukheṣu vigata-spṛhaḥ? It means that in success you're not overjoyed or carried away, and in failure, when you're sad, you're also not deeply perturbed. It's a kind of groundedness. And I want to argue that groundedness is not experiencelessness. Of course I'm having the experiences; what matters is how I engage with them. That's the sense in which the witness, the atman or self, is distinct from all the action.

At the end, Krishna says, in effect, "I don't need to act at all, but I act. Why doesn't my action bind me? Because I don't act for particular outcomes." So the problem isn't action itself. It's the attached way we typically act. He isn't saying, "Let's subdue prakriti, and everything will be hunky-dory once we're rid of it." I don't know that we could do that. Action in itself isn't the problem. How we act is. And witnessing matters here because it highlights that evenness, remaining unperturbed.

Beyond Dualities [01:01]

Andrea Hiott: That makes me think of how I always sense a kind of multiplicity here. Kaleidoscopic or constellatory are words I'm trying to use in my own philosophy, so, as you said, I'm reading things in. But I do feel it in the text. Even though there's this dichotomy, I wonder if it creates a kind of suspicious spirit around it, as in, maybe there isn't a dichotomy. Because even with all these contrasts, and, as we said, it's not about dissolving them but learning from them, there seems to be something else we can't quite talk about.

Even when we ask why we'd want good karma if it means we keep coming back (isn't the point to transcend?), that's complicated. Or think about what's happening here: Krishna is convincing Arjuna to go kill people he cares about. That's awful to even think about; it's hard to talk about. And yet as you read it, that's not really what it's about. It's about constellating that. It's not about making a choice, or even about all of us being separate. It's very hard to put into words. But I wonder if you've sensed that: a way this text might nudge us beyond some of the very categories that seem so important to it.

Keya Maitra: That's a very astute observation, and it's one of the things I find most inspiring about the Gita: not religiously, philosophically. In many places Krishna says, "Go beyond dualities." Doubters don't do very well in the Gita, because it's Krishna's message and Krishna has an agenda. But on dichotomies: go beyond the dualities of good and bad. You might say Arjuna's anxiety, his initial hesitation, his perplexity, come from not being able to get beyond good and evil. He understood good one way and evil another, and he asks Krishna, "How can you ask me to do this evil thing?" And what Krishna does (and as a philosopher this is self-serving) is show the importance of ontology, of metaphysics, for ethics and for making sense of one's life. You don't do metaphysics because you have spare time. You need it because it gives you meaning; it makes life worth living. So there's a way of going beyond dualities here: not necessarily transcending them, but understanding them. You may disagree with Krishna's metaphysics, but that's one way to think about moving beyond dichotomy.

Andrea Hiott: That's true, and I love that you bring up meaning. I was thinking of how Krishna tells Arjuna, "Your nature will lead you to fight; you'll get there," but then also says, "Reflect on this, and do as you choose." So there's this constant paradoxical spirit, with the tension that, as you said, is already there. Being able to deal with that differently becomes very meaningful.

You mentioned Gandhi, and I know this text was hugely important to him. But is it true that it was also very important to the people who killed him?

Keya Maitra: Yes.

The Gita's Difficulties, Honestly [01:06]

Andrea Hiott: These things are very hard. The subject of this book, this battle: people still face these things, and we face them in different ways. Maybe not life and death in this context, but I find them really hard, and not easy to fit into two categories in any absolute way, because we can always come at it from a different position. Whoever wrote this, the writers of the book, whatever we put into that—as you said, sometimes we put things into a book we don't even know we're putting there. Many people say it carries some political message. Leaving that aside, reading this book you can start to feel how much we have to accept that life is complicated, far more complicated than we've been able to deal with. That's why we put things into contrasts. But maybe we can start to feel into something else, which connects to karma and the different lives, the constellating and the multiplicity. I'm rambling, but I wonder if that makes sense to you, and whether it's been hard for you, especially with students, to think about this, given what I said about Gandhi but also given the subject matter and current events. Have you felt that tension?

Keya Maitra: You weren't rambling, Andrea. Let me say a little about me personally. I think this text, perhaps more than others (other people must have other texts), shows the importance of authenticity: really resonating with Arjuna's dilemma. Krishna could have just said, "Blah, blah, blah, let's fight." But no, he takes the time to convince him. And you're right, it is convincing, because at the end Arjuna doesn't say, "I'll fight because you say so, but I still have worries." He says, "My questions have been answered. I'm ready to fight."

Andrea Hiott: But he still doesn't win, right? Or does he? I've always wondered.

Keya Maitra: They win, but at such a cost. The Mahabharata itself is an incredible text, because it too is trying to go beyond dichotomies.

Andrea Hiott: That's what I'm getting at. Even that becomes a wider, nested complexity.

Keya Maitra: Very much so. That's why I think about authenticity: understanding that I have worries, and all of it is me. That's why I really resonate with the Gita's idea that everybody is your friend: don't treat friends differently from foes. Talk about today's world!

And about me: honestly, Andrea, this text has grown on me. Again, not because I'm enamored with it. For example, there are at least two verses in chapter 18 that, as I read them, really codify the caste system: these are the castes, and these castes should do these things, because of karma theory and the three gunas. I find that absolutely problematic. B.R. Ambedkar, from the Dalit community, was chairman of the drafting committee for India's constitution after independence in 1947. He was an "untouchable" (Dalit is the word we use now), and he was scathing in his criticism of the Gita, and I see many of his points. So I'm not enamored with it. But over time the Gita has become, for me, less somebody else's text and more a philosophical text that, like any philosophical text, has its own foibles and blind spots. That doesn't take away from the fact that it can be read in ways I find very philosophically inspiring. That's my relationship to it.

You mentioned the people who killed Gandhi. I believe it was a member of the Hindu Mahasabha. They're supposed to be devoted followers of Hinduism, and there's now a holiday for the Gita, Gita Jayanti, in the Hindu calendar. But my reading of the Gita and theirs are very different. And I take it as a capacity of this text, maybe a virtue, that it can accommodate all these readings. That has given me, not consolation exactly, but a kind of clarity: I don't need to worry about how others read the Gita or use it. I have my own relationship with it as a philosophical text. The tension is still there, but I don't see it as a problem. I see it as a source of renewal, of new ways of reading.

Andrea Hiott: Yes, that's what I was trying to get at by picking out the word meaning. By sitting with the tension, and cultivating a different kind of attention (which is a big part of your work), you can do what you just did: see this text as something we read differently depending on where we're coming from and what we've put our attention on. Learning that this happens is what I'm trying to think about with constellating, and with the tension that is caring. Right now we often think there are only two sides, so we have to prove each other wrong, and we get nowhere.

I agree with you. I tried to read this when I was 17 or 18, in a kind of spiritual moment, and I felt really hurt by it. I felt a bit like Arjuna at the beginning: I can't deal with this, I can't hear this. Now that I'm older (not really wiser, but I've been through a lot more), it reads very differently. And it has to do with exactly what you just demonstrated: we start finding meaning when we allow what seem like opposites to constellate. That's my way of saying it. And I feel this text, through its conversational nature and the historical, situated nature you bring out, is a way into that.

Attention [01:15]

Andrea Hiott: But we have to talk about attention, because without it this doesn't make much sense. We won't go through all the theories of consciousness, though that's another important part of your work. But I think you've approached consciousness from an empirical perspective that brings attention into this discussion in an important way. Would you say something about attention (A-T-T-E-N-T-I-O-N, not tension) and what it's meant for you in relation to this text?

Keya Maitra: Thank you, yes. When people come to the Gita, they often repeat, "Action without attachment, action without attachment." And in the classroom, students would ask me a very good question: "Isn't action without attachment kind of indifferent, uncaring? How can that be good?" I'd say, "You're absolutely right to ask." And it emerged for me that action without attachment is really about how you act: where you put your attention. When Krishna asks Arjuna to be a yogi, he's really saying, "Cultivate this redirection of your attention."

Normally, when we act for a particular outcome, our attention is on making that outcome happen. We work toward it; that's what effort is. So what does it mean if I'm not attached to the outcome? It means I'm redirecting my attention to the nature of the world: not just to me, but to who I am, according to Krishna, my relationship to everybody else, and, in the Gita, my relationship to Krishna. So becoming a yogi, the whole project, becomes redirecting one's attention. And I've argued that consciousness is where that redirection happens. Awareness is where you can be aware.

I want to argue (I have argued, and maybe I need to argue it better) that our actions, our being in the world, don't suddenly lose their intentionality. They're still about something. I'm still talking to you, so there's a certain aboutness. But redirected attention means that even as I talk to you, I'm talking in a certain way. The way I'd put it: I'm really enjoying this conversation because of its dynamic: constellatory, open, receptive. Some people call it deep listening. It's a conversation where your attention isn't fixed only on the end result, but on the process, and also, for Krishna, on certain ontological truths.

Andrea Hiott: That reminds me of what we were saying about the self and what's usually thought of as dualism, and what I was trying to say about yoga, feeling into that connection. A different kind of attention happens when you feel into a self that isn't limited in any way, that doesn't speak the language of limitation. Those contrasts stop making sense, even though they still exist at the same time. So attention is kind of the magic power. And it's what we cultivate and practice through certain kinds of conversation.

Care, Non-Ideal Theory, and the Expanding Circle [01:21]

Andrea Hiott: We need to start wrapping up, but there's a lot of care in all this. You write about care ethics, and I said earlier that caring is a kind of tension in itself. In your other work that word feels very present, and it seems connected to attention, and maybe to a different kind of autonomy than the one we usually think of in Western philosophy, or as Westerners (that word is strange, but you know what I mean). How can we ease into that? Your students raised something powerful about this seeming passive, and it's something I'm constantly trying to express: when we hold contradiction, we don't become passive. We become more caring. We feel into ourselves as caring. It's almost too much, which is almost why we can't do it. So non-attachment can sound like the opposite of caring, but the way you're expressing it, it's actually about more caring, and taking full responsibility.

Keya Maitra: Absolutely, it's definitely caring. Think about love: Krishna says to Arjuna many times, "You are my friend. I love you. You are my dear friend; that's why I'm telling you this truth."

I've argued, and others have too, that part of what explains the Gita's shelf life, its staying relevant for so long (especially in Hinduism, where there are so many texts), is a kind of internal diversity. The message has a simplicity, but once you understand it, there's diversity in how you get there. There are the three or four yogas people talk about: the yoga of action, the yoga of knowledge, and bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion, where Krishna says, essentially, "Knowledge is difficult, action is difficult too, so don't worry about those. Just act as my devotee, as if acting for me." So devotion and relationships are absolutely important: how caring matters, and what caring might mean.

There will be some differences to work out with the typical secular understanding of care ethics, because secular care ethics has nothing like the role Krishna plays in the Gita. Krishna is Brahman, the ultimate. We don't have that, so there's an ontological difference we need to be careful about. But overall, there's the importance of relationship, of holding different things together, and you also see a kind of non-idealism. We don't live in an ideal world. In feminist theory now, and elsewhere, non-ideal theory is important, and I think the Gita could go along with it, at least as I read it. Life isn't ideal. If it were, Arjuna wouldn't have to kill his own people. But how does one act with the hand one is dealt? So we're back to authenticity, and acceptance. There's deep caring, and the importance of relationships runs all through the Mahabharata, and definitely through the Gita.

Andrea Hiott: I think that's part of the constellatory thing. I was also thinking of intersectionality and the many ways feminists have come at that idea from different angles, which would fit really well. And is it in your paper where you address what your students raised, the idea that going inward makes us less socially responsible? You're saying that's actually the yogi's way of attention, because that objection still treats the self as some inner space, and the self is actually a dissolving of that. So responsibility widens, and so does the circle of care. Isn't that in your paper?

Keya Maitra: Yes. I was actually responding to one of the reviewers.

Andrea Hiott: Oh, that's where it came from.

Keya Maitra: And you're absolutely right: it's the circle of care. That's why those verses matter to me: of course love your friends, but also your enemies, and don't be so affected by success or failure. Those are very hard things to do. But if you try, what does it mean? What kind of cognitive shift does it require? And in many places the Gita says it isn't just about knowing, just filling your head with certain beliefs. That's fine, but you have to practice it, to cultivate that realization. And it's important to act while holding all of it together. I love how you put it: an expanding circle of care.

A Love Story [01:29]

Andrea Hiott: Well, it feels like that. This may be going too far for you, but there's a way to think of this as a love story: coming to love more of our enemies, or the world, or the difficult parts of ourselves, or what we're supposed to do. Or even, going back to where you started, showing me how interested you are in so many kinds of philosophy: that curiosity, letting that constellation be. For me this could be a kind of love story. But to end, I'm curious what you'd say about that word, love, if anything.

Keya Maitra: Lovely. I would call it a love story. Maybe not a love story in the Erich Segal sense…

Andrea Hiott: Not a Hollywood love story.

Keya Maitra: Nothing against that! But a love story if love means caring, deeply caring, which also means a kind of vulnerability. Loving is giving a part of yourself, an opening, a vulnerability. Of course we see Arjuna's vulnerability. But maybe we could also speak of Krishna's vulnerability, because Krishna isn't saying to Arjuna, "You need to do this." At the end he says, "Do what you think is the right thing to do." That's what makes it a conversation. Conversation requires a kind of vulnerability, a kind of growing together. So yes, I'd say it's a love story.

Andrea Hiott: I hadn't thought of that before: how conversation, real conversation, is actually a kind of caring. That's very beautiful, and a nice way to end, since we started there. Thank you for your work, for taking up the offer to do the translation, for teaching, and for talking with me today. I've really enjoyed this, and I really appreciate your work.

Keya Maitra: Thank you so much, Andrea. I loved this conversation, and the time flew, which is a good sign for me. Thank you for inviting me. I'm so happy to have had this opportunity.

Andrea Hiott: Be well. Bye.

Keya Maitra: Bye.

Closing Verse [01:31]

Andrea Hiott: Hey everyone, here's a little excerpt from the Bhagavad Gita, chapter 2, verse 47. It's a famous, frequently quoted verse. I wish I could say it in Sanskrit. It's spoken by Krishna to the warrior Arjuna, and it's about your duty, your dharma. It's been helpful for me today, so I'll just give it to you:

"You have a right to do your duty, but not to the results of your work. Do not think you are the cause of the results, and do not try to avoid your duty."

All right. Bye.

Links and References

Keya Maitra

Verses mentioned

People and works mentioned

Background on concepts

KEYA IS the Lenney Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hawai'i Mānoa. UConn also announced that she accepted an offer from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa as a Professor in Classical Indian Philosophy and the Lenney Distinguished Chair.

Andrea Hiott
Next

Molyneux's Enduring Question with Janet Levin and Brian Glenney