
Oppenheimer and the Gita (2014) - benbreen
http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/05/23/oppenheimer-gita/
======
rblion
Great article, confirms what I always believed about Oppenheimer and many
others in that time.

My grandma used to read the Gita to me every day when I was a toddler before I
started school. She had a stroke in December and in her final days, I would
read verses from the Gita to her returning the favor. Death is the greatest
teacher of all, teaches us the value of life and power of decision. Since her
passing, I've grown a lot and feel much like Oppenheimer as I work on my
'science project' for the sake of all beings on this planet. It may succeed,
it may be ignored. It doesn't matter, I will be dead soon and all that will
matter is that I fulfilled my 'dharma'.

Gandhi always kept his copy of the Gita with him and it was his guidebook for
his satyagraha movement which led to India's independence.

Some Gita verses that help me, might be helpful to you too:

“It is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation
of somebody else's life with perfection.”

“Show good will to all, Be fearless and pure; never waiver in your
determination or your dedication to the spiritual life. Give freely. Be self-
controlled, sincere, truthful, loving, and full of the desire to serve.

Realize the truth of the scriptures; learn to be detached and to take joy in
renunciation. Do not get angry or harm any living creature, but be
compassionate and gentle; show good will to all.

Cultivate vigor, patience, will purity; avoid malice and pride Then, Arjuna,
you will achieve your divine destiny.”

~~~
bigred100
My question is why as a Western dude who grew up with lots of exposure to
Christian scripture and surrounding culture elements or churches I can visit
am I gonna try and learn someone else’s religion (with none of those
advantages) when even taking the “easy” route is extraordinary difficult?

~~~
narag
Some of those traditions are previous to Christianism and most likely had a
strong influence on it. So maybe for context.

~~~
bigred100
So reading and learning a bit is cool. But I guess the part I wonder is how
you’re gonna use it as a guidebook for life or something if you have none of
the context and are kind of just guessing (maybe you’re not). For the record I
actually have a similar issue with a lot of American Protestant Christians
I’ve seen (have seemingly no connection to anyone but are convinced they can
figure out how to successfully apply a 2000yr old middle eastern religious
text to modern life on their own).

~~~
narag
I don't know. I wouldn't use any book as a guidebook for life, either if it
was written 2000 years ago or yesterday. Actually most religious people I know
have a bond to a community, being The Book kind of an identity "totem" of such
community.

------
Mugwort
I've wanted to study Sanskrit for a while now but nobody around where I live
can teach it. So I've been nibbling at at occasionally. Some points of
pronunication are a bit vague such as there being two kinds of T's and D's
which sound almost identical to me. I've read the Gita and the Uphanishad s in
English (Eaknath Easwaran's translation). Here's my impression. It's
definitely worth reading through a translation. You can read it not as
philosophy or religion but simply to read it. That's why I read it. To climb
the mountain of life a little bit higher to see more. To see a tiny bit of
what men like Oppenheimer, Ghandi, Thoreau and 1.3 billion others have been
inspired. I can now read most Devanagari characters, enough to recognize
simple words when they appear to me in stores like "Dharma", "Karma" or
"Tantra" etc. That said, I identify more closely with Judaism than anything
else. You need a place to call home. Still, the Sanskrit language is
fascinating and the Hindu scriptures have made a deep impression on me.

~~~
richard23132
Hinduism can not be compared with Judaism. Hinduism is fundamentally build to
protect the Brahmin supremacy and caste system is used to deny access to
education to the majority of people and to control the society by the priestly
class. All the scriptures are there to divert the attention from the main
subject when questioned. This essay "Annihilation of caste" by Ambedkar
[http://www.ambedkar.org/ambcd/02.Annihilation%20of%20Caste.h...](http://www.ambedkar.org/ambcd/02.Annihilation%20of%20Caste.htm)
gives a factual reasoning behind the construction of Hinduism. Its short but
full of verifiable facts. Especially for a non-indian this is a must read if
you want to understand the Hindu society.

~~~
dang
Please don't take HN threads further into religious flamewar. We don't want
that here; it leads nowhere good.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
momentmaker
Bhagavad Gita is a deep scripture about yogic teachings.

The premise of the story is a war between a family fighting for dominance.

Arjuna is one of the greatest archer at the time and he was fighting against
one side of his family.

Both side sought out Lord Krishna for help for their cause. Lord Krishna gave
each a choice - His army or Him as a guide.

Arjuna chose Him as a guide and majority of the book is about the dialog
between them.

The scripture is deeply allegorical and metaphorical. Bayasa, the author,
wrote it as a guide to live one's life (Self-Realization).

The war is actually talking about the "war" every human being is fighting
inside themselves. The "good" versus the "bad" or virtues versus vices. That's
the whole reason why we suffer. It's all an inner journey :)

I'd highly recommend reading The Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramhansa
Yogananda as his Master and other great saints explain more about it than I
can.

~~~
trianglem
What I took away from the Bhagvat Gita is that it is a treatise on why you
should accept, internalize and submit to the role or place that society has
assigned you.

~~~
momentmaker
Yes. Lord Krishna said that to Arjuna that you might fight because it's your
"duty". The death blow Arjuna deals to one of his enemy is that that enemy's
"karma". Arjuna is merely an instrument/tool of God/Lord Krishna. That enemy
is already "dead" whether by Arjuna's hands or another's.

That's why Lord Krishna said to Arjuna "Whatever you do, do unto Me." You're
not the "doer", the "Doer" is Creation/God/shaki/energy/consciousness that's
flowing within your body powering it through power of will.

I wouldn't say "society" has assigned to you but more like what Life is has
placed.

"Why were you were at that exact time and place?"

"Why did you encounter every single moment at that time and/or place?"

"Why have you met the people you have throughout your life?"

Cause-Effect (Karma)

Even non-action is action which has its effect. That's why Lord Krishna
chastised Arjuna for not fighting(non-action) because his ego didn't want to
fight.

~~~
ignoramous
I really like some of the teachings in Bhagavat Gita. It is a treasure trove
of wisdom to be cherished. I need to point though that a group of extremists
justified Muslim massacres because karma (Gujarat 2002). I'm curious how does
one _fight_ and argue effectively against such interpretations that cause
turmoil and conflict due to a abhorrent nihilistic view of the text which
_seems_ valid on its face value but undermines peace and tranquility and most
certainly doesn't deal justice to the innocents in its cross-hairs.

~~~
notduncansmith
The Gita does have some great teachings, as does the Bible, and as do the
works of people alive today. I think the most important lesson is not to cling
too tightly to any one set of scriptures. It seems a lot like programming
languages to me.

------
bcaa7f3a8bbc
The link to the original paper is dead, here is it.

* The Gita of J. Robert Oppenheimer

[https://web.archive.org/web/20131126020921/http://www.amphil...](https://web.archive.org/web/20131126020921/http://www.amphilsoc.org/sites/default/files/proceedings/Hijiya.pdf)

------
danans
The Bhagavad Gita is a bit like Moby Dick in that it is abstract enough that
everyone projects their own interpretation onto it, filtered through their own
experiences. However, because it is a religious text, people have been
fighting over the meaning for millenia, often to justify or motivate one
political stance or another, no doubt because motivating the protagonist to
political action of physical battle is itself the most concrete reading of the
Bhagavad Gita's meaning.

But the Gita is just one highly contested chapter of the larger, arguably more
interesting epic, the Mahabharata, which is the story of war and conflict
spanning generations of an extended clan of warriors.

The Mahabharata is a treasure trove of the complex sociology of ancient South
Asia, and quite _unlike_ the Gita, it's content is largely non-judgemental and
mostly secular.

In some traditional families, they actually prefer _not_ to keep a copy of
Mahabharata in the home per the superstition that it will engender conflict in
the family, instead preferring "thou shalt" texts like the Bhagavad Gita, or
Ramayana.

~~~
denton-scratch
All of these long, ancient religious texts are palimpsests (by which I mean
simply the work of multiple authors, over a period of time; I know that isn't
the strict meaning, and indeed some of them are strictly palimpsests, i.e.
documents that have been erased and written over).

I don't know for sure that the BV is such a palimpsest; but it is not
plausible that the Mahabharata as a whole is a record composed by a single
author, at a point in history.

~~~
danans
> it is not plausible that the Mahabharata as a whole is a record composed by
> a single author, at a point in history.

I agree. I don't think I argued against that? Responding to the wrong comment
perhaps?

The Bhagavad Gita in particular is a section of the Mahabharata that has seen
more revisions over time than the rest of th epic. In fact the name of the
purported author "Vyasa" itself means "arranger", implying that he was
organizing stories he received from others.

------
WomanCanCode
I've been fascinated by Sanskrit because some of the words sound so much like
old english/germanic. There need to be more study done on indian languages
because there have just soo many of them and every region has their own
dialects. It's as if the tower of babel incident happened over there.

~~~
danans
> words sound so much like old english/germanic.

The relationship you are seeing was discovered nearly two centuries ago, and
has been thoroughly studied since then [1].

> there have just soo many of them and every region has their own dialects.

If linguistic diversity is the measure you are interested in, Papua New Guinea
[2] and Sub Saharan Africa [3] are orders of magnitude more diverse that
Europe and South or East Asia.

1\. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-
European_languages](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages)

2\.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Papua_New_Guine...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Papua_New_Guinea)

3\. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-
Saharan_Africa#Languages...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-
Saharan_Africa#Languages_and_ethnic_groups)

------
dbKooper
Hinduism and ancient vedas is more of like a open source religion. So called
guru's have created various meditation techniques using its knowledge and now
selling it to the world. Damn i wish someone can decode it using AI and create
an AI meditation guru.

~~~
noonespecial
My Commodore Amiga used to give it a shot now and again.

~~~
dbKooper
then? What happened?

~~~
bcaa7f3a8bbc
Obviously, the system crashes.

For those who didn't get the joke, "Guru Meditation" on Amiga is the
equivalent of "Kernel Panic/Oops" on Unix.

------
p2hari
I couldn't resist but to comment on this as it is close to me also. The
Bhagavad Gita (celestial song) grows on you each time you read and at each
age, you read. Let us say you read it this year and again the next, it will
have a different impact on you (at least for me.. it grows on me). It is as
relevant today as it was at any time in the past and the future. It is not
just a dialogue between 2 people but two identities. It can be of a friend, as
is the case of Krishna and Arjuna, or can be considered as a conversation
between dad and daughter, mother and son, doctor and patient, etc. And each of
the Dharma, Karma, jnana(knowledge) and Bhakti(devotion) manifests. So it can
be a book that plays a part in psychology, administrative practises,
management techniques, political study, yoga, and meditation etc. In the
context of the space here and the article I cannot elaborate on those, but
yeah it is an absolute good read for anybody and I would suggest it as such.
Not getting into the details of the religion etc. Krishna comes across like a
great communicator and Arjuna as a great listener raising issues and relevant
doubts at the right time/moment so that the rhythm of the discourse is not
disturbed.

------
bakul
I think Wellerstein reads more into what Oppenheimer said (years later) about
what he thought when he saw the explosion than what he may have meant. My take
is that Oppenheimer was saying the quote from the Bhagvad Geeta accurately
described his thoughts at the time. That with the atom-bomb we (the United
States) have (the power to) become the destroyer of the whole world. I think
what he said about Vishnu and Arjuna was to merely provide the context of the
quote. He did not mean imply anything about his own duty. This is borne out by
what he says next: “I suppose we all thought that, one way or another”. No
matter what their personal motivation may be for working on the bomb, they
must all have sensed the enormous destructive power of the bomb.

------
8bitsrule
I suspect that Oppenheimer found, in 'following your duty for the good of your
tribe', some justification for his moral dilemma. But the mass destruction of
cities full of innocents is not, I think, the intended meaning of this Gita
passage. Else, what is the whole point of spirituality? So it ends up as yet
another expedient distortion.

(Just as the Bible quote 'I came not to introduce peace, but a sword' is -not-
about battlefield murders.)

I'm sure that, put into a like position, Einstein would not have agreed to
'serve' in the same way. Nor would he have been the only 'refusnik'.

------
pravint
I would highly recommend reading Bhagavat Gita(and other Vedic scriptures),
it’s available freely with translation to many different languages here at
[1].

Specific verse in article at [2]

[1] [https://www.vedabase.com/en/bg](https://www.vedabase.com/en/bg)

[2][https://www.vedabase.com/en/bg/11/32](https://www.vedabase.com/en/bg/11/32)

------
lordleft
The Gita is a triumph of Indian literature. Intriguingly, Gandhi held the Gita
in great esteem and interpreted the warfare it depicts as fundamentally
spiritual.

------
Mugwort
Very enjoyable short read. Almost as soon as Oppenheimer Trinity test was a
success, Leslie Groves drove him out, revoked his security clearance, called
him a communist and he suffered greatly as a result. Oppenheimer lost many of
his friends and his career. Because he was portrayed as a communist he found
it difficult to get a job or even get invited to conferences. A very sad end
for such a great man. One can only gaze in awe at his career, his
accomplishments. He even made an important contribution to General Relativity
with Harvard graduate student Ryan Snyder that a collapsing star would indeed
form a black hole according to GR. Whatever else could be said of him, He
certainly fulfilled his Dharma.

------
ultrasounder
Also discovered this on a previous thread on HN;
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14940606](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14940606)
[https://www.searchgita.com/](https://www.searchgita.com/) A beautiful tool
that lets you search for particular cantos from the Tome.

------
braindead_in
Related thread, the oldest known version of Mahabharata.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/IndiaSpeaks/comments/ddim7e/not_for...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IndiaSpeaks/comments/ddim7e/not_for_the_puranics/)

------
amriksohata
The Mahabharat, in which the Gita is played out as part of, talks about the
Brahmastra. A weapon that can destroy the entire universe. I don't know if
this is what Oppenheimer thought he had rediscovered, nuclear power which has
the power to destroy vast quantities of land.

------
deepaksurti
For a really deep study and interpretation of Gita by M K Gandhi [1] is
recommended.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/gospel-selfless-action-according-
Gand...](https://www.amazon.com/gospel-selfless-action-according-
Gandhi/dp/8172291264)

------
croh
This is best summary of the Gita.

[https://nilayashokshah.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/zzzzz-
git...](https://nilayashokshah.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/zzzzz-gita-
saar.jpg)

~~~
LoveDeathRobots
Possible explains this
[https://www.teoalida.com/world/india/](https://www.teoalida.com/world/india/)

~~~
croh
As I know, India is home of many religions and creeds following different
philosophies. So it may not. Housing issue in big cities is too common across
the world.(LA, Tokyo). Don't see any relation between religious philosophy and
housing issue.

~~~
LoveDeathRobots
> Don't see any relation between religious philosophy and housing issue.

Most of the historical social movements in the west came out of the Christian
tradition, whilst the eastern tradition of Karma/Dharma would say leave it,
it's the wheel of life or some such.

------
croh
What I understood from Hindu philosophy -

1\. Reality is advaita - it means single being or whole cosmos is one being.

2\. Maya or illusion is 'consciousness without above knowledge'. This is a
cause of suffering.

3\. As long as you're in illusion, you will suffer because you consider
yourself different than others. It is called 'I". As long as there is 'I',
you're in Maya. 'I' give rise to you/he/she/they/animals. If idea of 'I' is
not there then no you/he/she/they. All becomes one. I guess Douglas Hofstadter
tried to explain same concept in GEB by using self-referential systems. (I
might be wrong as I never able to finish book).

4\. Enlightened Guru is very important in journey. Creation is considered as
dense forest. Without Guru you can lose yourself. Guru appears when Chela is
ready. You have to keep searching truth.

5\. Law of Karma - Whatever is your current situation is your karma. How do
you react to it is your free will ?

6\. Creation is spontaneous per say. There is no reason behind it.

7\. People can use different practices as per their nature to reach pt 1.

8\. As long as there is desire, reincarnation will happen. Now problem is you
may be man/woman/animal/cow in next birth. So treat everyone well (including
species other than human being). You come in contact with different people
(good or bad)/animals because of some relation (may be in previous birth).

9\. Cow is considered sacred as she has human like emotions. She can live
happily without human help but still she gives human everything even after
treating her bad. It is considered great sacrifice e.g giving milk of your
child to other species.

What I like most is considering whole universe as family. Sometimes I feel sad
as being human. Also I found many stoicism concepts in Hindu philosophy which
is very interesting. 2 completely different cultures are on same conclusions.

~~~
PhantomBKB
That's a really good summary of the workings of life and the universe. Learned
a good many things from your post as well.

------
cvaidya1986
To read and search verses for free SearchGita.com

and free on App Store by topics like Meditation, Action

[http://appstore.com/searchgita](http://appstore.com/searchgita)

------
Shobji
Great Article

