More on the Gita/Varna questions
Dr. Jeffery D. Long (Chair, Department of Religious Studies, Elizabethtown College): I tend to agree with the general sense of the responses you have gotten from folks here on the RISA list, in terms of the historical interpretation of these texts. Affirmations of individual quality over birth, while present, seem to nonetheless occur in a larger context that takes birth for granted as a necessary prerequisite for brahmin status. My own interest is more in how these texts are and could yet be interpreted by contemporary Hindu progressives seeking an authoritative textual basis for challenging (and even rejecting) the notion of birth-caste in favor of an interpretation of terms like “brahmin” as referring more universally to anyone who meets certain prerequisites of character: to put it in more traditional terminology, of guna vs. jati. Anthropological observations, such as those made by Charles R. Brooks in ‘The Hare Krishnas in India,’ and my own observations both in India and in th...