Bhagavad Gita Questions

In the Common Intellectual Experience, students are tasked with reading and analyzing many difficult and thought-provoking philosophical works by some of the greatest and most well-known writers. Some of these works are widely accepted and enjoyed by the students while others are tossed aside and forgotten. Though Euripides’s Medea seemed to captivate the students’ attention and allow for profound thinking from the majority of the students, The Bhagavad-Gita seemed to be overlooked. Medea answers, in some way, all three of the central CIE questions (What does it mean to be human? How should we live our lives? What is the nature of the universe and what is our place in it?). Though The Bhagavad-Gita answers these questions, the wording was generally …show more content…
In the current generation of students at Ursinus College, there is an overall lack of Hindi knowledge. The students do not understand how the religion itself works and it is so different than the more prominent Christian faith. Therefore, students need class time to review the basics of Hinduism. Unfortunately, the course curriculum does not teach Hinduism to the extent that it should be and students end up with very general, and in some cases, false understanding of the religion. Though religion plays a large part in how humans should live their lives and in their place in the universe, students need more than a basic understanding of a couple of concepts in order to fully grasp the answers that are being presented in the text. In a class like the Common Intellectual Experience, only a couple of days can be allotted for each work that is going to be discussed. At least half of that time has to be dedicated to teaching fundamentals of Hinduism and this detracts from the overall learning of the three CIE questions. So, logistically speaking, it is smarter to remove The Bhagavad-Gita. In addition to the absence of both time and knowledge, the text comes across as very confusing for those who are unfamiliar with the religion. There are multiple people and multiple families that the students are expected to know in order to understand the context of this text (for example, the Pandava army, Drupada, Dhrishtaketu, Krishna, Anantavijaya, etc.) However, it becomes muddled and complex very quickly. Balancing the comprehension of a difficult text with the understanding of a new religion is very difficult and students end up unable to make connections and unable to analyze the philosophy behind the text. These are the reasons that The Bhagavad-Gita should be taken off of