​Was scripture written by the powerful to keep others in control?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
and afterwards they will launch their search in earnest.
Religion is a tool used by the higher class to exploit the lower class. But the problem with this interpretation of communism is, see every philosophy is like a map. Now suppose I have a map of Singapore, then that will help me to go around Singapore.
But suppose somebody gives me a map of Malaysia and then I go around Singapore, then I will just not find places. This doesn’t make sense, this doesn’t make sense, this doesn’t make sense. So people who don’t have an accurate map, that means their philosophy doesn’t reflect with reality properly, they keep walking off their map because their map doesn’t make sense with reality.
So we see first of all, if you look at the Bhakti tradition itself, if you look at scripture, it talks repeatedly about inverting the power structures. This is a defining characteristic of Bhakti. Inverting the power structures.
We see that Ambarish Maharaj is a grahastha and is a kshatriya. Dhruvasa Muni is a brahmana and a sanyasi. And yet the Bhagavatam shows that Dhruvasa Muni is higher.
I once gave a class, there are seven striking examples in the Bhagavatam of the inversion of the normal hierarchy. So much so, the Bhagavatam is so subversive in one sense, that even we have Bali Maharaj rejecting his own spiritual master, Shukracharya. You know, we have, normally there is the side of good and the side of evil.
But we have, you know, Indra is shown as lower than Uttarasura. So Uttarasura is shown as a greater devotee. And the most classic example is, a true example, of course, we see that the yajna, the wives are shown to be higher than the husbands.
And among all devotees, the gopis are shown to be the highest devotees. So basically, bhakti, far from perpetuating the existing social hierarchy, talks about inverting it. There is a normal hierarchy to which respect is offered.
But if there is bhakti, then that hierarchy gets transcended. And we see, in general, this religion can and does become a tool for the powerful to dominate the powerless. But we will see that within religion itself, there are systems of reform which come up.
The whole bhakti movement is a movement of reform. Sometimes people ask, they say that you are propagating this discriminatory caste system. You know, from India, there was such a terrible caste system.
And you are spreading Indian culture now. So you are propagating the same discriminatory caste system. But actually, if we see, the bhakti saints were often the victims of the caste system.
And they are the primary, among the primary leaders who agitate against the caste system. So rather than thinking of scripture as one body of knowledge or religion as one homogenous unit, where it’s all being used to exploit, you understand that there are different kinds of people within religion also. And it is a sad truth that religion has been abused at times by the powerful to exploit the powerless.
But the same, within the same religion itself, reform has also come. And the bhakti tradition is primarily a tradition of reform where by giving supreme importance to devotion, the spiritual is repeatedly shown to trump the material. So the Bhagavad Gita Bhagavatam offers respect to brahmanas.
It doesn’t entirely reject the brahmanas. But it shows that the brahmanas are subordinate to those who have bhakti. So in that sense, it’s actually a means to break the stronghold of the powerful, not perpetuate that stronghold.