Universal Cult

BHAGAVADGITA, The Song of God--translated by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood --Marcel Rodd Co. ($1.50).

Ten years ago Christopher Isherwood was one of the most promising of younger English novelists, and a member of the radical, pacifist literary set sometimes known as "the Auden circle." Now, thinking seriously of becoming a swami (religious teacher), he is studying in a Hindu temple in Hollywood, Calif.

Much-traveled Author Isherwood's early novel, The Last of Mr. Norris (TIME, May 20, 1935), was a grisly, eyewitness account of British pro-Nazis in Berlin. His Journey to a War (with verse commentary by W. H. Auden) was a stark, unromanticized look at embattled China. Now this rebellious son of a British lieutenant colonel lives monastically with three other men and eight women in a small house adjoining the alabaster temple of the Vedanta Society of Southern California. He shares his income and the housework with his fellow students, and daily ponders the teachings of his master, Swami Prabhavananda.

"Peace, Peace, Peace!" Three times each day Isherwood repairs to the temple, sits cross-legged between grey-green walls on which are hung pictures of Krishna, Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, other great religious teachers. The swami enters bareheaded, wearing a long, bright yellow robe that sweeps the floor. He too sits crosslegged, pulls a shawl around him, and for ten minutes meditates in silence. Then in a ringing bass he chants a Sanskrit invocation, repeats it in English, ending with the words, "Peace, Peace, Peace!"

This dispassionate ceremony is the ritual of a mystical order of which slight, agreeable, cigaret-smoking Swami Prabhavananda is the Los Angeles leader. It is an outgrowth of a small monastic community founded in India late last century in the name of Sri Ramakrishna, one of the great teachers of Indian Vedanta, the underlying philosophy of Indian religion.

Mystical Movement. Of late, Prabhavananda's teaching has attracted enough expatriate English literary men to create a minor but noteworthy literary movement. Novelist Aldous Huxley, ultra-sophisticate of the 1920s, studied privately with the swami. His latest novel, Time Must Have a Stop, bears the marks of his study. Erudite Philosopher Gerald Heard (Pain, Sex and Time; The Ascent of Humanity), son of an Anglican churchman and a professed agnostic since youth, was another private pupil. Like slick Manhattan Dramatist John van Druten, (Voice of the Turtle, I Remember Mama), both contribute to the society's magazine Vedanta and the West, now co-edited by Isherwood. Larry, the dissatisfied young hero of Somerset Maugham's current best-selling novel, The Razor's Edge, whose search for faith ended in Vedanta, is said to be modeled on Isherwood.

Vedanta (less correctly but more frequently called Hinduism) is the-philosophy derived from the oldest religious writings in the world: the collection of ancient Indian scriptures called the Vedas. The common basis of India's many religious sects, it teaches the fundamental sameness of all religion. Its basic tenets are: 1) that man's inner nature is divine; 2) that his purpose on earth is to manifest this eternally hidden divinity; 3) that truth is universal.

Hindu New Testament. The Bhagavad-Gita, often called the Hindu New Testament, is a majestic poem, expounding the teachings of Vedanta in an epic dialogue between Sri Krishna (a manifestation of

God) and an Indian prince called Arjuna (TIME, July 3). "It is," says Isherwood, "one of the world's greatest religious documents. In simple, timeless words, which belong to no one language, race or epoch, incarnate God speaks to man, His friend. He tells him of his own divine nature, of pardon and mercy, of strength and knowledge and love."

To preserve the everlasting simplicity of the Gita's words, Novice (Brahmachari) Isherwood (who knows no Sanskrit) and his teacher have collaborated on this latest translation, designed to bring its message closer to "the ordinary, perplexed men and women of today." The result is a distinguished literary work.

Simpler and freer than other English translations (three of which have been published in the past year), the translation compresses the long passages of epic poetry into a 15-page introduction, the recondite arguments of Vedantic mythology into a brief appendix. Between the two, the translators have presented a version of the great dialogue that does some violence to the original flavor of the poem, but makes it easily understandable to the common reader.

Sanskrit without Pain. In descriptions of Yoga techniques and Hindu cosmology, where there are no adequate English equivalents for many of the terms, the Sanskrit words are left in the text. This device makes for both obscurity and bad poetry. But Isherwood's lucid prose, in passages of the Gita that offer calm, unhurried advice, compensates for such lapses: "Poise your mind in tranquillity. . . . Desire for the fruits of work must never be your motive in working. . . . Work done with anxiety about results is far inferior to work done without such anxiety, in the calm of self-surrender."

The Isherwood-Prabhavananda translation is one which, as Aldous Huxley remarks in a preface, "can be read not merely without that dull, aesthetic pain inflicted by all too many English translations from the Sanskrit, but positively with enjoyment." It may help U.S. readers to understand not only the Gita itself, but also its influence on American letters through one of its greatest U.S. admirers, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

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