The Bhagavad-Gita - Fight Club-Style

The Bhagavad-Gita is widely accepted to be the most important Hindu text. Many modern artists have attempted to recreate The Bhagavad-Gita's universal message of materialism and worldly distractions. Fight Club, a novel written by Chuck Palahniuk that was also made into a popular film by David Fincher, strongly supports these philosophies.

The poem, which is literally translated as "song of the blessed lord," is praised by scholars for its beauty and simplicity. Dipankar Chatterjee and Keith Yandell, two of these scholars, believe it is mainly concerned with moving its readers toward salvation and is only secondarily concerned with doctrine.

The Gita, as it is widely known, was written by an unknown author some time in 400 b.c.e. It chronicles the start of a war between two cousin families, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, fighting for the Bharta kingdom at Kurukshetra. Arjuna, a warrior related to these cousins, is conflicted about charging onto the battlefield. He consults his charioteer, Krishna, and requests to be taken in-between the feuding armies. These actions, or inactions actually, drive Arjuna and Krishna down a spiritual journey that leads to the revelation that Krishna is actually the human manifestation of God.

Chatterjee and Yendel break the 700-verse poem down to five principal ideas that are concluded from Krishna's teachings:

• One's true self is one's undying soul that is divine in nature.
• ...one can avoid the inherent bondage of a material mode of existence by cultivating even-mindedness and detachment.
• Practice of detachment is possible through self-knowledge and devotion to God and is to be initiated in the performance of righteous acts that uphold social order.
• Such practice leads to freedom from fetter of action through the conquest of passion and ego-consciousness...
• Whenever righteousness declines and lawlessness abounds, God descends into this world to restore order.

They also examine the unique relationship between Arjuna and Krishna. The lines between good and evil are blatantly inferred and the conclusion of the poem seems destined. The important union is summed up in "...(Arjuna's quest) for an excuse to withdraw from the battle, but Krishna, the divine in humanity, (inspiring) the soul" (Chatterjee & Yendel 5).

One major discrepancy the scholar's note, which is widely scrutinized, is the poem's seemingly contradictory messages of love and rationalization of killing. The irony "disappears when it is understood that Arjuna is not really given a lesson on killing but is told to differentiate between real love and false compassion" (Chatterjee & Yendel 6). The threat of war is used to "...illustrate the real-life import of the teachings and to dramatize the importance of spiritual serenity in the midst of unnerving situations" (Chatterjee & Yendel 6).

The use of war as a symbolization is regarded by many as intentional. Swami Vivekananda believed the war was a figuration of the struggle "constantly going on within man between the tendencies of good and evil." Mahatma Gandhi himself believed the battle was "an allegory in which the battlefield is the soul and Arjuna, man's higher impulses struggling against evil."

Since The Gita was written, people have interpreted it in their own personal ways. Writers have attempted to emulate its simple message. Contemporary artists have also re-imagined The Gita's intentions in ways that at first may seem contrary but ultimately share the same philosophies. The novel and film, Fight Club is one of these contemporary works. While they're criticized for their depiction of violence and anarchy, both the novel and film had deeper messages that addressed humanity, the influence of materialism, and the search for the true self.

The novel was written in 1996 by Chuck Palahniuk and was made into a film by renowned director David Finch in 1999. The movie was much more commercially successful. The film follows Jack, an unhappy man who has a job he hates and lives a life that is much less than fulfilling. After a string of unique events, including falsely joining self-help groups and losing all his possessions in a mysterious fire, he befriends a man named Tyler Durden.

Together, the men embark on a journey of self-inflicted violence and anarchy. They start regular meetings for men to gather and take their aggressions out on each other, hence the title. These meetings spiral out of control and the club soon grows into what becomes known as Project Mayhem, a terrorist organization. Jack, the narrator, also discovers that Tyler Durden and himself are in fact the same person. In a psychological depression, he created the man he wished he could be but never had the willpower to become.

Much like The Gita, Fight Club has been scrutinized, polarized and re-evaluated. Because of the film's violent fight scenes, one would assume the film does nothing more than promote violence. Some scholars, however, disagree. Lynn M. Ta is one of them. She strongly believes that the film "attempts to open this space for us....(That the) violence (is) a vehicle for critiquing a culture dictated largely by consumerism and commercialism" (Ta 266). The film views the character's actions very darkly and at times comically, which Ta believes "...rely on the realization that these individuals seek relief from an oppressive capitalistic order through means that are equally conforming and repressive."

Because The Gita was written so much earlier historically than Fight Club, it can be assumed that they would deal with extremely different social issues. While The Gita focuses on more spiritual and internal conflicts, Fight Club expands on them, addressing sexual oppression as well as mental illness. While these issues may seem different, historical context may help make them very much the same.

According to Chatterjee and Yandell, The Gita was written to "...appeal to people of all levels of understanding." It was important to those that wrote and promoted the poem that everyone could understand its message, no matter their intellectual level. Very similarly, Fight Club is written about average, middle class, blue-collar workers. Those types of people, as well as the wealthy and impoverished, are meant to understand Jack's struggle.

Lynn Ta also points out issues that make Fight Club uniquely dissimilar to The Gita. Jack suffers from an actual mental illness, known as Dissociative Identity Disorder. The use of this disorder in the film is extremely important, according to Ta "in locating the recovery of a socially disempowered manhood in a divided subject that seeks release in brute, regressive masculinity, (which) the film suggests...violence is not only symptomatic, but also constitutive." She also continues to further interpret the narrator, who "splits into a sadistic (and masculine) Tyler who criticizes and punishes a masochistic (and feminine) Jack.

Because The Gita was written so long ago, one would also assume that the audience had a different level of understanding. Issues such as the oppression of men and the influence of mental illness were unfamiliar to them. Fight Club addresses them as well as the issues presented in The Gita, such as materialism and the belief in becoming more than what we are.

The greatest of all the similarities between The Gita and Fight Club is the correlations between Arjuna and Jack as well as Krishna and Tyler Durden. Both Arjuna and Jack are presented with conflicts that they themselves cannot manage. Arjuna is faced with a battle he does not want to fight and Jack must struggle with a life he is miserable in. While Arjuna's conflict can be interpreted as a spiritual one, Jack's can be very literal. His discord with life is something many people deal with presently, making it very easy for people to relate to.

The similarities between Krishna and Tyler are also very obvious. Both characters are secondary and their main purpose is to serve as a guide to Arjuna and Jack. They are at times both loving as well as aggressive and critical.

The Gita is mostly comprised of Krishna's teachings and parables. Like Krishna, Tyler Durden is famous for his one-liners. That character and his teachings have become a contemporary cultural icon. Much of what he says can be related to The Gita.

Much like The Gita's message of resurrection and the eternal soul, Tyler says "Only after disaster can we be resurrected," and that "It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything." The narrator Jack also addresses the philosophy of resurrection when he says, "Every evening I died, and every evening I was born again, resurrected."

Tyler also clearly addresses materialism when he informs Jack "We are consumers. We're the bi-products of a lifestyle obsession." He justifies the violence he inflicts upon Jack by telling him "You wanna make an omelet, you gotta break some eggs."

Ironically, Tyler Durden also addresses the possible existence of god. "Our Fathers were our models for God. If our fathers bailed, what does that tell us about God?" he asks Jack. "You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you. This is not the worst thing that can happen.... We don't need him!" While that line is drastically different than anything Krishna may have taught, it may very well share the same meaning.

The primary conflict when comparing The Gita and Fight Club is the necessity of a God figure. It is very clear, according to Chatterjee and Yendel's five principal ideas, that The Gita was meant to be a religious document, written with God in mind. Krishna himself is God. But when viewed in historical context, how well does this figure stand up? Other than devote Hindus, these messages of God and the eternal spirit may be perceived as antiquated with the rest of the world.

The creators of Fight Club, both the novel and the film, obviously disagree with the notion of God. According to them if God ever did exist, he didn't do a very good job considering the world in it's present condition. That has much to do with our current state of mind compared to that of The Gita's original audience. In a time when faith in God is not popular, who do we have faith in to save us? That answer is simple: ourselves.
If Gandhi had been alive to read and see Fight Club, there is one Tyler Durden quote in particular he would agree with:

We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression. (Palahniuk 141)

When reading The Gita, it may be necessary to view the war and the notion of God as metaphors. We can view our lives as wars of the spirit and we must be our own gods. That is the message Fight Club wants us to understand. No matter the conflicts we are faced with in life, Krishna said it best, "Always perform with detachment any action you must do; performing action with detachment, one achieves supreme good" (Miller 1022). We must take control of our lives while considering all of humanity. That is a conclusion both Krishna and Tyler Durden would be happy with.

Works Cited

Chatterjee, Dipankar & Yandell, Keith. "Bhagavad Gita"

World Philosophers and Their Works Salem Press, Inc. 2000

Gandhi, Mohandas K., The Bhagavad Gita According to Gandhi

Berkeley Hills Books, Berkeley 2000 pp.15-16

Miller, Barbara Stoler (translator). "The Bhagavad-Gita."

The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Volume A.

Second Edition. Ed. Sarah Lawall. New York: Norton, 2002.

pp.1014-1028

Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club Henry Holt and Company LLC

New York, New York 1996 p.141

Ta. Lynn M. "Hurt So Good: Fight Club, Masculine Violence, and the Crisis of Capitalism" The Journal of American Culture 29:3,

Blackwell Publishing, Inc. 2006

Uhls, Jim. Fight Club (film script), 1999

Vivekananda, Swami. "Sayings and Utterances",

The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda

Mentor, New York 1954 p.416