In the Gita on the other hand, kingly devotion to the
“infinitely superior force” personified by Krishna is at
times presented both as a guarantee of military victory and
as a way of avoiding karmic bondage through acts of war –
so long as they were undertaken for non-egotistic reasons.
This allows us to understand why Nazi ideologists could
interpret the Bhagavadgita as expounding an ‘Indo-Aryan
metaphysics of battle’ based on and justified by absolute
loyalty and devotion (bhakti) towards a single supreme god-
being in the form of a deified personage. As well as this
‘bhakti yoga’, even the more traditional ‘buddhi-yoga’
referred to in the Gita was interpreted in Germany as a
means, not only of controlling personal emotions and
desires with the mind (buddhi) but also of attaining a state of
ego-less loyalty and surrender to the supreme will of a
deified Teutonic clan leader – Hitler. And by sanctioning
even violent action, if engaged in with total indifference to
its results and free of all emotion, the karmayoga of the Gita
became a recipe for a attitude of carte blanche indifference to
the resulting sufferings of individuals, families and whole
peoples – rather than as a means of protecting the well-
being of all (the proper role of a king or leader in the Gita).
In this way, the Gita was turned into an ideological cloak
for the expansion of Lebensraum (literally ‘life-space’ or
‘room for living’) through earthly, territorial expansion and
land-grabbing – rather than through an expansion of
awareness. This is a gross distortion of the spiritual
singke
(singke)
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