Hinduism and The Good Place
Feb. 4th, 2020 11:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravenSo I talked around this a lot and then purplefringe said I should actually write down my thoughts about Hinduism and The Good Place. She is very persuasive so here they are. This post has a lot of a spoilers! If you haven't seen it through to the end, can I recommend you do that, because it's hilarious and beautiful and all the more so for being a complete and coherent work of art! It’s on Netflix. You’ll thank me.
So, true story: the only active group chat I am admin for is called "The Good Place!!" I love the show. I love it SO much. I love Chidi and Tahani and Janet and Michael and in some lights Jason and most of all, I love Eleanor. I love her strength of character, her willingness to make the hard choices, her leadership, her constant, sincere struggle to be a better person. I love The Good Place.
I’m also a Hindu, which I think most people know about me, and an observant one, which I think less people know; it’s complicated for reasons you will see. Partly this is because I was mumble-ridiculous years old before I realised I'd been saying "oh I wasn't raised religious" to people my whole life despite the fact that isn't in the slightest bit true. I am a Brahmin Hindu, raised by Brahmin Hindus, without as much of the ritual as is typical but in every other sense wholly in keeping with the tenets. (I mean, with caveat: there are 800 million Hindus out there, and they all think of it differently, particularly as it’s not doctrinal. It’s a loose conglomeration of belief systems rather than one defined thing, and - because I’m sure someone’s dying to tell me - in many versions, it carries with it a whole host of sins related to gender, caste and class. Still. I’m one Hindu of the many, and this is how I understand it.)
So here’s a thing that is true about us: we are not that invested in mushy stuff. It's not a religion that has much to say about love, charity, or mercy. Hinduism concerns itself with two things: duty, and justice. ("Dharma", a word that gets thrown about a lot, means both of those, and also something like "the way", or how things should be.) It's not worried about faith, and there’s a well-known argument that it’s not a religion at all, but a particularly longstanding ethics or deontology. That was certainly a thought I was raised with, but there is such a thing as a Hindu cosmology, which goes something like this. There is a divine presence in the universe, which is the universe; this is called brahman, but it isn’t a concept like “God", rather an unknowable, unapproachable divinity. We all, as living things who live in the universe, are part of it - the part of you that is a scrap of the divine is called atman, sometimes translated as “soul” - but it is unknowable. (This is why Hinduism is occasionally mistaken for polytheistic; the Hindu “gods and goddesses” are aspects of the divine, attempts at comprehension. Lots of people, families, professions, have their favoured avatars of worship, but that’s just their way of relating to the unrelatable. I don’t do this, personally, but many people do.) Other ways of coming close to the divine: in silence; in water; in high places. That one rings true to me.
What does that have to do with your day-to-day life? Not…a. whole lot? Most of Hindu life is about how to live well, according to the mandates of duty and justice. There are some basic principles. Most Hindus don’t eat beef, out of tradition; most also will not treat the written word badly, so we don’t rip or tear books in my house, and we don’t keep them on the floor or touch them with our feet. Otherwise it’s more general. You’re here to serve your community. You’re here to work. You’re here to honour your people and your past. You’re here to learn and then teach. In my family, there’s a particular emphasis on that last one. Most of all, you’re here to be part of a living society. It’s rather austere, for the most part. There is no earthly or heavenly reward, in Hinduism. You’re not going anywhere. This is already the Kali Yuga, the dark age of the world, and while the work you do may bring us slowly back to better times, not for thousands and thousands of years. The point is you’re here to do what’s right, not because your religion tells you to, but because it’s the right thing to do.
Along comes The Good Place, which blithely subverts any concept of “heaven” or “hell”, and tells us the purpose of human existence is what we owe to each other. That we need to live moral lives, just because it is good to live a moral life as a part of a society. And that to live a moral life requires us to decide, minute by minute, what a good life is; to read and think and introspect and know that there’s no safety net, no easy fix. I was saying to a friend the other day that the first time I cried at the show was at the end of season 2, when Eleanor lies on the couch and watches three hours of Chidi on YouTube, asking the question of how to live a good life. (Oh, Eleanor! <3333 It’s so difficult! It’s such a hard thing, every day of all of our lives!)
So that was why I’d started sort of thinking about The Good Place and Hindu ethics, and it’s been a nice layer on top of it all (among other nice layers - my first degree was in philosophy and political theory, the trolley problem episode was my favourite thing that’s ever happened) but it was the last two episodes that made me want to sit down and write all of this. In “Patty”, which is just as delightful as the rest of the show - they make it into the eponymous Good Place, finally! And oh no, it’s full of pleasure-satiated zombies, because it turns out you can get tired of milkshakes made of stardust and monkeys driving go-karts! I love it.
Then, in the last episode but one, Eleanor says: “The way to restore meaning to the people of the Good Place is to let them leave."
Which means so much, just so, so much to me, and I can’t really explain why but I’m going to try. I was sort of lying a minute ago when I said there’s no reward, in Hinduism? There is, kind of. It tells you that you will be reincarnated - or, more loosely, that all life is cyclical - and each time you exist, you will have another chance to be a better person. Memories wiped each time but with your ethical core remaining, you get another chance until you get it right. (No eternal damnation here. Christianity is a closed book to me in so many ways but in none more so than that.) Eight hundred reboots, my god, I fucking love The Good Place. You keep trying.
You keep trying. And after ten or ten thousand lives, you will come to moksha, otherwise nirvana, in which you will be released from the cycle of rebirth. The air in your lungs, as Jason says, will be the same as the air outside. You have done all you can, been all you can be, and just as every molecule of your body will return to the earth that made you, all that is in you that is divine will return to what made it. There is silence; there are deep places. You can leave.
I feel that desire, very deeply. I have tried, in adulthood, to live a Hindu life. I haven’t worried too much about the phenomenology of the whole damn thing. But I felt it, with the end of The Good Place, that bone-deep relief to hear that spoken, and it felt so beautiful and true and affirming. (I was raised as a Hindu in a Christian country, alongside beliefs that are meaningless to me. My religion is cow-worship and idols; my people are heathen and unsaved. Moses comes down from the mountain to find the Israelites are bowing down to a golden calf.) And here is The Good Place, a story that begins as heaven and hell, that says, no, this is not, after all, how it goes. The Rig Veda, the oldest of the Hindu scriptures - it was composed around 1500 BCE - has this to say about creation: "perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not; the one who looks down on it, only he knows— or perhaps he does not know.” Perhaps he (she? it) doesn’t know. It doesn’t matter where it all came from, and why. It doesn't matter that the doorkeeper is a frog guy and the judge likes TV. It matters that you live a good life, and that when it’s over, you can go.
purplefringe said I should actually write down my thoughts about Hinduism and The Good Place. She is very persuasive so here they are. This post has a lot of a spoilers! If you haven't seen it through to the end, can I recommend you do that, because it's hilarious and beautiful and all the more so for being a complete and coherent work of art! It’s on Netflix. You’ll thank me. So, true story: the only active group chat I am admin for is called "The Good Place!!" I love the show. I love it SO much. I love Chidi and Tahani and Janet and Michael and in some lights Jason and most of all, I love Eleanor. I love her strength of character, her willingness to make the hard choices, her leadership, her constant, sincere struggle to be a better person. I love The Good Place.
I’m also a Hindu, which I think most people know about me, and an observant one, which I think less people know; it’s complicated for reasons you will see. Partly this is because I was mumble-ridiculous years old before I realised I'd been saying "oh I wasn't raised religious" to people my whole life despite the fact that isn't in the slightest bit true. I am a Brahmin Hindu, raised by Brahmin Hindus, without as much of the ritual as is typical but in every other sense wholly in keeping with the tenets. (I mean, with caveat: there are 800 million Hindus out there, and they all think of it differently, particularly as it’s not doctrinal. It’s a loose conglomeration of belief systems rather than one defined thing, and - because I’m sure someone’s dying to tell me - in many versions, it carries with it a whole host of sins related to gender, caste and class. Still. I’m one Hindu of the many, and this is how I understand it.)
So here’s a thing that is true about us: we are not that invested in mushy stuff. It's not a religion that has much to say about love, charity, or mercy. Hinduism concerns itself with two things: duty, and justice. ("Dharma", a word that gets thrown about a lot, means both of those, and also something like "the way", or how things should be.) It's not worried about faith, and there’s a well-known argument that it’s not a religion at all, but a particularly longstanding ethics or deontology. That was certainly a thought I was raised with, but there is such a thing as a Hindu cosmology, which goes something like this. There is a divine presence in the universe, which is the universe; this is called brahman, but it isn’t a concept like “God", rather an unknowable, unapproachable divinity. We all, as living things who live in the universe, are part of it - the part of you that is a scrap of the divine is called atman, sometimes translated as “soul” - but it is unknowable. (This is why Hinduism is occasionally mistaken for polytheistic; the Hindu “gods and goddesses” are aspects of the divine, attempts at comprehension. Lots of people, families, professions, have their favoured avatars of worship, but that’s just their way of relating to the unrelatable. I don’t do this, personally, but many people do.) Other ways of coming close to the divine: in silence; in water; in high places. That one rings true to me.
What does that have to do with your day-to-day life? Not…a. whole lot? Most of Hindu life is about how to live well, according to the mandates of duty and justice. There are some basic principles. Most Hindus don’t eat beef, out of tradition; most also will not treat the written word badly, so we don’t rip or tear books in my house, and we don’t keep them on the floor or touch them with our feet. Otherwise it’s more general. You’re here to serve your community. You’re here to work. You’re here to honour your people and your past. You’re here to learn and then teach. In my family, there’s a particular emphasis on that last one. Most of all, you’re here to be part of a living society. It’s rather austere, for the most part. There is no earthly or heavenly reward, in Hinduism. You’re not going anywhere. This is already the Kali Yuga, the dark age of the world, and while the work you do may bring us slowly back to better times, not for thousands and thousands of years. The point is you’re here to do what’s right, not because your religion tells you to, but because it’s the right thing to do.
Along comes The Good Place, which blithely subverts any concept of “heaven” or “hell”, and tells us the purpose of human existence is what we owe to each other. That we need to live moral lives, just because it is good to live a moral life as a part of a society. And that to live a moral life requires us to decide, minute by minute, what a good life is; to read and think and introspect and know that there’s no safety net, no easy fix. I was saying to a friend the other day that the first time I cried at the show was at the end of season 2, when Eleanor lies on the couch and watches three hours of Chidi on YouTube, asking the question of how to live a good life. (Oh, Eleanor! <3333 It’s so difficult! It’s such a hard thing, every day of all of our lives!)
So that was why I’d started sort of thinking about The Good Place and Hindu ethics, and it’s been a nice layer on top of it all (among other nice layers - my first degree was in philosophy and political theory, the trolley problem episode was my favourite thing that’s ever happened) but it was the last two episodes that made me want to sit down and write all of this. In “Patty”, which is just as delightful as the rest of the show - they make it into the eponymous Good Place, finally! And oh no, it’s full of pleasure-satiated zombies, because it turns out you can get tired of milkshakes made of stardust and monkeys driving go-karts! I love it.
Then, in the last episode but one, Eleanor says: “The way to restore meaning to the people of the Good Place is to let them leave."
Which means so much, just so, so much to me, and I can’t really explain why but I’m going to try. I was sort of lying a minute ago when I said there’s no reward, in Hinduism? There is, kind of. It tells you that you will be reincarnated - or, more loosely, that all life is cyclical - and each time you exist, you will have another chance to be a better person. Memories wiped each time but with your ethical core remaining, you get another chance until you get it right. (No eternal damnation here. Christianity is a closed book to me in so many ways but in none more so than that.) Eight hundred reboots, my god, I fucking love The Good Place. You keep trying.
You keep trying. And after ten or ten thousand lives, you will come to moksha, otherwise nirvana, in which you will be released from the cycle of rebirth. The air in your lungs, as Jason says, will be the same as the air outside. You have done all you can, been all you can be, and just as every molecule of your body will return to the earth that made you, all that is in you that is divine will return to what made it. There is silence; there are deep places. You can leave.
I feel that desire, very deeply. I have tried, in adulthood, to live a Hindu life. I haven’t worried too much about the phenomenology of the whole damn thing. But I felt it, with the end of The Good Place, that bone-deep relief to hear that spoken, and it felt so beautiful and true and affirming. (I was raised as a Hindu in a Christian country, alongside beliefs that are meaningless to me. My religion is cow-worship and idols; my people are heathen and unsaved. Moses comes down from the mountain to find the Israelites are bowing down to a golden calf.) And here is The Good Place, a story that begins as heaven and hell, that says, no, this is not, after all, how it goes. The Rig Veda, the oldest of the Hindu scriptures - it was composed around 1500 BCE - has this to say about creation: "perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not; the one who looks down on it, only he knows— or perhaps he does not know.” Perhaps he (she? it) doesn’t know. It doesn’t matter where it all came from, and why. It doesn't matter that the doorkeeper is a frog guy and the judge likes TV. It matters that you live a good life, and that when it’s over, you can go.
no subject
on 2020-02-05 01:04 am (UTC)I've only seen the first season and a half of The Good Place, which was definitely entertaining, and I loved the characters, but I was sort of disappointed that I was unable to really connect much with the show in terms of my own beliefs.
So thank you for posting this! A very interesting read. It's giving me something to look forward to whenever I get the chance to pick up the rest of the Seasons.
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on 2020-02-05 01:05 am (UTC)no subject
on 2020-02-05 03:33 am (UTC)no subject
on 2020-02-05 03:51 am (UTC)(duty and justice - hey, it's your work! no wonder you're brilliant at it!)
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on 2020-02-05 05:44 am (UTC)no subject
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on 2020-02-05 10:29 am (UTC)(Also, so delighted likewise to know another Hindu in my fannish circles! Hi. :))
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on 2020-02-06 09:27 pm (UTC)As expressed by you, this is a very appealing philosophy! I'm not sure how much this is because Hinduism is an appealing philosophy to me (both "being able to prioritise different aspects of the divine, if you believe in a divine" and "the point is to Do The Right Thing" appeal to me a lot), or because you and I share something of a moral framework and you've therefore just expressed exactly the aspects of Hindu philosophy that is bound to appeal to me.
I wonder whether I can somehow initiate a conversation at work to get some of the Hindus I work with (my team of ten people has three practising Hindus) to talk more about their life philosophies ... my boss *definitely* lives the "Doing The Right Thing" philosophy in every aspect of her life.
I wasn't looking for something thought-provoking today, but I have found it and it was very interesting. Thank you!
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on 2020-02-07 02:15 pm (UTC)The last time I wrote meta about this show was at the end of S1 (Ramblings on theology, Judaism, and S1 of The Good Place). I want to write another post now that it's ended. The idea of what we owe to each other, the idea that we keep trying until we get it right, the idea that we can always improve ourselves and do better, even the idea that we can reincarnate and keep trying -- these are ideas that resonate with me in my own religious tradition too.
*
On a different note:
My religion is cow-worship and idols; my people are heathen and unsaved. Moses comes down from the mountain to find the Israelites are bowing down to a golden calf.
I am so sorry that you had to experience these prejudices, and I'm sorry for the ways in which my beloved religious tradition contributes to that (e.g. bringing the golden calf story into our collective culture.)
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on 2020-02-07 02:17 pm (UTC)I did not grow up with these teachings, but they are absolutely part of my tradition, and they mean a lot to me now. :-)
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on 2020-02-08 02:22 pm (UTC)On the other thing: thank you for saying that. <3
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on 2020-03-10 11:27 pm (UTC)And thank you for writing this, which has given me even more to think about.
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on 2020-05-26 07:59 pm (UTC)