Oppenheimer: How the Bhagavad Gita affected him

The globe has reacted well to Christopher Nolan's expansive new biographical drama Oppenheimer, which is about the "father of the atomic bomb." It has also been well received in India, however some have objected to a scene showing the scientist reading the Bhagavad Gita, one of Hinduism's most sacred texts, following intercourse. The book was one of Oppenheimer's favorites, and he had studied the antiquated Sanskrit language.

Two days before the first atomic bomb detonated in the desert of New Mexico in July 1945, Robert Oppenheimer performed a verse from the Bhagavad Gita, also known as "The Lord's Song."
Theoretical physicist Oppenheimer had learned Sanskrit, an old Indian language, and later the Gita while working as a teacher in Berkeley years earlier. One of Hinduism's greatest epics, the Mahabharata, contains the 2,000-year-old Bhagavad Gita, the world's longest poem with 700 verses.

The "father of the atomic bomb" released his strain by reciting a verse he had translated from Sanskrit just hours before an occasion that would alter the course of history:
At the cliff edge of the mountains, in the forest, and during war

In the midst of arrows and javelins on the large, dark sea,

In the midst of guilt, perplexity, and slumber,

A person is defended by his prior good deeds.
A young Oppenheimer was introduced to Sanskrit by Arthur W Ryder, a professor of Sanskrit at the University of California, Berkeley, according to Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin in their reputable 2005 book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer. The young physicist was a 25-year-old assistant professor when she came. He contributed to the development of one of the US's "greatest schools of theoretical physics" over the ensuing few decades.
 Oppenheimer captivated Ryder, a Republican and "sharp-tongued iconoclast." According to Oppenheimer, Ryder was a "quintessential intellectual" who "felt, thought, and spoke like a stoic." Ryder was a "remarkable combination of austerity through which peeps the gentlest soul," according to the young scientist's father, a textile importer.

    Who was Robert Oppenheimer in real life?

Ryder was viewed by Oppenheimer, who is portrayed in the biopic by actor Cillian Murphy, as a unique individual with "a tragic sense of life, in that they attribute to human actions the completely decisive role in the difference between salvation and damnation."

Soon, Ryder began teaching Oppenheimer private Sanskrit lessons every Thursday night. The scientist wrote to his brother Frank, "I am learning Sanskrit, enjoying it very much and enjoying again the sweet luxury of being taught."

According to Oppenheimer's biographers, many of his friends thought his recent fixation with an Indian language was strange. Harold F. Cherniss, one of them, thought it made "perfect sense" since Oppenheimer had a "taste of the mystical and the cryptic," and he was the one who brought the scientist to the scholar.
Oppenheimer's familiarity with Sanskrit and the Gita is obviously relevant to the telling of his tale. However, some right-wing Hindus have voiced concerns about the movie, particularly the sex scene with Florence Pugh's character Jean Tatlock, claiming it is an attack on their faith and calling for changes.

However, since it passed muster with India's film censors and outperformed Barbie at the box office since the two movies debuted on Friday, it is the Hollywood hit of the year in India.

Oppenheimer was undoubtedly a man of vast reading; in addition to philosophy, French, English, and history classes, he even pondered studying architecture and perhaps pursuing a career as a classicist, poet, or artist. He associated with TS Eliot's "sparse existentialism" in The Waste Land and focused on "themes of sadness and loneliness" in his poetry.

"He preferred challenging tasks. Since he found practically everything to be simple, Cherniss explained, "the things that really would catch his attention were essentially the challenging.
It "wasn't really long before" Oppenheimer was reading the Bhagavad Gita due to his aptitude for languages; he had studied Greek, Latin, French, German, and Dutch in six weeks. He described it to friends as the "most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue" and said that he found it "very easy and quite marvellous." A pink-covered copy of the book that Ryder had given him was on his bookcase, and Oppenheimer himself had given copies to his acquaintances.

According to his biographers, the scientist was so "enraptured by his Sanskrit studies" that when his father gave him a Chrysler in 1933, he gave it the name Garuda in honor of the mythologically large bird God from Hinduism.
Oppenheimer had written a pretty flowery letter to his brother outlining why effort and discipline had always been his guiding principles in the spring of that year. It suggested that he was fascinated by eastern ideas.

He stated: "We can achieve serenity and a certain small but priceless measure of freedom from the accidents of incarnation... and that detachment which preserves the world it renounces through discipline, though not through discipline alone." The only way to "see the world without the gross distraction of personal desire, and in seeing so, accept more easily our earthly privation and its earthly horror" is through discipline, he continued.

According to his biographers, Oppenheimer "seemed to be searching for an earthly detachment in the late twenties; he wished, in other words, to be engaged as a scientist with the physical world but detached from it."

"He wasn't looking for a pristine spiritual place to flee to. He had no interest in religion. He was looking for tranquility of mind. For a thinker who is deeply tuned into human concerns and sensual pleasures, the Gita seemed to offer the ideal philosophy.

The Meghaduta, a lyric poem by Kalidasa, one of the greatest poets in Sanskrit, was one of his favorite works. He wrote to his brother, "The Meghaduta I read with Ryder, with delight, some ease and great enchantment,"

Why did Oppenheimer earnestly turn to the Gita and its ideas of karma, destiny, and earthly duty? His early affiliation with the Ethical Culture Society, a "uniquely American offshoot of Judaism that celebrated rationalism and a progressive brand of secular humanism," is referenced by his biographers as "perhaps the attraction Robert felt to the fatalism of the Gita was at least stimulated by a late blooming rebellion against what he had been taught as a youth."
 Oppenheimer was not the only person to appreciate the Hindu scripture, to be sure. When compared to the "stupendous and cosmic philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita, which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial in comparison," Henry David Thoreau wrote about immersing himself in it. The admirer was Heinrich Himmler. Followers of Mahatma Gandhi were fervent. Additionally, two writers Oppenheimer loved, WB Yeats and TS Eliot, had read the Mahabharata.

Oppenheimer was inspired to read the Gita once again when he saw the enormous orange mushroom cloud rising in the skies following the first atomic bomb test. Tens of thousands of people were murdered by the bombs that were ultimately dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.

"We were aware that things would change. A few people wept, and a few others chuckled. In a 1965 documentary, he told NBC that "most people were mute.

"I recalled a passage from the Bhagavad-Gita, a sacred Hindu text, in which Vishnu [a major Hindu deity] tells the prince, "Now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds," in an effort to convince him to carry out his job. In some way or another, I believe we all thought that.

The comment, according to the scientist's acquaintance, sounded like one of Oppenheimer's "priestly exaggerations".
Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire came in first when The Christian Century's editors once requested the scientist to choose the works that had the most influence on his intellectual worldview. The Bhagavad Gita then occupied the second spot.