Teaching mindfully: learning and teaching through story-telling.

The well-known Catholic monk and writer Thomas Merton called the Bhagavad-gita (also called the Gitopanisad) "the main literary support for the great religious civilization of India, the oldest surviving culture in the world." [1] According to Srila Prabhupada, author of more than sixty volumes of translations of and commentaries on the religious classics of India, the Gita "is the essence of Vedic knowledge and one of the most important Upanisads in Vedic literature." [2]

Yet while devotees of Krsna ("the highest pleasure") often study this work by itself as one of their great scriptures, it is also part of a larger story, the historical epic the Mahabharata. [3] For Krsna's followers, the Gita "directs the reader to Krsna," who is the speaker, "the ultimate goal" and the substance of the story. [4] The Gita is literature, but it is also a teaching tool. Like all scriptures, both the content of its stories and the method of story-telling itself are valued for spiritual teaching and learning. As Prabhupada explains, "'If we want to take a particular medicine, then we have to follow the directions written on the label. We cannot take the medicine according to our own whim or the direction of a friend. It must be taken according to the directions on the label or the directions given by a physician." [5] In the case of the Gita, the speaker directing the story is Krsna. The story is to be accepted "without interpretation, without deletion and without our own whimsical participation in the matter" if we are to have any hope of understanding it. [6]

Theologian Robert K. Johnston discusses five pedagogical methods of religious interpretation of film in his 2000 book Reel Spirituality. These approaches can just as easily be applied to pedagogical work with novels and other forms of storytelling. The first, a kind of ethical or theological imperialism, starts from a particular ethical or theological perspective and imposes its own morality on the novel, film, or story. This approach often results in avoidance or censorship rather than learning or enlightenment. A second option is to look for recognizable religious or ethical elements, which requires encountering the story from an already clearly ...