He Became Death, Destroyer of Worlds. If Only He'd Read a Bit Further... | Opinion

The new film Oppenheimer includes a famous episode in which lines from the Bhagavad Gita, a slim section of ancient India's 18-volume epic the Mahabharata, flash through J. Robert Oppenheimer's mind as he witnesses the first atomic bomb explosion in July 1945: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

Historians debate the exact words that Oppenheimer recalled, and whether it was during the "Trinity" atomic-bomb test or sometime after. But they have missed something more important. Oppenheimer, who led the Manhattan Project, did more than just associate the atomic bomb with the Gita's "destroyer of worlds" passage. Without knowing it, he completed an astounding self-fulfilling prophecy: Some two thousand years earlier, the Mahabharata predicted something like a nuclear weapon and then, through its influence on Oppenheimer, contributed to making the prediction come true.

The implications of this are worth pondering while Oppenheimer has his cultural moment.

Oppenheimer was torn between the ethical imperative to beat Hitler to The Bomb versus the ethics of midwifing a weapon that could destroy civilization. According to historian James Hijiya, he resolved the dilemma by relying on the Gita's instruction to perform one's assigned duties as a spiritual practice, leaving the results to God or fate. He came to believe that his duty was to complete his charged task without fretting unduly over the ultimate consequences, which were out of his hands as a scientist.

This is in line with the Gita, which involves a brink-of-war dialogue between the great warrior Arjuna and his charioteer, Krishna. Arjuna fears that he will have to kill relatives and elders on the other side whom he loves and respects. Krishna replies that as a member of the warrior caste, it is Arjuna's duty to fight, surrendering the outcome to God.

Then Krishna unveils the kicker: He himself is that God. He reveals himself as the god Vishnu in his cosmic form, Vishvarupa, creator and "destroyer of worlds," luminous as "the radiance of a thousand suns." This is what flashed through Oppenheimer's mind at the Trinity bomb test.

Oppenheimer loved the Gita and knew it well. But he was not as familiar with the next volume of the Mahabharata. Had he been, he might have interpreted the epic's ethical teachings differently.

In that next volume, as the battle rages the opposing army unleashes a superweapon, called the Narayana weapon. Narayana is another name for Krishna or Vishnu. Deploying the weapon causes violent winds, splits the summits of mountains, and reverses the course of rivers. It turns the daytime battlefield dark and incinerates vast numbers of Arjuna's comrades in arms.

To a modern reader, this sounds uncannily like a nuclear weapon. The ancient epic envisions it, then roughly two millennia later, its earlier Gita section bolsters Oppenheimer's will to make the vision real, right down to seeing the detonation of the first atomic bomb as if it were Krishna or Vishnu revealed in his awesome, luminous, and destructive cosmic form. Oppenheimer realizes the vision of the superweapon even though he was unfamiliar with the part of the Mahabharata in which it appeared.

What meaning should we draw from this remarkable self-fulling prophecy? The Bomb was used to annihilate Japanese civilians and incited a nuclear arms race. Is this a case of ancient ethics that turn out to be deficient or inapplicable in modern times? Or does it point to some greater wisdom that needs assimilating?

In my reading of the Mahabharata, its 18 volumes can be viewed as an allegory of 18 stages in psychological and moral development. The epic is consistent in indicating that we must perform our moral duties. But as they mature, the protagonists get better at discerning what those obligations entail.

In the story, millions die in a war that lasts just 18 days. Only 11 combatants survive. Feeling inconsolable remorse for his part in this, Arjuna's eldest brother, King Yudhishthira, explores more advanced moral principles including acting to benefit all of society, until at the culmination of the epic he achieves perfection in moral intuition and embraces "compassion for all creatures."

This is far from irrelevant for our time. Having plumbed the Mahabharata for its insights into psychological development, I've found them to be timeless and helpful for illuminating hidden causes of many pathologies in modern civilization—social alienation, addiction, authoritarian populism, climate change, and more.

I believe that if Oppenheimer had studied the rest of the Mahabharata the way he studied the Gita, he might well have come to a different conclusion about the ethics of nuclear weapons.

Richard Sclove is the author of Escaping Maya's Palace: Decoding an Ancient Myth to Heal the Hidden Madness of Modern Civilization, winner of the 2023 Nautilus Gold Book Award.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.