The Bhagavad Gita & The Good Place

Why Chidi Anagonye and Arjuna Would Be BFFs

śhrī bhagavān uvācha
pārtha naiveha nāmutra vināśhas tasya vidyate
na hi kalyāṇa-kṛit kaśhchid durgatiṁ tāta gachchhati

The Supreme Lord said: One who has done good deeds will never perish. Either in this world or the next, he will not face ruin.

-Bhagavad Gita 6.40

It turns out life isn’t a puzzle that can be solved one time and it’s done. You wake up every day, and you solve it again.

-Chidi Anagonye, The Good Place

Big news! I got a WhatsApp message from the Bhagavad Gita teachers letting us know that the dates for the final tests have been set for the first two weeks in June. This is so we can be prepared to chant during Guru Purnima celebrations in Dallas in early July, where we will have the opportunity to perform in the presence of our guru, Sri Ganapathy Sachidananda Swamiji. I now have less than two weeks to finish learning the final chapter, plus revise the 17 chapters that I have already done. The idea that I am nearing the end is both hopeful and incredibly daunting. A few weeks ago, I did a round robin-style recitation with two other readers of the first six chapters. Our group was rusty on the early chapters, so it took us two hours to get through the six sections. It was the longest section of the Bhagavad Gita that I had chanted out loud in one session, and it still is only a third of what I will end up having to do.

I know that I have a lot to revise, but I was also surprised at how I breezed through some sections that used to give me pronunciation troubles. Though I do not understand what most of the Sanskrit means, the markings that used to be foreign syllables to me now resemble key words. When I see them on the page, I feel like my mouth works ahead of my brain and I can say them without really thinking. It’s a thrilling example of how, as one of my teachers describes it, the Gita begins speaking to you.

I don’t know if the Gita and I are having lengthy conversations yet, but I’ll take the awkward and brief chats we sometimes have. Any semblance of meaning that I derive from the text comes from the helpful English translations after every shloka. It can be distracting when I’m solely focused on chanting, but it provides a nice break when I want to move beyond the often frustrating task of accurate pronunciation. As I have spent some time with the translated shlokas, I have begun to make connections between the movies, TV shows, and stories that I love and the lessons in the Bhagavad Gita. While not all pop culture strives for philosophical significance, there are some pieces of media that seem to speak directly to the ideas in the Bhagavad Gita. One of these is The Good Place.

For those that haven’t seen it, please stop reading this blog and just binge the whole thing. Have you done that? Are we all caught up? Good, because there are spoilers ahead. As we now all know after having watched its four expertly crafted seasons, The Good Place is an NBC sitcom about four humans (and one fire demon) attempting to navigate and eventually redefine the afterlife as they learn how to become better people. You can probably already see the connection: a show about the afterlife and morality must have drawn on existing belief systems and philosophical texts. While the show did have philosophy consultants and the show’s creator, Mike Schur, has talked about his interest in Zen Buddhist philosophy, I haven’t found a direct link to Hindu philosophy or the Bhagavad Gita. Artist’s intent aside, I still think that there are many connections between the Bhagavad Gita and this hit sitcom. Particularly, there is one character who I see as a kindred spirit with Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita: Chidi Anagonye.

Chidi Anagonye, played by William Jackson Harper, in The Good Place.

In The Good Place, The five main characters each grapple with a personal flaw that initially prevents them from reaching the heaven-like Good Place. Eleanor Shellstrop, the self-described “Arizona dirtbag,” is prone to betraying those around her for her own selfish gain. Tahani Al-Jamil, a wealthy British socialite who is overshadowed by her beloved younger sister, cares too much about clout and what other people think of her. Jason Mendoza, a simple-minded DJ from Jacksonville, Florida, is driven by impulse and fails to think about the consequences of his actions. And Michael, well, Michael is a fire demon.

Finally, there’s my favorite character: Chidi Anagonye, the Nigerian-Senegalese moral philosopher with an easily upset stomach. His flaw isn’t that he’s selfish or inconsiderate, or any of the sins that we normally associate with moral deficiency. Instead, Chidi’s damning trait is that he’s indecisive. In flashbacks to his life on Earth, we see Chidi drive his loved ones to their breaking points by failing to make even the most simple decisions like what kind of muffin he should get or which chair he should sit in. He once ruined a make-your-own-sundae bar because “There were too many toppings. And very early in the process you had to commit to a chocolate palate or a fruit palate and if you couldn't decide you wound up with kiwi, junior mint, raisin, and it just ruins everybody's night.” In one of his trials in the afterlife, Chidi spends over an hour trying to choose between a brown hat and a nearly identical grey hat. His indecision comes from his fear that he could make an immoral choice, or one that does harm to others and breaks the social contract. I think Chidi and Arjuna would have understood each other in this way.

The Gita is essentially an overheard conversation between Lord Krishna and Arjuna, the virtuous if morally-squeamish warrior from the royal Pandava family. It takes place on the sacred battlefield of kurukshetra where the Kauravas and Pandavas are prepared to fight each other for domination of the Hastinapura kingdom, which the patriarchs of both sides lay claim to as the eldest sons. Arjuna is a mighty warrior who has gained glory in countless battles, and yet, right before the most important fight of his life, he hesitates. He looks across the field and sees his uncles, cousins, and guru. He knows that in order to win, he must kill them all. He is so overcome with emotion that he drops his almighty bow and tells Krishna that he cannot fight, though he knows it is his duty. However, he also knows he cannot run away, and he turns to Krishna for guidance. Krishna’s advice constitutes the next 17 chapters of the Gita, as he explains to Arjuna why he must perform his duty and fight. The Gita should not be read as a justification of war, as Krishna says multiple times that ahimsa, or non-violence, is a virtue. Rather, it is a metaphor for the paralyzing and terrifying battle raging in our own minds, convincing us that instead of facing our greatest challenges, it might be better to crawl back into bed and call it a day. When I think about Arjuna, literally shaking in his boots and unable to move, I am reminded of a certain “oddly jacked” and morally-troubled philosopher.

While the decision to go to war with your family may seem vastly different than whether almond milk is ok to drink, they both stem from the same dilemma: how to make the most ethical choice that does the least harm to others. The problem with having such rigid moral principles is that the world is more bendy and sloppy than our ethics can account for. When faced with the gray area, people like Chidi and Arjuna decide that taking no action is better than making the wrong choice. I can relate. Every day, we navigate an ethical minefield as we decide which institutions to financially support, which products to buy, which protests we should join and which we can let pass us by without a second thought. Sometimes, after I’ve read enough articles and seen enough Instagram text posts, I think that maybe it would be better to do nothing at all. Decision fatigue sets in, and I am ready to just plop down and binge The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (although, maybe I shouldn’t because I don’t want to support Amazon and isn’t it better for me to read a book and yet on the other hand…).

It would be much easier to just throw our metaphorical bow on the ground and refuse to enter the fray. But as Krishna tells us in the Bhagavad Gita, non-action is not necessarily a sign of enlightenment. In the third chapter, Karma Yogaha or Yoga of Action, Krishna tells Arjuna that “Without first performing action, one cannot reach the state of inaction (or enlightenment) granted by Knowledge.” Krishna says that you first have to rid your mind of all attachments and desires, joy and sorrow, love and hate, before you can meditate and give up worldly actions. Without first controlling your desires, any actions you take (karma) can keep you from attaining Enlightenment and breaking the cycle of re-births, even if those actions help others. In the first season of The Good Place, Eleanor attempts to increase her good points total in order to not be sent to the Bad Place. She spends an entire day opening doors for people, apologizing sincerely for the ways she’s harmed those in her community, and other good actions. However, her points total never increases because the motivation for her actions is selfish. She wants to remain in the Good Place, and therefore anything she does is tainted by this desire. We see this self-serving motivation in the real world too with the phenomenon of white saviorism and other ways in which our need to see ourselves as upstanding citizens leads us to prioritize our own moral purity over the actual needs of the people we are trying to save.

So what is Krishna’s solution to this conundrum? He tells Arjuna that people naturally have desires that they are born with (called gunas), and these desires lead us to take actions. We can’t help it. What we can do is change our attitude towards those actions. Instead of expecting results from your actions, surrender the fruits of all that you do. Do not feel joy or frustration because of the result of these actions. Simply do them because they are the actions that need to be taken. In the fourth chapter, Krishna says, “I have no ego. I do not have attachment or association with the body or sensations. Hence, I am not carried away by any action. I have no concern for the fruit of any action. He who perceives me as the Self or the Supreme Soul, remains free from the bondage of Karma.” This, admittedly, is incredibly difficult to do. We are always motivated by an end result, an expectation that the things we do will yield some benefit for us. And how do we take actions without having a sense of self, or ego, behind it? We don’t all have the literal voice of God telling us that our actions are justified, the way that Arjuna does, and we don’t all have eternal beings explaining our soul’s fate to us, the way that Chidi and the other characters in The Good Place do. All we have is our beliefs and a willingness to try.

The Bhagavad Gita contains over 700 shlokas with 18 chapters, and most of those are devoted to explaining all the different ways that one can lead a good life. Krishna explains both how to perform action and how to renounce action, how to meditate, how to worship in different ways, how to identify good traits versus demonic ones. Still, Arjuna is worried. In the sixth chapter, he cautiously asks Krishna, what happens if I fail? What if I mostly perform good actions or mostly maintain a peaceful mind, but I falter? In one of the more poetic lines of the Gita, Arjuna asks, “Does the seeker, thus interrupted in his efforts halfway, get destroyed totally, like a cloud scattered to shreds by a strong wind?” Krishna responds, “One who has done good deeds will never perish. Either in this world, or the next, he will not face ruin.” He explains that someone who has begun to turn towards Enlightenment may be re-born into a favorable situation, one that allows them to continue their spiritual journey from where they left off in a previous birth. They are given a gift that is so rarely granted in this world: the chance to try again.

In the final season of The Good Place, the humans and Michael re-design the afterlife to give people the ability to spiritually mature in this way. They create a system in which people, after they die, are subjected to personalized moral tests without realizing it. If they fail, they are “re-booted” over and over until they improve and are finally allowed to enter the Good Place. In order to help them along, each person retains a small piece of the lesson they learned in their previous reboots in the form of a moral conscience. We can’t expect people to always make the right choice. We can’t even be sure of what the right choice is. But if we dare to take on the challenge of self-realization, we can make progress towards a better world, for ourselves and the people around us. We can look for something greater than all the murkiness of our troubled world, and find dazzling clarity on the other side. But most importantly, we can try.

Ultimately, this is the lesson that each of The Good Place characters eventually comes to learn. No matter what philosophical school they adopt or what stupid mistakes they make along the way, they each learn that the attempt is what makes life worthwhile. In one of the final episodes, Chidi’s memory, which has been temporarily wiped, comes back to him in a series of discrete moments in time. In each of them, we see Chidi looking for The Answer that will solve all his problems in life, whether its his parents’ failing marriage or how to live the most ethical life possible. In his search, he becomes paralyzed by the idea that his choices could somehow be in conflict with this supposed Universal Answer, and it ruins most of the relationships in his life and most of his goals. Luckily, he is given many chances in the afterlife to understand that it is not about always picking the correct choice, but rather being willing to fail and getting up to try again. When he regains all of his memories and wakes up with this new outlook, Chidi is calmer and not plagued by indecision. He sees all the people that have helped him on this journey to self-realization, and he knows that he is a better person because of them. Mainly, he is a better person because of Eleanor, the most unethical woman in the world who, through her relationship with Chidi, learns to care about the people and the world around her. After reuniting with Eleanor and his friends, Chidi turns to Janet, their all-knowing interdimensional friend, and asks her for a note that he wrote to himself just before his memory was erased. He tells Janet, “It may be the best writing I’ve ever done.” The paper says simply: There is no “Answer.” But Eleanor is the Answer.

There are many tear-jerking moments in the final season of this incredible show, but this scene is one of my favorites. I can’t be certain of what happens when I die, and I can’t be certain of what to do with the time that I have before it happens. But I can try to love the people in my life and to make the choices that feel right at the time. And that, as Eleanor says, is the greatest things someone can do. Just try your best.