CHAPTER 1
“Oh, what a great crime we are about to commit! From our desire to enjoy kingship, we are ready to kill our own kinsmen. It would be better for me if Dhritarashtra’s sons with their weapons in hand were to kill me in combat, unarmed and unresisting.” And after he said this, Arjuna, with a grief-stricken heart, threw aside his bow and arrows and sat down in the back of his chariot.
— Bhagavad Gita 1.45–47
The Bhagavad Gita forms part of the Mahabharata, a vast epic poem in classical Sanskrit that tells the story of a devastating rivalry between two clans of the ruling class for control of a kingdom in northern India. The Gita consists of a dialogue between two leading characters in this epic, Arjuna and Krishna, at a tense moment just as war between the two sides is about to begin. The conversation deals with the moral propriety of the war and much else as well. The Gita begins with Arjuna in confusion and despair, dropping his weapons; it ends with Arjuna picking up his bow, all doubts resolved and ready for battle. Once he does so, the war begins, and the narrative of the Mahabharata continues.
From an early date, the Bhagavad Gita also circulated as an independent work. It has been read, recited, interpreted, commented on, transcribed, translated, and published as a self-standing work of religious philosophy. This double identity of the Gita, as both a portion of a larger epic story and autonomous text, is an important source of its power and appeal. In this biographical account of the Bhagavad Gita, primary attention will be given to the life of the Gita on its own. But to gain a full sense of the rhetorical power that this text had in its own time of composition, it is also necessary to consider the Gita in its larger epic context.
The Gita in the Mahabharata
In the Mahabharata two sets of brothers, related as cousins to one another, vie for the throne of Hastinapura, capital of northern India.1 The five Pandava brothers are the sons of Pandu and his two wives; the hundred Kaurava brothers are the offspring of Dhritarashtra, elder brother to Pandu. The kingdom is beset with problems of dynastic continuity of a convoluted nature, going back several generations. Dhritarashtra is born blind, ordinarily a disqualification for kingship in classical India, and so the younger Pandu initially rules. When Pandu dies as a result of imprecated lovemaking with his younger wife, Dhritarashtra assumes the throne and takes in the orphaned sons of his brother. The Pandavas and Kauravas grow up together in Hastinapura. As they are educated and trained together as members of the Kshatriya or warrior class, a deep rivalry grows between the two groups. Uncertainty looms as to who will succeed Dhritarashtra. Duryodhana, the eldest of the Kauravas, is particularly adamant in his efforts to disinherit and destroy his cousins, the Pandavas.
Faced with unremitting antagonism between the cousins, the elders decide to partition the kingdom—an unwelcome necessity. The Pandavas are sent out to the hinterlands, where they set up court in a new capital, Indraprastha, along the Yamuna River where Delhi now stands. Their success in building up their new kingdom virtually from scratch only exacerbates the jealousy of Duryodhana and the other Kauravas. After a series of confrontations, culminating in a dice game with the highest possible stakes, the Pandavas are finally forced into a fourteen-year exile. Eventually, though, they return to seek what they see as rightfully theirs. Animosity grows ever greater, and reconciliation becomes impossible. As war appears increasingly inevitable, both sides round up allies until the entire ruling class of India is involved on one side or the other. The two camps proceed to the northern plains of Kurukshetra, agree to rules of combat, and line up facing one another. It is at this moment that the warrior Arjuna asks his charioteer Krishna to drive their vehicle into the no-man’s-land between the two sides so he can survey the enemy combatants.
Arjuna is the third of the five Pandava brothers, and most skilled warrior among them. When growing up at Hastinapura, Arjuna is the one who prevails in the contests that their teacher Drona holds for the Pandavas and Kauravas. While the Pandavas are in exile, Arjuna goes on a lengthy quest for weapons in anticipation of the conflict to come. He performs extraordinary austerities, wrestles with the god Shiva, lives for awhile in the heaven of the god Indra, and returns with the most awesome divine weaponry in the world. Now with the battle about to begin, Arjuna is the powerful Pandava warrior that the Kaurava side most fears.
In the Mahabharata, Arjuna’s chariot driver Krishna appears as the ruler of a kingdom in western India. He meets the Pandavas when they are in hiding and quickly forms a special friendship with them. One of Pandu’s wives, Kunti, is sister to Krishna’s father, so they are already related as cousins. Later Krishna persuades Arjuna to abduct and marry his sister Subhadra, thereby tightening the relationship between them as brothers-in-law. Krishna acts as adviser to the Pandavas and also diplomat, unsuccessfully seeking reconciliation between the two camps just before the battle. But there is another side to Krishna, which becomes apparent from time to time. He is also divine. His godly status is not generally visible to other characters within the epic narrative, and is recognized only by a few unusually wise or fortunate figures. In the Bhagavad Gita, as we will see, Krishna powerfully reveals the full extent of his divine nature to Arjuna.
Shortly before the battle, both Duryodhana and Arjuna travel to visit Krishna in his palace. Each wishes to enlist Krishna’s aid for his own side in the war. To avoid favoritism, Krishna offers them a choice. One may have Krishna’s enormous army of a million trained warriors; the other may have Krishna himself, but only as a weaponless noncombatant. Duryodhana chooses troops, and Arjuna requests Krishna’s personal assistance. Both Duryodhana and Arjuna are happy with the outcome. Duryodhana believes that Krishna’s myriad troops will assure a Kaurava victory. Arjuna asks that Krishna serve in the humble position of a charioteer, a role not usually taken by a member of the warrior class. As Arjuna’s chariot driver, Krishna will remain in close proximity during the battle to advise and counsel his friend, cousin, and brother-in-law Arjuna.
When the battle lines have formed at Kurukshetra, Arjuna and Krishna look over the two sides. Drums are pounding, conches blasting, cymbals ringing—all creating a terrifying roar. Suddenly Arjuna loses all his zeal for battle. He sees his own cousins, grandfathers, uncles, in-laws, and teachers in the opposing Kaurava army. Surely it is not worthy to fight and kill one’s own kin. Arjuna is overcome with grief and indecision. His entire body trembles, his mind whirls in confusion, and he drops his fearsome bow. “I will not fight,” he declares (Bhagavad Gita 2.9).2
For Krishna this is a crisis. If the Pandavas are to have any chance of victory in the upcoming battle, they will need their most powerful warrior to be fully committed. The charioteer recognizes that his first task is to convince Arjuna to overcome all his anxieties and uncertainties. Krishna’s counseling session forms the conversation recounted in the Bhagavad Gita.
This dialogue of roughly seven hundred verses requires about an hour and a half to recite. Some observers have pointed to the unlikelihood, or the “dramatic absurdity,” as one noted Indologist put it, of great masses of zealous warriors sitting idly by for ninety minutes while a soldier and his charioteer chat in the no-man’s-land. Yet verisimilitude is not the aim of the epic here. This is a pause in the narrative action, a sandhi or “juncture” in the story, as classical Indian rhetoric would label it. Here two central characters in the Mahabharata reflect once again on the morality of the war along with the ultimate religious issues that such life-and-death struggles so often raise.
Krishna’s Battlefield Teachings
Though his body is shaking and his mind is spinning, Arjuna is able to articulate to Krishna the main causes of his distress. One is psychological. He feels deep pity and grief over the deaths sure to ensue during the battle. He sees no possible good that could compensate for the terrible losses from a war involving kin. The other is moral. Arjuna is confused as to his duty (dharma) in this situation. On the one hand, his responsibility as a member of the warrior class is to engage in appropriate battle. On the other hand, he owes a duty of protection to his own family members. When family obligations are not observed, Arjuna argues, the entire social order collapses. The opposite side in this battle is filled with Arjuna’s relatives. So Krishna’s efforts at persuasion must start with these two issues.
“The truly learned person,” the charioteer begins, “does not grieve over those who are dead and those not dead” (2.11). The dead do not cease to exist. Krishna’s assertion here rests on the premise of transmigration or metempsychosis: that a person’s essential spirit or soul existed already before birth, and will continue to exist after death. Just as a person might take off one set of clothes and put on a new one, so too at death the person’s soul dispenses with one used body and enters into a fresh new one. This is nothing new. Krishna is correct in observing that most of the “truly learned” schools of thought in classical India had come to accept the theory of transmigration in some form or another. The challenging part for Arjuna is to apply this radical redefinition of death to the situation of war. If only the body dies, then killing other soldiers in battle really only extinguishes those soldiers’ bodies, leaving their soul to move on to other ones. If Arjuna can fully accept this philosophical perspective, Krishna tells him, then he has no reason to grieve over war casualties.
As for Arjuna’s dilemma over conflicting duties, Krishna responds succinctly. Your duty as a member of the warrior class, to fight in a righteous battle, the charioteer asserts, trumps any obligations you may feel toward other members of your family (2.31). As the treatises on dharma state, it is part of the inherent nature of males of the Kshatriya class to engage in war. Krishna returns to this notion near the end of his address to Arjuna. “It is better to do your own duty, even poorly, than to perform the duty of someone else well” (18.47). Arjuna must follow his own nature as well as his class duty, and in doing so he will not commit any fault.
Thus Krishna responds to the two explicit causes of Arjuna’s distress. The conversation could have ended there. But Arjuna gives no indication that he is convinced yet, and Krishna is just getting started. At this point, still early in their dialogue, Krishna proposes to explain a method that can “cut away the bondage of action” (2.39).
What does Krishna mean by “bondage of action”? He refers here to some of the prevalent theories of action in classical India. Religious philosophers of various schools (Buddhist and Jain as well as Hindu) identified desire, the primary motivation for action, to be a fundamental problem. Undertaking an act out of desire, they maintained, leads to bondage. The key term here is karma, which in its primary usage simply denotes action. In classical India, however, karma also had come to refer to the persisting moral consequences of actions. (It is in this extended sense that the term has been incorporated into the modern English lexicon.) Many envisioned karma as a residue that adhered to a person’s self or soul, like some kind of opaque grime that obscured its intrinsic clarity. This buildup of karma caused a soul to be reborn again and again in bondage to the world of suffering. The way to avoid this bondage, therefore, was to avoid all desire-based action. And to accomplish this, it was necessary to leave behind one’s familial and social responsibilities, and become a renouncer. As a homeless mendicant, one could avoid acting out of desire, practice disciplines of meditation and austerity, and seek a state of liberation from all bondage—a state that transcended human suffering. Hindus most often called it moksha, Buddhists termed it nirvana, and Jains designated it kaivalya, but all the advocates of renunciation viewed it as the highest state.
Why should Krishna bring this up here, on the battlefield? Arjuna is no Buddhist monk or Jain ascetic, yet he is proposing to renounce an action that is his social responsibility. Krishna is urging Arjuna to engage in violent battle, an especially gruesome form of action. There were examples in classical India of rulers who did renounce their war making in favor of higher ethical values, such as the famous Buddhist emperor Ashoka Maurya (r. 270–230 BCE). So Krishna feels that he must reconcile his advocacy of worldly action with the religious claims of the renunciatory schools. To do so, he proposes a new theory of action.
One can act without being driven by desire, says Krishna. The key is to avoid any attachment to the results (or fruits) of your action.
Your obligation is to the action, and never to its fruits. Do not be motivated by the fruit of your actions. But do not become attached to non-action, either. Abandon your attachment and engage in worldly action, Arjuna, while standing firm in discipline (yoga). Consider success and failure to be equal. This equanimity is called discipline, Arjuna, since the action itself is much less important than the discipline of the intellect. (2.47–49)
This is one of the primary arguments of the Bhagavad Gita. One need not, and in fact should not, avoid worldly action. To avoid the bondage that results from actions driven by desires, however, one must avoid any attachment to the ends or fruits of that action. One must maintain a mental equanimity toward the outcome. This requires a firm disciplining of the mind. Arjuna should fight in the war, as it is his class duty to do so, and if he does this without any concern for success or failure, without desire for any fruits of victory or fear of defeat, no “bondage of action” will attach to him. This leaves open the path to liberation. “Through discipline of the intellect,” Krishna adds, “wise people renounce the fruits born of action, and freed from the bondage that leads to rebirth, they go to the unblemished state” (2.51).
With this new theory of action, Krishna has provided a way for Arjuna to engage in the upcoming battle without incurring the bondage that normally results from desire-based action. As Arjuna immediately recognizes, though, this theory is easier said than done. How does one gain the kind of mental equilibrium that would enable acting without any attachment to the fruits of that action? Arjuna imagines it can only be an extraordinary person, one whose “wisdom is firm” (sthitaprajna), and so he asks Krishna for a description of such a person (2.54).
To gain this sort of mastery over the self, one must employ discipline. The term here is yoga, the Indic word that has come to enjoy a complex and expansive life in modern global culture. In classical India, itinerant seekers and organized groups of renouncers had experimented with a wide range of disciplinary practices directed at the body and mind—fasting and abstinences, physical postures, breath control, sensory withdrawal, mental concentration, and the like. Here Krishna suggests that these disciplines can be adapted by those who are not renouncers, those still active in worldly affairs, to gain the self-mastery required for detached action. To become a person whose wisdom is firm, one must first gain control over the senses. As the winds of a tempest carry away a ship at sea, so the senses can draw the self into all sorts of unwanted attachments. Better, says Krishna, to learn to withdraw the senses from their objects, as a turtle draws its limbs back into its firm shell. For when one can remain serene, without any attraction or repulsion toward the objects of the world, that equanimity can lead to liberation (2.55–71).
Krishna’s description of the person of firm wisdom, the sthitaprajna, raises a new question for Arjuna. If that is the goal, what is the best way to reach such a state? Arjuna’s concern here reflects the broader religious situation in classical India. There were numerous schools of religious and philosophical thought all advancing their own claims as to the surest method to attain the best goal. How was one to decide which path to follow? “Tell me for certain,” Arjuna implores Krishna, “the one means by which I can gain the highest end” (3.2).
In the course of the following dialogue, Krishna discusses many of these methods of spiritual attainment. Later commentators have conveniently classified them into three overarching means or “paths” (marga): the discipline of action (karma yoga), discipline of knowledge (jnana yoga), and discipline of devotion (bhakti yoga). As we will see, later interpreters have frequently selected one or another of these paths as the most important or effective. Krishna praises all of them as worthy. He also evaluates the efficacy of each in terms of his own theory of action. That is, he judges disciplines most effective insofar as they are grounded in a mental state of equanimity or detachment from the fruits of action, or lead to such a state.
Krishna discusses the path of action most often in relation to the Vedic practice of sacrifice (yajna). Orthodox Brahmins considered this the preeminent form of religious action, leading to all kinds of benefits. Those most loyal to the Vedic practices believe the sacrificial actions to be automatically efficacious. As Krishna reframes it, by contrast, the crucial issue is not the action itself but rather the mentality with which the action is performed. “When one performs sacrifice without attachment, freely, his mind held firm through proper knowledge, his karma disappears completely” (4.23). Sacrifices that are undertaken with a desire to attain some fruit, whether that be success or enjoyments in this world or the next, will lead to the bondage of action; they will bind the person to future rebirths. But sacrificial actions of any sort that are performed with true mental equanimity, with detachment from the fruits of action, will lead to superior spiritual ends. The same holds true for Arjuna on the battlefield. He should engage in battle as his duty, without any attachment to the outcome, as a kind of sacrificial act.
As for the discipline of knowledge, Krishna surveys several different philosophical systems that aim to present full analyses of the underlying structure of the world. Proper knowledge of this structure, they assume, has a liberating power. The most important of these systems for Krishna’s discussion are early forms of the schools known as Samkhya (enumeration) and Vedanta (culmination of the Veda). Krishna grants qualified approval to these ways of analyzing or understanding the world. The Samkhya system divided reality into a fundamental dualism of the Soul (purusha) and Substance (prakriti). If one truly understands that the observing Soul stands separately from the categories of Substance, one can avoid attachment even in the midst of action. Because this analysis can lead to detachment, Krishna judges it to be valuable. Drawing on the speculations and insights of the Upanishads, the emerging Vedanta school of classical India developed a monistic analysis of reality, in which the eternal Soul (atman) was said to be one with an unchanging Absolute, termed brahman. All else is said to be ephemeral. In Krishna’s view, this way of comprehending the world could equally lead to firm wisdom in action. The philosophical criterion Krishna employs in his discussion of these schools of knowledge is not their metaphysical accuracy but rather the psychological consequences for one who adopts that perspective. He grants each a heuristic validity insofar as it leads one toward equanimity, but he does not endorse a single unitary system. Krishna is after a larger unity.
While the paths of action and knowledge draw on familiar religious practices or schools of thought, the path of devotion is something new within Sanskrit literature.
In religious usage the term bhakti, translated as devotion, denotes a vital living relationship between a human devotee and a god. The Bhagavad Gita provides the earliest treatment in Indic literature of a religious orientation that would be of enormous significance for the subsequent development of Hinduism and other Indian religious traditions as well. Krishna places this disciplinary newcomer on an equal footing with the other disciplines, and even at times elevates it above them.
The path of devotion involves strict discipline, just as the others do. One must cultivate an attitude of loyalty and adoration, a willingness to carry out the service of god. As with the other paths, this involves a subordination of the ego, an elimination of self-interest. But devotion also requires a worthy target or recipient of that devotion. In the course of their discussion on the battlefield, Krishna gradually reveals himself to Arjuna as exactly that worthy recipient: not just any old god, but the Supreme Deity of them all. Krishna’s presentation of the way of devotion and his divine self-revelation go hand in hand.
Early on in their dialogue, Krishna tells Arjuna that he has given these same teachings long ago to the Sun, who taught it to the first man and then to the first king of the solar dynasty (4.1). Arjuna is understandably perplexed, since he regards Krishna as his human friend, about the same age as he is. How could he possibly have conveyed these same teachings to such ancient figures? Krishna reiterates the notion of reincarnation, which implies that both of them have lived many previous lives, but then adds something new. Unlike Arjuna, he has taken on his birth knowingly and intentionally. “I have gone through many births, and so have you,” Krishna explains to Arjuna. “But I know them all, and you do not. Even though I am unborn, and even though I am the imperishable Lord of all Beings, I take birth by entering into my own physical form, by my own supernal power” (4.5–6). Further, he states, he has come with a purpose. “For whenever there is a decline in righteousness (dharma) and an increase in unrighteousness, Arjuna, then I emanate myself. For the protection of good people, for the destruction of evil-doers, and for the restoration of righteousness, I take birth in age after age” (4.7–8). Here in its first explicit appearance is the concept of Krishna’s (or Vishnu’s) avatara: his incarnation, or more literally “crossing down” into human or other physical form. (And here is another classical Indic term that has reincarnated itself firmly in modern English usage and global culture—in this case, through computer role-playing games and a Hollywood blockbuster.) In this brief exchange Krishna reveals two key elements in his own theology. He is a transcendent deity (the “Lord of All Beings”) who also takes on material forms (such as his current embodiment as Krishna), and he does so in order to intervene in worldly affairs and support righteousness.
Krishna goes on to elaborate this divine self-portrait in great detail. He encompasses all the other gods. He is the unborn, unchanging, undying, unmanifest, all creating, the source, the atman, the brahman, the One. In short, he lays claim to all the terms that philosophers in classical India had employed to point to the Absolute. But in contrast to the Absolute that the Upanishads had characterized in largely apophatic terms, Krishna the new Absolute simultaneously has a more immediate, palpable, visible identity. There he stands, in apparently mortal human form, in the front of Arjuna’s chariot. The theology of the Gita requires this double recognition: Krishna is the Supreme Being who is both transcendent and physically present. The later Vaishnava philosopher Ramanuja (1017–1137 CE) describes this seeming paradox as the coexistent “supremacy” (paratva) and “easy accessibility” (saulabhya) of the Lord.
Krishna’s revelation has fundamental implications for all three paths. If it is the case that Krishna is truly the Highest Lord, then it makes sense to direct all sacrifices to him. Moreover, if he is truly ubiquitous, he is already present in all the elements of the sacrificial rituals. “I am the rite,” he tells Arjuna, “I am the sacrifice, I am the offering, I am the herb, I am the mantra, I am the ghee, I am the fire, I am the oblation” (9.16). The ritual of sacrifice becomes a series of activities within the totality that is Krishna.
The path of knowledge, likewise, involves the recognition of Krishna as the best part or inner essence of all things. “In water I am the taste,” Krishna proclaims. “I am the light in the sun and the moon. In all the Vedas I am OM, in the ether sound, and in men their virility. I am the good smell in the earth and the fiery energy in the sun. In every living being I am the life force, and in ascetics I am their ascetic power. Know me, Arjuna, as the eternal seed of all things, the wisdom of the wise, and the charisma of those who shine” (7.8–10). Yet knowledge may have its limitations, too. There is something fundamentally paradoxical about this immanent Absolute, and Krishna seems to take pleasure in placing himself just beyond Arjuna’s conceptual reach.
This entire world is stretched out from me, in my unmanifest form. All creatures reside within me, but I do not reside in them. And yet again, all creatures do not reside within me. Behold my lordly yoga! I support all creatures and bring them into existence, but my self does not reside in them. Just as the great wind goes everywhere and yet remains within space, so all beings reside within me. Think about that! (9.4–6)
Even the gods are unable to know Krishna’s full extent, since he is the one and only Original God.
The discipline of devotion can involve both action and knowledge. Any act, no matter how modest, can become an act of devotion. Once again, it is not the action that counts but the mentality of the actor instead. “If one presents to me a leaf, a flower, a fruit, or water, with devotion,” Krishna explains, “I accept that offering of devotion from the donor. Therefore, Arjuna, whenever you act, make an offering, sacrifice, donate something, or undertake an ascetic practice, do so as an offering to me, and you will be freed from the bondage of your action, whether good or bad results” (9. 27–28). Devotion is a new way of cutting away the bondage of any act. One can abandon all personal attachment to the fruits by redirecting that action into a devotional service toward Krishna. Similarly, holding on to the perception of Krishna as all pervasive can lead from knowledge to devotion. “If a person sees me in everything, and sees everything in me,” Krishna tells Arjuna, “I will not disappear from that person, nor will that one disappear from me” (6.30). This understanding, he continues, will lead a person to an immersion in Krishna’s very being: “However he moves, he moves in me” (6.31).
Thus devotion becomes a discipline that is not simply one among several paths but rather enters into and transforms other disciplines. By this standard Krishna judges the person who practices the discipline of devotion as superior to others.
I consider that yogin [the one who practices bhakti yoga] to be superior to ascetics. He is superior to those who practice the discipline of knowledge and he is superior to those who practice the discipline of action. Therefore, Arjuna, be that kind of yogin. I consider the one who faithfully shares in me, and whose innermost self is absorbed in me, to be the most disciplined of all yogins. (6.46–47)
Additionally, he emphasizes, this path is open to all: “Those who take refuge in Me, even women, Vaishyas, Shudras, or those born impure, they nevertheless reach the highest destination” (9.32). For Arjuna, faced with the daunting prospect of war, devotion offers a new way of grounding his own actions. This is exactly what Krishna recommends. “Finding yourself in this impermanent and unhappy world, join yourself to me,” he concludes. “Fix your mind on me, devote yourself to me, sacrifice to me, honor me, and with your self yoked to me as its highest end, you will come to me” (9.33–34).
At this point Arjuna is fully convinced of Krishna’s divine nature. Still, he would like one further bit of evidence. So far Krishna has stood in front of him in the chariot, a human being explaining in words his own divine nature. Now Arjuna wishes to see Krishna’s “lordly form.” Krishna complies. First, though, he must grant Arjuna “divine vision.” Krishna himself does not change, but the transformation in Arjuna’s capacity to see enables the warrior to see what is already present. And what a reality he sees!
Initially, Arjuna perceives a visual confirmation of what Krishna has already explained verbally. Arjuna sees Krishna’s arms and eyes, bellies and mouths, stretching out in all directions. He views all the gods contained within Krishna’s vast body. Krishna fills the entire space of the world. It is an awesome sight, but as the vision unfolds, Arjuna becomes increasingly alarmed. “I quake in my innermost being,” he pleads, “and I cannot find firm ground or peace” (11.24). The Supreme Deity is turning into a world-destroying fire. Arjuna begins to see a distorted premonition of the battle to come, with Krishna at its destructive vortex.
All the sons of Dhritarashtra along with the legions of kings who rule the earth, Bhishma, Drona, that charioteer’s son Karna, and the leaders of our armies too, are all rushing into your fearsome mouths gaping with fangs. I see some dangling between your teeth with their heads already crushed. Like a multitude of gushing torrents of rivers rushing headlong to the ocean, these heroes of the human world are flooding into your flaming mouths. As swiftly as moths fly into a blazing fire to die, just as quickly these men are entering mouths to die. (11.26–29)
This is a long way from the friend and charioteer Krishna, and from the benign dharma-supporting incarnation Krishna. In confusion, Arjuna asks just who this terrifying being is. “I am Time,” replies this supernal form of Krishna, “powerful destroyer of worlds, grown immense here to annihilate these men” (11.32).
This is the other side of Krishna’s absoluteness. If he is the agent of all creation, he is also god of destruction. The upcoming battle appears to be a gigantic act of disintegration, carried out ultimately by Krishna acting as Time. This places Arjuna’s role in the war in still another new light. If God is the true agent of this all-consuming war, then the responsibility of Arjuna or any other warrior in it changes. Krishna clarifies this for Arjuna: “Therefore, rise up and gain fame,” he commands. “Conquer your enemies and rule a prosperous kingdom. They have already been destroyed by me. You will be my mere instrument, Arjuna. Drona, Bhishma, Jayadratha, Karna, and still other battle heroes are slain by me. You kill them” (11.33–34). As a devotee of Krishna, Arjuna should now carry out his duty as a warrior, with the understanding that his actions serve as an instrument of the divine will.
FIGURE 2. Sampurna Viratsvarup (Krishna in his supernal form), chromolithograph by B. G. Sharma, ca. 1965.
Published by Sharma Picture Publications. Author’s collection.
This is all a bit much for Arjuna. He falls down before this Supreme Lord and asks to see Krishna “just as you were before” (11.46). Perhaps it is not humanly possible to sustain such visionary insight, or perhaps Arjuna’s new perspective on the war is overwhelming. Krishna generously removes the divine vision, and Arjuna recovers his wits when he sees just his human friend Krishna easily accessible in the chariot with him.
Part of the larger narrative of the Mahabharata, the Bhagavad Gita is itself a narrative. Opening with a warrior’s crisis of grief and indecision, it proceeds through a rising action of teachings, as Krishna guides Arjuna through issues of morality, soteriology, and theology. With Arjuna’s acceptance of this new perspective, Krishna concludes by granting his listener an overpowering but temporary visual insight into his own all-encompassing nature. (Later texts refer to this as the Vishvarupa, the “All Form.”) The Gitanarrative might have ended with this, but it does not. As a new devotee Arjuna still requires further instruction, and so immediately after recovering from his state of panic he asks Krishna, “Who are the better yogins?” (12.1). Krishna promptly answers, and so the battlefield dialogue continues, in a lengthy denouement. These later discussions are best seen as amplifications, corollaries, and extensions of the main points Krishna has already conveyed.
At the end of the Bhagavad Gita, however, Krishna suggests one final wrinkle in the fabric of his teachings. He calls it the “biggest mystery of them all.”
Think about this knowledge I have taught you fully, the most secret of secrets, and then you can do as you wish. But first, listen to one last utterance of mine, the biggest mystery of them all. Since I love you very much, I will tell you this for your benefit. Hold me in your heart, be my devotee, sacrifice to me, honor me, and you will surely come to me. I promise you this, for you are loved by me. Abandon all your duties and take refuge with me alone. I will liberate you from all sins. Do not grieve. (18.62–66)
Some later schools of Hinduism have considered this the culminating or ultimate teaching of the entire Gita. First Krishna states his love for Arjuna. Up to now, the concept of bhakti has focused on the loyalty and love of the devotee toward God, but here God returns the love. There is emotional reciprocity in bhakti. Moreover, if one is fully devoted to God, even moral duties may be abandoned. After strongly supporting duty as the foundation for detached or selfless action throughout his earlier teachings, Krishna seems to allow an antinomian escape clause for the true devotee who takes refuge in God alone. In the end, Krishna takes responsibility for granting liberation to Arjuna, or to anyone completely devoted to him.
“So, is all your ignorant delusion destroyed?” Krishna asks. Arjuna answers that he has overcome all his initial doubts and is prepared to follow Krishna’s directives. He is ready now to fight in the great war to come.
The Fruits of War
If Krishna’s teachings in the Bhagavad Gita provide a persuasive rationale for Arjuna to fight, the Mahabharata does not shy away from the dire consequences of that decision. Many readers have seen the Gita as articulating the essential moral, ideological, or theological message of theMahabharata as a whole. If so, it is a bracing message indeed. The Mahabharata offers a grim story of consuming war suffused with loss and grief.
Once Arjuna accedes to Krishna’s argument and picks up his bow, the soldiers massed on the great field of the Kurus roar in anticipation and excitement. Even the gods gather to watch. The fight is on in earnest, and Arjuna will participate in it with all his energy and ability. It will last for eighteen days, and the scale of death will be overwhelming.
At the onset, both sides have agreed to the rules of engagement. As the battle wears on, however, these ethical guidelines for battle fall by the wayside and the warriors become immersed in spiraling cycles of increasingly brutal vengeance. Often it is Krishna who urges the Pandavas to employ low blows and lies to defeat their enemies, and frequently Arjuna is the one who dutifully follows his guidance. The carnage is tremendous on both sides. By the end, nearly the entire warrior class of India has been exterminated. Kurukshetra is covered with the corpses of men, horses, and elephants. Yudhishthira, the eldest Pandava brother, calculates at the conclusion that 1,660,020,000 men have been slain. Only a few Kshatriya males survive, including the five Pandava brothers, Krishna, and a handful of others. The Kshatriya women, meanwhile, wail and moan as they stream on to the battlefield, chasing away the jackals and crows as they search for the butchered remains of their husbands, sons, brothers, and fathers.
In the aftermath of this cataclysm, the victorious Pandavas are responsible for restoring sovereign rule. As the eldest son of Pandu, it falls to Yudhishthira to claim the throne. He is so filled with grief over what has transpired and his own feelings of culpability that he stubbornly resists. In our modern clinical vocabulary, he suffers from posttraumatic stress disorder. Only after the lengthy urging of Krishna and others does Yudhishthira agree reluctantly to take up his Kshatriya duty and be consecrated as king. Yudhishthira later performs a horse sacrifice that validates his uncontested imperial overlordship on the subcontinent. At the conclusion of the epic, after thirty-two years of sovereignty, Yudhishthira and his brothers retire from the capital and head north into the Himalayas in hopes of reaching heaven.
How does one comprehend a holocaust of such magnitude? Yudhishthira, Arjuna, and the other survivors within the story struggle for the rest of their lives to swallow the bitter fruits of the war. Their grief never ends, though they do manage to carry on their responsibilities in the postwar world.
The Mahabharata itself provides several broad frames for understanding the war at the center of the epic. One is sacrifice. In line with Vedic tradition, sacrifice is central to the maintenance of order at every level, both human and cosmic. In the situation of extreme disorder in the warrior class described at the epic’s beginning, only an extreme form of sacrifice can restore order within human society. The Mahabharata thus traces a narrative arc from a corrupt and fractious ruling class with multiple contentious centers of power, through an all-consuming war that is seen as a comprehensive human sacrifice, to the establishment of a unitary Indian Empire presided over by the just king Yudhishthira.
A second frame projects this eschatological interpretation in cosmic terms. The Mahabharata relates a cosmic purging. The Earth herself is overrun by demons, who have taken on human form as Kshatriyas, and requires an apocalyptic battle to rid herself of this malign force and reestablish earthly order. In terms of Indian notions of cyclic time, a great universal dissolution can then be followed by a new creation. This broad vision validates Krishna’s incarnation as a salvific figure and Arjuna’s vision of Krishna’s role in the battle, revealed in the Bhagavad Gita, as prime mover in this necessary revolving of the wheel of time.
Following these textual leads, later Indian tradition has often identified the transformative events described in the Mahabharata as marking the transition from one era to another. The war at Kurukshetra, it is said, represents the final deterioration of the Dvapara era, and the subsequent establishment of orderly rule begins a new era, the Kali-yuga, the one in which we now live. The Mahabharata therefore documents the founding events of the present.
Composition
Who composed the Bhagavad Gita? One may respond to this question in several ways.
One answer is that God did it. That is, Krishna, who reveals himself in the course of his discourse to be the incarnate Supreme Deity, conveyed these teachings to Arjuna, much as he had in the distant past and will continue to do in the future. The Gita itself endorses this perspective, and many Hindu believers through the centuries have readily accepted divine authorship. But textual historians are not generally satisfied with attributions of divine authorship to religious scriptures. We prefer human authors, and preferably humans with names, dates, and places. Some have tried to identify a human historical Krishna, as we will see, although the evidence for this is scanty.
The most common traditional Indian answer does supply a name. Vyasa is the author of the Mahabharata and hence of the Bhagavad Gita within it. He is a Brahmin sage who appears as a character within the Mahabharata. In fact, Vyasa plays quite a seminal role in the story, since he is the genetic grandfather to both the Pandava and Kaurava fraternities. When the ruling king of the Bharata dynasty, Vichitravirya, dies without fathering a male heir, Vyasa (who is a half brother to the deceased) is called to court in order to impregnate his two widows. Their sons are Pandu and Dhritarashtra, fathers of the Pandavas and Kauravas, respectively. Vyasa remains offstage during much of the Mahabharata story, happily meditating in his ashram. From time to time, however, he is called into action and intervenes vigorously in the narrative attributed to him. Thus Vyasa is, as the rhetorical critics would say, a “dramatized narrator” involved in his own tale. Textual historians generally prefer terms that undercut any implication of Vyasa’s actual authorship. They refer to Vyasa as a “mythical” or “symbolic” author of the Mahabharata.3
The Mahabharata itself supplies a more complex answer to the question of authorship. The name Vyasa means divider, compiler, and diffuser. Vyasa is famous for “dividing” the unitary Veda into four Vedas, according to tradition. Within the Mahabharata, he appears as one link in a chain of authorship, a compiler whose compilation is in turn retold, supplemented, and diffused by others.
The dialogue of Krishna and Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra that constitutes the Bhagavad Gita is observed by Sanjaya, an attendant at the Hastinapura court. Vyasa has granted divine vision to Sanjaya for the duration of the war, and this special gift enables Sanjaya to hear the Gitadialogue even without accompanying the pair on to the battlefield. Through this divine ability, he temporarily becomes an omniscient narrator. Sanjaya dutifully reports this conversation and the entire battle (covering five books, or nearly one-third of the entire epic) to the blind king Dhritarashtra, father of the Kauravas, seated in the royal palace at Hastinapura, over a hundred miles from Kurukshetra. Subsequently the Brahmin sage Vyasa assembles Sanjaya’s account, other lengthy portions spoken by others, and his own connective narration into a single epic composition. Thus he is, as his name suggests, the compiler in the Mahabharata. At his ashram, he teaches this great poem to five Brahmin pupils.
Long after the war at Kurukshetra, Arjuna’s great-grandson, Janamejaya, performs a large snake sacrifice at Taxila. The long-lived Vyasa attends the sacrifice together with his disciples. Since Vyasa has been an eyewitness to the deeds of the Pandavas and Kauravas, Janamejaya asks him to tell the story of his lineage’s ancestral battle. Vyasa directs his pupil Vaishampayana to relate the tale just as he has heard it. Vaishampayana obediently recites the epic story he has learned from his teacher to the king. Most of theMahabharata consists of the conversation between Vaishampayana and Janamejaya. Yet this is not the end of it.
One of the attentive auditors at Taxila is Ugrashravas, an itinerant bard. After listening to the full narration of Vaishampayana, Ugrashravas travels to an ashram in Naimisha Forest, where he meets Shaunaka and a group of Brahmin sages who are engaged in a lengthy twelve-year sacrifice. With much time on their hands, the sages ask Ugrashravas about Janamejaya’s snake sacrifice and the great story that Vaishampayana has recited there. Ugrashravas retells the story and supplements it with additional materials. Finally, there is one last frame in the Russian matryoshka-like structure of oral narrations: the anonymous narrator who relates to us, the outermost audience, the scene at the Naimisha ashram encompassing Ugrashravas’s version of Vaishampayana’s recitation of Vyasa’s compilation containing Sanjaya’s account of the conversation between Krishna and Arjuna on the Kurukshetra battlefield. The Mahabharata thus portrays its own composition as a complex sequence of oral retellings involving multiple speakers.
Indological scholars in India and the West have long debated the question of the historical composition of the Mahabharata and Bhagavad Gita. For a work as vast, intricate, and diffuse as the Mahabharata, few textual historians have accepted a historical Vyasa as a “single genius.” Most assume some form of multiple authorship, exerted over considerable time, similar in that sense to the epic’s own account of composition. They generally postulate that the epic began with oral storytellers and performers relating heroic tales that perhaps (although not necessarily) looked back to some long-past historical dispute. Perhaps there was a battle between rival Indo-Aryan clans around 900 BCE that formed the initial kernel for the epic narrative, but the stories gradually departed from any concern with historical veracity and took on their own narrative reality. These transmissions were eventually gathered together and formed into a single central story, with many digressions and ancillary materials, which at some point was committed to a written version. But when and why did this epic consolidation take place?
Recent scholarship on the Mahabharata has emphasized that religious and political developments in classical India provided a powerful impetus for the transformation of old stories of ancient Kshatriya battles into a vast new epic narrative.4 Notably, the rise of Buddhism and Jainism—renunciatory movements that explicitly denied Vedic and brahmanic authority—posed a powerful ideological challenge for proponents of orthodox traditions. The rise of the Mauryan dynasty (ca. 323–185 BCE), which united much of the subcontinent under a single imperial rule, also raised new questions, particularly when emperors like Ashoka Maurya patronized Buddhist institutions over brahmanic ones. In response to this fundamental challenge to Vedic and brahmanic authority, the authors of the Mahabharata sought to articulate a new vision of proper royal rule grounded on a modified Vedic tradition. This perspective suggests that the sponsorship for composing the epic may well have come from a post-Mauryan royal dynasty like the Shungas, who overthrew Mauryan rule in 185 BCE and explicitly sought to restore the preeminence of orthodox brahmanic practices, or the Kanvas who replaced the Shungas and ruled until 28 BCE.
Among recent scholars, James Fitzgerald postulates an initial shorter and porous work, a proto-Bharata composed during the Shunga period and subsequently expanded over the next several centuries. Somewhat later, perhaps under the imperial Guptas (320–497 CE), in Fitzgerald’s view, an authoritative written redaction of the Mahabharata was finalized. This Gupta period work, promulgated widely, became the archetype for all the lineages of manuscripts that exist today. When Indian scholars working at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune, India, from the early 1920s to the mid-1960s extracted a critical edition from the hundreds of available manuscripts, their edition probably approximated the written Gupta version.5 Alf Hiltebeitel proposes a revisionist hypothesis, by which the composition of the entire epic, much as we have it now, occupied a relatively brief time. He envisions an interdisciplinary compositional committee of brahmanic intellectuals, working perhaps under the royal patronage of the Shungas or other orthodox kings.
Indological scholars have also debated the compositional relationship between the Bhagavad Gita and Mahabharata. Some have viewed the Gita as an extrinsic interpolation into the epic story. Franklin Edgerton speaks of the “dramatic absurdity” of this long conversational pause at the onset of battle. Most recent scholars, however, see the Gita an integral portion of the Mahabharata. In the introduction to his translation, J.A.B. Van Buitenen argues persuasively for this position.
The Bhagavadgita was conceived and created in the context of the Mahabharata. It was not an independent text that somehow wandered into the epic. On the contrary, it was conceived and developed to bring to a climax and solution the dharmic dilemma of a war which was both just and pernicious. The dilemma was by no means new to the epic, nor is it ever satisfactorily resolved there, yet the Gita provides a unique religious and philosophical context in which it can be faced, recognized, and dealt with.6
Responding to the moral issues of war raised within the epic narrative, Brahmin poets developed a dialogue between principal characters at a moment of high tension in the story, and used it not only to deal with the dharmic dilemma of a fratricidal war but also to present a new vision of Krishna as Supreme Deity and outline a new form of religious devotional practice.
There is still one more way to answer the question of composition. The Bhagavad Gita was not just composed once and for all when Krishna spoke it to Arjuna, when Vyasa taught it to Vaishampayana, when Brahmin poets developed it under the patronage of the Shungas, or when Gupta rulers promulgated an authoritative written edition. In a sense, all new listeners or readers who engage seriously with the Bhagavad Gita, bringing their own concerns and aims to their readings, compose the work anew. The Gita is rich enough, complex and ambiguous enough, to give rise to many new compositions. In most cases these compositions take place just in the consciousness of the reader, in dialogues between reader and text, or in unrecorded conversations. In some, though, they take permanent form as written interpretations, commentaries, discourses, or translations of theGita. We can recover the continuing life of the Bhagavad Gita over the centuries from these new Gita-based compositions.