AUTHOR: VYASA (ATTRIBUTED TO)
DATE: C. SECOND CENTURY BC
The Bhagavad Gita (which translates as ‘Song of God’) is considered among the cornerstone texts of the Hindu faith, and a pivotal work in the history of Indian philosophy. Made up of eighteen chapters and some seven hundred verses, it forms part of the much larger epic poem, the Mahabharata. Its influence has extended far beyond India and it became much revered in the West too, not least because of the British imperialist presence in the country from the eighteenth century. India’s leading champion of independence, Mahatma Gandhi, called the Bhagavad Gita his ‘spiritual dictionary’, while the country’s first post-independence leader, Jawaharlal Nehru, commented: ‘The Bhagavad Gita deals essentially with the spiritual foundation of human existence. It is a call of action to meet the obligations and duties of life; yet keeping in view the spiritual nature and grander purpose of the universe.’
The poem is structured around a dialogue between the central protagonist, a prince called Arjuna, and his charioteer, confidant and guide, Krishna. The story comes in the wider context of the Mahabharata (‘The Great Epic of the Bharata Dynasty’), which tells of the dynastic struggles between two family groups, the Kauravas and the Pandavas (from which line Arjuna comes), in a text that runs to some seven times as long as the Iliad and the Odyssey combined. At the start of the Bhagavad Gita, these two familial branches are about to go into battle at Kurukshetra (encompassing an area of modern-day Haryana and the Punjab). Arjuna, however, is hesitant, aware that he is about to go into conflict with family members, friends and even his own teachers. ‘I would not like to kill these,’ he says, ‘even though they kill me.’ Wracked with uncertainty, he seeks advice from Krishna.
What follows is a profound rumination on such themes as the destiny of the soul, dharma (cosmic truth) and universal harmony, and the duty to act. Krishna – who is revealed to be a mortal avatar of the god Vishnu – persuades Arjuna of the immortality of the soul and that his duty as a warrior is to fight, but to do so without seeking personal benefit, thus contributing to the right order of things. In making his arguments, Krishna brings together multiple strands of Hindu belief with aspects of numerous Indian philosophies, not least the Vedic and Yogic traditions. Arjuna’s doubts about going into war, Krishna shows, are as a result of his incomplete understanding of the nature of things. Dharma, he teaches, comes with selfless action.
The Bhagavad Gita was written in Sanskrit, the ancient Indo-European language that came to be a liturgical language accessible only to an educated elite. According to tradition, its author was Vyasa (or, according to one legend, it was dictated by Vyasa to the elephant-god Ganesha, who broke off a tusk to use for its inscription). However, Vyasa is probably a symbolic author, with many scholars open to the idea that there were actually multiple authors. Similarly, assigning a precise date to the poem’s creation is highly problematic, although it seems unlikely to pre-date the fifth century BC and most academics favour a date in the second or third century BC. With its elegant verse and dynamic setting, the Bhagavad Gita is sometimes regarded as a more user-friendly update of the older and denser Upanishads, philosophical treatises that formed part of the Vedas, authored roughly between the mid-second and mid-first millennia BC.
HEAVYWEIGHT WORDS
On 26 February 2019, the world’s largest copy of the Bhagavad Gita was unveiled at the ISKCON (International Society for Krishna Consciousness) Temple in New Delhi, India. Consisting of 670 pages and measuring 2.8 metres by 2.9 metres, it weighs in at an astonishing 800 kg. Published by the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, it was printed in Milan, Italy, on paper that claims to be waterproof and untearable, and includes eighteen full-page illustrations. It was unveiled by the nation’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, who has described the text as ‘India’s gift to the world’.
Western scholars began translating the work in the eighteenth century, and its impact away from its indigenous home was instant. The great nineteenth-century Scottish philosopher and essayist, Thomas Carlyle, was among those who praised it, calling it ‘a most inspiring book; it has brought comfort and consolation in my life’. It has been noted, too, that the Indian-born Rudyard Kipling’s most famous poem, ‘If’, can be viewed as a distillation of the Bhagavad Gita’s central message, notably in the lines: ‘If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster/ And treat those two impostors just the same / … Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.’
For Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American transcendentalist, it was ‘the first of books; it was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us’. Nobel Laureate Hermann Hesse, meanwhile, described it as a ‘truly beautiful revelation of life’s wisdom which enables philosophy to blossom into religion’. And Aldous Huxley considered it in the context of ‘perennial philosophy’, a term coined by Gottfried Leibniz in relation to the idea that all philosophies share certain recurring concepts. The Bhagavad Gita, Huxley said, is ‘one of the most clear and comprehensive summaries of perennial philosophy ever revealed; hence its enduring value is subject not only to India but to all of humanity’. Its words even came to Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan Project that birthed the atomic bomb, on the occasion of the first nuclear detonation test:
We knew the world would not be the same. Few people laughed, few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
But perhaps the last word is best left to Gandhi, who found inspiration in the text throughout his fight for his nation’s freedom:
I find a solace in the Bhagavad Gita … when doubts haunt me, when disappointments stare me in the face, and when I see not one ray of light on the horizon I turn to the Bhagavad Gita, and find a verse to comfort me; and I immediately begin to smile in the midst of overwhelming sorrow. My life has been full of external tragedies and if they have not left any visible and indelible effect on me, I owe it to the teaching of the Bhagavad Gita.