Bhagavad Gita
பகவத் கீதை भगवद्गीता
Also The Gita, Song of the Lord, Gitopanishad.
Song of teaching Sanskrit Probably second century before to second century of the common era
What it is
The Gita is a conversation on a battlefield between a soldier who has decided not to fight and his charioteer, who is God. Arjuna, seeing his teachers and cousins on the other side, puts down his bow and argues that the war is not worth winning. Krishna answers him for seven hundred verses. It sits inside the Mahabharata as part of the Bhishma Parva and has been extracted and read on its own for at least a thousand years, and it is the one Hindu text read by people of every school and of none.
Its shape
Seven hundred verses in eighteen chapters, each called a yoga: Arjuna Vishada, the despondency, through Karma, Jnana and Bhakti yoga to the Moksha Sannyasa yoga at the end. It sits as chapters twenty three to forty of the Bhishma Parva of the Mahabharata. The eleventh chapter, the Vishvarupa Darshana, in which Krishna shows his universal form, is the one most often quoted and the shortest to read on its own.
What it argues about
These are not settled texts
The Gita has been read as meaning opposite things by serious readers for a thousand years, and the disagreement is the most interesting thing about it. Sankara read it as teaching renunciation and knowledge, with action a preliminary. Ramanuja read it as teaching devotion. Tilak read it as a call to action and wrote his commentary in prison to argue that it demanded political struggle. Gandhi read the same text as teaching non violence and treated the battlefield as allegory, which Tilak rejected and Ambedkar attacked outright, arguing that the Gita is a defence of the caste order and of killing when duty requires it. Every one of those readers was reading the whole text. A page that told you what the Gita means would be joining one side of a live argument without saying so.
Episodes worth knowing
Putting down the bow
The armies are drawn up and Arjuna asks to be driven between them to see who he is to fight. He sees his grandfather, his teacher, his cousins and his friends, and his limbs give way and his bow slips from his hand, and he says he will not fight, that no kingdom is worth this, that it would be better to live by begging. The entire text exists because of this refusal, and it is worth noting that the first chapter is given to the case against the war, argued well, by the person the rest of the book is spent persuading.
The eleventh chapter
Arjuna asks to see the form Krishna has been describing, and is given a divine eye to see it with, because ordinary eyes cannot. What he sees is without beginning or end, with countless mouths and eyes, all the worlds in it, and the warriors of both armies rushing into its mouths and being crushed. He is terrified and asks for the familiar form back. The verse in which Krishna names himself as time, the destroyer of worlds, is the one Oppenheimer quoted in 1965, which is how most of the world outside India first encountered the text.
Do the work, not the fruit
The line most often cited from the Gita is that a person has a right to the action and not to its fruits, and should neither act for the result nor be attached to inaction. It is quoted constantly in Indian public life and on office walls. Read in context it is an answer to a specific objection, Arjuna’s claim that the consequences make the act impossible, and the reply is that consequences are not what makes an act obligatory. Whether that is liberating or a way of getting somebody to do a terrible thing without owning it is exactly the question Ambedkar put to the text.
Whose telling
There is no single text
- Sankara, eighth century
- The oldest surviving commentary, reading it as Advaita: knowledge liberates, action prepares, renunciation is the goal.
- Ramanuja, eleventh century
- Reads it as Vishishtadvaita and as teaching bhakti, surrender to a personal God, as the highest path.
- Jnaneshwar, Marathi, thirteenth century
- The Jnaneshwari, a commentary in Marathi verse that made the text available outside Sanskrit and founded a devotional tradition.
- Tilak, 1915
- The Gita Rahasya, written in prison, arguing that the text teaches action and political duty rather than renunciation.
- Gandhi, 1929 onward
- Read it as allegory and as teaching ahimsa, translating it into Gujarati as Anasakti Yoga, the yoga of non attachment.
- Ambedkar
- Attacked it as a late defence of varna and of killing in the name of duty, written to shore up a social order rather than to free anybody.
Where the regions differ
- Tamil
- Kerala
- Telugu
- Kannada
- North
- Maharashtra
- Bengal
- Punjab
- Assam
- Sri Lanka
- Nepal
- Gujarat
- Odisha
- Mithila
- Kashmir
- Tulu Nadu
- manipur
- rajasthan
- konkani
- sindhi
- jharkhand
- himalayan
- kodava
- North India
- Gita Jayanti at Kurukshetra, recitation in households, and the Tilak and Gandhi readings that shaped the national movement.
- Maharashtra
- The Jnaneshwari is the Marathi devotional text and is read in the Varkari tradition alongside the original.
- Tamil Nadu
- Read in households and taught in the mathas; the Tamil commentaries and the Vaishnava reading of Ramanuja are both current.
- Karnataka
- Madhwa commentaries give it a dualist reading quite distinct from Sankara’s, and the Udupi mathas teach it.
Connected to
Deities
Arts
Festivals
Related works