Bhagavad Gita

The Bhagavad Gita, often simply called the Gita, is a poem in Sanskrit, the classical language of ancient India. Its name means "the Song of the Lord" (bhagavat, "the Blessed One" or "the Lord", and gītā, "song"). It forms a small part of the Mahabharata, one of the two great epics of India and among the longest poems in the world.

The Gita is a conversation. On the morning of a terrible war, the warrior prince Arjuna loses heart, and his charioteer Krishna answers his questions about life, death, duty and God. In Hindu tradition Krishna is an avatar, a descent of the god Vishnu into the world, so his words are received by many Hindus as divine teaching.

Although it is only 700 verses long, the Gita has become one of the most important texts of Hinduism and one of the most translated books in the world. Hindus of many schools revere it, and philosophers, poets, political leaders and scientists far beyond India have read it closely. It is read both as scripture by believers and as a historical and philosophical text by scholars, and this page presents both perspectives.

The Mahabharata tells of a quarrel between two branches of a royal family: the five Pandava brothers, among them Arjuna, and their cousins the hundred Kauravas, led by Duryodhana. After years of injustice, exile and failed peace talks, including a peace mission by Krishna himself, the two sides gather their armies on the plain of Kurukshetra, in the north of India.

The Gita begins with the blind king Dhritarashtra, father of the Kauravas, asking his counsellor Sanjaya what is happening on the "field of dharma". Sanjaya, granted the power to see the distant battlefield, reports everything, so the whole Gita is a story told within a story.

Arjuna asks Krishna to drive his chariot between the two armies. Seeing relatives, elders and teachers on both sides, he is overwhelmed by grief. He argues that killing his own family would be a sin and would destroy the social order, and he refuses to fight. The rest of the poem is Krishna's answer.

First, Krishna says that the true self (ātman) is eternal. Bodies are born and die, as people change old clothes for new ones, but the self is never born and never destroyed. So Arjuna's grief comes from confusing the self with the body.

Second, Krishna teaches that everyone must act; even doing nothing is a choice. The important thing is to do one's duty (dharma) without being attached to the results. One of the most quoted verses says, roughly: "You have a right to your actions, but never to their fruits." This way of acting is called karma yoga, the discipline of action.

Third, Krishna speaks of knowledge and of love. Seeing that the same divine reality lives in all beings brings wisdom and calm. And offering all one's actions to God with loving devotion (bhakti) frees a person from fear. Near the end, Krishna invites Arjuna to take refuge in him completely.

In the end Arjuna says his confusion is gone, picks up his bow, and prepares to do his duty. Readers have argued ever since about what this ending means.

Krishna also describes what a wise person is like. Such a person is not carried away by pleasure or crushed by pain, treats friends and enemies, praise and blame with the same calm, and does not act out of greed, fear or anger. This inner balance, which the Gita calls yoga, is presented as possible not only for monks in the forest but for people living ordinary lives with families and responsibilities.

The Gita has 18 chapters, each traditionally named as a kind of yoga, such as "the yoga of knowledge" or "the yoga of devotion". In the full Mahabharata they appear as chapters 25–42 (or 23–40 in some editions) of the Bhishma Parva. Each chapter ends with a colophon calling the text an Upanishad, linking it to the older philosophical texts of the Vedas.

Many commentators divide it into three groups of six chapters. The first six focus on action and self-discipline, the middle six on devotion and the nature of God, and the last six on knowledge, the difference between the body and the self, and the qualities of nature. This is a later interpretive scheme, not a division marked in the text itself.

Chapter 2 introduces the eternal self and the ideal of the sthitaprajña, the person of steady wisdom. Chapter 4 contains Krishna's promise to appear in the world whenever dharma declines. In chapter 11 Arjuna receives divine sight and beholds Krishna's universal form (viśvarūpa), blazing with countless faces and swallowing the warriors of both armies; here Krishna declares that he is Time, the destroyer of worlds. Chapter 18 draws the teachings together.

Most verses use the śloka, a metre of four quarters of eight syllables each, the same metre used for most of the epic. Its clarity and rhythm make the Gita suited to recitation, and many Hindus chant it daily or recite it at festivals and funerals.

Dharma is a many-layered word meaning duty, right order and religion. Arjuna's svadharma, his own duty as a kṣatriya (warrior), is to fight a just war. The Gita states that it is better to do one's own duty imperfectly than another's duty well. How far svadharma refers to social class, and how far to a person's own nature, has become a major question of interpretation.

The Gita brings together several paths that were in tension in its time. The Vedic tradition emphasised ritual action; the renouncers, including Buddhist and Jain monks and Upanishadic ascetics, sought liberation by withdrawing from action. The Gita's answer is to transform action rather than abandon it: act without selfish desire, and action no longer binds.

It also absorbs ideas from Sāṅkhya philosophy, which distinguishes spirit (puruṣa) from matter (prakṛti) and describes three qualities or guṇas, sattva (clarity), rajas (passion) and tamas (inertia), that shape all things. And it uses the language of the Upanishads about brahman, the ultimate reality.

Above all these, many readers see devotion as the Gita's culmination. Krishna is not only a teacher but the supreme God, source of the universe, who loves his devotees. The relationship between the impersonal brahman and the personal God, and between knowledge, action and devotion, is exactly what later schools interpreted differently.

Technically the Gita belongs to smṛti, "remembered" tradition, rather than śruti, the "heard" revelation of the Vedas. Yet it came to be treated almost as revelation. In the Vedanta tradition it forms one of the three foundational texts (prasthānatrayī), together with the Upanishads and the Brahma Sutras, on which every major school had to write a commentary.

For Vaishnava traditions, which worship Vishnu and his avatars, the Gita is central, and later texts such as the Puranas praise the merit of reading it. Its teaching of devotion influenced the bhakti movements that spread across India in the medieval period, expressed in regional languages as well as Sanskrit.

In everyday religious life, the Gita is recited in homes and temples, memorised by students, and studied in groups. Many Hindus celebrate Gita Jayanti, the day on which Krishna is believed to have spoken it. According to traditional chronology, the Kurukshetra war took place at the end of an earlier cosmic age, and the start of the present Kali age is traditionally dated to 3102 BCE; historians regard these dates as religious chronology rather than historical evidence.

The Gita's influence reaches far beyond its own verses. It inspired many later works that call themselves gītās, such as the Anu Gita within the Mahabharata itself and texts like the Ashtavakra Gita and Uddhava Gita, which present teachings in similar dialogue form. Scenes from the Gita, above all Krishna driving Arjuna's chariot, are among the most familiar images in Indian painting, sculpture, calendar art, theatre and film.

The oldest surviving commentary is by Adi Shankara (traditionally c. 8th century CE), the great teacher of Advaita Vedanta. He read the Gita as teaching that the self is identical with brahman and that liberation comes ultimately through knowledge, with selfless action purifying the mind to prepare for it.

Ramanuja (11th–12th century), of the Sri Vaishnava tradition, disagreed. For his Viśiṣṭādvaita (qualified non-dualism), individual souls and the world are real parts of God, and loving devotion and surrender to Narayana, whom Krishna embodies, is the highest path. Madhva (13th century) went further toward dualism, insisting that God, souls and matter are eternally distinct.

Other important commentators include Abhinavagupta of the Kashmir Shaiva tradition, who commented on a slightly different recension, and Dnyaneshwar, whose Dnyaneshwari (c. 1290) in Marathi is one of the earliest works of Marathi literature and helped bring the Gita to people who did not know Sanskrit.

These commentaries show that the Gita did not fix a single doctrine. Each school found its own philosophy in the text, and debating the Gita became a way of debating the nature of reality, the self and God.

In 1785 Charles Wilkins, an employee of the East India Company, published the first English translation, with a preface by the Governor-General Warren Hastings. Translations into French, German and other languages soon followed, and in 1808 Friedrich Schlegel included passages in the first direct translation from Sanskrit into German. The American Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were among its admirers.

In colonial India, the Gita became central to religious and national revival. Swami Vivekananda drew on it to present Hinduism as a universal spirituality. Bal Gangadhar Tilak wrote his influential commentary Gita Rahasya in prison in 1910–1911, stressing karma yoga as a call to action. Sri Aurobindo read it as a scripture of spiritual evolution. Some revolutionaries cited it to justify armed struggle against British rule.

Mahatma Gandhi called the Gita his "spiritual dictionary" and wrote a Gujarati commentary in prison in 1929. For him, its battlefield was an allegory of the struggle within the soul, and its teaching of selfless action supported non-violence. The Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar, by contrast, criticised the Gita for defending the caste order and for justifying killing through the doctrine of the eternal soul.

The Gita's global reach continued in the twentieth century. J. Robert Oppenheimer, who read it in Sanskrit, later recalled Krishna's words from chapter 11 when describing the first atomic test in 1945. Philip Glass's opera Satyagraha (1979) sets texts from the Gita in Sanskrit, and A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada's translation Bhagavad-gītā As It Is spread worldwide through the International Society for Krishna Consciousness.

Tradition attributes the Gita, like the whole Mahabharata, to the sage Vyasa. Historians generally regard Vyasa as a traditional or symbolic author, since the same figure is credited with compiling the Vedas and the Puranas, texts separated by many centuries.

Scholarly dates vary widely because the date of the Mahabharata itself is uncertain; the epic grew over many centuries, perhaps from around the 4th century BCE to the early centuries CE. The Gita is most often placed in the 2nd or 1st century BCE. A. L. Basham argued that its concern with the ethics of war and with renunciation fits a period after the rise of Buddhism and Jainism and the reign of Ashoka. Linguistic features that fall between Vedic and classical Sanskrit also point to the late first millennium BCE. Some scholars, such as K. N. Upadhyaya, argue for an earlier date in the 5th or 4th century BCE; others place a final redaction in the first centuries CE.

Many scholars see the text as composite. Basham suggested three or more authors or stages; others have identified an older core focused on Arjuna's duty, with later additions developing devotional theology and the vision of the universal form. Angelika Malinar, by contrast, has emphasised how closely the Gita's arguments connect to debates about war and kingship elsewhere in the epic, reading it as an integral part of the Mahabharata rather than a later insertion.

The text is remarkably stable at 700 verses in the vulgate, though some manuscripts and the Kashmir recension show variants, and one Mahabharata passage speaks of 745 verses. The standard critical text is that of the Critical Edition of the Mahabharata prepared at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune.

The most persistent debate concerns violence. Krishna urges Arjuna to fight in a war that will kill his kin, while many Indian traditions, including parts of the Mahabharata itself, praise ahiṃsā, non-injury. Some readers take the war literally and see the Gita as a justification of righteous war; Gandhi and many others read it allegorically as a teaching about inner struggle; still others, such as Ambedkar, see it as rationalising violence. Scholars also note that the Gita says little about the actual conduct of war, focusing instead on the inner attitude of the actor.

A second debate concerns caste. The Gita says that the four varṇas were created according to qualities and actions, and it urges each person to follow their own duty. Traditional readings linked this to birth; reformers such as Vivekananda and Aurobindo reinterpreted svadharma as duty according to one's nature or situation; critics argue that the text supported social hierarchy. The same verses thus support very different social visions.

Philosophers debate the Gita's ethical theory. Some describe karma yoga as a form of deontology, doing one's duty regardless of consequences; others stress that Krishna also points to consequences, such as social order. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article, for example, reads the Gita as criticising conventional moral theories and proposing its own procedural ethics centred on karma yoga and bhakti yoga.

Finally, historians of religion have asked how the Gita became so prominent. Some scholars argue that its status as the single essential scripture of Hinduism is partly a modern development, shaped by colonial-era translation, Orientalist scholarship and nationalist movements from the late nineteenth century, although it was already important in the commentarial and devotional traditions for many centuries. For believers, of course, its authority rests on its divine origin rather than on this history.