The Bhagavad Gītā

An Episode Made Scripture

First attested
around 200 BCEthe text itself, placed by most scholars between the second century BCE and the second century CE; nothing survives in manuscript from anywhere near then, and the earliest datable witness is Śaṅkara's commentary of about 750
Claimed
around 3102 BCEasserted by Traditional Hindu chronology, which sets the Kurukṣetra war at the turn of the Dvāpara and Kali ages — the epoch Āryabhaṭa fixed in the Āryabhaṭīya (499 CE) and later reckoning dates to 3102 BCE. Ravikīrti's Aihole inscription of Śaka 556 (634 CE) already counts 3735 years since the Bhārata war, though scholars dispute whether it counts from the war or from the beginning of the age; some traditional reckonings put the war at 3138 BCE instead.

The claim runs about 2.9 thousand years ahead of the evidence.

Commented on as a book in its own right since Śaṅkara in the eighth century, the Gītā became the Hindu book about duty in action — and the one most outsiders meet first — through a modern chain of readers: Wilkins 1785, Tilak 1915, Gandhi 1929-30.

A claim on the action, none on its fruit; it has tended to return to each reader the duty he brought.

Seven hundred verses forming eighteen chapters of the Mahābhārata's sixth book, the Bhīṣma Parva, where Arjuna refuses to fight his kinsmen and Kṛṣṇa answers him. Composition is usually placed between the second century BCE and the second century CE — a wide and contested range, and most scholars read the text as composite. Śaṅkara commented on it in the eighth century, the earliest commentary to survive. Charles Wilkins's translation of 1785, printed at East India Company expense and commended in Warren Hastings's prefatory letter, was the first of the Gītā into a European language; Emerson and Thoreau read it. Its standing as a book on its own, and as a book about action and duty, owes much to Tilak's Gītārahasya of 1915 and Gandhi's Anāsaktiyoga of 1929-30. The verses themselves never left the epic.

Light

Gives a working answer to anyone who must act before they can be certain: 2.47 grants a claim on the action and none on its fruit. Gandhi read non-violence out of a war poem for forty years.

Shadow

B. R. Ambedkar read it as a philosophic defence of counter-revolution, its verses on varṇa securing caste. And the same seven hundred verses yielded both Gandhi's non-violence and Tilak's summons to militant action — a text that has tended to return to each reader the duty he brought to it.

Sources and verification12 sources · 6 links

Primary source

  • Bhagavad Gītā, 2.47the Light's claim: a right to the action alone and never to its fruits
  • Aihole inscription of Ravikīrti, 634, Śaka 556; Meguti temple, Aihole, Karnatakaa seventh-century reckoning of 3735 years elapsed since the Bhārata war, the earliest dated witness to the traditional chronology in claim_source
  • Charles Wilkins, The Bhagvat-Geeta, or Dialogues of Kreeshna and Arjoon, 1785, London: C. Nourse, printed at East India Company expense, with a prefatory letter by Warren Hastingsthe first translation of the Gītā into a European language, and the version in which Emerson and Thoreau read it
  • Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Śrīmad Bhagavadgītā Rahasya, 1915, Marathi; written during Tilak's imprisonment at Mandalay, 1908-1914the reading of the Gītā as a treatise on karma yoga, argued against Śaṅkara's knowledge-first interpretation
  • M. K. Gandhi, Anāsaktiyoga, 1930, Gujarati; written at Kausani in 1929, published 1930 with Gandhi's introduction, 'the discipline of non-attached action', in which he says he had been reading the Gītā for more than forty yearsthe Gītā read as a discipline of non-attached action, and the 'forty years' in the Light

Scholarship

  • Eric J. Sharpe, The Universal Gītā: Western Images of the Bhagavadgītā, a Bicentenary Survey, 1985, Duckworth / Open Courttwo centuries of Western readings of the Gītā, beginning with Wilkins in 1785
  • Angelika Malinar, The Bhagavadgītā: Doctrines and Contexts, 2007, Cambridge University Pressthe standard scholarly account of the Gītā's doctrines and of the historical setting in which it was composed
  • Richard H. Davis, The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography, 2014, Princeton University Press, Lives of Great Religious Books, 2014the Gītā's rise to the standing of a freestanding scripture, and its use by Indian nationalists including Gandhi and Vivekananda

The tradition itself

  • Āryabhaṭa, Āryabhaṭīya, 499the Kali Yuga epoch from which the traditional date of 3102 BCE for the Kurukṣetra war is reckoned
  • Śaṅkara, Bhagavadgītābhāṣya, 750, conventionally placed c. 700-750; Śaṅkara's own dates are debatedthe earliest surviving commentary, and evidence that the Gītā was treated as a separately commentable text long before the colonial period

Where this claim originates

  • B. R. Ambedkar, Essays on the Bhagwat Gita: Philosophic Defence of Counter-Revolution: Krishna and His Gita, 1987, an unfinished chapter of Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Ancient India, published posthumously in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, vol. 3, Government of Maharashtrathe Shadow's first sentence — Ambedkar's reading of the Gītā as a philosophic defence of counter-revolution securing cāturvarṇya

Further reading

  • August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Bhagavad-Gita, id est Thespesion Melos, 1823, Bonn; Latinthe earliest European translation after Wilkins, and the route by which the Gītā reached German readers

Linked entries

  • Set againstThe Gurū Granth SāhibAttested

    Both are Indian scriptures recited daily, but the Guru Granth Sahib is installed and attended as a living Guru, where the Gītā is an episode of an epic that later editions bound on its own.

  • Set againstSiddhārtha GautamaDisputed

    B. R. Ambedkar read the Gītā as a philosophic counter-revolution mounted against Buddhism, chiefly for its defence of varṇa; the reading is contested, and it is why the two sit side by side here.

  • Set againstThe Chakra SystemAttested

    The Gītā names yogas of action, knowledge, devotion and meditation but no subtle-body centres; its cakra at 3.16 is the turning wheel of the world, and at 11.17 and 11.46 Kṛṣṇa's discus. The centres belong to later tantric texts and are read back into it.

  • Set againstThe DaodejingA modern connection

    Both were read in Europe as detachable wisdom books through translation — Wilkins's Gītā of 1785, Stanislas Julien's complete French Daodejing of 1842 — and both were taken up abroad as philosophy stripped of the ritual life around them.

  • Set againstThe Yoga Sūtras of PatañjaliAttested

    Both are read as yoga scriptures, but the Gītā sets several yogas inside an epic narrative and gives a personal God, while the sūtras give one discipline in aphorisms and make īśvara a special puruṣa rather than a creator.

  • Set againstKuṇḍalinīAttested

    The Gītā names no kuṇḍalinī; yet Jñānadeva's thirteenth-century Marathi commentary on it, the Jñāneśvarī, carries one of the earliest haṭha-yogic accounts of her awakening, at 6.228–40.

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