Bhagavad Gita

The setting is fixed and static: the armies are drawn up, Arjuna asks to be driven between them, and the entire text happens before a single arrow is loosed. It reaches the reader at two removes, Sanjaya, granted distant sight, is narrating the battlefield to the blind king Dhritarashtra, so every word of Krishna arrives as reported speech.

Arjuna's objection is not cowardice but a moral one. Killing teachers and kinsmen will destroy the family, and with it the order that families sustain. Krishna's reply moves through several registers rather than one argument. The self is not born and does not die, so what Arjuna thinks he is destroying is not what he thinks. Withdrawal is impossible anyway, since to be embodied is to act. What can be changed is the relation to action: nishkama karma, acting without appetite for the result, which turns work into something that does not bind. And there is svadharma, one's own duty by station, better done badly than another's done well, which is the text's most quoted and most contested move, since Arjuna's own duty is the warrior's.

Broadly, the first six chapters concentrate on disciplined action, the middle six on bhakti, loving devotion to a personal God, and the last six on knowledge, the three gunas, and the analysis of the self. The pivot is chapter eleven, where Krishna grants Arjuna a divine eye and shows the universal form, all worlds and all beings at once, the enemy already dying inside its mouths, and Arjuna, terrified, asks for the familiar shape back. The chapter supplied Robert Oppenheimer his line about becoming death.

The close is not philosophy but instruction: surrender, and be freed. Whether that supersedes the earlier paths or completes them is the question every commentator has to answer.

In the received vulgate the Gita occupies chapters 23 to 40 of the Bhishma Parva, the sixth of the epic's eighteen books, interrupting the battle narrative for eighteen chapters and then resuming it. That position is the crux of the dating problem.

Most textual scholars place its composition somewhere between the second century BCE and the second century CE, later than the epic's oldest layers and earlier than its final form. The evidence is internal: the Gita knows Samkhya categories and yoga practice in developed form, deploys a vocabulary of devotion to a personal God that the surrounding narrative does not, and argues about the relative value of ritual, renunciation and action in terms that read as a response to established Buddhist and Jain positions. Whether it was composed for its place, inserted whole from elsewhere, or assembled in stages within the epic is unsettled. The chapter break at the end, where the battle simply resumes, is easily read either way.

Hindu tradition holds the whole Mahabharata, Gita included, to be the composition of Vyasa, and treats the discourse as spoken as reported. The two accounts are not reconcilable and both are worth stating plainly.

The verse count is itself evidence. Seven hundred is the traditional figure, and the number Shankara worked from around 800 CE. The Kashmirian recension that Abhinavagupta commented on in the tenth or eleventh century carries additional verses, giving a total near 745, and differs in wording at many points besides. The Pune critical edition of the Mahabharata prints 700. That a text so closely memorised and so heavily commented on still varies by fifteen verses across regions is a useful corrective to any assumption that Indian scripture was transmitted uniformly, the Vedic recitation schemes protected the Vedas, not the epics.

For most of its history the Gita was not a book. It was an episode, read within the epic and expounded within Vedanta, and its authority came from being treated as one of the three foundations that any Vedanta teacher had to interpret.

That commentarial tradition is where its status was made. Shankara's commentary, from around 800 CE, is the oldest complete one surviving, and reads the Gita as finally teaching knowledge, with action preparatory. Ramanuja in the eleventh and twelfth centuries read the same verses as teaching devotion to Vishnu as the highest path, with the self real and distinct though dependent. Madhva in the thirteenth read them as asserting an unbridgeable difference between God and soul. Abhinavagupta gave it a Shaiva and tantric reading. Jnaneshvar's Marathi Jnaneshvari, from the late thirteenth century, took it out of Sanskrit entirely and is a monument of Marathi literature in its own right.

Its career as a standalone scripture is recent and largely colonial in occasion. Charles Wilkins translated it into English in 1785, the first Sanskrit text rendered directly into a European language, and Edwin Arnold's verse version, The Song Celestial, appeared in 1885. Gandhi read it first in Arnold's English, as a student in London, and it became the book he returned to daily; his own commentary, Anasakti Yoga, was published in 1929, and he read the war allegorically, as the struggle within a person, in explicit service of nonviolence. Bal Gangadhar Tilak's Gita Rahasya, written in prison and published in 1915, read it the opposite way, as a mandate for action, and revolutionaries carried it as such. Aurobindo, Vivekananda and Radhakrishnan each produced readings. A text that had been a chapter of an epic became, within a century and a half, the volume most likely to be handed to an outsider as the scripture of Hinduism.