Bibek Debroy - The Bhagavad Gita

If there is one text that captures the essence of Hinduism, it is the Gita or, more accurately, the Bhagavad Gita. As the word Gita suggests, the text was meant to be sung and has therefore been translated into English as the Song Celestial. However, the Bhagavad Gita is not the only Gita that is available, although it is almost certainly the first. Following the Bhagavad Gita, clearly in imitation, various other Gita texts surfaced. For instance, the Mahabharata itself has the Kama Gita and the Anu Gita. The Bhagavad Gita is the most important of this Gita literature and represents the teachings of Bhagavan/Lord Krishna to Arjuna on the eve of the Kurukshetra war. However, the teachings do not actually start until shloka (verse) 11 of Chapter 2. And one should not presume Krishna speaks every shloka in the Gita. As will be seen, there are many shlokas spoken by others. Indeed, there is also an impression that the Gita was told by Sanjaya to Dhritarashtra. That impression is correct. But again, very few shlokas are actually spoken by Sanjaya or even by Dhritarashtra. Actually, Dhritarashtra speaks only one shloka, the first. The other shlokas are utterances by Sanjaya, Krishna and Arjuna.

The Gita forms part of the Mahabharataspecifically of the Bhishma Parva of the epic, that is, that period of the Kurukshetra war when Bhishma is the Kaurava general. Chapters 1440 of Bhishma Parva deal with the Bhagavad Gita, although the Bhagavad Gita proper begins with Chapter 23 of Bhishma Parva and ends with Chapter 40. The Bhagavad Gita proper has eighteen chapters and 700 shlokas, as can be seen in the table below. Each chapter is qualified with the word yoga, which means union or, even, path.

Probably everyone knows that there are three paths to liberation: jnana yoga, karma yoga and bhakti yoga. Jnana yoga is the path of knowledge, karma yoga is the path of action and bhakti yoga is the path of devotion. Yoga means union, between the human and the divine. Broadly speaking, the first six chapters of the Gita are primarily about karma yoga, the next six chapters about bhakti yoga and the last six about jnana yoga. But this is a very rough division, because every chapter has all three elements. However, one will notice the increasing importance of bhakti yoga as one goes along. There are some shlokas that have become so common that most people will recognize them. These usually occur in the second, third and fourth chapters.

It is possible that the Bhagavad Gita originally had 750 shlokas. Some regional variations still have this number. But after Shankaracharyas (CE 788820) commentary on the Gita, versions with these extra shlokas disappeared. And the Bhagavad Gita became more or less standardized with 699 or 700 shlokas. The difference occurs in the first chapter, which sometimes has forty-six shlokas and sometimes forty-seven. But this difference is not in content: it is only a variation in which shloka includes what part of the text. Shankaracharya did not have a commentary on the first chapter and, because of this, the numbering in the other chapters is now standardized. The Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune has a critical or authenticated edition of the Mahabharata, and therefore a critical or authenticated edition of the Gita. That is the version followed in this translation. Notwithstanding this, there are very few variations across different versions of the Bhagavad Gita. Apart from numbering, they are really minor and occur only in the first chapter and are indicated in the text that follows. Some variations in numbering (that is, which part of the text is included in which shloka) occur in the first and the fourth chapters.

Shankaracharyas commentary also seems to have made the Bhagavad Gita much more popular. There is not much evidence of its popularity before that. Indeed, the Bhagavad Gita is included in the smriti (memorized texts that come down orally through the sages) rather than the shruti tradition of texts that have been revealed. The Mahabharata was not composed at one point in time and went through different versions. While some sections of the Mahabharata imply knowledge of the teachings of the Gita, other sections display ignorance about the Gita. Therefore, it is safe to assume that the Bhagavad Gita was interpolated and added to earlier sections of the Mahabharata and was already in existence when later parts of the Mahabharata were compiled. That suggests anything between the fifth century BCE and the second century BCE for the first version of the Gita and something like the second century CE for the final version.

There is no reason to presume that the Gita had a single author. The Gita is a text that synthesizes and incorporates many teachings of the Upanishads. In fact, many shlokas from the Upanishads are found in the Gita, with minor changes. Attempts have been made to detect internal inconsistencies across parts that represent bhakti or theism and parts that draw on Vedanta and are pantheistic. Or between parts that draw on Vedanta and others that draw on sankhya philosophy. However, these attempts are not terribly convincing. And there are also some shlokas that are clearly old, because they follow grammatical norms that would later have been regarded as not quite correct.

The reader may wonder why another translation of the