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The Bhagavad Gita as we have it now is the same text on which the great Vedantin teacher Shankara wrote a commentary around the beginning of the eighth century CE. Indeed the critical edition, published in India in 1947, follows (with some minor exceptions) Shankara’s version. Whatever ultimate reality he accorded to a personal god, Shankara uncontroversially regarded the Gita as the teaching of the Lord Himself, as recorded by Vyasa. In fact the Gita seems to have enjoyed this elevated status within the Vedanta system from relatively soon after its original appearance, although Shankara’s is the earliest surviving commentary.
Technically the Gita does not belong to the uncreated, beginningless and self-authenticating or revealed category of Vedic literature (the Veda itself). Rather it belongs to that tradition (literally, “what has been remembered”) which implicitly derives its authority from the Veda. But by Vaishnavas in particular, and increasingly by most Hindus, the Gita came to be regarded as having the same religious authority as a revealed text – that is to say, to all intents and purposes it was accorded an autonomous authority worthy of commentarial exegesis.
This is not the place to attempt a survey of the various commentaries on the Gita; the interested reader is referred to the works cited in the Bibliography. The question of the Gita’s “real” meaning does, however, raise additional problems for the translator, in so far as all translation inevitably involves interpretation, and any translation which seeks, as this one does, to render most of the Sanskrit technical terminology into English, interprets more than others. Where the Sanskrit original may remain open to a variety of readings, the English translation fixes on one, not arbitrarily so in the eyes of the translator, but nevertheless with a greater or lesser degree of compromise. It follows from this that, just as there can be no definitive performance of a Shakespeare play, so there can be no definitive translation of a text such as Gita – which is one reason why so many have been attempted.