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The Bhagavad Gita (“Song of the Lord”) is a self-contained episode of seven hundred verses embedded in one book of the great Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata. Although the Gita is probably over two thousand years old, Charles Wilkin’s English version of 1785 was the first full translation into a modern European language. Since then, in a wide variety of translations and interpretations, it has come to represent Hinduism, and even Indian spirituality in general, to the non-specialise Western reader. It is also the archetype of that necessarily modern phenomenon, the classic of world spirituality. Over the same period the Gita has assumed for many Hindus a universal status, so that it is regarded not only as the quintessential Hindu religious text, but also as a charter for all kinds of frequently conflicting social and political action.
One reason for the Gita’s universality is its capacity to bear almost any shade of interpretation, because of the variegated nature of its contents. It is as though the famous epigram directed by the Mahabharata at itself – “What is here may be found elsewhere, what is not here is nowhere at all” – has come to be applied as a hermeneutical principle to its offspring. While this demonstrates the fact that the Gita is and always has been a live religious text, with an apparently limitless capacity to inspire new and necessarily valid meanings, from the perspective of the tradition in which they are coined, it does not imply that all interpretations are equally convincing from the historical and philological perspectives; far from it. Nevertheless, it is often easier for scholarly exegetes and historians (themselves not always immune to bias) to reject other interpretations that to provide totally convincing replacements.
A reason for this has already been hinted at: the Gita is a religious text, not a philosophical tract. Its purpose is to engender and consolidate certain attitudes in its audience, in much the same was as the “Lord” of the title, Krishna, attempts in a variety of ways to lead his interlocutor, Arjuna, from perplexity to understanding and correct action. Although, in the context of the Mahabharata the problem is faced by one of the protagonist, Arjuna, and its resolution allows the action to proceed, for most Hindus the Gita is not simply part of the epic story but a religious teaching, transmitted to them personally by the guru-God Krishna. The problem therefore is not remote or fictional but imminent, and the solution, through the grace of God, is equally accessible.
That it is thought to be the word of God and also part of a narrative encompassing, in the words of a Western theatrical adaptation of the Mahabharata, “the poetical history of mankind”, helps us to understand what seems to be a paradoxical fact about the Gita, in the light of its recent history. Although it has been revered and the object of much exegesis from early in its existence, detailed knowledge of its contents seems not to have penetrated beyond scholarly circles in India until the last hundred years. One reason for this is that the original language of the Gita, Sanskrit, was known only to a relatively small numbers of pandits; moreover, translations into modern Indian languages, even if considered desirable, would have required a readership, which in turn required education. Literacy of that kind began to appear in India on a significant scale only in the nineteenth century, initially through the medium of English. Furthermore, it was not until this period that printing presses were introduced, creating the possibility of the widespread distribution of written material.
Before this change, it seems likely that most Indians, if they knew the Gita at all, knew it as part of an orally transmitted and flexible narrative tradition, as an adjunct to various rituals, and as material for recitation in a devotional context. In other words, they might have known and been able to recite certain verses, but they would have had no theological overview of the text. Indeed, for many Hindus the situation may not be so very different today; what the Gia is (the word of God) or what it is perceived to represent (the values inherent in Hindu culture) may be more important than its literal, verse by verse meaning. Moreover, its primary meaning may not be in its metaphysical or philosophical content at all, but in the story it tells, and in the relationship it dramatises between God and human beings.
This is not intended as a denial of the evident fact that some of the Gita’s teachings have, in a generalised form, become cornerstones of belief for many, if not most Hindus. But it may serve as a warning to the modern Westerner, picking up a book called The Bhagavad Gita and reading it from cover to cover, not to assume that she or he is using, understanding, or valuing the text in way that are necessarily similar to those employed in the tradition from which it derives.
Even within scholarly Sanskritic circles, there have been almost as many interpretations as interpreters or schools of thought. The history of the meaning of the text, so far as we can trace it, has therefore always been that of its commentaries and interpretations, whatever their level of sophistication. Before the modern period, any systematic study of the Gita would always have been from within a particular commentarial tradition. This method of approaching the text has been to some extent obscured by recent attempts to present the Gita “as it is”. But for all their claims, the “fundamentalists” responsible are of course no freer of interpretative frameworks and presuppositions than their predecessors, who were usually their superiors in rigour and sophistication.
Because of its role in the history of modern Indian culture and its pivotal position in the interaction which has taken place between Indian religions and the West in the last two centuries, study of the Gita continues to be instructive. But there are other, perhaps more important reasons for the disinterested reader to engage with it. (I leave aside what for some may be the most compelling consideration – the question of whether it has some universally valid spiritual or religious value.) Even in translation, even cut loose from a specific tradition of commentary, the Gita touches on and develops in its own way many key themes from the history of Indian religions, and raises questions that are still debated. As we shall see, it is the product of a time of transition, and it attempts to reconcile diverging world views. Maybe in that – in Arjuna’s predicament, if not the solution to it – lies some of the Gita’s appeal to our own age.
My purpose in the rest of this introduction is to provide the non-specialist reader with a brief sketch of the Gita’s narrative, cultural, and historical context, and to offer pointers to some of its main themes and preoccupations.
The Socio-Religious Context
The Mahabharata, the great epic which provides the Gita with its literary context, has no single author (if one discounts the mytical Vyasa). It belongs to an oral tradition that may have its origins in the eighth or ninth century BCE. Succeeding generations of reciter-poets added to, expanded on, and elaborated the basic material, which tells of a cataclysmic war between two branches of the same family and their followers. Like a snowball, the epic picked up and incorporated all the important religious, philosophical, and social changes through which it passed, often juxtaposing layers with little or no attempt at reconciliation. Nevertheless, certain themes, because they had come to preoccupy Indian religion and culture generally, began to dominate its “poetical history”: the question of what constitutes Dharma or the Law (the ways things really are and therefore the way they should be), how men and women can acquire knowledge of that truth, and how they should act in relation to it.
By the time the Gita had been incorporated into or crystallised out of the epic (scholars are divided on which is the correct description) – perhaps in some form in the third century BCE – many of these questions had become acutely significant for what we have come to call the “Hindu” tradition. In fact for this period that tradition is more accurately termed “Brahminical”, after the hereditary priestly class or estate which had established itself and its sacred body of knowledge, the Veda, as the arbiters of orthoprax and orthodox socio-religious conduct and values. This dominance is reflected both in the epic as we now have it and in the Gita. The fact that the main protagonists of the Gita are not brahmins at all but members of the equally hereditary warrior or ruling class should not blind us to this.
To refer to the Brahminical tradition is perhaps misleading, unless it is understood that by the time of the Gita there were a number of movements or tendencies within that tradition, not all of them obviously compatible. This led to tensions, the most significant being between those (portrayed as traditionalists) who enjoined the fulfilment of one’s prescribed social and religious duties as a member of the class into which one had been born, and those who advocated renouncing that ascribed status altogether in favour of a life of homelessness and spiritual discipline.
In the Brahminical context this divergence had first come to formal light in the early Upanishads (a category of late Vedic texts). It was there too that the essentials of the well-known doctrine of karma and rebirth made their initial appearance. It is easy to suppose that such a doctrine developed naturally out of the ritualists’ world view. The sacrifice is a mechanism for producing a result. Sacrificial action (the Sanskrit word for “action” is karman), if performed correctly, produces future benefits for the sacrificer. It is therefore possible to sacrifice in order to attain a place in another world after death. The responsibility for the correct performance of the ritual lies with the brahmins, the technicians of the sacrifice, who perform the ritual on behalf of the person who desires the result. The effects of the sacrifice are, however, finite, and it has to be continually renewed. So it is not difficult to infer that the sacrificially created merit (or food), which was supposed to sustain life in the other world after death, would eventually run out. At that point one would die again, returning through various natural stages to be reborn in this world, not necessarily as a human being. The cycle is potentially endless, and from this it is a relatively short step to the conclusion that action (karma) pursued for a purpose of whatever kind results in a relatively better or worse rebirth, life after life.
At about the same time there arose the perception that since embodied existence in this world, or any other, was necessarily impermanent and subject to various ills, then even if some individuals were not suffering now they soon would be, and death was both inevitable and unpleasant. To be caught in the cycle of death and rebirth was therefore not viewed positively, as a form of immortality, but negatively as suffering, and the object was to find a way to escape it. This was not annihilationism, for against continual rebirth was postulated a goal of permanent liberation and bliss, free of physical imperfection and impermanence. The way to this new goal was first formulated in the late Vedic texts in terms of knowledge of the inner meaning of the sacrifice – what holds it together and enables it to work. Presently this was extended to everything that exists: the same principle informs and underlies all things, including the embodied or essential self. The term that was eventually settled on to designate this principle was “Brahman”.
According to this line of thought, there was essentially no difference between the essence of the individual and Brahman, the principle underlying all things. Consequently, liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth was a matter of gnosis, for by knowing or realising Brahman (one’s own true nature) one would go to Brahman, a permanent, unchanging, and blissful state – a line of thought reiterated in the Gita. Purposely sacrificial action, indeed, purposeful action of any kind could not help in this; on the contrary, because such actions were linked with a personal desire for specific results, they merely bound one more firmly to the cycle of death and rebirth. In line with this, the Gita itself defines Yoga as “evenness of mind”, the cultivation of an attitude of non-attachment, based on knowledge of the way things really are, which leads to “skill in actions”, that is, the ability to act without desire.
According to Brahminical orthodoxy, to fulfill one’s duty in one of the three higher estates it was necessary to be a sacrificer, and to be a sacrificer it was necessary to be married and take a full part in the social world, the world of desire and purposeful action. Yet as we have seen, according to the Upanishadic analysis this was not conducive to liberation from rebirth and suffering. Only renunciation of the sacrificial and social world would enable the individual to approach that goal. Brahminical orthodoxy came to terms with this challenge by attempting to institutionalise renunciation as an alternative way of life that one could choose to follow after one had served one’s apprenticeship as a vedic student. This later hardened into a compulsory progression from stage to stage, with renunciation taking place only after one had fulfilled one’s duties as a householder and sacrificer. When the Gita was formulated, however, there was clearly still an element of choice.
In the wider Indian context, neither was it a matter of a simple choice between orthodox Brahmanical renunciation and life as a ritually bound householder. Other routes, other modes of life were also available to those seeking personal liberation, chief among them the heterodox systems of Jainism and Buddhism, with their rival views of what constituted Dharma (correct behaviour in the light of the way things really are). Indeed, it was in these heterodox systems that the doctrine of karma first became fully ethicised as a moral law that was universally applicable, regardless of birth, social status, or occupation. And whether to conform to it or not was a matter for the individual alone to decide.
A cornerstone of this renunciatory morality was that deliberate injury done to other living beings was wrong and had bad karmic consequences for the person doing the injury. This is an ethical stance which provides a direct challenge to Brahminical values for, as we have seen, Brahminical society is divided into four classes or estates, and members of each estate have their own inherent dharma or duty. Persons born into a particular estate conform to the inherent duty of that estate. By doing so they help to maintain the natural order of existence and automatically accrue good results; should they deviate from their inherent duty, however, the results will be bad for them personally and for society as a whole. One of the four estates is that of the warrior or ruler, and it is a warrior’s duty to fight. This is clearly antithetical to the renunciatory ideal of nonviolence. From one perspective, therefore, to refrain from violence will bring bad results, but from the others, to engage in it will be similarly disastrous.
We are brought back to the Gita, for this is precisely Arjuna’s dilemma: to conform to his inherent duty as a warrior and fight, and by doing so slaughter his enemies who are also his kinsmen, or to lay down his arms and disrupt the natural and social order. In other words, the Gita, through Arjuna, addresses the problem of the age: the problem of choice – of how to choose rightly. One of the Gita’s main projects, therefore, is to reconcile or synthesise the discordant ideologies of orthodox Brahminism and renunciation – a discord that is dramatised and personified in the person of Arjuna, who finds himself caught, like Hamlet, between two world views and two sets of values.
The resolution of this conflict is put into the mouth of Krishna, Arjuna’s charioteer, comrade-in-arms, teacher, and, as revealed in the Gita, God omnipotent. Krishna offers the distraught warrior what seems like a tier or nest of solutions. What they have in common is that they are all presented as justifications for fighting – that is to say, for acting in the world, conforming to one’s inherent duty, and perpetuating the socio-religious status quo. From the social perspective this is deeply conservative, although what Krishna is offering in fact is a compromise. He tells Arjuna to act, but to do so without attachment to the results or fruits of his actions. In other words, he must act without desire, and that will ensure that, whatever its immediate physical consequences, the action will have no karmic repercussions for him as the apparent agent of the action. In this way it is possible to experience the soteriological benefits of renunciation without leaving society or abandoning one’s inherent duty. In fact, according to Krishna, this internal renunciation is really the only way one can renounce, for the nature of material existence is such that it is impossible not to act.
Yet, in rejecting the way of the renouncer, Krishna is not thereby necessarily fully endorsing mainstream ritual Brahminism. His prescription to act without attachment to the fruits of action devalues the Brahminical soteriological goal of heaven, which for the orthodox is something to be attained through purposeful ritual. In other words, sacrifice as a means to personal salvation, as opposed to cosmic and social regulation, is rejected by the Gita. Indeed, if one is constrained to act, then the action in itself becomes soteriologically irrelevant: it is one’s accompanying internal attitude that is crucial, whether one acts out of desire or out of duty. From a soteriological as opposed to a social perspective, this is subversive of orthodox values, since it implies that, regardless of gender or class, anyone at all, simply by conforming to their class duty without attachment, can hope for salvation.
At another but related level of justification, Krishna tells Arjuna that what is permanent in the individual, the self, neither acts nor suffers the effects of action, therefore one cannot really kill or be killed. Moreover, unlike embodied beings, Krishna as God is not constrained to act; nevertheless, he does so to maintain the world, and those who are wise will follow his example. Krishna thus has a positive view of the world and the prevailing social order, for he is concerned to maintain it, and indeed intervenes by descending into the world whenever that order is threatened.
Again this is an orthodox Brahminical idea somewhat recast, for the general function of sacrificial ritual is to keep the world from sliding into disorder. There is, however, another reason why Krishna should view the world positively, since by activating his lower or material nature, it is Krishna himself who has brought the universe into being, along with everything else. He is both the source and essence of all things, and the dispassionate observer of his own creation. World renunciation of the kind undertaken by “atheistic” Jains and Buddhists, and orthodox Brahminical renounces (with their predilection for an impersonal monism derived from speculation on the meaning of the sacrifice), seems largely incompatible with monotheism of this type. To renounce the world would be tantamount to renouncing (part of) God. Moreover, Krishna specifically states that he has created not just the material world but the social order as well, the four estates.
The solution to Arjuna’s problem, therefore, is to act without attachment to the results – to fight because it is his inherent duty to fight. But in a modification of this, Krishna instructs the warrior that the results of any action whatsoever should be made over to God (i.e. Krishna). And in that way one will come to God. In terms of the ideology of sacrifice, of which again this is a reformulation, this requires that both the action and its results should be offered as a sacrifice to God. In a Brahminical sacrifice the results accrue to the agent, the patron of the sacrifice, but here the results accrue to God. Whereas Brahminical ideology is anthropocentric, the Gita is theocentric, and in a further tier of the Gita’s teaching it becomes clear that the only real agent, the only real actor with regard to any and every action, is God. Therefore, by making over one’s actions and their karmic consequences to God, one is merely conforming to the way things really are.
In the Gita God and the self, or the essence of the individual, are perhaps still near enough to being identical for God’s agency not yet to be fatal to a sense of human effort and responsibility. Nevertheless, one thing that the spectacular and, for Arjuna, the overwhelming theophany of Chapter 11 makes clear is that God is the only true actor and humans merely the instruments of his action. Sub specie aeternitatis Arjuna’s adversaries have already been destroyed by God: the warrior’s only responsibility, therefore, is to be God’s instrument in bringing about what, from this perspective, has already happened. In other words, it will come about regardless of Arjuna’s intention. Acting with desire and attachment to the results of action is therefore not merely deluded but meaningless.
Where does this leave the person seeking liberation from suffering, or salvation? Krishna has already said that those who make over the results of their actions to God go to Him, and indeed that all actions should be sacrificed to Him. But beyond that, one should make such offerings with devotion to God: “whoever shares in me with single-minded devotion, they are in me and I am in them. No devotee of Krishna’s, regardless of social status or gender, is lost. (Again there is a change in soteriological perspective without the kind of threat to orthodox Brahminical supremacy that external, social renunciation offers.) By thinking on God, by sacrificing one’s actions to Him in a spirit of ego-less non-attachment, one can earn God’s grace, and through that grace one will attain supreme peace. In effect it is possible to please God by conforming to one’s class duty and doing the things one has always done; yet such a strategy can only be soteriologically effective if accompanied by a radical change of attitude towards those same duty-bound actions, so that they come to be regarded not as one’s own but as God’s. The final chapter of the Gita spells this out for us, and adds a new, more personal note – one which in various forms came to dominate the relation between God and human beings in later Hindu religion, although in the context of the Gita as a whole it is almost an afterthought:
Beyond that, listen to my final word, the most secret of all. You have been assuredly singled out by me, so I shall speak it for your benefit. Fix your mind on me, devote yourself to me, sacrifice to me, do homage to me, and so you shall in reality come to me. I promise you: you are dear to me.
The Gita’s solution to Arjuna’s dilemma is to formulate a compromise – a compromise reflected in the situation that obtains when Krishna finishes speaking: everything has changed (internally) and everything remains the same (externally). In terms of the epic narrative, Arguna can now pick up his bow again and the battle can start.
The Narrative Context
At the core of the Mahabharata is the story of the struggle for the kingdom of Bharata (roughly northern India), the world of the original audience for the poem. (Modern India is known by the same name.) The contending parties are cousins, the children of two royal brothers. The elder of the two brothers, Dhritarashtra, has been born blind, so the younger one, Pandu, rules in his stead. Pandu dies, leaving five young sons – Yudhishthira, Bhima, and Arjuna from one wife, and Nakula and Sahadeva from another. Collectively, they are known as the Pandavas, “descendants of Pandu”. Dhritarashtra, who in spite of his blindness has now become king, is the father of a hundred sons, known as the Kauravas, “descendants of Kuru”. The eldest of the Kauravas is Duryodhana.
A simmering rivalry between the cousins, the Pandavas and Kauravas, over the legitimate succession threatens to boil into war. In an attempt to avert this the blind Dhritarashtra divides the kingdom in two, one part to be ruled by Duryodhana, the other by Yudishthira. But this only postpones hostilities, and eventually Duryodhana challenges the virtuous Yudhishthira to a game of dice. Yudhishthira loses everything – not just his kingdom, but his brothers, himself, and their joint wife, Draupadi. The Kauravas brutally humiliate Draupadi, ensuring that the war, when it comes, will be a vengeful one. In what is literally a last throw of the dice, Yudhishthira gambles again. This time the losers are to b exiled to the forest for twelve years and to spend a thirteenth year incognito. Only if these conditions are met in full can they then legitimately return and reclaim their kingdom. Yudhishthira loses again and the Pandavas go into exile.
After many adventures and, in the Mahabharata as we have it, much religious teaching, the Pandavas return after thirteen years to claim what is theirs. Duryodhana, however, refuses to give it up. War can now no longer be averted.
Each side assembles its allies. Among them is Krishna, the king of Dvaraka, who has links with both parties. He therefore gives his armies to fight on the Kaurava side, and goes himself to assist the Pandavas as Arjuna’s charioteer. And this is where the Bhagavad Gita begins. The old blind king, Dhritarashtra, has asked his bard, Sanjaya, to report the events of the war to him, and the Gita constitutes part of his narrative.
The two armies are facing each other. Arjuna, the great warrior, the great archer, is in his chariot, driven by Krishna, and the battle is about to start. Suddenly Arguna is overcome by apparently disabling moral scruples: how can it be right to kill his kinsmen? He avows his intention not to fight and sinks disconsolately into his chariot. This is totally unexpected and all the more shocking because of Arjuna’s heroic martial status. Real time, as is common enough in the epic, then comes to a halt while Krishna addresses the reluctant warrior.
If the way Arjuna is portrayed in the Gita is unexpected in the context of the rest of the Mahabharata, the treatment of Krishna is astonishing. More than an ally or even a teacher (although he is both those), he reveals himself as the universal God. Certainly he has previously demonstrated some miraculous powers, but this revelation is of a different order. Indeed, so overwhelming is it that Arguna finds it not only too much to bear but also apparently too much to remember. What does not fade, however, is the warrior’s renewed determination to fight, inspired by what Krishna has shown and taught him.
The Bhagavad Gita finishes here, at the moment in the epic when total war begins. After eighteen days of carnage, the Pandavas emerge victorious and Yudhishthira becomes king. Later, in his ambiguous hero mould, Krishna is killed in a hunting accident in the forest. The Pandava brothers hand on their hard-won kingdom and set off for the Himalayas in search of the king of the gods’ heaven, but only Yudhishthira, the embodiment of Dharma, reaches it alive. The others, including Arjuna, the troubled warrior of the Gita, perish on the way.