The Bhagavad Gita

The Bhagavad Gita, 'the song of the Lord', is a poem of eighteen chapters and about 700 Sanskrit verses set inside the Mahabharata, the enormous epic of the war between two branches of one royal family, the Pandavas and the Kauravas. It fills chapters 23 to 40 of the sixth book, the Bhishma Parva, and takes the form of a conversation. On the field of Kurukshetra, north of today's Delhi, the two armies stand ready. The Pandava hero Arjuna asks his charioteer Krishna, a cousin who is also the god Vishnu in human form, to drive between the lines. There he sees teachers, uncles and friends on the other side, drops his bow and says he will not fight. The blind king Dhritarashtra, father of the Kauravas, hears all of it from his minister Sanjaya, who reports the scene from the palace at Hastinapura.

Krishna's answer fills the rest of the poem. The self, he says, is never born and never dies; weapons cannot cut it, so grief for the body is misplaced. A warrior's own duty, his dharma, is to fight, and it is better to do one's own duty badly than another's well. The way out of Arjuna's trap is to act without clinging to the results: a person has a right to the work, never to its fruits. This is karma yoga, the discipline of action, which Krishna sets beside the discipline of knowledge taught in the Upanishads and above both places bhakti, loving devotion to God. He tells Arjuna that whenever right order decays he is born into the world, age after age, to restore it. In the eleventh chapter Arjuna asks to see Krishna as he really is and is shown the universal form, Vishvarupa, blazing like a thousand suns, with all the warriors of both armies rushing into its mouths; Krishna names himself Time, the destroyer of worlds, and tells Arjuna that the enemy is already slain. Arjuna, terrified, begs him to take back his gentle human shape, and in the last chapter promises to act as he has been told.

No one knows who wrote the Gita or exactly when. The Mahabharata grew between about 400 BCE and 400 CE, and the Gita is one of its later layers. Britannica's Wendy Doniger places it in the first or second century CE; other scholars put it in the second century BCE, so this entry runs from 200 BCE to 200 CE and is marked approximate. Its world is the rise of the worship of Vasudeva-Krishna as the highest god. Around 113 BCE a Greek envoy, Heliodorus from Taxila, set up a pillar to 'Vasudeva, god of gods' at Besnagar in central India and called himself a Bhagavata, a devotee; early in the first century CE an inscription at Mathura, Krishna's city in the legends, records a shrine to the five Vrishni heroes, Vasudeva among them. Hindus class the Gita as smriti, 'what is remembered', not as revealed Veda, yet it became the one Hindu text that nearly everyone knows.

Its later life is a history of readers. The philosopher Shankara (about 700 to 750) wrote the oldest surviving commentary, reading the poem as a teaching of non-dual knowledge; Ramanuja in the eleventh or twelfth century read it as a gospel of devotion to a personal God, and Madhva followed with his own. The Mughal emperor Akbar had the whole Mahabharata turned into Persian as the Razmnama, the 'Book of War', and his nobles had illustrated copies made. In 1785 Charles Wilkins, a merchant of the East India Company who had learnt Sanskrit at Benares, published the first direct English translation in London, with a letter of recommendation from the governor-general Warren Hastings, dated Benares, 4 October 1784, and the Company's authority on the title page. Through Wilkins the Gita reached Europe and America: Emerson read it in 1845 and Thoreau took it to Walden Pond and wrote of bathing his intellect each morning in its 'stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy'.

Gandhi first met the Gita in London in 1888 or 1889, in Edwin Arnold's English verse, when two Theosophist friends asked him to read the Sanskrit with them; it became his daily reading, the book he called his mother, and in 1930 he published his own Gujarati translation, Anasaktiyoga, 'the yoga of non-attachment', and wrote a letter on each chapter from Yeravda prison. J. Robert Oppenheimer learnt Sanskrit at Berkeley from Arthur Ryder in the 1930s, and in a 1965 NBC documentary recalled that the first atomic explosion at Trinity in 1945 had brought the eleventh chapter to his mind: 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' Printed by the million in Gorakhpur, sworn on in Indian courts, carved at Angkor and chanted at Kurukshetra, the Gita remains the shortest way into Hindu thought, and the question it begins with, what a decent person should do when every choice costs something, has not aged.