Bhagavad Gita
भगवद्गीता
Bhagavad Gita's revelation:
Krishna tells the Gita to Arjuna xxxxxxxx century BCE, forms part of the epic poem Mahabharata.
The Gita is a synthesis of various strands of Indian religious thought, including the Vedic concept of dharma (duty, rightful action); Sankhya-based yoga and jnana (knowledge); and bhakti (devotion).
Among the Hindu traditions, the Gita holds a unique pan-Hindu influence as the most prominent sacred text and is a central text in the Vedanta and Vaishnava traditions.
While traditionally attributed to the sage Veda Vyasa, the Gita is historiographically regarded as a composite work by multiple authors.Incorporating teachings from the Upanishads and the samkhya yoga philosophy, the Gita is set in a narrative framework of dialogue between the Pandava prince Arjuna and his charioteer guide Krishna, an avatar of Vishnu, at the onset of the Kurukshetra War.
Though the Gita praises the benefits of yoga in releasing man's inner essence from the bounds of desire and the wheel of rebirth,the text propagates the Brahmanic idea of living according to one's duty or dharma, in contrast to the ascetic ideal of seeking liberation by avoiding all karma.
Facing the perils of war, Arjuna hesitates to perform his duty (dharma) as a warrior. Krishna persuades him to commence in battle, arguing that while following one's dharma, one should not consider oneself to be the agent of action, but attribute all of one's actions to God (bhakti)
The Gita posits the existence of an individual self (mind/ego) and the higher Godself (Krishna, Atman/Brahman) in every being;[c] the Krishna–Arjuna dialogue has been interpreted as a metaphor for an everlasting dialogue between the two.
In the Gita's Chapter XIII, verses 24–25, four pathways to self-realization are described, which later became known as the four yogas: meditation (raja yoga), insight and intuition (jnana yoga), righteous action (karma yoga), and loving devotion (bhakti yoga).
dating
A manuscript illustration of the battle of Kurukshetra, fought between the Kauravas and the Pandavas, recorded in the Mahabharata. c. 1700 – c. 1800 CE
Winthrop Sargeant linguistically categorizes the Bhagavad Gita as Epic-Puranic Sanskrit, a language that succeeds Vedic Sanskrit and precedes classical Sanskrit. This suggests that the text was composed after the Pāṇini era, but before classical Sanskrit became the norm. This would date the text as transmitted by the oral tradition to the later centuries of the 1st-millennium BCE, and the first written version probably to the 2nd or 3rd century CE.
Kashi Nath Upadhyaya dates it a bit earlier, but after the rise of Buddhism, as the Mahabharata contains references to the Buddha and Buddhist references. He states that the Gita was always a part of the Mahabharata and that dating the latter suffices in dating the Gita. Based on the estimated dates of the Mahabharata as evidenced by exact quotes of it in the Buddhist literature by Asvaghosa (c. 100 CE), Upadhyaya states that the Mahabharata, and therefore the Gita, must have been well known by then for a Buddhist to be quoting it.
Authorship
In the Indian tradition, the Bhagavad Gita, as well as the epic Mahabharata of which it is a part, is attributed to the sage Vyasa, also known as Krishna Dvaipayana and as Veda-Vyasa.A Hindu legend narrates that Vyasa composed it, and Ganesha, who broke one of his tusks, used this tusk to write down the Mahabharata along with the Bhagavad Gita.
Scholars consider Vyasa to be a mythical or symbolic author, in part because Vyasa is also a title or generic name for the compiler of a text, and Vyasa is also regarded by tradition as the compiler of the Vedas and the Puranas, texts dated with a time-difference of circa two millennia.
According to Alexus McLeod, a scholar of Philosophy and Asian Studies, it is "impossible to link the Bhagavad Gita to a single author", and it may be the work of many authors. This view is shared by the Indologist Arthur Basham, who states that there were three or more authors or compilers of Bhagavad Gita. This is evidenced by the discontinuous intermixing of philosophical verses with theistic or passionately theistic verses, according to Basham
J. A. B. van Buitenen, an Indologist known for his translations and scholarship on Mahabharata, finds that the Gita is so contextually and philosophically well-knit within the Mahabharata that it was not an independent text that "somehow wandered into the epic".The Gita, states van Buitenen, was conceived and developed by the Mahabharata authors to "bring to a climax and solution the dharmic dilemma of a war".
Vāsudeva-Krishna roots
According to Dennis Hudson, there is an overlap between Vedic and Tantric rituals within the teachings found in the Bhagavad Gita.[46] Dennis Hudson places the Pancaratra Agama in the last three or four centuries of 1st-millennium BCE, and proposes that both the tantric and vedic, the Agama and the Gita share the same Vāsudeva-Krishna roots.
According to Hudson, a story in this Vedic text highlights the meaning of the name Vāsudeva as the 'shining one (deva) who dwells (Vasu) in all things and in whom all things dwell', and the meaning of Vishnu to be the 'pervading actor'. In the Bhagavad Gita, similarly, 'Krishna identified himself both with Vāsudeva, Vishnu and their meanings'. The ideas at the centre of Vedic rituals in Shatapatha Brahmana and the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita revolve around this absolute Person, the primordial genderless absolute, which is the same as the goal of Pancaratra Agama and Tantra.
The Bhagavad Gita manuscript is found in the sixth book of the Mahabharata manuscripts – the Bhisma-parvan. Therein, in the third section, the Gita forms chapters 23–40, that is 6.3.23 to 6.3.40.[51] The Bhagavad Gita is often preserved and studied on its own, as an independent text with its chapters renumbered from 1 to 18.
Adi Shankara, in his 8th-century commentary, explicitly states that the Gita has 700 verses, which was likely a deliberate declaration to prevent further insertions and changes to the Gita. Since Shankara's time, "700 verses" has been the standard benchmark for the critical edition of the Bhagavad Gita.
Chapters and content
The original Bhagavad Gita has no chapter titles. Some Sanskrit editions that separate the Gita from the epic as an independent text, as well as translators, however, add chapter titles. For example, Swami Chidbhavananda describes each of the eighteen chapters as a separate yoga because each chapter, like yoga, "trains the body and the mind". He labels the first chapter "Arjuna Vishada Yogam" or the "Yoga of Arjuna's Dejection".Sir Edwin Arnold titled this chapter in his 1885 translation as "The Distress of Arjuna".
The chapters are:
Chapter Name of Chapter Total Verses
1 Arjuna Vishada Yoga 47
2 Samkhya Yoga 72
3 Karma Yoga 43
4 Jnana Karma Sanyasa Yoga 42
5 Karma Sanyasa Yoga 29
6 Atma Samyama Yoga 47
7 Jnana Vijnana Yoga 30
8 Akshara Brahma Yoga 28
9 Raja Vidya Raja Guhya Yoga 34
10 Vibhuti Yoga 42
11 Vishvarupa Darshana Yoga 55
12 Bhakti Yoga 20
13 Kshetra Kshetrajna Vibhaga Yoga 35
14 Gunatraya Vibhaga Yoga 27
15 Purushottama Yoga 20
16 Daivasura Sampad Vibhaga Yoga 24
17 Shraddha Traya Vibhaga Yoga 28
18 Moksha Sanyasa Yoga 78
Total 701