BHAGAVADGITA. — The "Song of the Blessed," is a didactic poem of 700 stanzas, inserted in Book VI of the Mahabharata, chapters 23-40 according to the critical edition of Poona (1945). The decisive battle between the Kauravas and Pandavas for possession of Madhyadesha, which lasted 18 days, is about to begin. Standing on his war chariot, driven by his cousin Krishna, who will later reveal himself as the god Vishnu incarnate, the Pandava hero Arjuna raises his bow to shoot the first arrow, when he is suddenly overcome with dismay at seeing his relatives among the enemy forces. He begs the divine charioteer to stop the chariot in the midst of the two armies, and after observing that fathers and sons, grandfathers and grandsons, relatives and in-laws are arrayed against one another, he lays down his bow and collapses onto his seat, renouncing battle. Krishna consoles him and urges him to fulfill his duty as a soldier, for in fighting one kills only the body, not the soul, which is immortal.
Upon this episode is grafted the philosophical poem, which belongs to a transitional period in which Brahmanic institutions and rites had fallen into disrepute, and salvation was sought not through sacrifice and prayer but through inaction and renunciation of all human interests—family, possessions, celestial joys—in order to attain immediate liberation. This antisocial conception of religious life, which the Bhagavadgita opposes, is already found in the oldest Upanishads, and thus the poem may well date to several centuries before the common era. To Arjuna, who has asked for his counsel (II, 7), the Blessed One, in the guise of Krishna, prescribes a rule of life that may be summarized in this triad: action (karma), knowledge (jnana), and devotion (bhakti). Action must be disinterested and in accordance with one’s duty (II, 47; XVIII, 43). The new ethics proclaimed by the Gita is precisely that of passionless action (karma yoga), which does not bind one to rebirth and is pleasing to God, the creator of castes and their duties. Yet activity must be regulated by knowledge, which culminates in the recognition of the unity of all beings, thereby destroying egoism. This cannot be achieved without a moderate practice of Yoga (q.v.), which is the best means of combating the natural inclination toward incredulity and ignorance. The practice of Yoga leads to love (bhakti) and knowledge of God. Once divine presence is discovered and experienced, the work of one who practices "Yoga in action" becomes conformed to the will of God through the mystical experience attained (XVIII, 55-56). Divine grace is open to all; those of lower castes, and even women, and indeed sinners, attain the supreme goal if they take refuge in the Blessed One. He is a helpful and merciful god; he becomes man and appears in the world in every cosmic age, when virtue declines and injustice triumphs, to save souls that are a part of him (XV, 7). Between one descent into the world and the next, the dharmasastra, the treatise on divine and human laws, serves as a guide for men, to which Arjuna must conform his conduct. Moreover, the Blessed One is always present in the world and pervades and governs it, as the thread does the beads of a necklace (VII, 7). "All this world," he says (IX, 4), "is pervaded by me, assuming an imperceptible form; in me all beings exist, yet I do not dwell in them." "All beings, O son of Kunti (Arjuna), return to my nature at the end of a cosmic age, and at the beginning of an age, I recreate them" (IX, 7).
The god of the Gita is therefore both immanent and transcendent; pantheism and theism are combined in a cosmic conception that may seem absurd to us but not to the Indian mind. The Taittiriya Upanishad (II, 6) states: "He (Brahman), having performed austerities, created all this (universe), whatever it may be. Having created it, he entered into it." Given this premise, the assertions of Vishnu-Krishna—"I am uncreated and eternal, the Lord of all creatures," "the great Ruler of the world," "the origin of all things" (IV, 6; X, 3; 8)—should not surprise us. Before his manifestation, the Blessed One and the Absolute, the cosmic principle, Brahman (q.v.), are one.
The incompatibility, from a European standpoint, of reconciling immanence with transcendence led Professor Garbe to believe that the poem, originally theistic, was reworked in a pantheistic sense around the 2nd century CE. He therefore expunged 170 stanzas that he deemed incompatible with the worship of a personal god. H. Jacobi demonstrated the unfoundedness of this hypothesis, and the foremost Indian scholar of the Gita, Professor Bellvankar, has shown in his learned introduction to the English translation of the poem how the apparent antinomies may be reconciled. Far from being the result of a reworking, the pantheism of the Gita is original, and the rites prescribed by orthodox Brahmanism, while not constituting the highest good, are nonetheless considered means to attain it (XVIII, 5). The poem’s character is conservative: sacrificial rites (yajna), duties of social station (varnashrama), obedience to the precepts of the dharmasastras are the practical elements it continues to recommend and defend. In its doctrinal and theoretical aspect, however, the poem adopts a conciliatory stance, as when it recognizes that both Samkhya and Yoga are equally valid means of salvation. Only atheists are irrevocably condemned to rebirth in demonic forms (XVI, 19-20). As for the coincidences between the Gita and the Gospels, which led Lorinser (1869) to argue that the author of the poem knew and plagiarized the New Testament, these must be regarded as purely coincidental.
Ferdinando Belloni Filippi