Bhagavadgītā

BHAGAVADGĪTĀ. - The "Song of the Blessed One" is a didactic poem of 700 stanzas, inserted in Book VI of the Mahābhārata, chaps. 23-40 according to the critical edition of Poona (1945). The decisive battle between the Kurus and the Pandus for the possession of Madhyadēśa, lasting 18 days, is about to begin. Standing on his battle chariot, driven by his cousin Kṛṣṇa, who will later reveal himself as the god Viṣṇu made man, the Pandu hero Arjuna has raised his bow to shoot the first arrow, when he is suddenly seized with dismay at seeing his relatives among the adversaries. He begs the divine charioteer to halt the chariot between the two armies, and after having observed that fathers and sons, grandfathers and grandsons, relatives and kinsmen, are arrayed one against the other, he lets the bow fall and sinks back onto the seat, renouncing the fight. Kṛṣṇa consoles him and urges him to fulfill his duty as a soldier, because by fighting one kills bodies, not souls, which are immortal.

Upon this episode the philosophical poem is grafted, belonging to a period of transition: in which the Brahmanic institutions and rites had fallen into discredit, and salvation was sought no longer in sacrifice and prayer, but in inaction and the renunciation of every human interest: family, possessions, heavenly joys, in order to attain identification with the Ātman (v.) through ecstatic contemplation. This antisocial conception of religious life, to which the (Bhagavad)-gītā opposes itself, already belongs to the most ancient Upaniṣads, and yet the poem could also be earlier by some centuries than the common era. To Arjuna, who had asked him for counsel (II, 7), the Blessed One, in the figure of Kṛṣṇa, prescribes a rule of life, which is summed up in this triad: work (karman), knowledge (jñāna) and devotion (bhahti). Action must be disinterested and conformable to one's own duty (II, 47; XVIII, 43). The new ethics that the Gītā proclaims is precisely that of dispassionate action (karmayoga) which does not bind one to rebirth and is acceptable to God, creator of the castes and of their duties. But activity must be regulated by knowledge that culminates in the recognition of the unity of all beings, destroying egoism. This is not reached without a moderate exercise of Yoga (v.), which is the best means of combating the natural inclination to unbelief and ignorance. The practice of Yoga leads to love (bhahti) and to the knowledge of God. Once the divine presence has been discovered and experienced, the work of one who practices "Yoga in action" becomes conformable to the will of God by virtue of the mystical experience attained (XVIII, 55-56). Divine grace is open to all; those belonging to lower and lowest castes, women, even sinners attain the supreme goal if they seek refuge in the Blessed One. Who 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 the souls that are a particle of him (XV, 7). Between one descent into the world and another, the dharmaśāstra, the treatise of 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 penetrates and governs all things as the thread does the pearls of a necklace (VII, 7). "All this world - he says (IX, 4) - is pervaded by me who have assumed an imperceptible form; in me all beings stand, but I do not stand in them." "All beings, O son of Kundi (Arjuna), return into my nature at the end of a cosmic age, and at the beginning of an age, I create them again (IX, 7)." The god of the Gītā is therefore immanent and transcendent; pantheism and theism are found associated in a cosmic conception, absurd for us, but not for the Indian mind. Says the Taittirīya-upaniṣad, II, 6: "He (Brahman), having performed penance, created all this (universe), whatever it is. After having created it, he entered into it." This premised, the assertions of Viṣṇu-Kṛṣṇa: I am "uncreated and eternal, the Lord of all creatures," "the great Ruler of the world," "the origin of every thing" (IV, 6; X, 3; 8), must not surprise us. Before his manifestation, the Blessed One and the Absolute, the cosmic Principle, the Brahman (v.).

The incompatibility, from the European point of view, of reconciling immanence with transcendence, induced Prof. Garbe to think that the poem, originally theistic, was reworked in a pantheistic sense, around the 2nd century A.D. He therefore expunged all the stanzas, 170, that he judged incompatible with the cult of a personal god. H. Jacobi demonstrated the groundlessness of this hypothesis, and the best Indian connoisseur of the Gītā, Prof. Belvalkar, has indicated in his learned and profound introduction to the English version of the poem, how the apparent antinomies can be reconciled. Far from being the fruit of a reworking, the pantheism of the Gītā is original, and the rites prescribed by orthodox Brahmanism, if they do not constitute the summum bonum, are nevertheless considered means of attaining it (XVIII, 5). The character of the poem is conservative: sacrificial rite (yajña), duties of the social state (varṇāśrama), obedience to the precepts of the dharmaśāstra, are the practical part that it continues to recommend and defend. In the doctrinal and theoretical part, the poem instead assumes a conciliatory attitude, as when it recognizes that both the Sāṃkhya and the Yoga are equally valid means of salvation. Only atheists are irremissibly condemned to be reborn under diabolical forms (XVI, 19-20). As for the coincidences between the Gītā and the Gospels, which induced Lorinser (1869) to maintain that the author of the poem had known and plagiarized the New Testament, they must be considered purely accidental.

Ferdinando Belloni Filippi