Text · Sanskrit philosophical dialogue
Bhagavad Gita
/ˌbʱɐɡɐʋɐd ˈɡiːtaː/
Also known as Bhagavad Gītā, Bhagavadgītā, Gītā, Gita, Shrimad Bhagavad Gita, Srimad Bhagavad Gita
A dialogue of 700 verses in eighteen chapters set inside the Bhishma Parva of the Mahabharata, in which Krishna, as charioteer, persuades a hesitating Arjuna to fight at the start of the Kurukshetra war. It fuses dharma, Samkhya-based yoga and knowledge, and devotion, and every chapter colophon calls it an Upanishad. Some 227 commentaries survive in Sanskrit alone, and modern readers from Tilak to Gandhi turned a battlefield text into a manual for political action.
- Date
- -200–-1
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered
Worth knowing
The first English translation, by Charles Wilkins in 1785, carried an introduction by Warren Hastings and was soon put into French, German and Russian. In April 2025 a Gita manuscript was added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register.
Traditionally ascribed to Vyasa, it is regarded by historians as a composite work. It is generally dated to the second or first century BCE, but estimates run from 400–500 BCE to the 1st century CE, 200 BCE may mark a major revision, and Heather Elgood gives 300 BCE–300 CE; any date depends on the uncertain dating of the Mahabharata.
Connections (5)
- InfluencedUpanishads
The Gita draws on the Upanishads and parallels many of their verses, and every chapter closes with the colophon 'in the Gita-Upanishads', which is why the word Gita is feminine, agreeing with upanishad. Patrick Olivelle counts the theistic verse Upanishads, the Katha, Isha and Shvetashvatara among them, as the earliest products of the tradition whose later literature includes the Gita. With the Brahmasutra the two form the Prasthanatrayi, the three sources every Vedanta school must interpret.
- Scriptural inclusion inMahabharata
The Gita's eighteen chapters and 700 verses sit in the Bhishma Parva of the Mahabharata, numbered 6.25–42 or 6.23–40 depending on the recension, at the moment the two armies face each other. J. A. B. van Buitenen judged it too well knit into the epic to have wandered in from outside, and Malinar ties Arjuna's crisis to the debates on war and peace in the Udyoga Parva. Any date for the Gita therefore depends on the uncertain date of the epic.
- Traditional linkJyotisar, Kurukshetra
Hindu tradition places the delivery of the Gita at Jyotisar in Kurukshetra, beneath a banyan; a tree on a raised plinth there is held to be an offshoot of the original. The site's authority goes back to Adi Shankara, who in the eighth century identified Jyotisar as the exact spot. The text itself names only the battlefield, calling Kurukshetra the field of dharma in its first verse, and the pilgrimage site fixes that field to a single tree.
- Commented onDnyaneshwar
Dnyaneshwar's Dnyaneshwari of 1290, also called the Bhavarthadipika, is a Marathi commentary on the Gita and the oldest surviving literary work in Marathi. Written by a poet of the Nath yogi tradition, it reads the Gita through Advaita Vedanta and insists that devotion with inner renunciation matters, not whether God is called Krishna or Shiva. Of the hundreds of commentaries on the Gita, 227 of them in Sanskrit alone, this one became a foundation of the Varkari tradition of Eknath and Tukaram.
- InfluencedMohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Gandhi called the Gita his 'spiritual dictionary' and the gospel of selfless action, and named its philosophy anasakti yoga. In Yeravada jail in 1929 he wrote a Gujarati commentary on it, which Mahadev Desai translated into English and published with Gandhi's foreword in 1946. He read the battle as an allegory, the battlefield as the soul, and credited the text with his commitment to ahimsa: a pacifist reading of a dialogue written to persuade a warrior to fight.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Bhagavad Gita". Richard H. Davis, The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography (2014).
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