- Length
- 176 pagesJohnson, Oxford World's Classics, 1994
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Bhagavad Gita
A conversation lasting a few minutes, between two men in a chariot, in the gap between two armies about to destroy each other. It is the most read philosophical text in the world, it has been used to justify withdrawal from the world and armed struggle in it, and both readings are in the poem.
- Date
- c. 200 BC - 200 AD
- Attributed to
- unknown; set within the Mahabharata
- Region
- Northern India
- Language
- Sanskrit
- 1785 English, Charles Wilkins The first substantial direct translation from Sanskrit into English Attested
- 1885 English, Edwin Arnold Verse; the version Gandhi first read Attested
- 1994 English, W. J. Johnson Current scholarly standard; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Answered — Drew a named later reply, but was not itself a reply
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Dialogue — Argument staged between speakers
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
More commented on than any other Indian text: every major school produced a reading of it, and the modern political uses are a continuation of that rather than a departure.
What the book says
Seven hundred verses in eighteen chapters, set in the pause before a battle. Arjuna, the finest archer of his generation, has his chariot driven into the empty ground between two armies to look at what he is about to do, and sees his cousins, teachers and elders drawn up on the other side. He puts down his bow and says he will not fight. The rest is his charioteer's answer. Krishna begins with the argument that what is really Arjuna is not born and does not die, so nothing that matters is destroyed in battle. He moves to duty: Arjuna is a warrior and the action belongs to him, and abandoning it is not renunciation but evasion. Then comes the doctrine the book is known for - that one has a right to the action but never to its fruits, and that acting without attachment to the outcome is what makes action free rather than binding. Later chapters set out three paths that turn out to be one: disciplined action, disciplined knowledge, and devotion. In the eleventh chapter Arjuna asks to see Krishna as he really is and is shown something he immediately begs to have withdrawn. At the end he takes up the bow.
What it argues
That the problem is not action but attachment to what action produces. Arjuna's refusal looks like moral seriousness and Krishna treats it as a failure of nerve dressed as one: the consequences he fears are not his to control, and arranging his conduct around them is both futile and a kind of self-importance. What is in his power is to do what is his to do, well, and without claiming the result. Around this sits a metaphysics in which the self is untouched by what happens to bodies, and a theology in which the discipline is completed by devotion to a personal god who is also the ground of everything.
What answered it
Shankara, and then everyone. His commentary reads the poem as teaching that liberation comes through knowledge and that action prepares the ground; Ramanuja's answers it by reading the same text as teaching devotion; Madhva reads it as teaching difference. In the twentieth century the argument became political. Tilak read it as a call to action against colonial rule; Gandhi read the battlefield as an allegory of the struggle within a person and made the poem central to a doctrine of nonviolence; Ambedkar read it as a defence of caste duty written to justify a social order, and said so bluntly.
How it argues
By taking the objection seriously and answering it several times over. Krishna does not give one argument; he gives a sequence, and the poem lets Arjuna keep asking, saying at one point that the teaching is confusing him with apparently contradictory advice. The three paths are presented in turn and then folded together, which is either a synthesis or an unresolved tension depending on the commentator. The setting does philosophical work too: a doctrine about acting without attachment stated in a monastery would mean something different from the same doctrine stated to a man holding a bow.
The moment
The setting is a dynastic war between cousins; the composition belongs to a period when the older sacrificial religion, the renouncer traditions that rejected it, and the emerging devotional cults were all live options. The poem's achievement is to hold them together. It grants the renouncer's point that attachment binds, and then denies the conclusion that one should therefore withdraw - which is a direct response to the Buddhist and Jain movements that had made withdrawal respectable, and a defence of ordinary duty against them.
How it travelled
Continuously in India and early to Europe. Charles Wilkins' English version of 1785, published with a preface by Warren Hastings, was the first substantial work translated directly from Sanskrit into a European language, and it reached the New England transcendentalists within decades - Emerson and Thoreau both read it and both said so. The poem's later travel has been unusual: it is the Indian text most likely to be found in a Western house, and its circulation owes as much to twentieth-century devotional movements as to scholarship.
The strongest objection
Ambedkar's, and it is not easily answered. The poem tells a man that his duty is fixed by the class he was born into, that performing it is better than performing another's well, and that the deaths that follow do not touch what really matters. Whatever else it is doing, it is supplying a defence of a hereditary social order at the moment that order was under pressure, and the metaphysics of the untouched self makes the human cost of that order weightless. Gandhi's allegorical reading avoids this by declining to take the battlefield literally, which is a solution the text itself does not offer.
Why read it
Because it is short, direct and about a problem everyone has - what to do when every available course is bad - and because it is one of the very few philosophical works that is also a scene. Read it with the objection in mind rather than in a devotional register, and read a translation with notes: the key terms carry three meanings each and English gives you one.
- First printed
- 1808
- First in English
- 1785
- Digitised
- Yes
The text is unusually stable, with few significant variants across an enormous manuscript tradition. It is printed both within the Mahabharata and, far more often, alone.
Charles Wilkins' 1785 English is public domain, as are Edwin Arnold's verse version of 1885 and Besant's. Johnson, Zaehner and Miller are in copyright. There are more English translations of this text than of any other work of Indian literature.
Where it stands
Live, and contested rather than settled. It is a working religious text for hundreds of millions of people, a standard object of academic study, and a document whose political readings remain a live argument in India.
On quoting this book
The Sanskrit is public domain and several old English versions are too, but the famous lines are famous in translations that are either in copyright or Victorian paraphrase. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether the poem was composed for the Mahabharata or inserted into it is disputed, as is its date across a range of four centuries. Whether the three paths are a unity or an unresolved layering of positions from different periods is the standing scholarly question. Every major interpretation is contested by another equally traditional one. And the tradition's own account, which places the conversation in a former age and treats the text as revealed, is set here beside the historical account without either being adjudicated.