Bhagavad Gita: The Ancient Hindu Scripture and Its Origins

The Bhagavad Gita, the “Song of the Lord”, is a Sanskrit poem of 700 verses in which the god Krishna instructs the warrior prince Arjuna on the eve of a great battle. Embedded in the Mahabharata epic and composed in northern India most likely between the 5th and 2nd centuries BC, it is one of the central scriptures of Hinduism. Over the past two centuries it has also become one of the most translated and discussed religious texts in the world.

Setting and structure

The Gita occupies 18 chapters of the Bhishma Parva, the sixth of the 18 books of the Mahabharata. The epic tells of a long struggle for the throne of Hastinapura between two branches of a royal family, the five Pandava brothers and their cousins, the Kauravas. Both sides gather vast armies on the plain of Kurukshetra, north of modern Delhi.

The poem is framed as a report. Sanjaya, an adviser gifted with divine sight, describes what he sees on the battlefield to the blind Kaurava king Dhritarashtra. The Gita opens with the king’s question about what his sons and the Pandavas did when they assembled at Kurukshetra.

Most of the text is a dialogue between Arjuna, the third Pandava brother and the finest archer of his age, and Krishna, his friend and charioteer. Krishna is a prince of the Yadava clan and, as the poem gradually reveals, an incarnation of the supreme god Vishnu. The verses are mainly in the shloka metre, the standard metre of Sanskrit epic.

The dialogue

In the first chapter, Arjuna asks Krishna to drive his chariot between the two armies. Seeing his teachers, cousins and friends in the opposing ranks, he is overcome with grief. He lets his bow slip from his hand and says he would rather be killed than kill his own kin for a kingdom.

Krishna’s reply fills the remaining 17 chapters. He first tells Arjuna that the true self, the atman, is eternal and cannot be killed; only bodies die. He then reminds him of his dharma, his duty as a member of the warrior class, which is to fight a righteous war.

From this starting point the teaching widens into a broad account of how to live and how to reach liberation, called moksha. In chapter 11 Krishna grants Arjuna divine eyes and reveals his universal form, a terrifying vision of the whole cosmos, all the gods and all time within his body. Arjuna, awed, accepts Krishna as the supreme lord. At the end of the poem, his doubts resolved, he takes up his bow again.

Key ideas

The Gita brings together several strands of Indian thought that had developed in the Upanishads and in the philosophical schools of Samkhya and Yoga. Its best-known idea is karma yoga, the discipline of action. Krishna teaches that a person has a right to act but not to the fruits of action. One should therefore do one’s duty without desire for reward or fear of failure, offering every act to God.

Alongside this, the poem describes jnana yoga, the path of knowledge, in which one realises the true nature of the self, and bhakti yoga, the path of loving devotion to a personal god. Bhakti is given special emphasis in the later chapters, where Krishna promises that those who devote themselves to him with love will reach him.

The Gita also discusses the three gunas, or qualities of nature: sattva (purity and clarity), rajas (passion and activity) and tamas (inertia and darkness). It explains how they shape character, diet, worship and action. Its idea that God takes form in the world whenever righteousness declines, to protect the good and restore dharma, became central to the Hindu doctrine of avatars.

Dating and authorship

Hindu tradition attributes the Mahabharata, including the Gita, to the sage Vyasa, who is also a character in the epic. The epic itself grew over many centuries, perhaps from around the 4th century BC to the 4th century AD, absorbing new material as it was recited.

The date of the Gita is debated. Its language and ideas presuppose the older Upanishads and the early Samkhya philosophy, which suggests it is later than about the 5th century BC. Most scholars place its composition between about the 5th and 2nd centuries BC; many favour the 2nd century BC, and some argue that it reached its final form only in the early centuries AD.

Scholars also disagree on whether it was composed as a single work. Some, such as the German Indologist Richard Garbe, argued for several layers, with devotional passages added to an older philosophical core. Others stress its unity of purpose. There is no reliable evidence for the date of the war it describes, which Indian tradition places in the distant past.

Place in Hindu scripture

Hindu tradition divides sacred texts into shruti, “what is heard”, meaning the Vedas and Upanishads regarded as revealed, and smriti, “what is remembered”, which includes the epics and law books. As part of the Mahabharata, the Gita is formally smriti. In practice, however, it has often been treated with the authority of revelation, and it is sometimes called the “Gita Upanishad”.

In the Vedanta schools of philosophy it became one of three foundational texts, known together as the prasthanatrayi: the principal Upanishads, the Brahma Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita. A teacher who wished to found or defend a school was expected to write commentaries on all three. This is why so many of the great Indian philosophers wrote on the Gita, and why its short verses carry such a heavy weight of interpretation.

Within the epic, the Gita is followed by the 18-day battle of Kurukshetra, which ends in the victory of the Pandavas at a terrible cost to both sides.

Commentaries and translations

The Gita’s influence grew through commentary. The earliest surviving full commentary is by Shankara, the 8th-century teacher of Advaita Vedanta, who read it as a guide to non-dual knowledge of the self. Ramanuja in the 11th–12th century and Madhva in the 13th century wrote commentaries emphasising devotion to a personal god. In 1290 the poet-saint Jnaneshwar composed the Dnyaneshwari, a celebrated verse commentary in Marathi.

The poem reached Europe in 1785, when Charles Wilkins, an official of the East India Company, published the first English translation in London. The governor-general Warren Hastings wrote its preface. August Wilhelm von Schlegel published a Latin translation in 1823, and the Prussian scholar Wilhelm von Humboldt praised the poem warmly. In the United States, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau read it closely. Edwin Arnold’s verse translation, The Song Celestial, appeared in 1885.

Modern influence

In the 19th and 20th centuries the Gita became a key text of Hindu reform and Indian nationalism. Swami Vivekananda drew on it in his teaching, and the nationalist leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak wrote a major commentary, the Gita Rahasya, while imprisoned at Mandalay, publishing it in 1915 as a call to selfless action.

Mohandas Gandhi read the Gita every day and described it as a spiritual guide for his life. He interpreted its battle allegorically, as the struggle between good and evil within each person, and found in it support for non-violent action without attachment to results. Sri Aurobindo, the philosopher and former revolutionary, also wrote extensively on it.

Its fame in the West was sealed by an episode of the atomic age. In a 1965 television documentary, the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer recalled that after the first nuclear test in July 1945 he had thought of the line “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”, his rendering of chapter 11, verse 32. Today the Gita is published in hundreds of translations, and its birthday, Gita Jayanti, is celebrated in the month of Margashirsha (November–December).

Myths and facts

The Gita is sometimes presented as a separate book written by a single author at a known date. In fact it is part of the Mahabharata, its author is unknown and its date can only be estimated. Claims that it records a war that can be dated precisely by astronomy are not accepted by mainstream historians.

It is also sometimes said to glorify war. Its setting is a battle and Krishna urges Arjuna to fight, but the text is mainly concerned with duty, the self and devotion. Commentators from Shankara to Gandhi have read its battlefield in very different ways, some literally and some as an allegory of moral struggle.

Timeline

• c. 5th century BC: Earlier Upanishads and Samkhya ideas that the Gita draws on are taking shape.
• c. 5th–2nd century BC: Probable period of the Gita’s composition, within the growing Mahabharata.
• c. 4th century AD: The Mahabharata reaches roughly its final form.
• c. 8th century AD: Shankara writes the earliest surviving full commentary.
• 1290: Jnaneshwar completes the Dnyaneshwari in Marathi.
• 1785: Charles Wilkins publishes the first English translation in London.
• 1915: Tilak publishes the Gita Rahasya.
• 1965: Oppenheimer recalls verse 11.32 in a television interview.

Why it matters

The Bhagavad Gita condenses many of the central ideas of Hindu thought, duty, the immortal self, selfless action and devotion, into a short and dramatic poem. It has guided philosophers, saints, reformers and ordinary readers for more than two thousand years. Through translation it has also become part of world literature, read far beyond the tradition that produced it.