Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, was the prominent figure in the freedom struggle in India from the British rule. He is also known as the 'The Father of the Nation', in India. The author has written a number of books and some of them include Character & Nation Building, India of My Dreams, and All Men are Brothers. The author was born on the 2nd of October, 1869, in Porbandar, Gujarat. In the year 1942, he played a key role in launching the Quit India movement, which was intended at forcing the British to leave the nation. As a result of launching this movement, he was thrown in prison and remained there for several years, due to other political offenses allegedly committed by him. At all times, he practised satyagraha, which is the teaching of non-violence. As the British rule ended, he was saddened by India's partition, and tried his best to bring peace among the Sikhs and Muslims. On the 30th of January, 1948, Mahatma Gandhi was shot dead by a Hindu nationalist, for allegedly being highly concerned about the nation's Muslim population.

My Submission

I. Preliminary

I fear that it is an act of supererogation on my part to append a long supplementary introduction and fairly profuse notes to this translation of Gandhiji’s Anasaktiyoga, because I know that the brief introduction by Gandhiji, written in his usual succinct and direct manner, leaves nothing to be desired so far as the central message of the Gita is concerned, and his brief notes are enough for the purpose. But, for several reasons I have thought it necessary to add both to his introduction and his notes. For one tiling, the Anasaktiyoga was written mainly for the Gujarati reading public, and especially the unsophisticated and even unlettered section of that public. Secondly, he wanted the book to be made available to the poorest in the country and, therefore, as small in size and as cheap as possible. These two ends necessarily limited the scope both of Gandhiji’s introduction and notes. He studiously avoided all things that would make the little book in any way difficult for the unlettered reader, and deliberately kept out of his regard the studious or the curious who would need help or enlightenment on certain points in which the readers he had in view would not be interested. Thus, for instance, there is not one mention of even the word Upanishad in any one of his notes, or even in his introduction, not to speak of any points of interest to the scholar or to the student: for instance, the question of the date of the Gita, the text of the Gita, the question of the Krishna Vasudeva cult. His chief concern were his readers and the message he read in the Gita. Not only was his scope limited, but he disowns all claim to scholarship, and thinks that some of the subjects over which keen controversy has raged have no intimate bearing on the message of the Gita. Above all, he has, as everyone knows, too keen a sense of his limitations to be deflected out of the scope he sets to himself.

But this translation of his translation of the Gita is meant for a different, if not also a larger public. I hope and expect that a large number of English-knowing youths in India will like to have Gandhiji’s interpretation of the Gita. I also feel that many outside India who are interested in a study of Gandhiji’s life and thought may care to go in for this book. Furthermore, I have an impression that the bulk of the readers of the book will be students. It is with the needs of this public in view that I have appended additional notes to the shlokas (verses) and propose, by means of this “Submission” to cover a number of points that could not be dealt with in the notes, and were outside the scope of Gandhiji’s book. Let me make it clear that I lay no more claim to scholarship than does Gandhiji, but I am myself a student—as I hope to remain until my dying day—and it is out of my sympathy for the needs of people of my kind that I have presumed to introduce this additional matter. I found that in the very nature of things some explanatory notes were necessary in a translation into a foreign language of a translation in an Indian language of a great Sanskrit work of philosophy and ethics; and as I read Gandhiji’s translation over and over again I felt that certain doubts and difficulties that troubled me were likely to trouble other minds too, and that I should offer what explanation I could about them. In doing so I have steered clear of all matters of purely scholastic interest, but have referred again and again to the sources—the Upanishads which the Divine Cowherd is said to have turned into cows to draw the nectar-like milk of the Gita. I have also ventured to draw parallels from the Bible and the Koran and the words of great seers who drew their inspiration from those great books, in order to show how, in the deepest things of life, the Hindu and the Musalman and die Christian, the Indian and the European, in fact all who cared and endeavoured to read the truth of things, are so spiritually akin. This I thought would help, in however small a measure, to contribute to that “free sharing among religions which no longer stand in uncontaminated isolation”, to the need of which Dr Radhakrishnan, that great interpreter of Hindu life and thought, has called attention in his East and West in Religion. Not that I went out of my way to hunt for those parallels, but I took them just as they came in the course of my quiet reading in my prison cell.

II. Date, Text, Author etc.

Let me warn the reader against expecting in this “Submission” a discussion of certain things usually discussed in such books. I have avoided them for precisely the same reason that Gandhiji would avoid them, even if he were writing for English-knowing readers. I would like to note, however, the results of research of scholars on certain points and my view regarding the bearing of some of them on the message of the Gita.

1. The first is the question of the date of the Gita. Whilst I have no fresh contribution to make on the subject, let me briefly record the results of the researches to date. Mr Hill thinks that the theory of a Christian influence to be traced in the Gita is “now almost universally discredited”, and that “the internal evidence points to the second century B. G. as the period when the Gita in its present form appeared”. This is the most conservative estimate. Dr Radhakrishnan summarizes the evidence on the point thus: “We shall not, I believe, be far wrong if we assign the Gita to the fifth century B.C.”, “though if the references in the Dharma Sutras are regarded as interpolated texts, then the Gita may be assigned to the third or the second century B.C.” Lokamanya Tilak has cited considerable evidence-7-that of Pali texts and other —to prove that the Gita existed before, and exercised considerable influence on, the growth of Mahayana Buddhism, and he has no doubt that the present text of the Gita must be assigned to the fifth century B.C.

2. The second is the question of the text of the Gita. There seems to be no doubt in the mind of the scholars that the present text of the Gita is a redaction of a much earlier original. The question about the scope of this earlier original must remain unsolved until something like a “Code Sinaiticus” for the Gita is discovered. One may, however, say that, even when this original is discovered, it will not make much difference to souls like Gandhiji, every moment of whose life is a conscious effort to live the message of the Gita. This does not mean that Gandhiji is indifferent to the efforts of scholars in this direction. The smallest questions of historical detail interest him intensely as I can say from personal knowledge. In the quiet of the Yeravda Central Prison I have seen him spending hours discussing a reading or text. But his attitude is that in the last analysis it is the message that abides, and he is sure that no textual discovery is going to affect by a jot the essence or universality of the message.

3. The same thing may be said about questions of the historical Krishna and the genesis and history of the Krishna Vasudeva worship, i.e. the Bhagawat Dharma. While no labour and time spent on research in this connection would be ill-spent, for Gandhiji the quest of a historical Krishna has an entirely different meaning. As one may see from his intensely deep little introduction, he has already found Him, no matter whether the scholars prove him to be an inspired cowherd or an inspired charioteer driving Arjuna to victory. Substitute for “Christ” the” word “Krishna” in those beautiful words of Albert Schweitzer and you find Gandhiji’s attitude described to the minutest precision: “Christ comes to us as one Unknown, without a name, just as by the lake side He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same words, ‘Follow thou Me’, and sets to us those tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands,, and to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and as an ineffable mystery they shall learn in their experience who He is.” He has not the slightest doubt that Krishna is in every one of us, that we would feel and act on the influence of His presence if we were purged of all passion and pride and had ceased to run after the things of the earth, that He would listen to us if only we would seek refuge in Him, that He would claim us back as though we had never been away from Him. All questions of the quest for the historical Krishna become of subsidiary importance when we bear in mind the fact that the Gita preaches no exclusive doctrine and that when the author of the Gita introduces Krishna as speaking first person, it is no personal Krishna speaking but the Divine in Arjuna and in every one of us. Krishna is represented as speaking in the name of God, Parmatman, Supreme Brahman. The Shvetashvatara Upanishad is an unbroken praise of the Lord whom it names Siva or Rudra, but at no moment is the truth far from the seer who, composed the Upanishad that Siva or Rudra is

The one God, hidden in ‘all things,
All-pervading, the Inner Soul of all things,
The Overseer of deeds, in all things abiding,
The witness, the Sole Thinker, devoid of all qualities,
The One Controller of the inactive many,
Who makes the one seed manifold—
The wise who perceive Him as standing in one’s self
They, and no others, have eternal happiness.

It is the same thing with Krishna in the Bhagawadgita, He is the Atman, He is the Purushotiama, He is Brahman. He is the God of gods, the Lord of the Universe seated in the heart of all. Mr Hill calls the Gita “an uncompromising eirenicon” — uncompromising because the author of the Gita will “not abate one jot of Krishna’s claim to be Supreme, to be the All.” It is a mistake, I think, to talk of anything like “Krishna’s claim”. It is not so much the purpose of the author to advance the claim of a particular person, however divine, as the deity, as to direct the mind and the heart and the soul of man to the only abiding Reality. The name Vasudeva is defined in the Mahabharata thus: “Because I have my abode (vasa) in all creation, I am Vasudeva.” A person deified and described as Vasudeva was already being worshipped; no doubt the author of the Gita may or may not have seen him physically, but that his whole being was suffused with him is certain, and it is to that devotion that he gives name and form and reality. The characteristics of the ideal devotee — “in whom My soul delights” — quoted by Gandhiji in his introduction from the twelfth discourse, are not the characteristics of the devotee of a particular god. They are to be found — and must be found — in any true devotee of God, whether he calls Him Krishna or Christ or God or Allah. The ‘ME’ in “Abandon all duties and come to ME the only refuge” (XVIII. 66) does hot and cannot mean the person called Krishna — that person no longer exists — but it means the ever-abiding Lord in every one of us. “In Him alone take thy refuge, with all thy heart. By His grace thou shalt win to the eternal heaven of supreme peace” (XVIII. 62). The emphasis is not on ME as the Lord, but on the Lord speaking through ME, and further, as we shall see in the sequel, not on the profession of His name but on doing His work and His will: “He alone comes to Me, Panda va, who does My work, who makes Me his goal, who is My devotee, who has banished all attachment, who has ill-will towards none” (XI. 55). Did St. Paul mean an exclusive Jesus when he said: “That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge” (Eph. 3. 17-18-19); “As ye have received Christ Jesus, so walk in Him, rooted and built up in Him” (Col. 1. 6-7)? I submit not.

4. Vyasa, the reputed author of the Mahabharata, is believed to be the author of the Gita, as it forms part of the epic, but there is no conclusive evidence to prove this, nor have we any evidence on the facts regarding the life of Vyasa.

Evidence about Krishna Vasudeva cannot be said to be scanty, as references to a “Krishna” can be traced even in the early Vedic hymns. But there is no evidence of a conclusive nature to establish his identity or to prove that the rishi Krishna of the Vedic hymns and the pupil Krishna the son of Devaki, and the disciple of Ghora Angirasa, of whom the Chhandogya Upanishad speaks; and the Krishna of the Mahabharata now playing the role of a charioteer and warrior, now being described as worshipping Mahadeva, now being hailed as an incarnation of the Supreme Deity even by Dhritarashtra and Bhishma and now being decried by scoffers as built of common clay; and the Krishna of the Puranas—whether all these are one and the same. There can be no doubt, however, that an extraordinary personality combining in himself the qualities of a hero and a statesman, a warrior and a philosopher, did exist at a time of which we have no record, that he grew to enormous proportions in the race-memory of the Aryans, so much so that he came to be revered as an avatara and later on as the Incarnation, and countless traditions and legends grew up about “the ideal man”, according to the varying psychological and spiritual levels of the ages that followed.

I would thus sum up my attitude — and perhaps Gandhiji’s also — on this and similar questions. An aspirant will not make himself uneasy over the absence or uncertainty of evidence regarding the author of the Gita or the identity of Krishna. Let the scholars not tire of effort in this direction. But for us laymen there is much comfort to be derived from the thought that the seers of old practised anasakti (detachment), which is the message of the Gita, to an extent that puzzles our sophisticated generation. The doctrine of detachment, or selflessness, or work in the spirit of sacrifice is as old as Creation, as Lord Krishna assures us in the Gita. It must have been practised to perfection by the seers who revealed the message to mankind It is delivered in a concentrated form in the Gita and argued out in it as in no other scriptures. The author of the Gita felt and saw and knew and lived Krishna and left his experience as an abiding heritage for mankind.

III. The Book and The Theme

Is not then the Gita anything in the nature of a historical narrative, forming as it does, part of the great War-epic? Gandhiji has challenged the description of the Mahabharata as a historical war-epic. In support of the challenge, I venture to enforce its argument by a few more considerations to show that the Gita can, in no sense of the term, be regarded as a historical dialogue. That a war named the Mahabharata War or some other took places need not be disputed, but that the author of the epic and the Gita had anything like the object of a historical narrative in mind is certainly disputed.

1. Look at the intensely significant artistry of the way in which the jewel of the Gita is set in the field of gold of the great epic. The reputed author Vyasa is supposed to be one of the deathless ones — Chiranjivas — and he is said to be the, progenitor of Pandu and Dhritarashtra whose sons fought on the field of Kurukshetra. It is this ‘deathless one’ who approaches Dhritarashtra, the blind king,, before the commencement of the fight and asks him if he would care to have his eyes opened in order to see the fighting. He is said to have declined the privilege, lest his heart should subside in him to see the fearful carnage,, but at a certain stage he evinces anxiety to know the happenings from day, to day. Sanjaya was endowed with divine vision and without being on the battlefield narrated, the happenings to the blind king. As though this much was not enough to open the eyes of the blind student trying to read history in a spiritual epic, Vyasa goes further and reassures the king that Sanjaya’s divine vision would serve him better than his natural vision, for “this Sanjaya will narrate the battle to you (in a unique way), for he shall know whatever happens, within the sight of or unknown to all, whether by day or by night, whether actually or in the mind of any of the actors. Weapons shall not touch Sanjaya and fatigue shall not tire him.” It is Sanjaya thus endowed with supernatural vision who narrates the dialogue which is said to have taken place between Arjuna and Krishna. And how does he satisfy the old king’s curiosity? The old king, in the only question that is put into his mouth in the whole poem, asks to know “what my Sons and Pandit’s did, assetribled, on-battle intent, on the Field of Kuru”. The reply is the narration of an intensely philosophical dialogue between Arjuna and Krishna through eighteen discourses, and at the end of the narration he describes not what the king’s sons did or what Pandu’s sons did, but that he was intensely exultant to have had the superb privilege of listening to that unique dialogue and that *’where is the Master of Yoga and where is Partha, the bowman, there, I am sure, are Fortune, Victory, Prosperity: and Eternal Right”. Does it need any argument after this that it is riot a historical dialogue that we are reading, but a profoundly meaningful poem?

There is, therefore, no wonder, that to quite a considerable class of readers the Gita conveys an allegorical meaning : some likening the Pandayas to the forces of light and the Kauravas to the forces, of darkness, and making the human body the field of dharma; some putting various meanings on , the obviously meaningful names of the various characters of the epic and pressing allegory to distant lengths. To some Dhritarashtra, the blind king, is the individual ego blindly holding on to the flesh, as his name indicates, listening to the dialogue between Krishna, the Indweiler, and Arjuna, the humble and transparently pure intellect obeying His behest and fighting the forces of darkness and winning the victory. To use a phrase of Dr Carid, Dhritarashtra, to these interpreters, becomes “at once the combatants and the conflict and the field that is torn with strife”. Some, on the other hand, would make Arjuna the individual ego torn with internal conflict and approaching Krishna, the Self for guidance.

2. Even if one assumes that the epic is a historical narrative, is it necessary that the Gita too must be the narration of a dialogue that took place on the field of battle? Instances are not wanting of genuine works of history containing imaginary dialogues. Thucydides, the most conscientious historian known to antiquity, did not hesitate to introduce such imaginary dialogues between, and to invent speeches for, historical characters in order to elucidate situations, and has himself said that he had deliberately done so. As for poetical works, many poets of a transcendental vision have picked up historical or semi-historical incidents and used them for depicting imperishable visions of the soul of man struggling with grim facts of life. To take only, one instance — that of that master painter of human passions, Shakespeare. We see in his dramas men and women thrown into situations as profoundly tragic as that in which we find Arjuna in the first discourse of the Gita. See how Lady Blanch, in King John, feels herself torn between different interests, and talks almost in the language of Arjuna:

Which is the side that I must go withal?
I am with both : each army has a hand:
And in their rage, I having hold of both,
They whirl asunder and dismember me.
Husband, I cannot pray that thou mayst win;
Uncle, I needs must pray that thou must lose;
Father, I may not wish the fortune thine;
Whoever wins, on that side shall I lose;
Assured loss before the match be played.

But Shakespeare simply describes her sad predicament and leaves her to her fate. We do not hear of her again. Macbeth he does not leave to his fate but puts in charge of the devil, who at one time as witches and at another as Lady Macbeth fans the flame of his ambition, dries up all the milk of human kindness in him, and drives him to the dire deed. Hamlet he tosses on the boisterous seas of a devastating indecision. Brutus loses his sleep, his mind suffers “the nature of an insurrection”, he walks about “musing and sighing with arms across”, avoids the counsel of his noble wife, lest she should cure him of the 4’sick offence within his mind”, and finally decides to do what he thinks is for the “general good”, not in the spirit of a butcher but that of a sacrificer:

Let’s kill him boldly, but not wrathfully;
Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods.

And throughout the drama he retains such a composed selflessness that it makes even his enemies declare him to be “the noblest Roman of them all”. The author of the Gita, centuries before Shakespeare, made Arjuna’s mind also suffer “the nature of an insurrection”, but neither did he leave him to his fate nor fling him to the devil. He put him face to face with God — as Shakespeare put Brutus face to face with his self—and made God quell the insurrection and surround him with light and peace and bliss. We have not only the whole insurrection described, the delusion exposed, the doubter with his doubts fully depicted, but we have something more revealed to us—the Dispeller of doubts and the Bringer of Peace. It is this which to my mind makes the Gita the Bible of Humanity. The Gita says: When you are torn with doubt and despair and anguish, go to the Dweller in the Innermost, listen to His counsel, obey it implicitly and you will have no cause to grieve. Every mystic, burning with genuine aspiration, seeks comfort and solace from his God in matters of doubt, and Miss Underhill had referred to so many “internal conversations” between the contemplative soul of the mystic and his God. Is it any way unreasonable to imagine that the author of the Gita — one of the supreme mystics of the world — had himself a similar “internal conversation”, and so visualized Arjuna, an aspirant, as having such “internal conversations” and left the picture as an inspiring heritage for all the spiritual aspirants of the world ? It may not be unreasonable, but it is heretical, someone might perhaps say. Heretical it is, I admit, but the heresy should in no way hurt one’s faith. If it is an actual discourse between Krishna and Arjuna that is narrated by the author of the Gita, one can think of him as nothing more than a reporter. I for one should prefer to think of him as a Kavi (poet-seer, a word we often find applied to God Himself) who has given us God’s authentic message as was revealed to him and as was believed by him. The Gita, seen in this light, becomes none the less adorable for me, than it would be if someone proved to me that it was an actual dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna that was reported therein.

3. The barest examination of the contents of the Gita shows that the author, saturated with the teachings of the Upanishads, and a devotee of Krishna, as he was, wanted to leave to mankind an expression of what he had felt and seen and lived. Hopkins’ charge that the Gita is an “ill-assorted cabinet of primitive philosophical opinions” has value only in that it proves that the poem is certainly not a historical narrative. But the charge betrays gross ignorance of philosophy and a most superficial reading of the Gita. Modern philosophical opinion has wellnigh accepted the Upanishadic philosophy or is at least coming near it. What appears to be a jumble is nothing more than a reflection of the state of things in the days when the poem was written. The Vedas with their apparently many gods and occasionally expressed monotheism were there; the Upanishads had raised a noble protest against the Vedic ritual which had still a hold on the people and in decrying paradise-seeking ritual had laid an excessive emphasis on the life of renunciation as the only means of salvation; the Sankhya and Yoga principles were there in the atmosphere not yet crystallized into definite systems; the Bhagawat cult of Krishna Vasudeva was also there. Whether Buddha and Buddhism were there it is not yet definitely established, but atheistic doctrines were certainly prevalent. It was the unique, though very uphill, task of the author of the Gita to pick up scattered and heterogeneous material, to sift the true from the false, to attenuate seeming contradictions, and to present a new philosophy and new art of life. There is Sankhya, there is Yoga, there is Tajna, there is Bhakti, and there are the gods too, everywhere in the Gita, but all in their proper place and setting and some with a connotation and meaning which they did not possess before. As regards the relation of the Upanishads to the Gita, I have already referred to the well-known metaphor of the cows, the milker and the milk. If I may venture to change the metaphor, without incurring the charge of heresy, I may say that the meadows of the Upanishads provided for the author of the Gita a rich verdure which was converted into the nectar-like milk of the Gita. For whilst one finds the influence of the Upanishads throughout the Gita, whilst one finds words and whole verses taken from them, they are so digested and assimilated that one can scarcely think that they went into the making of the rich product.

For what is there in the Gita, one may ask, that is not in the Upanishads? What Dr Radhakrishnan calls the “fundamental ultimates” are there borrowed bodily from the Upanishads; the Atman (Self) and the Brahman are there in the very language of the Upanishads—in the seemingly mutually contradictory language of the evolving Upanishads, as my notes on II. 19, II. 20, II. 29, XIII. 12-17, and other verses will show; but whilst one has to trace the evolution and reconcile the contradictions in the Upanishads (as Prof. Ranade has ably done in his Constructive Survey of Upanishadaic Philosophy) the author of the Gita has woven them in with such consummate skill that they are all in their appropriate place on the pattern for which they are used and to which they seem to belong in a most vital manner. Where he has adopted a thought from the Upanishads it seems as though he had simply chosen a test to produce a most inspiring sermon.

I shall take just a few examples. Take this well-known text from that very brief Upanishad containing all the philosophy of the Upanishads, I mean the Ishopanishad: “Even while engaged in action here, a man may look forward to living a hundred years; for even thus and not otherwise the actions will not smear the man.” As it is, it almost reads like a conundrum. But the author of the Gita related it to the preceding verse “renouncing that, thou must enjoy”, and out of the two produced his whole philosophy of action that binds and action that does not bind but frees.

I have pointed out in detail in its proper place in my notes the way in which the author has summarized one whole section of the Mundaka Upanishad and clothed it with a new meaning (IV. 32-38). He had a lively sense of the essentials and had no hesitation in jettisoning the unessentials as we find in so many places in the Gita. For instance, he refers to the ancient eschatology, summarizes a string of verses from the Chhandogya Upanishad (5. 10. 1-6) in two neat shlokas and in a third gives us the significance of the belief (see my note on VIII. 24-26).

Take now the Sankhyan principles which we shall have occasion to study in some detail in the next section. The Praskna Upanishad (4.8) contains a full enumeration of them, and indeed the Sankhyan Purusha is already turned into the empirical self, the seer, toucher, taster, hearer, smeller, thinker, whose abode is the Supreme Imperishable Atman — Paramatman the Universal Self. The gunas also are there in the germ in other Upanishads. But the author of the Gita has constructed a whole philosophy and ethics out of these scattered elements and given them a new and rich meaning.

For the Yoga of meditation take the sections in the Maitri Upanishad 6. 18-22, on which one may say the whole of the sixth and part of the eighth discourses are based. I shall not enter into the comparison here, but the reader who will care to go to the sources in the pages of Hume will not fail to see that the Gita exposition of the method of meditative mysticism, shorn of the technical details described in the Upanishad,, is a vast development on the latter, and the final part of the sixth discourse containing the covenant of the Lord to the failed aspirant is the Gita’s most original and inspiring contribution.

The gods of the Vedas are there, and the worshippers of different gods are also referred to, but each of these worshippers, whilst fully recognized, has been given his proper desert, and the gods are brought under the numerous manifestations of the one All-pervading God who is to be worshipped and adored, through those manifestations, if one will. The tenth discourse, read in this light, is a luminous commentary on the Vedas. I do not know how far Prpf. Ranade is justified in tracing the seeds of the full-grown tree of bhakti (devotion) to the instances of humble discipleship that we come across the Upanishads: Narada who approaches Sanatkumara with a broken and contrite heart 7—“I have heard from those like you, sir, that he who knows the Atman passes beyond sorrow. Such a sorrowing one I am; pray help me to pass beyond sorrow”; or Brihadrathai who in the same spirit begs his guru to “deliver” him from sansara wherein he was lying like a frog in a waterless well. Well, we must not forget that the Gita too is described as an Upanishad— though not counted as one —and the spirit of discipleship has been in India ever since the beginnings of philosophy. I would rather read in these and other instances of disciples going to their masters to learn brahmavidya (divine knowledge) a strong suggestion that Arjuna’s is also a similar case, in a different background of course. The seeds of the tree of bhakti are to be looked for in the praises and prayers with which the Vedas are full — the upasana in which the Vedic seer “bows to God over and over again — God who is in fire and in water, who pervades the whole world, who is in the annual crops as well as in the perennial trees”; or in those glorious Upanishadic prayers where the soul implores the Nourisher (Pushan) to uncover for the votary of Truth its face hidden in a golden veil; or where the Upanishad prescribes for the sacrificer that sublime form of prayer for being led from the unreal to the Real, from darkness to Light, from death to Deathlessness. The atmosphere was there ready with the Krishna Vasudeva cult for the upasana of the Vedas to be systematized and converted into the life-giving farm of devotion to one God.

But Prof. Ranade is fully justified in seeing the description of the Universal form of the Lord (eleventh discourse) already in the germ in the Mundaka Upanishad: “When in the Mundakopanishad we find the description of the cosmic Person with fire as his head, the Sun and the Moon as his eyes, the quarters as his ears, the Vedas as his speech, air as his prana, the universe as his heart the earth as his feet, we have in embryo a description of the vishvaroopa which later became the theme of the famous eleventh chapter of the Bhagawadgita on the transfigured personality of Krishna.”

But at this rate it is possible to trace almost everything in the Gita to the Upanishads likened to cows in the meditation versus preceding the Gita. If, without offending the susceptibilities of those who want to read in the Gita the actual words of the incarnate Lord, I might make a suggestion : I would say that the very idea of Krishna as charioteer and guide, philosopher and friend of Arjuna may be traced to the Rathopanishad which makes the Atman the master of the chariot of the body, the intellect the driver, the mind the reins, and the senses the horses. There are nearly a dozen places in which the Gita has actually borrowed from this great Upanishad. Why should not the master-artist use this beautiful image in his epic in order to weave out of the philosophy of the Upanishad the living religion of the Bhagawadgita?

I shall, however, not elaborate the point. Whoever would be a serious student of the Gita must go to these source books — the “revered Upanishads” as Hume has called them, and he will find die truth of the metaphors of the cow, and the meadow I have referred to above. But let no one therefore run away with the impression that the Gita is a highly poetic echo of the Upanishads. The Gita performs the unique function of making what was an esoteric doctrine a living reality for the unlettered, the lowly and the lost, and present the highest form of practical religion to enable each and all to realize his or her purpose in life. Above all, it blazons forth in an unmistakable manner the truth that life is worth living and teaches how it may be worth living. It is a unique synthesis and reconciliation of the two doctrines which were in those days held to be contradictory — sannyasa (renunciation of action) and yoga (performance of action).

Hinduism, remarks a Christian critic, has no New Testament, and hence no Gospel to offer to it adherents. Well, the critic did not know that the venerable Dr Deussen had already given the reply to him: “To every Indian Brahmana today the Upanishads are what the New Testament is to the Christians”; and if I may venture to extend Dr Deussen’s comparison, I may say that if the Upanishads are the New Testament, the Gita may well be said to constitute therein the Gospels. The author of the Gita having lived the teaching of the Upanishads summed it up thus: “Performing action without attachment, man shall attain the Supreme” (III. 19), or if I may paraphrase the language of this and other similar verses, according to the Gita, ‘Sacrifice is the fulfilling of the law.’

But there is nothing exclusive about the Gita which should make it a gospel only for the Brahmana or the Hindu. Having all the light and colour of the Indian atmosphere, it naturally must have the greatest fascination for the Hindu, but the central teaching should not have any the less appeal for a non-Hindu as the central teaching of the Bible or the Koran should not have’ any the less appeal for a non-Christian or a non-Muslim.

In the verse I have just quoted is contained in a nutshell the teaching of the book. The Gita presents to its devotee a vision of the Supreme, tells him how to discover Him, how to recognize Him in His true nature and magnitude, how to enter Him and how to be one with Him— the End and the Means thereto as we might say in short. The colophon at the end of each discourse of the Gita is note-worthy. It has come down to us from an ancient date and though the title of each discourse given in this colophon differs in various editions, the colophon itself is the same in all editions: “Thus ends discourse (number) entitled (name) in the converse of Lord Krishna and Arjuna, on die science of Yoga as part of the knowledge of brahman in the Upanishad called the Bhagawadgita (Sung by the Lord).” Upanishad etymologically means what the pupil learns sitting at the feet of the master; it may also mean the knowledge which by taking one near the Supreme helps to cut off earthly ties. Thus, in one sense, brahmavidya and upanishad are synonymous. The Gita is, therefore, the science and art of Yoga — or shall we call it the Art of Life — for the attainment of the knowledge of brahman, or the Wisdom and the Art of Life! This phrase in the colophon may also be translated, “the science of Yoga rooted in brahmavidya.” It goes without saying that unless the Art of Life is rooted in the Wisdom of Life it will never lead to it. There seems to be no doubt, however we may interpret it, that Wisdom, as leading to the summum bonum, is the goal for the attainment of which the Art of Life or Yoga is the means. The Gita is the Upanishad of the Mahabharata.

IV. The Fundamentals

We shall now turn to a study of that Wisdom and that Art as revealed in the Gita. Perhaps the best way to do so is to present a brief interpretative analysis of the various discourses. But before we start with the analysis, it would not be out of place to indicate what we might call the permanent background of the Gita. It starts with accepting certain “unanalysable ultimates” — the Self, the Absolute, God, and the Universe and certain fundamental postulates. It presents no philosophical treatment, as it is really addressed to those who assume these ultimates, for the simple reason that the author’s purpose was to expound the ordinary man’s mission in life rather than to present a philosophical system. Thus, when Arjuna approaches Krishna with an appeal which recalls, ‘What in me is dark, illumine,’ He does so by a sudden flash light revelation of the Unborn, Ageless, Deathless, Everlasting, Indemonstrable Atman or Self. He uses the epithet ‘Indemonstrable’ indicating in a word his whole meaning. How will one demonstrate or measure Him who is the proof of all proofs and measure of all measures? As the Kena Upanishad puts it: “He is the very hearing of the ear, the very mind of the mind, the very voice of speech, the very breath of breath and the very vision of the eye.” Or as the modern philosopher Dr Radhakrishnan puts it: “The ultimate assumption of all life is the spirit in us, the Divine in man. Life is God and the proof of it is life itself. If somewhere in ourselves we did not know with absolute certainty that God is, we could not live. Even the sun and the moon would go out if they began to doubt. Our lives are not lived within their own limits. We are not ourselves alone; we are God-men.”

About the composition of the Universe, the Gita takes up the theory then in vogue, as any modern-thinker would start with assuming the theory of evolution. The Shankhyan cosmology was then in vogue; it was, as we have already seen, referred to in some of the Upanishads. Since the mention of it in the Gita, various Smritis have adopted it and it is referred to in various places in the Mahabharata. The system as we know it in its complete form was not then in existence; there were probably fragments of an original of which no trace can be found; there was what we might call a torso or a skeleton. At any rate the Gita accepted it as a skeleton, put life into it, and made use of it for its philosophy and ethics. It will be useful for our purpose to give a brief sketch of the Sankhya system in order that we may be able to see how much of it the Gita has adopted and how it has used the raw material. It will also familiarize us with certain terms which will occur over and over again in the Gita.