-
CHAPTER FIVE: The Bhagavadgītā
- State University of New York Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
74 CH APTER FI V E The Bhagavadgītā I consider myself worshipped through the sacrifice of knowledge by the one who reads this our sacred conversation. And a person who listens to it with faith and without scoffing shall be liberated and attain to the happy realm of the righteous. —Bhagavadgītā XVIII, 70ff. Throughout the last thousand years of the history of Hinduism, the popularity and authority of the Bhagavadgītā, the “Song of the Lord,” has been, and still is, unrivalled.1 The Vedāntins accepted it as the third of the prasthānas and it has also been received by the masses as a book of spiritual guidance and comfort. Whoever reads it for the first time will be struck by its beauty and depth. Countless Hindus know it by heart and quote it at many occasions as an expression of their faith and of their own insights. All over India, and also in many places of the Western hemisphere, Gītā lectures attract large numbers of people. Many are convinced that the Bhagavadgītā is the key book for the re-spiritualization of humankind in our age. A careful study of the Gītā, however , will very soon reveal the need for a key to this key-book. Simple as the tale may seem and popular as the work has become it is by no means an easy book, and some of the greatest scholars have grappled with the historical and philosophical problems that it presents. The Bhagavadgītā in its present form constitutes chapters 23 to 40 in the Bhīṣmaparvan of the Mahābhārata, one of the numerous philosophico-theological interpolations in the Great Epic.2 Since we possess Śaṅkarācārya’s commentary on the Bhagavadgītā, which presupposes the same text that we possess today,3 we know with certainty that the Gītā has not been changed in the last twelve hundred or more years. The very fact that Śaṅkara commented upon it, despite its obvious theistic and Kṛṣṇaitic bias, would permit the conclusion that at the time it already enjoyed a very high standing among philosophers THE BH AGAVADGĪTĀ 75 and ordinary people alike. Little is known about the text before that date, and this is the reason why we find the most extraordinary range of views among scholars, both as regards the age and the original form of this poem. R. D. Ranade, one of India’s greatest religious scholars of the recent past, in a study entitled The Bhagavadgītā as a Philosophy of God-Realization, Being a Clue through the Labyrinth of Modern Interpretations4 offered a critique of dozens of different opinions on the date and message of the Bhagavadgītā. There have been numerous Western scholars who have tried to explain the obvious inconsistencies of the present text by stripping the Ur-Gītā from later additions and interpolations. According to G. Holtzmann, the original Gītā was Vedāntic in character and the unorthodox bhakti doctrines have been grafted upon it; according to Garbe, the original Gītā was a devotional and sectarian (Kṛṣṇaite) tract, to which the Vedāntic portions were tacked on under the influence of Brahmanism. E. W. Hopkins thought that our Gītā was a Kṛṣṇaite version of an older Viṣṇuite poem, and this in turn was at first a nonsectarian work, perhaps a late Upaniṣad.5 W. Garbe proceeded on philological grounds to sift out what he considered the additions and kept of the 700 ślokas only 530 as genuine, all of them non-Vedāntic.6 H. Oldenberg, a widely respected Sanskritist , thought that the original Gītā comprised only the first twelve of the present eighteen chapters, the last six being a later addition. R. Otto came to the conclusion that the original Gītā consisted of only 133 stanzas; the rest was added and interpolated later. The original text did not contain any doctrinal matter, whereas the eight tracts that were added brought in sectarian dogma. Several Western scholars—bitterly opposed by Indians—maintained that the Gītā betrayed Christian influence.7 The most articulate of these was probably F. Lorinser, who in 1869 published a metrical version of the Bhagavadgītā. He tried to prove that the author of the Gītā had used the New Testament, especially the Pauline epistles, weaving Christian ideas and conceptions into his system. A. Weber, a reputable Sanskrit scholar, saw...