The Bhagavad Gītā

What it is

Seven hundred verses in eighteen chapters, embedded in the sixth book of the Mahābhārata — a dialogue between the warrior Arjuna and his charioteer Kṛṣṇa, who is God.

The setting is the moment before a battle. Arjuna surveys the opposing army, sees his cousins, teachers and childhood companions arrayed against him, and collapses. His bow slips from his hand. He says he will not fight, that victory over his own family is worthless, and that he would rather be killed unresisting.

The remainder of the book is Kṛṣṇa's answer.

Where it came from

Composed probably between the second century BCE and the second century CE and inserted into the epic, which had itself been growing for centuries.

Its historical significance is as a synthesis. By the time of composition several paths to liberation were competing — ritual action, renunciatory knowledge, disciplined yoga, and devotion. The Gītā reconciles them, treating each as valid, and gives devotion the last word.

That is why every school of Vedānta had to comment on it and why every one of them could: Śaṅkara reads it as teaching knowledge, Rāmānuja as teaching devotion, Madhva as teaching distinction. It is expansive enough to be claimed by all of them.

How it is read

Its central teaching is niṣkāma karma — action without attachment to results. You have a right to action, Kṛṣṇa says, never to its fruits; let not the fruits of action be your motive, nor let your attachment be to inaction.

The argument is that withdrawal is not available. Nobody can refrain from acting even for a moment; inaction is itself a choice with consequences. What can be renounced is not action but the grasping after outcomes — which is what binds. Act because it is right to act, and release the result.

Chapter eleven contains the theophany: Arjuna asks to see Kṛṣṇa's true form, is granted divine sight, and beholds the universal form — all beings, all worlds, all time simultaneously, mouths flaming, warriors rushing into them and being destroyed. He is terrified and asks him to stop. It is one of the most extraordinary passages in religious literature, and the line Robert Oppenheimer recalled at Trinity — now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds — comes from it.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the text is genuinely ambiguous, and the clearest demonstration is that two of modern India's greatest figures read it in opposite directions.

Gandhi treated it as his primary spiritual text, read it daily, and interpreted the battle allegorically: Kurukṣetra is the human heart, the armies are competing impulses, and the war is the inner struggle. From this he drew a doctrine of desireless action in the service of truth, and made a book about a battlefield into a foundation for non-violence. His commentary is called Anāsakti Yoga, the yoga of non-attachment.

B.R. Ambedkar — jurist, principal author of India's constitution, and a Dalit — read the same text and concluded it was a defence of war and of caste. Kṛṣṇa's argument to Arjuna includes the claim that it is better to do one's own duty badly than another's well, and Arjuna's duty is defined by his being born a warrior. Ambedkar read the Gītā as a philosophical justification of varṇa obligation, produced to shore up a social order, and rejected it.

Both readings are defensible from the text. It does say that the soul is not slain when the body is slain. It does ground Arjuna's obligation in his caste. And it does teach that attachment to results is the root of bondage. The text will support the allegory and it will support the literal reading, and the tradition has done both for two thousand years.

We can say it is the most influential Indian text in the West, having reached Emerson and Thoreau in the nineteenth century and everyone since.

We can say the framing of the whole thing is worth noticing. The most widely read Hindu scripture opens with a man in complete despair, unable to act, saying that nothing is worth doing — and the entire book is an answer to that. Whatever one makes of the answer, the question it addresses is the one under meaning and absurdity.

We cannot resolve the interpretive dispute, and this site will not pretend to. Presenting the Gītā as a straightforward text of peace requires ignoring Ambedkar, and presenting it as a straightforward defence of caste war requires ignoring two millennia of readers who found something else in it.

Further reading

• The Gītā in a scholarly translation — Barbara Stoler Miller's or Laurie Patton's.
• Gandhi, The Bhagavad Gita According to Gandhi.
• Ambedkar's Essays on the Bhagavad Gita, in his collected writings — read alongside.
• Richard Davis, The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography (2014), on its reception history.