The Bhagavad Gita is the highest expression of philosophical Hinduism. It is a chapter of the immense Indian epic, the Mahabharata, the saga of the war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas.
Arjuna, hero of the Pandavas, is about to confront the army of the Kauravas on the battlefield of Kuruksetra. Among the opposing army are his friends and relatives. Convinced that it would be wrong to kill his own kinsmen, Arjuna is overcome by despair. He lays down his bow and declares that he will not fight.
The God Vishnu, incarnated as the charioteer Krishna, explains that Arjuna should do his duty and do battle. The human soul, which is part of the universal soul, is immortal - therefore no-one is actually slain. If people perform the duties appropriate to their station, without attachment to success or failure, then they cannot be stained by action. The rest of the poem provides the full philosophy underlying this insight.
The Gita is variously dated between the third century BC and the fourth century AD. The reason for uncertainty is that the Gita is not always consistent and may be the work of several hands. One strand was probably written by a follower of the philosophy expressed in the Upanishads, in which Brahman is the highest unity underlying reality. Another strand, focussed on a more personal deity, may have been added later by a devotee of the supreme god Vishnu.
The Gita is panentheistic rather than pantheistic. God is in all things, and all things are in God. But the visible universe springs from only a fraction of Vishnu's glory. There is also a hidden part of God which extends beyond the universe.
Nevertheless, the Gita contains probably the most powerful and thoroughgoing expression of pantheism in world scripture. The one God is the pinnacle of all things - the radiant sun of lights, the thought organ of sense organs, the intellect of beings, the ocean of waters, the Himalayas of mountain ranges, the Ganges of rivers. He is also the inherent essence of everything - including evil. He is the gambling of rogues, the courage of the courageous, the rod of disciplinarians, the statecraft of politicians, the Knowledge of the knowing.
The text is from the translation of Franklin Edgerton, The Bhagavad Gita, Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1944.
Also more on The Mahabharata..
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The Mahabharata (composed between 300 BC and 300 AD) has the honor of being the longest epic in world literature, 100,000 2-line stanzas (although the most recent critical edition edits this down to about 88,000), making it eight times as long as Homer's Iliad and Odyssey together, and over 3 times as long as the Bible (Chaitanya vii). According to the Narasimhan version, only about 4000 lines relate to the main story; the rest contain additional myths and teachings. In other words, the Mahabharata resembles a long journey with many side roads and detours. It is said that "Whatever is here is found elsewhere. But whatever is not here is nowhere else."
The name means "great [story of the] Bharatas." Bharata was an early ancestor of both the Pandavas and Kauravas who fight each other in a great war, but the word is also used generically for the Indian race, so the Mahabharata sometimes is referred to as "the great story of India."
The work is divided into 18 books (concerning an 18-day war among 18 armies). The main narrative concerning the war is contained in the first ten books.
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