What Is the Bhagavad Gita? A Conversation on a Battlefield

The Gita is chapters 23 to 40 of the sixth book of the Mahabharata, the epic of a war between two branches of a royal family, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, over the throne of Hastinapura, and it was probably composed somewhere between the second century BC and the second century AD, inserted into a story that was already old. The archer is Arjuna, the third Pandava brother; the charioteer is Krishna, a prince of the Yadava clan who has agreed to drive for Arjuna but not to fight, and who is, as he reveals in the eleventh chapter, the supreme God. The battle of Kurukshetra that follows lasts eighteen days and kills almost everyone, and the Gita is the pause before it, in which the story stops and a philosophy is taught.

Arjuna's refusal is not cowardice; it is moral. Killing kin destroys the family, and with it the rites and the order of society, and no kingdom is worth that. Krishna's answer works on several levels at once, and the Gita is often read as a summary of the whole of Hindu thought because it tries to reconcile them. The self, he says, does not die: the atman, the true self, is unborn and eternal, wears bodies as a man wears clothes and discards them, and Arjuna can no more kill it than the enemy can kill his. Duty, dharma, is binding: Arjuna is a warrior, and a warrior's dharma is to fight a just war, and to abandon one's own duty for another's, however attractive, is a fall. And action itself must be rethought.

The Gita's lasting contribution is its teaching on how to act, and it offers three disciplines, yogas, which it presents as roads to the same end:

• •Karma yoga, the path of action: to act without attachment to the results, doing one's duty fully while renouncing any claim on the fruit, so that action no longer binds the actor to the cycle of rebirth; you have a right to your actions, Krishna says, but never to their fruits
• •Jnana yoga, the path of knowledge: to see through the world of appearances to the one reality behind it, the teaching of the Upanishads that the self and the absolute are one
• •Bhakti yoga, the path of devotion: to surrender oneself in love to God, who returns the love and frees the devotee, which the Gita in its later chapters places above the others and which made it the founding text of devotional Hinduism

In the eleventh chapter Arjuna asks to see Krishna as he truly is, and is given a divine eye. What he sees is the universal form: all the gods, all beings, all worlds inside one body with countless faces and arms, blazing like a thousand suns, and the warriors of both armies rushing into its mouths to be crushed between its teeth. Krishna speaks the line that Oppenheimer recalled at the first atomic test, that he is time, the destroyer of worlds, and that the men Arjuna is reluctant to kill are already dead by his decree; Arjuna will be only the instrument. Arjuna, terrified, begs for the familiar form back, and gets it. The vision is the Gita's answer to Arjuna's original objection, and it is not a comfortable one: the individual's choices matter, and they are also being made inside something incomprehensibly larger.

The Gita has borne every reading. The philosopher Shankara in the eighth century read it as teaching that knowledge alone frees; Ramanuja in the eleventh read it as teaching devotion to a personal God; the nineteenth-century reformers read it as ethics; and Gandhi, who called it his mother and read it daily, read it as an allegory of the war within each person and as a manual for non-violent action without attachment, which required him to argue that the battle was not literal. Revolutionaries in the same decades read it as a licence to kill the British. It was the first Sanskrit work translated directly into English, in 1785, with a preface by Warren Hastings predicting that it would survive the British Empire, and Emerson, Thoreau and Eliot read it in that translation and its successors. Its 700 verses are learned by heart in Indian schools and courts swear witnesses on it, and it is the one text that a Hindu of any school would name as scripture.

The Bhagavad Gita is a dialogue in the Mahabharata in which the warrior Arjuna, refusing to fight his kin, is taught by his charioteer Krishna, who is God, that the self is eternal, that duty binds, and that action done without attachment to its fruits, knowledge of the one reality, and above all loving devotion to God each lead to liberation. Its vision of the universal form and its teaching on selfless action have made it the central scripture of Hinduism and a text read by philosophers, revolutionaries and Gandhi alike.