The Bhagavad-Gita - A Study Course by John Algeo - Analysis and comm in 28 lessons (2000), okultyzm, Bhagavad-Gita
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Produced by the Department of Education The Theosophical Society in America
The Bhagavad Gita
A Study Course
By John Algeo
Analysis and commentary in 28 lessons
© 2000 The Theosophical Society in America
P.O. Box 270, Wheaton, Illinois 60189-0270
The Theosophical Society in America
The Bhagavad Gita
THE BHAGAVAD GITA, Lesson 1
A. Preface to the Bhagavad Gita
The Bhagavad Gita is one of the world’s most important books—indeed, one of the great
books of human culture, Eastern and Western alike.
In India, the Gita is many things: it is the major guidebook to the spiritual life in the
Hindu tradition; it is an eirenicon—a work that harmonizes the diverse views of life that find
a place within traditional Indic religious philosophy, and it is an inspirational and culture-
defining book that is to Indian society what the gospels are to the West. It is hard to overstate
the importance and centrality of the Gita to Indian life.
The Gita has been also, however, a powerful influence in the West. It is indeed part of a
remarkable chain of links connecting East and West. The New England Transcendentalists—a
group of nineteenth-century Americans who were an important school of thinkers and writers,
in a number of respects anticipating later Theosophical thought—read the first English
translation of the Gita. Henry David Thoreau, one of that group, in particular wrote about
reading the Gita on the shore of Walden Pond, and its philosophy inspired a famous essay of
his, “On Civil Disobedience,” about how to cope with societal injustice. Much later, when
Mohandas Gandhi was a young man and a law student in England, he was introduced to the
Gita by Theosophists, and then he read Thoreau’s essay, which in turn inspired his policy of
satyagraha
or passive resistance. Later Martin Luther King was in turn inspired by Gandhi’s
policy to create his own program of nonviolence. So the Gita has echoed back and forth
across the globe between India and America, as a defining document of contemporary thought
and action. No other work has had a comparable influence across cultures in binding together
East and West.
But what is the Gita in itself?
The Gita is a poem (the word
gita
means “song”). It is a very small part of the greatest
and longest epic ever written—the Mahabharata, which is far longer than the Greek Odyssey
and Iliad combined. It recounts the story of a great civil war. Epics typically show the values
and defining characteristics of a people. The Mahabharata is in that way the quintessential
story of India. But it is also the story of all human beings, a universal epic, for it deals with
fundamental human motives, frustrations, quandaries, and joys.
The Gita deals with a basic theme in the Mahabharata—
dharma
or the way we should act
because of who and what we are. In particular, the Gita is about a moral quandary in which
the hero in the Mahabharata war faces fundamental questions about the right way to live. The
poem operates on two levels—historical and archetypal. It is a history of an actual battle
fought near modern Delhi at a turning point in human history. But it is also an archetypal
myth about the struggle that each one of us experiences within ourselves.
The dual level of the poem is made clear in the opening two words of the poem:
“Dharmakshetre, Kurukshetre,” which mean “On the field of dharma, on the Field of the
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The Theosophical Society in America
The Bhagavad Gita
Kurus.” The Kurus were the ruling family of India at the time of the poem, and Kurukshetra is
an actual geographical location, a field, near modern Delhi where the ancient civil war was
fought. So the second word of the poem tells us that we are dealing with a particular place and
time, millennia ago, in the heroic age of India, and half way around the globe from twenty-
first century America.
But the first word of the poem tells us that we are
dealing with a timeless reality.
Dharma
(a central
word in the poem) means, among other things, the
essential nature of a thing or person. And so the poem
is about the “field” or subject matter of what is
essentially real in life. In reading the Gita, we cannot
ignore its historical setting, on the Field of the Kurus,
but what is most important for all peoples
everywhere is what the poem has to say about the
field of dharma.
The story centers on Prince Arjuna, the middle of
five sons of the royal house (called Pandavas after
their father Pandu). Their father has died, leaving
them as wards of their uncle, who himself has a
hundred sons. Arjuna’s cousins (called Kauravas—
descendents of the ancient king Kuru), under the
leadership of the eldest, the wicked Duryodhana,
have plotted to cheat Arjuna and his brothers out of
their legitimate inheritance and even to murder them.
Arjuna, who belongs to the
kshatriya
or warrior caste, is called upon by his duty in life to
fight against evil and for the right. He therefore is required by his social duties to defend his
brothers’ legitimate claim to their kingdom against their usurping cousins. On the eve of the
battle, however, Arjuna experiences a crisis of conscience. On the one hand, he knows that his
duty as a kshatriya warrior compels him to defend his brothers’ rights; on the other hand,
however, his duty to his family requires that he harm none of them, whatever they may be or
have done. And those he will be fighting include his cousins, his grandfather, and even his
teacher, with whom the bond of support is even stronger than with blood relatives.
Arjuna sees the terrible price to be paid for killing members of his own family. He sees
no good coming from the battle and only evil from his own part in it. He therefore calls upon
his friend and charioteer, Shri Krishna, for advice. Krishna is a cousin of Arjuna’s and a
childhood friend, but he is not merely human. Though Arjuna does not realize it at the start of
the poem, Krishna is a divine incarnation—god made flesh. The Bhagavad Gita, which means
“The Lord’s Song,” is Krishna’s answer to Arjuna’s desperation.
The archetypal meaning of the poem is that within each of us a battle rages between
selfish impulses that ignore the claims of justice and mercy and a realization that ultimately
we are all connected in a unity that embraces all humanity and the whole world. Arjuna is our
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The Bhagavad Gita
conscious mind, which must make the choice of how we will live. The wicked cousins are our
impulses to self-centeredness and greed. Krishna is the divine spark within us, our higher Self,
which is always available to rein in the horses of our feelings and thoughts and to guide us in
the battle of life, if we will only seek that help.
Arjuna’s quandary is a threefold one. Generalized to the common human situation, its
three aspects can be formulated as follows:
1. How can we act freely and unconditionedly?
2. How can we have confidence in the power of goodness to make all things right?
3. How can we choose between unclear alternatives to resolve the dilemmas we face?
The message that Krishna, our higher Self, gives to Arjuna, our conscious mind, is a
threefold one. First, in all our actions, we must be motivated to do what is truly right, not what
seems comfortable or convenient. That will give us the skill in action that we need and for
which Karma Yoga (coming to wholeness by right action) is the answer.
Second, if we act out of that motive and with a realization that a divine plan orders all
things in the world, the results of our actions will be good. That will give us the vision of
Reality that we need and for which Bhakti Yoga (coming to wholeness by devoted
confidence) is the answer.
Third, we can know what we should do—what is truly a right action for us—only if we
first know ourselves—who we, in truth, are. We are not the selfish desires of the wicked
cousins. We are not the confused and uncertain mind of Arjuna. As Arjuna discovers at the
end of the poem, we are, in fact, ourselves Krishna, the divine spark, the higher Self. That
gives us the knowledge that we need to choose between unclear alternatives and for which
Jñana Yoga (coming to wholeness by direct insight into the nature of things) is the answer.
The Gita is a song sung in the midst of a battle. It is a celebration of peace and harmony
in the midst of life’s confusion. It is a timeless assurance that we each have within ourselves
the answers to all our questions and confusions. We need only call upon that inner power to
discover who we are, what we can trust, and how we should act.
B. The Text of the Poem
Participants in this seminar may use whatever translation of the Gita they prefer. In fact it
is good to use several translations at the same time—to compare how they express the ideas of
the poem. There is an old Italian proverb:
Traduttore, traditore
“The translator is a traitor.”
The play on words works better in Italian than in English, but the point of the proverb is that it
is impossible to translate exactly the meanings, nuances, and associations of one language into
another. So, in reading translations from another language, we are helped by using several
different ones for the same text. Different translations will focus on different aspects of the
same words and so help to convey a better-rounded understanding of the original.
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The Theosophical Society in America
The Bhagavad Gita
In these papers, quotations will generally be from, or based on, Annie Besant’s
translation of the Gita. There are several reasons for that choice. First, Besant’s translation
stays very close to the original, so in it we get something like the literal meaning of the
Sanskrit Gita. Second, Besant was a great master of English style, so her translation reads
well. Third, she was sensitive to the Theosophical meaning of the poem, so that also comes
through well in her version. Occasionally, we will paraphrase Besant’s translation somewhat
because it was first published in 1895, and so is in spots rather Victorian in style—particularly
in imitating the archaic language of old-style English scriptures (with words like
thee
and
hath
).
If you use a literary translation, such as Sir Edwin Arnold’s poem,
The Song Celestial
, or
Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood’s very readable translation,
The Song of
God
, be aware that they are much freer versions, often not corresponding verse by verse with
the original, but attempting to capture the general sense rather than the particular meanings. A
very useful scholarly version is Winthrop Sargent’s edition,
The Bhagavad Gita
(2
nd
ed.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), which gives an interlinear translation and
a word-by-word gloss of the Sanskrit (in both devanagari and transliteration) and has a helpful
introduction.
C. Activities
Choose a translation (or several translations) of the poem to use for this seminar. You
might go to a library or bookshop and browse through a number of translations, comparing
the same passages in several to find one that particularly appeals to you. If you are still in
doubt—try Annie Besant’s.
Skim over the translation(s) you choose to get a general sense of the poem, but don’t
worry about details, which we will be considering later. Chapter one (which we will start next
month) is both difficult and untypical, so don’t get bogged down in or discouraged by it. It is
a transition from the plot of the epic and uses a great many typical epic conventions.
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