Sanskrit easily and frequently forms long compound words whose pronunciation will trouble the general reader uninitiated into its rhythms. But this conspicuous feature is not at all unique to Sanskrit. German is also fond of long compounds. Whereas we English speakers say “linguistics” or “the study of antiquity” (under the influence of Latin and French on English), German speakers say “Sprachwissenschaft” or “Altertumswissenschaft.” This habit of compounding words without any helpful hyphens to guide us through them drove poor Mark Twain to write a very funny essay called “The Awful German Language,” in which he complained (mock-) bitterly about such long word monstrosities as Altertumswissenschaft. Like German, Sanskrit will appear to the novice to be full of overly long words and names that are impossible to pronounce. But the pronunciation of the long Sanskrit names that we encounter in the Bhagavad Gītā and elsewhere in the vast world of Sanskrit literature is governed by the fairly simple rules that have been summarized above. Surprisingly quickly, one gets used to them, especially if one pays a little attention.
In a nutshell, one should pay close attention to the long and short vowels, as well as to the heavy and light syllables, because it is the long and heavy ones that tend to receive an accent, even when several of them appear in a single word. Thus, to return again to the names of the two great Sanskrit epics, the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaa, the main stress should be on the third syllable from the end in both words. But some stress should also be given to the other preceding long vowels as well. In fact, if you dwell a bit longer on all of the long vowels and heavy syllables of all Sanskrit words, while skipping lightly over all of the short vowels and light syllables, you will come off as a reasonably well-informed student of Sanskrit pronunciation.
Introduction
Some Observations on the Main Themes of the Bhagavad Gītā
Classical India knew and indeed cherished two large and immensely popular epic traditions, and we are fortunate that it preserved them both remarkably well, in the classical language of India, Sanskrit. These two epic cycles are the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaa. Both of them, but especially the Mahābhārata, grew over the course of many centuries to include and preserve a vast repertoire not only of epic (that is, warrior) legend, but also of mythological tales of gods and heroes, folk and fairy tales, love stories, proverbial wisdom literature and riddle tales, moral, philosophical, ritual, and finally religious discourses as well. The most prominent and well-known of all, both in India and beyond, is the small classic Bhagavad Gītā (“The Song of the Blessed One”), which forms part of the sixth book of the Mahābhārata. It has been one of the most important documents of traditional Hinduism ever since its composition, probably in the first century C.E.
Both the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaa begin with a core narrative that is quintessentially epic in theme. The Mahābhārata (“The Great Tale of the Bhārata Clan”) centers on a dynastic dispute between the five righteous Pāava brothers and their cousins, the Kauravas, which results in a gambling match. The five brothers lose the match, which leads to a very long period of exile for them and their wife in common, lasting for twelve years. They spend a thirteenth year hiding in the palace in disguise, in the kingdom of the Matsya clan. In the Rāmāyaa (“The Wanderings [or perhaps better, The Travels or Travails] of Rāma”), the unfailingly righteous Rāma is also exiled to the forest because of the imperial ambitions of a manipulative stepmother. Both epics contain the central message that our heroes must patiently endure the gross, flagrant injustices inflicted upon them, even by their own kin. In both epics they do so out of their unswerving commitment to dharma, “duty, righteousness, law.” The focus on dharma, especially the dharma of the elite warrior caste, the Katriyas, is the fundamental theme of both epics. It reflects the kind of stoicism and even fatalism that we typically find in the epic literature of a warrior elite. As a result, fate (Sanskrit daiva) is in fact an important theme in both of these epics.
Both epic cycles, as we have seen, were originally composed and performed orally, for the most part in a loosely rhythmical metrical stanza. Like other epics of world literature, the Sanskrit epics use a language that is highly formulaic, largely improvisational, and focused primarily on moving the story along quickly. The charioteer-bards,* who were well trained in these traditions, recited or perhaps sang these popular tales before audiences from the highest ranks of society, such as kings and the nobility, the Katriyas, as well as high-caste Brahmin priests. They performed these tales not only in Sanskrit, but eventually also in the vernacular languages of postclassical India, before the middle and lesser ranks of society as well. Often these audiences included even the lowest ranks, the low-caste villagers (śūdras), for example, and women and children.* We know from the study of contemporary oral epic traditions, both in India and elsewhere, that the bards were free to emphasize, adorn, modify, add, or subtract certain elements of the story, as long as the story’s core, which eventually became universally known to their audiences, was preserved unaltered (just as the Homeric tales, for example, came to be universally known to all Greeks of the classical period). Such easily generated and widely distributed variations were aimed at the given audience in attendance at a performance. For this reason, the repertoire of both story cycles grew to enormous proportions by the time they were eventually written down. The traditional text of the Rāmāyaa had grown to roughly 25,000 stanzas, while the traditional Mahābhārata grew to something like 100,000 stanzas in eighteen books, roughly eight times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined.
It took many centuries, perhaps nearly a millennium, for these texts to reach such an enormous size. In fact, both epics were the collective enterprise of an entire culture. The Rāmāyaa is traditionally said to be the work of a single author called Vālmīki, while the Mahābhārata is attributed to Vyāsa. But the name of the latter is revealing: it means “the Arranger, the Compiler,” which would suggest that he is more or less a mythical figure, like Homer among the Greeks, performing the function of the editor in the formation and growth of the tradition. It is generally estimated that the Sanskrit epics grew and flourished from roughly the fifth century B.C.E. to the fourth century C.E. As for the Bhagavad Gītā itself, a fairly short text of exactly seven hundred stanzas, scholars have debated whether it formed part of the original core of the Mahābhārata or was instead a later addition. And if it was not a part of that original core, then when, exactly, was it inserted into the great storehouse of the collective wisdom of India that the Mahābhārata has become? I tend to agree with those who argue for a relatively late date for the Bhagavad Gītā, perhaps somewhere in the first century C.E.*
At the time when the Sanskrit epics were formulated and collected, a great, formative cultural change took place in India: the emergence of a remarkably new kind of spirituality, from which the Bhagavad Gītā derives much of its inspiration. Around the second century B.C.E., expressions of an intense personal devotion to a particular deity began to emerge, with increasing passion. This new devotionalism, called bhakti in Sanskrit, was radically different from the traditional Vedic spirituality (dated roughly 1200 to 500 B.C.E.) that had preceded it by several centuries. Though reverence for the Vedic tradition, and especially for the Upaniads, continued to be expressed generally—at times in the Bhagavad Gītā itself—bhakti devotionalism was an explicit turning-away from the generally more impersonal sacrificial ritualism of the Vedas, which the high-caste Brahmins had preserved with great virtuosity, both in their memorization of the Vedic texts and in their performance of the Vedic rituals. The profoundly original spirituality of the Upaniads—that last creative phase of Vedic literature, which the Bhagavad Gītā frequently quotes with great favor—tended to be more impersonal, more philosophical, and more metaphysical than devotional. The Upaniads introduced many new concepts into the Brahmanical traditions that developed out of the older Vedas, and eventually they became one of the most important foundations of classical Hinduism, and a major source of in
spiration for the Bhagavad Gītā. What the Bhagavad Gītā added to this Upaniadic tradition of meditation and yoga was its primary focus on the god Ka.
The Upaniads transformed the profoundly sacrificial tradition of the Vedas into a set of symbolic acts that no longer required the inherent violence of actual sacrifice, that is, the actual shedding of a sacrificial victim’s blood. The famous opening passage of the Bhadārayaka Upaniad catalogs in great detail the body parts of the Vedic sacrificial horse. Horse anatomy was well known to the Vedic clans because of the required ritual dismemberment, and the cataloging of the slain horse’s body parts, in the Vedic horse sacrifice. The innovation that we see in this opening passage consists in equating the horse’s body parts with significant parts of the cosmos. Thus the head of the horse is equated with the dawn, the horse’s vision is the sun, its breath is the wind, its body is the year, the four limbs are the four seasons, its liver and lungs are the hills, and its body hairs are the plants and trees; when the horse urinates, it rains; and so forth.
In effect, this series of equations or identifications (in Sanskrit, called bandhus) achieves a symbolic or magical transformation of a violent act of animal sacrifice into a meditation on the reconstitution of the entire cosmos into all of its constituent parts. What we witness in this passage is a significantly new event: a Vedic teacher urging his students to understand that the age-old horse sacrifice, with all its violence and explicit obscenity (involving crude sexual taunting between high-caste Brahmin priests and the equally high-caste wives of the king), is not really a horse sacrifice at all! This kind of symbolic thinking, which is essentially magical,* came to be deeply influential in Vedic culture and maintained a tenacious hold as well on post-Vedic culture—that is, classical Hinduism—for many centuries afterward. The Bhagavad Gītā ultimately rejects this kind of magical thinking, in favor of a newer religious sentiment. It advocates instead the devotee’s personal surrender to the deity. The Bhagavad Gītā thereby solidified bhakti devotionalism as a major cultural force in classical India and centered it on the god Ka.
The authors of the Upaniads had also advocated an identification between the individual soul (the ātman) and the cosmic soul that pervades the universe (Brahman). This was a significant metaphysical step away from the magical equations of the sacrificial victim’s body with the body of the cosmos that we see in the opening passage of the Bhadārayaka Upaniad.* This advance in philosophical sophistication is illustrated by another famous passage, again from the early Upaniads: stanza 6.3 of the Chāndogya Upaniad, where the individual soul or self (the ātman) is ultimately equated with the infinite cosmic self (Brahman). Clearly, this Vedic equation took deep roots in the Bhagavad Gītā as well, where Ka frequently identifies himself with this infinite Brahman. (See examples in Chapters 5, 6, and 8, among many others.) In the Bhagavad Gītā, the ātman is eternal, and is ultimately unaffected by events in the natural world (prakti) and its three qualities (guas). This conception of the ātman is extremely important in the Bhagavad Gītā, which refers to this utterly spiritual, nonmaterial entity—the individual soul—by means of many other Sanskrit terms: for example, dehin, “the embodied one”; or purua, “the person, spirit”; or ketrajña, “the knower of the field.” Less frequent but equally revealing are terms like sākin, “the witness,” and udāsīna, “the impartial bystander” or “the reliable witness.” All these terms are used to describe the ultimate detachment of the ātman from the inevitable troubles of this world.
Another feature of the philosophy of the Bhagavad Gītā that deserves attention is the fact that reincarnation is so well entrenched in it that it is simply taken for granted. The doctrine of the perpetual reincarnation of the ātman goes back, once again, to the Upaniads. In this view, the ātman is born, and dies, and is reborn again—and again and again—in a long string of lives that does not end until the individual realizes his or her identity with infinite Brahman. While the Bhagavad Gītā is not the source of this doctrine, it is a very successful popularization—perhaps one of the most successful popularizations—of this doctrine in all of Hindu literature. Notably, both Buddhism and Jainism, which reject so many core doctrines of the Hindu traditions, readily accept the doctrine of reincarnation. They both also embrace its corollary, the doctrine of karma: the view, that is, that one’s actions have inevitable consequences, not only in this life, but in all the lives that follow it. The notions of karma and re-incarnation are deeply embedded and pervasive in Indian culture; it is hard to imagine an India that did not have these ideas as central elements in its worldview.
As we have seen, many crucial Upaniadic ideas endured well beyond the Vedic period, which essentially came to an end with the advent of the many heterodox and profoundly ascetic traditions, especially Buddhism and Jainism, in about the fourth century B.C.E. Clear traces of asceticism had already appeared within the Vedic tradition as well, which, especially in the Upaniads, put great new emphasis on the personal liberation (Sanskrit moka, and in Buddhism, nirvāa) of the individual from all social (and especially caste) obligations. In Sanskrit these were called śramaa traditions, that is, the traditions of those who renounce the world. By rejecting the spiritual authority of the Vedic tradition, Buddhism, Jainism, and similar movements offered themselves as alternatives to the caste system, with its elaborate network of restrictive and rigid—and at times brutally oppressive—social obligations. Buddhism, Jainism, and the other śramaa traditions refocused spirituality away from social obligations (i.e., caste dharma) and trained it instead on the individual’s deliverance from suffering. This shift is clearly illustrated by the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, which assert that all life is suffering, that the cause of suffering is desire, that suffering can be extinguished, and that the eightfold path of Buddhism is the means to extinguishing it. In Buddhism the term dharma takes on this new, less socialized meaning. The emphasis on personal liberation is also reflected in Jainism’s adamant focus on complete nonviolence (Sanskrit ahisā), an enormous influence on Gandhi. These traditions emphasized withdrawal from a social system about which they tended to be very pessimistic, even contemptuous at times, and triggered a turn in classical India toward monasticism and asceticism.
Although the Bhagavad Gītā never directly refers to these ascetic śramaa traditions, it can nevertheless be seen as a response to the challenge that these movements posed to traditional Brahmanic Hinduism. But its counterargument against them is a remarkably unexpected one. The Bhagavad Gītā at times does gesture toward a philosophy of nonviolence—the word ahisā occurs in the Bhagavad Gītā four times—but never as a central tenet of its teaching. The word always occurs in lists of the virtues—of the wise man, or the “knower of the field,” or the man born into divine circumstance, or finally the man who possesses the quality, the disposition, of clarity (sāttvika). But by and large the Bhagavad Gītā is a kind of counterintuitive challenge to the conventional morality of those who would preach nonviolence. Ka’s ultimate goal is to persuade Arjuna to pick up his weapons and fight. Implicit in the view of the Bhagavad Gītā, as in the Mahābhārata as a whole, is the belief that in this world violence, like action itself, is inevitable.
As the Bhagavad Gītā opens, Arjuna is expressing moral qualms against this war between cousins. He looks across the battlefield at both of the assembled armies. He sees kinsmen on both sides, revered teachers and dear cousins and cherished childhood playmates. This arouses a moral reaction in him that we all can recognize as true and right. His moral sense tells Arjuna clearly that such a war, especially among kin, is utterly wrong. It is clear that his qualms against this impending doomsday battle are impeccably moral, and as such should be highly commendable. Who among us would not want to see such moral qualms expressed, and acted upon, today? But paradoxically Ka does not commend Arjuna’s moment of conscience. Instead he dismisses it as weakness of nerve, unfitting in a nobleman. Any warrior or soldier anywhere will be familiar with this sort of response. It appeals to the sense of sham
e that soldiers feel before their peers at experiencing a failure of nerve at some moment of crisis on the battlefield. This argument from shame is a well-worn cliché of epic literature and is frequently expressed throughout our two Sanskrit epic cycles. But as a cliché, it does not move Arjuna to change his mind. Arjuna shows that he is a truly moral agent, and not just a coward, as Ka at first seems to suggest.
Thereafter Ka presents an argument to Arjuna that dismisses what might be called traditional ethics, at least from a Western, or perhaps a secular or worldly, point of view. But from Ka’s point of view—the point of view of eternity—Arjuna’s moral stance is immature. It is a myopic view of the world that is driven, simply and crudely, by desire, and it makes no difference that the desire is for peace rather than for war. Ka’s answer to Arjuna’s moral qualms comes down to this: In the long run, inevitably, we all must die. Since death is inevitable, there is no point in lamenting it. We must do the right thing, dharma, no matter what that might entail. If the fulfillment of dharma requires the execution of cousins, teachers, and friends, well then, so be it. When the message is put this bluntly, it seems harsh indeed.
Consider the following stanzas from Chapter 2:
11. You grieve for those who are beyond grieving, and you talk like one with wisdom, but the truly learned grieve neither for those who have lost their lives nor for those who still have them.
12. But in fact there never was a time when I did not exist, nor you, nor any of these other lords. And there never will be a time when we do not exist.
13. Just as the embodied one experiences childhood, and youth, and old age, in this body, in the same way he enters other bodies. A wise man is not disturbed by this.
The Bhagavad Gita Page 2
