THE BHAGAVAD GITA A NEW TRANSLATION Gavin Flood and Charles Martin To our teachers CONTENTS Translators’ Introduction The Bhagavad Gita Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Notes TRANSLATORS’ INTRODUCTION T he Bhagavad Gita, the “Song of the Lord,” is a Sanskrit poem composed in seven hundred numbered stanzas, divided into eighteen chapters, in the form of a dialogue between the Lord Krishna, a god whom we first see in his “gentle, human form,” and Arjuna, a heroic warrior, who is himself the son of another god by a mortal woman. Their discourse takes place on the eve of a cataclysmic battle, on a field between two armies of warring cousins. Arjuna, realizing that if he fights, he will be forced to kill his friends, relatives, and teachers, casts down his bow and arrow (he is a great archer) and refuses to engage in combat. The Gita unfolds as a discussion of Arjuna’s moral dilemma, with Krishna as the wise interlocutor explaining to Arjuna that he must overcome his instinctual revulsion and convincing him that he must attend to his duties as a warrior, while Krishna reveals himself as an incarnation of God in human form. Ever since its composition, sometime between the second century BC and the third or fourth century AD, the Gita has captivated the Hindu imagination, proving an inspiration to some of India’s leading politicians and public figures (such as Mahatma Gandhi) and a generating source of art and literature. And yet, because it deals with common human issues—how we should act, how we should perform virtue in the context of who we are in our own lives—Gandhi justifiably regarded it as a universal text. Still, the Gita is a dialogue, rather than a work of systematic philosophy, and so the meanings of the text are not self- evident. As a result, the Gita has been interpreted in many ways and used in support of a number of different philosophical and political ideas, from pacifism to aggressive nationalism, from philosophical monism to theism. As we have said, the Gita begins with the moral dilemma of Arjuna. But we need now to say more about that dilemma and the narrative context in which it is set. Although the Gita is self-contained, its actions and characters are firmly interwoven with those of a much larger poem, one of the largest ever conceived, a Sanskrit epic of nearly one hundred thousand stanzas called the Mahabharata. The Gita forms a small but important part of this epic (6.23–40). Complex in its narrative and chronology, the Mahabharata tells many stories, but a brief description of the relevant part of the epic will help us to understand the stakes involved in the dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna. The Gita and the Mahabharata The story into which the Gita is set is that of a war between two rival factions over succession to the throne of the North Indian kingdom of Bharata. Both parties have arguments that legitimate their claim. Once upon a time, there were two brothers, sons of Vyasa, who is both the author of the Mahabharata and a character in it. The elder son, Dhritarashtra, was born blind and could not inherit the throne, and so his younger brother Pandu became king. Pandu had been cursed, so that he would die if he ever slept with a woman. His resourceful first wife Pritha (also known as Kunti) slept in turn with three gods, producing the first three of five sons; his second wife, Madri, slept with twin gods and produced twins. The five children were known collectively as the Pandavas: Yudhishthira, the eldest, Bhima, the strongest, our protagonist Arjuna, and the twins Nakula and Sahadeva. The other faction consisted of their cousins, the hundred sons of Dhritarashtra, known as the Kauravas, or descendants of Kuru. The Kauravas were led by their eldest brother, Duryodhana. On the death of King Pandu, blind Dhritarashtra succeeded him, which created rivalry between the two sets of cousins. In an attempt to keep the cousins’ rivalry from turning into war, Dhritarashtra divided the kingdom; one half to be ruled by Duryodhana, and the other half by Yudhishthira. Yudhishthira instituted a royal consecration, sanctioned by the Vedic scriptures, to establish his authority, which involved Duryodhana challenging him to a game of dice. Yudhishthira accepted the challenge and gambled away his kingdom, along with his brothers and their shared wife Draupadi, who was publicly humiliated. A second game of dice, however, yielded a somewhat better outcome, ensuring that he and his brothers, along with Draupadi, would go into exile in the forest for twelve years with a further year spent incognito. Once this period of time had elapsed, the Pandavas could return to reclaim their kingdom. The Mahabharata recounts their time in the forest, the adventures they experienced, and the various religious teachings they encountered. After thirteen years in exile they returned to reclaim their kingdom as agreed, but Duryodhana refused to give it up, and so war ensued. The battle at Kurukshetre (an actual place north of Delhi) lasted for eighteen days, until the Kauravas were utterly defeated by the Pandavas. Set on the eve of this great conflict, in a timeless moment before the storm, the Bhagavad Gita itself is removed from the battle, framed by the request of the blind king Dhritarashtra to his minister Sanjaya, behind the Kaurava lines: “Having gathered, battle-hungry on virtue’s field, the field of Kuru, what did they do then, Sanjaya, my sons and the sons of Pandu?” Sanjaya observes the battle with his divine sight, and recounts the dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna to the king. Arjuna’s charioteer Krishna is a prince of the Vrishni clan and cousin to both the Pandus and Kauravas. He declared that one side could have his army and the other side could have him in a non-combative role. The Pandavas chose to have Krishna and so he became Arjuna’s charioteer while his army was relegated to the Kauravas. Again, Krishna’s decision not to side wholeheartedly with one faction reflects the subtlety and complexity of the story; the Kauravas are not straightforwardly the perpetrators of wrong and both sets of cousins have legitimate claims to succession. The Teachings The main issues for the Gita are therefore issues of ethics and virtue, and the opening lines of the text reflect these fundamental concerns. Dhritarashtra asks Sanjaya to tell him what the Pandavas did “on virtue’s field, the field of Kuru” (dharmakshetre kurukshetre). The Sanskrit term for virtue is dharma, whose semantic range includes duty, law, truth, ethics, and the sociocosmic order. It is from a Sanskrit verbal root dhri, meaning “to uphold” or “bear up,” and so dharma points to a power that upholds the universe and to a natural law that constrains the behavior of all beings. Thus it is the dharma of grass to grow, of birds to fly, and of warriors to fight. But it is not only natural law but moral law as well. An ordered society must be virtuous and people must act in accordance with their dharma. Kurukshetre and the field of virtue represent, of course, the field of life, the field of all our lives. The teachings of the Gita, although set within a particular narrative and context, are intended to be abstracted to all situations. What is at stake is who we are, how we should live our lives, and how we should act in the world. Dharma is a key term for understanding the Gita and for understanding Hinduism generally. Guidance and rules for how a community should organize itself and how individuals should act and conduct themselves were contained in ancient scriptures. These scriptures, known collectively as the Veda (“knowledge”), were thought to be revelations from a higher source beyond this world. For many years the Veda was not written down but orally received and transmitted through the generations. In time this body of literature came to be regarded as shruti—that which has been heard by the ancient sages who communicated this revelation to humanity. Another group of later texts about conduct came to be known as that which is remembered, smriti, the traditions of human, although inspired, authorship. If shruti constitutes a primary revelation of a higher reality—some maintaining it to be a revelation from God, others simply an eternal revelation without origin—then smriti is a secondary revelation. Shruti has more authority than smriti but, practically, guidance about how society should conduct itself is found in the smriti literature, especially the law books or Dharmashastra. The Mahabharata was thought to be composed by the sage Vyasa, and so the Bhagavad Gita is technically smriti. It is, however, for all practical purposes