Bhagavad Gita As Viewed By Swami Vivekananda

As a character Buddha was the greatest the world has ever seen; next to him Christ. But the teachings of Krishna as taught by the Gita are the grandest the world has ever known. He who wrote that wonderful poem was one of those rare souls whose lives sent a wave of regeneration through the world. The human race will never again see such a brain as his who wrote the Gita. The Gita is the popular scripture of India and the loftiest of all teachings. It consists of a dialogue held by Arjuna with Krishna, just before the commencement of the fight on the battlefield of Kurukshetra. I would advise those of you who have not read that book to read it. If you only knew how much it has influenced your own country even!

Introduction

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF THE GITA

The book known as the Gita forms a part of the Mahabharata. To understand the Gita properly, several things are very important to know. First, whether it formed a part of the Mahabharata, i.e. whether the authorship attributed to Veda- Vyasa was true, or if it was merely interpolated within the great epic; secondly, whether there was any historical personality of the name of Krishna; third, whether the great war of Kurukshetra as mentioned in the Gita actually took place; and fourthly, whether Arjuna and others were real historical persons. Now in the first place, let us see what grounds there are for such an inquiry. We know that there were many who went by the name of Veda-Vyasa; and among them who was the real author of the Gita-the Badarayana Vyasa or the Dvaipayana Vyasa? "Vyasa" was only a title. Anyone who composed a new Purana was known by the name of Vyasa, like the word Vikramaditya, which was also a general name. Another point is, the book Gita had not been much known to the generality of people before Shankaracharya made it famous by writing his great commentary on it. Long before that, there was current, according to many, commentary on it by Bodhayana. If this could be proved, it would go a long way, no doubt, to establish the antiquity of the Gita and the authorship of Vyasa. But the Bodhayana Bhashya" on the Vedanta Sutras from which Ramanuja compiled his Shri-Bbasbya, which Shankaracharya mentions and even quotes in part here and there in his own commentary, and which was so greatly discussed by the Swami Dayananda not a copy even of that Bodhayana Bhashya could I find while travelling throughout India. It is said that even Ramanuja compiled his Bhashya from a worm-eaten manuscript that he happened to find. When even this great Bodhayana Bhashya on the Vedanta-Sutras is so much enshrouded in the darkness of uncertainty, it is simply useless to try to establish the existence of the Bodhayana Bhashya on the Gita. Some infer that Shankaracharya was the author of the Gita and that it was he who foisted it into the body of the Mahabharata.

Then as to the second point in question, much doubt exists about the personality of Krishna. In one place in the Chandogya Upanishad, we find mention of Krishna, the son of Devaki, who received spiritual instructions from one Ghora, a yogi. In the Mahabharata, Krishna is the king of Dwaraka; and in the Vishnu Purana, we find a description of Krishna playing with the Gopis.