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    The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography
    The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography
    The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography
    Ebook248 pages4 hours

    The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography

    By Richard H. Davis

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    The life and times of India's most famous spiritual and literary masterpiece

    The Bhagavad Gita, perhaps the most famous of all Indian scriptures, is universally regarded as one of the world's spiritual and literary masterpieces. Richard Davis tells the story of this venerable and enduring book, from its origins in ancient India to its reception today as a spiritual classic that has been translated into more than seventy-five languages. The Gita opens on the eve of a mighty battle, when the warrior Arjuna is overwhelmed by despair and refuses to fight. He turns to his charioteer, Krishna, who counsels him on why he must. In the dialogue that follows, Arjuna comes to realize that the true battle is for his own soul.

    Davis highlights the place of this legendary dialogue in classical Indian culture, and then examines how it has lived on in diverse settings and contexts. He looks at the medieval devotional traditions surrounding the divine character of Krishna and traces how the Gita traveled from India to the West, where it found admirers in such figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Aldous Huxley. Davis explores how Indian nationalists like Mahatma Gandhi and Swami Vivekananda used the Gita in their fight against colonial rule, and how contemporary interpreters reanimate and perform this classical work for audiences today.

    An essential biography of a timeless masterpiece, this book is an ideal introduction to the Gita and its insights into the struggle for self-mastery that we all must wage.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateOct 26, 2014
    ISBN9781400851973
    The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography

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      Book preview

      The Bhagavad Gita - Richard H. Davis

      LIVES OF GREAT RELIGIOUS BOOKS

      The Bhagavad Gita

      LIVES OF GREAT RELIGIOUS BOOKS

      The Dead Sea Scrolls, John J. Collins

      The Bhagavad Gita, Richard H. Davis

      The Book of Mormon, Paul C. Gutjahr

      The Book of Genesis, Ronald Hendel

      The Book of Common Prayer, Alan Jacobs

      The Book of Job, Mark Larrimore

      The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Donald S. Lopez, Jr.

      Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, Martin E. Marty

      Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae, Bernard McGinn

      The I Ching, Richard J. Smith

      The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, David Gordon White

      Augustine’s Confessions, Garry Wills

      FORTHCOMING:

      The Book of Revelation, Timothy Beal

      Confucius’s Analects, Annping Chin and Jonathan D. Spence

      Josephus’s Jewish War, Martin Goodman

      John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, Bruce Gordon

      The Lotus Sutra, Donald S. Lopez, Jr.

      C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, George Marsden

      The Greatest Translations of All Time: The Septuagint and the Vulgate, Jack Miles

      The Passover Haggadah, Vanessa Ochs

      The Song of Songs, Ilana Pardes

      The Daode Jing, James Robson

      Rumi’s Masnavi, Omid Safi

      The Talmud, Barry Wimpfheimer

      The Bhagavad Gita

      A BIOGRAPHY

      Richard H. Davis

      PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

      Princeton and Oxford

      Copyright © 2015 by Princeton University Press

      Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

      Princeton, New Jersey 08540

      In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street,

      Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

      press.princeton.edu

      Jacket illustration © B. G. Sharma. www.bgsharmaart.com

      All Rights Reserved

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Davis, Richard H., 1951–

      The Bhagavad Gita : a biography / Richard H. Davis.

      pages cm — (Lives of great religious books)

      Summary: The Bhagavad Gita, perhaps the most famous of all Indian scriptures, is universally regarded as one of the world’s spiritual and literary masterpieces. Richard Davis tells the story of this venerable and enduring book, from its origins in ancient India to its reception today as a spiritual classic that has been translated into more than seventy-five languages. The Gita opens on the eve of a mighty battle, when the warrior Arjuna is overwhelmed by despair and refuses to fight. He turns to his charioteer, Krishna, who counsels him on why he must. In the dialogue that follows, Arjuna comes to realize that the true battle is for his own soul. Davis highlights the place of this legendary dialogue in classical Indian culture, and then examines how it has lived on in diverse settings and contexts. He looks at the medieval devotional traditions surrounding the divine character of Krishna and traces how the Gita traveled from India to the West, where it found admirers in such figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Aldous Huxley. Davis explores how Indian nationalists like Mahatma Gandhi and Swami Vivekananda used the Gita in their fight against colonial rule, and how contemporary interpreters reanimate and perform this classical work for audiences today. An essential biography of a timeless masterpiece, this book is an ideal introduction to the Gita and its insights into the struggle for self-mastery that we all must wage—Provided by publisher.

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      ISBN 978-0-691-13996-8 (hardback)

      1. Bhagavadgita—History. 2. Bhagavadgita—Criticism, interpretation, etc. I. Title.

      BL1138.66.D38 2014

      294.5'92409—dc23

      2014023890

      British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

      This book has been composed in Garamond Premier Pro

      Printed on acid-free paper.

      Printed in the United States of America

      10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

      CONTENTS

      ILLUSTRATIONS

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      I am grateful to Fred Appel for asking me to work on a biography of the Bhagavad Gita. His invitation set me on a journey that has been challenging and rewarding, and it is not over yet.

      In the course of my work on this biography, I’ve profited from the conversations, enthusiasm, and suggestions of many friends and colleagues. At Bard College, my colleagues Sanjib Baruah, Bruce Chilton, and Carolyn Dewald all read portions of this work and gave valuable comments. Kristin Scheible read through a full draft of the manuscript with her class on Reading Religious Texts, to see how well it would work as an undergraduate course book. I appreciate the comments and advice of Dennis Dalton, Joshua Greene, Brian Hatcher, Jack Hawley, Gene Irschick, Jon Keune, Steve Lindquist, Donald Lopez, Christian Novetzke, Phil Oldenberg, Rosane Rocher, Steve Rosen, Gordon Stavig, and Tom Trautmann on various portions of this work. I am also grateful for the thoughtful suggestions of the anonymous readers at Princeton University Press.

      In India, many people helped me during work on this project; I can single out only a few. In Delhi, I appreciate the invitation of Jyotindra Jain and Kavita Singh to present some of my work at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and the vigorous comments of the faculty and students there. In Mumbai, Rashmi Poddar and Shekhar Bajaj gave me much needed assistance, and in Wardha, I was aided by Bharat Mahodaya and Ashok Mehre. For my visits to Kurukshetra, I am grateful for the help and friendship of Rajendra S. Rana and Anand Pal Tomar. For my time in Pune and Alandi, I thank Sucheta Paranjpe for her assistance.

      I have been lucky to have the opportunity to present talks growing out of my work on the biography of the Gita at Barnard College, Brown University, Harvard University, Luther College, Tufts University, the University of Michigan, and Yale University. I thank audiences at all of these talks for their stimulating questions.

      I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for a fellowship that enabled me to work full-time on this book, and to Bard College for its support of continuing faculty research. Finally, I wish to acknowledge my gratitude to the students at Bard College over many years who have patiently read through the Bhagavad Gita with me and who have engaged in their own dialogues with Krishna.

      LIVES OF GREAT RELIGIOUS BOOKS

      The Bhagavad Gita

      Introduction

      Dhritarashtra asked: When my troops and the Pandavas met together, itching for battle, at Kurukshetra, the field of dharma, what happened, Sanjaya?

      — Bhagavad Gita 1.1

      The Bhagavad Gita opens on a field of battle. At Kurukshetra, two massive armies led by the Pandavas and Kauravas have assembled. All the rulers along with the entire warrior class of India are involved, siding with one camp or the other. Leaders blow thunderously on conch shells, while drums and cymbals create a cacophonous roar. Warriors are slapping their arms in eager anticipation. Nearby, packs of jackals and flocks of crows have also assembled, looking forward to a feast of human flesh.

      Just as the battle is about to commence, Arjuna, the leading warrior of the Pandava side, asks his charioteer Krishna to station his vehicle in between the two vast forces. I want to look at the men arrayed here so eager for war, he explains, and Krishna drives his chariot into the no-man’s-land. At this moment, Arjuna is overcome with anxiety and despair. He drops his bow and threatens to renounce the battle altogether. It is Krishna’s task to persuade Arjuna to overcome his doubts.

      The ensuing dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna goes far beyond a rationale for war. It touches on many of the ethical dilemmas, religious practices, and philosophical issues that concerned Indian elites of ancient times. As Krishna instructs Arjuna, he draws on ideas from the many contending schools of thought in classical India, and seeks to integrate them within his own overarching agenda. In the course of their conversation, Krishna reveals to Arjuna that he is the Supreme Lord. Hence this work has long been known by the title Bhagavad Gita, the song (gita) of the Lord (bhagavan).

      One can visit the spot in India where this famous dialogue took place. Nowadays a small pilgrimage center, Kurukshetra lies in the fertile plains of Haryana state, in northwestern India, along the course of the dried-up Sarasvati River, once a tributary of the Indus River. In and around the town are numerous sites where significant events in the great battle are supposed to have occurred. At the center of town, overlooking the holy bathing tank used by pilgrims, stands a monumental bronze statue, sixty feet in length and thirty-five feet high, of Krishna and Arjuna in their chariot.

      A few miles west of town, the place where Krishna and Arjuna held their conversation is known as Jyotisar, the essence of illumination. A wide banyan tree, said to be a descendant of an original banyan under which Krishna parked the chariot, marks the exact Place of the Gita Teaching. Under the shade of the tree now sits a small marble statuette depicting Krishna turning to address Arjuna, protected in a modest marble and glass display case. Also inside the case are two laminated, full-color religious posters and a small booklet of the Bhagavad Gita itself. All are adorned with garlands of orange marigolds, white jasmine, and red rose. The tree is surrounded by ponds where one can take a purifying bath, and scattered about the site are several modest shrines dedicated to various Hindu gods and saints. It is a quiet and contemplative place now, like so many former battlefields. When I first journeyed to Jyotisar in January 2010, the only other visitors loitering around the place were young male students from the nearby Institute of Hotel Management.

      In India and beyond, one can also celebrate the day on which the Bhagavad Gita dialogue happened. The eleventh day of the waxing moon in the lunar month of Margashirsha, which generally falls in December or January, is known as the Gita Jayanti, the birthday of the Gita. Although the age of the Gita has been a long-standing matter of uncertainty and debate, the lunar date of the conversation is clearly established in the text. Today the famous conversation is often observed with collective recitations of the seven hundred verses of the Gita, accompanied by acts of worship and devotional singing. At Kurukshetra, the locals celebrate Gita Jayanti with particular verve. In addition to recitations and discourses on the Gita at the Shri Krishna Museum, the town hosts a five-day Kurukshetra Festival, which includes a procession of musicians and holy men, cultural performances pertaining to the Gita in several great tents, political leaders being felicitated, fireworks, and a massive crafts fair of over five hundred displays from throughout India. Beyond India as well, Hindus in Malaysia, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States commemorate the day on which this sacred text was first spoken.

      Early in the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna that he has given these same teachings from the beginning of time. And accordingly, many observers have maintained that the dialogue narrated in the Bhagavad Gita is not merely a historically specific conversation but in fact an eternal teaching that has universal relevance or an event that takes place at all times. Kurukshetra is both a particular field of battle and perpetual field of dharma, or righteousness, as Dhritarashtra’s opening question suggests. The medieval Hindu philosopher Shankara (788–820 CE) believed that this dialogue restates the essential teachings of the eternal Vedas. Mohandas Gandhi held that the battlefield of Kurukshetra is located in every human soul, where the perennial conflict between good and evil occurs without end. Devotees of the god Krishna like A. C. Bhaktivedanta, founding teacher of the International Society of Krishna Consciousness, view Krishna to be the Supreme Personality of Godhead, eternally present in the heavenly realm and at the same time recurrently appearing in our world to reenact his timeless activities. The British novelist and essayist Aldous Huxley considered the teachings of Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita as the most systematic scriptural statement of a perennial philosophy common to all the religions of the world. And countless other readers and reciters over the centuries have heard in Gita’s words something that speaks powerfully to them in their own circumstances.

      FIGURE 1. Kurukshetra Utsav: Gita Jayanti Samaroh, poster, unknown artist, 2011.

      Author’s collection. The poster advertises the 2011 Gita Birthday Festival at Kurukshetra.

      The doubleness of the Bhagavad Gita—its historical specificity and its continuing, even eternal, life—animates this short biography. Whether or not Krishna actually spoke these words to Arjuna under a banyan tree in the Kurukshetra battlefield on the eleventh day of the light fortnight of Margashirsha, the Bhagavad Gita was composed at a certain time and place. Most Sanskrit scholars agree that the Bhagavad Gita originated in northern India, sometime in the classical period between the reign of the Mauryan king Ashoka (r. 269–232 BCE) and Gupta dynasty (320–547 CE), as part of a much larger poetic composition, the epic poem Mahabharata. The dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna, as it has been passed down, was deeply and creatively engaged with the many philosophical and religious currents and disputes of northern Indian during this period. In the course of this discussion, Krishna articulates a complex new religious formulation that encompasses many other existing schools of thought.

      Like many great religious works, the Bhagavad Gita has outlived its own time and place of composition. The work has lived a vivid and contentious existence over the centuries since, through readings and recitations, translations and commentaries that have reinscribed this classical Indian work into many new currents and disputes. Medieval Brahmin scholars and Krishna devotees, British colonial scholars, German romantics, globe-trotting Hindu gurus, Indian anticolonial freedom fighters, Western students, and spiritual seekers have all engaged in new dialogues with the Gita.

      My own dialogue with the Bhagavad Gita began in the early 1970s, when I was a college student majoring in the history and philosophy of religion. A wave of counter-cultural fascination with Eastern spirituality had brought the Gita to a large, new US audience, and new translations by both scholars and Hindu teachers proliferated. The first version I read was the translation by Bhaktivedanta, Swami Prabhupada, an Indian guru who traveled to the United States in 1965 and established a following of Krishna consciousness. Though intrigued by the work, I was puzzled by its unfamiliar terminology and complicated discussion. Little did I expect that this was the beginning of a lifelong dialogue. A few years later, as a neophyte student of Sanskrit, I tried my hand at reading the Gita in its original language. And now, over the past twenty-five years, I have taught the work in college courses on Indian religions, almost as regularly as the Gita Jayanti is celebrated.

      Sometime in the nineteenth century, the Bhagavad Gita acquired the label of the Hindu Bible. While the designation is misleading in important respects, since the Gita has never enjoyed the canonical authority over the Hindu community that the Hebrew Bible holds for Jews or Christian New Testament has for Christians, it does point to a crucial similarity. Like those more extensive bibles of other traditions, the Gita is internally complex and ambiguous enough to have spoken differing truths to different audiences, as suited to their diverse situations and expectations. Like them, it has given rise to two millennia of dialogues, readings, and interpretations. The medieval poet Jnanadeva compared the Gita to the legendary multifaceted wish-granting gem Chintamani. For centuries new readers have glimpsed the wish-granting Gita through its different facets, seeking to bring their own desires toward fulfillment. My book explores those glimpses.

      The life of the Bhagavad Gita cannot be separated from the identity of its principal speaker, Krishna. Throughout the Mahabharata, Krishna appears as a human warrior and ruler, a friend of Arjuna and the other Pandavas, who also has a mysterious other side. For one thing, his upbringing among a tribe of nomadic cowherders is most unusual for a member of the Kshatriya class. More significantly, he reveals his divine nature in the course of the Gita. Krishna’s own doubleness as a god in human incarnation introduces another layer of complexity to the work. How

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