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    The Bhagavad Gita According to Gandhi
    The Bhagavad Gita According to Gandhi
    The Bhagavad Gita According to Gandhi
    Ebook114 pages2 hours

    The Bhagavad Gita According to Gandhi

    By Mahatma Gandhi

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    This is the first volume in any language to include Gandhi's Gita text and commentary together in their entirety. Presented to his disciples at prayer meetings over a nine-month period in 1926, Mahatma Gandhi's commentaries on the Gita are regarded in India as among the most important of the century. In them Gandhi addresses the issues he felt most directly affected the spiritual lives of common people.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherReading Essentials
    Release dateJan 5, 2019
    ISBN9781773233888
    The Bhagavad Gita According to Gandhi
    Author

    Mahatma Gandhi

    Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) was an Indian lawyer, nationalist, and civil rights activist. Born Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, he was first given the honorary title of Mahatma—Sanskrit for “great-souled”—in 1914 while living in South Africa. Raised in Gujarat in a prominent Hindu family, he travelled to London and studied law at the Inner Temple. Called to the Bar in 1891, Gandhi returned to India for a brief time before settling in South Africa. There, he started a family while perfecting his style of nonviolent resistance grounded in civil disobedience. In 1915, he returned to his native country to join the fight against British rule, organizing peasants across India to take a stand against taxation, racism, and other forms of colonial oppression. He became the leader of the Indian National Congress in 1921 and increased his involvement with the movements for women’s rights, religious and ethnic equality, and the elimination of India’s caste system, which unjustly effected Dalits deemed untouchable from birth. His central cause, however, was Swaraj, which can be translated as self-governance or democracy. As his popularity increased, he simplified his lifestyle in solidarity with the Indian poor, wearing traditional clothing, eating vegetarian food, and fasting as a matter of personal hygiene and protest. In 1930, he led the twenty-five day Dandi Salt March or Salt Satyagraha, in response to a British salt tax, inspiring millions of Indians to take direct action against British rule. A proponent of religious pluralism, he lamented the interfaith violence between Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims that broke out following independence and the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. At 78 years old, he was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist for his outreach to the Muslim community.

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      Book preview

      The Bhagavad Gita According to Gandhi - Mahatma Gandhi

      The Bhagavad Gita

      According to Gandhi

      by Mahatma Gandhi, translated by Mahadev Desai

      First published in 1946

      This edition published by Reading Essentials

      Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany

      [email protected]

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

      The Gospel of Selfless Action or The Gita According to Gandhi I have an impression that the bulk of the readers of [this] book will be students…. [And] let me make it clear that I lay no more claim to scholarship than does Gandhiji, but I am myself a student?as I hope to remain until my dying day?and it is out of sympathy for the needs of the people of my kind that I have presumed to introduce this additional matter.

      —Mahadev Desai, Gandhi’s biographer, personal secretary, and father of Narayan, concerning his own introduction and this translation into English of Gandhi’s Gujarati version.

      Fifty-one years after his death Gandhi’s nonviolence seems to be the only alternative to non-existence, his consideration of unity of life inspires ecologists today, his ideas of simplicity and non-possession are the ultimate answers to the culture of waste we are living in today.

      Narayan Desai in ‘My Gandhi’

      FOREWORD

      The following pages by Mahadev Desai* are an ambitious project. It represents his unremitting labours during his prison life in 1933-‘34. Every page is evidence of his scholarship and exhaustive study of all he could lay hands upon regarding the Bhagavad Gita, poetically called the Song Celestial by Sir Edwin Arnold. The immediate cause of this labour of love was my translation in Gujarati of the divine book as I understood it. In trying to give a translation of my meaning of the Gita, he found himself writing an original commentary on the Gita.

      The book might have been published during his lifetime, if I could have made time to go through the manuscript. I read some portions with him, but exigencies of my work had to interrupt the reading. Then followed the imprisonments of August 1942, and his sudden death within six days of our imprisonment. All of his immediate friends decided to give his reverent study of the Gita to the public. He had copies typed for his English friends who were impatient to see the commentary in print. And Pyarelal, who was collaborator with Mahadev Desai for many years, went through the whole manuscript and undertook to perform the difficult task of proof reading. Hence this publication.

      Frankly, I do not pretend to any scholarship. I have, therefore, contended myself with showing the genesis of Mahadev Desai’s effort. In so far as the translation part of the volume is concerned, I can vouch for its accuracy. He carried out the meaning of the original translation. I may add too that Pyarelal has interfered with the original only and in rare cases where it was considered to be essential, an interference which Mahadev Desai would, in my opinion, have gladly accepted, had he been alive.

      On the train to Madras

      M.K. GANDHI

      20th January, 1946

      *Gandhiji is referring here to Mahadev Desai, his disciple and personal secretary for some thirty years. It also was Mahadev who translated from Gujarati to English Gandhiji’s autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth. In this online edition of Gita, only the actual Gandhian translation appears. I hope to be able to add Mahadev’s original 121-page commentary and verse annotations in an update.

      ANASAKTIYOGA

      (Introduction)

      [It was at Kosani in Almora on 24th June, 1929, i.e., after two years’ waiting, that I finished the introduction to my translation of the Gita. The whole was then published in due course. It has been translated in Hindi, Bengali and Marathi.

      There has been an insistent demand for an English translation. I finished the translation of the introduction at the Yeravda prison. Since my discharge it has lain with friends and now I give it to the reader. Those, who take no interest in the Book of Life, will forgive the trespass on these columns.* To those who are interested in the poem and treat it as their guide in life, my humble attempt might prove of some help.

      —M.K.G.]

      *This translation appeared in the columns of the Young India, 6-8-1931, from where it has been reproduced here.

      I

      1. Just as acted upon by the affection of co-workers like Swami Anand and others, I wrote My Experiments with Truth, so has it been regarding my rendering of the Gita. "We shall be able to appreciate your meaning of the message of the Gita, only when we are able to study a translation of the whole text by yourself, with the addition of such notes as you may deem necessary. I do not think it is just on your part to deduce ahimsa etc. from stray verses," thus spoke Swami Anand to me during the non-cooperation days. I felt the force of his remarks. I, therefore, told him that I would adopt his suggestion when I got the time. Shortly afterwards I was imprisoned. During my incarceration I was able to study the Gita more fully. I went reverently through the Gujarati translation of the Lokamanya’s great work. He had kindly presented me with the Marathi original and the translations in Gujarati and Hindi, and had asked me, if I could not tackle the original, at least to go through the Gujarati translation. I had not been able to follow the advice outside the prison walls.

      But when I was imprisoned I read the Gujarati translation. This reading whetted my appetite for more and I glanced through several works on the Gita.

      2. My first acquaintance with the Gita began in 1888-89 with the verse translation by Sir Edwin Arnold known as the Song Celestial. On reading it, I felt a keen desire to read a Gujarati translation. And I read as many translations as I could lay hold of. But all such reading can give me no passport for presenting my own translation. Then again my knowledge of Sanskrit is limited, my knowledge of Gujarati too is in no way scholarly. How could I then dare present the public with my translation?

      3. It has been my endeavor, as also that of some companions, to reduce to practice the teaching of the Gita as I have understood it. The Gita has become for us a spiritual reference book. I am aware that we ever fail to act in perfect accord with the teaching. The failure is not due to want of effort, but is in spite of it. Even though the failures we seem to see rays of hope. The accompanying rendering contains the meaning of the Gita message which this little band is trying to enforce in its daily conduct.

      4. Again this rendering is designed for women, the commercial class, the so-called Shudras and the like who have little or no literary equipment, who have neither the time nor the desire to read the Gita in the original and yet who stand in need of its support. In spite of my Gujarati being unscholarly, I must own to having the desire to leave to the Gujaratis, through the mother tongue, whatever knowledge I may possess. I do indeed wish that at a time when literary output of a questionable character is pouring upon the Gujaratis, they should have before them a rendering the majority can understand of a book that is regarded as unrivalled for its spiritual merit and so withstand the overwhelming flood of unclean literature.

      5. This desire does not mean any disrespect to the other renderings. They have their own place. But I am not aware of the claim made by the translators of enforcing their meaning of the Gita in their own lives. At the back of my reading there is the claim of an endeavour to enforce the meaning in my own conduct for an unbroken period of forty years. For this reason I do indeed harbour the wish that all Gujarati men or women wishing to shape their conduct according to their faith, should digest and derive strength from the translation here presented.

      6. My co-workers, too, have worked at this translation. My knowledge of Sanskrit being very limited, I should not have full confidence in my literal translation. To that extent, therefore, the translation has passed before the eyes of Vinoba, Kaka Kalelkar, Mahadev Desai and Kishorlal Mashruwala.

      II

      7. Now about the message of the Gita.

      8. Even in 1888-89, when I first became acquainted with the

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