Gita Introduction

Ch. I - Introduction

            If you are holding this book in your hands, you—like me—want to know more about the Gita. Yes, even as I write this, I continue to learn and to study. I am a student like you. You are my children and my grandchildren, my friends and distant relations. In the pages of this book, we can study the Gita together, ask and answer questions, and improve our lives immeasurably.

            I assume that you, by picking up this book in the first place, you have heard of the Gita in a basic way. You may even know quite a lot about its origins and importance. If you do—if you know the Gita's origins in India among a corrupt and corroded society, its spread and influence on Ancient Greece, its bestselling status when it was translated into English and its subsequent impact on the most important early thinkers and writers in America, and its role in unexplainable phenomenon the world over—you can probably skip this chapter. If not, or if you want to be inspired anew, read on. You'll no doubt reach the chapter's end, knowing so much more than you realized there was to know and think But what is so great about the Gita? Well, that's where the rest of this book comes in.

            Essentially, the Gita is a war story, sung into the greatest warrior of his age, Arjuna, by his charioteer, Krishna. It speaks of duty, responsibility, emotion, and the delicate balance between mind and intellect. It's rich with symbolism and countless layers of meaning. And it has influenced the lives of billions of people throughout history and the world over. Yes, you read that correctly: billions of people.

            Aldous Huxley, the author of one of the most prophetic books about modern Western civilization (Brave New World), said that the Gita was "one of the most clear and comprehensive summaries of perennial philosophy ever revealed; hence its enduring value is subject not only to India but to all of humanity." He also called the Gita "the most systematic statement of spiritual evolution of endowing value to mankind."

            The American scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer studied Sanskrit specifically so he could read the original text of the Gita, and he called it one of the most important books ever written, and among the most influential books on him personally. Famously, he quoted the Gita (“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”) to onlookers witnessing the first successful atomic test in the 1940s.

            Albert Einstein, too, was a lover of the Gita, saying “When I read the Bhagavad-Gita and reflect about how God created this universe everything else seems so superfluous.”

            High praise indeed, but the influence of the Gita is everywhere you look: The current highest-grossing film of all time, Avatar, contains several clear references to the Gita, as does The Legend of Baggar Vance, which features a main character with a name quite similar to Bhagwan, and a secondary character named R. Juna. Elements from the Gita have made their way into Star Wars and The Matrix, too. Without the Gita, there would be no January, no Colossus at Rhodes or Rhode Island, no Cyrus the Great.

            Now, let's clarify that “the Gita” is shorthand for “the Bhagwad Gita,” which means “Song of the Bhagwan,” and “Bhagwan” is another word for supreme being or god. Like much of what we'll talk about here, this is a somewhat simplified version of the full, complex reality, but it's accurate enough for right now. The Gita is part of a compilation of the teachings of a self-realized scribe named Vyas. (We'll get to what it means to be self-realized later on.) Vyas nestled his teachings inside an epic story of warring clans, families divided by conflict and tragedy, and epic heroes battling each other and themselves to win back or take over many kingdoms. This whole story, of which the Gita is a small part, is called the Mahabharata.

            The sage who wrote the Mahabharata and the Gita, Vyas, lived thousands of years ago—probably about three thousand, but perhaps as many as five thousand. He saw around him a society that had fallen from greatness. In fact, he was disgusted with society around him at the time. Obsessed with money, social standing, and ritual, the people of the era had cast aside the wisdom of holy teachings, replacing them with bribes and prayers to in the hope of winning selfish favor with the gods. The people, Vyas believed, had forgotten the goodness within themselves—they focused on material goods, rather than common humanity, knowledge, and selflessness. The number of times one bowed (and in what direction) and the quality of the sacrifice or offering left before a crude idol was less important—far less important—than behaving well and dealing fairly with each other. In other words, getting rid of selfish desires was essential to getting in touch with the goodness within humanity.

            So Vyas started to draw together his teachings and compose a story. It was a grand epic, and he assembled it knowing he could nest within its overlapping tales essential truths about how humans should behave and how essential it was to treat each other and oneself with respect. The meaning of the old scriptures that had been corrupted might be saved with a new story and new interpretations. Within Vyas' Mahabharata is a short tale of a prince's self-doubt during an epic battle with his own family. This is the Gita.

            The prince's name is Arjuna, and he has returned after 12 years of banishment to take back his kingdom from a wicked and corrupt group of cousins who have declared themselves kings. Arjuna was a great warrior at a time when one's profession was one's life. He had access to the best training and the finest weapons, and, above all, to his teacher and charioteer, Krishna. When time comes to fight, Arjuna's army meets the army raised by his cousins on a great battlefield. Arjuna is eager; this is the battle he's waited his whole life to engage in. Bow strung across his back, he rides out in his chariot, Krishna alongside him, to fight.

            But, when he reaches the center of the battle, he—without explanation—can't fight. He has to drop his bow, in the heat of battle, and lie down. He is torn by what he sees: his own army at his back, marching to help him take back his kingdom so he can lead, and the enemy army of unrighteous usurpers advancing on him from the other direction. Krishna sees Arjuna fall, kneels beside him, and sings into his ear the contents of the Gita.

            It is a story rich with symbolism and deep meaning, just as Vyas intended. There is even some evidence that the wars that form the backdrop for the story actually took place, even if the idea of pausing a battle to recite a portion of the Mahabharata is clearly fictional. Nevertheless, the wisdom of the text was most important. It explains the true nature of the senses, the mind, the intellect, and the delicate balance between them.

            The Gita lent the wisdom of the ages to its followers in India, and India's vast wealth, power, and diversity spread these ideas to many other parts of the world. In Ancient Greece, where the sun was driven across the sky in a chariot, the charioteer was named Kouros, the Greek equivalent of Krishna. Krishna's consort, Radha, saw her name transformed into Radhos, and, later, Rhode. This is the origin of both the island of Rhodes in Greece as well as America's own Rhode Island. In Rome, the god Janus looked both forward and back with his multiple heads, and he lent his name to the first month—January—which both opens a new year and closes an old one. But Janus was not a Roman god, or a Greek one: he was the Indian elephant god Ganesh. The name “Cyrus,” which was popular in Ancient Persia, is itself a derivation of “Krishna.”

            When the Gita began to make its way to the West, it was seen almost immediately as a groundbreaking text. The first Governor-General of India, Warren Hastings, was so taken with the Gita that he exclaimed it would “survive when the British Dominion in India shall long have ceased to exist.” This did not earn him any points with the British, who were subjugating India harshly at the time and had no patience to hear that anything—let alone an Indian philosophical text—would outlast their mighty empire.

            Hastings then went on to commission the translation of the Gita into English by Charles Wilkins, whose work was an instant best-seller in London and America (more on both of them later). Ralph Waldo Emerson put copies into the hands of nearly everyone he could, writing that he “owed a magnificent day to [the Gita]. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us.” Emerson's friend Henry David Thoreau said that Shakespeare, compared to the Gita, was "youthfully green & practical merely."

            Even in our modern era, the Gita's wisdom and teachings continue to blossom. In the 1920s, a British Indian court found that a master yogi named Bengali Baba had brought back to life the dead Prince of Bhawal. In the 1930s, a commission set up by Mathatma Gandhi himself concluded that a girl named Shanti Devi had lived previously in the body of another woman who died during childbirth. In the 1960s, Swami Rama was examined by scientists at the Menninger Clinic, who wanted to know how this yogi could control his breathing and heartbeat simply through the mindfulness learned in a lifetime of studying the Gita. Swami Rama could, for all intents and purposes, put himself in a state of suspended animation at will. We'll spend more time looking at each of these miraculous cases in another chapter.

            For now, what's important is this: the Gita has and will continue to have a profound impact on the world around us. Its depths are still being discovered, and the more we examine these depths the more we will see that they may well be limitless.