Bhagavad Gita

薄伽梵歌，常簡稱為吉塔。

The Bhagavad Gita was originally compiled by Ved Vyas as a separate text. Later, when he wrote the Mahabharat, he embedded the Bhagavad Gita in it. The Mahabharat contains one hundred thousand verses, and is therefore, the largest poem in the world. It is seven times bigger than the Iliad and Odyssey put together and three times bigger than the Bible. Along with the Ramayan, it is accorded the status of Itihās, meaning historical manuscript of India. Its stories and moral instructions have fashioned the fabric of Indian culture for thousands of years. The Mahabharat is divided into eighteen sections. The Bhagavad Gita is set in the sixth section, which is called the Bheeshma Parva. It comprises eighteen chapters of the section, beginning from Chapter Twenty-five, and continuing until the Chapter Forty-two.

Since the Bhagavad Gita encapsulates most of the important aspects of the knowledge of the Vedas, it is also called Gitopanishad, or the Gitā Upaniṣhad. It serves two important purposes as described below.

There is one kind of teaching that propagates a dogma, cult or creed. There is another kind of teaching that propagates ideals and life principles that are supremely above all cults and creeds. Scholars who regard the Gita as the fruit of some particular religious system do injustice to the universality of its message. The ideas it presents are not the speculations of a philosophic intellect, rather they are the enduring truths of spiritual realities that are verifiable in our own existence and sojourn through life. Thus, when the first English edition of the Gita was published, Warren Hastings, the then Governor General of India, wrote in his foreword: “These (writings of the inhabitants of India) will survive when the British dominion of India shall have long ceased to exist, and when the sources which it yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance.”

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