The Bhagavad Gita For Millennials

by Bibek Debroy

The Mahabharata was composed by Krishna Dvaipayana Vedavyasa. Every once in a while, someone comes along to collate and classify the Vedas. He has the title of Vedavyasa.

a mahayuga consists of satya or krita yuga, treta yuga, dvapara yuga and kali yuga. A cycle of creation is known as a manvantara, presided over by a Manu. Vaivasvata Manu is the Manu who presides over our current manvantara. Every manvantara has just over seventy-one mahayugas and in our current manvantara, we are now in the twenty-eighth mahayuga.

Mahabharata is believed to have 100,000 shlokas.

Bhishma Parva covers the period when Bhishma was the general, and the Bhagavad Gita is part of Bhishma Parva.

It has 994 shlokas and twenty-seven chapters.

the sub-parva named after the Bhagavad Gita has a little bit more than what we know as the Bhagavad Gita text.

the Gita mahatmya is from the Varaha Purana.

Adi Shankaracharya (788–820 CE) wrote a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita.

Swami Vivekananda wrote on the Gita. He wrote separate monographs on karma yoga, raja yoga and jnana yoga, all worth reading.

Mahabharata (O) probably dates to 500 BCE, while Mahabharata (F) probably dates to 500 CE.

Sanskrit grammar evolved over a period of time, and after Panini, came to assume a certain structure, especially in what is called classical Sanskrit.

The question whether the Gita was composed by one or more authors has been a matter of dispute among scholars.

the poem differs in style from beginning to end,

the poem attempts to reconcile many different points of view, so that it abounds in ‘contradictions’, ‘puzzling anomalies’ and ‘philosophical inconsistencies’ and the different meanings given to the different words are indicative of its ‘patchwork origin’.

A statistical study of the Anustubh style of the adhyayas of the Gita undertaken by this author shows that the variations of this style as between the eighteen adhyayas are not significant to justify the assumption of its multiple authorship… The Gita is undoubtedly the work of a single author, who worked out a broad synthesis of the schools of philosophic thought known at the time.

read the paper M.R. Yardi published in 1977–78,

there was a single author for the Bhagavad Gita and five different authors for the Mahabharata.

Naturally, this is probabilistic, not deterministic.

Ockham’s razor. In Latin, one variant of this reads, ‘Pluralitas non-est ponenda sine necessitate’. (When choosing between two competing theories, choose the one with fewer assumptions.)

200 manuscripts for Bhishma Parva. The earliest manuscript was from Adyar Library, Madras (now Chennai), dated 1506 CE.

For the Bhagavad Gita, there was a Kashmiri version dated 1489 CE. There is also a 1492 CE Bhagavad Gita manuscript at the Bodleian Library, Oxford University.

some old manuscripts from Java, Indonesia, which go back to the tenth century CE,

5Yardi, M.R. The Bhagavadgita as a Synthesis. Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune. 1991.

There is something known as International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) that Westerners normally use.

website on the Gita maintained by IIT Kanpur earlier, known as the Gita Supersite.

translations of the Bhagavad Gita in English. The first one was done by Charles Wilkins (1749–1836) in 1785.8

An international bibliography of the Bhagavad Gita was published in 1983.9

number of translations in English, not just in print, must be close to 500.

Translations are always imperfect.

The Vedangas are limbs or auxiliaries and the six Vedangas are shiksha (articulation and pronunciation), chhanda (prosody), vyakarana (grammar), nirukta (etymology), jyotisha (astronomy) and kalpa (rituals).

Chhanda shastra is the study of metres or prosody.

Aksharas can be hrasva or laghu (light or L) and guru (heavy or G).

Every verse consists of four quatrains (pada), the word pada meaning one quarter.

there were more than 1,300 different metres. One of the most popular was something called anushtubh. This features prominently in the Valmiki Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Puranas. The bulk of the Bhagavad Gita is also in anushtubh. The anushtubh structure meant eight aksharas in each pada, with a total of thirty-two aksharas. In addition, for anushtubh, in every pada, the fifth akshara would have to be L and the sixth akshara would have to be G.

other metres in the Bhagavad Gita are trishtubh or its variants. Trishtubh has eleven syllables in each line, with forty-four aksharas in the entire shloka.

Edwin Arnold’s translation—that is in verse.

In the Kurukshetra battle, the Pandavas had seven akshauhinis and the Kauravas had eleven akshauhinis. An akshauhini is a unit of the army, consisting of 21,870 chariots, 21,870 elephants, 65,610 horses and 1,09,350 foot-soldiers.

There are several commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita. Among the more famous ones are those by Adi Shankaracharya, Abhinavagupta (950 CE–1016 CE), Ramanuja (1017–1137 CE), Madhvacharya (1238–1317 CE) and Vallabhacharya (1479–1531 CE).

The major Puranas are eighteen in number.

Vedavyasa composed the eighteen Puranas in 400,000 shlokas.

The names of the eighteen major Puranas are the following, with the number of shlokas indicated within brackets: (1) Agni (15,400); (2) Bhagavata (18,000); (3) Brahma (10,000); (4) Brahmanda (12,000); (5) Brahmavaivarta (18,000); (6) Garuda (19,000); (7) Kurma (17,000); (8) Linga (11,000); (9) Markandeya (9,000); (10) Matsya (14,000); (11) Narada (25,000); (12) Padma (55,000); (13) Shiva (24,000); (14) ...

kshetra is a place of pilgrimage where there is no flowing water and tirtha is a place of pilgrimage where there is flowing water.

Kurukshetra had five lakes, created from the blood of kshatriyas when Parashurama slaughtered them, but it did not have flowing water.

Anyone who died fighting in Kurukshetra would go to heaven.

Gurgaon (Gurugram) is named after Dronacharya’s hermitage.

Dhrishtadyumna was the overall commander of the Pandava army.

In Duryodhana’s listing of the Pandava side, in the first chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, we have Yuyudhana, Virata, Drupada, Dhristaketu, Chekitana, Purujit Kuntibhoja, Shaibya, Yudhamanyu, Uttamauja, Subhadra’s son and the sons of Draupadi. Yuyudhana is another name for Satyaki, a warrior from the Vrishni lineage. Satyaki was therefore related to Krishna and was also Arjuna’s student. Virata was the king of Matsya. His daughter, Uttara, married Arjuna’s son, Abhimanyu. Drupada was the king of Panchala and his daughter was Draupadi. The Chedi kingdom was a powerful kingdom. When the Chedi king, Shishupala, was killed by Krishna, Shishupala’s son became the king. This son was Dhrishtaketu and he fought on the side of the Pandavas. Chekitana was from the Vrishni lineage.

Chekitana was Dhrishtaketu’s son. Kunti was the daughter of King Kuntibhoja and who was allied with the Pandavas. The kingdom was known as the Kuntibhoja kingdom. King Kuntibhoja’s son was Purujit. Both Kuntibhoja and Purujit fought on the side of the Pandavas.

This Shaibya was from the kingdom of Shibi and he fought on the side of the Pandavas. Yudhamanyu and Uttamauja are often mentioned together. They were King Drupada’s sons, that is, they were Draupadi’s brothers.

When Arjuna’s chariot advanced, Yudhamanyu protected it on the left and Uttamauja protected it on the right. Subhadra’s son means Abhimanyu.