THIS book originated in a series of articles which were to be written for The Aryan Path of Bombay on the significance of the chapter titles of the Gita. The Editors altered the title to The Song of the Higher Life, and, before I knew where I was, I found myself engaged on a running commentary on the Gita as a whole. Partly owing to the nature of the Gita itself, and partly because of the exigencies of publication in monthly instalments, a certain amount of repetition was involved. I have tried to eliminate as much as possible, but for any that remains I can only beg the indulgence of the reader.
My thanks are due to the Editors of The Aryan Path for their kind permission to reprint the series in book-form. The present is a revised version, a certain amount of new matter and several appendices having been added. My thanks are also due to my pupil Srimati Arpita Devi, who typed out the manuscript and gave me invaluable help throughout; also, to Mr. Bertram Keightley for going through it and making valuable suggestions.
THE Bhagavat Gita needs little introduction nowadays even in the West. Many have come to value it as one of the world's great spiritual classics and a lot of them take it as their guide to the inner life. Of its popularity in India there is no need to speak. Though its author is unknown (for we can scarcely adopt the orthodox view that it was, as we have it, spoken by the historical Krishna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra) it is revered by Hindus of all schools of thought, and is one foot of the triple base on which the Vedanta is founded, the other two feet being the Upanishads and the Brahma-Sutras. Every teacher who wished to claim Vedantic authority for his teachings was obliged to write a commentary on it showing that it supported his views.
In consequence of this we have commentaries written from many diverse points of view, monist and dualist, pantheist and theist. Enthusiasts for action, for knowledge or(jnana gnosis), or for devotion to a personal God, all find their special tenets in the Gita, and, though this universal appeal is proof of its catholicity, its authoritative status has had the drawback that the various commentators have often devoted more energy to special pleading and refutation of opponents than to straight- forward inquiry into the real meaning of the text.
Into the views (equally diverse) of the Western scholars, with their incurably external method of approach, it is not proposed to enter. Garbe considered it a Sankhya-Yoga textbook overwritten by Krishna worshippers and then again by a Vedantist, while Hopkins held that it was a Vishnu-ite poem worked up in the interests of the Krishna cult. Nearly all of them object to what they term its philosophical inconsistencies and loose use of terms.
Let me say at once that I care nothing at all for these learned pronouncements. To anyone who has eyes to see, the Gita is based on direct knowledge of Reality, and of the Path that leads to that Reality, and it is of little consequence who wrote it or to what school he was outwardly affiliated. Those who know Reality belong to a Race apart, the Race that never dies, as Hermes Trismegistus puts it, and neither they nor those who seek to be born into that Race concern themselves with the flummeries of sects and schools.
It is by such a seeker and for such seekers that this book has been written. Some may feel that the interpretation is a somewhat modernized one, but in answer to that I would only say that the words of an Enlightened One refer to eternal realities. Those realities are the same now as they were thousands of years ago, and the texts of the Gita should be interpreted in words that refer to those realities here and now, and not merely in words which did refer to them in mediaeval India or, for that matter, at the time when the book was originally written. To think otherwise is to mistake words for realities. As the Buddha teaches in Lankavatara Sutra: "Meaning is entered into by words as things are revealed by a lamp.... So, I, making use of various forms and images of things, instruct my sons; but the summit of Reality can only be realized within oneself"
The point of view from which this book has been written is that the Gita is a textbook of Yoga, a guide to the treading of the Path. By Yoga is here meant not any special system called by that name, not jnana yoga, nor karma yoga, nor bhakti yoga, nor the eightfold yoga of Patanjali, but just the Path by which man unites his finite self with Infinite Being. It is the inner Path of which all these separate yoga's are so many one-sided aspects. It is not so much a synthesis of these separate teachings as that prior and undivided whole of which they represent partial formulations.
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