Bs Murthy
Bhagvad-Gita, often referred to as the Gita, comprises eighteen chapters, which, in all, contain seven hundred slokas (verses) that is not counting the unnumbered opening number of its thirteenth chapter. Though it has gained prominence on its own steam, in fact it is a part of the epochal Mahabharata, which, with over 100,000 slokas, is the longest tome in the world of letters. Moreover, this epic, probably compiled around the third century BCE, whose authorship is attributed to Vyāsa, is regarded by the Hindus as the panchama veda (the fifth Veda) and the Gita, its divine part, is celebrated by the world as an unrivalled philosophical work. Yet it is a safe bet to aver that while most (mainly Hindus) might have heard about it, hardly any would have read it (much less appraised it) though it contains no more than seven-hundred verses, excluding the above cited unnumbered one! Not only that, possibly, this classic could be the only epic in the world that is admired without application of mind and debunked with reasonable misgivings as it, as it is, sanctions the inimical caste structure in the Hindu polity that is as opposed to the Torah, the Bible, and the Quran, which seek to inculcate emotional unity amongst their respective adherents! Whatever, on one hand, William von Humboldt, the philosopher of yore, eulogized it as “the most beautiful, perhaps the only true philosophical song existing in any known tongue …. perhaps the deepest and the loftiest thing the world has to show”, and on the other, Vijay Mankar, the Ambedkarite of the day, debunks it is as a rotten work deserving to be thrown into a dustbin for “it advocates inequality of man based on caste, stigmatizes women as an inferior kind, and legitimizes violence.” Equally significantly, neither Humboldt was alone in lifting it to the skies for he had the illustrious company of many a Western thinker such as Arthur Schopenhauer, Albert Einstein, Aldous Huxley, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, only t
Read this work at the World Public Library (library card needed).