Diving into the nectar of the Gītā

The whys and wherefores of this project

mala-nirmocanaṃ puṃsāṃ jala-snānaṃ dine dine |
sakṛd Gītāmṛta-snānaṃ saṃsāra-mala-nāśanam || (Gītā-Māhātmyam 3)

To get rid of their bodily muck, 
people bathe using water every day; 
but a single immersion 
    in the nectar of the Gītā
wipes out the stains of mundane existence!

On this holy Vasanta-pañcamī day, the 16th day of the month of Māgha, I would like to commence a project that I have long desired to undertake: to translate and comment upon the 700 verses of the Śrīmad-Bhagavad-Gītā and to share them with family and friends.

I need say nothing more about the significance of the Bhagavad-Gītā than to note that virtually every school and sub-school of Hinduism has accepted the Gītā and has its own history of engagement with it. To provide but one example, two different volumes of the Gītā were published in British India in the early years of the twentieth century by the Gujarātī Printing Press and by the Nirṇaya Sāgar Press, which together offered no less than seventeen different commentaries and sub-commentaries on the Gītā over nearly 3,000 pages of densely-typeset Sanskrit. The greatest minds of Indic civilization have wrestled with the Gītā for millennia, and have found in it both inspiration and comfort.

What, then, can I bring to the effort of understanding the Gītā that has not already been said by far greater minds than mine? (In the language of business, what’s the differentiating factor of my offering?) What qualifications do I possess to justify starting this project?

My journey to the Gītā

I started reading the Gītā in English translation in my teenage years. We were lucky to have a couple of very different translations, written by authors from very different religious and spiritual backgrounds. I struggled to understand, at that age, how the same text could be understood so differently, and naïvely tried to find the “true” meaning of the text. Seeing as I knew no Sanskrit then, that effort came to a premature end. Nevertheless, that attempt must have sown some seeds of curiosity in me, for I ended up getting a Ph.D. in Sanskrit and Indian philosophy nearly two decades later. Along the way, I had the opportunity to lead numerous classes in reading parts of the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa, though never the Gītā directly.

It was really during the pandemic that I returned to the Gītā, as a way to find both inspiration and comfort in these dark days. Based on the maxim that the best way to learn something is to teach it, I’ve been running a small Gītā study group with my wife and our cousins, where I translate and interpret a small portion of the text each week and then everybody in the group engages with the text in light of their own lives.

It is this still-ongoing study group that has inspired me to share my in-progress translation of and reflections on the Gītā with a slightly wider audience. I have found it deeply refreshing to be able to read the Gītā in the original Sanskrit, and to engage with the text directly without having to go through the intermediaries of either a traditional commentary or a contemporary translation. It is my hope that my translation and reflections preserve some of this freshness and open up the Gītā to a new generation of readers, thinkers, and doers. (The irony of having to become yet another intermediary in order to make it easier to disintermediate the Gītā is not lost on me, I assure you.)

The anubandha-catuṣṭaya of this project

According to traditional Hindu reading practices, the nexus of interaction between a text and its reading is constituted by the anubandha-catuṣṭaya, a “quartet of relations”. These are: viṣaya (the topic of the text), adhikārin (the intended audience), prayojana (the purpose of the text), and sambandha (the interconnection of the previous three elements). Philosophical texts in Sanskrit will frequently lay out these four elements explicitly in their first verse.

While I have not (yet) composed a Sanskrit verse laying out my vision for the anubandha-catuṣṭaya of my project, I have certainly thought long and hard about each of the four elements here.

• The topic, of course, is the Bhagavad-Gītā, all 700 verses of it. We will be looking at each verse, translating it, and trying to extract as much meaning as we can from the verse itself. I will try to avoid getting too deep into the many different commentaries and summaries of the Gītā that different Hindu traditions have come up with, but sometimes that will be unavoidable. As a general rule, I will not read the commentaries written on a verse until I come up with my own commentary on it.

• The intended audience is people of my generation, give or take a decade: parents of young children, college graduates, young professionals, and so on.

  • I presume no knowledge of Sanskrit at all, and only a minimal knowledge of the story and characters of the Gītā (which you might acquire from perusing the Wikipedia page, for instance).

  • Nor do I presume any affiliation with any specific Hindu tradition. I will highlight different positions as they come up, of course, but I am emphatically not trying to write a sectarian translation of the Gītā that is usable by members of just one community or another.

  • I would also greatly appreciate thoughts and comments from readers who might not regard themselves as Hindu. The Gītā is a text that speaks to universal challenges of the human condition, and sometimes the most useful insights into the text may well come from unexpected sources. As the Ṛgveda says (I.89.1a): ā no bhadrāḥ kratavo yantu viśvataḥ “May auspicious thoughts come to us from all quarters!”

• The purpose of this project is very simple at one level: to make the Gītā accessible and relevant to a new generation of people, particularly those who might not have otherwise turned to it. I think of this in terms of two Sanskrit concepts

  • The first is svīkāra. This word is usually translated as meaning “acceptance” in modern Hindi, but I am really thinking of its literal Sanskrit sense: “to make something your own.” To “accept” the Gītā is not to swallow it wholesale, or to buy everything it says uncritically. Rather, I would really want people to make the Gītā their own: to read it, wrestle with its many layers of meaning, and to work out for themselves how (and whether!) to operationalize it in their daily lives.

  • The second is viniyoga, often translated as “application”. This is a richly creative process, though very much under-appreciated, that I believe has actually given the Hindu tradition the flexibility to adapt to very different circumstances over the course of millennia. Viniyoga is about applying an element (such as a Vedic hymn or verse) in a different context (for instance, for meditation or contemplation). Doing this correctly requires an understanding of the transferred object as well as the new context to which it is being applied. In our case, my hope is to enable and empower people to creatively apply verses and ideas from the Gītā to the ever-evolving contexts in which we live today.

• Finally, the interconnection of all these elements lies in the format and presentation of the material.

  • By translating the verses and providing extensive commentary on each verse, I want to try to open up as many avenues for thoughtful exploration for readers.

  • I will stick to posting once a fortnight. I want to give readers enough time to wrestle with the meanings of those verses and to own them.

  • My beautiful and brilliant wife and co-author Anaha will be posting her own reflections more frequently along with contemplation prompts.

The Bhagavad-Gītā is a recipe for self-transformation. It is a text that, when allowed to operate upon our consciousness, will help us transform our attitudes towards ourselves, each other, and the world and lead us towards greater serenity, wisdom, and radiant joy. I invite you to join me in this exploration by subscribing (for free!) to this newsletter and this community.

A verse from the Gītā-dhyānam

I opened with a verse in praise of the Gītā and will close with yet another verse about the Gītā. It is customary to recite a short set of verses known as the Gītā-dhyānam “Contemplation of the Gītā” before starting any recitation or study of the Gītā itself. As a way to honor this practice, I will translate one verse from this set here:

sarvôpaniṣado gāvo, dogdhā Gopāla-nandanaḥ |
Pārtho vatsaḥ, sudhīr bhoktā, dugdhaṃ Gītâmṛtaṃ mahat ||

All of the Upaniṣads are cows;
their milker is Lord Kṛṣṇa the delighter of the cowherds.

Arjuna Pārtha is the calf; 
wise people are the consumers;
and the milk is
    the great nectar of the Gītā.

The Gītā is thus the essence of the Upaniṣads, which are themselves regarded as the acme of the Vedas. Lord Kṛṣṇa, who grew up appropriately among cowherds, is the one who has “milked” this essence out of the Upaniṣads. Arjuna, to whom Kṛṣṇa teaches the Gītā, is but a calf: he is the excuse, the vyāja, brought in to trigger the milking process. The ones who really benefit from the Gītā’s nectarine milk, though, are the wise—though perhaps their real wisdom lies simply in their realizing their need to imbibe the Gītā! May such wisdom illuminate our intellects, ennoble our actions, and adorn our souls.

|| Sarvaṃ Śrī-Kṛṣṇârpaṇam astu ||