Bhagavad Gītā
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~170,000 words · 792 passages
Cite this work
- APAAdi Shankara. (n.d.). Bhagavad Gītā. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/adi-shankara/bhagavad-gita-with-the-commentary-of-sri-shankaracharya-translated-to-english-b
- MLAAdi Shankara. "Bhagavad Gītā." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/adi-shankara/bhagavad-gita-with-the-commentary-of-sri-shankaracharya-translated-to-english-b.
- ChicagoAdi Shankara. Bhagavad Gītā. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/adi-shankara/bhagavad-gita-with-the-commentary-of-sri-shankaracharya-translated-to-english-b.
What it is about
Shankara's commentary on the Bhagavad Gita: the text that turned the poem into a work of philosophy and that fixes the Advaita reading of Vedanta.
Context and history
Shankara probably lived in the eighth century. His commentary (bhashya) reads the Gita from a single thesis: there is only one reality, brahman, and each person's atman is not a part of it but that very thing; what separates us from it is not a distance but an ignorance. Hence his insistence that knowledge, not ritual action, is what liberates — which obliges him to interpret carefully those passages of the Gita that exalt action. It is the earliest surviving commentary and the one that has fixed how the text is read for twelve hundred years; Ramanuja and Madhva wrote theirs precisely in order to dispute it, and the three readings together are the core of later Indian philosophy.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
[This is a paurawic verse speaking of the Antaryamin, the Inner Guide and Regulator of all souls. It is quoted here by the commentator in order that he may begin his important work, after the orthodox fashion, with the con* templation of his favourite God (Ishifa-Devata), namely, N&~ r&ya«a, and further with a view to shew that the Pura«a (archaic history), the Itihasa (ancient tradition) and the Gtt& teach one and the same doctrine. NEtr&yarca is, In the popular conception, the Creator who was brooding over the waters just before the "beginning of Creation. Cf. Manu I. 10. According to a subtler conception, N&r&yawa is the Antaryamin, the Divine Being in whom all embodied souls have their being. He is not a creature of the Avyakta, but far transcends it. It is the Avyakta,— the Avyaknta, Maya» the undifferentiated matter, — out of which, when in apparent union with Isvara, is evolved the principle of Hira/jyagarbba, here spoken of as Attda or the Mundane Egg, which is composed of the five simple rudimentai elements of matter. An intermingling of the five rudimentai elements of matter gives rise to the principle of the Viraj, of which are formed the Earth and all the 2 THE BHAGAVAD-GITA← Back to Adi Shankara