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15. GITA
The Bhagavad-Gita By Indrani Bandyopadhyay http://www.theosophy-nw.org/theosnw/world/asia/as-bandy.htm
Upon reading the Mahabharata, one notices that its middle is out of kilter with its beginning and ending: that amongst the grand and richly detailed narrative of two families lies a text that hardly fits the epic's theme or style. This text is the Bhagavad-Gita. It is no great surprise that a warrior (in this case, Arjun) should should be struggling with the notion of death, truth, and duty as he goes to war: modern literature is well represented in its depictions of the misgivings of soldiers. But what is surprising is the vehemence with which war, death, and a soldier's duty are defended, and especially by Krishna, the chosen Lord of the peaceable Vaishnavites.
The Bhagavad-Gita comes to us as a section of the Mahabharata, the epic and romantic tale of two armies and the great battle of Kurukshetra. Here the Gita sits, but not entirely comfortably. In the first volume of A History of India, Romila Thapar explains that "the Epics had originally been secular. .. (and were] revised by the Brahmans with a view to using them as religious literature; thus many interpolations were made, the most famous being the addition of the Bhagavad Gita to the Mahabharata" (pp. 133-4). She mentions that the Mahabharata itself "may have been the description of a local feud," but in its final form becomes "no longer the story of war, but has acquired a number of episodes (some of which are unrelated to the main story) and a variety of interpolations, many of which are important in themselves ..."; and that both epics were "concerned with events which took place between c. 1000 and 700 BC, but as the versions which survive date from the first half of the first millennium AD they too can hardly be regarded as authentic sources for the study of the period to which they pertain" (pp. 32, 31).
Judaism and the Gentile Faiths: Comparative Studies in Religion By Joseph P. Gita was interpolated into Mahabharata sometime during the first century C.E....As in the case of Judaism, the Gnostic sects and the mystery cults of the Greco-Roman world may well have been the channels......
Dr. Phulgenda Sinha places the interpolations as late as to around 8th century AD and ascribes it as a result of Christian and Islamic influence. According to Sinha, there was an original gita of 84 as found
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