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possessed by few of the scriptures of India. This Divine Song (or Song of the Blessed One) is at present a Krishnaite version of an older Vishnuite poem, and this in turn was at first an unsectarian work, perhaps a late Upanishad. It is accepted by Vishnuites as a kind of New Testament; and with the New Testament it has in truth much in common. It must be pointed out at the outset that there is here the closest connection with the later Upanishads. The verse, like that of the Katha Upanishad (quoted above), which stands almost at the beginning of the Song, is typical of the relation of the Song to the Upanishad. It will be noticed how the impersonal 'That,' i.e., absolute being, brahma, changes almost at once to the personal He ([=a]tm[=a] as Lord). As shows the whole Song, brahma throughout is understood to be personal.[3] The caste-position of the priest in the Git[=a) is owing to the religious exaltation of the poem; and the precedence of S[=a]man is not unusual in the latest portions of the epic (see below).]
To understand the religion which reaches its culmination in the epic no better course could be pursued than to study the whole of the Divine Song. It is, however, too long a production to be introduced here in its entirety; but the following extracts give the chief features of the work, than which nothing in Hindu literature is more characteristic, in its sublimity as in its puerilities, in its logic as in its want of it. It has shared the fate of most Hindu works in being interpolated injudiciously, so that many of the puzzling anomalies, which astound no less the reader than the hero to whom it was revealed, are probably later additions. It is a medley of beliefs as to the relation of spirit and matter, and other secondary matters; it is uncertain in its tone in regard to the comparative efficacy of action and inaction, and in regard to the practical man's means of salvation; but it is at one with itself in its fundamental thesis, that all things are each a part of One Lord, that men and gods are but manifestations of the One Divine Spirit, which, or rather whom, the Vishnuite re-writer identifies with Krishna, as Vishnu's present form.
The Divine Song, as it is revealed in the epic by Vishnu (-Krishna) to his favorite knight, Arjuna, begins thus: "Know that the 'That' in which is comprised the 'This' is indestructible. These bodies of the indestructible Eternal One have an end: but whoso knows Him as slayer, and whoso thinks Him to be slain, these two have not true
