Gita Rahasya -Tilak 567

Srimad Bhagavadgita-Rahasya OR Karma-Yoga-Sastra -Bal Gangadhar Tilak

CHAPTER XV APPENDIX In short, even if we keep aside for the time being the traditional story ttat Sri Krsna preached the Glta to Arjuna at the commence- ment of the war, and consider the matter from the point of view that the Glta is a Vedic epic included in the Mahabharata for explaining Morality and Immorality, we will see that the place which has been chosen in the Bharata for the preaching of the Gita is such as is even poetically a most proper one for impressing the importance of the Gita on the minds of people. When the propriety of the subject-matter of the Gita, as also of the place where it has been put in the Mahabharata has been explained in this way, the objection that there was no necessity to preach this Spiritual Knowledge on the battle-field, and that the text must have been interpolated into the Mahabharata at a later date, or the question whether ten stanzas or one hundred stanzas are the important stanzas in the Bhagavadgita, no longer remain; because, when it was once decided that certain subjects must for certain reasons be included in certain places in the Mahabharata, in order to explain Morality, and to justify the Bharata being expanded into the Mahabharata, the writer of the Mahabharata did not care how much space was taken up in fully expounding those subject-matters, as will be seen from the other chapters of the Mahabharata. Yet, as it is necessary to consider what amount of substance there is in the various other theories which have been advanced as regards ths external examination of the Gita, and as I have now occasion to do, so, I have in the following seven parts of this chapter, dealt seriatim with seven of these subjects, namely, (1) the Gita and the Mahabharata, (2) the Gita and the Upanisads, (3) the Gita and the Brahma-Sutras, (4) the rise of the Bhagavata religion and the Gita, (5) the time or date of the Gita as it now exists, (6) the Gita and the Buddhistic literature, and (7) the Gita and the Christian Bible. I must, however, make it clear to start with, that, as external critics examine the Mahabharata, the Gita, the Brahma-Sutras, the Upanisads etc., merely as literature, that is, from the worldly and historical point of view, I also propose to deal with the above-mentioned subjects from the same points of view.