Niranjan Saha

Though the Bhagavadgītā or Gītā is one of the important sourcebooks of Indian philosophy and religion, or rather of Hindu philosophy and religion, its date, authorship, textual formation, teaching, etc. are still debatable among the scholars—oriental and occidental. While supports in this regard can be garnered from both ancient and modern sources, they too seem to be inconclusive and contradictory. Thus, this paper, while analysing these debatable points regarding this text, taking into consideration both textual sources and modern scholars’ views, concludes that, in order to have an unbiased attitude and its true import at large, the text is to be viewed and read scrupulously from its literary need and historicity.

The aim of this short article is to introduce a topical text called the Daśaślokī of Ᾱdi Śaṃkara, widely known as Śaṃkara and its only available commentary the Siddhāntabindu by Madhusūdana Sarasvatī. While these two classics delineate in a nutshell the basic tenets of Advaita Vedānta philosophy and are placed with great significance in the tradition, very little work on them, particularly those based on textual study, has been done in modern scholarship. Thus, the article, without going into much detail of the content of these two works and the commentaries available, gives, in brief, their introduction, in order to revisit them.

The Vedānta philosophy has its roots in scriptural sources, specifically, in three canonical texts, viz. the Brahmasūtra-s by Bādarāyaṇa, which is called nyāya-prasthāna or tarka-prasthāna; the Upaniṣad-s, which are called the śruti-prasthāna; and the Bhagavadgītā, which is regarded as the smṛti-prasthāna. Thus, like the first two constituents of this trio, the third one has a tangible legacy of commentarial tradition; as almost all well-known advocates of the Vedānta schools have commented on these three sourcebooks. In this paper, an attempt has been made to give a brief sketch of such commentarial tradition of the Bhagavadgītā, starting with its commentary by Śaṃkara to the other major commentaries available up to the 15th–16th centuries. While each of these commentaries finds support in the text for their respective philosophical doctrines, an impartial evaluation, with support of modern scholars, shows that none of the commentaries can claim to represent faithfully the true intent of the text, and that the true import of it can only be had if the text is judged from its literary and historical point of view.