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Śrīmad Bhagavad Gītā Bhāṣya

The Bhagavadgītā read as teaching freedom through knowledge alone, with Krishna's order to fight meant for a man not yet ready to renounce.

by Ādi Śaṅkara459 passages held

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Original title
Bhagavadgītā-bhāṣya
Original language
Sanskrit

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Overview

At the start of his bhāṣya, a commentary that explains the Bhagavadgītā verse by verse, Śaṅkara writes that earlier commentators had explained the poem word by word and still ordinary readers found it teaching contradictory things. Some of those commentators held that liberation comes from knowledge of the self and ritual action practised together, and his commentary, the oldest on the Gītā that survives, argues against them throughout. The poem is a dialogue inside the epic Mahābhārata: Arjuna, a warrior, refuses to fight an army of his own teachers and kinsmen, and Krishna, his charioteer, whom the poem reveals as God, answers him. Śaṅkara builds his case on a question Arjuna asks at the start of the third chapter: if knowledge is better than action, why urge him into this terrible deed? The question would make no sense, Śaṅkara argues, if Krishna had just told him to combine the two. The Gītā therefore gives them to different people. Action done without desire for its fruit, which the poem calls karma yoga, purifies the mind of someone still bound to acting, and that is why Arjuna, who does not yet know the self, is told to fight. Liberation itself comes only from knowledge that the self is Brahman, the ultimate reality, and whoever has that knowledge gives up action altogether. Some four centuries later Rāmānuja answered with a commentary that reads the poem as teaching devotion to a personal God.

Key concepts

What does karma yoga mean in Śaṅkara's reading of the Gītā?

It is action done as duty, offered to the Lord, without desire for its fruit. For Śaṅkara it does not free anyone by itself. It cleanses the mind of someone still bound to acting, so that knowledge of the self can later arise. That is why Arjuna, who does not yet have that knowledge, is told to fight rather than to withdraw.

What is renunciation, or sannyāsa, in this commentary?

It is giving up all action, ritual included, and in its full sense it belongs to the one who knows the self. Such a person has nothing left to gain from deeds, so works simply fall away. Śaṅkara distinguishes this from inner renunciation of the fruits of action, which the poem asks of everyone who still acts, Arjuna among them.

What is the 'combination' view the commentary argues against?

It is the view, held by some earlier commentators, that freedom comes from knowledge of the self and ritual works practised together. Śaṅkara rejects it because knowing and acting rest on opposite assumptions: action needs a doer who wants something, while knowledge shows the self as one that neither acts nor lacks anything. One person cannot hold both at once.

What are the 'field' and the 'knower of the field'?

The Gītā calls the body, with its senses and mind, the field, and the conscious self that is aware of it the knower of the field. Śaṅkara reads Krishna's words that he is the knower in all fields as saying that the Lord and the self are one. The Lord only seems to suffer in bodies, through limits set up by ignorance.

What are the gunas?

They are the three strands that make up nature and everything in body and mind: sattva, clarity and calm; rajas, passion and restlessness; and tamas, dullness and inertia. Every action is driven by some mix of them. In Śaṅkara's reading the self stands apart from all three as their witness, and taking their work for one's own is ignorance.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Why This Terrible Deed?

If knowledge is better than action, why must Arjuna fight? His own question becomes the proof that the Gītā gives knowledge and action to different people, never to one person at once.

Some earlier commentators taught that freedom needs knowledge of the self and ritual works together. Śaṅkara answers that Arjuna's question at the start of the third chapter would make no sense had Krishna just told him to combine them. Action without desire for its fruit, karma yoga, belongs to someone still bound to acting, and it cleanses the mind. Arjuna, a warrior who does not yet know the self, is told to fight for that reason, and King Janaka's perfection through works is read the same way.

  • action
  • karma yoga
  • karma
  • duty
  • renunciation
  • ritual
  • ritual action
  • agency
  • nonattachment
  • equanimity

Enter a dialogue

Freedom by Knowing Alone

What does an unhappy person lack? Not a better deed but a true knowledge of what they are, and the commentary asks what is left of action once that knowledge has come.

Arjuna's grief and delusion, Śaṅkara writes in his introduction, are the seeds of the round of rebirth, and only knowledge of the self removes them. The self does not act: the wise see inaction in action, because body and senses move while the self only witnesses. Even the Lord, the knower in every body, seems bound only through the limits ignorance sets up. Whoever knows this has nothing left to gain from works and gives them up, since renunciation is the knower's state, not a technique for reaching it.

  • liberation
  • self-knowledge
  • knowledge
  • ignorance
  • self
  • nonduality
  • Brahman
  • rebirth
  • consciousness
  • perception

Enter a dialogue

Devotion and the Purified Mind

If knowledge alone frees, what are devotion, meditation and the taming of desire for? They prepare the ground, and at their height they turn out to be knowledge.

Desire, which Krishna calls the enemy, springs in Śaṅkara's reading from not knowing the self and drives a person through the three strands of nature, the gunas. Work offered to the Lord, meditation and discipline of the senses purify the mind until knowledge can arise in it. Devotion is no rival path, since its consummation is knowledge attained by devotion. A strain remains for him to handle: the poem also promises the highest goal through devotion to people who could never take up a renouncer's life.

  • devotion
  • meditation
  • desire
  • gunas
  • yoga
  • worship
  • self-discipline
  • detachment
  • spiritual practice
  • prakriti

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
459
distinct concepts
365
by passages held, corpus-wide
#163

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “liberation” and “self-knowledge”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 28 pairings. 78 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
liberationself-knowledge43
karma yogarenunciation30
liberationrenunciation30
renunciationself-knowledge28
knowledgeliberation25
ignoranceself-knowledge24
karma yogaliberation23
actionself-knowledge21
ignoranceself20
actionrenunciation17
karma yogaself-knowledge16
actionknowledge12
actionliberation12
ignoranceliberation12
knowledgerenunciation12
actionignorance10
knowledgeself10
liberationself9
actionkarma yoga8
ignoranceknowledge8
actionself6
ignorancerenunciation6
karma yogaknowledge5
knowledgeself-knowledge4
selfself-knowledge2
ignorancekarma yoga1
karma yogaself1
renunciationself1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. A Thousand Teachings (Upadeśasāhasrī)

    The one treatise of his that is not a commentary and that scholars widely accept as his own: the place to see how he taught, not only what.

     SA
  2. Aitareya Upanisad, with the Commentary of Sankaracarya (Aitareya-Upaniṣad-bhāṣya)

    Three chapters of the Aitareya Āraṇyaka, a ritual text of the Ṛgveda tradition, that tell a creation story; for Śaṅkara its point is that Brahman is consciousness.

     SA
  3. Brahmasūtra-bhāṣya

    His principal work, a commentary on the most compressed of the texts he explained; both later schools of Advaita grew from commentaries on it.

     EN
  4. Brhadaranyaka Upanishad with the Commentary of Sankaracarya (Bṛhadāraṇyaka-Upaniṣad-bhāṣya)

    Sureśvara, his pupil, wrote verse commentaries on two of Śaṅkara's Upanishad commentaries, this one and the Taittirīya; the Bṛhadāraṇyaka is by far the larger of the two.

     SA
  5. Īśa-Upaniṣad-bhāṣya

    One of his shortest commentaries, in which the case against combining ritual and knowledge that the longer commentaries argue at length is made on a single disputed verse.

     EN
  6. Kaṭha-Upaniṣad-bhāṣya

    The Kaṭha is a poem from the Black Yajurveda tradition, two chapters of three sections each; Śaṅkara's prose commentary follows it line by line.

     SA
  7. Māṇḍūkya-Upaniṣad-bhāṣya

    A commentary on a commentary: Śaṅkara glosses both the Upanishad and the verses of Gauḍapāda, his teacher's teacher in the tradition, whose Kārikā scholars count as the earliest surviving systematic treatise of Advaita.

     EN
  8. Praśna-Upaniṣad-bhāṣya

    A teaching dialogue from the Atharvaveda tradition, six questions put to one teacher, which Śaṅkara follows from the origin of living beings to the nature of the knower.

     SA
  9. Śrīmad Bhagavad Gītā Bhāṣya (Bhagavadgītā-bhāṣya) you are here EN
  10. Taittiriya Upanisad with the Commentary of Sankaracarya (Taittirīya-Upaniṣad-bhāṣya)

    The source of the five selves, or sheaths, that later Advaita manuals such as the Vivekacūḍāmaṇi teach at length; here Śaṅkara reads them in the Upanishad itself.

     SA
  11. Vivekacūḍāmaṇi

    A teaching manual copied in many Advaita monasteries; tradition counts it as Śaṅkara's, and most modern scholars doubt it is his.

     SA
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