The Bhagavad-Gîtâ
The Song of the Awakened
The Bhagavad-Gîtâ
This book, "The Song of the Awakened" (or Blessed), is a new translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, minus two chapters that were not in the original book, that is, the first and eleventh. The first is the genealogy and presentation of the characters of the «Mahabharata», a book of Hindu war adventures, having nothing to do with the teaching of the awakened. Chapter eleven is only a series of praises to God.
The Bhagavad-Gita, or “The Song of the Awakened”, is a collection of a Buddha’s teachings, as Sri Gautama was. No one knows the name or the history of this awakened person; he has been completely forgotten. All that remains of him is the traces of his teaching, compiled in the book.
The Bhagavad-Gita is thought to date from an era between the fifth and the first century BCE and was originally a Upanishad. It would have been the “Bhagavadgîtopanishad”. The Sanskrit word “Upanishad” means “to sit respectfully at the feet of the master to listen to his teaching”, which corresponds to satsang.
The word “Upanishad” means “hearing”, “ear”, “revealed knowledge” or “Veda”, in Sanskrit. In "The Song of the Awakened" (or Bhagavad-Gita), it is often referred to as "Knowledge". This word, in the context of this book, designates two things: the revelation of truth, the perfect consciousness of bliss (satçitananda) and spiritual practice itself.
The Upanishad are extensions of the Veda-Samhitas. There are more than 100 different Upanishad, including ten major ones. The major Upanishad are the oldest, thought to be written between eight hundred and five hundred years before our era.
The Hindus, around the first century BCE, took back the teaching of the forgotten master and rewritten it, so that it entered the "Mahabharata", a kind of "adventure book" that recounts the great war between two noble families, the Pandava and the Kaurava.
In India, children read small comic books, where these episodes of the Mahabharata are told in the «romance» mode. The only spiritual content of this saga is the Bhagavad-Gita! But this book was not part of this story, originally.
The Hindus added to the Bhagavad-Gita a figure from the Mahabharata; Arjuna, and reworked the text to make it a dialogue between him and “Krishna” to create coherence between these two books.
The awakened person who taught “knowledge” was an Aboriginal man, dark with skin, like the Dravidians, or the present Mundas and Adivasis peoples. The Aryas, who came from Bactria (a region straddling the present-day states of Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, located between the mountains of the Hindu Kush and the Amou-Daria River) and plateaus of Persia (Iran), were clear of skin.
As this master was «black», of Dravidian type, they called him «krishna», which means «dark» or «black», we could even say «negro». In the original Vedas, those of the Aryas, all kinds of people were so called, men as women, because they were dark with skin.
The Hindus deified this awakened master, whom they called «Krishna». They made him an avatar of Vishnu, one of the three gods of their Trimurti, with Shiva and Brahma, in order to bring him into Hinduism. Others have made him the supreme God.
It is like for Sri Gautama, the most famous Buddha, who lived around the sixth century BC. The Hindus, great waste pickers, have made it, as for krishna, an avatar of Vishnu, while he himself, Sri Gautama, has never claimed anything other than an ordinary human being (Walpola Rahula, “The Teaching of the Buddha,” 1978, coll. point, ed. du Seuil, Paris).
In this book that I propose for your reading, some verses have been ignored because they served only as articulations for the false dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna, and have been added to the original text in order to integrate it into the "Mahabharata". For the rest, you can form an opinion. I have been practicing the Dharma of which “Krishna” speaks assiduously since 1975, which has allowed me to interpret the verses of this teaching as faithfully as possible.
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