Bhagavad-Gítá or the sacred lay ; a colloquy between Krishna and Arjuna on divine matters : an episode from the Mahabharata

lV ADVERTISEMENT.

in preference to those of the Calcutta edition, I have ventured in some places to suggest and adopt new ones which the sense required. |

The Bhagavad-Gita was, in all probability, originally written in the very form in which we have received it. It was composed at an age when book-making had become a well-known art among learned Bréhmans; and it does not appear to me, as it has done to some, that any part of it is to be attributed to another date or pen than the rest. The plan of the work would seem to have been a poem of exactly seven hundred couplets,—the chapters ending only where the particular subject of each was concluded. Interpolation was, therefore, scarcely possible ; nor is there any passage which would seem to be thoroughly corrupt or miscopied. The poem attained so great a celebrity in India, that its verses became proverbs in the mouths of the pious, while the literal meaning of the words is everywhere clear and simple. Thus the only alterations made are those of single words or letters, and even these are so shght as very seldom to affect the sense.

The manuscripts of the Bhagavad-Gita, which were collated

by Schlegel and Lassen, are thirteen in number, and all coincide