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Updated: May 21, 2025
Unless one understands Metempsychosis he will never be able to understand the Eastern Teachings, for he will be without the Key. You who have read the Bhagavad Gita, that wonderful Hindu Epic, will remember how the thread of Re-Birth runs through it all.
Indeed, the Bhagavad Gita is unique among the books of India in teaching that action is superior to renunciation. Sri Krishna says: "Renunciation and pursuit of action are both instruments of happiness. But of the two, pursuit of action is superior to renunciation of action."
There are Hindu authorities who would carry it back to the fifth century B.C., the time which is assigned for the first recension of the Mahabharata, of which the Bhagavad Gita is a very small part. But the highest authorities find conclusive proof that it originated about the second or third century of our era, and was then inserted as a part of an episode in the narrative of the great epic.
But the Bhagavad Gita does not teach clearly even this Vedantic doctrine. Selfishness is too much stamped upon the Hindu faith. It is too exclusively an individualistic religion. It is every one for himself in the great struggle of man for redemption.
"There are vast worlds all placed away within the hollows of each atom, multifarious as the motes in a sunbeam." In the BHAGAVAD GITA, we read many passages where the divine guru Krishna gives chastisement to the prince of devotees, Arjuna. I met Maitra shortly after my graduation from high school; he visited the Mahamandal hermitage in Benares while I was a resident.
In another place we are told that the worshipper "who is purified by the penance of knowledge has come into my essence." This is the eschatology of all Hindu Shastras. The peculiar teaching of the Bhagavad Gita concerning action and its emphasis upon a strenuous life in this world would have led us to expect the teaching of a future of some kind of activity.
The same doctrine is taught in a more advanced form by the poem called the "Bhagavad Gîtâ," the date of which is probably more than a thousand years later than that of the Upanishad just quoted. In this poem, Krishna, incarnate for the nonce as Arjuna's charioteer, reveals for a special purpose his identity with Brahma, the Eternal All; and Arjuna, when sufficiently instructed adores him thus:
He knows the Bible, and the Bhagavad Gita." "Oh, I'm beginning to understand," Beth exclaimed. "Nights alone with the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita, and one's schooldays a weathering from the open and seasoning from the seas. Men have such chances to learn the perils and passions of the earth, but so few do.... I see it now.
It cannot be denied that defenders of the Bhagavad Gita, and of the whole Indo-pantheistic philosophy, might make out a somewhat plausible case along these lines. I recall an instance in which an honored pastor had made such extravagant use of these New Testament expressions that some of his co-presbyters raised the question of a trial for pantheism.
Nor does the duality of nature and thought, to which I have alluded, in any wise contradict this. In pure thought we must understand the dichotomic process to be the distinction of a positive by a privative, both logical elements of the same thought, as I have elsewhere shown. The opposites or contraries referred to as giving rise to the dualistic conceptions of divinity are thus readily harmonized with the conception of logical unity. This was recognized by the Hindoo sage who composed the Bhagavad Git
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