If the Gita is a recorded conversation reported by Sanjaya to Dhritarashtra how does it contain Sanjaya’s speech?

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Hare Krishna question if Sanjay reporting the Bhagavad Gita is more like a recording because the event had already happened Bhagavad Gita had already spoken then he came back and then he told then how is it that within the Bhagavad Gita Sanjay is himself speaking he speaks in the first chapter, he speaks in the eleventh chapter, he speaks in the eighteenth chapter so how does this happen yes, so Vishwanath Jagathakur explains that actually we see the Bhagavad Gita it is not necessary that all of the verses in the Bhagavad Gita are essentially spoken by Bhagawan we see out of the 700 verses it is not that Krishna is speaking every single one of the verses otherwise there would have been no need to say Shri Bhagawan watches specifically so it’s a conversation and then it’s not just a conversation it’s a reporting of a conversation so an overwhelming majority of the verses in the Bhagavad Gita are spoken by Krishna and it is his message that makes it distinctive so the remaining thing is contextual is contextualization what is given for explaining the context of where what happened so we have three other speakers, we have Dhritarashtra speaking the first verse and we have Sanjay speaking a few verses and we have Arjuna speaking a few verses majority is spoken by Krishna so now Sridhar Swami in his Bhagavatam commentary in the first canto itself explains that scripture is not necessarily literal verbatim reporting of everything that happened so for example he says that actually it is accurate reporting of whatever happened but it is not verbatim so that means that if we see all of scripture is written in poetic format the whole Mahabharata is poetry, the whole Ramayana is poetry now is it that every single character there spoke poetry we may say the Brahmanas were learned, the Kshatriyas were learned but what about the Rakshasas what about the Vanaras or if we come to Chaitanya Charita Amrit Chaitanya Mahaprabhu goes to Udupi now there the conversation is depicted in Bengali obviously the people, the Brahmins in Udupi would not have known Bengali Chaitanya Mahaprabhu would have spoken with them in Sanskrit so the point is that scripture retains the essential message but it is not necessarily a verbatim recording verbatim repetition now because Vyasadeva is a literary incarnation of the Lord, so normally when somebody reports some important things may be left out but because Vyasadeva himself is the literary incarnation of God, what he reports is having the original potency so essentially Krishna’s message as reported by another manifestation of Krishna Vyasadeva, that has been transmitted repeated, elaborated meditated on by so many great saints so all of that comes to us when we speak the Bhagavad Gita so Bhagavad Gita still remains sacred but because it is Vyasadeva who has actually provided us the Bhagavad Gita in a literary form in a book so we have his narration of the event so it is not that, for example after the first chapter gets over then we have so when Krishna and Arjuna were speaking Krishna did not speak to Arjuna it is a normal conversation that was going on, that division of the Bhagavad Gita into chapters, it is done by Vyasadeva that is a division which corresponds with 18 chapter divisions in the Mahabharata so now while reporting the events over there, what is the rhetorical tool that is used so that means the Bhagavad Gita is a conversation which is spoken in a particular historical setting, so first Vyasadeva makes the setting and making the setting means that he puts he describes Dhritarashtra’s question and then he starts describing Sanjay’s answer so in that sense this part of the Bhagavad Gita is not happening on the Kurukshetra battlefield, this part of the Bhagavad Gita is actually, it is happening in Hastinapur in the sense that what is being described over there is not what is described in Hastinapur but from there onwards when he says Dhritarashtra, Duryodhana came and Duryodhana spoke, so that is happening at that is happening at the scene, that is Kurukshetra, so now in the first chapter, so here, let’s try to understand how it is happening there is a conversation between Krishna and Arjuna that is being reported, but with this conversation is happening in a particular setting so to describe that setting you cannot have Krishna or Arjuna speaking at that time, so who will be describing the setting, that will be described by the narrator, that narrator is Sanjay, so whenever something about the setting is to be described, is to be told and that is relevant, then it is Sanjay speaking, so it is not that the whole Bhagavad Gita is necessarily spoken by Sanjay to Krishna nor is Sanjay Dhritarashtra, nor is it that the whole Bhagavad Gita is spoken by Krishna to Arjuna, rather what we call as the Bhagavad Gita is a textualized rendition of that conversation given to us by Vyasadeva and this usually happens in the first chapter and the last chapter that Sanjay is speaking now in the eleventh chapter there is a rhetorical tool that is used, because again throughout the Bhagavad Gita there is primarily conversation that is happening but when amidst the conversation some action happens, now the action, so for example say two people are talking, now while talking if one person gets up from a chair and starts walking, this person will not say okay I am getting up from the chair and walking now if the narrator wants us to know then the narrator will say that but that will have to be attributed to the narrator, that will not be attributed to the speaker, so like that in the eleventh chapter there is not just conversation, there is action happening and that action is that Krishna displays his Vishwaroopa so to describe his action then the camera which is either focused on Krishna or it is focused on Arjuna what is Krishna speaking, what is Arjuna speaking, it shifts back okay Krishna and Arjuna are here and what happened so then what he sees is described, so Sanjay comes in to give us a broader context for the conversation of Krishna and Arjuna and to describe the action that helps us better understand the conversation that’s how Sanjay is present also in the first primarily the first eleventh and the eighteen chapters. Thank you.