Is the Gita a later insertion in the Mahabharata?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

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what is the is the Bhagavad Gita later insertion in the Mahabharata based on style of writing etc well if you consider the style of writing the meter and other things they are remarkably similar and from a historical perspective with all due respect to academic scholars it’s a it’s a very iffy game by iffy game iffy means it’s a lot of ifs ifs ifs lot of guesswork because ultimately how do we know whether what was the date at which a particular book was written if you see India itself India is a very hot tropical country and in the past when paper was not there things were written on leaves and leaves don’t whatever was used for writing would not stay for long so basically we can when historians try to determine the date of any book essentially they try to look for physical remains that suggest the existence of prevalence of that book so they may look for certain architectural remains they may look for some some cross references in other texts and there are multiple ways but essentially what historians are looking for and what they can find is the suppose a thief has stolen some money and this thief kept the money in an envelope and the investigators have a picture of the envelope and they search everywhere where the envelope is and finally they find the envelope but finding the envelope doesn’t give them the money back so similarly what we can have knowledge of is the historical age all that we can determine is that what are the oldest written remains or written references to the Gita or the Mahabharata but historians themselves acknowledge that there was oral tradition that was much more widespread and much more ancient than the written tradition so how old the oral tradition was that is something which there is just no way for empirical historians to know that’s why a prominent Indologist has said that the dating of dating of the Indian literature is shrouded in terrifying darkness and all that anyone can do is just throw pins and wherever they land that’s the dates that people give so there are one way so this is basically the whole more important than when a book was written is what is said in the book if somebody wants to go into the specifics of dating we can go into it separately so His Holiness Deva Amrit Maharaj has written a book called Searching for Vedic India where he talks elaborately about the dating of the text and what are the problems with it but one quick point is that Jainism, Buddhism at least is understood by historians to have been who have originated in pre-Christian times and Jains and Buddhists they were no fans of Krishna and his teachings they have criticized him and while criticizing him they have criticized sometimes his ethical character sometimes his teachings and none of them who were thousands of years before have divorced Krishna and the Bhagavad Gita from the Mahabharata so this idea of divorcing the two is a relatively modern phenomena okay Hare Krishna