appear to me to be the successive[1] embodiments of the spiritual thought of the age, as it became more and more dissatisfied with the system of mere ceremonial then dominant.
There are several other points of much interest in the Bhagavadgîtâ, such as the reference to the Sânkhya, and Yoga; the place assigned to the Mârgasîrsha month; the allusion to the doctrines of materialism; the nearly entire coincidence between a stanza of the Gîtâ and one in the Manu Smriti. But in the present state of our knowledge, I do not. think that we can extract any historical results from any of them. Without dwelling on them any further[2], therefore, I will only state it as my opinion that the Sânkhya, and Yoga of the Gîtâ are not identical with the systems known to us under those names, and that the Manu Smriti has probably borrowed from the Gîtâ the stanza common to the two works.
We now proceed to a discussion of some of the external evidence touching the age of the Bhagavadgîtâ. It is, of course, unnecessary to consider any evidence of a date later than the eighth century A. C., that being the date generally received, though not on very strong grounds, as the date of Sankarâkârya, the celebrated commentator of the Gîtâ[3] For the period prior to that limit, the first testimony to consider is that of Bânabhatta, the author of the Kâdambarî. The date of Bâna is now fairly well settled as the middle of the seventh century A. C. The doubt which the late Dr. Bhâu Dâjî had cast upon its correctness[4], by impugning the received date of king Harshavardhana, appears to me to have been satisfactorily disposed of by the paper of
- ↑ The word Brahma-nirvâna, which occurs so often at the close of chapter V and also at chapter II, 72, seems to me to indicate that nirvana had not yet become technically pinned down, so to say, to the meaning which Buddhism subsequently gave to it, as the name of what it deemed the summum bonum. Nirvâna by itself occurs at VI, 15.
- ↑ See some further remarks on these points in my Introduction to the Gîtâ in verse.
- ↑ Professor Tiele (History of Ancient Religions, p. 140) says Sankara was born in 798 A.D.; on. the authority, I presume, of the Âryavidyâsudhâkara, p. 226.
- ↑ Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. viii, p. 250; and see, too, Indian Antiquary, vol. vi, p. 61. Dr. Bühler).
