gita: Greatness of the Gita


The greatness of the central thought of the Gita in which all its threads are gathered up and united, consists in the synthetic value of a conception that recognises the whole nature of the soul of man in the universe and validates by a large and wise unification its many-sided need of the supreme and infinite Truth, Power, Love, Being to which our humanity turns in its search for perfection and immortality, and some highest joy and power and peace.

There is a strong and wide endeavour towards a comprehensive spiritual view of God and man and universal existence. Not, indeed, that everything without any exception is seized in these 18 chapters, no spiritual problem left for solution; but still so large a scheme is laid out that we have only to fill in, to develop, to modify, to stress, to follow out points, to work out hint and illuminate adumbration.

The Gita itself does not evolve any quite novel solution out of its own questionings. To arrive at the comprehensiveness at which it aims, it goes back behind the great philosophical systems to the original Vedanta of the Upanishads; for there we have the widest and profoundest extant synthetic vision of spirit and man and cosmos.

But what is in the Upanishads undeveloped to the intelligence because wrapped up in a luminous kernel of intuitive vision and symbolic utterance, the Gita brings out in the light of a later intellectual thinking and distinctive experience.
December 3 is Gita Jayanti



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