Had Krishna uttered these doctrines on the famous battlefield, we should inevitably have found references to them in the literature produced during the following centuries. But where in the Brāhmanas do we find any of the leading ideas of the Gītā? Even if men had disbelieved Krishna, his claim to be God incarnate would at least have drawn out a protest; but in no single Brāhmana or early Upanishad is there the slightest hint of anything of the kind. So far from there being any corroboration of the great myth in early literature, there is the clearest proof that it is false. In the Kāthaka recension of the Black Yajur Veda king Dhritarāshtra is mentioned as a well-known person[[73]]; yet in the whole literature of the Black Yajur there is no suggestion that Krishna claimed divine honours. The Satapatha Brāhmana, which is a product of the Kuru-Panchāla country,[[74]] contains the names of a number of the heroes of the great war,[[75]] but never refers to Krishna as God incarnate; while in the Chāndogya Upanishad,[[76]] which belongs to the same district,[[77]] he is spoken of merely as a man: he is mentioned as a pupil of Ghora Angirasa and is called Krishna Devakiputra.[[78]] Nay, even in the earliest part of the Mahābhārata itself Krishna is only a great chief, and not a deity at all.[[79]] Finally, the references to Pandu heroes and to the worship of Krishna and Arjuna in Pānini,[[80]] would lead to the conclusion that in Pānini’s day Krishna was not regarded as the supreme God, but as one among many;[[81]] and this cautious inference is corroborated by the fact that the Mahābhāshya itself does not recognize him as the incarnation of Brahma, but as a hero and demi-god.[[82]] Thus the whole of the Vedic literature, and the whole of the Sūtra literature, are destitute of a single reference to Krishna as the incarnation of the Supreme. There is only one conclusion to be drawn from this overwhelming mass of evidence.[[83]]
It is strange that educated Hindus should have clung so long to the idea that the Gītā is a real utterance of Krishna. The very fact that the poem has always been regarded, not as Sruti, but simply as Smriti, should have been enough to suggest the truth. A piece of genuine divine teaching, uttered in such circumstances, and before the composition of the earliest Upanishads, would have inevitably found a place among the most authoritative scriptures of the faith. The fact of its having been always regarded as Smriti is sufficient proof by itself that the book does not belong to the Vedic age at all. Another consideration ought also by itself to have been sufficient to save Hindus from such a grave error, namely, this, that no great religious advance or upheaval followed the time when Krishna is supposed to have lived and taught. Contrast the mighty revolutions that followed the work of Buddha, of Christ and of Mahommed; and the emptiness of the Krishna claim will become at once apparent.
Again, the subject of all the early Upanishads is the nature of the Supreme Spirit, whether called the Atman or Brahma. If on the field of Kurukshetra, Krishna had claimed to be the Supreme, as the Gītā says he did, can any one believe that the claim could have been passed unnoticed in the Upanishads? Krishna is mentioned in the Chāndogya; Brahma is the subject of the Chāndogya: yet there is not the slightest hint anywhere that Brahma has been incarnated, far less that Krishna is Brahma. Such evidence is surely irresistible.
One reason why the truth about this myth has been so long in finding its way into the minds of educated Hindus is undoubtedly to be found in the wretchedly inadequate way in which Sanskrit literature is taught in the Universities of India. In Calcutta at least most men who take Sanskrit as one of their subjects for the B. A. Degree get through their examination without having the slightest knowledge of the history of the literature.[[84]] For some curious results of this very deficient training, see the Appendix.
With Krishna, all the other so-called Avatārs vanish; for they rest on foundations still more flimsy and fanciful. They merely serve as signal proofs of the tendency inherent in the Hindu mind to believe in incarnations and to see such around them. This tendency was already living and creative long before the Christian era, and it has kept its vitality down to the present day; for though Chaitanya, the sixteenth-century reformer, is the most noteworthy of those who within recent times have been counted Avatārs, he is by no means the last: the late Ramkrishna Paramhamsa was regarded as such,[[85]] and some of her admirers claim the same honour for Mrs. Annie Besant.[[86]] Further, this making of Avatārs is but one aspect of that passion for deifying men which has characterized Hinduism from first to last,[[87]] a passion which has set many a modern Englishman among the gods. Even such a whole-hearted Christian as John Nicholson did not escape.[[88]]
The story, then, that Krishna uttered the Song on the battlefield, is a pious imagination. All scholars hold the war to be historical; Krishna’s name can be traced in the literature from the Upanishads downwards; it is possible, or even probable, that he was a Kshattriya prince[[89]] who fought in the war; but the assertion that on the field he claimed to be the supreme being, is absolutely negatived by all the early history and literature of India.
How then are we to account for the Gītā? Whence came its power and its beauty? and how did it reach the form it has?—We must recognise the action of three factors in the formation of the Song, the philosophy, the worship of Krishna, and the author. We have already traced in outline the genesis of the philosophy; there remain the cult and the author.
All our scholars recognize that Krishna-worship has existed in India since the fourth century B. C. at least; for there can be no doubt that, when Megasthenes says that Herakles was worshipped in Methora and Kleisobora,[[90]] he means that Krishna was worshipped in Mathura and Krishnapur. How much further back the cult goes we have no means of learning. Nor does it really matter for our purpose. The important thing to realize is the existence of this worship of Krishna, before his identification with Vishnu[[91]] and final exaltation to the place of the supreme pantheistic divinity.
The author of the Gītā was clearly a man of wide and deep culture. He had filled his mind with the best religious philosophy of his country. He was catholic rather than critical, more inclined to piece things together than to worry over the differences between them. Each of the philosophic systems appealed to his sympathetic mind: he was more impressed with the value of each than with the distinctions between them. But his was not only a cultured but a most reverent mind. He was as fully in sympathy with Krishna-worship as with the philosophy of the Atman. Indeed, it was the union of these qualities in him that fitted him to produce the noblest and purest expression of modern Hinduism. For Hinduism is just the marriage of ancient Brāhmanical thought and law with the popular cults. But without his splendid literary gifts the miracle would not have been possible. The beauty, precision and power of the diction of the poem, and its dignity of thought, rising now and then to sublimity, reveal but one aspect of his masterly literary ability. Much of the success of the poem arises from his genuine appreciation of the early heroic poems, which he heard recited around him, and from his consequent decision to make his own Song, in one sense at least, a heroic poem. Lastly, there is the shaping spirit of imagination, without which no man can be a real poet. With him this power was introspective rather than dramatic. No poet with any genuine dramatic faculty would have dreamed of representing a warrior as entering on a long philosophic discussion on the field of battle at the very moment when the armies stood ready to clash. On the other hand, what marvellous insight is displayed in his representation of Krishna! Who else could have imagined with such success how an incarnate god would speak of himself? Nor must we pass on without noticing that, though the situation in which the Song is supposed to have been produced is an impossible one, yet for the author’s purpose it is most admirably conceived: how otherwise could the main thought of the book—philosophic calm leading to disinterested action—have been so vividly impressed on the imagination?