Devotional Love in the Bhagavad Gita

Veda Vyasa · Higher Ethics and Devotion Series · 42 pages

Selections from W.Q. Judge's 1890 recension of The Bhagavad Gita: The Book of Devotion, prepared in collaboration with James Henderson Connelly, with the “Antecedent Words” and footnotes retained; forty-two pages, with a contents and train of thoughts at the front. The epigraph is from the Gita's own closing chapter: that whoever studies these sacred dialogues shall be considered to worship by the sacrifice of knowledge. Judge's complete translation and his seven essays on the Gita are both held separately in this section.

The selections are arranged not by chapter but as a progression, under the heading of approach. The first division sets out the qualifications required before devotion is discussed at all. The second takes devotion itself and divides it by the channel through which it works — through Brahman, through faith, through sacrifice, and through gifts. Each division carries the Gita's own text beneath it, so the arrangement functions as a reading route through a book that does not present its material in that order. Under faith comes the teaching that food, sacrifices, mortification and alms-giving are each of three kinds. Under sacrifice comes one of the sharpest passages in the poem, on those who practise severe self-mortification not enjoined in the scriptures: full of hypocrisy and pride, longing for what is past and desiring more to come, torturing the powers and faculties in the body and the deity who dwells in the innermost heart, and thereby shown to be of an infernal tendency. Under gifts comes the formula OM TAT SAT, given as the threefold designation of the Supreme Being.

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