The Bhagavad Gita, translated by W.Q. Judge

Krishna Dvaipayana, William Quan Judge (T) · Higher Ethics and Devotion Series · 69 pages

William Quan Judge's recension of the Bhagavad Gita, given complete at sixty-nine pages with his introduction, and described on its contents page as a versified student's edition for instant cross-reference to other editions — meaning the verses are numbered so a reader can move between this and any other translation without losing the place. Judge's essays on the first seven chapters, and the selections arranged as protreptics, are held separately in this section.

The eighteen chapters are given with the descriptive titles Judge assigned them, and the sequence shows how he read the poem: after the despondency of Arjuna, every chapter but the first and the eleventh is headed devotion by some particular means. Devotion through application to the speculative doctrines is followed by devotion through the right performance of action, through spiritual knowledge, by means of renunciation of action, by self-restraint, and by spiritual discernment. The middle chapters continue the pattern — devotion to the omnipresent spirit named as OM, by the kingly knowledge and the kingly mystery, and by the universal divine perfections. Chapter eleven, the vision of the divine form as including all forms, stands outside the scheme as the poem's central theophany. The remaining chapters return to it: devotion by means of faith, by discrimination of the Kshetra from the Kshetrajna, by separation from the three qualities, and through knowledge of the supreme spirit. The effect of titling them this way is to present the whole poem as a single argument about devotion approached from eighteen directions, which is the reading the rest of this section works from.

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