Text layers in the Gita

[Martin Gansten]

>This really is an old hat - orientalist, colonialist eh?-,  but which older
>"Hindu" text does not have  such layers? To interpret the Upanisads or the
>Gita as a unitary text is about as bad as doing the same thing with the
>Hebrew Bible, based on the various Christian or Mormon points of view.
>(Valid for a Christian/Mormon but telling us little about the authors'
>intent of the Hebrew Bible).

I would disagree with that, as far as readings of the Gita alone are
concerned. For one thing, the Hebrew Bible is a far longer text; and from
what I am given to understand -- though no Hebraist myself -- the books
comprising it vary considerably in style, etc. The Gita has but 700 or so
verses (the Kashmiri version, incidentally, is some 45 verses longer, not
shorter), and the style is internally consistent -- as, in my opinion, is
the doctrinal content. It is synthetic, certainly, but historically
multi-layered? I think not.

The traditional Vedantic view of the Gita *and* all the (classical)
Upanishads as a unitary corpus (zaastraikaarthya), on the other hand, *is*
comparable to a unitarist interpretation of the Bible. Whether we need to
label it 'bad', even from a scholarly point of view, is a different matter.
In my view, ahistorical readings of a text are not necessarily 'bad' unless
actually posing as historical.

Martin Gansten
Lund University