Bhagavad Gita with Commentaries / Preface to the Russian Edition of the Bhagavad Gita

BHAGAVAD GITA
with Commentaries

Edition of the Bhagavad Gita
and commentaries by Vladimir Antonov

Translated
by Mikhail Nikolenko

New Atlanteans, Lakefield, Canada, 2008

ISBN 978-1-897510-28-5

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Preface to the Russian Edition of the Bhagavad Gita

The Bhagavad Gita — or, in translation from Sanskrit, the Song of God — is the most important part of the Indian epic poem Mahabharata. The latter describes events that took place 5-7 thousand years ago.

The Bhagavad Gita is a great philosophical work that played the same role in the history of India, as the New Testament did in the history of countries of the European culture. Both these books powerfully proclaim the principle of Love-Bhakti as the basis of spiritual self-development of man. The Bhagavad Gita also presents to us a complete notion about such fundamental problems of philosophy as what is man, what is God, what is the meaning of human life and the principles of human evolution.

The main hero of the Bhagavad Gita is Krishna — an Indian raja and an Avatar — embodiment of a Part of the Creator, Who gave to people through Krishna greatest spiritual precepts.

Philosophical truths are expounded in the Bhagavad Gita in the form of a dialogue between Krishna and His friend Arjuna before a military combat.

Arjuna prepared long before to this righteous battle. But when the day of the battle has come and Arjuna with his army stands in the front of the warriors of the belligerent party, he recognizes among them his own kinsmen and former friends. And he, being provoked to it by Krishna, begins to doubt his right to participate in the battle. He shares these doubts with Krishna.

Krishna reproaches him: watch, how many people gathered here to lay down their lives for you! And the encounter is unavoidable*! How can you, who brought these people here to die, leave them at the very last moment!? Since you — a professional warrior — took up arms, then fight for the righteous cause. And understand that life of every one of us in the body is but a short space of the true life. Man is not a body, and he does not die with death of the body. And in that sense no one can kill and no one can be killed.

Arjuna, intrigued by such words of Krishna, asks Him more and more questions. And from the answers it becomes clear that the path to the Perfection goes not through killing, but through Love — Love, at first, to the manifested aspects of God-Absolute and then to the Creator Himself.

These answers of Krishna are the essence of the Bhagavad Gita — one of the greatest — by profoundness of wisdom and breadth of the fundamental problems covered — books existing on the Earth.

There are several translations of the Bhagavad Gita into Russian language. Among them the translation by A.Kamenskaya and I.Mantsiarly [13] reproduces the meditative aspect of the Krishna’s sayings best. Yet, for many verses of the text, the translation is incomplete.

The translation by V.S.Sementsov [15] is a successful attempt to reproduce the poetic structure of the Sanskrit Bhagavad Gita. The text, indeed, began to flow like a song. But the exactness of the translation in some cases got worse.

The advantage of the Russian translation made by the Society for Krishna’s Consciousness [14] is that it is accompanied by the Sanskrit text (including transliteration). But the content is extremely distorted.

The translation made under the editorship of B.L.Smirnov [8] is supposed — according to the intention of the translators — to be highly exact. Yet, its language is somewhat “dry”. But, as it happened to the all mentioned translations, many important statements of Krishna were not understood by the translators and thus were translated incorrectly. Among such typical errors is interpretation of the word Atman as “smaller than the smallest”, and not as “subtler than the subtlest”; or translation of the word buddhi as “supreme mind”, “pure thought”, etc, and not as “consciousness”. Only the translators who have mastered the highest levels of yoga can avoid such errors.

The readers are presented a new edition of the translation of the Bhagavad Gita made by the compiler of this book.