376 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
a token of their view that the charges contained the whole truth and nothing but the truth. On the other hand, the Bhagvat Gita presented Krishna as God omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, pure, loving, essence of goodness. Two such works containing two quite contradictory estimates about one and the same personality could not have been written at one and the same time by one and the same author. It is a pity that Mr. Tilak in his anxiety to give a pre-Buddhist date to the composition of the Bhagvat Gita should have completely failed to take note of these important considerations.
The second proposition of Mr. Tilak is equally unsound. The attempt to fix a date for the composition of the Bhagvat Gita is nothing but the pursuit of a mirage. It is doomed to failure. The reason is that the Bhagvat Gita is not a single book written by a single author. It consists of different parts written at different times by different authors.
Prof. Garbe is the only scholar who has seen the necessity of following this line of inquiry. Prof. Garbe hold that there are two parts of the Bhagvat Gita one original and one added. I am not satisfied with this statement. My reading of the Bhagvat Gita leads me to the conclusion that there have been four separate parts of Bhagvat Gita. They are so distinct that taking even the present treatise as it stands they can be easily marked off.
(i) The original Gita was nothing more than a heroic tale told or a ballad recited by the bards of how Arjuna was not prepared to fight and how Krishna forced him to engage in battle, how Arjuna yielded and so on. It may have been a romantic story but there was nothing religious or philosophical in it.
This original Gita will be found embedded in Chapter I, Chapter II, verses…. and Chapter XI verses 32-33 in which Krishna is reported to have ended the argument:
“Be my tool, carry out my will, don’t worry about sin and evil resulting from fighting, do as I tell you, don’t be impudent.”
This is the argument which Krishna used to compel Arjuna to fight. And this argument of coercion and compulsion made Arjuna yield. Krishna probably threatened Arjuna with brute force if he did not actually use it. The assumption of Vishva-rupa by Krishna is only different way of describing the use of brute force. On that theory it is possible that the chapter in the present Bhagvat Gita dealing with Vishva-rupa is also a part of the original Bhagvat Gita.
(ii) The first patch on the original Bhagvat Gita is the part in which Krishna is spoken of as Ishvara, the God of the Bhagvat religion. This part of the Gita is embedded in those verses of the present Bhagvat Gita which are devoted to Bhakti Yoga.