Bhagavad Gita: Arjuna's Crisis at Kurukshetra and Oppenheimer's Memory

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The Bhagavad Gita is set on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, where the warrior prince Arjuna has his charioteer drive between two armies and sees his uncles, cousins, friends and teachers on the other side. He drops his bow, torn between his duty as a warrior and his duty to protect his kin, and asks his charioteer Krishna whether he can simply walk away. Legend says the sage dictated the text to Ganesha, who broke off a tusk to write it down. Historians instead see a composite work refined by many authors from an oral tradition and codified around the second or first century BCE, while Indologist J.A.B. van Buitenen argued it was placed in the Mahabharata to bring the epic's dilemmas to a philosophical climax.

The Gita answered a crisis created by rising ascetic movements that taught liberation through non-action, since all action creates karma. Its answer is inner renunciation: fulfill your dharma but give up attachment to the fruits of action. It distinguishes prakriti, the changing material world including the thinking mind, from the atman, the unchanging inner self, and maya, the illusion that the material world is all there is. Many modern readers treat the dialogue as an inner conversation between ego and higher self. Its global fame came in the late 19th century through Western translations and the Theosophical Society, and in the 20th century it guided both Mahatma Gandhi's nonviolent struggle and J. Robert Oppenheimer's response to the first atomic test in July 1945.

• The eighth-century philosopher Shankara fixed the text at exactly 700 verses through his line-by-line commentary.
• Scholars date its final form by the shift from older Vedic Sanskrit to classical Sanskrit structures.
• The hosts compare the ego to a driver in a traffic jam and the atman to a calm passenger in the back seat.
• The Gita rejects physical non-action as impossible, since even breathing is an action.
• Oppenheimer recalled a line about a cosmic force embodying time and becoming the shatterer of worlds.