The Bhagavad Gita is a bit like Moby Dick in that it is abstract enough that everyone projects their own interpretation onto it, filtered through their own experiences. However, because it is a religious text, people have been fighting over the meaning for millenia, often to justify or motivate one political stance or another, no doubt because motivating the protagonist to political action of physical battle is itself the most concrete reading of the Bhagavad Gita's meaning.
But the Gita is just one highly contested chapter of the larger, arguably more interesting epic, the Mahabharata, which is the story of war and conflict spanning generations of an extended clan of warriors.
The Mahabharata is a treasure trove of the complex sociology of ancient South Asia, and quite unlike the Gita, it's content is largely non-judgemental and mostly secular.
In some traditional families, they actually prefer not to keep a copy of Mahabharata in the home per the superstition that it will engender conflict in the family, instead preferring "thou shalt" texts like the Bhagavad Gita, or Ramayana.
All of these long, ancient religious texts are palimpsests (by which I mean simply the work of multiple authors, over a period of time; I know that isn't the strict meaning, and indeed some of them are strictly palimpsests, i.e. documents that have been erased and written over).
I don't know for sure that the BV is such a palimpsest; but it is not plausible that the Mahabharata as a whole is a record composed by a single author, at a point in history.
> it is not plausible that the Mahabharata as a whole is a record composed by a single author, at a point in history.
I agree. I don't think I argued against that? Responding to the wrong comment perhaps?
The Bhagavad Gita in particular is a section of the Mahabharata that has seen more revisions over time than the rest of th epic. In fact the name of the purported author "Vyasa" itself means "arranger", implying that he was organizing stories he received from others.
But the Gita is just one highly contested chapter of the larger, arguably more interesting epic, the Mahabharata, which is the story of war and conflict spanning generations of an extended clan of warriors.
The Mahabharata is a treasure trove of the complex sociology of ancient South Asia, and quite unlike the Gita, it's content is largely non-judgemental and mostly secular.
In some traditional families, they actually prefer not to keep a copy of Mahabharata in the home per the superstition that it will engender conflict in the family, instead preferring "thou shalt" texts like the Bhagavad Gita, or Ramayana.