Edwin Arnold, Leonardo Paolo Lovari

The Bhagavad Gita (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

The Bhagavad Gita, the greatest devotional book of Hinduism, has long been recognized as one of the world’s spiritual classics and a guide to all on the path of Truth. It is sometimes known as the Song of the Lord or the Gospel of the Lord Shri Krishna. According to Western scholarship, it was composed later than the Vedas and the Upanishads – probably between the fifth and second centuries before Christ. It is a fragment, part of the sixth book of the epic poem The Mahabaratha. The Mahabaratha tells of the Pandavas, Prince Arjuna and his four brothers, growing up in north India at the court of their uncle, the blind King Dhritarashtra, after the death of their father, the previous ruler. There is always great rivalry between the Pandavas or sons of Pandu and the Kauravas, the one hundred sons of Dhritarashtra. Eventually the old king gives his nephews some land of their own but his eldest son, Duryodhana, defeats Yudhisthira, the eldest Pandava, by cheating at dice, and forces him and his brothers to surrender their land and go into exile for thirteen years. On their return, the old king is unable to persuade his son Duryodhana to restore their heritage and, in spite of efforts at reconciliation by Sanjaya, Dhritarashtra’s charioteer; by Bheeshma, his wise counsellor; and even by the Lord Krishna himself, war cannot be averted. The rival hosts face each other on the field of Kurukshetra. It is at this point that The Bhagavad Gita begins. When Prince Arjuna surveys the battlefield, he is overwhelmed with sorrow at the futility of war. The teachings of The Bhagavad Gita are spoken by the divine Lord Krishna, who is acting as the prince’s charioteer. They are overheard by Sanjaya and reported back to King Dhritarashtra. When Krishna has finished speaking to Arjuna, the two armies engage. The battle lasts eighteen days and by the end of it nearly all of the warriors on both sides are dead save Krishna and the five sons of Pandu.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Harmakis Edizioni
• Erscheinungstermin: 16. November 2017
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9788885519343
• Artikelnr.: 50016160

Autorenporträt

Sir Edwin Arnold KCIE CSI (10 June 1832 - 24 March 1904) was an English poet and journalist, who is most known for his work The Light of Asia Arnold was born at Gravesend, Kent, the second son of a Sussex magistrate, Robert Coles Arnold. He was educated at King's School, Rochester; King's College London; and University College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate prize for poetry in 1852. He became a schoolmaster, at King Edward's School, Birmingham, and in 1856 went to India as Principal of the Government Sanskrit College at Poona, a post which he held for seven years, which includes a period during the mutiny of 1857, when he was able to render services for which he was publicly thanked by Lord Elphinstone in the Bombay Council.[2] Here he received the bias towards, and gathered material for, his future works. Returning to England in 1861 he worked as a journalist on the staff of the Daily Telegraph, a newspaper with which he continued to be associated as editor for more than forty years, and of which he later became editor-in-chief.[3] It was he who, on behalf of the proprietors of the Daily Telegraph in conjunction with the New York Herald, arranged the journey of H.M. Stanley to Africa to discover the course of the Congo River, and Stanley named after him a mountain to the north-east of Albert Edward Nyanza.[2] Arnold must also be credited with the first idea of a great trunk line traversing the entire African continent, for in 1874 he first employed the phrase "Cape to Cairo railway" subsequently popularised by Cecil Rhodes. It was, however, as a poet that he was best known to his contemporaries. The literary task which he set before him was the interpretation in English verse of the life and philosophy of the East. His chief work with this object is The Light of Asia, or The Great Renunciation, a poem of eight books in blank verse which was translated into various languages such as Hindi (tr. by Acharya Ram Chandra Shukla).