What is the Bhagavad Gita and when was it spoken?

The setting is exact. The armies are drawn up, the conches have sounded, and Arjuna asks Krishna to drive his chariot into the space between the two lines so that he can see whom he must fight. He sees teachers, uncles, cousins and grandfathers, and his bow slips from his hand. He says he would rather be killed unarmed than win a kingdom over the bodies of his own family. What follows is Krishna answer, in seven hundred verses and eighteen chapters, and by the end Arjuna picks up the bow.

In the epic it is placed in the Bhishma Parva, the sixth book, as the Bhagavadgita Parva. In the numbering of the critical edition it occupies chapters twenty-three to forty of that book. The argument is often treated as though it stopped time, and in the narrative it effectively does: the war waits.

The Gita moves through several answers rather than one. The self is not killed when the body is killed, so grief for the dead misreads what dies. Action cannot be avoided, since even inaction is a choice, so the discipline is to act without grasping at the results: you have a right to the work, never to its fruits. It is better to do your own duty imperfectly than another duty well. And in the later chapters the argument turns devotional, with Krishna revealing himself as the ground of everything and asking for love rather than analysis, ending with the surrender verse of chapter eighteen.

The eleventh chapter is its centre of gravity, where Krishna shows Arjuna the universal form and says that he is time, grown old, come to consume the worlds, and that these warriors are already dead whether Arjuna fights or not.

On dating, the Gita is generally taken to be a layer within the epic rather than its oldest core, with proposals clustering in the last centuries BCE. It became the single most commented-on text in Indian philosophy, read and argued over by Shankara, Ramanuja, Madhva, and in modern times by Tilak, Gandhi and Ambedkar, who disagreed with each other completely.