Thoreau said “In the
morning, I bathe my intellect in Bhagavadgita, a stupendous and cosmogenal book
in comparison which all our modern literature is trivial and useless.”
The greatest incident of the
[Kurukshetra] war was the marvelous and immortal poem of the Gita, the Song
Celestial. It is the popular scripture
of India and the loftiest of all teachings.
It consists of a dialogue held by Arjuna with Krishna, just before the
commencement of the fight on the battlefield of Kurukshetra. I would advise those of you who have not
read that book to read it. If you only
knew how much it has influenced your own country even! If you want to know the source of Emerson’s
inspiration, it is this book, the Gita.
He want to see Carlyle, and Carlyle made him a present of Gita; and that
little book is responsible for the Concord Movement. All the broad movements in America, in one way or other, are
indebted to the Concord party.
-Swami
Vivekananda,
‘The
Mahabharata’, CompleteWorks,
Vol. IV
(Mayavati, 1962), p. 95.