[Advaita-l] Abhinava Gupta's version of the Gita (Was: gita commentaries (was: what is siddhiH))

[Siva Senani Nori]

W.r.t. what Sri Vidyasankar said on the Bhagavadgita, esp. about the 45 additional verses, the following might be useful:

a. As per the Bhishma Parvan of the Mahabharata, the Gita has 745 verses, with the break-up of the number of verses from Krishna, Arjuna etc. also mentioned. However, the most popular versions, mostly identical with the one commentated by Sri Adi Sankaracharya, which is said to have 700 verses, but the actual count is 701.

b. Some of these additional verses were, I gather, referred to by Sri Vedanta Desikan as well. The 700 sloka version is so popular that the 745 sloka version is only mentioned, seldom published. May be because of this, it is said sometimes that the Kashmiri version, commentated by Sri Abhinava Gupta, has 745 slokas.

c. I recently had occasion to go through the above issues in some detail. The actual version commentated upon by Sri Abhinava Gupta has 15 additional slokas. More significantly than these slokas a number of phrases, words or entire foot of a verse are different. To give a flavour of that difference, sthirapraj~na is used in stead of sthitapraj~na in the second chapter. The commentary itself is somewhat unusual. Only those parts which need explanation, in the opinion of the commentator, have been explained. When I looked up some of these explanations (on the 15 additional slokas), I was amazed by their quality. Very acute, pithy and irrefutable. In one word, illuminating. And, each chapter of commentary is ended by a summarising verse, in this commentary called Gitartha Samgrah.

d. Compared to the 15 additional slokas of the Kashmiri version, the additional 30 slokas are a mixed bag. Some were straight from the Upanishads, or very near the readings of the Upanishads; some were of little value, as seemed to this alpamati; others contained beautiful poetry, and some only half-baked, half-completed metaphors.

Overall, the most useful result of looking up these additional slokas was the wonderful introduction to Sri Abhinava Gupta. The additional slokas did not seem to carry any additional or different message / philosophy, at least to my limited intellect. 

Regards
Senani


----- Original Message ----
From: "Sundaresan, Vidyasankar (GE Infra, Water)" <vidyasankar.sundaresan at ge.com>
To: advaita-l at lists.advaita-vedanta.org
Sent: Friday, January 25, 2008 8:37:09 PM
Subject: Re: [Advaita-l] gita commentaries (was: what is siddhiH)

authors. But the commentaries of abhinavagupta, SrIdhara and madhusUdana
sarasvatI are better studied separately, I think, because they have
independent things to say about the gItA. abhinavagupta's gItA, the
so-called Kashmiri recension, even has about 45 verses more than the
standard version that the other commentators have. If one is interested

Regards,
Vidyasankar


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