Talks on The Gita

Vinoba Bhave is known as the National Teacher of India and was an advocate of non-violence and human rights. Deeply influenced by the Bhagavad Gita, his talks on the text from prison during his freedom-fighting days were compiled and published as Talks on the Gita. His vision was to create a spiritual foundation for the whole of society.

He would say, "The world may forget all other services that I rendered, but will never forget these. I was in a state of complete absorption (Samadhi)while composing and giving the talks on the Gita, hence I believe these creations will keep serving mankind."

Acharya Vinoba Bhave was a towering personality of the Indian freedom struggle. As a great social reformer and ahimsavadi he embodied the essence of the Bhagavad Gita - of skill in action, struggle for self-mastery and selfless service.

Acharya Vinoba was an advocate of non-violent change. He championed the rights of fellow Indians not only during the Independence struggle when he was repeatedly jailed for political resistance, but also as the founder of Bhoodan - a land-gift movement built on an appeal to landowners, big and small, to voluntarily part with some of their farm land to the landless and the land poor so they may earn a dignified living.

In the cause of Bhoodan, beginning in 1951 and for the next thirteen years, Acharya Vinoba walked tens of thousands of kilometres across his beloved country. His call, "Go with complete confidence in the heart of everyone you approach," evoked his originality as an activist for social justice, and in his faith in the goodness of the human heart to respond in the face of dire humanitarian appeal.

The Bhagavad Gita was a significant influence in Acharya Vinoba's life and moral vision. In his reading of the Gita's high-minded aphorisms, he penetrated to its universal message of do unto others as you would have them do unto you. He coined the slogan, "Jai Jagat", symbolising the well-being of all.

In 1916, at twenty-one years of age, Vinobaji met Mahatma Gandhi who became his political and spiritual mentor. Vinobaji actively participated in ashram life by the Sabarmati in Gujarat. Later, at the Wardha ashram, Vinobaji published his insights on the Upanishads and the devotional poetry of Bhakta Tukaram.

Between January and June of 1932, Acharya Vinoba was jailed for six months in Dhule in Maharashtra. Prison became his abode of reading, writing, and, the Bhagavad Gita, a source of wisdom and strength to continue the freedom struggle inside prison walls. Over the course of six months, Acharya Vinoba gave eighteen discourses on the Bhagavad Gita that were transcribed by Pandurang Sane known to all as Sane Guruji, a fellow inmate and freedom fighter.

Published in Marathi as Gita Pravachan or Talks on the Gita, they are laced with storybook telling of profound life truths and understood by even those with no knowledge of holy literature. The Acharya said, "My writings and talks on the Gita elsewhere would not have the magic touch that these talks have, as these were delivered in jail, which, for us, was a battlefield, before the soldiers in the freedom struggle."

Shri Ram Chandra Mission is delighted to republish the Talks on the Gita, which Acharya Vinoba Bhave said was the story of his life and also his message'.

The Bhagavad Gita is no stranger to the West. Nor is Vinoba Bhave, the author of these talks on the `Song Celestial'. Since the death of Gandhi, one name that has sent, if not a wave, a ripple of hope throughout this frightened world is that of Vinoba.

During Gandhi's life Vinoba's name was not much known even in India. Today, however, the remotest villages resound with the words `Vinoba' and Bhoodan. Even outside India, well-informed circles have sat up to take notice of the 'walking saint' and his land-gift mission. Many thinkers in the West have seen in Vinoba's message a solvent for that war of ideologies that has become the despair of the human race.

Vinoba was born in a Brahmin family of Maharashtra (India) in September 1895. From his childhood he showed a remarkable lack of interest in worldly affairs. A brilliant undergraduate, he gave up college because that sort of education was not what his soul craved for. The idea of utilizing his education in order to make money never entered his head. So, he went to Benaras (Varanasi-India's holiest city and acknowledged as the premier seat of Sanskrit scholarship) to study Sanskrit and Philosophy and to live a life of contemplation and brahmacharya (self-discipline in the most comprehensive sense).

Though he gave up college, Vinoba has remained a student all his life. Unlike Gandhi, he is an erudite pundit of Sanskrit, Philosophy and the religious literature of the world. He has studied the Koran in Arabic, which language he learnt only to be able to read that holy book in the original. He knows the Bible and Christian religious literature as well perhaps as a Doctor of Divinity.

I shall not forget the occasion when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, the leader of the Montgomery, Alabama movement of non-violent resistance to racial segregation, met Vinoba with his wife. Jim Bristol of the Quaker Centre, Delhi, it was, I think, who in introducing Mrs. King spoke of her proficiency in music and suggested that she might sing some hymns and Negro spirituals for Vinoba. Everyone was delighted at the suggestion. I looked at Vinoba and wondered loudly if he knew what the Negro spirituals were. We were all startled, most of all the Americans, when Vinoba, as if in answer, raised his ever-downcast eyes towards Mrs. King and intoned softly, 'Were you there, Were you there, When they crucified my Lord?' When Mrs. King sang that spiritual, it had an added poignancy for us.

Vinoba is a linguist. Besides Sanskrit, Pali and Arabic, he knows English well; reads French; was recently learning German; knows all the major Indian languages. He loves Mathematics. His quest for knowledge is insatiable. But it is not knowledge as ordinarily understood. Most knowledge he regards as superficial and is interested in seeking after the fundamental truths of life. He has an uncanny capacity for separating the chaff from the grain and going to the root of a question. I have not met another person with as keen, razor-like a mind as Vinoba's.

`Vinoba literature', i.e. the collection of his writings and speeches, is already a voluminous affair and is ever-growing. It deals mostly with Philosophy and the theory and practice of non-violence.

To go back to his early days again. There were from the beginning two urges, or rather two tributaries of a single stream of urge, that impelled Vinoba onward. The one came from his identification with his fellow-creatures and impelled him, naturally, to work for the freedom of his country. Due to this urge he felt strongly attracted by the courage, dedication, sincerity and spirit of self-immolation of the revolutionaries of Bengal (whom the British unjustly called `terrorists').

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