Eastern Thought & the Gita

by Gerard D.C. Kuiken

Eastern Thought and the Gita consists of five parts. Part One is the same as Part One in The Original Gita, discussing Eastern thought in concise form. In Part Two, the 209 stanzas of the Original Gita are the same as in The Original Gita, but in the Introduction to Part Two, the date and the origin are compared with the content and the date of the Bhagavad Gita. In Part Three, comments on the 209 stanzas of the Original Gita are given with a new translation of the core 319 verses of the 700 verses of the Bhagavad Gita that correspond to these 209 verses. In Part Four, the core 319 Sanskrit verses are given in transliterated form with a word-for-word translation. The new English translation of each Sanskrit verse has been guided by the stanza in the Original Gita. Each chapter starts with a comparison of the content of the whole chapter in the Bhagavad Gita with the content of the corresponding chapter in the Original Gita.In this comparison and in comparing each corresponding verse(s) in the Bhagavad Gita with the stanza in the Original Gita, it is found that the differences are minor, mostly found in changing abstract forms, such as THAT into Me, Krishna, and by adding devotion to Krishna. This study shows that the connection to the Original Gita can still be found, to a very high degree, in the 319 verses of the Bhagavad Gita. Part Five is an extensive Sanskrit-English dictionary containing all the Sanskrit words found in the 319 core verses in English alphabetical order. The multiple meanings of the Sanskrit words are given, and also their roots and parts of compounded words. Every reader, without knowledge of the Sanskrit language, can check every choice of any translator of the 319 core verses of the Bhagavad Gita by using this 240-page dictionary, constructed by consulting the various dictionaries of Sanskrit in English, German and French. The book ends with a bibliography and an index.