Shankara's 700 verses

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The Gita's famous 700 comes from Shankara's commentary, not from the epic's own count.

Every great book has a moment when somebody decides what is in it and what is not. For the Bhagavad Gita, the person usually credited with that moment is Adi Shankara, the eighth-century philosopher, and the number he gave is seven hundred.

First, where the Gita sits. It is not a separate scripture that wandered into the Mahabharata; it sits inside the Bhishma Parva, the book of the first part of the war, in a stretch usually numbered as chapters 25 to 42 (or 23 to 40, depending on which edition you hold). The scene is the opening of the Kurukshetra battle. Arjuna, the great archer, looks at the two armies, sees teachers and cousins on the other side, and loses heart. Krishna, who is driving his chariot, answers him with eighteen chapters of teaching on duty, action, knowledge and devotion. We hear all this at second hand: it is Sanjaya, the charioteer-bard given special sight, who reports it to the blind king Dhritarashtra.

Now the counting. When Shankara wrote his commentary on the Gita, he stated outright that the text has seven hundred verses. Modern scholars read that statement as more than a head-count. Before print, before a single fixed edition, a famous text could grow: a verse added here, a variant there, a gloss that slowly turned into scripture. By announcing the total, Shankara seems to have drawn a fence. The scholar Swami Gambhirananda accepts seven hundred as the historic standard, and from Shankara's time onward that is the number every serious edition has followed.

There is one wrinkle worth knowing. Gambhirananda also suggests that older manuscripts may have carried 745 verses. But no genuine manuscript with 745 has ever turned up, so that remains a guess, and the commentary tradition does not rest on it.

Here is a neat piece of arithmetic that supports the seven hundred. In some versions of the Bhishma Parva, the verses are tallied by speaker: Krishna with 574, Arjuna with 84, Sanjaya with 41, and Dhritarashtra with a single verse, his one question at the very start. Add those up and you land on exactly seven hundred. The eighteen chapters range from the shortest, chapters 12 and 15 with twenty verses each, to the longest, chapter 18, with seventy-eight.

Does the number matter beyond bookkeeping? It does, because it is the reason a verse can be quoted by chapter and number and still be the same verse in every printed copy, in any language. A student in Pune and a student in Chicago can open to the same place. Many later traditions of reading, commentary and devotion treat the text as it stood in Shankara's time. The Gita Mahatmya, the Jnaneshwari and Gandhi's habit of learning verses by heart are the kind of later reception that grew up around this fixed text. Gandhi, for instance, is recorded as having memorised the last nineteen verses of the second chapter.

So when you hear that the Gita is a "700-verse" scripture, hear it as a small piece of history. It is a promise made by one commentator about what counts as the book, and the centuries have kept it.

Who: Adi Shankara

Bound to

Jnaneshwari: the Gita in Marathi at sixteen same-story-other-version

Sanjaya's divine sight trivia-about

Anugita: the Gita retold after the war mirror

The butcher who taught a Brahmin mirror

Gita Mahatmya: the parrot, the prostitute and the sinful Brahmin trivia-about

Krishna as Parthasarathy at Triplicane located-at

Where this comes from

commentary · Wikipedia: Bhagavad Gita
read for this telling · Wikipedia: Bhagavad Gita Verse count and textual history sections (Shankara's 700; Gambhirananda; 6.43 speaker counts; chapter table)

See it on the tree · All stories

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