The New Lifetime Reading Plan

As the two opposing armies take the field, Arjuna, greatest of the Pandavas, calls upon the god Krishna to help him and his brothers. Krishna declines to take sides, but neither will he remain aloof from the battle; he says that he will fight on one side, and his own army will help the other side. He offers Arjuna the choice, and Arjuna wisely chooses Krishna alone rather than his innumerable horde of troops; Krishna becomes Arjunas charioteer. As the battle is about to begin, Arjuna loses his nerve. He cannot, he tells Krishna, bear to think of killing the Kauravas, who are his uncles and cousins; he would rather die than dishonor himself in an ignoble battle.

Time stands still on the battlefield as Krishna instructs Arjuna in his duty. As the dialogue unfolds between hero and god, Krishna reminds Arjuna that the world itself is but an illu- sion; moreover even in the realm of what seems to be, there is no distinction between past, present and future. Arjuna's role is to fulfill his dharma, the path of duty laid out for him by fate. The responsibility for the coming death in battle of the Kauravas is not his; "even without you," says Krishna, "ali these warriors arrayed in hostile ranks will cease to exist. They are already killed by me. Be just my instrument, the archer at my side!" Arjuna asks Krishna to reveal himself in his full divine glory; when his request is granted, he is overcome by awe and accepts his fate—the battle can commence.

The Bhagavad Gita is a short work, one that can be read in an hour or two but which repays many rereadings. I think you will agree with me that it is a work of almost hair-raising power and magnificence. This is a view that has been shared by many people in the West. The Gita was one of the first works of Indian classical literature to be translated into English when the British East нndia Company Consolidated its colonial control of нndia. Emerson [69] admired the Gita; Thoreau [80] had a copy with him at Walden Pond and read it with enthusiasm. Perhaps the most famous Western quotation of the Bhagavad Gita was also the most apt: When Robert Oppenheimer observed the Trinity Test, the workTs first explosion of an atomic device, he quoted the divine Krishna: "Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds."

There are many English translations of the Bhagavad Gita; the version by the late Barbara Stoler Miller is, in my view, far superior to most others.

J.S.M.

18

SSU-MA CH1EN

145-86 B.C.E.

Records of the Grand Historian

In early China, beginning well before the time of Confucius [4], royal governments included officials known by a title that we translate into English as Grand Historian. This officiaTs duties involved not only preserving offнcial documents and keeping a chronicle of the kings acts, but also responsibility for observing, interpreting, and recording portents and omens, everything from flocks of birds behaving strangely to a comet in the sky. Any of these could be warnings that Heaven was displeased with the rulers stewardship of his realm. The posi- tion required special skills ranging from record-keeping to astrology, and so the office of Grand Historian was often handed down from father to son. In the second century B.c.E. two Grand Historians, Ssu-ma Tan [Sima Tan] and his more famous son Ssu-ma Ch^en [Sima Qian], compiled a work that is one of the greatest histories every written.

China was unified in 221 B.c.E. by the famous First Emperor, Cfrin Shih-Huang-Ti [Qin Shihuangdi], whose tomb guarded by thousands of terra-cotta soldiers is one of the won- ders of the ancient world. In an effort to suppress seditious independent thinking and to bring ali knowledge under his own control, the emperor tried with some success to burn ali privately owned books. When the imperial library was also burned in the rebellion that soon ended the emperors repres- sive regime, China was in danger of losing its literary heritage. Under the succeeding Han Dynasty, teams of scholars were put to work to reconstruct the lost books from memory. As part of the same impulse to recover the past, Grand Historian Ssu-ma Tan was given the task of compiling a complete and systematic history of the world (i.e. China and its environs) from the beginning of time. Upon his death in 110 B.c.E., his son inherited both his office and the principal authorship of the great work that the father had begun, the Shih chi [Shiji]— a title that can be translated either as The Historical Records or Records of the Grand Historian.

The Shih chi is a massive work of 130 substantial chapters; it has never been translated in its entirety into a Western lan- guage. It consists of twelve chapters of narrative history, from the (mythical) Yellow Emperor, founder of Chinese civilization,