The Bhagavad-Gita's Central Role In Germany's Spiritual Life

The Bhagavad-Gita, helped to shape the world view of Germany.

Through their love of ideas, German scholars like Friedrich von Schlegel and Baron Ferdinand Eckstein became Sanskrit scholars.

The "native land" of Indic studies may have been England, but Germany is the true cradle of the Indic renaissance. In Jena, Weimar and Heidelberg, then at Bonn, Berlin and Tübingen oriental studies were established during the 1790s "like a rapid-fire series of explosions." (Raymond Schwab in Oriental Renaissance, p. 53). The many translations of Indian texts produced by the English in India were available to German philosophers when their interest in India's spiritual philosophy was awakened. Charles Wilkins' translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, had become a favourite book among Westerners throughout Europe, and together with other translations, found its widest audience in Germany.

The brothers Friedrich von Schlegel and August Wilhelm von Schlegel used their own printing press in 1823 to publish August Wilhelm's Latin translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, with the original Sanskrit text. European scholars commended it. This translation was to be an important resource for Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767--1835) and, later, George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770--1831), both of whom gave it their undivided attention.

Wilhelm von Humboldt claimed that his familiarity with the Oupnek'hat [Upanishads], the Manusmriti, Burnouf's extracts from the Padmapurana and Colebrooke's essay, "On the Religion and Philosophy of the Indians," enabled him to comprehend the philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita. (Hiltrud Rüstao, "From Indology to Indian Studies: Some Considerations," Bulletin of the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, March 1998, p. 126. [Hereafter: "From Indology to Indian Studies"]) He wrote that "this episode of the Mahabharata is the most beautiful, nay, perhaps even the only true philosophical poem which we can find in all the literatures known to us," (Quotation from Maurice Winternitz, A History of Indian Literature, Vol. 1, part 2, Second ed. (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1963) p. 375, Citation from India's Contribution, p. 166) and ranked the Gita above the works of Lucretius, Parmenides and Empedocles." (India's Contribution, p. 166) After looking into the Gita, he wrote to his friend, statesman Frederick von Gentz in 1827:

I read the Indian poem for the first time when I was in my country estate in Silesia and, while doing so, I felt a sense of overwhelming gratitude to God for having let me live to be acquainted with this work. It must be the most profound and sublime thing to be found in the, world. (Citation from P. Nagaraja Rao, The Bhagavad Gita (The Quest for the Moral Ideal, Religious Values and the Affirmation of Faith), (Madras: -- The Author, 1986), p. 20.)

Humboldt wanted to inform the world of the concept of God that he found and appreciated in the Bhagavad-Gita. With as much capacity to plumb the scripture's depths as could be cultivated at that time, he set himself to broadcast its teachings with an open mind. His lecture on the Bhagavad-Gita. at Berlin's Royal Academy of Sciences to Prussia's intellectual elite in 1825 (Art, Culture and Spirituality, p. 359) stirs the reader's mind to this day. It was published in 1826. He appeared again at the Academy one year later, this time with his analysis of the Gita's Advaitic structure founded on Samkhya philosophy, and summarized the Gita's discourses and poetic value in great detail. (From Indology to Indian Studies, pp. 126-127)

The first Humboldt lecture on the Bhagavad Gita caught the attention of George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. He published a review of it in 1827 that contributed a critical and appreciative analysis. Hegel felt Humboldt's lecture to be "an essential enrichment of the knowledge of the Indian way of concepts of the highest spiritual interests". (G. W. F. HegeL Werke (Works), Vol. 20, 59. Citation from "From Indology to Indian Studies," p. 128) and his penetrating review served to promote Humboldt's work.

Freidrich von Schlegel (1772--1829) was the first German to study Sanskrit and Indian religion and philosophy in depth.(Swami Ashokananda, The Influence of Indian Thought on the Thought of the West (Mayavati, Advaita Ashrama, 1931), p. 20). His interest in India was greatly influenced by the Bhagavad Gita. Schlegel produced his eminent pioneering work, On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians: A Contribution to the Foundation of Antiquity (Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier), in 1808. it was the primary publication of nineteenth-century European Indology in the German language, acknowledged for its scholarly translations of extracts from the Sanskrit texts of the Bhagavad Gita and the Ramayana. His words in Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier hailed the contribution of Vedanta, and were later brought to life by Max Müller in his lecture, "Origin of the Vedanta":

It cannot be denied that the early Indians possessed a knowledge of the true God; all their writings are replete with sentiments and expressions, noble, clear, and severely grand; as deeply conceived and reverentially expressed as in any human language in which men have spoken of their God. . . The divine origin of man, as taught in Vedanta, is continually inculcated, to stimulate his efforts to return, to animate him in the struggle, and incite him to consider a reunion and reincorporating with Divinity as the one primary object of every action and reaction. Even the highest form of European philosophy, the idealism of reason as it is set forth by the Greek philosophers, seems, when compared to the bounteous light and force of oriental idealism, to be no more than a feeble Promethean spark within the full celestial splendor of the noonday sun, a thin flickering spark always on the point of burning out. (Friedrich von Schlegel, Indian Language, Literature and Philosophy, p. 471).