GARY.C. MOORE:
Brilliant suggestion! I love it! It fits my thesis about the Stoics and Marcus Aurelius precisely! I should have thought of it myself. The context of the Bhagavad Gita fits exactly the political context of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. The only basic difference is reincarnation but in the Gita that is not nearly as heavily weighted with reward and punishment as other Hindu works, and far inferior ones at that. Shankara essentially wants *enlightenment*, jivanmukta, to be a liberation from reincarnation which, unlike the vast majority of Hindus, he considers it, though still a ladder of merit, a horror in itself because it precisely is intended to tie one to objects of this world, its only so-called merit being a *graduated* release of affection for people and things finally ending in no relationship whatsoever of emotion or morality to anything or anyone else, that is, *jivanmukta while still alive*, something other Hindu thinkers disputed as attainable only after attaining, and finishing, the highest state of reincarnation.
*** The actual context of the Bhagavad Gita is the huge Mahabharata, an epic poem of over a hundred thousand lines, the longest epic poem in the world supposedly. It is in the sixth book or *Parvan*, called *Bhismaparvan*, out of eighteen, and constitutes in that Parvan chapters 23-40. As W. J. Johnson says,

QUOTE:* One reason for the GITA’S universality is its capacity to bear almost any shade of interpretation [GCM: much like Epictetus], because of the variegated nature of its contents. It is as though the famous epigram directed by nthe MAHABHARATA at itself - ’What is here may be found elsewhere, what is not here is nowhere at all.”* END QUOTE


    One interpretation of the BHAGAVAD GITA is that *You have to do what you have to do according to your social and political context. Do not worry about it or be concerned. Death does not matter. It is all illusion anyway.* This is just like Marcus Aurelius being obliged to attend the games at the Arena, yet, bored with it reads his mail
- outraging his fellow spectators - and even commenting in Book X, 8, about the dying victims whining for their lives.

    The GITA states theoretically what goes on throughout the MAHABHARATA, betrayal, lying, murder, adultery, etc, etc, etc. as well as holiness, stoic discipline, selfless heroism, etc, etc, etc. What the GITA theorizes in the abstract, the MAHABHARATA details in the vast array of all possible human actions. Even Krishna takes on a dark side, elsewhere than the GITA, as lusting for battle and killing. But, of course, that *lust* - in our way of seeing things - is viewed entirely different by Hindus who understand what Shiva, Kali, and Bharaiva are all above, that is, death is insignificant, not worth thinking about.