Excerpt from The Bhagavad-Gita: The Songs of the Master In the days of Prince Siddhartha, also a Rajput of the Solar race, the priestly hierarchy was not only grown strong and great all over northern India, but, in many regards, it had fallen into over-ripeness and decline. One of the Buddha's most eloquent sermons is directed against the many abuses of the Brahman order, and preserves for us a picture, unsparing in its satire, and perfect in detail, of the life of the Brahmans, in spiritual and external matters alike, in the Buddha's day. As we know that the Buddha's long life was lived some twenty-five hun dred years ago, we can easily see that the epoch of the Great War, in which Krishna and Arjuna fought, must have been many centuries earlier; and far beyond the time of the Great War lie the archaic days of the greater Upanishads. In general, we may hold that no man who has been well forgotten, suddenly becomes the hero of a popular poem. The very essence of ballads and bardic songs is that they record doughty deeds still fresh in all memories; and, the world over, the bards have gained glory and reward by singing the praises of warriors, and the beauty of queens, at the courts of the queens and warriors they celebrated, or at least before their children, who shone in their reflected glory. Praise of living princes has always been the business of heralds and bards. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.