OCHS Weblog

The OCHS web team have launched a section of our website devoted to lecture downloads. Presently we can offer downloads in MP3 format but we are also working on facility to listen online and Podcasts.

These lectures and seminars are offered mainly as reference material for scholars and students interested in the topics covered. We offer the service in an effort to help develop the field of Hindu Studies and make good scholarship more accessible. The recordings are unedited so we ask listeners to please excuse any discrepancies in quality of sound or professionalism. We hope to develop this resource to become an important resouce for anyone interested in Hindu Culture, its philosophies, literature, art, history and societies, in all times and every part of the world.

Prior to coming to Oxford to read for an M.Litt at the OCHS, my three years of M.A. at the University of Tel Aviv were devoted to work on the Bhagavad Gita.

The M.A. degree is a larger project in Israel than at most universities internationally, and the thesis was to be about 80,000 words long – the size of a Doctorate at Oxford or Cambridge. I decided that, in essence, my main thrust would be to articulate the composition of the Bhagavad Gita, showing that it does indeed have a well-defined structure that is conceptually quite coherent.

Many scholars see the Gita as an aggregation of various ideas penned by various authors, put together in order to supply a ‘Hindu’ answer to the rising influence of Buddhism. The approach that I took was philosophical as opposed to linguistic. In the search for coherency, rather than examining the linguistic structure of the Gita, I looked into its conceptual structure. It had occurred to me that the concept of reality in the Gita is primarily hierarchical, and that opened out the possibility of a better understanding. On this basis, I searched the text for the means by which one could promote oneself up the ladder of actions leading from the lower to the higher stages. This ‘ladder’ of salvation is a traditionally accepted idea, and I have intertwined it into my study.

The result was a fuller articulation of the Gita’s clear and coherent structure. Now what was left was for me to offer a full verse translation from Sanskrit into Hebrew, along with a commentary demonstrating how the text fits onto this ladder-like structure. The translation was accepted for my degree with honours, and was subsequently accepted by a leading publisher under governmental auspices, and published in 2002. Today, it has become the standard academic Bhagavd gita edition for University courses in Israel.

Ithamar Theodor completed an M.Litt on Vedanta and the concept of ‘Rasa’ at Oxford University and the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies in 2004. He currently teaches Indian thought at the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Haifa, Israel. His Hebrew translation of the Bhagavad Gita is available from Carmel Publishers.