Page:The Life of Lokamanya Tilak.djvu/365

 survive the dreary period. But the subsequent commutation of his sentence to one of simple imprisonment together with the Hterary facihties afforded, en- abled him to undertake the enterprise and within less than twenty months after he was " well settled " at Mandalay, he wrote in a letter as follows : —

"About the Gita, I have finished what I call Gita Rahasya, an independent and original book investigating the purpose of the Gita and showing how our religious philosophy is applied therein to solution of the ethical problem. For, my view of the Gita is, that it is a work on Ethics — not Utilitarian, nor intuitional but transcendental, somewhat on the lines followed in the Green's ' Prolegomena to Ethics .' I have com- pared, throughout, the Gita-philosophy with the West- em, both religious and ethical and have tried to show that our system is, to say the least, not inferior to any of the Western methods. This Rahasya is made up of 15 chapters with an appendix devoted to a critical examination of the ,Gita as part of the Mahabharat and discussing its age etc. * * * j^ ^ill i think fill about 300 or 350 pages. To this a translation of the Gita, according to my view of it, is yet to be appended and I am now engaged on this translation, which, by the bye, is a light task. * * * I believe it will be found to be an entirely -original book like the " Orion "; for so far as I am aware, no one has ventured on such a path before in translating or commenting on the Gita, though I have had this view of the Gita in mind for about the last twenty years and more. I have used all the books that I have here with me