"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds"

I think that many people know this passage from the Gita quoted by Robert Oppenheimer on the explosion of the first atomic bomb (in NV).

I recently completed the Gita (not in Sanskirt ) and couldn't find this quote anywhere.

I did, however, read this passage that I kept coming back to again and again:

I am all-powerful Time which destroys all things, and I have come here to slay these men.  Even if thou dost not fight, all the warriors facing thee shall die.

Arise therefore! Win they glory, conquer thine enemies, and enjoy thy kingdom.  Through the fate of their karma I have doomed them to die:  be thou the means of my work.

 

Drona, Bhishma, Jayd-ratha and Karna, and other heroic warriors of this great war have already been slain by me: tremble not, fight and slay them.  Thou shalt conquer thine enemies in battle.

It turns out that this passage is exactly the one quoted by Oppenheimer (the first sentence that is).

I did not realize that he had learned Sanskrit and read the Gita in the original tongue, thus the difference.

I think the reason that I was drawn to this passage was that it reminded me of First Samuel 17:45-47:

... Thou comest to me with a sword, and with a spear, and with a shield: but I come to thee in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom thou hast defied.

This day will the Lord deliver thee into mine hand; and I will smite thee, and take thine head from thee; and I will give the carcases of the host of the Philistines this day unto the fowls of the air, and to the wild beasts of the earth; that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel.

And all this assembly shall know that the Lord saveth not with sword and spear: for the battle is the Lords, and he will give you into our hands.

The really interesting thing about my reading of the Gita was that I was listening to Thus Spake Zarathustra on audiobook.

I have read this several different times, but this time it was intense.  Maybe it was the verbalization or maybe it was the combination with the Gita or maybe both.  Maybe it was there was an element of spirituality justification (via the Gita) for phrases like the below:

"Why so hard!"--said to the diamond one day the charcoal; "are we then not near relatives?"

Why so soft? O my brethren; thus do I ask you: are ye then not--my brethren?

Why so soft, so submissive and yielding? Why is there so much negation and abnegation in your hearts? Why is there so little fate in your looks?

And if ye will not be fates and inexorable ones, how can ye one day-- conquer with me? And if your hardness will not glance and cut and chip to pieces, how can ye one day--create with me?

For the creators are hard. And blessedness must it seem to you to press your hand upon millenniums as upon wax, Blessedness to write upon the will of millenniums as upon brass, harder than brass, nobler than brass.  Entirely hard is only the noblest.

This new table, O my brethren, put I up over you: BECOME HARD!

Another interesting thing was that I really saw (at least in my translation) the real level of affiliation that Buddhism has with Hinduism...

Wikipedia: Bhagavad Gita