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Bhagavad Gita

Also known as: The Bhagavad-Gītā, The Song of the Lord, The Gita

700-verse Sanskrit scripture inserted into the much longer *Mahābhārata* epic — among the most read and most commented-upon religious texts in human history. Composed sometime between roughly 200 BCE and 200 CE; structured as a dialogue between the warrior **Arjuna** and his charioteer **Kṛṣṇa** on the battlefield of Kurukshetra immediately before the great war that is the *Mahābhārata*'s central event. Arjuna refuses to fight; Kṛṣṇa, revealing himself across eighteen chapters as a divine presence, instructs Arjuna in the meaning of action, duty, devotion, knowledge, and the nature of the absolute. The text has been read across the Hindu tradition (it is one of the *prasthāna trayī*, the triple foundation of [[vedanta|Vedānta]], alongside the [[the-upanishads|Upanishads]] and the *Brahma Sūtras*) and absorbed by every major philosophical school; in the modern period it became central to the Indian independence movement (Tilak, Gandhi, Aurobindo each wrote substantial commentaries) and to the global reception of Hindu thought.

The Bhagavad Gītā (Song of the Lord) sits within the Bhīṣma Parva of the Mahābhārata, the great Sanskrit epic. The setting is the moment immediately before the climactic war between the Pāṇḍava brothers and their cousins the Kauravas, on the field of Kurukshetra. Arjuna, the principal Pāṇḍava warrior, surveys the opposing army — full of his teachers, kinsmen, and friends — and refuses to fight. He puts down his bow. His charioteer, Kṛṣṇa, who has appeared throughout the epic as a wise prince but has not yet fully disclosed himself, begins to instruct him.

The Gītā is the eighteen chapters of that instruction.

What the text teaches

Across the eighteen chapters Kṛṣṇa works through several interleaved teachings:

[[karma-yoga|Karma yoga]] — [[karma-yoga|the yoga of action]]. Arjuna cannot escape action; everyone acts; what changes is the relation to the fruit of action. Act according to dharma (duty, the right action for one’s situation) without attachment to the results — that is the path of liberation through action.
Jñāna yoga — [[jnana-yoga|the yoga of knowledge]]. The wise see through the appearances of the manifest world to the unchanging absolute; they recognize that the soul is not slain when the body is slain (chapter 2); they act from this knowledge.
[[bhakti-yoga|Bhakti yoga]] — [[bhakti-yoga|the yoga of devotion]]. The path of love and surrender to the divine. The Gītā is the principal scripture of Hindu bhakti (devotion); Kṛṣṇa repeatedly emphasizes that the devotee who turns to him with whole heart is dear to him, regardless of caste, station, or prior practice.
The teaching on the absolute. Kṛṣṇa progressively reveals himself through the dialogue as not only a human prince but a manifestation of the divine. In chapter 11 — the Vishvarūpa darśana — Arjuna receives a vision of Kṛṣṇa’s universal form, a vision so overwhelming that Arjuna asks Kṛṣṇa to return to his more bearable human shape. The vision is one of the great theophanies in any tradition’s literature.
The integration of paths. A central question for the commentary tradition has been how the three yogas (karma, jñāna, bhakti) relate. The Gītā itself does not flatten them; different chapters emphasize different paths, and Kṛṣṇa concludes (chapter 18) by inviting Arjuna to choose what serves him.

The classical commentary tradition

Every major [[the-upanishads|Vedānta]] school has produced a substantial Gītā commentary, and these commentaries are themselves the principal record of how the text has been understood. The most influential:

[[adi-shankara|Śaṅkara]]‘s commentary (c. 700 CE; Advaita reading) — emphasizes jñāna and the recognition of the non-dual ground.
Rāmānuja’s commentary (c. 1100; Viśiṣṭādvaita reading) — emphasizes bhakti and the loving relation between the qualified devotee and the qualified absolute.
Madhva’s commentary (c. 1240; Dvaita reading) — emphasizes bhakti and the substantial distinction between God and devotee.
Jñāneśvar’s Bhāvārtha Dīpikā (1290; Marathi vernacular) — one of the great vernacular Gītā commentaries, and a foundational text of Marathi literature.
Modern commentaries — Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s Gītā Rahasya (1915, written in prison; emphasizes [[karma-yoga|karma yoga]] and political action); [[mahatma-gandhi|Mahatma Gandhi]]‘s Anāsakti Yoga (1929; emphasizes karma yoga and ahiṃsā); Aurobindo’s Essays on the Gita (1922); Vinoba Bhave’s Talks on the Gita (1932, also from prison); Swami Chinmayananda’s contemporary commentary.

On the modern context

The Gītā has played a complicated role in modern Indian history. Tilak and the early independence movement read it (in part) as a call to active engagement with the political situation; Gandhi read it (in part) as a teaching of ahiṃsā ([[ahimsa|non-violence]]) — even though the text takes place on a battlefield where Arjuna will fight. The two readings are not the same, and the contestation continues.

In the 20th-century Western reception, the Gītā was one of the principal Hindu texts encountered. Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley engaged it; J. Robert Oppenheimer famously quoted chapter 11 (Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds) at the Trinity test. The text remains widely read in spiritual-but-not-religious Western contexts.

On translations

Many available; recommended:

Eknath Easwaran (Nilgiri, 1985) — readable, accessible, lightly Hinduized for Western readers.
Barbara Stoler Miller (Bantam, 1986) — scholarly translation in modern English.
Winthrop Sargeant (SUNY, 1979; rev. 2009) — interlinear word-by-word with translation; the standard study tool.
Laurie L. Patton (Penguin Classics, 2008) — accessible recent translation.
Graham M. Schweig (HarperOne, 2007) — emphasizes bhakti; Vaiṣṇava-influenced.
Stephen Mitchell (Harmony, 2000) — popular but free; closer to a meditation than a translation.

Sources

The Bhagavad-Gita. Trans. Barbara Stoler Miller. Bantam, 1986. Source class: primary text / scholarly translation.
The Bhagavad Gita. Trans. Laurie L. Patton. Penguin Classics, 2008. Source class: primary text / accessible translation.
The Bhagavad Gita. Trans. Winthrop Sargeant. SUNY, 1979. Source class: primary text / interlinear edition.
Mohandas K. Gandhi. The Bhagavad Gita According to Gandhi. Edited by John Strohmeier. [[berkeley|Berkeley]] Hills, 2000. Source class: book / 20th-c. commentary.
[[sri-aurobindo|Sri Aurobindo]]. Essays on the Gita. [[sri-aurobindo|Sri Aurobindo]] Ashram, 1922 (multiple subsequent editions). Source class: book / 20th-c. commentary.

Lenses still to grow

The Vishvarūpa darśana (chapter 11) as a piece of theological-poetic literature in its own right.
The three yogas in detail.
The Tilak-Gandhi-[[sri-aurobindo|Aurobindo]] readings as a piece of modern Indian intellectual history.
The Mahābhārata as the larger context of the Gītā; the epic is enormous and underrepresented in this wiki.
The Gītā in modern Western reception — Oppenheimer, Isherwood, the Hare [[krishna|Krishna]] movement.

What links here, and how

Inbound connections from across the wiki, grouped by lens and by relationship. These appear automatically — every entity page declares what it links to, and that data populates here on the targets.

Spiritual

parallels

Mahatma Gandhi his *Anāsakti Yoga* (1929) is one of the major modern commentaries on the Gītā; he carried the text with him daily and described it as his *spiritual reference book*
Mirabai her practice is the lived form of the *Gītā*'s bhakti teaching — though she did not write commentary; her teaching is in her songs

Cultural

rooted in

Bhakti Yoga chapter 12 (*Bhakti-yoga*) is the canonical Gītā chapter on the path; Krishna declares bhakti the easiest and surest discipline
Jnana Yoga Gītā chapters 2, 4, 13 are the principal loci; Krishna teaches jñāna alongside karma and bhakti as integral paths
Karma Yoga the Gītā is the foundational text; chapters 2, 3, and 18 are the principal locus

5 inbound links · 3 outbound