The Bhagavad Gītāश्रीमद्भगवद्गीता

The Bhagavad Gītā (“The Song of the Lord”), usually called simply the Gītā, is a dialogue of about 700 Sanskrit verses in eighteen chapters, set on a battlefield at the opening of the great war of the The Mahābhārata. On the eve of the battle, the warrior Arjuna, seeing his teachers, grandfather, cousins and friends drawn up in the opposing army, throws down his bow and refuses to fight. His charioteer, Kṛṣṇa — his friend and cousin, and, as the dialogue reveals, God incarnate — answers his despair with a teaching that ranges over the nature of the self, the meaning of duty, the problem of action, the disciplines of knowledge, meditation and devotion, the structure of the universe, and the nature of God, culminating in a terrifying vision of Kṛṣṇa’s cosmic form and a final call to surrender. Composed probably between the second century BCE and the second century CE, the Gītā is the most widely read, most translated and most commented-upon text of Hinduism. It has been called “the Bible of India”, “the gospel of selfless action”, and the most beautiful philosophical poem in any language. Every major school of Vedānta wrote a commentary on it; Gandhi called it his “spiritual dictionary”; Oppenheimer quoted it after the first atomic explosion; and its central teaching — to act without attachment to the fruits of action — has shaped millions of lives.

Setting

Place in the Mahābhārata

The Gītā occupies chapters 23–40 of the Bhīṣma Parva, the sixth book of the Mahābhārata. The Pāṇḍava brothers, cheated of their kingdom by their cousins the Kauravas in a rigged dice game and sent into thirteen years of exile, have returned to claim their share. All attempts at peace — including Kṛṣṇa’s own embassy asking for only five villages — have failed. The two vast armies face each other on the plain of Kurukṣetra, north of modern Delhi.

The frame of the Gītā is a narration within a narration. The blind king Dhṛtarāṣṭra, father of the Kauravas, sits in his palace while his charioteer Sañjaya, granted divine vision by the sage Vyāsa, describes what is happening on the battlefield. The Gītā opens with the king’s question: “On the field of dharma, on the field of the Kurus (dharmakṣetre kurukṣetre), gathered together, eager to fight, what did my sons and the sons of Pāṇḍu do, Sañjaya?” (1.1). It ends with Sañjaya’s declaration that “where there is Kṛṣṇa, lord of yoga, and where there is Arjuna, the archer, there, I think, are fortune, victory, prosperity and righteousness” (18.78).

Composition

The Gītā is probably later than most of the surrounding epic, and may have been inserted into it; scholars have dated it anywhere from the fifth century BCE to the second century CE, with most favouring a date around the turn of the era. Some see layers within it — an older core on karma-yoga and the self, and later chapters on devotion and the universal form — while others, and the tradition itself, read it as a unified composition. It draws on the Upaniṣads (especially the Kaṭha Upaniṣad, several of whose verses it repeats), on early Sāṃkhya and Yoga (darśana), and on the devotional cult of Vāsudeva-Kṛṣṇa, and it synthesises them into a new whole.

Plot summary

Arjuna’s despair

As the armies prepare to fight and the conches blow, Arjuna asks Kṛṣṇa to drive his chariot into the space between the two armies, so that he can see whom he must fight. There he sees “fathers and grandfathers, teachers, uncles, brothers, sons, grandsons, friends” (1.26). He is overwhelmed:

My limbs fail, my mouth is parched, my body trembles, my hair stands on end. My bow Gāṇḍīva slips from my hand, and my skin burns. I cannot stand; my mind is reeling… I do not want victory, Kṛṣṇa, nor kingdom, nor pleasures. What use is kingdom to us, or enjoyment, or even life? (1.29–32)

He argues — with real moral force — that killing one’s kin is a great sin; that it will destroy families, and with them the traditions (dharma) that hold society together; that women will be corrupted and castes mixed; that the ancestors will fall from heaven for lack of offerings. “It would be better for me if the sons of Dhṛtarāṣṭra, weapons in hand, killed me unresisting and unarmed in battle” (1.46). He sinks down in the chariot, his bow and arrows fallen, his mind “overwhelmed by grief” (1.47).

This is the moment the whole Gītā answers. Arjuna’s crisis is not cowardice; it is a genuine conflict between two dharmas — the warrior’s duty to fight a righteous war, and the universal duty not to kill one’s family and teachers. He is, in modern terms, a conscientious objector.

Kṛṣṇa’s first answer: the immortal self

Kṛṣṇa first rebukes him: “Whence has this weakness come upon you at this critical hour? It is unworthy of a noble man… Do not yield to unmanliness. Shake off this petty faintness of heart and arise, scorcher of enemies!” (2.2–3). Arjuna, confused, asks to be taught: “I am your disciple; teach me, who have taken refuge in you” (2.7).

Kṛṣṇa’s teaching begins, smiling, with the immortality of the self:

You grieve for those who should not be grieved for, yet you speak words of wisdom. The wise grieve neither for the living nor for the dead. Never was there a time when I did not exist, nor you, nor these kings; nor will there ever be a time when we cease to be… As the embodied self passes through childhood, youth and old age in this body, so it passes into another body. (2.11–13)

The self “is not born, nor does it ever die… Unborn, eternal, everlasting, ancient, it is not slain when the body is slain” (2.20, from the Kaṭha Upaniṣad). “As a man casts off worn-out clothes and puts on new ones, so the embodied self casts off worn-out bodies and enters new ones. Weapons do not cut it, fire does not burn it, water does not wet it, wind does not dry it” (2.22–23). If the self cannot be killed, Arjuna’s grief is misplaced.

Kṛṣṇa adds a second argument: Arjuna is a Kṣatriya, a warrior, and “there is nothing better for a Kṣatriya than a war of dharma”; if he refuses, he will lose honour and incur sin, and his enemies will mock him as a coward (2.31–37).

Karma-yoga: action without attachment

Then Kṛṣṇa turns to the teaching that is the Gītā’s most distinctive contribution: karma-yoga, the discipline of action. Arjuna’s problem is not just that killing is wrong, but that all action binds — according to the doctrine of Karma, every action produces results that tie the doer to the cycle of rebirth. The ascetic answer, common in Kṛṣṇa’s day, was to renounce action altogether. Kṛṣṇa rejects it. One cannot stop acting: “No one can remain even for a moment without acting; everyone is driven to act, helplessly, by the qualities born of nature” (3.5). What binds is not action but desire for its results:

karmaṇy evādhikāras te mā phaleṣu kadācana mā karma-phala-hetur bhūr mā te saṅgo ‘stv akarmaṇi

Your right is to action alone, never to its fruits. Let not the fruits of action be your motive, nor let your attachment be to inaction. (2.47)

Established in yoga, perform actions, abandoning attachment, Arjuna, the same in success and failure. Evenness of mind is called yoga (samatvaṃ yoga ucyate). (2.48)

Yoga is skill in action (yogaḥ karmasu kauśalam). (2.50)

The ideal is the sthitaprajña, “the person of steady wisdom”, whom Kṛṣṇa describes at the end of the second chapter: one who has abandoned all desires, is content in the self alone, is unshaken by sorrow and undesiring of pleasure, free of passion, fear and anger; who withdraws the senses from their objects “as a tortoise draws in its limbs”; who is like the ocean, which remains unmoved though all the rivers flow into it (2.55–70). Gandhi recited these verses every evening.

Why act at all?

Arjuna is puzzled: if knowledge is superior to action, why urge him to this terrible deed? Kṛṣṇa answers in the third chapter that there are two paths — knowledge for the contemplative, action for the active — but that action is necessary: the body itself cannot be maintained without it; the world itself is sustained by the cycle of sacrifice, in which gods and humans nourish each other; and the wise must act “for the welfare of the world” (loka-saṅgraha), setting an example, as Kṛṣṇa himself acts though he has nothing to gain. “Better one’s own dharma, though imperfect, than another’s well performed; better death in one’s own dharma; another’s dharma is fraught with fear” (3.35). See Dharma.

Arjuna then asks: what drives a person to sin even against his will? Kṛṣṇa answers: desire and anger, born of the quality of passion (rajas), “all-devouring, the great enemy”; as fire is covered by smoke and a mirror by dust, so knowledge is covered by desire (3.36–39).

The avatāra and the sacrifice of knowledge

In the fourth chapter, Kṛṣṇa reveals that he taught this yoga long ago to the sun god, who taught it to Manu, and that it was lost. Arjuna objects: you were born recently, the sun god long ago. Kṛṣṇa answers with the doctrine of the avatāra, the “descent” of God:

Many births of mine have passed, and of yours too, Arjuna. I know them all; you do not… Whenever dharma declines and adharma rises, I send myself forth. To protect the good, to destroy the wicked, and to establish dharma, I come into being age after age. (yadā yadā hi dharmasya glānir bhavati bhārata… sambhavāmi yuge yuge) (4.5–8)

He explains the paradox that the wise see “action in inaction and inaction in action” (4.18): the one who acts without attachment does not really act, and the one who refrains from action out of desire is acting. All action, offered to God, becomes sacrifice; and the highest sacrifice is knowledge, “the sword of knowledge” that cuts doubt (4.33–42).

Renunciation, meditation and the self

The fifth chapter reconciles renunciation (saṃnyāsa) with action: true renunciation is inward — the abandonment of desire, not of work. The one who acts, offering all actions to Brahman, is untouched by sin, “as a lotus leaf by water” (5.10). The sixth chapter describes dhyāna-yoga, meditation: sitting in a clean place, on a seat neither too high nor too low, with body, head and neck erect, gazing at the tip of the nose, the mind fixed on God — “like a lamp in a windless place that does not flicker” (6.11–19). Arjuna objects that the mind is restless, “as hard to control as the wind”; Kṛṣṇa agrees, but says it can be controlled “by practice and dispassion” (6.34–35). And what of the one who fails in yoga? “No one who does good, my friend, ever comes to grief”; he is reborn in a good family and continues the path (6.40–45).

God and the world

Chapters 7 to 12 turn from the discipline of the self to the nature of God and the path of devotion (bhakti). Kṛṣṇa describes his two natures: a lower nature of eight parts — earth, water, fire, air, space, mind, intellect and ego — and a higher nature, the life-principle that sustains the world. “All this is strung on me like pearls on a thread” (7.7). “I am the taste in water, the light in the sun and moon, the Oṃ in all the Vedas, the sound in space, the manhood in men” (7.8). He is the source and dissolution of the world, the goal of all worship: “Whatever form any devotee wishes to worship with faith, I make that faith steady… they obtain their desires, but in truth these are granted by me” (7.21–22).

The eighth chapter teaches about the moment of death: “Whatever state a person remembers at the end, when leaving the body, to that state he goes” (8.6) — so remember God always. The ninth, the “royal secret”, proclaims God’s love for his devotees regardless of birth: “Whoever offers me with devotion a leaf, a flower, a fruit or water, that offering of love I accept” (9.26); “even those of evil birth — women, Vaiśyas and Śūdras — if they take refuge in me, attain the highest goal” (9.32), a verse at once inclusive and revealing of the prejudices of its age. “Fix your mind on me, be devoted to me, sacrifice to me, bow down to me; thus disciplined, with me as your goal, you will come to me” (9.34).

The tenth chapter lists God’s manifestations (vibhūtis): “Among the Ādityas I am Viṣṇu, among lights the radiant sun… among the Vedas I am the Sāma Veda… among mountains I am Meru, among waters the ocean, among trees the sacred fig, among sages Kapila, among horses the one born of nectar… among letters I am A… I am the gambling of cheats… Whatever is glorious, prosperous or mighty, know that it springs from a fragment of my splendour” (10.21–41).

The universal form

In the eleventh chapter, Arjuna asks to see Kṛṣṇa’s divine form. Kṛṣṇa gives him a divine eye, and reveals his universal form (viśvarūpa): a being of countless mouths and eyes, wonderful sights and ornaments and weapons, “as if the light of a thousand suns had risen at once in the sky” (11.12). Arjuna sees the whole universe in Kṛṣṇa’s body — gods, sages, serpents — without beginning, middle or end. Then he sees the warriors of both armies rushing into Kṛṣṇa’s terrible mouths, “some caught between the teeth, their heads crushed to powder” (11.27). Terrified, he asks who this is. Kṛṣṇa answers:

I am Time (kāla), the destroyer of worlds, grown mature, engaged here in destroying the worlds. Even without you, none of the warriors arrayed in the opposing armies will survive. Therefore arise, win glory! Conquer your enemies and enjoy a prosperous kingdom. They have already been slain by me; be merely the instrument, Arjuna. (11.32–33)

J. Robert Oppenheimer, watching the first atomic explosion at Alamogordo in 1945, later said that he remembered this verse — in his translation, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” — and also the verse about a thousand suns. Arjuna, shaken, begs Kṛṣṇa to return to his familiar, gentle human form, and Kṛṣṇa does so, telling him that this vision cannot be won by Vedas, austerity, gifts or sacrifice, but only by devotion (11.53–54). See The Universal Form.

Devotion

The twelfth chapter asks which is better: to worship the unmanifest, imperishable Absolute, or the personal God? Kṛṣṇa answers that both reach him, but the path of the unmanifest is harder for embodied beings; the devotee who fixes his mind on God is dearest to him. He describes the true devotee: “He who hates no creature, who is friendly and compassionate, free from ‘mine’ and ‘I’, the same in pain and pleasure, patient… by whom the world is not disturbed and who is not disturbed by the world… the same to friend and foe, in honour and dishonour, cold and heat, praise and blame — that devotee is dear to me” (12.13–19).

The field, the qualities, the tree

The last six chapters return to philosophy. The thirteenth distinguishes the field (kṣetra) — the body and all of nature — from the knower of the field (kṣetrajña), the conscious self; and Kṛṣṇa declares himself the knower in all fields. The fourteenth explains the three guṇas — goodness (sattva), passion (rajas) and darkness (tamas), the strands of nature — and how they bind the self, and how the one who transcends them attains liberation. The fifteenth describes the world as an inverted fig tree with its roots above and branches below, to be cut down with “the strong axe of non-attachment”, and Kṛṣṇa as the “supreme person” (puruṣottama) beyond the perishable and the imperishable. The sixteenth contrasts the divine and demonic natures; the seventeenth classifies faith, food, sacrifice, austerity and gifts by the three guṇas — sattvic food is fresh and nourishing, rajasic food too bitter, sour, salty or hot, tamasic food stale and putrid (17.8–10).

The final teaching

The eighteenth chapter summarises everything: the difference between renunciation and relinquishment; the threefold nature of knowledge, action, agent, intellect, resolve and happiness; the duties of the four classes, each “born of their own nature”; and the perfection achieved by doing one’s own work as worship. Then Kṛṣṇa speaks what tradition calls the final verse (carama-śloka):

sarva-dharmān parityajya mām ekaṃ śaraṇaṃ vraja ahaṃ tvāṃ sarva-pāpebhyo mokṣayiṣyāmi mā śucaḥ

Abandoning all dharmas, take refuge in me alone. I will free you from all sins; do not grieve. (18.66)

Kṛṣṇa asks: “Have you heard this with a concentrated mind, Arjuna? Is your delusion, born of ignorance, destroyed?” Arjuna answers: “My delusion is destroyed, and I have regained my memory through your grace, Acyuta. I stand firm, my doubts are gone. I will do as you say (kariṣye vacanaṃ tava)” (18.73). He picks up his bow. The war begins.

Teachings

Three paths — or one

Later tradition, following the Gītā’s own language, summarised its teaching as three paths (yogas) to liberation: karma-yoga, the path of selfless action; jñāna-yoga, the path of knowledge; and bhakti-yoga, the path of devotion — sometimes with dhyāna-yoga, meditation, as a fourth. The Gītā’s genius is to present these not as rival religions but as aspects of one life: one acts, but without attachment; one acts as an offering to God; and one acts in the knowledge that the self is not the doer, that nature acts through the guṇas, and that God is the source of all. The commentators argued about which path is supreme: Ādi Śaṅkara said knowledge, with action and devotion as preparations; Rāmānuja and later devotional teachers said devotion; Tilak and Gandhi said action.

Synthesis

The Gītā is a synthesis of nearly all the religious currents of its time: the Vedic ideal of sacrifice, reinterpreted as all action offered to God; the Upaniṣadic knowledge of the immortal self; the Sāṃkhya analysis of nature and the guṇas; the Yoga of meditation; the renunciant ideal, interiorised; and the new devotion to a personal God, Vāsudeva-Kṛṣṇa. It is also a synthesis of the two great goods of Indian life — dharma, duty in the world, and mokṣa, liberation from it.

Interpretations

The classical commentators

The Gītā is one of the three foundational texts (prasthāna-traya) of Vedānta, and every school wrote a commentary on it. Śaṅkara’s (8th century), the oldest surviving, reads it as teaching that liberation comes from knowledge alone, and that action is only for those not yet ready for renunciation. Rāmānuja’s (12th century) reads it as teaching devotion and surrender to a personal God as the supreme path. Madhva (13th century) reads it as dualist theism. Abhinavagupta (10th–11th century) read it through Kashmir Śaivism; Jñāneśvar’s Marathi verse commentary, the Jñāneśvarī (1290), made it the heart of devotional religion in Maharashtra.

Modern readings

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Gītā became the central text of modern Hinduism and of Indian nationalism.

• Bal Gangadhar Tilak, in Gītā Rahasya (1915), written in a Mandalay prison, read it as a gospel of energetic action in the world — including political action against colonial rule — rather than renunciation.
• Sri Aurobindo read it as a teaching of integral yoga, the divinisation of life.
• Mahatma Gandhi, who first read it in English (Edwin Arnold’s The Song Celestial) as a law student in London, called it his “mother” and his “spiritual dictionary”: “When disappointment stares me in the face and all alone I see not one ray of light, I go back to the Bhagavad Gītā.” Remarkably, he read it as a teaching of non-violence: the battle was an allegory of the struggle within each person between good and evil, and the essence of the teaching was selfless action, which is incompatible with hatred.
• B. R. Ambedkar read it critically, as a counter-revolutionary text defending the caste order against the egalitarian revolution of Buddhism.
• Vinoba Bhave, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Vivekananda and A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami (Bhagavad-gītā As It Is, 1968, the basis of the Hare Kṛṣṇa movement) each produced influential readings.

The problem of violence

The Gītā’s most troubling question is the one Arjuna asks: is it right to kill? Kṛṣṇa’s answer — fight, because the self cannot be killed, because it is your duty, because God has already decided the outcome — has disturbed readers for two thousand years. The allegorical reading (Gandhi’s) and the literal reading (the warrior must fight a just war) have both had powerful defenders; so has the critical reading that the text serves to justify violence and caste duty. The Gītā remains one of the great texts on the ethics of war, alongside Augustine and the just-war tradition.

Reception in the world

The Gītā was the first Sanskrit text translated directly into English, by Charles Wilkins in 1785, with a preface by Warren Hastings predicting that it would survive “when the British dominion in India shall long have ceased to exist”. It entered German Romanticism through August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Latin translation (1823); Wilhelm von Humboldt called it “the most beautiful, perhaps the only true philosophical song existing in any known tongue”. In America, Emerson and Thoreau revered it — Thoreau wrote in Walden: “In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavat Geeta.” T. S. Eliot drew on it in Four Quartets (“Not fare well, / But fare forward, voyagers”); Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Carl Jung, Hermann Hesse and Simone Weil read it closely. Oppenheimer studied it in Sanskrit. It has been translated into more than seventy-five languages, many hundreds of times.

The Gītā in conversation

Two verses carry the book: “Your right is to action alone, never to its fruits” (2.47) — the ethic of doing one’s best and letting go of outcomes — and “Whenever dharma declines… I come into being age after age” (4.7–8). And when the subject is power and destruction, Oppenheimer’s line is from here: “I am Time, the destroyer of worlds” (11.32).