Bhagavad Gītā

The Bhagavad Gītā sits inside the Bhīṣmaparvan of the Mahābhārata, chapters 23 to 40, and is narrated at two removes: Sañjaya reports to the blind king Dhṛtarāṣṭra what he sees on the field at Kurukṣetra, and what he sees is a conversation. Arjuna, having asked his charioteer to halt between the armies, recognises teachers and kinsmen on the other side and refuses to fight. The refusal is the occasion for everything that follows.

What makes the text unusual in early Sanskrit literature is that it does not resolve Arjuna's crisis by argument from a single position. It moves through several, and holds them together. Chapter 2 answers with metaphysics: the self is not what dies, so grief mistakes its object. Chapter 3 shifts ground entirely, arguing that action cannot be avoided — inaction is itself a kind of act — and that what can be abandoned is not the deed but attachment to its fruit. That formula, karma-yoga, is the text's most quoted contribution and its most contested one, because it licenses the performance of duties that would otherwise be intolerable.

From chapter 7 the register changes. Kṛṣṇa, who has been speaking as teacher and charioteer, begins to speak as the ground of the world, and in chapter 11 Arjuna asks to see that form directly. The viśvarūpa-darśana is the poetic centre of the work: the metre switches to triṣṭubh, the language accelerates, and Arjuna, terrified, asks for the ordinary four-armed form back. The theistic turn is not an appendix to the philosophy — it reframes the earlier chapters, since detached action is now action offered to someone.

The closing chapters systematise. The three guṇas are applied to knowledge, action, agents, intellect, resolve and even food; the final chapter reviews renunciation and ends with what tradition calls the carama-śloka, the instruction to abandon all duties and take refuge. Readers have disagreed for a thousand years about whether that supersedes the earlier teaching on duty or completes it.

The Gītā's commentarial history is nearly as important as the text. Śaṅkara's bhāṣya, the earliest surviving complete commentary, reads it as teaching knowledge of the non-dual self, with action as preparation. Rāmānuja reads the same verses as teaching devotion to a personal God who is qualified, not attributeless. Madhva, Abhinavagupta, Jñāneśvara and later Tilak and Gandhi each found a different centre of gravity. Our edition keeps the mūla text separate from commentary and links the layers rather than merging them.

The text on this site follows the vulgate recension of 700 verses used by Śaṅkara, with variant readings from the Kashmiri recension recorded in the apparatus rather than adopted silently. Chapter and verse numbering is the standard one, so citations elsewhere resolve here without adjustment.