The Bhagavad Gita -- An Overview of the Song of God

Two armies face each other on the plain of Kurukshetra. Conches have been blown; the bowstrings are drawn. In the space between the lines a chariot stops, because the warrior in it has asked his charioteer to drive there so that he can see who he is about to fight. He sees teachers, uncles, cousins and friends. His bow slips from his hand, and he sits down in the chariot and says he will not fight.

The warrior is Arjuna. The charioteer is Krishna. What Krishna says to him over the next seven hundred verses is the Bhagavad Gita, "the song of the Lord" -- the most widely read, translated and commented-on text in Hindu tradition, and for many Hindus the one book that sums up all the others.

The Gita is not a separate book that was later attached to the epic. It sits inside the Mahabharata, in the Bhishma Parva, the sixth of the epic's eighteen books, where it runs across eighteen chapters. The frame is a report within a report: the blind king Dhritarashtra, far from the battlefield in Hastinapura, asks his minister Sanjaya what is happening, and Sanjaya -- given divine sight by the sage Vyasa -- describes the scene and repeats the conversation word for word. That is why the very first verse of the Gita is spoken by Dhritarashtra, and why chapters end with Sanjaya's voice rather than Krishna's.

Tradition counts seven hundred verses, almost all in the simple anushtubh metre of the epic, with a few longer verses in the tristubh metre at moments of high feeling, especially in the eleventh chapter, where Arjuna sees Krishna's cosmic form. Krishna speaks most of it; Arjuna's questions shape it. His doubts are the reason the teaching moves where it does.

Arjuna's problem is not cowardice. It is a moral argument, and a good one: killing one's elders and kin is wrong, the wealth won by it would be stained with blood, and war destroys families and the order they hold together. Krishna does not answer with one argument but with several, layered, and the eighteen chapters are often read as moving through them in turn.

The first answer is about the self. What Arjuna fears to kill cannot be killed: the Self in every body is unborn and does not die when the body dies. The second is about action. No one can live without acting, so the question is not whether to act but how -- and the answer, karma yoga, is to act fully and well while letting go of the claim on results. The third is about God. Behind every action and every being stands one Lord, and the deepest form of action is to offer it to him. In the closing chapters these threads are drawn together, and Arjuna, his doubt gone, picks up his bow.

Because the Gita says so much in so little space, every major school of Vedanta wrote a commentary on it, and each read it in its own light. Adi Shankaracharya (around the eighth century) read it as teaching that liberation comes from knowledge of the one Self, with action as a preparation that purifies the mind. Ramanuja (eleventh to twelfth century) read it as teaching loving devotion to a personal God, with the soul as forever distinct from and dependent on him. Madhva (thirteenth century) read it in a strictly dualist way. Later Bhakti teachers made its last chapter -- "abandon all dharmas and take refuge in me alone" -- the heart of the whole text.

In modern India the Gita became something else as well: a book for public life. Bal Gangadhar Tilak wrote a long study of it as a call to action; Mahatma Gandhi called it his "mother" and read it as teaching non-attachment and selfless service, even though its setting is a war. That one text could support such different readings is part of why it has lasted.

For a first reading, many teachers suggest starting not at chapter one but at chapter two, from its eleventh verse, where Krishna begins to speak; reading chapter twelve, the shortest and simplest, on devotion; and then reading the whole through slowly, a chapter a sitting. The Gita repays rereading more than any first pass: its verses were meant to be learnt, recited and carried, and many people know a handful by heart long before they understand them.

The question it was spoken to answer is still the ordinary human one: what to do when every choice costs something, and how to act well without being crushed by the outcome. That is why a dialogue set at the start of a war is read every day in homes far from any battlefield.