For curious readers
Understand the Bhagavad Gita through what you already know
Many readers meet the Gita sideways: through a line Oppenheimer remembered, through the Stoics, through the word karma. These pages begin where you are and walk back to the Sanskrit, one verse at a time.
इति ते ज्ञानमाख्यातं गुह्याद्गुह्यतरं मया । विमृश्यैतदशेषेण यथेच्छसि तथा कुरु ॥
iti te jñānamākhyātaṃ guhyādguhyataraṃ mayā | vimṛśyaitadaśeṣeṇa yathecchasi tathā kuru ||
Thus I have explained to you the most secret wisdom. Reflect on it fully, and then do as you wish.
Three ways in
Each begins with something you may have heard, and ends at the verse it came from.
- Bhagavad Gita 11.32“Now I am become Death”The verse Oppenheimer remembered after the first atomic test, what the Sanskrit says, and why kāla reads first as Time.
- The Gita and the StoicsThe Bhagavad Gita and Stoicism, verse by verseFive Gita verses beside Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and Seneca, and the places where the two ways of life part.
- Start hereWhat is the Bhagavad Gita, and how to start reading itWho speaks, where it sits in the Mahabharata, who wrote it, and a calm way into the first two chapters.
Words that travelled
Ideas from the Gita that reached English, each read back in its own context.
- KarmaKarma means actionChapters 2 to 4 on acting fully without being bound by what the action brings.
- Bhagavad Gita 2.47Karmaṇy evādhikāras teThe most quoted line on work and its fruit, with the Sanskrit word by word.
- DharmaDharma, from the root “to hold”Closer to your own nature, acted on, than to a list of duties, read through 3.35 and 18.47.
- ĀtmanWhy “soul” is a loose fit for ātmanThe Gita’s self set beside the Katha Upanishad and the Bible, so the differences show.
- MāyāMaya, the power that makes the real look otherwiseRead from 7.14, where Krishna calls it divine, woven of the gunas, and hard to cross.
- The three gunasSattva, rajas and tamasClarity, drive and inertia in your food, work and moods, and chapter 14 on moving beyond all three.
- SthitaprajñaA portrait of the steady mindVerses 2.55 to 2.72, from the tortoise drawing in its limbs to the ocean that rivers fill without moving it.
- ManifestationHow the divine shows itselfEleven verses on the world as Krishna’s manifestation. If you came for the law of attraction, this is a different and older idea.
- Another GitaThe Ashtavakra Gita beside the Bhagavad GitaA sage teaching a king that the self is already free, compared with Krishna teaching a warrior to act.
How these pages read the Gita
Every verse appears with its Sanskrit, taken from our verse files, so you can see what the English stands on. Where a famous English line drifts from the Sanskrit, we show both and say where they part. We read the verses with the traditional Sanskrit commentators, Shankara, Ramanuja and those who followed them, and we quote older translations only when they are in the public domain.
Nothing here asks you to believe anything first. Near the end of the Gita, in the verse above, Krishna asks Arjuna to reflect on all of it and then decide.
Tell us what is on your mind and read seven verses chosen for it, one a day, with the Sanskrit and its meaning.
Start my seven days