Śrīmad Bhagavad Gītā
Eighteen chapters, seven hundred verses. Not a book to finish at one sitting, but one to open again and again at different stages of life.
Tap any chapter card to open that chapter. For now the page for Chapter 1 is ready.
Gītā Dhyānam
pārthāya pratibodhitāṃ bhagavatā nārāyaṇena svayaṃ
vyāsena grathitāṃ purāṇamuninā madhye mahābhāratam |
advaitāmṛtavarṣiṇīṃ bhagavatīmaṣṭādaśādhyāyinīṃ
amba tvāmanusandadhāmi bhagavadgīte bhavadveṣiṇīm ||
Arjuna’s collapse on seeing his own people ranged against him
47 versesRead Chapter 1 →
The undying self, duty, and the marks of a steady mind
72 verses
Acting without clinging to the fruits of action
43 verses
The purpose of the avatara, and seeing inaction in action
42 verses
Renouncing action and the yoga of action compared
29 verses
Meditation and mastery of the mind
47 verses
The nature of the divine and the ways of knowing it
30 verses
Remembrance at the time of death, and the imperishable
28 verses
The most secret knowledge and the simplicity of devotion
34 verses
The divine glory seen in the world
42 verses
The cosmic form that Arjuna saw
55 verses
The marks of a devotee
20 verses
The body and the one who knows the body
34 verses
Sattva, rajas and tamas
27 verses
The ashvattha tree of worldly life, and the Supreme Person
20 verses
The divine and the demonic natures
24 verses
Three kinds of faith, food, austerity and giving
28 verses
The meaning of renunciation, and the conclusion of the Gita
78 verses
|| oṃ tat sat ||
About the Bhagavad Gita
The Bhagavad Gita is a dialogue of seven hundred verses set inside the Bhishma Parva of the Mahabharata. These are the words Krishna spoke to Arjuna in a chariot halted between two armies, at the moment the war was about to begin. Sanjaya reports the dialogue to the blind king Dhritarashtra. So what we read is a story in two layers: words spoken in the middle of a battlefield, and a father sitting in a palace listening to them.
Structure
The name of every chapter ends in the word yoga, and the first chapter, which describes Arjuna’s grief, is no exception. There is a custom of seeing the eighteen chapters as three groups of six: more about action in the first six, about devotion in the middle six, and about knowledge in the last six. It is a division made for the convenience of reading, not a strict boundary. Besides, all three themes are woven through the whole Gita.
Most verses are in the anushtubh metre: four quarters of eight syllables each, set as two lines. Some passages, such as the vision of the cosmic form in the eleventh chapter, are in the trishtubh metre, with eleven syllables to a quarter. Seven hundred is the commonly used count. Some editions carry an extra verse, a question from Arjuna, at the start of the thirteenth chapter. Here we follow the seven-hundred-verse arrangement.
Commentaries
The Upanishads, the Brahma Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita together form the prasthanatraya, the three foundational texts of Vedanta. So the teachers of every school of thought have written commentaries on the Gita. Of the complete commentaries available today, Shankaracharya’s is the oldest. Ramanujacharya and Madhvacharya read it from the standpoint of their own schools. In later centuries Sridhara Swami’s Subodhini and Madhusudana Saraswati’s Gudhartha Dipika became very influential.
In modern times Bal Gangadhar Tilak wrote the Gita Rahasya in Mandalay prison, and Gandhiji read the Gita as Anasakti Yoga, the yoga of non-attachment. In Kannada, D. V. Gundappa’s Jeevana Dharma Yoga reads the Gita through the eyes of everyday life. That the same verse has been read differently by different commentators is part of the richness of the Gita.
About these pages
Each chapter has its own index page, available in three scripts: Kannada, Sanskrit (Devanagari) and IAST. Every verse has a page of its own with the verse in all three scripts, a word-by-word meaning, and full meanings in Kannada and English. Two collapsible boxes follow, in Kannada with English: context and commentary drawn from several traditional commentaries, and what the verse says to life today. Where commentators read a verse differently, both readings are given. The remaining chapters are being added one by one.
Sources: several.
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