Śrīmad Bhagavad Gītā in English IAST: All 18 Chapters

|| oṃ tat sat ||

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About the Bhagavad Gita

Three short readings: what the book is, why it is read, and the two paths it teaches. The Bhagavad Gita: an introduction · The greatness of the Bhagavad Gita · Two paths, and what they reach

The Bhagavad Gita: an introduction

Where it stands, how it is built, and how it has been read

Where it stands

The Bhagavad Gita is a dialogue of seven hundred verses inside the Bhishma Parva of the Mahabharata. Two armies stand ready at Kurukshetra. Arjuna asks Krishna, his charioteer, to halt the chariot between them. He sees his own grandfather, his teachers and his kinsmen on the other side, and he lays down his bow. What Krishna says to him then is the Bhagavad Gita.

We do not hear it directly. Sanjaya tells it to the blind king Dhritarashtra. Sanjaya can see the field because Vyasa has given him the sight. At the end he says that by the grace of Vyasa he heard this yoga from Krishna himself (18.75). So the book has two layers: words spoken in the middle of a battlefield, and a father sitting in a palace listening to them, whose sons are on that field.

What it calls itself

At the end of every chapter a colophon names the book. It calls the Bhagavad Gita an Upanishad, brahmavidya, ‘the knowledge of Brahman’, and yogashastra, ‘the science of yoga’, given as a dialogue between Sri Krishna and Arjuna. The name of every chapter ends in yoga, even the first, which has no teaching yet and ends in Arjuna’s grief. The ten dhyana verses placed before the first chapter on these pages add a picture of their own: the Upanishads are cows, and the Bhagavad Gita is their milk.

Three groups of six

There is a long-standing way of reading the eighteen chapters as three groups of six. The first six give importance to karma yoga, the way of action. The middle six, the seventh to the twelfth, give it to bhakti yoga, the way of devotion. The last six, the thirteenth to the eighteenth, give it to jnana yoga, the way of knowledge.

It is a way of reading, not a wall. The second chapter, in the first group, speaks at length of the self that cannot be slain. The seventh, which opens the group on devotion, is named the yoga of knowledge and realisation. The eighteenth gathers all three. The grouping helps a reader see where the weight falls in each chapter, and all three ways are woven through the whole book.

Metre and count

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 count in common use. Some editions carry one more verse, a question from Arjuna, at the start of the thirteenth chapter. These pages follow the count of seven hundred.

The commentators

The Upanishads, the Brahma Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita together form the prasthanatraya, the three foundational texts of Vedanta. So the teachers of each school of Vedanta have written commentaries on the Bhagavad 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 Bhagavad Gita Rahasya in Mandalay prison, and Gandhiji read the Bhagavad Gita as Anasakti Yoga, the yoga of non-attachment. In Kannada, D. V. Gundappa’s Jeevana Dharma Yoga reads the Bhagavad 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 Bhagavad Gita.

The greatness of the Bhagavad Gita

Why it is read again and again, and who may read it

More than words can hold

No one has managed to say in words all that the Bhagavad Gita is, and the old teachers did not claim to. The Lord himself calls it a secret, knowledge more secret than the secret (18.63). The essence of the Vedas is held to be gathered in it.

Its language is simple. A little practice is enough to follow the Sanskrit, and many learn its verses by heart as children. Its meaning is another matter. A lifetime of study does not reach the end of it. A verse read for the hundredth time shows something it did not show before, and so the book never grows old. Read with a steady mind, with faith and with devotion, every word of it turns out to carry weight.

Every word a teaching

Many books tell of the Lord, his nature, his power and his secret, but few as directly as the Bhagavad Gita, and most turn to the affairs of the world along the way. Here there is hardly a word that is not teaching. An old verse, which tradition gives to Vyasa, says it in two lines:

gītā sugītā kartavyā kimanyaiḥ śāstravistaraiḥ |
yā svayaṃ padmanābhasya mukhapadmādviniḥsṛtā ||

‘The Bhagavad Gita should be studied well: what need is there of the spread of other scriptures? It came from the lotus mouth of Padmanabha himself.’ Sugita, ‘well studied’, means more than well recited. It means read with care, its meaning and its feeling taken in and kept in the heart.

At the end of the eighteenth chapter the Lord speaks of it himself. One who teaches it to the Lord’s devotees will come to him, and no service is dearer to him. One who studies this dialogue worships the Lord with the sacrifice of knowledge. And even one who only listens to it, with faith and without envy, is freed and reaches the auspicious worlds of the righteous (18.68 to 18.71).

Open to everyone

The Bhagavad Gita asks nothing about a reader’s birth or station in life. What it asks for is a willing heart: devotion, the wish to listen and freedom from envy (18.67, 18.68), and faith in the one who hears (18.71). In 9.32 he names, one by one, those whom others might leave out: women, vaishyas, shudras, and those said to be of sinful birth. They too, he says, taking refuge in him, reach the highest goal. And in 18.46 he says that one who worships him through his own work finds perfection. Whatever a person’s work, the way begins there.

Not only for renunciates

Some who know only its name say the Bhagavad Gita is a book for sannyasis, and keep their children away from it, afraid that a son who studies it will leave home and become a renunciate. They have not looked at its first listener. Arjuna, in his confusion, was ready to give up his duty as a kshatriya and live on alms (2.5). After the teaching he did not take sannyasa. He took up his bow again, did his duty, and lived on in the world as a householder. How could the same book turn a child away from life?

So the better advice runs the other way. Those who want what is good should read the Bhagavad Gita with its meaning and its feeling, with their children and on their own: pathana, ‘reading’, and manana, ‘turning it over in the mind’. And then try, little by little, to live as it asks.

The time we have

Behind the advice is a sober thought. The old teachers say a human birth is hard to come by. The Bhagavad Gita says that pleasures born of the touch of the senses are wombs of sorrow, with a beginning and an end, and that the wise do not delight in them (5.22). To spend the time we have only on what passes in a moment and leaves sorrow behind is not wise. The book asks that it be spent well.

Two paths, and what they reach

The way of knowledge, the way of selfless action, and two kinds of attainment

Two paths

To reach him, the Lord sets out two main paths in the Bhagavad Gita. He says so himself in the third chapter: long ago he spoke of a twofold steadfastness, the yoga of knowledge for the Sankhyas and the yoga of action for the yogis (3.3). The first is sankhya yoga, the way of knowledge. The second is karma yoga, the way of action done without desire for its fruit. This is a second way of dividing the teaching, beside the three groups of six chapters: those show where the weight of each chapter falls, these are the two disciplines a seeker can follow.

The way of knowledge

Sankhya yoga begins with seeing the world as it is. All things are like a mirage, or the scenes of a dream: seeming real while they last, but made of maya. It is the qualities of nature, the gunas, moving among the gunas (3.28). So in whatever is done through the mind, the senses and the body, the seeker keeps no sense of ‘I am the doer’. Seeing, hearing, eating, walking, sleeping, breathing, he holds in mind, ‘I do nothing at all’ (5.8, 5.9).

And with that he stays at one with the Paramatman, the highest self, who is everywhere, and who is being, consciousness and bliss. For him nothing exists apart from Vasudeva. ‘Vasudeva is all’, the seventh chapter says of such a one, and adds that he is very rare (7.19). This is the practice of sankhya yoga.

The way of selfless action

Karma yoga begins from another place: everything is the Lord’s. The seeker does his work as the Lord asks and for the Lord, gives up attachment and the wish for its fruit, and stays the same in success and in failure (2.48). Like a lotus leaf that water does not wet, he acts and is not stained (5.10).

With it goes devotion. With faith and love, in body, speech and mind, he takes refuge in the Lord and keeps him in mind always: his name, his qualities, his glory and his form. The Lord calls such a one the most steadfast of all yogis (6.47). This is nishkama karma yoga, action free of desire.

One goal, two roads

Both lead to the same end. So the Lord says it is the childish, not the wise, who call them different, and that one who truly follows either gains the fruit of both (5.4, 5.5). Yet while they are being walked they are different, and so he describes them apart (3.3).

One person cannot walk both at the same moment. There may be two ways across the Ganga, but whoever crosses goes by one of them at a time. A sannyasi, who has laid action down, has no room for the way of action. The way of knowledge is different: in the reading given here, it is open at every stage of life.

Knowledge for the householder too

Because the Lord also calls sankhya renunciation, sannyasa, some say only a sannyasi may follow it, and never a householder. The second chapter says otherwise. From its eleventh verse to its thirtieth the Lord teaches the way of knowledge, the self that is not born and does not die, and in the middle of it he tells Arjuna, a householder, to fight (2.18). Then he says that what he has given so far is the understanding of sankhya (2.39). If a householder had no place on that path, the Lord would not have taught it to him that way. Not every teacher agrees. Sri Shankara, whose commentary the Reflections on these pages draw on, holds that the steadfastness in knowledge of 3.3 belongs to those who have renounced.

What the path asks is only that the seeker not take himself to be the body. One who still feels ‘I am this body’ cannot follow it rightly, and so the Lord says renunciation is hard to reach without the yoga of action (5.6), and that the unmanifest is reached with difficulty by those who have a body (12.5). Selfless action is the easier way. That is why he tells Arjuna again and again to keep him in mind and act: ‘remember me at all times, and fight’ (8.7).

Two kinds of attainment

Both paths speak of siddhi, ‘attainment’, and the Bhagavad Gita uses the word in two senses. In 2.48 siddhi is success, set beside its opposite, failure: in its plainest sense, the attainments of the world (Sri Shankara reads it there as the gaining of knowledge). In 14.1 the Lord speaks of para siddhi, the supreme attainment the sages reached through knowledge.

The lower attainments, apara siddhi, are the familiar ones: money, fame, power, authority. Each comes with a shadow. What has come can go, and so the one who has it lives in fear of losing it.

The higher attainment is the knowledge that sets free, moksha jnana, and with it comes vairagya, freedom from craving. One who has it has nothing left to lose, and so nothing to fear. The Bhagavad Gita puts fear beside attachment and anger, and says the sage of steady mind is free of all three (2.56).

And this knowledge has to be kept. At the end Arjuna does not say he has learned something new. He says his delusion is gone and his memory, smriti, has come back (18.73). The knowledge that frees is spoken of as something remembered. Once found, it is not to be forgotten. That is why the book is read again and again, and why the first of the dhyana verses says, ‘On you I meditate, again and again’.

About these pages

Each chapter has its own index page, available in three scripts: Kannada, Sanskrit (Devanagari) and English 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. All seven hundred verses now have such pages.

In the first six chapters each verse page also has a Reflection under its meaning: the central point of Sri Shankara Bhagavatpada’s commentary, and of Anandagiri and Madhusudana Saraswati where he has none, in Kannada and English. It is being added to the other chapters in turn. The ten verses said before the reading have a page of their own, with meaning and explanation: Gita Dhyana.

Sources: several.

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