श्रीमद्भगवद्गीता
Bhagavad Gītā
The Song of the Lord, on the field at Kurukṣetra
You stand at a hard choice. Two duties pull against each other. Your mind is divided, and you cannot see the clean path. You want to act well, but you are not even sure what acting well means. This is where the Bhagavad Gita, the Song of the Lord, meets you. It begins with a man in exactly that place.
His name is Arjuna. He is a warrior, and two armies have gathered to fight on the field of Kurukshetra. He asks his charioteer, Krishna, to drive him into the open space between them so he can see who has come. There he sees his own family, his teachers, and his elders standing on both sides, waiting to kill and be killed. His nerve breaks. His limbs give way. His mouth goes dry. His bow slips from his hand. He sinks down in grief and refuses to fight. The Gita opens not with an answer but with this collapse, the question left open.
The rest of the book is Krishna's answer, and he gives it not as one path but as many. He teaches action, devotion, knowledge, and meditation, and names a yoga in nearly every chapter. The tradition gathers these into three great paths, and the book moves through them in turn.
The first is the path of action. Krishna begins deeper than the battle, with the Self, called the Atman, what you truly are. The Self is never born and never dies; only the body comes and goes, the way you change worn-out clothes for new ones. So grief rests on a mistake. Then Krishna turns to action. You have a right to your work, he says, but not to its fruits. So do your own duty, let go of craving for results, and drop the sense of being the doer. Offer the work like a sacrifice. Stay even in gain and loss. From there the teaching moves inward, to meditation, to steady practice, and to a calm that sees the same Self in every being.
The second is the path of devotion. It moves from knowing Krishna, to seeing him, to loving him. First Krishna says who he is: the source of all beings, the secret few ever grasp. He names maya, his own power that deludes the world and hides him. Then the words turn into sight. Krishna gives Arjuna a divine eye, since the ordinary eye cannot reach this, and Arjuna beholds the whole universe gathered in one blazing form, bright as a thousand suns. Wonder turns to terror as the form devours the warriors, and Krishna names himself Time, the destroyer of worlds. He restores his gentle, familiar shape. This vision, he says, comes by devotion, by loving trust in God, not by study alone. So the path itself becomes bhakti, loving devotion: fix the mind on Krishna, offer even a leaf with love, and become the kind of devotee he holds dear. Birth bars no one, and no one who turns to him is turned away.
The third is the path of knowledge. Here the work is to tell things apart. Krishna teaches the difference between the body, which he calls the field, and the conscious knower within it. He teaches the three gunas, the strands of nature: sattva, which is clarity; rajas, which is restless drive; and tamas, which is dullness. They bind every embodied being. He sorts the perishable world from the Supreme Person beyond it, divine traits from demonic ones, and faith and action by those same three strands. The work is discernment: watch nature move without being pulled in. The last chapter gathers it all into one act: give up the craving for results, do your own duty offered to the Lord, and take refuge in Krishna.
On the final goal, the schools genuinely differ. Advaita Vedanta reads the end as merging into the one Self. Vishishtadvaita, Dvaita, Shuddhadvaita, and Bhakti hold that the self stays a real soul, kept close by a personal Lord.
The schools, side by sideHow the Schools Read the Gītā →One song in sixteen questions and twelve readings: what each hears as the heart of the Gītā, what frees you, what becomes of action, and whether the soul is eternal or only the one Self.The Gita does not settle your choice for you. It teaches you how to stand inside it. Arjuna was silent on the field. Turn the page, and hear how Krishna begins to speak.
701 ślokas · 19 commentaries · 7 translations · audio in 3 voices
Begin · Chapter 1Each a Yoga, Each a Door
A note on the bhāṣya-mālā
Every śloka opens onto a reading desk. Three classical bhāṣyas sit beside the verse by default, Ādi Śaṅkarācārya, Śrī Rāmānujācārya, Śrī Madhvācārya. Sixteen other voices are a tap away, spanning every major Vedānta school, Kashmir Śaiva, Marathi bhakti through Jñāneśvarī, and modern commentary from Swami Sivananda to Sri Aurobindo. The Gītā has never been read by one voice; this desk does not pretend otherwise.
25 of 26 sages available, the rest in progress
For more than a thousand years the schools of Vedānta have read this text against one another. The Reading Desk lets you do the same: any three of these voices, on any verse, in Sanskrit or English, side by side.
The roster is still being populated. Voices marked pending will join the desk as their ingestion completes.