Mystical systems
Bhagavad Gita
Direct answer
Bhagavad Gita: The Bhagavad Gita, the Song of the Lord, is a Sanskrit poem of 700 verses in 18 chapters, set within the Mahabharata, in which Krishna teaches the warrior Arjuna before a battle.
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At a glance
- Also called
- the gita, krishna and arjuna
- Found in
- Mystical Systems
- Related
- Bhakti, Upanishads, Atman, Advaita Vedanta
The Bhagavad Gita, the Song of the Lord, is a Sanskrit poem of 700 verses in 18 chapters, set within the Mahabharata, in which Krishna teaches the warrior Arjuna before a battle.
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What is the Bhagavad Gita about?
The Gita opens on the field of Kurukshetra. The warrior Arjuna sees his kinsmen and teachers in the army opposite and lays down his bow. His charioteer Krishna, who reveals himself in the course of the poem as God, answers him over eighteen chapters. He teaches that the self is not killed when the body is, that a person should do the duty that falls to them without clinging to its results, and that all action can be offered to God.
The poem sets out three paths: action without attachment, knowledge, and bhakti, loving devotion, which many readers take to be its last word. It draws together the teaching of the Upanishads with the worship of a personal God, and every school of Vedanta has claimed it.
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What sets Bhagavad Gita apart
The Gita is a scripture staged as a crisis. The whole teaching is given between two armies, to a man who has refused to fight, and it never leaves that spot. It is also a text of the second rank that outgrew its rank: formally it belongs to remembered tradition and not to the revealed Vedas, yet commentators treat it beside the Upanishads. In its eleventh chapter Arjuna is shown Krishna's cosmic form and begs him to take his familiar shape again.
- Length: 700 verses in 18 chapters
- Setting: the field of Kurukshetra, in the sixth book of the Mahabharata
- Speakers: Krishna and Arjuna, in a frame narrated by Sanjaya
- Three paths: action without attachment, knowledge, and devotion
- Oldest commentary: Shankara's, about the eighth century
- First English version: Charles Wilkins, 1785
Often mistaken for something else: The Upanishads are counted as revealed scripture and teach mainly by enquiry; the Gita belongs to the epic and joins that enquiry to devotion and to action.
The story behind Bhagavad Gita
The Gita forms part of the sixth book of the Mahabharata and is usually dated to within a few centuries of the start of the common era. The oldest surviving commentary is Shankara's, of about the eighth century, and Ramanuja and Madhva answered with their own. Charles Wilkins made the first English translation in 1785. In the twentieth century Gandhi read the battle as a picture of the struggle within each person, a reading others dispute.
Why Bhagavad Gita matters
Bhagavad Gita is among the most widely read Hindu scriptures and the main source for bhakti as a path, so much later teaching is commentary on it.
How to read Bhagavad Gita
Many Hindus recite and study it daily; teachers expound it verse by verse; readers of any background take it up as a poem on duty and devotion.
Bhagavad Gita in practice: an example
Someone facing a hard duty might read the second chapter, where Krishna tells Arjuna to act well and leave the outcome alone.
Where readings of Bhagavad Gita go wrong
Bhagavad Gita’s setting is a war, and whether the battle is literal or a figure of inner conflict is a question commentators still answer differently.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Mystical Systems
- Aliases
- what is the bhagavad gita, bhagavad gita meaning, the gita, bhagavad gita summary, krishna and arjuna
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
What is the Bhagavad Gita about?
It is a dialogue in which Krishna persuades the warrior Arjuna to do his duty and teaches him about the self, right action and devotion to God. Its setting is the eve of the great battle of the Mahabharata.
What are the three paths of the Bhagavad Gita?
They are karma yoga, acting without attachment to results; jnana yoga, the path of knowledge; and bhakti yoga, the path of loving devotion. The poem treats them as joined, and many commentators hold that it ranks devotion highest.
Who wrote the Bhagavad Gita?
Tradition credits the sage Vyasa, the legendary author of the whole Mahabharata. Scholars regard it as the work of unknown poets, composed around two thousand years ago and set into the epic.
