At a glance
- Religion
- Hinduism
- Language
- Sanskrit
- Length
- 700 verses in 18 chapters
- Setting
- Book Six of the Mahabharata, on the battlefield of Kurukshetra
- Speakers
- Krishna and the warrior Arjuna
- Main teachings
- Duty, the eternal self, and the paths of action, knowledge and devotion
Setting: a crisis on the battlefield
The Gita opens on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, where two branches of a royal family, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, are about to fight. Arjuna, a Pandava hero, sees relatives, teachers and friends in the opposing army and is overwhelmed. He lays down his bow and refuses to fight.
Krishna responds with the teaching that forms the Gita’s eighteen chapters. The battlefield setting is read by many interpreters both literally and as a symbol of the moral struggles of human life.
Dharma and duty
Krishna first urges Arjuna to fulfil his svadharma, his own duty as a warrior. He teaches that it is better to perform one’s own duty imperfectly than another’s duty well.
The Gita’s teaching on duty has been interpreted in many ways. Traditional readings connect it to social roles; modern readers, including Mahatma Gandhi, read the battle as an inner struggle and drew from the Gita a call to selfless action.
The eternal self
Krishna teaches that the true self, atman, is eternal and cannot be killed. Bodies are born and die, but the self passes on, “as a person discards worn-out clothes and puts on new ones.” Grief over death therefore rests on a misunderstanding of what a person truly is.
Karma yoga: the path of selfless action
A central teaching is karma yoga: acting without attachment to the results. Krishna says that one has a right to action but not to its fruits. Actions offered to God, done without selfish desire, do not bind a person to the cycle of rebirth.
This idea has made the Gita influential far beyond India, inspiring readers to see everyday work as spiritual practice.
Jnana yoga and bhakti yoga
The Gita also describes jnana yoga, the path of knowledge, which involves discerning the eternal self from the changing world, and dhyana, meditation.
Above all, many readers see the Gita as a text of bhakti, loving devotion. Krishna promises that those who worship him with love and surrender to him will be liberated. The final chapters call Arjuna to abandon all other duties and take refuge in Krishna alone.
The vision of the universal form
In the eleventh chapter, Arjuna asks to see Krishna’s divine form. Krishna reveals his universal form, vast, radiant and terrifying, containing all worlds and all beings. Arjuna is awed and asks Krishna to return to his familiar human form. The passage expresses the Gita’s teaching that Krishna is the supreme God present in and beyond all things. J. Robert Oppenheimer famously recalled a line from this chapter after the first atomic test.
Place among Hindu scriptures
The Gita is technically smriti, “remembered” tradition, as part of an epic, but many Hindus treat it with the reverence given to revealed scripture. It is one of the three foundational texts of the Vedanta schools, with the Upanishads and the Brahma Sutras, and major philosophers such as Shankara, Ramanuja and Madhva wrote commentaries on it with different interpretations.
The Gita in Hindu life
Many Hindus read or recite the Gita daily, and its verses are used in teaching, worship and funerals. The International Society for Krishna Consciousness has distributed it widely around the world. It has been translated into many languages and influenced thinkers in India and the West.
A concise summary
The Bhagavad Gita is a dialogue in the Mahabharata in which Krishna teaches Arjuna on the battlefield. It teaches duty, the eternal self, selfless action, knowledge, meditation and devotion to God, and has been interpreted by many schools as a guide to living a spiritual life within the world.