Bhagavad Gita
Vyasa c. 200 BCE
A verse dialogue follows the warrior Arjuna as he questions Krishna about duty before a battle. Their conversation unfolds in a chariot between two armies, with Arjuna facing relatives on the opposing side.
81 pages 1h 34m reading time
- A central sacred text of Hinduism, and one of the most widely read spiritual works in the world.
- Argues that a person should do their duty without being attached to winning or losing, acting out of devotion rather than desire for reward.
- Teaches that the true self is a soul that cannot be killed and lives on after the body dies, and that there are several paths to God, including action, knowledge, and loving devotion.
- Mahatma Gandhi called it his spiritual guide and drew on its idea of selfless action in his nonviolent struggle for India's independence.
- It shaped Western thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and J. Robert Oppenheimer famously quoted it ("Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds") when recalling the first atomic bomb test.
Said to be dictated
Legend says the sage Vyasa recited the larger epic aloud while the god Ganesha wrote it down.
Part of a giant epic
It is a short section of the Mahabharata, an Indian poem many times longer than the Iliad and Odyssey combined.
Told by a far-seeing narrator
Within the epic, the adviser Sanjaya reports this talk to a blind king, using a god-given power to see far away.
Gandhi's first reading
Gandhi first read the poem as a young law student in London, in this English translation by Arnold.
Translated from Sanskrit by Edwin Arnold