Srimad Bhagavad Gita: A simple rendering

by Swami Samarpanananda

Srimad Bhagavad Gita : A simple rendering

-- Swami Samarpanananda

This work is a brief rendering of each chapter of Gita, and is meant to serve as an introductory reading of Gita for interested readers who find it difficult to comprehend the work. Necessary comments and explanations have been added wherever necessary to make it more intelligible. Serious readers, however, are advised to go through the original text/translation, preferably with a commentary. This work takes its interpretation from Sri Shankaracharya's commentary.

Introduction Srimad Bhagavad Gita, or more popularly, Gita is the spiritual and philosophical heartbeat of India. The best that India has to give to the world in the fields of wisdom, religion, philosophy and spirituality is Gita. Whatever India has achieved in these area is poetically preserved in Sanskrit in this short work of seven hundred verses in eighteen chapters. The poetic beauty and the philosophical clarity of the work is unparalleled in the history of the world literature. Every Hindu lives and dreams in Gita, and when he dies, he is given a farewell of chants from Gita. Every practising Hindu makes it a point to recite from it daily, every philosophical Hindu tries to study and understand the work, and every mystic Hindu strives to mould his life according to Gita. Gita belongs to the Bhishma Parva of the epic Mahabharata, and is in dialogue from between Sri Krishna and Arjuna just before the battle of Kurukshetra was to take place.

The Background Arjuna and his four brothers were arrayed against their cousins in a deadly battle that was about to be fought out in the name of dharma,