Bhagavad Gita

The Bhagavad Gita — “the Song of the Lord” — is the most read and most loved of all Hindu scriptures. It is a 700-verse episode embedded in the much larger epic Mahābhārata. On the eve of a great battle between the Pāndava and Kaurava cousins, the warrior Arjuna lowers his bow, sickened at the prospect of killing his own kin. His charioteer — who turns out to be the god Krishna — answers him over eighteen chapters with the most sustained and rigorous teaching on duty, devotion, knowledge, and the nature of the self that the Indian tradition produced.

We use Edwin Arnold’s 1885 translation, The Song Celestial. Arnold was a Victorian English poet and Sanskrit scholar; his Gita is in blank verse, free of rhyme, and reads as a genuine English poem. It is the version that introduced the Gita to the West, that Gandhi carried in his pocket, that Henry David Thoreau and T. S. Eliot read. It is not the most literal translation — for that, see Edgerton or Telang — but for the experience of reading the Gita as poetry it has not been matched in any public-domain version.

Where to start: Chapter 2 (the famous core teaching on the imperishable self), then Chapter 11 (the vision of Krishna’s universal form — overwhelming in any translation, perhaps especially in Arnold’s), then Chapter 6 (on yoga as meditation), then come back to Chapter 1 for the setup. The whole book takes about two hours to read.