Will I love The Bhagavad Gita?

I respect this book because it challenges the common-sense distinction between action and inaction. Part of the epic Hindu poem Mahabharata is a cunning text. On its spiritual surface, it preaches overcoming suffering, casting away ego, practicing detachment, and unifying oneself with the divine. Yet these tenets simultaneously boost Krishna’s rhetoric to convince Arjuna to slaughter his own family.

This is a thinly veiled attack on the Buddhist ideal of doing nothing on the grounds that every inaction involves action and vice versa. Its real insight, for me, is that we should sometimes actively do nothing. My favorite instance of… show more.

The Mahabharata epic, composed in around 200 BCE, is the longest poem in the world, and about eight times as long as the combined Iliad and Odyssey. The most famous section is Chapters 25-42 of the sixth book, known as the Bhagavad Gita (Song of God) in which the god Krishna appears to the archer Arjuna in the midst of the Battle of Kurukshetra. Counterintuitively, Krishna advises Arjuna not to succumb to his scruples about killing his enemy cousins, the Kauravas, but to do his duty and fight on.

The themes of the Gita suggest that it is rooted in… show more.

The Bhagavad Gītā is one of India’s most revered spiritual books for good reason: It contains everything you need to know. A dialogue between the warrior, Arjuna, and his chariot driver, Krishna — who also happens to be an incarnation of the divine — it’s a gripping drama, an instruction manual for life, and one of the most concise articulations of the search for higher meaning that’s ever been written. For English speakers, I recommend the translation and commentary by Eknath Easwaran, which goes down easy.

Mohandas Gandhi once said: “When doubts haunt me, when disappointments stare me in the face, and I see not one ray of hope on the horizon, I turn to Bhagavad Gita and find a verse to comfort me; and I immediately begin to smile in the midst of overwhelming sorrow. Those who meditate on the Gita will derive fresh joy and new meanings from it every day.”

This ancient foundational text from Hinduism had such a profound effect on one of the greatest men of peace in the twentieth century. There is so much to discover in this book about… show more.