Essence of the Bhagavad Gita: A Contemporary Guide to Yoga, Meditation, and Indian Philosophy

ESSENCE OF THE

BHAGAVAD GITA

A Contemporary Guide to Yoga,

Meditation & Indian Philosophy

by EKNATH EASWARAN

NILGIRI  PRESS

20230818

Table of Contents

Publisher’s Note

Series Preface: The Wisdom of India

Introduction

Prologue

1 The War Within

2 The Nature of Reality

3 The End of Sorrow

4 Levels of Personality

5 The Sticky Illusion of Separateness

6 The Meaning of Yoga

7 Wisdom Through Meditation

8 Yoga as Skill in Daily Living

9 Healing the Unconscious

10 Life After Life

11 The Long Journey of Evolution

12 Into Battle

Epilogue

A Garland of Verses

Further Reading

Glossary

Index

More Books by Eknath Easwaran

Publisher’s Note  

This book has been produced by Eknath Easwaran’s senior editors, longtime students who worked closely with him since his first book in 1970 and were charged by him with continuing to compile his books from transcripts of his talks after his passing.

In his last editorial planning meeting, in 1998, Easwaran gave instructions about the books in progress that he wanted completed from his unpublished transcripts, outlines, and notes. Essence of the Bhagavad Gita is the first of those posthumous projects to be published, ­Easwaran’s final distillation of the Gita’s teachings. It is something rare and precious: the legacy of a gifted teacher sharing a lifetime’s immersion in a sacred text, conveyed in his talks and informal sessions with some of his closest students.

It is a great privilege to pass such a work as this on to Easwaran’s readers around the world.

Series Preface  

The Wisdom of India

Some years ago I translated what I called the classics of Indian spirituality: the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Dhammapada. These ancient texts, memorized and passed from generation to generation for hundreds of years before they were written down, represent early chapters in the long, unbroken story of India’s spiritual experience. The Upanishads, old before the dawn of history, come to us like snapshots of a timeless landscape. The Gita condenses and elaborates on these insights in a dialogue set on a battlefield, as apt a setting now as it was three thousand years ago. And the Dhammapada, a kind of spiritual handbook, distills the practical implications of the same truths presented afresh by the Compassionate Buddha around 500 B.C.

These translations proved surprisingly popular, perhaps because they were intended not so much to be literal or literary as to bring out the meaning of these documents for us today. For it is here that these classics come to life. They are not dry texts; they speak to us. Each is the opening voice of a conversation which we are invited to join – a voice that expects a reply. So in India we say that the meaning of the scriptures is only complete when this call is answered in the lives of men and women like you and me. Only then do we see what the scriptures mean here and now. G. K. Chesterton once said that to understand the Gospels, we have only to look at St. Francis of Assisi. Similarly, I would say, to grasp the meaning of the Bhagavad Gita, we need look no farther than Mahatma Gandhi, who made it a guide for every aspect of daily living. Wisdom may be perennial, but to see its relevance we must see it lived out.

In India, this process of assimilating the learning of the head into the wisdom of the heart is said to have three stages: shravanam, mananam, and nididhyasanam; roughly, hearing, reflection, and meditation. These steps can merge naturally into a single daily activity, but they can also be steps in a journey that unfolds over years. Often this journey is begun in response to a crisis. In my own case, though I must have heard the scriptures many times as a child, I don’t remember them making any deep impression. When I discovered the Bhagavad Gita, I was attracted by the beauty of its poetry; I didn’t understand its teachings at all. It was not until I reached a crisis of meaning in my mid-thirties, when outward success failed to fill the longing in my heart, that I turned to these classics for wisdom rather than literary beauty. Only then did I see that I had been, as the Buddha puts it, like a spoon that doesn’t know the taste of the soup.

Since that time I have dedicated myself to translating these scriptures into daily living through the practice of meditation. The book in your hands is one fruit of this long endeavor. Such a presentation can only be intensely personal. In my translations I naturally let the texts speak for themselves; here I make no attempt to hide the passion that gave those translations their appeal. To capture the essence of the Gita, the Upanishads, and the Dhammapada, I offer what I have learned personally from trying to live them out in a complex, hurried world. I write not as a scholar, but as an explorer back from a long, long voyage eager to tell what he has found.

Yet however personal the exploration, these discoveries are universal. So it is not surprising that at the heart of each of these classics lies a myth – variations on the age-old story of a hero in quest of wisdom that will redeem the world. In the Upanishads, a teenager goes to the King of Death to find the secret of immortality. In the Gita, standing between opposing armies on the eve of Armageddon, the warrior-prince Arjuna seeks guidance from an immortal teacher, Sri Krishna. And behind the Dhammapada lies the story of the Buddha himself, a true story woven into legend: a prince who forsakes his throne to find a way for all the world to go beyond sorrow in this life. These old stories are our own, as relevant today as ever. Myth always involves the listener. We identify with its heroes; their crises mirror ours. Their stories remind us not only what these scriptures mean but why they matter. Like the texts themselves, they seek a response in our own lives.

So this book is both the fruit of a journey and an invitation. If you like, you may read it as a traveler’s tale rich in the experience of some distant place, enjoying the sights and adventures without the travail of actually making the trip yourself. But this place is really no more distant than the heart, so if you find that this description calls you to your own voyage of exploration, my highest purpose in writing will be fulfilled.

Introduction

The Bhagavad Gita is India’s best-known scripture – magnificent poetry couched as a dialogue between a warrior-prince named Arjuna and his charioteer and teacher, Sri Krishna, an avatar of God – that is, God in human form. The dialogue form is important, for the Gita is not a book of commandments but a book of choices. Arjuna, a man of action, turns to Sri Krishna in a crisis of confusion about how to act; Sri Krishna presents the highest wisdom and then leaves it to Arjuna to decide – an element of freedom that is a major part of the Gita’s appeal to readers today.

I can’t remember when my love of the Gita began. As a child I had no conscious interest in anything spiritual; I was an ordinary boy growing up in a remote South Indian village, absorbed in my friends and pets and our sports and games. But one summer before I reached the age of ten, my grandmother decided that instead of swimming and playing soccer, I should spend my vacations learning Sanskrit from the village priest. I learned in the traditional manner, year after year, from passages committed to memory from India’s great scriptures and poets – including many verses from the Bhagavad Gita. The poetry appealed to me deeply, but so far as I can tell the words must have sunk into my unconscious without any sense of their deeper meaning. Only years later, through the example of Mahatma Gandhi, did I begin to understand the Gita as not only magnificent literature, but a sure guide to human affairs – a guide that could, in fact, throw light on the problems I faced in my own times of crisis.

Religion as Realization

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the second president of India and a profound scholar, once commented that the ancient Greeks gave the world intellectual values, the Romans political values, and the Jews moral values. India’s contribution, he added, is spiritual values. It is a generalization, but one with a good deal of truth. A civilization can be evaluated by the kind of human being it aims at, the highest ideal it holds up. Wherever we look in India’s long history, we find the highest honor given to men and women dedicated to the realization of the supreme reality that most religions call God.

I think it was Arnold Toynbee, in the course of his study of world civilizations, who said that India had a genius for religion: not in the sense of a particular religion, but religion itself. This needs some explanation, for we are used to thinking of religions in the plural, bound to particular cultures, and thus of India’s scriptures as Hindu. But the word Hinduism, even the idea, does not appear in our scriptures, and it is really too narrow to describe what India means by religion. The term that is used is sanatana dharma. Sanatana means changeless, eternal; dharma is a rich and complex word that we can translate here as law. Sanatana dharma is the bedrock of reality, the eternal principles or changeless values on which life is based, regardless of creed, country, culture, or epoch.

The oldest expression of this idea goes back a good five thousand years to the cradle of Indian mysticism, the Upanishads – visionary records of the direct encounters of anonymous sages with a transcendent reality. The Upanishads are lofty and inspiring, but they are not terribly practical: they tell what sages have found, but little about how others can make this discovery themselves. Yet the whole point of sanatana dharma is that religion must be based on personal experience. We need some way to translate the wisdom of the Upanishads into living, daily reality.

That is where the Bhagavad Gita scores heavily. In the Gita, the wisdom of the Upanishads is complemented and brought to earth by Sri Krishna, who, through Arjuna, tells us – you and me – what practices to follow to gain direct, experiential knowledge of reality. In Indian philosophy, the various paths to this wisdom are called yoga and the underlying theory is sankhya. At some point in the development of Indian thought – perhaps early in the first millennium B.C. – sankhya and the major schools of yoga became systematized. But the Gita was composed much earlier, while these schools of thought were still emerging. As a result, it is broad enough to support all paths that lead to the discovery of sanatana dharma, examining them not systematically but in dialogue – a major virtue, for dialogue naturally accommodates various points of view and rewards exploration. This allows the Gita to be inclusive rather than dogmatic, with the result that virtually every major philosophical system in India refers to the Gita for authority.

One aspect of this relatively early stage of Indian mysticism can be frustrating to a modern reader: terms and ideas commingle without rigorous boundaries or definitions. The sages who gave us the Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita do not seem to have been philosophically inclined; they chose to sing rather than define, with the result that a key word such as yoga is used in the Gita in different ways. The idea is that the meaning of such words is so full that the best way to get at it is to consider it in a living context from various points of view, the way one makes a map from the observations of several travelers. In this book, rather than serve up one of the later definitions of such words and narrow their meaning, it has seemed best to approach them as they are used and allow the meaning to build up as understanding deepens.

With one major exception, I shall also ignore later commentaries in order to focus on the Bhagavad Gita itself and what I have learned from it personally. The exception is certain key words and ideas introduced by a towering eighth-century mystic from South India named Shankara, whose brilliant commentaries on the Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita established the canon of Indian mysticism. Some of these ideas – particularly the doctrine of maya, the illusion of separateness – appear in the Gita but are not elaborated; Shankara’s explanations are simply too insightful to be ignored.

The Epic Setting

The Bhagavad Gita appears in the sixth book of an immense epic called the Mahabharata, which tells the story of the struggle between two rival branches of the same dynasty: the Pandavas, five brothers, and the Kauravas, their cousins. But this story is only the backbone of the Mahabharata. India’s oral tradition, like India itself, is syncretic, and over the centuries many, many other stories and bits of mythology, lore, and wisdom were grafted onto this main storyline. The Mahabharata is not so much a single work as a literature in itself. Though it can be condensed into a running narrative, the vast majority of us in India absorb it in pieces, episodes that are told or sung or dramatized on their own.

The Bhagavad Gita is one of these independent episodes and seems to have been always considered a work of its own. It is not so much part of the Mahabharata as an Upanishad, slipped into the narrative about a third of the way in – a view supported by the traditional colophon that ends each chapter, which identifies the Gita as an Upanishad on yoga.

So far as drama goes, in any case, the Gita’s placement in the storyline is brilliant. Despite attempts by the Pandavas to preserve peace, the Kauravas have insisted on war – a cataclysmic conflict that will draw in almost every kingdom in India. The Gita begins on the morning before battle is joined. Arjuna, one of the Pandavas, instructs his charioteer, Sri Krishna, to drive their chariot into the open field between the opposing armies. There, seeing family, friends, and teachers preparing to destroy one another, he throws his bow to the ground and tells Krishna he cannot go on.

At this point the story is suspended, and we are lifted out of time while Sri Krishna gives Arjuna comprehensive instruction in the essentials of life and death: the Bhagavad Gita. Then the teaching concludes, we drop back into the narrative, and the Mahabharata continues – thousands upon thousands of verses giving the tragic details of a convulsive eighteen-day war in which virtually all the major combatants on both sides compromise their honor and are slain.

It is simplest, of course, to see the Gita as an integral part of this story, an episode that needs no explanation. Yet its overall character is so different from what comes before and after that it is easy to see why instead it has often been considered an allegory. The names themselves encourage this: the battlefield – Kurukshetra, the field of the Kuru dynasty – is dubbed dharma-kshetra, the field of righteousness; King Dhritarashtra’s name can mean he who has usurped the throne; the names of his sons all begin with du-, evil, and their eldest, Duryodhana – literally dirty fighter – leaves us no doubt about how well his name fits. On the other side is Sri Krishna, no less than an incarnation of God, and Arjuna and his four brothers, each of whom has a god as his father. While things are never quite black and white – the Mahabharata is as complex as Shakespeare – no one has ever wondered who the good guys are, or doubted that this war is a struggle between good and evil.

Mahatma Gandhi took this a step further: the war the Gita describes, he held, actually takes place within ourselves. There is a field called Kurukshetra north of Delhi where this battle is said to have taken place, but in Gandhi’s view the real battlefield is one’s own life, where the struggle between right and wrong, good and evil, rages from birth to death. There is ample support for this view in the text itself: for example, when Sri Krishna tells Arjuna that the enemies he must conquer are lust, fear, and anger. The dialogue between these two then becomes not so much symbolic as a searching of the soul – an interpretation that becomes living truth when one tries to translate the Gita’s teachings into thought and action. Like so many other dialogues between God and man in mystical literature East and West – The Imitation of Christ, the Psalms of David, the Katha Upanishad, the writings of Heinrich Suso or of Mechthild of Magdeburg – this is the heart’s appeal for wisdom and guidance, answered, as it only can be, from within. Then the choice of a dialogue format may remind us of Plato: the wisdom is within us, not in the text; the Gita only serves to draw it out.

One last point brings the Bhagavad Gita directly into our times. The central message of the Gita is that life is an indivisible whole – a concept that contemporary civilization flouts at every turn. Until we learn the principles of unity and how to live in harmony with them, the Gita would say, we cannot have abiding peace or live in harmony with each other and the planet; we cannot even enjoy the real and lasting progress that is the hallmark of civilization.

The Gita doesn’t ask us to take this on faith. It simply offers a frame of reference through which we can look afresh at what we see around us, scrutinize the plans and promises offered by contemporary politics and economics, and judge for ourselves how useful any approach can be that does not begin with the essential unity of life.

Prologue

Close your eyes. You have been blind like this from birth, ruler of a kingdom you cannot see, dependent on the advice of those around you, some wise, most otherwise. Your choices of whom to listen to and whom to ignore have led to a war that will end in ruin for both sides. Unable to watch the pending catastrophe with your own eyes, you appeal to your charioteer, who possesses extrasensory vision:

Tell me, Sanjaya, what is happening on the field of battle, the field of dharma, where my army and my enemies have gathered for war. (1:1)

So the Bhagavad Gita begins, with the words of the blind king Dhritarashtra, whose crippling attachment to his selfish sons has split his dynasty in two.

This is also the last we shall hear from him, for the Gita has very little to do with his story or his war. Yet this opening verse makes a haunting introduction to the theme of a war within, and Dhritarashtra’s plight is a sobering reminder that each of us, too, has probably made blind decisions that have left us perplexed about how we got here and how to face a future that we ourselves have helped to create.

Clearing up this confusion is the purpose of the Gita, so we shall spend no more time with blind kings and their stories. It is not Dhritarashtra who stands for us but Arjuna, a warrior who seeks understanding of life, death, and duty from his char­io­­­teer, Sri Krishna, a divine incarnation who has chosen him as his disciple and friend. Like Dhritarashtra, we too are about to listen in on a hidden dialogue, not one far away but deep within the heart. And while we too are unable to watch, the Gita will let us hear – and, more important, help us to understand.

Chapter 1  

The War Within

We open the Gita and are plunged into the confusion of war. Armies are about to clash, and the air echoes with the blare of conch horns and the trumpeting of elephants in full armor – pandemonium that surely belongs more to the Iliad or even a war movie than to a scripture on yoga.

Yet this drama is essentially stage-setting – a bridge to the real beginning of the Bhagavad Gita in chapter 2, when Sri Krishna begins to teach. Then we find ourselves in a different world, serene and detached, where verse after verse reveals that the battle referred to is one that takes place within: the struggle between right and wrong, selfishness and selflessness, anger and compassion, that rages continuously in every human heart. The chaos of the opening chapter only mirrors the turmoil we feel within.

Each of us can recognize Arjuna’s crisis