The Bhagavad Gita is the most beloved scripture of India. Bhagavad Gita means “Song of the Spirit,” the divine communion of truth-realization between man and his Creator, the teachings of Spirit through the soul, that should be sung unceasingly.
The pantheistic doctrine of the Gita is that God is everything. Its verses celebrate the discovery of the Absolute, Spirit beyond creation, as being also the hidden Essence of all manifestation. This God-realization cannot be attained merely by reading a book. So comprehensive as a spiritual guide is the Gita that it is declared to be the essence of the ponderous four Vedas, 108 Upanishads, and the six systems of Hindu philosophy. Only by intuitive study and understanding of these tomes, or else by contacting Cosmic Consciousness, can one fully comprehend the Bhagavad Gita. Indeed, the underlying essential truths of all great world scriptures can find common amity in the infinite wisdom of the Gita’s mere 700 concise verses. The entire knowledge of the cosmos is packed into the Gita. The age and authorship of the Gita, as with so many of India’s ancient writings and scriptures, remains an engaging subject of intellectual and scholarly research and dispute. Its verses are found in the sixth of eighteen books that constitute India’s great epic poem, the Mahabharata, in the Bhishma Parva, sections 23–40. In 100,000 couplets this hoary epic — perhaps the longest poem in world literature — recounts the history of the descendants of King Bharata, the Pandavas and Kauravas. The Bhagavad Gita, a sacred dialogue on yoga between Bhagavan Krishna — who was at once an earthly king and a divine incarnation — and his chief disciple, the Pandava prince Arjuna, purportedly takes place on the eve of this fearsome war. The authorship of the Mahabharata, including the Gita portion, is traditionally assigned to the illumined sage Vyasa, whose date is not definitely known. My guru and paramgurus — Swami Sri Yukteswar, Lahiri Mahasaya, and Mahavatar Babaji — are rishis of this present age, masters who themselves are God-realized living scriptures. They have bequeathed to the world — along with the long-lost scientific technique of Kriya Yoga — a new revelation of the holy Bhagavad Gita, relevant primarily to the science of yoga and to Kriya Yoga in particular.
This Bhagavad Gita that I offer to the world, God Talks With Arjuna, is a spiritual commentary of the communion that takes place between the omnipresent Spirit (symbolized by Krishna) and the soul of the ideal devotee (represented by Arjuna). I arrived at the spiritual understanding expressed in these pages by attunement with Vyasa, and by perceiving the Spirit as God of creation relating wisdom to the awakened Arjuna within myself. I again acknowledge that I owe much to my paramgurus, Mahavatar Babaji and Lahiri Mahasaya, and to my Gurudeva, for their revelations, which have inspired the birth of a new presentation of the Gita. This work is not mine; it belongs to them, and to God, Krishna, Arjuna, and Vyasa.
(Excerpts from the spiritual commentary of The Bhagavad Gita by Sri Sri Paramahansa Yogananda, God Talks With Arjuna: The Bhagavad Gita. This book is available, in two volumes, in English and Hindi, through Yogoda Satsanga Society of India. bookstore.yssofindia.org)
The author is the writer of the worldwide acclaimed book, Autobiography of a Yogi and the founder of Yogoda Satsanga Society of India.