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

by Eknath Easwaran

Overview

In this companion to his best-selling translation of the Bhagavad Gita, Easwaran explores the essential themes of this much-loved Indian scripture.

Placing the Gita in a modern context, Easwaran shows how this classic text sheds light on the nature of reality, the illusion of separateness, the search for identity, and the meaning of yoga. The key message of the Gita is how to resolve our conflicts and live in harmony with the deep unity of life, through the principles of yoga and the practice of meditation.

Easwaran grew up in the Hindu tradition and learned Sanskrit from an early age. A foremost translator and interpreter of the Gita, he taught classes on it for forty years, while living out the principles of the Gita in the midst of a busy family and community life.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Sri Krishna, the Lord, doesn’t tell the warrior prince Arjuna what to do: he shows Arjuna his choices and then leaves it to Arjuna to decide. Easwaran, too, shows us clearly how these teachings still apply to us – and how, like Arjuna, we must take courage and act wisely if we want our world to thrive.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781586380687
Publisher:	Nilgiri Press
Publication date:	12/13/2011
Series:	Wisdom of India , #2
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	349,003
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Eknath Easwaran (1910 – 1999) was brought up in the Hindu tradition and learned Sanskrit from a young age. He was chairman of the English department at a major Indian university when he came to the United States on a Fulbright fellowship in 1959.

A gifted teacher and writer who settled in the West, Easwaran lived out the principles of the Gita in the midst of a busy family and community life. His translations of the Indian classics, The Bhagavad Gita, The Upanishads, and The Dhammapada, are all best-sellers in their field, and more than 2 million copies of his books are in print.

Read an Excerpt

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 vacation learning Sanskrit from the village priest. I had no idea why, and I rather resented it, but because I loved Granny deeply I did as she desired. I learned in the traditional manner, from passages committed to memory from India’s great scriptures and poets, including many from the Bhagavad Gita. The verses appealed to me deeply for their beauty, but so far as I can tell they must have sunk into my unconscious without any sense of their deeper meaning.

So I am at a loss to explain why, when I left home for college at the age of sixteen, I chose to spend my first pittance of a pocket allowance on a copy of the Gita in Sanskrit. To my uncles, that purchase was a sure sign that I would never amount to much. Today it seems almost as if the book had been waiting for me to come and pick it up. Without realizing it, I had already become a “Gita kid.”

I read the book over and over, committing to memory favorite verses until they numbered probably three or four hundred. Later, as a university student and then as a professor, I had many occasions to listen to learned talks on the Gita by distinguished scholars, philosophers, and religious figures. Yet it was only when I met Mahatma Gandhi that I began to understand that the Gita is not only magnificent literature but a sure guide to human affairs — one that could, in fact, throw light on the problems I faced in my own times of crisis. Gandhi went so far as to say frankly, after nearly a lifetime of personal experience, that the Gita contains the answer to every problem life has to offer. That is the greatest debt I owe him. For all India he is the father of the nation, which is a very high tribute; but for me he is the beacon of our times, and his source of light was the Bhagavad Gita.

Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the second president of India and a great scholar, once observed that the ancient Greeks gave us 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, never appears in our scriptures, and it is really is too narrow to describe what they mean 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. So sanatana dharma means something universal: the eternal principles or changeless values on which life is based, regardless of creed, country, culture, or epoch.

If you ask orthodox Hindus when their religion was founded, they may tell you, “Our religion was never founded. It was always there.” This kind of reply baffles Western scholars, but it means simply that the laws of life, like physical laws, have existed forever. No one has put this better than Mahatma Gandhi: “What I mean by religion . . . is not the Hindu religion . . . but the religion that transcends Hinduism, which changes one’s very nature, which binds one indissolubly to the truth within . . . It is the permanent element in human nature.”

The oldest expression of this idea goes back a good five thousand years to the cradle of India’s civilization, the Vedas: four collections of an ancient wisdom tradition transmitted orally but systematically until they began to be written down, perhaps as early as 3000 BC. Each of the Vedas can be divided into two sections. The first of these deals with rituals, myth, and hymns that are of great cultural significance but not relevant to this search for a universal religion. For that we turn to the second part of the Vedas, which comprises the Upanishads — visionary records of the direct encounters of anonymous sages with a transcendent reality. The Upanishads are probably the oldest expression in history of what Aldous Huxley called the “perennial philosophy.”

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 religion in this sense is that wisdom must be based on one’s own experience. We need some way to translate the wisdom of the Upanishads into everyday life.

That is where the Bhagavad Gita scores heavily. It too offers inspiration and poetry, but unlike the Upanishads, it combines these with practical explanation and instruction. It is, in a word, a handbook — as Mahatma Gandhi put it, a manual for daily living, not just in ancient India but in all times and places. 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 ways of attaining this knowledge are called yoga and the underlying theory is sankhya. At some point in the development of Indian thought — perhaps early in the first millennium BC, certainly well before the Buddha was born — sankhya and the major schools of yoga became systematized. But that seems to have happened after the Bhagavad Gita was composed, when later schools of thought were still emerging. As a result, the Gita is broad enough to support all paths to the discovery of sanatana dharma, providing not just a guidebook but a map.

Table of Contents

Preface: The Wisdom of India
Introduction

1. The War Within
2. The Search for Reality
3. The Higher and Lower Mind
4. The Causes of Delusion
5. Yoga as the Way Forward
6. Meditation
7. Yoga in Daily Life
8. Yoga in Work and Relationships
9. Healing the Unconscious
10. Death and the Continuity of Life
11. Spiritual Evolution
12. Faith and Incarnation
13. The End of Sorrow: Portraits of the Illumined Person

Further Reading
Glossary
Favorite Verses from the Gita
Index

Editorial Reviews

"It is impossible to get to the heart of those classics unless you live them, and [Easwaran] did live them. My admiration of the man and his works is boundless." — HUSTON SMITH, author of The World’s Religions (Reviewing Easwaran’s translation, The Bhagavad Gita)

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