Hindu & Vedic
The Bhagavad Gita, a conversation about duty and detachment, set on the edge of a battlefield.
What it is
The Gita sits inside the Mahabharata, the long Sanskrit epic, as a dialogue between the warrior Arjuna and his charioteer Krishna. It is usually placed in the last centuries before the common era. Although it occupies a small part of a very long poem, it has been read and commented on as a work in its own right for many centuries.
The conversation opens with Arjuna refusing to fight and becomes an argument about action: whether a person can act without being bound to the result of acting. It draws several strands of Indian religious thought into one text, which is part of why traditions that disagree with each other have all read it closely.
Where these words come from
Bhagavad Gita
Bhagavad-Gita (Besant, 4th edition, 1922) · Translated by Annie Besant
18 discourses · Public domain
Read the complete textat en.wikisource.org
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