World Lit Reader

Bhagavad Gita

Krishna and Arjuna's battlefield dialogue on duty, action, self-command, devotion, vision, and liberation.

Vyasa ยท c. 2nd century BCE-2nd century CE

Read Bhagavad Gita with context

You can read the Gita and save notes and quotes from it. The poem begins in a warrior's crisis and becomes a teaching on action without attachment, disciplined selfhood, devotion, knowledge, and liberation. World Lit Reader can also place the Gita beside later writers who used Indian philosophy to rethink the self, nature, suffering, art, and freedom.

Read the Bhagavad Gita Impact on Thoreau, Emerson, Schopenhauer Action without attachment Vision and liberation

Key Reading Paths

  • Arjuna's crisis: kinship, duty, pity, panic, and the refusal that opens the teaching.
  • Self-command: steady mind, desire, anger, restraint, practice, and the divided self.
  • Devotion and offering: faith, humility, love, worship, and the ordinary acts that become sacred.
  • The cosmic vision: Arjuna's overwhelming vision of Krishna's universal form and world-destroying time.
  • Gita and tragic philosophy: suffering, action, renunciation, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche's struggle with pessimism.

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