The Bhagavad Gita, side by side

The most loved book in Hinduism is a soldier's panic attack, and the answer to it. Two armies stand ready to fight. A warrior named Arjuna asks his charioteer to drive him out into the gap between them so he can see who he is about to kill, and there, across the field, he sees his cousins, his teachers, and his childhood friends. His nerve goes. He drops his bow, sits down, and says he would rather die than fight. Everything famous in the Bhagavad Gita is what his charioteer says back.

The charioteer is Krishna, and partway through the talk he stops being a friend giving a pep talk and reveals that he is God, holding the whole universe inside his body. The Gita, which means "the song of the Lord," is the 700 verses he speaks to get one frightened man back on his feet. It is not a free-standing book. It sits two thirds of the way into the Mahabharata, the enormous Sanskrit war epic, and you do not even hear it firsthand: a blind old king is waiting at home for news of the battle, and his aide, granted long-distance sight by a sage, narrates the whole dialogue back to him as it happens. So a scripture about how to face death without flinching is delivered between two armies, in the last quiet minutes before the killing, by a god disguised as a driver, to a man falling apart, and overheard by a blind king through a clairvoyant. The staging is half the genius.

It is also the most translated Hindu text in the world, and the translators do not agree. The single most quoted line in the book is verse 2.47, the seed of everything Krishna teaches about action. Here is its first half, the same eight Sanskrit words, rendered by seven different hands.

Work, business, deeds, action; fruit, results, reward. One translator makes it a clean transaction you have no claim on, another makes it a moral instruction, a third strips it to four flat words. They are reading the same line. Sanskrit packs a lot into a little, and every translator has to decide what Krishna meant before they can write it down, so they decide differently. That spread is the subject of this page.

Underneath the spread, the argument is simple enough to say in two sentences. Krishna's diagnosis: you suffer because you are hooked on the results of what you do, and because you have mistaken your dying body for your actual self. His prescription is three roads to the same freedom, and you do not have to choose between them. Act without clutching at the outcome (this is karma yoga, the path of action). Love and hand yourself over to God (bhakti, devotion). Know the deathless Self that was never born and will never die (jnana, knowledge). The book braids the three together and calls the braid yoga.

Six words carry that whole argument, and none of them crosses cleanly into English, which is why you see them left untranslated even in plain renderings. They are worth knowing before you start.

dharma

duty, law, righteousness, religion, the order of things, the role you were born into. One word doing the work of six. The book's first word and last word are both forms of it.

yoga

literally a yoking, as of an ox to a cart. Discipline, method, path, union with the divine. The exercise classes borrowed the word; it always meant much more than the stretching.

atman

the Self, soul, the deathless witness inside you, as opposed to the body and personality it is wearing. Knowing it is not the body is the move that dissolves Arjuna's grief.

karma

action, work, deed, and the long tail of consequence an action drags behind it. Not yet the cosmic scoreboard the English word became.

guna

strand, quality, thread. The three the Gita keeps naming (sattva, clarity; rajas, drive; tamas, inertia) are the raw materials everything in nature is spun from, including you.

Brahman

the absolute, the ground of everything, the one reality behind the many. The Upanishads, which the Gita is standing on, say that your atman and Brahman are the same thing, from the outside in (tat tvam asi, "that thou art") and from the inside out (aham brahmasmi, "I am Brahman").

Below is the whole book, all 700 verses, in the order the tradition fixed them. For each one you get the Sanskrit, in Devanagari and in transliteration, then every English version I could line up, stacked so you can read them against each other. For the keystone verses, the ones the rest of the tradition leans on, there is a plain-language breakdown of what the verse is doing and where the translators part ways. The gold-dotted verses in the index are the ones with a breakdown, and the keystone arrows jump between them. Use the arrows or your keyboard to move through the rest.

Where the text comes from

Every translation here is reproduced verbatim, not paraphrased. The complete ones were pulled as data and parsed by script, so nothing in them was retyped or reworded by hand or by a model. The only change to any quotation is curly quotation marks turned straight, to match the rest of the site.

• The Sanskrit, in Devanagari and in transliteration, is from the open bhagavadgita.io dataset, which prints the standard received text verse by verse.
• The five complete English translations come from the same open dataset: Shri Purohit Swami (1935, the literary version the poet W. B. Yeats helped into print), Swami Sivananda (the practical one the Divine Life Society gives away), Swami Adidevananda (who follows Ramanuja, the devotional reading), Swami Gambhirananda (who follows Shankara, the non-dual reading), and Dr. S. Sankaranarayan (an academic literal rendering).
• Sir Edwin Arnold (The Song Celestial, 1885) and Kashinath Telang (1882, the Sacred Books of the East edition) appear on the keystone verses. Arnold's is the Victorian poem that carried the Gita into English; it is the version a young Gandhi first read, in London, in a translation by an Englishman. Both are public domain, from the Internet Archive.

That spans a Victorian scholar, a Victorian poet, and four readers from inside the living tradition, two of whom (Gambhirananda and Adidevananda) deliberately follow rival schools, so on many verses you can watch the old argument between them play out in the English. The other famous moderns the breakdowns name, Annie Besant, Prabhavananda and Isherwood, Eknath Easwaran, Barbara Stoler Miller, Stephen Mitchell, Winthrop Sargeant, Graham Schweig, and Laurie Patton, are still in copyright and printed in books, not posted as clean machine-readable text. Rather than retype them and risk a wrong word, I name them where their choice matters and leave the quoting to the editions I could verify exactly.

The breakdowns are mine. They lean on the standard scholarship and on the three great commentators who read the same verses in opposite directions: Shankara (non-dual), Ramanuja (devotional), and Madhva (dualist). Where they split, I have tried to say so rather than smooth it over, because the splitting is the most honest thing about the book.

A note on the count. By tradition the Gita is exactly 700 verses, which is why it is sometimes just called "the Seven Hundred." The edition here runs to 701, because one stanza in chapter 13 gets split differently; a Kashmiri line of manuscripts runs to 745. Even the number of verses is something the editions disagree about. The blind king Dhritarashtra, for what it is worth, speaks only the opening line; Krishna does almost all the rest of the talking.

The image on the homepage card is an Indian print of Krishna driving Arjuna's four-horse chariot onto the field, catalogued as Arjuna requests instruction from Krishna (Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0). That request, in the pause before the fighting, is the door the whole book walks through.