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Essence of the Bhagavad Gita: A Contemporary Guide to Yoga, Meditation, and Indian Philosophy (Wisdom of India, 2)
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About Essence Of The Bhagavad Gita: A Contemporary Guide
Product Description 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. Review "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." — H U S T O N S M I T H, author of The World’s Religions (Reviewing Easwaran’s translation, The Bhagavad Gita) 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 1.5 million copies of his books are in print. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 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
