The Bhagavad Gita and the Three Paths

The Bhagavad Gita, a 700-verse dialogue within the epic Mahabharata, is one of the most widely read Hindu texts. On a battlefield, the warrior prince Arjuna hesitates to fight his own relatives, and his charioteer Krishna, revealed as a form of the divine, counsels him. Krishna teaches that Arjuna must do his duty without attachment to results, an idea called karma yoga. The Gita also presents jnana yoga, the path of knowledge, and bhakti yoga, loving devotion to God, which it describes with special warmth.

By offering several paths to liberation, the text made spiritual goals accessible to householders and not only to renunciants. Readers have interpreted the battlefield in very different ways: Gandhi read it as an allegory of inner moral struggle and drew lessons of non-violence from it, while others read it more literally as a defense of righteous action. Its flexibility helps explain its enormous influence.