Bhagavad Gita was spoken by Lord Sri Krishna, believed to be the Supreme Personality of Godhead about 5000 years ago on the battlefield of Kurushektra to his disciple Arjuna. It clearly establishes the position of Lord Krishna as the Supreme Personality of Godhead, the absolute truth and as a personal sentient being who creates and fully controls both the material and spiritual worlds. All the living entities are minute parts and parcels of this Supreme being and are his eternal servitors.

Bhagawad Gita teaches that the ultimate purpose of life is to realize one's true position and relationship with God (Lord Krishna) and attain him. To achieve this purpose, the topmost and most effective method prescribed by God himself in Gita, is Bhakti Yoga. Bhakti Yoga means complete surrender to God in an attitude of love, devotion and service. This is the final conclusion of the Gita.

After the departure of Lord Krsna, many authors have to tried to write commentaries and translations on Gita. The principal drawback of almost all of them is that they are written by people who don't have any faith in Krsna (God),they don't believe that Krsna is God Himself . They try to charcterize God by some sort of impersonal energy or power and consider that Krsna, who spoke the Gita, was a mere representation of that energy. Thus they completly miss the essence and true conclusions of the teachings of Gita. As Lord Krsna describes himself in Gita, the teachings of Gita need to heard to be heard from a person who is in the DISCIPLIC SUCCESSION, that is an unbroken chain of teacher and disciple started by him with Arjuna. When a person outside this chain tries to teach about Gita, generally his commentaries marred by mental speculation and dry philosophy and are not recommended to anyone desiring to make a ser! ious progress in spiritual life.

Swami A.C. BhaktiVedanta Prabhupada, a true devotee of the Supreme Lord comes in the disciplic succession started by Lord Krsna himself. He has presented an English translation of Gita, which is the most authentic and original to be found today. When I read this edition of Gita, I know that I'm in safe hands.


A beautifully conceived masterpiece; it brings happiness.   June 14, 1998
 4 out of 5 found this review helpful

Deeply satisfying philosophy combined with intellectually thorough spirituality. The authoritative book on Indian spirituality and yoga. This how-to book on achieving peace and strength of character is also a very scholarly presentation, replete with the original sanskrit, roman transliterations, word for word translations and purports. As Henry David Thoreau said: the Gita presents a "...stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy, in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial."


The many Sanskrit words for "Supreme Personality of Godhead"   May 3, 1998
 5 out of 11 found this review helpful

This is the edition of the Bhagavad-Gita that has so often been shoved into your hands in the airport or on the streets or at the local Grateful Dead stadium show. The text is, presumably, directly from the hand of Bhaktivedanta who, it should be acknowldged, was himself an "authentic expositor" of that tradition of Bengali Vaishnavism which stems more-or-less directly from late-medieval saint Caitanya. If the work is in fact from his hand, the best that can be said for it is maybe Bhaktivedanta didn't know English so well. (I don't know one way or the other for certain, but I would suspect that he was fluent in English). The worst to be said about the work is that, as a translation, it is consistently and egregiously wrong in its construal of the Sanskrit verses. This is immediately evident to anyone who knows Sanskrit, since the translation of the individual is convienently given below each verse. In short, the work has no value as an accurate translation of the Sanskrit into English. As a document expressive of the ideals of the HareKrishna movement, on the other hand, the book is quite valuable. Moreover as an expression of internationalist modern Hinduism it can be fruitfully compared with numerous other commentaries on the Bhagavad-Gita written in twentieth century by the likes of Gandhi, Sri Aurobindo, and Swami Vivekananda. And indeed, it is in the lengthy commentaries on each verse that the work is most interesting. For it is in the commentaries that one may find more or less cogently expounded the beliefs of what has become, at least in the United States, one of the most distrusted, discredited, and, perhaps, imperfectly understood of religious "cults". Finally, if one can both distinguish the message from the bearers of it and wade through some fairly turgid English cosmic nonesuch the book all this notwithstanding contain some genuine wisdom. And anyway, if one is incapable of the hermeneutic sophistication required to distill such a heady draught from the! HareKrishna's Bible the work does include some pretty hip Neo-Hindu color plates.