The Bhagavad Gita by Eknath Easwaran

╭ introduction
things, an integrity and harmony in the universe and the
affairs of life that cannot be disturbed without courting chaos.
Thus it means rightness, justice, goodness, purpose rather
than chance.
Underlying this idea is the oneness of life: the Upanishadic
discovery that all things are interconnected because at its
deepest level creation is indivisible. This oneness bestows a
basic balance on the whole of nature such that any disturbance
in one place has to send ripples everywhere, as a perfect
bubble, touched lightly in one place, trembles all over until
balance is restored. The implications are caught perfectly by
those famous lines from John Donne, which deserve to be
read now with a fresh eye as not merely great rhetoric but a
faithful representation of reality:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of
the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away
by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory
were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own
were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved
in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.
There is an ancient Sanskrit epigram, Ahimsa paramo
dharma : the highest dharma is ahimsa, nonviolence, universal
love for all living creatures; for every kind of violence is a
violation of dharma, the fundamental law of the unity of life.
Thus every act or thought has consequences, which them-
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