The Bhagavad Gita by Eknath Easwaran

╭ introduction
scholars, who feel the Gita contradicts itself. It also puzzled
Arjuna, the faithful representative of you and me. “Krishna,”
he says at the beginning of chapter 3, “you’ve been telling me
that knowledge [jnana] is better than action [karma]; so why
do you urge me into such terrible action? Your words are
inconsistent; they confuse me. Tell me one path to the highest
good” (3:1–2). No doubt he speaks for every reader at this
point, and for those who go on wanting one path only, the
confusion simply grows worse.
For those who try to practice the Gita, however, there is a
thread of inner consistency running through Krishna’s advice.
Like a person walking around the same object, the Gita takes
more than one point of view. Whenever Krishna describes
one of the traditional paths to God he looks at it from the
inside, extolling its virtues over the others. For the time being,
that is the path; when he talks about yoga, he means that one
particular yoga. Thus “this ancient word” yoga, says Gandhi’s
intimate friend and secretary, Mahadev Desai,
is pressed by the Gita into service to mean the entire gamut
of human endeavor to storm the gates of heaven. . . . [It
means] the yoking of all the powers of the body and the
mind and soul to God; it means the discipline of the intellect,
the mind, the emotions, the will, which such a yoking
presupposes; it means a poise of the soul which enables one
to look at life in all its aspects and evenly.
The Gita brings together all the specialized senses of the
╭ 50