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Bhagavad Gita AS-IT-IS
$15.00
Bhagavad-gita As It Is
The Bhagavad-gita is the main source-book on yoga and a concise summary of India’s Vedic wisdom. Yet remarkably, the setting for this best-known classic of spiritual literature is an ancient Indian battlefield.
At the last moment before entering battle, the great warrior Arjuna begins to wonder about the real meaning of his life. Why should he fight against his friends and relatives? Why does he exist? Where is he going after death? In the Bhagavad-gita, Lord Krsna, Arjuna’s friend and spiritual master, brings His disciple from perplexity to spiritual enlightenment. In the course of doing so, Krsna concisely but definitively explains transcendental knowledge; karma-yoga, jnana-yoga, dhyana-yoga, and bhakti-yoga; knowledge of the Absolute; devotional service; the three modes of material nature; the divine and demoniac natures; and much more.
Bhagavad-gita As It Is is the largest-selling, most widely used edition of the Gita in the world.
Description
OVER 26 MILLION COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE.
The Bhagavad-Gita (“Song of God”), which forms eighteen chapters in the epic Mahabharata, presents the core of the Vedic philosophy in a relatively brief seven hundred verses. Celebrated and revered for its profound message, it is the one book turned to by philosophers, yogis, and transcendentalists of nearly all paths of Vedic spirituality. In the West it early inspired, among others, the American Transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau and has been looked to ever since for its perennial wisdom. It is the essential Vedic text for spiritual realization.
Just on the verge of the historic Battle of Kurukshetra, the warrior Arjuna loses his nerve. Totally distraught and ready to give up on life, he turns to his friend and charioteer, Krishna, for advice, “What should I do?” The conversation that follows effectively deals with humanity’s crucial questions: what is the purpose of life? What happens when we die? Is there a reality beyond this time-bound, physical plane? What is the ultimate cause of all causes? Krishna comprehensively answers all these (and more) and then reveals His own identity as none other than the Supreme Personality of Godhead, appearing on earth to usher in a new era of spiritual understanding.
Throughout the Gita Krishna teaches that the essence of all human pursuit – and the ultimate goal of all pious work, meditation, and austerity – is to develop an attitude of loving service to the Supreme Person. His ultimate instruction, “surrender to Me,” challenges Arjuna – and any reader of the Bhagavad-gita – to transcend religion and belief and to enter the realm of bhakti – devotional service – which alone can fully satisfy the self.
Bhagavad-gita As It Is is unique among Gita commentaries; the author, Srila Prabhupada, represents a line of teachers coming in disciplic succession from Krishna Himself. Prabhupada’s clarity, wit, and faithfulness to the original Sanskrit text make the teachings of the Gita easily accessible to the Western reader.
