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Many Hindus have said that the most succinct and powerful abbreviation of the diverse realm of Hindu thought can be found in the Bhagavad Gita. Essentially, it is a microcosm of Vedic, Yogic, Vedantic and Tantric thought within the Hindu fold. The Bhagavad Gita refers to itself as a 'Yoga Upanishad,' a text that speaks of truths through Krishna.
The Bhagvad Gita is set within the great Hindu epic of the Mahabharata. It is the story of Arjuna, a warrior prince, and his mentor and friend Krishna, a king who is really the reincarnation of the God Vishnu. In the coming great battle of Kurukshetra, Krishna is Arjuna's charioteer. In the first chapter, as the blowing of conch shells signals for the fighting to begin and with the opposing armies arrayed on either side of them, Arjuna and Krishna ride out into the middle of the Kurukshetra battlefield. As Arjuna sees his friends, teachers and relatives fighting for both armies, he is heartsick at the thought that he must kill these beloved persons. He turns to Krishna for advice.
Krishna counsels Arjuna on a wide range of topics, beginning with the tenet that since souls are immortal, the deaths on the battlefield are just the shedding of the body, which is not the soul. Krishna goes on to expound on many spiritual matters, including the yogas (or paths) of devotion, action, meditation and knowledge. Fundamentally, the Bhagavad Gita proposes that true enlightenment comes from growing beyond identification with the ego, or consciousness of the little self, and to identify with the truth of the immortal Self, the soul or Atman, the ultimate divine consciousness. Through dispassion for the senses, extreme jubilation and bereavement, the yogin is able to transcend his mortality and attachment for the material world and see the infinite.
To demonstrate the infinitude of the unknowable, indescribable and ineffable Brahman, Krishna temporarily gives Arjuna the cosmic eye and allows him to see Him in all his divine glory. He reveals that He is fundamentally both the ultimate essence of being in the universe; he is also its material body as well as an incarnation for the personified Lord Vishnu. This threefold understanding of the nature of God has made the Bhagavad Gita the basis for many varying philosophies of the Hindu faith and the fountainhead text of Yoga.
The Gita has been the favorite book of many great thinkers, sages, devotees and figures of Hindu India. Among the most well-known is Shri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, the leading example of the yoga of love and devotion, or bhakti yoga, of Krishna exemplifying what Vaishnavas, or followers of Vishnu, saw as a great devotee of Krishna. It was he who first sang the "Hare Krishna" mahamantra (great mantra). Needless to say, he was steeped in the Bhagavad Gita. Mahatma Gandhi, who interpreted the war of the Mahabharata as a metaphor for the confusions, doubts, fears and conflicts that trouble all people at one time or another. He thus used the culminating message of the Gita as an inspiration in his own struggle against the British colonial rule.
The first great yogin to spread the message of Hindu Yoga in America was the dynamic Swami Vivekananda, follower of Shri Ramakrishna, known for his seminal commentaries on the four yogas, those of Bhakti, Jnana, Karma and Raja Yoga. In writing them, he drew from his knowledge of the Vedas, Upanishads and the Gita to expound on them. (See below for "Bhagavad Gita as a Yoga Scripture"). Swami Sivananda, a renowned yogin, advises that the true yogin will read verses from the Bhagavad Gita every day. Paramahamsa Yogananda, writer of the famous "Autobiography of a Yogi," viewed the Bhagavad Gita as one of the world's most divine scriptures, along with the Four Gospels of Jesus.
The Gita addresses this discord within us and speaks of the yoga of equanimity, a balanced outlook. The term yoga covers a wide range of meanings, but in the context of the Bhagavad Gita it describes a unified outlook, serenity of mind, skill in action, and the ability to stay attuned to the glory of the Self (Atman), which is ultimately one with the basis of being (Brahman). According to Krishna, the root of all suffering and discord is the agitation of the mind caused by desire. The only way to douse the flame of desire is by stilling the mind through discipline of the senses and the intellect.
However, abstinence from action is regarded as being just as detrimental as extreme indulgence. According to the Bhagavad Gita, the goal of life is to free the mind and intellect from their complexities and to focus them on the glory of the Self by dedicating one's actions to the divine. This goal can be achieved through the yogas of meditation, action, devotion and knowledge.
Krishna summarizes the Yogas through eighteen chapters. There are four kinds of Yoga: Raja Yoga or psycho-physical meditation, Bhakti Yoga or devotion, Karma Yoga or selfless action, and Jnana (pron. GYAAN) Yoga or self-transcending knowledge) Other forms that exist today sprang up long after the Bhagavad Gita and Yoga Sutras and are all essentially forms of Raja Yoga.
While each path differs, their fundamental goal is the same: to realize Brahman (the Divine Essence) as being the only truth, that the body is temporal, and that the soul (Atman) is infinite and one with Brahman. Yoga's aim (nirvana, moksha) is to escape from the cycle of reincarnation through realization of oneness with the ultimate reality.
Here are some quotations from Lord Krishna that make up history's first real yoga text and give comprehensive definitions of the four principle yogas:
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