Bhagavad Gita (Richard Gotshalk)

by Richard Gotshalk

The Bhagavad Gita is a dramatic poem which forms a small part of the great epic, the Mahabharata. The poem is the dialogue through which Arjuna`s doubts are resolved by Krsna`s teaching about the nature and place of action in the ultimate reality of things. The present translation is supplemented by a commentary; both seek to emphasize how the teaching is rooted in the concrete situation, and how its order and structure reflect the changing condition of the conversants and the purpose of the conversation. Footnotes and notes are included to clarify the Sanskrit, to indicate alternative translations, and to note relevant comments from other commentators and translators. RICHARD GOTSHALK, doctorate from Northwestern University, currently engaged in a series of studies of the beginnings of philosophy in China, India, and Greece, and will seek to use these as providing the appropriate beginning points in a historical recall within which the crisis of the world today can be most pointedly discerned and discussed.