Bhagavad Gita: Sanskrit Text, Transliteration and Meaning, Chapter by Chapter

The Bhagavad Gita, “the Song of the Lord”, is a conversation. It takes place on a battlefield, at the moment before a war begins, between the warrior Arjuna and his charioteer Krishna. Arjuna has just seen the people he is about to fight and cannot go on. Krishna answers him, and the answer runs to eighteen chapters. Over the centuries it has become one of the most read and most commented-on texts in the world, and it is read in India as a scripture, as a philosophical work and as a book of practical guidance.

This section sets out the Gita one chapter at a time. Every verse has the speaker, the Sanskrit in Devanagari, a simple transliteration and a meaning written in plain English. Each chapter page also has an introduction, a summary, a short note of where the two source texts differ, and answers to common questions.

Where the Gita sits in the Mahabharata

The Gita is not a separate book. It is part of the Bhishma Parva, the sixth of the eighteen books (parvas) of the Mahabharata. In the critical edition of the epic, produced at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune, it fills chapters 23 to 40 of that book. The epic’s own list of its sub-sections names this stretch the Bhagavad Gita Parva, but that is a division within the Bhishma Parva and not a separate work.

The story it belongs to is a family war. The Pandavas, the five sons of Pandu, and the Kauravas, the hundred sons of the blind king Dhritarashtra, have come to the field of Kurukshetra. The king cannot see it. His minister Sanjaya, to whom, as the Mahabharata tells it, the sage Vyasa gave the power of distant sight, describes the war to him. This is why the Gita is told in layers. Krishna speaks to Arjuna, Sanjaya hears and repeats it, and Dhritarashtra listens. The king speaks only once in the whole Gita, in the very first verse, and Sanjaya’s voice returns near the end of the book.

Tradition credits the Mahabharata and so the Gita to Vyasa. Scholars see the text as composed over a long time and place the Gita in the centuries around the start of the common era, without agreeing on an exact date.

What the Gita teaches, in outline

The teaching begins when Arjuna puts down his bow in chapter 1. Krishna’s first answer, in chapter 2, is that the self is not what dies when the body dies, and that grief for the dead is therefore misplaced. From there the text turns to the question of how to act: how to do one’s work in the world, fully, without being bound by hope of reward or fear of loss. This is the Gita’s best known idea, the yoga of action.

The text then widens. It speaks of knowledge and its practice (chapters 4 to 6), of devotion to a personal Lord (chapters 7 to 12, with the vision of the universal form in chapter 11), and of the nature of the world, the self and the three qualities of nature (chapters 13 to 18). Some teachers group the chapters into three sixes, action, devotion and knowledge, although the Gita itself mixes the three throughout. The great commentators, among them Shankara (traditionally the eighth century), Ramanuja (eleventh to twelfth century) and Madhva (thirteenth century), read it in different ways and drew different philosophies from it. That is part of why it is still studied. You do not have to decide among them to read the text.

How to read the Gita

Read one chapter at a time, and read the speaker line before each verse. The same word can mean different things in Arjuna’s mouth and in Krishna’s. Arjuna speaks in distress, and the arguments he makes in chapter 1 are not the Gita’s own teaching. Krishna’s answer is.

Read the meaning before the Sanskrit if you are new to the text, and the Sanskrit before the meaning if you know a little. The transliteration is a simple guide to sound, written without the marks used in scholarly work. It will not teach you correct recitation, which is best learned from a teacher or a trusted recording.

Keep in mind that the Gita is in dialogue form and many of its verses depend on the verses around them. Verse 2.47, for example, is often quoted alone, but it is meant to be read with the verses on either side. If a verse seems to say something hard or surprising, look at the verses before it and the chapter introduction on its page.

The Gita is a text for reflection and for study. This site does not treat it as a source of promises. If you are in distress, or making a major life decision, speak to someone you trust and, where it matters, to a qualified professional.

How the text on these pages is sourced

The Sanskrit text comes from the critical edition, the scholarly text of the epic built by comparing many manuscripts. GRETIL (the Gottingen Register of Electronic Texts in Indian Languages) holds an electronic text of the Bhagavad Gita based on the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute edition of the Mahabharata, entered by Muneo Tokunaga and others and revised by John Smith of Cambridge. It is in Roman script.

We converted that Roman text to Devanagari ourselves, by a fixed set of letter rules, and then compared every verse with the text on Sanskrit Wikisource, which follows the commonly printed version of the Gita. The two texts agree closely. Where they differ in the words, and not just in spelling or the way words are joined, we list the difference at the foot of the chapter page. Chapters 1 to 3 have 162 verses between them, and the two texts differ in the words in 9 of them (5 in chapter 1, 2 in chapter 2 and 2 in chapter 3), one of those being a spelling slip on Wikisource.

In chapters 1 to 3 the critical edition and the printed text number the verses in the same way, so a reference such as 2.47 points to the same verse in either. Meanings and chapter notes are our own writing and not taken from any translation. The Gita is a traditional text with no living copyright. Where a point of interpretation is disputed among commentators, we say so.

Related pages

• Krishnashtakam: a stotra in praise of Krishna
• Achyutashtakam: eight verses to Achyuta, a name of Krishna
• Janmashtami: the birth of Krishna
• Janmashtami puja vidhi: how the day is observed
• Ekadashi: the Gita’s traditional anniversary, Gita Jayanti, is kept on the Ekadashi of the bright half of Margashirsha
• All mantras, stotras and sacred texts