Arguably India's greatest gift to the world, The Bhngavadgita ('The Song of the Blessed') forms an episode in the sixth book of the great Hindu epic the Mahabharata and is the supreme work of that religion. The Gita consists of a dialogue between Prince Arjuna and his mentor and friend, Lord Krsna, on the eve of the climactic battle of Kuruksetra. This discourse, contains an exposition of the Hindu philosophy of Karma Yoga (disciplined action performed in the right spirit) as Prince Arjuna struggles with his understandable 'existential' anguish at having to join battle against his gurus and kinsmen. The Gita, although almost 2,500 years old, contains profound truths of great relevance to contemporary society both in India and the West.

The first thing about the Bhagavadgita that any non-Hindu or non-Indian needs to understand is that it incorporates what may broadly be termed the Hindu view of life more than any other extant Hindu Though almost 2,50o years old, it is very much a part of Indian thought and world-outlook. The symbolic importance the Bhagavadgita holds for the average Indian indicates the extent to which, for most Indians,time present is contained in time past. It is impossible tO ignore the Bhagavadgita in India. Newspapers contain extracts from it almost every day, just as politicians and public speakers draw upon its innumerable alokas to illustrate their stand. It even forms part of advertising copy. The important thing about this large-scale pervasiveness is that the Bbagavadgita does not feature merely as a convenient, extraneous source for quotations. It constitutes a substantial part of the actual sub-structure of present-day thought for most Indians (or at least for the Hindus who form the single largest social group). Ultimately, one returns to it, either in acceptance or rejection. At the same dine, paradoxically, the presence of the Bhagavadgita does not appear to have made any significant difference to the direction in which Indian society has moved. Its tacit acceptance, though not "hypocritical", is embedded in a fundamental contradiction between ideology (or faith/belief) and social practice. All its exhortations of detachment from the fruits of action, its insistence on the importance of action as an end in itself, have not stopped Indian society from its obsessive quest for the material, perceived as the only index of individual and social success.

PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
1 Yoga of the Hesitation and Dejection of Arjuna
2 Samkhya Yoga
3 Karma Yoga: The Way of Action
4 The Way of Knowledge and the Abandonment of Action
5 The Yoga of Renunciation
6 The Yoga of Meditation
7 The Way of Knowledge and Realisation
8 The Yoga of the Immutable
9 The Yoga of Sovereign Knowledge and Sovereign Mystery
10 The Yoga of Divine Manifestations
11 The Yoga of the Revelation of the Cosmic Form
12 The Yoga of Devotion
13 The Yoga of the Division of the Cosmos into Body and Soul
14 The Separation of the Three Gun.as
15 The Yoga of the Supreme Self
16 The Divine and the Demoniacal Attributes
17 The Yoga of the Threefold Division of Faith
18 The Yoga of Deliverance Through Renunciation