The Bhagavad Gita for
Daily Living
CHAPTERS 1 THROUGH 6
By Eknath Easwaran
PREFACE
A Living Tree
by Ramagiri Ashram
2 January 1975
This practical commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, one of the greatest
scriptures of the world, has grown out of the weekly talks given by Sri Eknath
Easwaran1 to a group of his devoted students and friends in
Berkeley. The talks, beginning in May 1968, have been carefully recorded and
transcribed weekly with the help of many members of Easwaran's âshram, or
spiritual family. The transcribed lectures were compiled and edited under
Easwaran's close supervision.
The Gita class, like all of Easwaran's classes, is primarily a preparation
and inspiration for the practice of meditation as well as a commentary on a
particular scripture. Group meditation follows the hour-long talk, in which
Easwaran usually covers one or two verses from the Gita. In these impromptu
talks, he may apply the verse to the biggest challenges facing the world today
or direct his comments to solving the personal problem of a friend in the
audience. But whether talking about local incidents in Berkeley or
international issues, his unchanging purpose is to inspire his listeners to
practice the Gita in their daily life and to make the Gita a driving force in
their consciousness. The purpose of this book is to enable Easwaran's readers,
also, to translate the timeless values of the Gita into their daily living
through the practice of meditation.
Easwaran began studying Sankirt, the language of the ancient Hindu
scripture, at the age of ten in his village school in Kerala state, India. He
also studied Sanskirt at his ancestral Shiva temple under a priest from a
community which is well known in India for its pure Sanskirt tradition.
Thoroughly familiar with the Gita in the original Sanskirt, Easwaran is also
perfectly at home in English, though Malayalam is his mother tongue. In
Interpreting the scriptures, however, he relies on neither his Sanskirt nor
his English scholarship, but on his experience in meditation and his personal
practice of the spiritual life. He grew up in a large joint family in the
matrilineal tradition of Kerala, and he considers his mother's mother, the
flower of the Eknath family, his spiritual teacher.
It is said that every spiritual teacher has a particular context in which
he or she flourishes best. Easwaran is an educator. Formerly, he would say, it
was education for scholarship, education for degrees; now it is education for
living. Before he came to the United States he was chairman of the Department
of English at the University of Nagpur and was devoted to his students and the
literature he taught them. After coming to this country on the Fulbright
exchange program in 1959, Easwaran began giving talks on meditation and
spiritual life, and the response was so great that in 1960 he established the
Blue Mountain Center of Meditation in Berkeley to carry on his work of
teaching meditation. Since that time, except for one return to India, he has
been giving ongoing classes each week on the practice of meditation and
commenting on the writings of the great mystics of all religions, including
the Yogasûtras of Patanjali, the Little Flowers of St. Francis,
the writings of Meister Eckhart, the Upanishads, the Bhaktisûtras of
Nârada, the Dhammapada of the Buddha, the Sermon on the Mount, Thomas a
Kempis's Of the Imitation of Christ, and the Bhagavad Gita. He also
teaches courses on meditation and on Mahatma Gandhi for the University of
California Extension, Berkeley. In Nagpur, he likes to tell us laughingly, he
had a reputation for always dragging Sri Ramakrishna into his lectures on
Shakespeare and Shaw. Now, in these talks on the Gita, it is Shakespeare who
illustrates the teachings of Sri Ramakrishna and St. Francis. The content has
changed, but the context in which Easwaran flourishes cannot be very
different: a small but extremely devoted group, perhaps eighty to a hundred,
mostly young people of the sort who gravitate to a university town, gathered
around in a semicircle to drink in the words of a man who is talking not about
something he has read or something he has thought out, but about something he
has experienced in his own life.
So this is a very special kind of book. Easwaran likes to say that it has
grown like a tree because it issues directly from his life, which is so
completely rooted in the Gita that every day he gains a deeper understanding
of its teachings during even the most commonplace experiences: sharing ice
cream with the âshram children in Santa Rosa, walking with friends down
Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, watching a mime with his wife in San Francisco's
Union Square. Every Tuesday night in class this tree would flower, and we
would hear these incidents retold as precise, profound illustrations of the
Gita's applicability to our modern world. You can follow these incidents in
this book, week by week, and at the same time you can trace the growth of the
Blue Mountain Center of Meditation itself: the long months of looking for an
âshram site, the building and remodeling when Ramagiri Ashram was acquired,
the arrival of Easwaran's mother and nieces from India. The results is a
living document which, as Easwaran says, is still growing even now and which
will continue to grow as it is read and absorbed by others into their own
lives.
Easwaran has chosen to comment on the eighteen chapters of the Gita in
three volumes, each volume covering six chapters. It is said that these three
parts of the Gita illustrate the glorious truth of the Upanishads Tat tvam
asi, "That thou art." The first six chapters are an exposition
of tvam, 'thou,' the Âtman, and reveal the nature of our real, eternal
Self. The second six chapters concern Tat, 'That': Brahman, the supreme
Reality underlying all creation. The last six chapters explain asi,
'is,' the relationship between tvam and Tat, between the Self
within and the supreme Reality which unites all existence into one whole. The
Gita develops this truth of the Upanishads Tat tvam asi, "That
thou art": by discovering our real Self we become united with the Ground
of all existence and realize the indivisible unity of all life.
Easwaran would like to convey his appreciation to everyone who has helped
with this book, including those who have attended the Gita talks with
sustained enthusiasm over the years. He wishes to express his deep love to all
the members of his spiritual family who have assisted in translating,
recorded, transcribed, editing, and printing this commentary on the Gita.
In turn we, the editors, speaking for everyone who has helped, feel that
working on this book has been a great privilege. Nachiketa, the student in the
Katha Upanishad, tells Yama, "A teacher of this, another like you, is not
to be had. No other boon is equal to this at all." And as the reader will
see, such a combination of enlightenment and practical, effective teaching as
is found here is rare indeed, difficult to find in the modern world.
__________
1. Easwaran is the given name
by which he is known among his friends; Eknath is the name of his
ancestral family. Sri is used in India as a respectful form of
address.
__________
Easwaran, Eknath. The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living:
Chapters 1 Through 6.
(Preface: "A Living Tree," by Ramagiri
Ashram), (The Blue Mountain Center of
Meditation, Berkeley, California, 1975), pp. 7-10.
