God Talks With Arjuna: The Bhagavad Gita --- A Review

"God Talks With Arjuna: The Bhagavad Gita: Royal Science of God Realization. The Immortal Dialogue Between Soul and Spirit" comes in two volumes, and this review is of the first volume that contains the first five chapters of the Bhagavad Gita that has 18 chapters.

The Bhagavad Gita (aka Gita), sometimes called "The Song by God" (especially in the West), contains 700 verses, a dialogue between a warrior called Arjuna and his cousin Sri Krishna, who is none other than the primeval force of the universe. The Gita is actually an excerpt from the Mahabharata, where the dialogue is found in chapters 23–40 of book 6 of the epic. Undoubtedly, it is one of the holiest texts of Hinduism, and of all living religions of the world today.

There are innumerable commentaries on the Gita, most of them can be safely ignored, however; there are also a number of others, like the one I am writing about, that occupy a very important place in the lives of serious spiritual aspirants. What one finds in the text that I am reviewing is the commentary on the Gita by Paramahansa Yogananda, the author of Autobiography of a Yogi.

Paramahansa Yogananda, who belongs to the Advaitic school, explains the 700 verses from the  Vedantic point of view, which identifies the individual self (atman) with the ground of reality (brahman). According to Advaita all reality and everything in the experienced world has its root in Brahman, which is unchanging Consciousness; there is no duality between a Creator and the created universe. All objects, all experiences, all matter, all consciousness, all awareness are somehow also this one fundamental reality Brahman. That is the gist of Swami Yogananda's commentary on chapters 1 to 5.

In his commentaries, one also finds useful advice to aspirants who are desirous of self-realisation. Replete with scientific, philosophical and scriptural anecdotes, analogies, examples and citations, the work scintillates with extreme brilliance. It is not marred by sectarian bias and bigotry, a hallmark of Srila Prabhupada's "Bhagavad Gita As it is".

The Sanskrit transliteration and translations in "God Talks With Arjuna" are accurate, authentic and reliable. This is a book for scholars and lay persons alike.