Dear Friends,

The Gita in a Nutshell is a condensation of a larger mystical work, called the Bhagavad Gita. The Bhagavad Gita consists of eighteen chapters of poetic verse in Sanskrit, and represents a dialogue between Krishna (God) and Arjuna (God’s devotee). There are literally hundreds of translations, many of these with lengthy commentaries. It is the central feature of an epic poem, the Mahabharata, which takes up several printed volumes. Some, though not all, students of the Bhagavad Gita, believe that it existed before the Mahabharata was written, passed down orally from guru to disciple, and was incorporated into the epic by its author, Vyasa, at a much later date.

There is also speculation by some scholars that the Bhagavad Gita was once a very short work on yoga consisting of a mere fraction of the verses that make up today’s version. The process of summing up the Gita in such short form for this book, involved extracting verses from what appears to be the original version, as well as a few other verses from chapters supposedly added later, and doing a great deal of condensing and consolidating. The purpose of this endeavor was to make this otherwise cumbersome masterpiece more accessible and easier to use for the Westerner.

Any scripture can be understood at many levels. In the great mystical works, the same idea often recurs in various places throughout. This is not an accident, nor is it poetic license. This device gives the author-teacher the opportunity to present an idea in different ways so that it might have a better chance of being grasped by the reader-student. It also provides an excellent means of pointing to deeper meanings, esotericisms, mysteries, that hide out in the original language, and at the same time, give the student of yoga a resource for understanding the various stages through which she or he must pass in the process of sadhana.

Durga Ma
Tarzana, California
January, 2001

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