A Sacred Epic

Paramahansa Yogananda’s The Yoga of the Gita

Jun 10, 2008

Paramahansa Yogananda, Book Cover - Songs of the Soul

The Bhagavad Gita is the most famous part of the sacred Sanskrit poem, Mahabharata, which is the longest epic poem in existence.

In 2007, Self-Realization Fellowship released Paramahansa Yogananda’s The Yoga of the Bhagavad Gita. This important book serves as useful summary and introduction to Yogananda’s classic work titled God Talks to Arjuna.

Preface

In the Preface, a quotation from Paramahansa Yogananda, founder of Self-Realization Fellowship and Kriya Yoga teacher, asserts, “Sri Krishna’s message in the Bhagavad Gita is the perfect answer for the modern age, and any age: Yoga of dutiful action, of nonattachment, and of meditation for God-realization.”

The Gita offers “a timeless prescription for the happiness and balanced success of everyday life.” Such descriptions might lead a reader to think the Gita a self-help book rather than a poem. While the Gita has been translated by many who have grasped the surface of its meaning, now the full import can be experienced through Yogananda’s enlightened translation.

Many translations and explanations of this sacred Hindu scriptural poem have been offered over the centuries, but for the first time, the world is experiencing a translation and explication that is truly authentic as well as accurate: “What distinguishes the original translation by Paramahansa Yogananda is that, for the first time, the English rendering was done with an understanding of the profound inner symbology hidden in the Sanskrit verses.”

The Preface of this text explains that the historical battle dramatized in the Gita is “an allegory of the inner conflict between man’s base materialistic instincts and his innate yearning to attain the blissful spiritual consciousness of the oneness with the Divine.” The names of the characters appearing the poem are symbols, and Yogananda expertly interprets the meaning of the symbology.

Part 1: Keys to the Gita’s Wisdom

Introducing the sacred poem, Paramahansa Yogananda explains that the meaning of “Bhagavad Gita” is “the song of the spirit.” The text is the Hindu’s “Holy Testament” or Bible. He remarks, “the entire knowledge of the cosmos is packed into the Gita.” The spirituality of the Gita is displayed in its “rhetoric, alliteration, diction, style, and harmony”—all which give testimony that it exists from a former “glorious golden age.”

Part 1 goes on to offer valuable tools for understanding the metaphoric language and symbology of the great epic with the following section titles: The Spiritual Battle of Everyday Life, Yoga: The Method of Victory, The Psychological Forces That Oppose the Soul, The Triumph of the Soul through Practice of Yoga.

Part 2: The Bhagavad Gita (translation by Paramahansa Yogananda)

Part 2 of this great text offers a summary of the Gita, with the following section titles: The Despondency of Arjuna, Sankhya and Yoga: Cosmic Wisdom and the Method of Its Attainment, Karma Yoga: The Path of Spiritual Action, The Supreme Science of Knowing God, Freedom Through Inner Renunciation, and twelve addition sections.

Conclusion: “Arise! Before you is the royal path!”

The parting words of the Conclusion to The Yoga of the Gita are an enticement to follow that “royal path.” It makes clear that the Gita is a profound poem and a living scripture based on the scientific principles that inform yoga.

While many people believe that poetry and science are polar opposites, the message of the Gita, when accurately translated and interpreted as it is here by Paramahansa Yogananda, demonstrates that the two fields merge and create the way to God-realization: “the story [of the Bhagavad Gita] is the story of the soul’s journey back to God.” And according to all great spiritual leaders, that is “a journey each one must make.”