In That Same Path

Bhagavad-Gita 4.11

Eknath Easwaran on the Bhagavad Gita

The Bhagavad Gita, the “Song of the Lord,” is Hinduism’s best-known scripture and one of India’s greatest gifts to the world, a masterpiece of world poetry on which countless mystics have drawn for daily practical guidance. Composed sometime between the fifth and second centuries B.C.E., it has the character of an Upanishad, inserted into the epic Mahabharata just before the outset of a devastating dynastic war. Against this background the teaching of the Gita unfolds, couched as a dialogue between Sri Krishna, a divine incarnation, and his friend and disciple Arjuna, a warrior prince who represents anyone trying to live a spiritual life in the midst of worldly activity and conflict. Part of Mahatma Gandhi’s genius was to interpret the Gita’s teachings as a manual for selfless action in a world of conflict, where the battle that forms its background is essentially the “war within”: the struggle between selfishness and selflessness in the depths of human consciousness.

–Eknath Easwaran, editor and translator [Bhagavad-Gita (Commentary in spiritual anthology, “God Makes the Rivers to Flow.”] p. 290.

All Paths Lead to Me

He who knows me as his own divine Self,
As the Operator in him, breaks through
The belief he is the body, and is
Not born separate again. Such a one
Is united with me, O Arjuna.

Delivered from selfish attachment, fear,
And anger, filled with Me, surrendering
Themselves to me, purified in the fire
Of my Being, many have reached the
State of Unity in me.

As people approach me, so I receive
Them. All paths lead to me, O Arjuna.

–Eknath Easwaran, editor and translator [Bhagavad-Gita 4:9-11 (passage meditation in spiritual anthology, “God Makes the Rivers to Flow.”] pp. 182, 290.