Bhagavad Gita

Eknath Easwaran (1910-1999) brings to this volume a rare combination of credentials. Trained from a young age in one of the purest Sanskrit traditions in India, he had a deep intuitive knowledge of his own Hindu legacy. He also had a great love of Western literature and was chairman of the English department at a major Indian university when he came to the United States on a Fulbright fellowship in 1959. From the 1960s onwards, Easwaran held classes on mysticism and practical spirituality for a primarily American audience. A gifted teacher, he was able to anticipate the problems that Western readers may have with the concepts underlying the classics of Indian spirituality, and to explain them in fresh and profoundly simple ways.In 1961 Easwaran founded the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation in California, and in 1967, at the University of California, Berkeley, he taught the first academic course on meditation ever offered for credit at a major American university. He continued to teach passage meditation and his Eight Point Program for spiritual living to an American and international audience for almost forty years. His twenty-seven books on meditation and the classics of world mysticism have been translated into twenty-five languages.Easwaran drew on the Bhagavad Gita throughout his life for deep inspiration. He shared Mahatma Gandhi’s view that you can turn to this great Indian scripture for guidance on any problem, in any age, because it is universal and eternal. As Huston Smith writes, Easwaran lived the Gita.Through the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation and its publishing arm, Nilgiri Press, Easwaran continues to reach an ever-growing audience around the world through publications and retreats.Chapter introductions and notes are by Diana Morrison, who has a masters degree in Comparative Literature and Sanskrit from the University of California, Berkeley. She has taught college courses on Hinduism and for many years has been an editor at Nilgiri Press.