Vishada to Prasada: A Re-reading of the Bhagavad Gita

What is a man to do at the hour when the work that is nobody's but his own stands in front of him, and the wish to do it is no longer in him? That is the condition the Gita opens with. And the arguments for moving away, set out in its first chapter, are not weak ones - they are arguments of order, of relation, of consequence, and of right and wrong. The other seventeen chapters are the testing of them. This re-reading does not give the meaning of every verse. It holds to one distinction that the text itself keeps: which way the act went, and whether the doer was bound by it. These are two questions and not one - and the answer to either gives no leave from the other. What lies between is the distance between two of the text's own words: grief at the beginning, prasada at the end. And the test too is the text's own. At the end of the talk Arjuna did not move away. He rose. How the book is built > Who it is for The reader who has read the Gita already and is not satisfied by the summaries of it. This is no commentary, no retelling, and no book of devotion.