The Bhagavad Gita the original translation of Swami Prabhupâda The Bhagavad Gîtâ of Order The Original text as close to the Sanskrit of MahâBhârata Bhîshma Parva chapter 23-40, as possible Translated by Anand Aadhar Prabhu Production and copyright of this translation: Anand Aadhar Prabhu Anand Aadhar is a former clinical psychologist who renounced the material way of finding happiness. He gave up his private practice of doing psychotherapy with people of dubious motivation and went to India in the late eighties to study the better and more honest approach of yoga in the different âshrama's. Thus he found the principles of equality, brotherhood and freedom or a revolution of reform more wisely respected. He met with several guru's and yoga-practitioners and learned from each of them before he arrived at his own integral practice. He was first introduced into the basics of meditation by reading the books of Rudolf Steiner and Krishnamurti and later on initiated into the secrets of yoga by Bhagavân Sri Sathya Sai Baba who with His siddhi's [yogic perfections or miracles] definitely broke his materialistic and rationalistic vision of reality in a way that left him no doubt as to how the universe is run. After visiting him he went to Poona to receive initiation from Bhagavân Sri Rajneesh, the later Osho, just before that spiritual philosopher and guru left this planet in the winter of 1990. He went to Amsterdam, London, New York and other cities where he in temples under the guidance of the disciplic succession [paramparâ] of the Brahmâ- Mâdhva Gaudyâ Vaishnava Samprâdaya studied the Sanskrit of mantra's, the vedic literatures and the culture of Krishna-bhakti in the company of the pupils of Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupâda [ISKCON]. From their more traditional appraoch he adopted the title of prabhu, the usual term used in respecting devotees, or bhakta's. The title Svâmi that he received from Osho he renounced out of respect for the âcâryas in exchange for the address of Prabhu. Apart from a bhakta-program he received no further initiation from them. The leading sannyâsis in the Netherlands at the time advised him to put his energy in doing devotional service with the computer, hence this internetsite with the Bhagavad Gîtâ and the Bhâgavatam based on the work of Swami Prabhupâda. Aadhar withdrew as an older devotee [born 1954] within his own ashram in the east of the Netherlands to more extensively study in depth the music, the Gîtâ and the Bhâgavatam. With local people interested there does he presently maintain a regular practice of hatha, bhajan, fasting, feasting, translating, studying, reading, listening and contemplating in his conclusion of Aadhar Yoga. He does no puja [idol-worship], but does regularly, to the regular of Krishna's greater nature, listen to the Gîtâ and associate in kirtan [singing together] and reading from the Bhâgavatam. The original texts and word for word-translations are of Swamî Prabhupâda and ©1989, of The Bhaktivedanta Book Trust The Bhagavad Gita the original translation of Swami Prabhupâda Introduction Dear reader, Who am I to present to you this great Song of God? I can give you my name, but this book is exactly about answering this question properly. It is about Lord Krishna explaining to His friend Arjuna who he and He Himself really is. That knowledge would give Arjuna the strength and the resolve to know and to defeat his enemies. The crisis of Arjuna is that of identity: who am I, what am I to do, how am I to see things, what is my nature, what is the right attitude? How to attain peace ànd the victory? We as readers are that Arjuna, and I as a translator/interpreter/concatenator was in the same position. I was faced with many Bhagavad Gîtâs that I, honestly, truly all couldn't read properly. First of all it is a heavy piece of philosophy actually, with which it is difficult to identify oneself. Second of all were most Gîtâs available cut into an enormous heap of philosophical fragments in studies of detail, from which the original course of reasoning became completely obscure. It was not difficult to understand what the preaching was all about, but what did the book say itself? How could I listen to the original speaker and pick it up from the heart as one usually does, following the reasoning in a book? In a book I normally want to listen to what the speaker has to say, anything in the way between me and the speaker is a hindrance. Thus can all the culture of belief and interpretation be experienced as a hindrance, or a problem of the purity of the medium between oneself and the Lord of Wisdom. I could ask myself: Am I listening to Vyâsadeva, the writer, to Sañjaya, the reporter of this discussion Vyâsa introduces as a speaker, or to Krishna, the one that is speaking to us actually? Am I listening to the spiritual teacher introducing me into this knowledge, interpreting and translating it to my and his understanding and to my and his social and personal ego-interest, to the religion of social convention keeping up the good attitude or am I just studying a medium on itself, like a material book or a modern internetpage that depends on its own material conditions managed by a publisher or webmaster? Thus this presentation of the Gîtâ is an effort to reconstruct what actually was said by Lord Krishna. I kept, translating, as close to the Sanskrit as possible trying not to add, nor to omit a single word, so that the words Vyâsadeva, the original author, used, can be appreciated as from him. On the battlefield of Kurukshetra just before the great war of the Mahâbhârata Krishna spoke these to Arjuna at the end of an era of vedic culture that left us with the nature of what we now know as modern time and by Hindus is called Kali-Yuga, the Iron age of Quarrel. I have called this Gîtâ, the Gîtâ of Order because that was what I longed for and that was what my original purpose and belief in God was: to get everything, everyone, the world, and myself in order. So, I studied what the tradition said, I remembered what I learned from modern science, philosophy and the spiritual teachings and last but not least I wanted to see my own modern/postmodern experience reflected too without falling into the selfhood of ego. From the tradition itself I learned that its approach of proper reference does not really differ from the method of modern natural science also founded on proper reference. Sañjaya could be a pure medium for the words of Krishna, because he was a loyal pupil of Vyâsadeva. So I too could be a pure medium if I would follow the same method. Thus this Gîtâ does not stand on itself but is directly born from a previous version, a line of disciplic succession, the tradition; it also originated from all the versions and the whole discussion entertained at the present time. I understood I had to cope with the whole confusion in this field. I had to choose: there are so many Gîtâs and thus so many traditions of learning to respect. There is the Gîtâ of S'ankarâcârya, the Gîtâ of Maharishi Yogi, the Gîtâ of S'rî Yukteswar, the Gîtâ of the American Gîtâ Society, the Gîtâ of W.Q. Judge of Theosophy, the Gîtâ of the internet-site for it, the Gîtâ of the Hare Krishnas and even a Gîtâ presented on television. I concluded, remembering of what I had understood thus far, that if one is not of sacrifice, that one hasn't really understood the purport of what the Lord tries to tell us. Therefore I could skip all Gîtâ 's that were not offered on the internet. Gîtâ 's not shared with the world cannot be considered as to be of good will towards the world, I could maintain as a new norm to a new medium. The knowledge of God is the property of God and not of a bookseller or institute of learning. So all claims of proprietorship or slackness in offering were disqualified. That left me with the only recently available Gîtâ of Theosophy, the always available Gîtâ 's of the American Gîtâ Society, a recently from the Internet withdrawn version of the Gîtâ from Vaishnavas in India (at the end of this translation not mentioned in the reference-links at the bottom of the page anymore), the Internet-site www.bhagavad-gita.org from another branch of western Vaishnavas for it and the original Hare Krishna Gîtâ of Swami Prabhupâda's western ISKCON-math school of Vaishnavism. The last two Gîtâ's became my stronghold of study as they were the only ones meeting the scientific demand of proper reference to the original Sanskrit, word for word. From them I could, together with the Sanskrit dictionary and a basic course in Sanskrit, reconstruct the original course of reasoning as it is offered here. As such I am a follower of this Vaishnav' culture and a pupil (of a pupil of) the âcârya (teacher, guru, by example) that introduced this method of respect for the tradition in our Western Culture. The other Gîtâ's so became just a second opinion to find out what the discussions of translation in the world were really all about, while I meanwhile kept to the siddhânta, or end conclusion of vedic study of the leading acâryâs. The Bhagavad Gita the original translation of Swami Prabhupâda This end conclusion was devised by S'rî Krishna-Caitanya (born 1486), a great devotee and âcârya of Lord Krishna who was recognized as Bhagavân, an original incarnation of the Supreme Lord.