The Gita Around the World

What happened

Eliot names Krishna outright in the third of the Four Quartets, written during the Blitz: “I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant.” He then compresses the Gita's central instruction into two words — fare forward — addressed to travellers who cannot know whether they will arrive.

Thematic connection

BG 2.47 tells Arjuna his claim is on the action, never on its fruit. Eliot puts that teaching in the mouth of wartime: act rightly now, without the consolation of knowing how it ends. It is the Gita's karma yoga rewritten for a country under bombardment.

What happened

Hesse's novel follows a seeker who abandons every borrowed path — Brahmin ritual, ascetic self-denial, the Buddha's own sangha — because none of them is his. Scholars have traced its structure to the Gita: Siddhartha's final realisation by the river, that the world must be accepted rather than fled, is the Gita's answer to renunciation.

Thematic connection

BG 3.35 is the verse that refuses borrowed lives: better to perform your own dharma imperfectly than another's dharma well. Siddhartha's entire arc is a dramatisation of that line — he can only be saved by the path that is his.

What happened

Huxley wrote the introduction to the 1944 Prabhavananda–Isherwood translation of the Gita — the edition that carried the text into mid-century American letters — and made it a cornerstone of The Perennial Philosophy the following year, his argument that the world's mystical traditions converge on a single insight.

Thematic connection

BG 6.29 states that insight plainly: the disciplined see the Self in all beings and all beings in the Self. Huxley's whole thesis — that Christian, Sufi, Buddhist and Vedantic mystics are describing one thing — is an expansion of this verse.

What happened

Salinger read the Gita every morning, and his novel's climax is a lecture in karma yoga: Zooey tells his sister — collapsed on the sofa, sick with disgust at a world of phonies — that she must do her work, act, and detach entirely from what the work earns her. The book ends not with escape but with a return to duty.

Thematic connection

BG 2.47 is the anti-burnout verse, and Franny's crisis is burnout: she is paralysed because she cannot bear the fruits of her actions — applause, ego, the college play. Zooey's cure is the Gita's: act for the act's sake, and the paralysis dissolves.

What happened

Harrison read the Gita daily after meeting Krishna devotees in the late 1960s. “Within You Without You” (Sgt. Pepper, 1967) put Vedantic non-duality on the biggest-selling record in Britain; “The Lord Loves the One” (Living in the Material World, 1973) sets the Gita's promise of divine reciprocity to slide guitar.

Thematic connection

BG 9.22 is exactly the bargain Harrison sings: to those who are constantly devoted, Krishna carries what they lack and preserves what they have. The Beatle who had everything the material world could give spent the rest of his life setting that verse to music.

What happened

Coltrane's reading in the years before A Love Supreme included the Bhagavad Gita alongside Vedanta, Ramakrishna, Krishnamurti and Yogananda. The album is structured as an offering — its four movements titled Acknowledgement, Resolution, Pursuance and Psalm — and the liner note is a prayer, not a credit.

Thematic connection

BG 9.27: whatever you do, whatever you eat, whatever you offer — do it as an offering to Me. That is the formal shape of A Love Supreme. Coltrane did not write a record about God; he made the playing itself the offering, which is precisely the verse's instruction.

What happened

Heisenberg travelled to India in 1929 and spent time in long conversation with Rabindranath Tagore about Indian philosophy. He said afterwards that the ideas he had found most absurd in his own physics — that the observed and the observer cannot be separated, that a thing has no fixed state until it is measured — stopped seeming absurd once he had a philosophical tradition that assumed as much.

Thematic connection

BG 2.16 draws the line the Gita never crosses: the unreal has no being, the real never ceases to be. Heisenberg's uncertainty is not a claim that nothing is real — it is a claim that the reality is not where classical physics kept looking. Both are arguments about what counts as fundamental.

What happened

Schrödinger kept Vedantic philosophy — of which the Gita is the popular summation — at the centre of his metaphysics for his entire life, and wrote it out most directly in My View of the World. His conclusion was not a metaphor: he held that there is literally one consciousness, and that the appearance of many minds is a trick of perspective.

Thematic connection

BG 13.28: he truly sees who sees the same Lord dwelling equally in all beings. Schrödinger arrived at the identical claim from the direction of physics — the founder of wave mechanics ending up, by his own account, an Advaitin.

What happened

Vivekananda met Tesla in New York in the 1890s and explained the Vedantic categories of prāṇa (energy) and ākāśa (the substrate from which matter arises). The line above is from Vivekananda's own letter — the reliable record of the meeting. Tesla never produced the demonstration, and the encounter has since been heavily mythologised; what is documented is the hope Vivekananda placed in it.

Thematic connection

BG 7.4 enumerates the eightfold prakṛti — the material nature out of which everything measurable is built — while insisting it is the lower nature, with consciousness as the higher. Vivekananda wanted a physicist to prove the first half. The Gita's more radical claim is the second half, which no equation has yet touched.

What happened

Williams carried a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, a small Ganesha idol and a St Christopher medallion on her 2007 mission, and flew with the Gita and the Upanishads again on Boeing's Starliner in June 2024 — the flight whose thruster failures stranded her aboard the ISS for nine months instead of eight days.

Thematic connection

BG 9.4 says the whole universe is pervaded by the Divine in unmanifest form — every thing rests in It, and It rests in no thing. It is a strange verse to read at 400 km, watching the planet that contains everything you have ever loved go by once every 90 minutes, and stranger still when the ride home stops working.

What happened

Gabbard, the first Hindu elected to the U.S. Congress, took her oath of office in January 2013 with her hand on her own well-worn copy of the Bhagavad Gita rather than a Bible. She later gave that same personal copy to Narendra Modi during his 2014 visit to New York, and took the oath on the Gita again on becoming Director of National Intelligence.

Thematic connection

BG 18.47 is the Gita's argument from svadharma: the duty ordained by your own nature, done imperfectly, beats another's duty done well. An oath of office is precisely a public claim about duty — which makes the Gita, whatever one makes of the politics, an unusually apt book to swear on.

What happened

Within a single month in 2014, Modi presented a copy of the Bhagavad Gita to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, to Emperor Akihito at the Imperial Palace, and to U.S. President Barack Obama at the White House — making the text, rather than the customary shawl or silverware, India's signature diplomatic gift.

Thematic connection

BG 3.21 is the verse about exemplary action: whatever a great person does, others follow; the standard they set, the world pursues. A head of state choosing what to hand another head of state is doing exactly that — selecting, in public, the thing his country wants to be known by.

What happened

Bhaker, who had crashed out of Tokyo 2020 with a malfunctioning pistol, described reading the Bhagavad Gita in the run-up to Paris. Standing on the line for the final shots, she said she deliberately stopped tracking the scoreboard — and became the first Indian woman to win an Olympic shooting medal.

Thematic connection

BG 2.47 is the most quoted verse in the Gita and the hardest to actually do: your claim is on the action, never on the fruit. In a sport decided by fractions of a millimetre, thinking about the medal is the fastest way to lose it. Bhaker's account is the verse as sports psychology, and it worked.

What happened

Humboldt learned Sanskrit in his fifties in order to read the Gita, then delivered two lectures on it to the Berlin Academy in 1825 and 1826. His verdict — the single most quoted sentence ever written about the text — is routinely misattributed to others. He wrote to a friend that he felt “a sense of overwhelming gratitude to God for having let me live to be acquainted with this work.”

Thematic connection

BG 4.38 claims there is nothing in this world as purifying as knowledge. Humboldt, a philologist and a statesman, took a text from a civilisation Europe barely acknowledged and told the Prussian Academy it was the loftiest thing the world had to show. That is the verse's claim, enacted.

What happened

Provoked by Humboldt's lectures, Hegel wrote a long two-part review essay that is really a close reading of the Gita itself — the most sustained engagement with an Indian text by any major European philosopher of the era. He treated it as India's paradigmatic work, and disagreed with it: he read the Gita's yoga as an abstraction away from the concrete world, where his own system demanded that Spirit realise itself within history.

Thematic connection

BG 2.48 defines yoga as evenness of mind, holding steady in success and failure alike — while still performing the action. Hegel saw only the withdrawal and missed the second half of the verse. The Gita's whole argument is that equanimity is what makes sustained action possible, not what replaces it.

What happened

Jung cites the Gita's promise of divine descent in The Red Book, the private journal of his confrontation with the unconscious. He returned to Indian thought repeatedly, and the parallel he drew was structural: the god who reappears when order collapses is, in his reading, also a description of what the psyche does under crisis.

Thematic connection

BG 4.7 — yadā yadā hi dharmasya — is the Gita's theory of renewal: whenever righteousness declines, the Divine manifests again. Jung's individuation is the same shape at the scale of one person. The self reasserts itself precisely at the point of breakdown, which is why he was so interested in this verse.

What happened

Wilkins produced the first translation of the Gita into any European language, printed in London by the East India Company on Warren Hastings's personal recommendation. It was rendered into French by 1787 and German by 1802 — and it is the reason Emerson, Thoreau, Schlegel, Humboldt and Hegel had a Gita to read at all.

Thematic connection

BG 1.1 is where every reader in every language begins: a blind king asks what his sons and the sons of Pandu did, gathered on the field of dharma. In 1785, for the first time, that question was asked in English — and the West's two-and-a-half-century argument with the Gita began.

What happened

Schlegel published the first critical edition of the Sanskrit text in Europe, printed in Devanagari with a facing Latin translation. Latin was still the common tongue of European scholarship, so this — not the English — is the edition Humboldt read, lectured on, and put in front of Hegel.

Thematic connection

BG 2.20 — the soul is never born and never dies — was the verse that most startled Schlegel's readers, because it made a claim about the self that European philosophy had spent centuries defending on entirely different grounds. Printing it in Latin dropped it directly into that conversation.

What happened

Arnold's blank-verse Gita appeared exactly a century after Wilkins's. Four years later, a young Indian law student in London — who had never read the Gita in his life — was persuaded by two Theosophist friends to read it with them in Arnold's English. That student was Mohandas Gandhi, and he called the book his “eternal mother” ever after.

Thematic connection

BG 2.62–63 is the ladder Gandhi quoted for the rest of his life: brooding on objects breeds attachment, attachment breeds desire, desire breeds anger — and from anger, ruin. He read it as the mechanism of every human conflict, and built a political method on interrupting it at the first rung.