How this edition was made

The Sanskrit text of the Bhagavad Gita is thousands of years old and in the public domain. It is taken here from a public-domain digital edition, checked against two further independent sources, and checked again against the rules of the script itself. It is never typed by hand, so no verse can be quietly corrupted along the way.

That is not a formality. The original dataset turned out to contain 58 corrupted verses, and all of them were found and fixed this way.

The English translations are original to this edition. Most well-known translations are still under copyright, and the older ones that are not tend to be written in a Victorian English that gets between the reader and the meaning. Translating afresh keeps one consistent voice across all 700 verses.

Every verse gets the same four things: a plain-English explanation, one concrete example from ordinary life, and a section on the philosophy underneath. The writing is held to a reading level an ordinary reader can follow - not by simplifying the ideas, but by keeping the sentences short and the vocabulary plain.

Where the great commentarial traditions genuinely disagree - and on some verses they disagree deeply - this edition says so rather than quietly picking a side.

The interface and the chapter descriptions are available in English and Hindi. The verse commentary is being added in Hindi chapter by chapter; where a chapter is not yet translated, it appears in English.

All 700 verses of Sanskrit are already here. The commentary is being written chapter by chapter, and each chapter goes live as it is finished.