Eighteen chapters, seven hundred verses

Arjuna-viṣāda Yoga · 47 verses

Two armies face each other. Arjuna asks his charioteer to drive him into the gap between them so he can see who he is about to fight. He looks, and he recognises everyone: his teachers, his cousins, the men who taught him to hold a bow. His body gives out. He puts down his weapon and sits down in the chariot.

Sāṅkhya Yoga · 72 verses

Krishna begins to answer. He starts where Arjuna is stuck — on death — and argues that what is truly you was never born and cannot be killed. Then he turns from what is real to what to do about it, and lays down the idea the rest of the book is built on: do your work, and let go of your grip on how it turns out.

Karma Yoga · 43 verses

If understanding is better than action, Arjuna asks, why push me into this terrible fight? Krishna answers that nobody gets to not act. Sitting still is also a choice with consequences. The question was never whether to act, only what you are acting for.

Jñāna-karma-sannyāsa Yoga · 42 verses

Krishna says this teaching is old, and that he has taught it before. Arjuna asks how that can be, since they are both alive now. The answer opens out into who Krishna is, and why the divine takes form when things go badly wrong.

Karma-sannyāsa Yoga · 29 verses

Arjuna is still confused. Krishna keeps praising both giving things up and getting on with the work. Which is it? Krishna answers that they arrive at the same place, but one is easier to walk. You can hold everything lightly while your hands are still busy.

Ātma-saṃyama Yoga · 47 verses

The practical chapter. How to sit, how to eat, how to steady attention. Arjuna objects that the mind is as hard to hold as the wind. Krishna agrees — and says it can still be done, by practice and by loosening your grip.

Jñāna-vijñāna Yoga · 30 verses

Krishna turns to his own nature — the whole world as his lower form, and something finer behind it. He describes the four kinds of people who turn toward the divine, including, plainly, those who come because they want something.

Akṣara-brahma Yoga · 28 verses

Arjuna asks a run of direct questions about what lasts, what dies, and what happens at the end. Krishna answers with the long view: vast cycles of time, and what the mind turns to in its final moment.

Rāja-vidyā-rāja-guhya Yoga · 34 verses

Krishna calls this the most direct teaching of all, and the most freely given. Everything rests in him without him being caught up in it. And the door is open to anyone at all — a leaf, a flower, water offered honestly is enough.

Vibhūti Yoga · 42 verses

Arjuna asks where he should look to find the divine. Krishna answers with a long list: among mountains, the Himalaya; among rivers, the Ganges; among words, the single syllable. Wherever something is at its fullest, look there.

Viśvarūpa-darśana Yoga · 55 verses

Arjuna asks to see it directly. He is given the eyes to do so, and what he sees is not comforting: every world and every being at once, and time itself devouring everything. He is terrified and begs for the familiar face back.

Bhakti Yoga · 20 verses

After the terror of the vision, the shortest and gentlest chapter. Arjuna asks which is better: to love a form you can hold in mind, or the formless. Krishna says the road with a face on it is kinder, then describes what someone who has arrived is actually like to be around.

Kṣetra-kṣetrajña-vibhāga Yoga · 35 verses

A clean distinction: your body and mind are a field, and there is something that knows the field. Krishna lists what real knowing looks like in a person — and almost all of it turns out to be character rather than cleverness.

Guṇa-traya-vibhāga Yoga · 27 verses

Everything in nature is woven from three strands: clarity, drive, and inertia. They bind even good people, and they take turns. Krishna describes how to recognise which one has hold of you right now, and what it looks like to no longer be pulled by any of them.

Puruṣottama Yoga · 20 verses

An upside-down tree, roots in the sky and branches below, as an image of the world we live in. Krishna says to take an axe to it — not to the world, but to the attachment that keeps you hanging in its branches.

Daivāsura-sampad-vibhāga Yoga · 24 verses

Two sets of qualities are laid side by side. One opens a life out: fearlessness, honesty, patience, no appetite for cruelty. The other closes it down: self-display, anger, the certainty that you are owed. Krishna is blunt about where each leads.

Śraddhā-traya-vibhāga Yoga · 28 verses

Arjuna asks about people who are sincere but do things their own way. Krishna answers that faith takes the colour of the person holding it, then runs the three strands through everything: what you eat, what you give, what you do without being asked.

Mokṣa-sannyāsa Yoga · 78 verses

The longest chapter gathers everything. What giving up really means, how the three strands shape knowledge and work and happiness, why doing your own work imperfectly beats performing someone else's. Then the final turn, and Krishna's last word — which is not an order, but a choice handed back.