Although widely published and read by itself, Bhagavad-gītā originally appears as an episode in the Mahābhārata, the epic Sanskrit history of the ancient world. The Mahābhārata tells of events leading up to the present Age of Kali. It was at the beginning of this age, some fifty centuries ago, that Lord Kṛṣṇa spoke Bhagavad-gītā to His friend and devotee Arjuna.
 
Their discourse – one of the greatest philosophical and religious dialogues known to man – took place just before the onset of war, a great fratricidal conflict between the hundred sons of Dhṛtarāṣṭra and on the opposing side their cousins the Pāṇḍavas, or sons of Pāṇḍu. Begin your spiritual journey with this most excellent of road maps.
 
“In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita, in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial”-Henry David Thoreau
 
 “I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad-gita. It was the first of books: it was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us” -Ralph Waldo Emerson