5. Yoga in the Bhagavad Gita (c. 100 CE)

The popular text of the Bhagavad Gita, which is in eighteen chapters, comprises about two-thirds of The Book of the Bhagavad Gita (Bhagavadgitaparvan), which is the sixty-third of the hundred minor books of the Mahabharata.

The Mahabharata was composed from bardic and local sources between about 500 BCE and 400 CE; it is a massive text (the longest epic in the world) of around 100,000 verses, and is by far the largest of the two great epics of Hinduism (the other being the Ramayana).

In the Mokshadharma section of the Mahabharata, which is a part (chapters 168–353) of the twelfth major book (Shantiparvan), various philosophical schools are discussed, including that of yoga.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna is given divine instruction by his charioteer, who is the god Krishna in disguise. The setting for the instruction is a battlefield (at Kurukshetra, near Delhi) upon which two branches of the Bharata (or Kuru) family, to which Arjuna belongs, are about to go to war.

Krishna instructs Arjuna that there are three kinds of yoga: jnana yoga (the yoga of knowledge), bhakti yoga (the yoga of religious devotion), and karma yoga (the yoga of action without a desire for reward). These three paths are essentially 'mental' paths, none of which requires discipline of the body or of the breath.

In the Bhagavad Gita, yoga is nearly always for some purpose, requiring strenuous effort, which transforms the 'vision' and understanding of the practitioner.

The Gita warns against withdrawal from the world: liberation results from spiritual insight, devotion to god, or from selflessly performing our social duties, knowing that our souls undergo transmigration in many bodies over many aeons.

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