About the Bhagavad Gita: chapters, verses and setting

The Bhagavad Gita, "the song of the Lord", is a Sanskrit poem of 700 verses in 18 chapters. It forms part of the Bhishma Parva, the sixth book of the Mahabharata. Its setting is the field of Kurukshetra, just before the great battle is to begin. The warrior Arjuna, seeing his teachers and relatives drawn up on both sides, lays down his bow and refuses to fight. The rest of the poem is the conversation that follows between Arjuna and Krishna, who is serving as his charioteer.

The whole dialogue is reported to the blind king Dhritarashtra by his minister Sanjaya, which is why the poem opens with the king's question and closes with Sanjaya's words. There are thus four voices in the poem: Dhritarashtra, Sanjaya, Arjuna and Krishna, who speaks by far the greater part.

The eighteen chapters

Each chapter is called an अध्याय (adhyaya) and is named as a "yoga", a discipline or path. The names below are as given in the source we used; other editions give slightly different names for some chapters. The verse counts are those found by our program in that source.

Some printed editions count 35 verses in the thirteenth chapter, by including an opening question from Arjuna, which gives 701 in all. The 700-verse count is the usual one.

What the chapters are about

Readers commonly group the eighteen chapters in three sets of six. The first six deal mainly with action and self-discipline: the grief of Arjuna, the nature of the self, work without attachment, and meditation. The middle six turn to devotion and to the nature of the divine, reaching a climax in the vision of the universal form in the eleventh chapter. The last six analyse knowledge, the three qualities of nature (गुण), faith, and freedom, and close with the final teaching. This three-part reading is a traditional aid, not a rule; themes run across the whole book.

The language and the metre

Most of the Gita is in the anushtubh metre, the "shloka" proper, with four quarters of eight syllables. At moments of heightened feeling, such as the description of the eternal self in the second chapter and the vision of the eleventh, the poem moves into a longer metre with eleven syllables in each quarter. The Sanskrit is classical and comparatively simple, which is one reason the Gita has been a first reading text for students for centuries. Much of its vocabulary lives on in Hindi: कर्म, धर्म, योग, ज्ञान, भक्ति, आत्मा, शांति.

How the Gita is studied

Over many centuries the great teachers of the different schools of Indian philosophy wrote commentaries on the Gita, each reading it in the light of their own tradition, and they differ on important points. In modern times it has been translated into most of the world's languages. This site does not enter into those interpretations. It offers a small number of well-known verses with the plain meaning of their words, as an aid to learning Sanskrit, and leaves deeper study to teachers and to the traditional commentaries.

The verses on this site

We give 36 verses, grouped by subject: duty and action, the self that does not die, the steady mind, mastering the mind, knowledge, learning and speech, devotion and assurance. To see how any verse is taken apart and understood, read how to read a shloka.

The figures on this page (verses in each chapter) were counted by a program in the text fetched from Sanskrit Wikisource on 12 November 2026. Statements about the Gita's place in the Mahabharata and its metres are general, long-established facts.