Svāmī Dayānanda Sarasvatī's translation of the Bhagavad Gītā remains the one most aligned with our own sensibilities - he presses hardest on the ontological points and unfolds the words most precisely. For going further, the Bhagavad Gītā Home Study Course is authoritative: nine volumes, roughly four thousand pages, available from Arsha Vidyā. We have relied on it more than on anything else.

James Swartz teaches widely in video, in print and in person. Beyond the site listed above, three of his books have been particularly useful: The Essence of Enlightenment, The Three Gunas: A Guide to Yoga Philosophy and Practice, and The World is Too Small to Trouble a Wise Person.

We have also benefited from the Śrī Gangadhareswar Trust, and from Svāmī Sivananda's Vedānta for Beginners (Divine Life Society, Delhi).

Alongside the dictionaries and corpora listed above, we have drawn on the Holy Bhagavad Gītā site for some word translations, on advaidam.com, practicalphilosophy.in, Yogapedia and Wikipedia, and on various AI tools for editing, sourcing and rearranging.

Special gratitude to Andre Vas for his model of AI training on key Advaita Vedānta texts, and for his organisation of Sanskrit grammar - one of the first such models we became aware of. His Sanskrit Garden is listed on our Sanskrit resources page.

The first translation into any European language was Charles Wilkins's The Bhăgvăt-Gēētā (1785), made under the patronage of Warren Hastings. It was an earlier book than the one most associated with the Transcendentalists - Edwin Arnold's The Song Celestial (1885), which reached Gandhi in London and a generation of Western seekers after him.

The movement's third major figure is less often connected to this material and is worth naming. Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) was the first editor of The Dial, the Transcendentalist quarterly, and the author of Woman in the Nineteenth Century, the first substantial feminist work published in America. Her own comparative reading ran toward Greek, Egyptian and Norse sources rather than Indian ones, and the journal's Ethnical Scriptures column - which printed selections from the Laws of Manu and other Asian texts - began only after Emerson and Thoreau succeeded her as editor.

What makes her relevant here is not a citation but a pattern. Dacher Keltner, whose Awe (2023) brought this reading to our attention, describes how the experience of awe dissolved the tightly gendered self that Fuller's century had assigned her, and released her to seek what she called the all - a movement from a constricted personal identity toward something unbounded. That is the shape of the Gītā's own argument stated in a nineteenth-century American register: the self that dissolves is the constructed one, and what remains is not smaller than the person but larger.

We have found much value in spending time with a number of different versions of the Gītā and of the Upaniṣadic verses, as no doubt many of you have. They each have a different tenor. We cannot attest to the word-by-word theological accuracy of any of them - or, for that matter, of our own - yet anyone who with sincere effort tries to bring wisdom to others is doing great service. We honour them with adoring kinship. Om Tat Sat.

Our notes on what each translation does differently sit beside the books themselves, on the Bhagavad Gītāḥ page - tap the i on any cover.

With thanks to David R, Suus G, German M, Sitaram K, and to many others besides.

If we have neglected to mention a source, or you notice an error, please let us know - we would rather fix it than keep it.