Bhagavad-Gītā As It Is

For each verse, the book (in complete editions) includes the Devanagari script, a Latin transliteration, word-for-word Sanskrit-English meanings, and English translation.

The narrative in the Bhagavad-Gītā concerns a dialogue between Lord Krishna and a mighty warrior named Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra.

Krishna assumes the role of Arjuna's chariot driver and aids him in the battle and reveals to Arjuna several divine truths about human existence in the material plane, the true nature of the supreme personality of God, and the method of eternal progression and release from the earthly cycles of death and rebirth through the practice of bhakti yoga.

Bhagavad-Gītā As It Is is written in the tradition of Gaudiya Vaishnavism, whose followers regard the Bhagavad Gita as the essence of the Vedic knowledge and the Upanishads, and consider the book authoritative and literally true.

Bhagavad-Gītā As It Is suggests a way of life for the contemporary Western world, and is derived from the Manu Smriti and other books of Hindu religious and social law.

In this way of life, ideal human society is described as being divided into four varnas (brahmana – intellectuals, kshatriya – administrators, vaishya – merchants, shudra – workers).

Within his writings, Prabhupada supports the view that one becomes a member of one of the varnas, not by one's birth (lineage), but by one's personal qualities (guṇa) and the type of work (karma) one actually performs (BG 4.13).

After Srila Prabhupada had passed away in 1977, the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust (BBT) published in 1983 a "Revised and Enlarged" posthumous edition containing at least one thousand substantial changes.

Prabhupada's translation is sold outside India due to the efforts of Hare Krishna members on the streets, in airports, and in other public places.

It has been published in fifty-nine languages, including French, German, Danish, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Swedish, Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Latvian, Ukrainian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Georgian, Croatian, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Nepali, Hindi, Bengali, Assamese, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Malayalam, Odia, Tamil, and Telugu.