It is a synthesis of various strands of Indian religious thought, including the Vedic concept of dharma (duty, rightful action); samkhya-based yoga and jnana (knowledge); and bhakti (devotion).

[9][10][11] Incorporating teachings from the Upanishads and the samkhya yoga philosophy, the Gita is set in a narrative framework of dialogue between the pandava prince Arjuna and his charioteer guide Krishna, an avatar of Vishnu, at the onset of the Kurukshetra War.

[6] Though the Gita praises the benefits of yoga[12][13] in releasing man's inner essence from the bounds of desire and the wheel of rebirth,[6] the text propagates the Brahmanic idea of living according to one's duty or dharma, in contrast to the ascetic ideal of seeking liberation by avoiding all karma.

The Bhagavad Gita is not to be confused with the Bhagavata Puran, which is one of the eighteen major Puranas dealing with the life of the Hindu God Krishna and various avatars of Vishnu.

[107] According to Ronald Neufeldt, it was the Theosophical Society that dedicated much attention and energy to the allegorical interpretation of the Gita, along with religious texts from around the world, after 1885 and given H. P. Blavatsky, Subba Rao and Anne Besant writings.

[125] According to Huston Smith, a notable neo-Vedantin, referring to BG XIII verse 23–25, the Gita mentions four ways to see the self, based on the Samkhya-premise that people are born with different temperaments and tendencies (guṇa).

Krishna says that such self-realized people are impartial to friends and enemies, are beyond good and evil, equally disposed to those who support them or oppose them because they have reached the summit of consciousness.

[163] According to theologian Christopher Southgate, verses of this chapter of the Gita are panentheistic,[164] while German physicist and philosopher Max Bernhard Weinstein deems the work pandeistic.

[172][173] The 13th chapter of the Gita offers the clearest enunciation of the Samkhya philosophy, states Basham, by explaining the difference between field (material world) and the knower (Self), prakriti and purusha.

[20][134][135] Krishna qualifies various aspects of human life, including faith, thoughts, deeds, and eating habits, in relation to the three gunas (modes): sattva (goodness), rajas (passion), and tamas (ignorance).

[193] Contextually, it also means the essence of "duty, law, class, social norms, ritual and cosmos itself" in the text, in the sense "the way things should be in all these different dimensions".

While Duryodhana presents it as a matter of status, social norms, and fate, Vidura states that the heroic warrior never submits, knows no fear and has the duty to protect people.

[220] Theologian Catherine Cornille writes, "The text [of the Gita] offers a survey of the different possible disciplines for attaining liberation through knowledge (Jnana), action (karma), and loving devotion to God (bhakti), focusing on the latter as both the easiest and the highest path to salvation.

"[253] Bhagavad Gita integrates various schools of thought, notably Vedanta, Samkhya and Yoga, and other theistic ideas, but its composite nature also leads to varying interpretations of the text and scholars have written bhashya (commentaries) on it.

[266] To Shankara, the teaching of the Gita is to shift an individual's focus from the outer, impermanent, fleeting objects of desire and senses to the inner, permanent, eternal atman-Brahman-Vasudeva that is identical, in everything and every being.

He interprets its teachings in the Shaiva Advaita (monism) tradition quite similar to Adi Shankara, but with the difference that he considers both Self and matter to be metaphysically real and eternal.

In 1849, the Weleyan Mission Press, Bangalore published The Bhagavat-Geeta, Or, Dialogues of Krishna and Arjoon in Eighteen Lectures, with Sanskrit, Canarese and English in parallel columns, edited by Rev.

[314]: 514  According to Larson, there is "a massive translational tradition in English, pioneered by the British, solidly grounded philologically by the French and Germans, provided with its indigenous roots by a rich heritage of modern Indian comment and reflection, extended into various disciplinary areas by Americans, and having generated in our time a broadly based cross-cultural awareness of the importance of the Bhagavad Gita both as an expression of a specifically Indian spirituality and as one of the great religious "classics" of all time.

[333] According to Larson, the Edgerton translation is remarkably faithful, but it is "harsh, stilted, and syntactically awkward" with an "orientalist" bias and lacks "appreciation of the text's contemporary religious significance".

Uthaya Sankar SB retold the complete text in Bahasa Malaysia prose as Bhagavad Gita: Dialog Arjuna dan Krishna di Kurukshetra (2021).

"[352] According to Jacqueline Hirst, the universalist neo-Hindu interpretations of dharma in the Gita are modernist readings, though any study of pre-modern distant foreign cultures is inherently subject to suspicions about "control of knowledge" and bias on the various sides.

[355][356][357] B. R. Ambedkar, born in a Dalit family and served as the first Law Minister in the First Nehru Ministry, criticized the text for its stance on caste and for "defending certain dogmas of religion on philosophical grounds".

To Ambedkar, states Klausen, it is a text of "mostly barbaric, religious particularisms" offering "a defence of the Kshatriya duty to make war and kill, the assertion that varna derives from birth rather than worth or aptitude, and the injunction to perform karma" neither perfunctorily nor egotistically.

[124] Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, in his commentary on the Gita,[367] interprets the battle as an allegory in which the battlefield is the soul and Arjuna embodies man's higher impulses struggling against evil.

[370][note 31] Scholars such as Steven Rosen, Laurie L. Patton and Stephen Mitchell have seen in the Gita a religious defence of the warrior class (Kshatriya Varna) duty (svadharma), which is to wage war with courage.

[371][372] Indian independence leaders like Lala Lajpat Rai and Bal Gangadhar Tilak saw the Gita as a text which defended war when necessary and used it to promote armed rebellion against colonial rule.

In the late 1930s, with advice from and influence of Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard[375] he became a practising pacifist and Conscientiousness Objector, working with the Quakers, doing alternative service to help settle Jewish refugees fleeing the war.

Ethicist Jeremy Engels notes that in contrast to Ambedkar's view, other readers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, as well as "most pandits and yogis", understand the Gita's message not as a literal call to war, but as an allegory for the inner battle between good and evil in the human soul.

"[388] Lal further argues that: "the truth of the matter surely is that no rational refutation is possible of the essential humanist position that killing is wrong...many of the answers given by Krishna appear to be evasive and occasionally sophistic.

[137][390] Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and author of books on Zen Buddhism, concurs with Gandhi and states that the Gita is not teaching violence nor propounding a "make war" ideology.