Bhagavad Gita
Book
If this were a book, this page is the table of contents. Each Part groups two or three Gita chapters; each chapter links to a summary essay, and each essay links on to the verse-by-verse companion at /gita/chapter/N and the concept notes.
Setting and Crisis
The frame of the whole poem: two armies drawn up, and one warrior who cannot lift his bow. Everything the other seventeen chapters do is an answer to the breakdown staged here.
Foundations — Self, Action, Knowledge
The Gita's core teaching, laid down three times over: the self that does not die (2), the necessity of action (3), and how knowledge and action fit together across a teaching lineage (4).
Renunciation and Meditation
Two chapters on the inner side of the practice: renunciation and action shown to be one road (5), and the concrete discipline of seating the mind (6).
Knowing the Divine
The teaching turns from the self to God: the two natures and the four kinds of seeker (7), the hour of death and the two paths (8), and the 'royal secret' of a devotion open to everyone (9).
The Vision
Where to see the divine in the ordinary world (10), and then the thing itself — the form that contains everything, including Time (11).
The Practice of Devotion
One short, pivotal chapter: the case that a personal God is the easier and safer path for an embodied being, and the portrait of the devotee it produces (12).
Field, Guṇas, Highest Person
The most analytic stretch of the poem: the body as 'field' and the self as its 'knower' (13), the three strands that bind all action (14), and the cosmic tree cut at the root to reach the Highest Person (15).
Two Natures in Conduct
The guṇa analysis applied to character and worship: the divine and demonic endowments (16), and the threefold grading of faith, food, sacrifice, austerity, and giving (17).
The Capstone
The whole teaching walked back through one term at a time, and the frame of chapter 1 closed. Ends on self-surrender and Arjuna standing up.