Concepts

Viṣāda (विषाद)

Arjuna's collapse into grief and moral paralysis on the battlefield — the crisis that gives Chapter 1 its traditional name, Arjuna-viṣāda-yoga, and that the rest of the Gita exists to answer.

Atman (आत्मन्)

The self that inhabits the body in the Gita's second chapter — unborn, imperishable, and untouched by what happens to the body — the metaphysical foundation the chapter's argument for fighting rests on.

Brahman (ब्रह्मन्)

The Absolute — the reality the Gita's paths converge on, described both as a state one can reach in this life (brahmabhūta, brahma-nirvāṇa) and as the ground the whole field of nature rests on.

Buddhi-yoga (बुद्धियोग)

The yoga of the discerning intellect — chapter 2's name for taking the same truth it argued as Sāṅkhya and turning it into a practice: steadying the buddhi so action stops generating bondage.

Dharma (धर्म)

One's own duty (svadharma) in the Gita's second chapter — a role-bound, contextual obligation, not a single universal rule for everyone.

Kāma (काम)

Desire — named by the Gita as the single enemy behind wrongdoing, a fire that its own fuel never satisfies, and the first of the 'three gates of hell' chapter 16 says to renounce.

Karma (कर्म)

The Gita's technical sense of karma — action itself, and the discipline of acting without attachment to its fruit — distinct from the popular "cosmic reward and punishment" meaning of the word.

Mokṣa (मोक्ष)

Liberation — release from the cycle of birth and death and from the pull of the opposites — held out across the Gita as the end every path serves, and promised outright in the text's final verse.

Samatva (समत्व)

Evenness — the Gita's own definition of yoga: a mind level toward success and failure, and, in the later chapters, a vision that sees the same self in every kind of being.

Senses, mind, intellect (इन्द्रिय-मनस्-बुद्धि)

The Gita's ladder of the inner faculties — senses below the mind, mind below the intellect, and the self above all three — used to locate where craving must be met and which faculty does the meeting.

Sthitaprajna (स्थितप्रज्ञ)

The "person of steady wisdom" the Gita's second chapter closes with — its technical term for what settled equanimity actually looks like, in mind and action.

Yoga (योग)

In the Gita's second chapter, yoga names a discipline of evenness of mind in action — not a physical practice, and not a single technique — first given this technical sense at BG 2.48.

Ahaṃkāra (अहंकार)

The 'I-maker' — the reflex that claims authorship of actions nature is performing — which the Gita treats as the specific misperception its teaching on non-doership is meant to correct.

Lokasaṅgraha (लोकसंग्रह)

Acting for the holding-together of the world — chapter 3's reason a person who needs nothing from action still acts: to keep the fabric of shared life from unravelling by example.

Svadharma (स्वधर्म)

One's own dharma — the duty proper to one's station and situation — which the Gita says is better performed imperfectly than another's performed well, because it is the only ground from which a person can actually act.

Yajña (यज्ञ)

Yajña — action performed as offering rather than personal claim, the mechanism chapter 3 gives for why some action doesn't bind, and the seed of lokasangraha, acting for the world's cohesion rather than private gain.

Akarma (अकर्म)

Inaction — and chapter 4's puzzle of 'seeing inaction in action, and action in inaction': the claim that whether a deed binds depends not on the deed but on how the doer holds it.

Avatāra (अवतार)

Krishna's chapter 4 doctrine of periodic divine descent — born through his own creative power whenever dharma decays, and, by his own account, not the kind of birth that binds an ordinary being to rebirth.

Jñāna (ज्ञान)

Knowledge as a path in its own right — the Gita's third strand alongside action and devotion — culminating in chapter 4's claim that every action, without exception, finds its completion in knowledge.

Paramparā (परम्परा)

The chain of transmission — chapter 4's account of how this teaching passed from teacher to student down a line of 'royal sages,' was lost when the chain broke, and is being restarted with Arjuna.

Śraddhā (श्रद्धा)

Faith as the precondition for the whole path — the settled trust that makes knowledge reachable and any act meaningful — distinct from chapter 17's typology of what kinds of faith there are.

Sannyāsa (संन्यास)

The Gita's chapter-5 redefinition of renunciation — not physical withdrawal from action but the inner dropping of doership — which lets Krishna treat sannyāsa and karma-yoga as reaching the same goal by different routes.

Dhyāna (ध्यान)

The concrete meditative technique chapter 6 spells out step by step — seat, posture, gaze, moderation — aimed at bringing a wandering mind under its own control, distinct from abhyasa's later, more general principle of practice through repetition.

Vairāgya (वैराग्य)

Dispassion — the loosening of the mind's grip on what it wants — which chapter 6 pairs with abhyāsa as the two hands that, together, still an otherwise unstillable mind.

Yoga-bhraṣṭa (योगभ्रष्ट)

The one who falls from yoga — chapter 6's answer to Arjuna's fear that a half-finished practice is wasted: no effort toward the good is ever lost, and the striving resumes in the next life where it stopped.

Māyā (माया)

Krishna's guṇa-woven veil in Chapter 7 — the mechanism by which the world fails to recognize his imperishable nature behind the manifest world, hard to cross except by those who take refuge in him.

Prakṛti and Puruṣa (प्रकृति-पुरुष)

The Gita's working dualism — nature (prakṛti), which performs every action through its three strands, and spirit (puruṣa), which does nothing but witness and undergo — and the liberation that comes from telling them apart.

Vijñāna (विज्ञान)

Realized knowing — the Gita's frequent companion to jñāna, marking the difference between grasping a truth and having it become the texture of one's own experience.

Adhiyajña and the six terms (अधियज्ञ)

The cluster of six technical terms Arjuna asks Krishna to pin down at the start of chapter 8 — brahman, adhyātma, karma, adhibhūta, adhidaiva, adhiyajña — each naming the same reality as it bears on a different domain.

Akṣara (अक्षर)

The Indestructible — chapter 8's name for a reality beyond even Brahma's vast cosmic cycles, reached by whatever a mind is fixed on at the moment of death, which is why the chapter treats lifelong practice, not a deathbed thought, as the real discipline.

Prayāṇa-kāla (प्रयाणकाल)

The hour of departure — chapter 8's teaching that whatever state of mind one holds at the moment of death is the state one goes to, which makes lifelong practice a rehearsal for a single instant.

Rājavidyā (राजविद्या)

Rājavidyā-rājaguhya — chapter 9's own name for its teaching, at once the most cosmic claim in the Gita (Krishna pervades and sustains everything while remaining untouched by it) and, by its own account, the easiest to practice.

Vibhūti (विभूति)

Krishna's catalogue of foremost-in-category self-manifestations — the Ganges among rivers, the Himalaya among mountains, Om among speech — offered as concrete objects for meditation, not a claim to completeness.

Kāla (काल)

Time as the world-destroyer — the identity Krishna gives at the climax of the eleventh chapter's vision, reframing the battle Arjuna dreads as an outcome already settled, with Arjuna only its instrument.

Viśvarūpa (विश्वरूप)

The infinite, world-devouring body Krishna shows Arjuna on demand in chapter 11 — every world, god, and time itself in one form, seen only through a divine eye and reachable, per the chapter's own close, by nothing but undivided devotion.

Abhyasa (अभ्यास)

Repeated practice — the first rung of chapter 12's three-step fallback ladder for anyone who can't sustain direct fixation on Krishna, moving from an unreachable ideal toward whatever discipline a person can actually hold.

Avyakta (अव्यक्त)

The Unmanifested — Krishna's akṣara Brahman, named entirely by negation in chapter 12's opening dichotomy against bhakti, and, per the chapter, no less real, only harder to reach.

Bhakti (भक्ति)

Devotion to Krishna's personal, manifest form — the path chapter 12 names "best in yoga," not because the alternative fails to reach the same goal, but because it's easier for an embodied mind to hold onto.

Kṣetra–Kṣetrajña (क्षेत्र-क्षेत्रज्ञ)

The Field and its Knower — chapter 13's terms for the body-plus-experience an embodied being inhabits and the perceiving self that merely observes it, the same distinction the chapter recasts as prakriti and purusha.

Guṇatraya (गुणत्रय)

The three qualities of nature — sattva, rajas, and tamas — that chapter 14 identifies as the actual mechanism binding the imperishable dweller in the body, each through a distinct attachment.

Īśvara (ईश्वर)

God as personal Lord and inner ruler — seated, chapter 18 says, in the heart of every being, turning them 'as if mounted on a machine' — the aspect of the divine that receives devotion and grants refuge.

Puruṣottama (पुरुषोत्तम)

The "highest Purusha" of chapter 15's title-verse — beyond both the perishable (all beings) and the imperishable (the changeless witness), pervading and sustaining both, and named only after the chapter builds that two-term binary specifically in order to overturn it.

Daivāsura Sampad (दैवासुरसम्पद्)

Chapter 16's binary division of beings into divine (daivī) and demonic (āsurī) inherited endowments, catalogued at wildly unequal length and traced through to opposite fates.

Oṃ Tat Sat (ॐ तत् सत्)

The threefold designation of Brahman that closes chapter 17 — three syllables spoken to consecrate acts of sacrifice, gift, and austerity, and the Gita's verdict that anything done without faith is 'Asat,' null.

Śraddhā-traya (श्रद्धात्रय)

The threefold sattva/rajas/tamas typing of faith itself — the axis chapter 17 substitutes for Arjuna's scripture-or-not question, then applies in turn to worship, food, sacrifice, austerity, and gift-giving.

The five factors of action (पञ्चकारण)

Chapter 18's anatomy of any deed — the body, the doer, the instruments, the many efforts, and providence — offered as the reason the self that claims to be the sole author 'does not see.'

Tyāga (त्याग)

Chapter 18's technical resolution of a term used loosely for sixteen chapters — relinquishing the fruit of action while continuing to act, distinct from sannyasa's casual sense of giving up action itself.