Krishna's counsel to Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra — 700 verses embedded within the Mahabharata that stand today as the tradition's single most translated and commented-upon text.
महाभारत के भीतर · within the Mahabharata
The Gita unfolds as an eighteen-chapter dialogue, set just as the Kurukshetra war is about to begin, when Arjuna, seeing kinsmen and teachers arrayed on both sides, loses the will to fight. Krishna's response ranges across karma yoga (action without attachment to outcome), bhakti yoga (devotion), and jnana yoga (knowledge), before revealing his cosmic form, the Vishvarupa, in chapter eleven.
Nearly every major philosophical school, Advaita, Vishishtadvaita, Dvaita, has produced its own commentary (bhashya) on the Gita, each reading its core teachings differently — a text flexible enough to anchor sharply differing schools of thought. Its verse 'you have a right to your work, but never to the fruit of that work,' already quoted in this site's Itihasa chapter, remains among the most cited lines in the entire tradition.