Essence of the Bhagavad Gita: A Contemporary Guide to Yoga, Meditation and Indian Philosophy

Born into an ancient matrilineal Hindu family in Kerala state. South India, Eknath Easwaran regards his mother's mother as his spiritual teacher. She taught him by her selfless example how to find complete fulfillment in the family context. Easwaran was chairman of the English department of a well-known Indian university when he came to the United States on the Fulbright exchange program. Here, as in India, his humor and humanness soon made him a teacher of enormous appeal. In 1960 he established the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation in Berkeley, California- "to move." as he puts it, "from education for degrees to education for living." As the Center's director, he continues to teach meditation in the greater San Francisco Bay Area to those who want to lead active, spiritually fulfilling lives in the midst of family, friends, and society. Easwaran brings to this volume a rare combination of literary skill, scholarship, and spiritual wisdom. His Sanskrit comes from one of the purest traditions in India, and for almost twenty years he followed a successful career as a writer, lecturer, and teacher of English literature. But it is essentially the stamp of personal experience that makes Easwaran's presentation of the spiritual life so effective. In this book, without metaphysics or philosophy, he illustrates the practicality of the Bhagavad Gita with familiar anecdotes from daily living. Besides The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living, Easwaran has written Meditation, Gandhi the Man. Dialogue with Death, and Conquest of Mind. His translations of India's spiritual classics appear in The Bhagavad Gita, The Dhammapada, and The Upanishads. He has compiled God Makes the Rivers to Flow, an anthology of passages for meditation from the world's great scriptures and mystics, and writes for The Little Lamp, the journal of the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation.