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Bhagavad Gita — Complete Summary Cards

Name: Bhagavad Gita — Complete Summary Cards
Author: Vyasa (c. 200 BC)

Krishna's counsel to Arjuna on the field of Kurukshetra, in 31 cards: the deathless Self no weapon touches; karma yoga — act with all your skill yet renounce the fruit; the mind steadied like a lamp in a windless place; the three gunas and the path beyond them; and the final refuge of devotion and surrender.

Based on Bhagavad Gita by Vyasa (c. 200 BC)

The Self no death can touch

Never Born, Never Dies

Before Krishna answers any question of duty, he lifts Arjuna's gaze to what cannot die. The body ends; the Self within it was never born and can never cease.

Arjuna's grief assumes that death is final — that to lose a body is to lose the person. Krishna's first teaching overturns this. What truly lives in us was never born and cannot be destroyed.

“Never the spirit was born; the spirit shall cease to be never; never was time it was not; End and Beginning are dreams!” (ch. 2). The Self — the atman — is not produced by the body, and does not perish with it.

This is not a denial of loss. The body is real and its passing is real. But behind the changing frame stands something changeless, a light the years cannot dim: birthless, deathless, and unaltered for ever.

Knowing this does not make one careless of life. It makes one unafraid — able to act, and to grieve, without being ruled by the terror of the end.

Bhagavad Gita

#02

Karma Yoga

Work, but not for the reward

To Action Alone You Have a Right

The single most famous teaching of the Gita: your claim is on the doing, never on what the doing earns. Do the work fully; release the harvest.

We usually act for an outcome — the prize, the praise, the result. Krishna severs the two. The deed is yours to give your whole strength to; the fruit was never in your hands to begin with.

“Let right deeds be thy motive, not the fruit which comes from them” (ch. 2). This is karma yoga: not less action, but action purified of grasping.

The paradox is that clinging to the result is what wrecks the work — it breeds anxiety, shortcuts, and paralysis. Let the fruit go and the hands grow steady and free.

This is not indifference to quality. It is total investment in the effort joined to total release of the return.

Bhagavad Gita

#03

Karma Yoga

Yoga is evenness of mind

Even in Gain and Loss

If action without craving is the practice, equanimity is its inner shape — a mind that meets success and failure with the same steady poise.

Having told Arjuna to release the fruit, Krishna names the state that makes it possible: evenness. The yogi is not numb, but balanced — unshaken whether the deed prospers or fails.

So gird yourself to act, he says, “as things alike to thee — pleasure or pain, profit or ruin, victory or defeat” (ch. 2). Meet the pairs of opposites without being thrown by either.

This evenness is not a mood you wait for; it is a discipline you practise. The mind is trained to stop lurching between elation and despair as results roll in.

Krishna gives it a definition worth memorising: “equability is Yog” — skill in action is precisely this poise under outcome.

Bhagavad Gita

#04

Karma Yoga

Rest at the heart of the work

Action in Inaction

The wise are not those who flee action, but those who work with such inner stillness that the doing costs them no agitation at all.

Arjuna is tempted to think renunciation means downing tools. Krishna corrects him: no one alive escapes action, and fleeing it is itself a kind of act. The real freedom is inward.

“He who sees how action may be rest, rest action — he is wisest 'mid his kind; he hath the truth!” (ch. 4). The enlightened one acts fully while remaining unmoved at the center.

The turning wheel spins hardest at its rim and stays perfectly still at its hub. So the sage: busy in the world, quiet at the core, doing everything while grasping at nothing.

This is why withdrawal is no shortcut. Peace is not the absence of work; it is a way of working.

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Bhagavad Gita — Complete Summary Cards

Never Born, Never Dies

To Action Alone You Have a Right

Even in Gain and Loss

Action in Inaction

In this deck

Never Born, Never Dies

To Action Alone You Have a Right

Even in Gain and Loss

Action in Inaction

Better Your Own Duty

Every Act an Offering

Arjuna's Despair

The War Within

Grieve Not

The Worn-Out Robe

The Field and the Knower

Desire, the Devourer

The Ladder of the Fall

The Three Gates of Ruin

The Two Natures

A Lamp Unflickering

The Steady Wisdom

The Middle Way

Your Own Best Friend

No Effort Is Lost

The Three Strands

Beyond the Three

Faith Takes Your Shape

Three Roads, One Summit

The Fire of Knowledge

When Righteousness Declines

A Thread of Pearls

The Form of Forms

A Leaf, a Flower, a Fruit

The Same Self in All

Take Refuge

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