BHAGAVAD GITA

Buddhists hold The Dhammapada in high regard, no less so than the Hindus the Bhagavad Gita.

The Gita is an episode in the enormous epic, the Mahabharata. It is eighteen chapters long.  In the form of a dialogue between Sri Krishna, the divine incarnation, and his friend Arjuna, the great warrior of the family of Pandavas, its significance lies in its endorsement of bhakti (devotion) as a true way of salvation.

The story has Arjuna hesitating at the point of leading his brothers and their allies into battle against the Kuru princes, sons of his uncle the blind Dhritirashtra and thus his close relatives.  Arjuna wishes to abandon the battle.  Krishna is his charioteer in the story who stands at his side poised for instant action.  As it happens, it is not Arjuna who goes on to act, but the Kuru leader, his uncle.  He is the one who now orders the conch-shell to be blown as the signal for battle.

Krishna states to Arjuna that his, Arjuna's, hesitation stems from his lack of an accurate understanding of the "nature of things."  His hesitation, Krishna goes on to say, is now an impediment to the proper balancing of the universal dharmic order.  Krishna warns that without action, the cosmos will fall out of order and truth will be obscured.

Krishna counsels Arjuna on the larger idea of dharma, or universal harmony and duty.  He proceeds to tell Arjuna that the soul (Atman) is eternal and immortal, that any "death" on the battlefield would involve only the shedding of the body, whereas the soul is permanent and would continue on. 

At the heart of the Gita is that the world is the play, as in drama, of Brahman, with Brahman playing all the parts.  And Brahman is doing so for its own purposes.  It is not for us to judge any aspect of it.  We are to keep Brahman ever in our minds, keep devoted, and understand that the world is going the way it is meant to go.  We must remain steadfast in our devotion to Brahman, and trust it.