Key words: dharma, karma, yoga
A handful of Sanskrit words carry much of the meaning of these texts. Translations can only approximate them, so it helps to know their range.
Dharma
From a root meaning “to hold” or “to support”, dharma is what holds a person, a family and the world together: duty, right conduct, law, and the order of things. In the Gītā, svadharma is one’s own duty, the right action for one’s own place and nature (3.35). Translations use “duty”, “righteousness” or “law”, and keep the Sanskrit word where none of these fits.
Karma
Karma first means simply “action” or “deed”, and in the Vedas especially ritual action. Later it also came to mean the effects that actions leave behind, which shape what happens next. The Gītā’s best-known teaching is about karma: act, but without clinging to the fruits of action (2.47).
Yoga
Yoga comes from a root meaning “to join” or “to yoke”. In the Gītā it means a discipline or path, and also a settled state of mind: “evenness of mind is called yoga” (2.48). The Gītā speaks of karma-yoga, the path of action, jñāna-yoga, the path of knowledge, and bhakti-yoga, the path of devotion.
Ātman and Brahman
Ātman is the self: not the body or the changing mind, but what is aware through all of them. Brahman is the ultimate reality behind the whole world. The Upaniṣads ask how the two are related, and different schools of thought answer in different ways. The Gītā’s second chapter describes the self as never born and never dying (2.20).
Bhakti and mokṣa
Bhakti is loving devotion to the divine; the Gītā presents it as a path open to everyone. Mokṣa is liberation: freedom from the cycle of birth and death and from the suffering that comes with it. Different traditions describe both in their own terms.
Many readings
Over two thousand years, teachers of many schools have written commentaries that read these words in different ways. Vedyatra’s translations aim to stay close to the Sanskrit and do not follow any one school; where a commentary is shown, it is clearly marked as commentary.