The Gita’s Four Basic Conflicts of Life -1. Swami Krishnananda
29/04/2019 (Spoken to a French-speaking group on December 28th, 1972) 1. The Bhagavadgita cannot be easily understood. We can understand the Vedas and the Upanishads properly, but not the Bhagavadgita. Even the Upanishads, the fundamental scriptures of India, have a single meaning on the surface so that there is no difficulty in understanding them. But the Bhagavadgita is highly symbolic and esoteric, and the surface meaning is not its real meaning. No other scripture in India has had so many commentaries. While the Upanishads speak of God or the Absolute directly, the Bhagavadgita tries to touch various stages of the evolution of man, and that is the difficulty in understanding it. The Bhagavadgita is, in one sense, the most important scripture because it touches all sides of life from the lowest to the highest. It touches the inner as well as the outer. It touches the social, the individual and the spiritual aspects at one and the same time. It is the only scripture which c...