1The Bhagavadgītā is the most important and influential text in the history of Indian religions. While it has been rendered countless times before, this bi-lingual edition offers a new prose translation along with the original Sanskrit and an Introduction particularly well-suited for students and beginners. The Gītā is always a work that demands as much as it offers, for we are invited to question the deepest commitments of shared human experience. Who are we? Why do we need to act, understand, and commit ourselves to our own lives, to family and society's ideals, and as fully to the pursuit of the sublime? It asks us how we will engage life's challenges that will not relent, what we know and want to know about ourselves and the world, and, ultimately, what moves us to care and to love. This translation encourages us to study the Gītā as much for its consummate humanism as it does the mysteries of the divine experiencing itself.