Be humble, truthful, and harmless, patient and honorable, and show reverence for the wise. Strive for purity, constancy, control of self... an ever-tranquil heart in fortunes good and bad...
From the Bhagavad-Gita (Song of God)
The Yoga of Knowledge
Not shaken by adversity,
Not hankering after happiness;
Free from fear, free from anger,
Free from the things of desire.
I call him a seer, and illumined.
The bonds of his flesh are broken.
He is lucky, and does not rejoice;
He is unlucky, and does not weep,
I call him illumined.
When a man enters Reality,
He leaves his desires behind him.
Thinking about sense-objects
Will attach you to sense-objects;
Grow attached, and you become addicted;
Thwart your addiction, it turns to anger;
Be angry, and you confuse your mind,
Confuse your mind, and you forget the lesson of experience;
Forget experience, you lose discrimination;
Lose discrimination, and you miss life's only purpose.
The recollected mind is awake
In the knowledge of the True Self (Atman)
Which is dark night to the ignorant;
The ignorant are awake to their sense-life
Which they think is daylight:
To the seer it is darkness.
Renunciation Through Knowledge
When goodness grows weak,
When evil increases,
I make myself a body.
In every age I come back
To deliver the holy,
To destroy the sin of the sinner,
To establish righteousness...
He who does not worship God cannot be happy even in this world.
What then, can he expect from any other?
The form of worship which consists in contemplating the Supreme Omnipresent Infinite Eternal Presence is superior to ritualistic worship with material offerings. The reward of all action is to be found in enlightenment.
When you have reached enlightenment, ignorance will delude you no longer. In the light of that knowledge you will see the entire creation within your own True Self.
And though you were the foulest of sinners,
This knowledge alone would carry you
Like a raft, over all your sin.
The Bhagavad-Gita (Song of God) is part of an epic Sanskrit poem
It is the best known Hindu scripture, and has attracted great thinkers around the world. Writers such as Herman Hesse, Aldous Huxley, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, and the psychologist Carl Jung.
The passages above (attributed to Krishna) are from an edition translated by the English novelist Christopher Isherwood and S. Prahhavananda first published in 1944 – I came across this translation as a college student and it is still my favorite.
You can find a few online versions here:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/index.htm
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