Jñâna is the spiritual knowledge which not only connects all Hindus, but also all others who have faith in the spirit of the Absolute. Therefore, concerning this true mystery, in this classical version of the Bhagavad Gîtâ the knowledge of finding liberation in the spirit, of developing bhakti or devotion with the person of God, is called âtmatattva, the principle and reality of the true self, or that what stands for the knowledge of the connectedness in spiritual matters. It is simply so that we without this âtmatattva are not human, because we essentially are homo sapiens, or man by the love of our spiritual wisdom. Even though this book contains some words and names found in the dictionary of Sanskrit, this will  to those readers who are interested in the classical sphere and culture of the Vedas not be an obstacle. In the footnotes the essential concepts used are one by one explained, and thus this translation is not only faithful to the original text and purport, but also comprehensible to the lay. The rather liberal phrasing is of a modern style though and thus is also because of this the text easy to follow. The result is A Song of Fortune accessible to any classically oriented person contending with the modern burden of illusion and the loneliness of philosophical impersonalism. For the more experienced student of the Gîtâ at each page a link has been added to the Vedabase which offers the Sanskrit, word-for-word translations and the commentary of the disciplic succession which is responsible for bringing the devotional culture of respecting the Gîtâ to the West.
Also available are the previous as-it-is version: the Bhagavad Gîtâ of Order and the modern version: it is the same Gîtâ as this one, but with all names translated into western ones and with the situation of the battlefield transposed to the one of a modern political debate.


Anand Aadhar Prabhu, the translator, is the vedic name of René P.B.A. Meijer, a clinical psychologist born in the Netherlands in 1954, who, having turned to the philosophy of yoga, after he became independent in 1982, got initiated in India in 1989.