Description

About the Book

This book has been written to guide to the treading of the Path of Yoga in the Bhagawad Gita. By Yoga is here meant not any special system called by that name, not jñÊna yoga, nor karma yoga, nor bhakti yoga, nor the eightfold yoga of Patanjali, but just the Path by which man unites his Finite self with Infinite Being. It is the inner Path of which all these separate yogas are so many onesided aspects. It is not so much a synthesis of these separate teachings as that prior and undivided whole of which they represent partial formulations. It deals with the whole Path from the beginning to the end, from what Buddhists term “Entry in the stream” to the goal of NirvÊÓa. The Path is not the special property of Hinduism, nor indeed of any religion. It is something which is to be found, more or less deeply buried, in all religions, and which can exist apart from any formal religion at all. That is why the Gita, though a definitely Hindu book, the very crest-jewel of Hindu teachings, is capable of being a guide to seekers all over the world.

ABOUT AUTHOR

Sri Krishna Prem (Ronald Henry Nixon) was born in 1898. After service in the Royal Flying Corps, he took his M.A. at Cambridge and in 1920 went to India to pursue his interest in Buddhism and theosophy. There he met his guru, Sri Yashoda Mai, a Bengali lady of profound mystical experience. He followed her to a remote ashram in the Himalayan foothills, took holy orders as a monk of the Hindu Vaishnava sect, and was given the name Sri Krishna Prem. After his guru’s death, he was left in charge of the ashram and reluctantly accepted the task of leading the other disciples. Teaching from his own religious insight and retaining only such ritual as he felt to be of universal significance, he became one of the outstanding figures in India’s spiritual life. He died in 1965.