The Bhagavad Gita Retold

There was once a monk in a remote Himalayan monastery. His name doesn’t matter, in fact, he’d have preferred it that way. At the age of twenty-two, he decided that he would master silence like no other. After all, he had been told countless times that a rambling mind was the source of all suffering and what better way to quieten the inner world than by silencing the outer one, he thought.

In the beginning, it was hard, but he began modestly enough. Three days of mauna, silence, then seven, then a full month. Within a few years, he could go several months without uttering a syllable. The other monks looked at him with that mixture of awe and quiet resentment. His guru, a wise and slightly amused short man, simply nodded whenever he passed.

By his fortieth year of practice, he had become something of a local legend. Pilgrims and seekers walked for days just to be around him. They said his silence was palpable, that you could feel your own thoughts slowing down when you sat ten feet from where he meditated. It was as if silence was no longer an act but had become his clothing, his breath, his bones. It radiated from his very being. In fact, he was, in his own estimation, almost done.

But somewhere he knew that he had been living in a bubble, for he had not really stepped out in the real world for over four decades. He hadn't really challenged or tested himself.

So, one morning in the month of January, when the air was crisp and the bells were ringing for the dawn rituals, he walked to his guru who was now as old as an ancient relic, touched his feet, and left the monastery for a distant city. Someplace where no one would have heard of him, let alone look up to him.

And so, at the edge of a bustling city, he found a tree and an abandoned hut. He made up his mind to sit there, cross-legged, for forty days. Whoever passed, whatever they said or did, he would remain undisturbed. This would be his final examination.

The first week was nothing. People came and went, some bowed, some left offerings of flowers and rice, a stray dog growled and pulled at the edge of his shawl. He did not stir. The second week, a wealthy merchant came, left sweetmeats and money, and sat in front of him, crying about his sick wife and rebellious son. The monk felt no flutter either at the merchant’s grief or the money he’d offered. The third week, two rowdy kids kicked him in the knee, but the monk's face remained still like it’d had for the last forty years.

As days passed, the word spread across the town. People came simply to look at him, the way one looks at a remarkable tree or an unusual cloud. He had become, in some sense, no longer a person at all but a phenomenon.

On the morning of the thirty-ninth day, a child wandered up to him.

She was perhaps four years old, dressed in a faded yellow frock, her hair tied with a piece of string. Her mother had gone to buy fruits from the nearby cart and had told her to wait. She waited the way small children wait, which is to say, she did not wait at all. She looked at the monk for a long time. "You look like my grandfather," she said, "but why don't you move or say something?"

She drew her face closer to his and studied his half-closed eyes, his balding head, the small fly that had landed on his cheek and which he had not bothered to brush away.

And then she threw back her little head, and laughed hard, as if she had discovered something ridiculous and wonderful at the same time. She laughed at the fly, at the monk, at the absurd seriousness of a grown man sitting on a stone like a rock. "At least, get the fly off you," she said and shooed away the fly.

The monk opened his eyes a bit more. For a moment, nothing happened and the young child continued to laugh, drawing her face even closer with wide eyes. One pair of tiny eyes full of wonder were peeking into the old and still eyes of the monk.

But then, something strange occurred. The monk began to laugh too. It was a great, helpless, shoulder-shaking laugh that rolled out of him like water that had been dammed up for forty years and had finally remembered the sea. He laughed until tears ran down his face. The child, alarmed at first, then delighted, climbed into his lap, and threw her arms around him.

Meanwhile, the little girl's mother came rushing to her. “So, this is where you’ve been all this while!” she said, exasperated. “I was worried sick.”

The monk got up, handed the little girl to the mother, pointed at his hut, and said to her, "All of what it has, you can take it. Might come handy.” The hut had cash, sweets, clothes, jewels, and other offerings made to him over the last few weeks. And with that, he immediately left for the monastery.

"I have failed," he said, prostrating before his guru. The words came out hoarse, unused.
"Failed at what?" the guru asked.
"My silence. Forty years. And a child broke it in a single afternoon."
"My son," the guru said. "Your silence was not broken but completed. For forty years you were quiet to keep the world out. Now, for the first time, you were silent enough to let it in. There is a difference."

"Then what was I doing all those years?" he asked. "Was it all a waste?"
"You were learning the scales," the master said. "Today you played the first note of music."

The Bhagavad Gita asks the same question of every reader who tries to solve the world by leaving it. There is no escaping the world, it says. It's ignorant to even try. Our short life on this planet is a beautiful song and it's entirely up to us to make it more beautiful, to learn the scales, to sing it soulfully, to make it our song, a divine song. The very meaning of Bhagavad Gita is the Song of the Divine, the one that fountained from the perfect being, Krishna.

To write on the Gita is asking an ant to capture the enormity and attributes of an elephant. It's audacious on my part, but I have learned my scales, and I am happy to replay the notes for you.

The questions herein are Arjuna’s but plucked out of your consciousness. And the answers are Krishna's, but the voice that carries them across the centuries is mine, doing its imperfect best. In other words, the song belongs to Krishna. I’m only humming in the key I’ve been given.

As you move through the pages, sometimes you will agree and other times you will argue back. Arjuna did both, too. If you stay with it, however, you may find, as he did, that the battlefield changes around you while the conversation continues. That you are no longer where you were when you sat down. That somewhere along the way, the bow has been placed back in your hand.

This is the prologue from my upcoming book, The Bhagavad Gita Retold, being published by HarperCollins. It will be available online and in bookstores by the end of this year.

Meanwhile, I'm pleased to announce a live event in Delhi on 4-Oct-2026. You are welcome to read more or reserve your spot here, if you like. On a first come first served basis. I thought you, my reader, deserve to know that this event has been announced. By the way, the first edition of my book will be available for collection at the venue.

Peace.
Swami