Winner, 2024 Book Award, Dharma Academy of North America

The Bhagavad Gītā is one of the treasures of world culture. Sacred in India, and beloved to hundreds of millions throughout the centuries and around the world, it is the best-known of all Sanskrit works in the West. There has been sustained interest in the Bhagavad Gītā for several centuries in the Anglophone world, and well over one hundred complete English translations have been published.

This book presents the first comprehensive and accessible concordance of the Bhagavad Gītā. The concordance lists every word of the original, noting all its locations and instances within the text, along with related words. It is accompanied by various supportive references, including Sanskrit and English indexes. The concordance can be linked with any translation, giving readers in-depth access to the Sanskrit text.

This book is designed for those with little or no knowledge of Sanskrit as well as those familiar with the original text. It allows readers to gain a greater reach into the Bhagavad Gītā and achieve a deeper understanding of its ideas, facilitating nuanced analyses of the text and its language. It is an essential reference for scholars, teachers, students, and other readers interested in India’s spiritual classics.

Prizes

Winner of Book Award, Dharma Academy of North America 2024 (United States)

Graham M. Schweig’s Bhagavad Gītā Concordance is the best work of its kind for all of Sanskrit literature. It is comprehensive, precise, and astonishingly user-friendly. No future translation of the Gītā or scholarly study of its language, philosophy, or theology can proceed without consulting this concordance. -- Ariel Glucklich, professor and chair of theology and religious studies, Georgetown University
Bhagavad Gītā Concordance fills a major lacuna in scholarship and will become a standard reference book and resource for millions of scholars and practitioners. Graham Schweig's translation of the Bhagavad Gītā is a masterpiece, and this concordance is impeccably done. -- Gopal K. Gupta, author of Māyā in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa: Human Suffering and Divine Play
Schweig’s comprehensive and utterly useful concordance of the Bhagavad Gītā is astonishingly the first of its kind, even though there have been other related reference works that precede it. Recollecting even a single word, phrase, or idea from the Gītā—a monumental and oft-memorized work of Indian philosophy and culture—both the scholarly and general reader can now easily consult this concordance to bountiful results. -- Deven M. Patel, author of Text to Tradition: The Naiṣadhīyacarita and Literary Community in South Asia
The Bhagavad Gītā serves as the gateway for understanding the core principles and practices of Hindu Yoga. This remarkable concordance serves at least two purposes. First, it allows one to navigate all the complex and well chosen terms that define key ideas in the text. Second, it helps broaden one’s grasp of the Sanskrit language, tracing the root origins of words and their many derivations. This book is essential for all university libraries and for all intermediate Sanskrit seminars. -- Christopher Key Chapple, Doshi Professor of Indic and Comparative Theology, Loyola Marymount University
Graham Schweig has lovingly and comprehensively put together the ultimate concordance of the Bhagavad Gītā. It is not just a list of words and other lexical items that are easily located in the main text, but the volume also includes several useful appendices of themes, Sanskrit-English and English-Sanskrit vocabulary along with four well-received translations of the Sanskrit-English vocabulary, a list of Sanskrit nominal stems and verbal roots, and the entire text in Roman transcription. This is an indispensable resource for students and lay readers who seek a better grasp of this supremely important Indian text. -- Frederick M. Smith, professor emeritus of Sanskrit and classical Indian religions, University of Iowa
Graham Schweig's concordance of the Bhagavad Gītā, which is perhaps the most central Sanskrit text of devotional Hinduism over the last two thousand years with its abundance of commentaries, is a magnificent achievement of scholarship—one that will stand the test of time as a recourse for devotees and scholars on the subject. This is a work that has no rival. It will be resorted to and quoted again and again so long as the Gītā retains its prominence. -- Julius L. Lipner, professor emeritus of Hinduism and the comparative study of religion, University of Cambridge

Graham M. Schweig is professor and director of studies in religion at Christopher Newport University as well as distinguished teaching and research faculty at the Center for Dharma Studies at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley. He is the translator of Bhagavad Gītā: The Beloved Lord’s Secret Love Song (2007) and the author of Dance of Divine Love: India’s Classic Sacred Love Story: The Rāsa Līlā of Krishna (2005), among numerous other publications.