Svabhavikasutra

The first part of this book focuses on translating the Bhagavadgita verses that have a correlation with the 209 statements of the Svabhavikasutra, its source text. The verses are given in transliteration and devanagari with a word-for-word translation. Comments on the Bhagavadgita are found in the introduction to each chapter. Over 2,000 translations of and commentaries on the Bhagavadgita are known in more than 75 languages. The first translation into a modern European language was entitled "Wonderful Verses from the Indian Language." This translation into Polish was made by Stanislaw Grochowski (1542-1612) in 1611 from a Latin translation of the Bhagavadgita by Francisco Benci (1542-1594), a Jesuit missionary who stayed for some time in India. More than 300 translations into English are known since the printing of the first book directly translated from Sanskrit by Charles Wilkins (ca. 1750-1833) in 1785. The reader might compare the new translation with other translations by exploring the many meanings provided by the 250-page Sanskrit-English dictionary in the second half of the book and considering the choices made by other translators. The dictionary includes the inflected word forms found in the Bhagavadgita. It allows the reader to verify a translation and make a new one, even without knowing Sanskrit and its grammar. Indexes of verb forms and meanings are appended to the book.