II. The Core of the Teaching:- Aclear conception fastening upon the essential idea, the central heart of the teaching is especially necessary here because the Gita with its rich & many-sided thought, its synthetical grasp of different aspects of the spiritual life & the fluent winding motion of its argument lends itself, even more than other Scriptures, to ome-sided misrep-resentation born of a partisan intellectuality…. Thus, there are those who make the Gita teach, not works at all, but a discipline of perparation for renouncing life & works: the indifferent performance of prescribed actions or of whatever task may lie ready to the hands, becomes the means, the discipline; the final renunciation of life & works is the sole real object. It is quite easy to justify this view by citations from the book & by a certain arrangement to stress in following out its argument especially if we shut our eyes to the peculiar way in which it uses such a word as sannyasa, renunciation; but it is quite impossible to persist in this view on an impartial reading in face of the continual assertion to the very end that action should be preferred to inaction & that superiority lies with the true, the inner renunciation of desire by equality & the giving up of works to the supreme purusha. The Gita can only be undewstood, like any other great work of the kind, by studying it in its entirety & as a developing argument. But the modern interpreters, starting from the great writer Bankim chandra chatterji who first gave to the Gita this new sense of a Gospel of Duty, have laid an almost exclusive stress on the idea of equality, on the expression kartavyam karma, the work that is to be done, which they render by duty, & on the phrase “Thou hast a right to action, but none to the fruits of action” which is now popularly quoted as the great word, mahavakya, of the Gita. The rest of the eighteen chapters with their high philosophy are give a secondary importance, except indeed the great vision in the eleventh. This is natural enough for the modern mind which is, aor has been till yesterday, inclined to be impatient of metaphysies & far-off spiritual seekings, eager to get to work &, like Arjuna himself, mainly concerned for a workable law of work, a dharma. But it is the wrong awy to handle this Scripture.