Bhagavad-gītā As It Is Breaks Records, Draws Praise

Through the efforts of His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, the Bhagavad-gita is enjoying a resurgence of popularity in the West. In fact, each of the last three years has seen Srila Prabhupada's disciples double their sales of his Bhagavad-gita As It Is. (To meet the great demand in 1977, Bhaktivedanta Book Trust Coordinator Rameswara Swami ordered one and one-half million copies-one of the largest single-title book orders ever placed!) What accounts for so much interest in Srila Prabhupada's unique edition of the Gita? A few of the hundreds of scholarly testimonials tell the story:

Back in 1968, just after the first printing of Bhagavad-gita As It Is, the well-known clergyman and author Thomas Merton became one of the first to praise it. He wrote at that time, "The Gita can be seen as the main literary support for the great religious civilization of India, the oldest surviving culture in the world. The present translation and commentary is another manifestation of the permanent living importance of the Gita. Swami Bhaktivedanta brings to the West a salutary reminder that our highly activistic and one-sided culture is faced with a crisis that may end in self-destruction because it lacks the inner depth of an authentic metaphysical consciousness. Without such depth, our moral and political protestations are just so much verbiage."

More recently, Dr. Davis Herron, Professor of Religion at Manhattan College, had this to say: "This definitive edition of the Gita is, due to its extensive purports, a storehouse of ancient Vedic wisdom, poetry, politics, and history. It should serve as a useful textbook for students and as a reference book for scholars of religion, as well as a general introduction to Vedic culture and practical philosophy for the layman. It is written for serious readers in general, not only from a scholar's point of view, but from that of a life-long practitioner of the yoga of devotion. It is this sense of devotion that Srila Prabhupada has captured in his discussion of the verses, and which other commentators have failed to reveal."