Bhagavad Gita
A complete course through the Gītārtha Saṅgraha · Dr. M. A. Alwarśreyān svadharmo viguṇaḥ paradharmāt svanuṣṭhitāt
Bhagavad Gita 3.35: Better is one’s own duty, imperfectly performed…The text that holds yoga together
The Bhagavad Gita is among the most widely read Indian philosophical texts in the world, translated into over 70 languages, studied across centuries, and central to the practice of yoga in every tradition that descends from Mysore. Kṛṣṇa’s teaching to Arjuna at the moment of greatest crisis is not peripheral to yoga. It is one of its deepest roots.
The Gita is a complete and systematic teaching on the nature of the self, the purpose of action, the path of devotion, and the meaning of liberation. It addresses questions that practitioners ask every day: Why do I practice? What is the relationship between effort and surrender? What actually happens in the mind through practice? What does liberation mean in ordinary life?
This course offers the Gita as it has been understood within Mysore’s living Sanskrit and Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition, the cultural fabric that produced modern yoga, explained by a scholar who has lived inside this text since childhood.
The Gītārtha Saṅgraha: a living framework
This course follows the Gītārtha Saṅgraha, a remarkable 10th-century CE text by Yāmunācārya, one of the great ācāryas of the Nāthamuni paramparā and a direct predecessor of Rāmānuja.
Yāmunācārya composed the Gītārtha Saṅgraha as a concise philosophical summary of the entire Bhagavad Gita. Each verse is a precise and concentrated statement that unfolds, in study, into a detailed engagement with the corresponding chapters of the Gita itself. The depth contained in each verse is such that serious study can occupy years. This is not a text to be hurried through, but one to be inhabited.
This structured method has been transmitted within this lineage for a thousand years. It is the method through which the tradition itself has always taught the Gita: beginning with the whole, entering the detail, then returning to the whole with new understanding.
Yāmunācārya stood as a direct predecessor of Rāmānuja within the Nāthamuni paramparā. The Gītārtha Saṅgraha carries his reading of the Gita forward, and to study it today with Dr. Alwar is to study the Gita through eyes that have read it this way for a thousand years.
Dr. M. A. Alwar
Senior Professor, Maharaja’s Sanskrit College, Mysore · Scholar in the Nāthamuni SampradāyaDr. Alwar was born in 1972 into the household of Śrī U.Ve. Prof. M.A. Lakṣmīthāthācārya Swami, whose family has carried a rare and unbroken line of Ācārya Puruṣa succession across many generations. He grew up inside the philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita, not as a text approached through academic study but as a living transmission received from within the tradition that has carried it for nearly a thousand years.
With over two decades of teaching experience, he is known for exceptional lucidity: he makes the most demanding philosophical distinctions of Viśiṣṭādvaita accessible to students from any background, without sacrificing their precision or depth.
To study the Bhagavad Gita with Dr. Alwar is to receive it through a scholar formed within the Nāthamuni Sampradāya, the living Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition of Mysore, carrying forward a philosophical understanding that has guided his own lineage for nearly a thousand years.
What the course covers
Following the Gītārtha Saṅgraha, Dr. Alwar leads a complete study of all 18 chapters of the Bhagavad Gita. The course moves verse by verse through Yāmunācārya’s text, each verse opening into a detailed engagement with the corresponding chapters of the Gita itself.
The crisis and the question
Arjuna’s collapse on the battlefield and Kṛṣṇa’s opening response: the nature of the self (ātman), the distinction between the eternal and the perishable, and the first teaching on steadiness of mind.
Action and its freedom
Karma yoga: the yoga of action performed without attachment to results. How the dedicated practitioner acts in the world while remaining inwardly free. The nature of yajña and the relationship between effort and surrender.
Knowledge and devotion
Jñāna yoga and bhakti yoga: the yoga of knowledge and the yoga of devotion. The path of loving surrender as understood within Viśiṣṭādvaita.
The field and the knower
Kṣetra and kṣetrajña: the field of nature and the knower of the field. The three guṇas, and the Gita’s own culminating teaching on prapatti.
What is included
Every session recorded and available immediately. Study at your own pace.
Every session as audio only. The Gita travels well on walks and in transit.
A written summary of each session. Read before or after listening.
Your course never expires. The Gita rewards return visits as your understanding deepens.
Certificate of completion issued by Saṃskṛti Foundation, Mysore.
Recognized as Continuing Education for Yoga Alliance registered teachers.
Who this course is for
This course is for practitioners and teachers who feel drawn toward the philosophical world that stands behind their practice. You do not need to read Sanskrit. You do not need a background in Indian philosophy. The course is designed so you can enter it from wherever you are. The text will meet you there.
It will speak especially to Ashtanga, Iyengar, and Vinyasa practitioners who feel the pull toward a deeper understanding of what yoga is actually for, and to yoga teachers who want to speak about the Gita with genuine understanding: not borrowed quotes, but real comprehension of what the text teaches and why it matters.
It will be of special interest to anyone who has studied the Yoga Sūtras and wants to understand how the Gita extends and deepens that philosophical map. The two texts are the twin pillars of this tradition, and studying them together is how this lineage has always approached them.
Scholarship places available. A limited number of 50% discounted places are offered for Indian citizens. Please reach out directly to inquire.
The lineage behind this course
Nāthamuni, the 9th-century Śrīvaiṣṇava ācārya, stands at the root of the paramparā this course draws from. Yāmunācārya, his lineage successor and the teacher of Rāmānuja, wrote the Gītārtha Saṅgraha that structures this course. Dr. Alwar stands within this same broad tradition, in a line of Sanskrit and Śrīvaiṣṇava scholarship that is a thousand years old.
Mysore itself is the cultural fabric in which this depth of scholarship met the practice that became modern yoga. Śrī Kṛṣṇamācārya, too, was formed within that world. When you study the Gita through the Gītārtha Saṅgraha with Dr. Alwar, you enter the same philosophical depth that shaped him, carried forward here by a scholar who has lived inside this text since childhood.
Enroll today
Start learning immediately. Your course never expires.
Questions first? Reach out directly. I’m happy to help.
Andrew Eppler · andrew@ashtangayogastudio.com
WhatsApp +1 405 503-7779
If the course fee presents a genuine difficulty, please reach out. We will find a way. 50% scholarship places available for Indian citizens.
The Bhagavad Gita, the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali, and the Sankhya Kārikā together form the philosophical foundation of yoga practice. The Sankhya Kārikā supplies the metaphysics Patañjali assumes throughout the Sūtras: puruṣa and prakṛti, the three guṇas, the path to kaivalya. Without it, much of the Yoga Sūtras remains opaque. Studied together, these three texts give the practitioner the complete philosophical world from which the yoga we now practice emerged. All three courses include video, audio, and written notes with permanent access.
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