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50 free Bhagavad Gita trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
The Bhagavad Gita is seven hundred verses of conversation held on a battlefield, minutes before a war begins. A prince drops his bow and refuses to fight his own family; his charioteer, who happens to be divine, spends eighteen chapters talking him round. Out of that exchange came the text Hindus most often reach for, one that has been translated, it is said, more than two hundred ways. These fifty questions cover the frame story and its cast, the chapter structure, the lines people quote — on action without attachment, on the self that weapons cannot cut, on the cosmic vision — and the ideas of karma, dharma and bhakti. The final stretch follows the Gita out of India: the first English translation, commentators from the eighth century to Gandhi and Tilak, and the physicist who recalled it at an atomic test. It suits a pub quiz with a religion round, a classroom introduction to Hindu scripture, or anyone who knows the famous quotation and wants the rest. Play on your phone with instant answers and explanations, or print it and read it aloud.
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Q 01At which July 1945 test did Oppenheimer later say the Gita line 'Now I am become Death' came to mind?
Trinity
Trinity, the first atomic bomb test, was where Oppenheimer recalled verse 11.32, a text he had read in the original Sanskrit under Arthur Ryder at Berkeley. He retold the moment in a 1965 television documentary.
Q 02Who wrote in Walden of bathing his intellect each morning in the Gita's 'stupendous and cosmogonal' philosophy?
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau equated Walden Pond with the Ganges in that same passage, and in the book's first chapter called the Gita more admirable than 'all the ruins of the East'.
Q 03Which 2000 Robert Redford golf film, loosely based on the Gita, casts Krishna's counterpart as a caddie?
The Legend of Bagger Vance
The Legend of Bagger Vance takes its title character's name from Bhagavan, and the golfer Rannulph Junuh is an echo of Arjuna. Novelist Steven Pressfield acknowledged the Gita as his inspiration.
Q 04Which NASA astronaut of Indian descent took a copy of the Gita to the International Space Station in 2006?
Sunita Williams
Sunita Williams, who practises Hinduism, followed it up on her 2012 flight with an Om symbol and a copy of the Upanishads, and in 2007 visited her ancestral village of Jhulasan in Gujarat.
Q 05Vivekananda told Indian youth they would be 'nearer to Heaven' through which game than through the Gita?
Football
Football was his prescription for bodies he thought too weak for scripture: 'You will understand the Gita better with your biceps, your muscles, a little stronger,' the lecture goes on.
Q 06Jyotisar, where tradition says the Gita was spoken beneath a banyan, is in which Indian state?
Haryana
Haryana's Kurukshetra district holds Jyotisar, where a banyan said to descend from the original tree still stands on the bank of the Jyotisar Sarovar wetland.
Q 07Which Governor-General wrote the introduction to Charles Wilkins's 1785 Gita, the first in English?
Warren Hastings
Warren Hastings dated his introduction 4 October 1784 at Benares and argued that such knowledge 'attracts and conciliates distant affections'; his backing got the book printed in London.
Q 08Gita 16.21 names three gates to the hell of self-destruction: lust, anger and which third?
Greed
Greed completes the trio that Krishna says must all be abandoned, in a chapter that sorts human nature into divine and demonic kinds.
Q 09Gita 2.22 likens the self's passage into a new body to a person doing what?
Shedding old clothes
Shedding old clothes for new ones is the image: the embodied self casts off a worn-out body as easily as worn-out garments, which is why Krishna calls grief for the body misplaced.
Q 10Gita 11.12 compares the blaze of Krishna's cosmic form to how many suns rising in the sky at once?
A thousand
A thousand suns was also the image Oppenheimer said came to him at the first atomic test, before the better-known line about becoming Death.
Q 11What does Gita 2.23 say weapons cannot cut, fire cannot burn and wind cannot dry?
The soul
The soul, or atman, is what Krishna calls eternal, unborn and unchanging in this passage, using it to argue that Arjuna's grief for those about to die is misplaced.
Q 12Who narrates the Gita to the blind Kuru king, using divine sight that Vyasa granted him?
Sanjaya
Sanjaya also gets the last word: the Gita's closing verse is his prediction that fortune and victory follow wherever Krishna and Arjuna stand together.
Q 13Which blind king speaks only the Gita's opening verse, asking what his sons and the Pandavas did?
Dhritarashtra
Q 21In which language did Gandhi write his 1929 Gita commentary in Yeravada jail?
Gujarati
Gujarati was Gandhi's mother tongue, and Mahadev Desai's English version of the commentary appeared in 1946 with a foreword by Gandhi, who called the Gita his 'spiritual dictionary'.
Q 22Where was Bal Gangadhar Tilak imprisoned for sedition when he wrote his Gita Rahasya in pencil?
Mandalay, Burma
Mandalay, Burma held Tilak from 1908 to 1914, and he drafted the 400-plus pages of his karma-yoga reading of the Gita there in under four months.
Q 23Which English poet's 1885 verse translation was the first Gita Gandhi ever read, as a student in England?
Edwin Arnold
Dhritarashtra speaks one verse of the 700, against 574 for Krishna and 84 for Arjuna, and spends the rest listening to his counsellor's report from the field.
Q 14Gita 1.20 introduces Arjuna by the insignia on his chariot flag; which deity does it show?
Hanuman
Hanuman's insignia on the flag is how the Gita first pictures Arjuna, who 'took up his bow' on seeing the Kaurava sons arrayed against him, then asked for his chariot to be moved.
Q 15The title Bhagavad Gita is usually translated into English as 'The Song of' what?
God
God is the usual rendering, from Bhagavan, 'the blessed one', though translators have also offered 'the word of God', 'the Divine Song' and 'Celestial Song'.
Q 16Gita 9.26 says Krishna accepts any offering made with devotion: a leaf, a flower, a fruit or what?
Water
Water rounds out a list chosen for its humility: Krishna says he 'delightfully' partakes of whatever a devotee offers in pure consciousness, however cheap the gift.
Q 17Gita 6.16 says yoga is impossible for anyone who does too much or too little of which two things?
Eating and sleeping
Eating and sleeping in moderation are the precondition, part of chapter 6's practical manual on meditation, which also wants a solitary spot and a seat neither too high nor too low.
Q 18Gita 18.66, near the end of Krishna's discourse, tells Arjuna to abandon all dharmas and do what instead?
Take refuge in him alone
Take refuge in him alone is the instruction, with a promise attached: 'I shall liberate you from all sinful reactions; do not fear.' Many commentators treat it as the Gita's summit.
Q 19In Gita 18.73, his last words, Arjuna says his illusion is dispelled and declares what?
I will do as you say
I will do as you say settles the matter that 700 verses were spent on, and the narrator then takes over for the Gita's final five verses.
Q 20Which UNESCO register for documentary heritage added the Gita's manuscript in April 2025?
Memory of the World
Memory of the World lists documents rather than sites, a programme begun in 1992 that by April 2025 held 570 inscriptions, making the Gita a late arrival.
Edwin Arnold called it The Song Celestial, and Gandhi later said he regarded Arnold's as the best of all the English translations he had read.
Q 24Which organisation's founder wrote 'Bhagavad-gita As It Is', by far the most widely distributed English Gita?
Hare Krishna movement
The Hare Krishna movement, ISKCON, has had its founder Prabhupada's 1968 translation put into fifty-six other languages, with sales its publisher estimates at twenty-three million copies.
Q 25Dnyaneshwar's 1290 Gita commentary, written in his teens, is the oldest surviving literary work in which language?
Marathi
Marathi literature begins with it: Dnyaneshwar, dead in his early twenties, inspired the Varkari saint-poets Eknath and Tukaram, and read the Gita as Advaita Vedanta.
Q 26Whose 8th-century commentary, the oldest surviving, fixed the Gita's length at exactly 700 verses?
Adi Shankara
Adi Shankara's declaration was probably meant to stop further insertions, and it worked: some old manuscripts may have run to 745 verses, but 700 has been the benchmark since.
Q 27With the Upanishads and the Gita, which text by Badarayana completes the Prasthanatrayi, Vedanta's triple canon?
The Brahma Sutras
The Brahma Sutras distil the Upanishads into terse aphorisms, and the founder of any new Vedanta school had to write commentaries on all three texts to prove the system.
Q 28Which author of The Doors of Perception wrote the introduction to Prabhavananda and Isherwood's 1944 Gita?
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley, writing mid-war in 1944, called the Gita 'perhaps the most systematic scriptural statement of the Perennial Philosophy', the subject of his own book the next year.
Q 29Which framer of India's constitution called the Gita a Brahmanical 'tool' in his essay 'Krishna and his Gita'?
B. R. Ambedkar
B. R. Ambedkar, born into a Dalit family, objected above all to the Gita's assertion that varna derives from birth rather than worth, and to the excuse that killing only touches the body.
Q 30In Gita 11.32, the verse Oppenheimer rendered 'Now I am become Death', the word kala more literally means what?
Time
Time is the literal sense: 'I am mighty Time, the source of destruction that comes forth to annihilate the worlds,' runs one modern rendering, and the vision shows warriors rushing into its mouths to be devoured.