Bhagavad Gita Trivia
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99 free Bhagavad Gita trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 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 02Which American writer told of bathing his intellect each morning in the Gita's 'stupendous and cosmogonal' philosophy?
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau wrote the line in Walden, in a passage that pictures his own pond mingling with the sacred Ganges.
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.
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 is the field the Gita's first verse names as the place where the two armies gathered; at Jyotisar, a banyan is said to be an offshoot of the tree Krishna spoke under.
Q 07Which Governor-General wrote the introduction to Charles Wilkins's 1785 Gita, the first in English?
Warren Hastings
Warren Hastings argued in it that knowledge gained from the people Britain ruled 'attracts and conciliates distant affections', and the East India Company published the book in London on his recommendation.
Q 08Gita 16.21 names three gates to the hell of self-destruction: lust, anger and which third?
Greed
Greed completes the trio, and the next verse holds out the reward: whoever gets free of all three gates works for his own good and reaches the supreme goal.
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 is the Sanskrit's count, and a 1949 magazine profile reported it as the verse that came to Oppenheimer 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
Dhritarashtra asks his one question and then only listens: every verse after it, Krishna's whole teaching included, is his counsellor's report from the field.
Q 21Where was Bal Gangadhar Tilak imprisoned for sedition when he wrote his Gita Rahasya?
Mandalay, Burma
Mandalay, Burma held Tilak from 1908 to 1914, and the book he wrote there turned the usual reading around: the Gita, he argued, teaches selfless action in the world, not renunciation.
Q 22Which English poet's 1885 verse translation was the first Gita Gandhi ever read, as a student in England?
Edwin Arnold
Edwin Arnold called it The Song Celestial; two Theosophist brothers in London invited Gandhi to read the Gita with them, and he felt ashamed that he had never read it in Sanskrit or in his own language.
Q 23Which organisation's founder wrote the 1968 translation 'Bhagavad-gita As It Is'?
Q 14The title Bhagavad Gita is usually translated into English as 'The Song of' what?
God
God is the usual rendering of Bhagavan, the title under which Krishna speaks throughout: English editions open his speeches with lines such as 'The Blessed Lord said'.
Q 15Gita 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 16Gita 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 17Gita 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.'
Q 18In 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 19Which UNESCO register added the Gita's manuscript in April 2025?
Memory of the World
Memory of the World lists documents rather than sites, under a programme UNESCO launched to guard against 'collective amnesia' and the destruction of archives; the Gita went in together with the Natyashastra.
Q 20In which language did Gandhi write his own commentary on the Bhagavad Gita?
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'.
Hare Krishna movement
Hare Krishna movement is the everyday name for ISKCON, set up in New York by Prabhupada, who had given up his business and family ties and sailed from India in 1965, in his late sixties.
Q 24Dnyaneshwar's 1290 Gita commentary, written in his teens, is a founding classic of which language's literature?
Marathi
Marathi devotional poetry took its lead from the work: Dnyaneshwar, dead in his early twenties, inspired the Varkari saint-poets Eknath and Tukaram.
Q 25Whose 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 26With 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 27Which English novelist wrote the introduction to Prabhavananda and Isherwood's 1944 translation of the 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 28Which Indian leader's essay 'Krishna and his Gita' called the text a 'tool' of Brahmanical Hinduism?
B. R. Ambedkar
B. R. Ambedkar, born into a Dalit family and later a framer of India's constitution, read the Gita as a defence of the warrior's duty to kill and of caste fixed by birth rather than worth.
Q 29In 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.
Q 30Gita Jayanti falls in which lunar month, the one Krishna claims as his own in Gita 10.35?
Margashirsha
Margashirsha, also called Agrahayana, hosts Gita Jayanti because tradition dates the dialogue itself to the eleventh day of the month's waxing moon.