This week we are giving access through our shelves to an English translation of the Bhagavad Gita with the famous commentary by Shankara. Following this link you will be able to read a short selection and also to download the entire work, including the original Sanskrit text.

Whatever fruit of merit is declared by the scriptures to be attainable when the Vedas are properly studied, when the sacrifices are performed in all their parts, when austerities are well practised, —beyond all this multitude of fruits rises the Yogin who rightly understands and follows the teaching imparted by the Lord in His answers to the seven questions, and he then attains to the highest abode of Ishvara, which existed even in the beginning. He attains Brahman, the Cause.

• We also bring a new article by Lord Northbourne on “Intellectual Freedom”, looking dispassionately at many of our modern superstitions:

Anyone who clings to religion is clinging, not to an arbitrary framework of man’s devising, but to the only framework that can serve as a starting-point for the realization of an inward freedom that is independent of terrestrial contingencies. Moreover this inward freedom is a truly intellectual freedom in so far as it is founded on an integral vision of truth, on a vision which is unified at its source because it comes from within and is not derived exclusively from the observation of the dispersed and fugitive relativities of this world.

• Finally, Fr Giuseppe Scattolin shares from Cairo his reflections on the relevance of “Spirituality in Interreligious Dialogue”:

Dialogue, in fact, does not involve only theoretical thinking, necessary as it may be. It must be, in the first place, a meeting at the level of spiritual life and religious experience which are the heart of all religions.