The Bhagavad Gītā (“Song of the Lord”) sits inside the sixth book of the Mahābhārata, one of the two great Sanskrit epics: a dialogue in which Kṛṣṇa answers the warrior Arjuna’s crisis of conscience on the eve of battle. Because the epic is a work of human authorship, the Gītā is formally smṛti, not śruti. Yet the Vedānta tradition gave it a place beside the Upaniṣads and the Brahma Sūtras in its triple canon, and every major school’s founder commented on it.
You will meet it in this Atlas as a constant supporting witness. Rāmānuja in particular cites it steadily; it appears in his commentary here dozens of times, abbreviated “Bha. Gî.” in the edition’s Victorian spelling. Śaṅkara more often invokes it under the general name Smṛti. When a commentator writes “the Smṛti says,” a Gītā verse is frequently what follows.