This article examines the three classical paths of Yoga described in the Bhagavad Gita — Karma Yoga (the path of right action without attachment to outcome), Jnana Yoga (the path of discriminative knowledge and self-inquiry), and Bhakti Yoga (the path of devotion and surrender) — as a comprehensive philosophical framework for the full range of human temperaments and their respective routes to self-realisation. The article draws on Shankara's Advaita Vedanta, Ramanuja's Vishishtadvaita, and Sri Aurobindo's integral synthesis as three major interpretive frameworks. The Bhagavad Gita's context — Arjuna's crisis of meaning and action on the battlefield of Kurukshetra — is examined as the archetypal human predicament that the three paths simultaneously address. Contemporary relevance is examined: Karma Yoga as the framework for meaningful work in the age of AI displacement, Jnana Yoga as the philosophical antidote to the information-without-wisdom crisis of the digital age, and Bhakti Yoga as the path that addresses the meaning deficit and relational poverty that the happiness research consistently identifies as the primary crisis of affluent modernity.
Narayan Rout (Wed,) studied this question.