My Thoughts on the Bhagavad Gita and the power of the Number 18
Over the past year, as I have been reading the Bhagavad Gita by Gita Press Gorakhpur, I have noticed something interesting. While reading the Bhagavad Gita, one number kept quietly repeating itself in my mind, "18". At first, it felt like a coincidence. But the more I observed, the more it felt intentional, almost like a hidden rhythm running through the epic and its message. In Hindu or precisely Sanatana philosophy, numbers are never just numbers. Knowledge itself is called "Sankhya", which literally means counting or arithmetic. This tells me that numbers are not separate from wisdom, they are part of how wisdom is expressed. The Gita has 18 chapters. This alone is striking, but the pattern does not stop there. The Mahabharata, the great epic that holds the Gita within it, is traditionally divided into 18 volumes. The war that forms the background of the Gita was fought for 18 days. It feels as if the teaching, the story and the battlefield are all aligned to the...