A Public Session on the Gita: Shraddha and Asuya

Acharya Prashant held a public session on the Bhagavad Gita in London on 29 June under conditions that would have thinned most gatherings. Owing to unforeseen circumstances the venue was changed and the timings revised twice, yet the audience arrived in strength. The hall filled to capacity, and as people kept coming they settled wherever space allowed, many of them on the floor, following the session attentively to its close. Over a lakh joined the session online too.

Turning to the text, Acharya Prashant drew out the meanings of Shraddha and Asuya. Shraddha, he said, is not blind belief but an openness and receptivity to the truth, a willingness to let it in. Asuya is its opposite, the disposition to search the truth for faults rather than receive it. As long as a person remains filled with Asuya, he said, the truth stays out of reach. Real Shraddha is the readiness to set the ego aside and stand humbly before the truth, and that willingness is the first step toward self-knowledge.

The session comes near the close of an extended tour of Britain. Across the two legs of the tour he addressed the Cambridge India Business Dialogue 2026, delivered a session on the Ishavasya Upanishad at Oxford, spoke at the House of Lords, gave a keynote address at the London School of Economics and held a further dialogue there with Professor Jonathan Birch on animal consciousness, and took part in London Climate Action Week 2026.

The argument he pressed across those settings held steady to the end. A wide education of the self, Acharya Prashant has maintained throughout the tour, is the fundamental answer to the environmental, social and psychological crises now facing humanity, and the outward reforms usually proposed will fall short without it.