It is the vāsanās that breed attachment to karmas and to their fruits. So the teaching of the Gītā is the very foundation for uprooting the vāsanās first of all. The Gītā is the compendium of the essential meaning of all the Vedas. While explaining the outward karmas that the earlier portion propounds, yajña, yāga and the like, and the mental karmas, the upāsanās, it has also set forth the attainable Jñāna Yoga. However great a person may be, however learned, if delusion arises in him, the sorrow born of it will without fail obstruct his engagement in action. Arjuna was a great hero, a man of renunciation, a jñāni; yet his engagement in action was obstructed by moha, which took the form of the war, and by the grief to which that moha gave rise. There, because of the absence of Viveka between body and Ātma, the moha took the form of a cognition that ascribed to the Ātma, which has not the slightest connection with any of the properties of saṃsāra, the reality of the illusory saṃsāra, its being a property of the Ātma, and so on. First comes moha. This is not Arjuna's alone; it belongs to all mankind, and so it is common to every living being. Think of the Gītā as ‘īta’, swimming, for crossing the ocean of saṃsāra. Just as swimming supports the body in crossing the rivers formed in physical nature, so the Gītā supports us in crossing the mental ocean of saṃsāra.