Jnana Yoga is the path of the discriminating intellect — the path by which the veils of ignorance are stripped away and reality is seen as it is. Where Bhakti approaches the Divine through the heart and Karma Yoga through the will, Jnana approaches through the trained mind. Chapters 4, 5, 7, and 13 are the classical loci.
The knowledge the Gita means is not information. It is transformative insight — the direct recognition that the perceiving Self is not the perceived body, that the field of experience is one thing and the knower of the field is another (Chapter 13). Krishna calls this the 'sovereign knowledge, the sovereign secret' (9.2). It is called royal because it is exalted, and secret because it is available only to the prepared mind.
The preparation is disciplined. The seeker must approach the teacher with humility, service, and honest inquiry (4.34). He must purify himself through action offered without craving. And he must recognise that even the knowledge, when it arrives, does not belong to him personally — it is Brahman knowing itself through the individuated mind. The end of Jnana is not the accumulation of understanding but its dissolution into being.
Crucially, the Gita insists that Jnana and Karma Yoga are not rivals. 'The ignorant, not the wise, speak of them as different,' Krishna says in 5.4. In the mature practitioner, action becomes luminous with knowledge, and knowledge is grounded in action.