19
Essays on the Gita
VOLUME 19
THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SRI AUROBINDO
© Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust 1997
Published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department
Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry
PRINTED IN INDIA
Essays on the Gita
Publisher’s Note
The first series of Essays on the Gita appeared in the
monthly review Arya between August 1916 and July
1918. It was revised by Sri Aurobindo and published as
a book in 1922.
The second series appeared in the Arya between August 1918 and July 1920. In 1928 Sri Aurobindo brought
out an extensively revised edition in book form.
For the present edition, the text has been thoroughly
checked against all previous editions and against the
manuscripts of the revised Arya.
CONTENTS
FIRST SERIES
I
Our Demand and Need from the Gita
3
II
The Divine Teacher
12
III
The Human Disciple
20
IV
The Core of the Teaching
29
V
Kurukshetra
39
VI
Man and the Battle of Life
47
VII
The Creed of the Aryan Fighter
57
VIII
Sankhya and Yoga
68
IX
Sankhya, Yoga and Vedanta
81
X
The Yoga of the Intelligent Will
94
XI
Works and Sacrifice
105
XII
The Significance of Sacrifice
114
XIII
The Lord of the Sacrifice
124
CONTENTS
XIV
The Principle of Divine Works
134
XV
The Possibility and Purpose of Avatarhood
145
XVI
The Process of Avatarhood
158
XVII
The Divine Birth and Divine Works
168
XVIII
The Divine Worker
177
XIX
Equality
188
XX
Equality and Knowledge
200
XXI
The Determinism of Nature
212
XXII
Beyond the Modes of Nature
224
XXIII
Nirvana and Works in the World
234
XXIV
The Gist of the Karmayoga
247
SECOND SERIES
Part I — The Synthesis of Works, Love and Knowledge
I
The Two Natures
263
II
The Synthesis of Devotion and Knowledge
278
CONTENTS
III
The Supreme Divine
289
IV
The Secret of Secrets
301
V
The Divine Truth and Way
311
VI
Works, Devotion and Knowledge
322
VII
The Supreme Word of the Gita
337
VIII
God in Power of Becoming
355
IX
The Theory of the Vibhuti
366
X
The Vision of the World-Spirit
— Time the Destroyer
377
XI
The Vision of the World-Spirit
— The Double Aspect
388
XII
The Way and the Bhakta
396
Part II — The Supreme Secret
XIII
The Field and its Knower
409
XIV
Above the Gunas
421
XV
The Three Purushas
435
CONTENTS
XVI
The Fullness of Spiritual Action
450
XVII
Deva and Asura
463
XVIII
The Gunas, Faith and Works
477
XIX
The Gunas, Mind and Works
493
XX
Swabhava and Swadharma
507
XXI
Towards the Supreme Secret
526
XXII
The Supreme Secret
540
XXIII
The Core of the Gita’s Meaning
562
XXIV
The Message of the Gita
572
Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry, c. 1915
A page of the Arya as revised by Sri Aurobindo
Essays on the Gita
First Series
I
Our Demand and Need
from the Gita
T
HE WORLD abounds with scriptures sacred and profane, with revelations and half-revelations, with religions
and philosophies, sects and schools and systems. To these
the many minds of a half-ripe knowledge or no knowledge at
all attach themselves with exclusiveness and passion and will
have it that this or the other book is alone the eternal Word of
God and all others are either impostures or at best imperfectly
inspired, that this or that philosophy is the last word of the
reasoning intellect and other systems are either errors or saved
only by such partial truth in them as links them to the one
true philosophical cult. Even the discoveries of physical Science
have been elevated into a creed and in its name religion and
spirituality banned as ignorance and superstition, philosophy as
frippery and moonshine. And to these bigoted exclusions and
vain wranglings even the wise have often lent themselves, misled
by some spirit of darkness that has mingled with their light and
overshadowed it with some cloud of intellectual egoism or spiritual pride. Mankind seems now indeed inclined to grow a little
modester and wiser; we no longer slay our fellows in the name
of God’s truth or because they have minds differently trained
or differently constituted from ours; we are less ready to curse
and revile our neighbour because he is wicked or presumptuous
enough to differ from us in opinion; we are ready even to admit
that Truth is everywhere and cannot be our sole monopoly; we
are beginning to look at other religions and philosophies for
the truth and help they contain and no longer merely in order
to damn them as false or criticise what we conceive to be their
errors. But we are still apt to declare that our truth gives us
the supreme knowledge which other religions or philosophies
4
Essays on the Gita
have missed or only imperfectly grasped so that they deal either
with subsidiary and inferior aspects of the truth of things or can
merely prepare less evolved minds for the heights to which we
have arrived. And we are still prone to force upon ourselves or
others the whole sacred mass of the book or gospel we admire,
insisting that all shall be accepted as eternally valid truth and
no iota or underline or diaeresis denied its part of the plenary
inspiration.
It may therefore be useful in approaching an ancient Scripture, such as the Veda, Upanishads or Gita, to indicate precisely
the spirit in which we approach it and what exactly we think
we may derive from it that is of value to humanity and its
future. First of all, there is undoubtedly a Truth one and eternal
which we are seeking, from which all other truth derives, by the
light of which all other truth finds its right place, explanation
and relation to the scheme of knowledge. But precisely for that
reason it cannot be shut up in a single trenchant formula, it
is not likely to be found in its entirety or in all its bearings
in any single philosophy or scripture or uttered altogether and
for ever by any one teacher, thinker, prophet or Avatar. Nor
has it been wholly found by us if our view of it necessitates
the intolerant exclusion of the truth underlying other systems;
for when we reject passionately, we mean simply that we cannot
appreciate and explain. Secondly, this Truth, though it is one and
eternal, expresses itself in Time and through the mind of man;
therefore every Scripture must necessarily contain two elements,
one temporary, perishable, belonging to the ideas of the period
and country in which it was produced, the other eternal and imperishable and applicable in all ages and countries. Moreover, in
the statement of the Truth the actual form given to it, the system
and arrangement, the metaphysical and intellectual mould, the
precise expression used must be largely subject to the mutations
of Time and cease to have the same force; for the human intellect
modifies itself always; continually dividing and putting together
it is obliged to shift its divisions continually and to rearrange
its syntheses; it is always leaving old expression and symbol for
new or, if it uses the old, it so changes its connotation or at least
Our Demand and Need from the Gita
5
its exact content and association that we can never be quite sure
of understanding an ancient book of this kind precisely in the
sense and spirit it bore to its contemporaries. What is of entirely
permanent value is that which besides being universal has been
experienced, lived and seen with a higher than the intellectual
vision.
I hold it therefore of small importance to extract from the
Gita its exact metaphysical connotation as it was understood
by the men of the time, — even if that were accurately possible.
That it is not possible, is shown by the divergence of the original
commentaries which have been and are still being written upon
it; for they all agree in each disagreeing with all the others,
each finds in the Gita its own system of metaphysics and trend
of religious thought. Nor will even the most painstaking and
disinterested scholarship and the most luminous theories of the
historical development of Indian philosophy save us from inevitable error. But what we can do with profit is to seek in the
Gita for the actual living truths it contains, apart from their
metaphysical form, to extract from it what can help us or the
world at large and to put it in the most natural and vital form
and expression we can find that will be suitable to the mentality
and helpful to the spiritual needs of our present-day humanity.
No doubt in this attempt we may mix a good deal of error born
of our own individuality and of the ideas in which we live, as
did greater men before us, but if we steep ourselves in the spirit
of this great Scripture and, above all, if we have tried to live in
that spirit, we may be sure of finding in it as much real truth
as we are capable of receiving as well as the spiritual influence
and actual help that, personally, we were intended to derive
from it. And that is after all what Scriptures were written to
give; the rest is academical disputation or theological dogma.
Only those Scriptures, religions, philosophies which can be thus
constantly renewed, relived, their stuff of permanent truth constantly reshaped and developed in the inner thought and spiritual
experience of a developing humanity, continue to be of living
importance to mankind. The rest remain as monuments of the
past, but have no actual force or vital impulse for the future.
6
Essays on the Gita
In the Gita there is very little that is merely local or temporal
and its spirit is so large, profound and universal that even this
little can easily be universalised without the sense of the teaching
suffering any diminution or violation; rather by giving an ampler
scope to it than belonged to the country and epoch, the teaching
gains in depth, truth and power. Often indeed the Gita itself
suggests the wider scope that can in this way be given to an idea
in itself local or limited. Thus it dwells on the ancient Indian
system and idea of sacrifice as an interchange between gods and
men, — a system and idea which have long been practically obsolete in India itself and are no longer real to the general human
mind; but we find here a sense so entirely subtle, figurative and
symbolic given to the word “sacrifice” and the conception of
the gods is so little local or mythological, so entirely cosmic and
philosophical that we can easily accept both as expressive of a
practical fact of psychology and general law of Nature and so
apply them to the modern conceptions of interchange between
life and life and of ethical sacrifice and self-giving as to widen
and deepen these and cast over them a more spiritual aspect and
the light of a profounder and more far-reaching Truth. Equally
the idea of action according to the Shastra, the fourfold order
of society, the allusion to the relative position of the four orders
or the comparative spiritual disabilities of Shudras and women
seem at first sight local and temporal, and, if they are too much
pressed in their literal sense, narrow so much at least of the
teaching, deprive it of its universality and spiritual depth and
limit its validity for mankind at large. But if we look behind
to the spirit and sense and not at the local name and temporal
institution, we see that here too the sense is deep and true and
the spirit philosophical, spiritual and universal. By Shastra we
perceive that the Gita means the law imposed on itself by humanity as a substitute for the purely egoistic action of the natural
unregenerate man and a control on his tendency to seek in the
satisfaction of his desire the standard and aim of his life. We
see too that the fourfold order of society is merely the concrete
form of a spiritual truth which is itself independent of the form;
it rests on the conception of right works as a rightly ordered
Our Demand and Need from the Gita
7
expression of the nature of the individual being through whom
the work is done, that nature assigning him his line and scope
in life according to his inborn quality and his self-expressive
function. Since this is the spirit in which the Gita advances its
most local and particular instances, we are justified in pursuing
always the same principle and looking always for the deeper
general truth which is sure to underlie whatever seems at first
sight merely local and of the time. For we shall find always
that the deeper truth and principle is implied in the grain of the
thought even when it is not expressly stated in its language.
Nor shall we deal in any other spirit with the element of
philosophical dogma or religious creed which either enters into
the Gita or hangs about it owing to its use of the philosophical
terms and religious symbols current at the time. When the Gita
speaks of Sankhya and Yoga, we shall not discuss beyond the
limits of what is just essential for our statement, the relations of
the Sankhya of the Gita with its one Purusha and strong Vedantic
colouring to the non-theistic or “atheistic” Sankhya that has
come down to us bringing with it its scheme of many Purushas
and one Prakriti, nor of the Yoga of the Gita, many-sided, subtle,
rich and flexible to the theistic doctrine and the fixed, scientific,
rigorously defined and graded system of the Yoga of Patanjali.
In the Gita the Sankhya and Yoga are evidently only two convergent parts of the same Vedantic truth or rather two concurrent
ways of approaching its realisation, the one philosophical, intellectual, analytic, the other intuitional, devotional, practical,
ethical, synthetic, reaching knowledge through experience. The
Gita recognises no real difference in their teachings. Still less
need we discuss the theories which regard the Gita as the fruit
of some particular religious system or tradition. Its teaching is
universal whatever may have been its origins.
The philosophical system of the Gita, its arrangement of
truth, is not that part of its teaching which is the most vital,
profound, eternally durable; but most of the material of which
the system is composed, the principal ideas suggestive and penetrating which are woven into its complex harmony, are eternally
valuable and valid; for they are not merely the luminous ideas or
8
Essays on the Gita
striking speculations of a philosophic intellect, but rather enduring truths of spiritual experience, verifiable facts of our highest
psychological possibilities which no attempt to read deeply the
mystery of existence can afford to neglect. Whatever the system
may be, it is not, as the commentators strive to make it, framed
or intended to support any exclusive school of philosophical
thought or to put forward predominantly the claims of any
one form of Yoga. The language of the Gita, the structure of
thought, the combination and balancing of ideas belong neither
to the temper of a sectarian teacher nor to the spirit of a rigorous
analytical dialectics cutting off one angle of the truth to exclude
all the others; but rather there is a wide, undulating, encircling
movement of ideas which is the manifestation of a vast synthetic
mind and a rich synthetic experience. This is one of those great
syntheses in which Indian spirituality has been as rich as in its
creation of the more intensive, exclusive movements of knowledge and religious realisation that follow out with an absolute
concentration one clue, one path to its extreme issues. It does
not cleave asunder, but reconciles and unifies.
The thought of the Gita is not pure Monism although it
sees in one unchanging, pure, eternal Self the foundation of
all cosmic existence, nor Mayavada although it speaks of the
Maya of the three modes of Prakriti omnipresent in the created
world; nor is it qualified Monism although it places in the One
his eternal supreme Prakriti manifested in the form of the Jiva
and lays most stress on dwelling in God rather than dissolution as the supreme state of spiritual consciousness; nor is it
Sankhya although it explains the created world by the double
principle of Purusha and Prakriti; nor is it Vaishnava Theism
although it presents to us Krishna, who is the Avatara of Vishnu
according to the Puranas, as the supreme Deity and allows no
essential difference nor any actual superiority of the status of
the indefinable relationless Brahman over that of this Lord of
beings who is the Master of the universe and the Friend of all
creatures. Like the earlier spiritual synthesis of the Upanishads
this later synthesis at once spiritual and intellectual avoids naturally every such rigid determination as would injure its universal
Our Demand and Need from the Gita
9
comprehensiveness. Its aim is precisely the opposite to that of
the polemist commentators who found this Scripture established
as one of the three highest Vedantic authorities and attempted
to turn it into a weapon of offence and defence against other
schools and systems. The Gita is not a weapon for dialectical
warfare; it is a gate opening on the whole world of spiritual
truth and experience and the view it gives us embraces all the
provinces of that supreme region. It maps out, but it does not
cut up or build walls or hedges to confine our vision.
There have been other syntheses in the long history of Indian
thought. We start with the Vedic synthesis of the psychological
being of man in its highest flights and widest rangings of divine
knowledge, power, joy, life and glory with the cosmic existence
of the gods, pursued behind the symbols of the material universe
into those superior planes which are hidden from the physical
sense and the material mentality. The crown of this synthesis was
in the experience of the Vedic Rishis something divine, transcendent and blissful in whose unity the increasing soul of man and
the eternal divine fullness of the cosmic godheads meet perfectly
and fulfil themselves. The Upanishads take up this crowning
experience of the earlier seers and make it their starting-point
for a high and profound synthesis of spiritual knowledge; they
draw together into a great harmony all that had been seen and
experienced by the inspired and liberated knowers of the Eternal
throughout a great and fruitful period of spiritual seeking. The
Gita starts from this Vedantic synthesis and upon the basis of its
essential ideas builds another harmony of the three great means
and powers, Love, Knowledge and Works, through which the
soul of man can directly approach and cast itself into the Eternal.
There is yet another, the Tantric,1 which though less subtle and
spiritually profound, is even more bold and forceful than the
synthesis of the Gita, — for it seizes even upon the obstacles to
the spiritual life and compels them to become the means for a
richer spiritual conquest and enables us to embrace the whole
1
All the Puranic tradition, it must be remembered, draws the richness of its contents
from the Tantra.
10
Essays on the Gita
of Life in our divine scope as the Lila2 of the Divine; and in
some directions it is more immediately rich and fruitful, for it
brings forward into the foreground along with divine knowledge, divine works and an enriched devotion of divine Love,
the secrets also of the Hatha and Raja Yogas, the use of the
body and of mental askesis for the opening up of the divine life
on all its planes, to which the Gita gives only a passing and
perfunctory attention. Moreover it grasps at that idea of the
divine perfectibility of man, possessed by the Vedic Rishis but
thrown into the background by the intermediate ages, which is
destined to fill so large a place in any future synthesis of human
thought, experience and aspiration.
We of the coming day stand at the head of a new age of development which must lead to such a new and larger synthesis. We
are not called upon to be orthodox Vedantins of any of the three
schools or Tantrics or to adhere to one of the theistic religions
of the past or to entrench ourselves within the four corners of
the teaching of the Gita. That would be to limit ourselves and to
attempt to create our spiritual life out of the being, knowledge
and nature of others, of the men of the past, instead of building
it out of our own being and potentialities. We do not belong
to the past dawns, but to the noons of the future. A mass of
new material is flowing into us; we have not only to assimilate
the influences of the great theistic religions of India and of the
world and a recovered sense of the meaning of Buddhism, but
to take full account of the potent though limited revelations of
modern knowledge and seeking; and, beyond that, the remote
and dateless past which seemed to be dead is returning upon
us with an effulgence of many luminous secrets long lost to the
consciousness of mankind but now breaking out again from
behind the veil. All this points to a new, a very rich, a very vast
synthesis; a fresh and widely embracing harmonisation of our
gains is both an intellectual and a spiritual necessity of the future.
But just as the past syntheses have taken those which preceded
them for their starting-point, so also must that of the future,
2
The cosmic Play.
Our Demand and Need from the Gita
11
to be on firm ground, proceed from what the great bodies of
realised spiritual thought and experience in the past have given.
Among them the Gita takes a most important place.
Our object, then, in studying the Gita will not be a scholastic
or academical scrutiny of its thought, nor to place its philosophy
in the history of metaphysical speculation, nor shall we deal with
it in the manner of the analytical dialectician. We approach it
for help and light and our aim must be to distinguish its essential
and living message, that in it on which humanity has to seize for
its perfection and its highest spiritual welfare.
II
The Divine Teacher
T
HE PECULIARITY of the Gita among the great religious
books of the world is that it does not stand apart as a
work by itself, the fruit of the spiritual life of a creative
personality like Christ, Mahomed or Buddha or of an epoch of
pure spiritual searching like the Veda and Upanishads, but is
given as an episode in an epic history of nations and their wars
and men and their deeds and arises out of a critical moment in the
soul of one of its leading personages face to face with the crowning action of his life, a work terrible, violent and sanguinary, at
the point when he must either recoil from it altogether or carry it
through to its inexorable completion. It matters little whether or
no, as modern criticism supposes, the Gita is a later composition
inserted into the mass of the Mahabharata by its author in order
to invest its teaching with the authority and popularity of the
great national epic. There seem to me to be strong grounds
against this supposition for which, besides, the evidence, extrinsic or internal, is in the last degree scanty and insufficient. But
even if it be sound, there remains the fact that the author has
not only taken pains to interweave his work inextricably into
the vast web of the larger poem, but is careful again and again to
remind us of the situation from which the teaching has arisen;
he returns to it prominently, not only at the end, but in the
middle of his profoundest philosophical disquisitions. We must
accept the insistence of the author and give its full importance
to this recurrent preoccupation of the Teacher and the disciple.
The teaching of the Gita must therefore be regarded not merely
in the light of a general spiritual philosophy or ethical doctrine,
but as bearing upon a practical crisis in the application of ethics
and spirituality to human life. For what that crisis stands, what
is the significance of the battle of Kurukshetra and its effect on
Arjuna’s inner being, we have first to determine if we would
The Divine Teacher
13
grasp the central drift of the ideas of the Gita.
Very obviously a great body of the profoundest teaching
cannot be built round an ordinary occurrence which has no gulfs
of deep suggestion and hazardous difficulty behind its superficial
and outward aspects and can be governed well enough by the
ordinary everyday standards of thought and action. There are
indeed three things in the Gita which are spiritually significant,
almost symbolic, typical of the profoundest relations and problems of the spiritual life and of human existence at its roots;
they are the divine personality of the Teacher, his characteristic
relations with his disciple and the occasion of his teaching. The
teacher is God himself descended into humanity; the disciple is
the first, as we might say in modern language, the representative
man of his age, closest friend and chosen instrument of the
Avatar, his protagonist in an immense work and struggle the
secret purpose of which is unknown to the actors in it, known
only to the incarnate Godhead who guides it all from behind the
veil of his unfathomable mind of knowledge; the occasion is the
violent crisis of that work and struggle at the moment when the
anguish and moral difficulty and blind violence of its apparent
movements forces itself with the shock of a visible revelation on
the mind of its representative man and raises the whole question
of the meaning of God in the world and the goal and drift and
sense of human life and conduct.
India has from ancient times held strongly a belief in the
reality of the Avatara, the descent into form, the revelation of
the Godhead in humanity. In the West this belief has never really stamped itself upon the mind because it has been presented
through exoteric Christianity as a theological dogma without
any roots in the reason and general consciousness and attitude
towards life. But in India it has grown up and persisted as a
logical outcome of the Vedantic view of life and taken firm root
in the consciousness of the race. All existence is a manifestation
of God because He is the only existence and nothing can be
except as either a real figuring or else a figment of that one
reality. Therefore every conscious being is in part or in some
way a descent of the Infinite into the apparent finiteness of
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Essays on the Gita
name and form. But it is a veiled manifestation and there is
a gradation between the supreme being1 of the Divine and the
consciousness shrouded partly or wholly by ignorance of self
in the finite. The conscious embodied soul2 is the spark of the
divine Fire and that soul in man opens out to self-knowledge as
it develops out of ignorance of self into self-being. The Divine
also, pouring itself into the forms of the cosmic existence, is
revealed ordinarily in an efflorescence of its powers, in energies
and magnitudes of its knowledge, love, joy, developed force of
being,3 in degrees and faces of its divinity. But when the divine
Consciousness and Power, taking upon itself the human form
and the human mode of action, possesses it not only by powers
and magnitudes, by degrees and outward faces of itself but out
of its eternal self-knowledge, when the Unborn knows itself and
acts in the frame of the mental being and the appearance of
birth, that is the height of the conditioned manifestation; it is
the full and conscious descent of the Godhead, it is the Avatara.
The Vaishnava form of Vedantism which has laid most stress
upon this conception expresses the relation of God in man to
man in God by the double figure of Nara-Narayana, associated
historically with the origin of a religious school very similar in
its doctrines to the teaching of the Gita. Nara is the human
soul which, eternal companion of the Divine, finds itself only
when it awakens to that companionship and begins, as the Gita
would say, to live in God. Narayana is the divine Soul always
present in our humanity, the secret guide, friend and helper of
the human being, the “Lord who abides within the heart of
creatures” of the Gita; when within us the veil of that secret
sanctuary is withdrawn and man speaks face to face with God,
hears the divine voice, receives the divine light, acts in the divine
power, then becomes possible the supreme uplifting of the embodied human conscious-being into the unborn and eternal. He
becomes capable of that dwelling in God and giving up of his
whole consciousness into the Divine which the Gita upholds as
the best or highest secret of things, uttamaṁ rahasyam. When
1
para bhāva.
2
dehı̄.
3
vibhūti.
The Divine Teacher
15
this eternal divine Consciousness always present in every human
being, this God in man, takes possession partly4 or wholly of the
human consciousness and becomes in visible human shape the
guide, teacher, leader of the world, not as those who living in
their humanity yet feel something of the power or light or love
of the divine Gnosis informing and conducting them, but out
of that divine Gnosis itself, direct from its central force and
plenitude, then we have the manifest Avatar. The inner Divinity
is the eternal Avatar in man; the human manifestation is its sign
and development in the external world.
When we thus understand the conception of Avatarhood, we
see that whether for the fundamental teaching of the Gita, our
present subject, or for spiritual life generally the external aspect
has only a secondary importance. Such controversies as the one
that has raged in Europe over the historicity of Christ, would
seem to a spiritually-minded Indian largely a waste of time; he
would concede to it a considerable historical, but hardly any
religious importance; for what does it matter in the end whether
a Jesus son of the carpenter Joseph was actually born in Nazareth
or Bethlehem, lived and taught and was done to death on a real
or trumped-up charge of sedition, so long as we can know by
spiritual experience the inner Christ, live uplifted in the light of
his teaching and escape from the yoke of the natural Law by
that atonement of man with God of which the crucifixion is the
symbol? If the Christ, God made man, lives within our spiritual
being, it would seem to matter little whether or not a son of
Mary physically lived and suffered and died in Judea. So too
the Krishna who matters to us is the eternal incarnation of the
Divine and not the historical teacher and leader of men.
In seeking the kernel of the thought of the Gita we need,
therefore, only concern ourselves with the spiritual significance
of the human-divine Krishna of the Mahabharata who is presented to us as the teacher of Arjuna on the battle-field of
Kurukshetra. The historical Krishna, no doubt, existed. We meet
4
Chaitanya, the Avatar of Nadiya, is said to have been thus partly or occasionally
occupied by the divine Consciousness and Power.
16
Essays on the Gita
the name first in the Chhandogya Upanishad where all we can
gather about him is that he was well known in spiritual tradition
as a knower of the Brahman, so well known indeed in his personality and the circumstances of his life that it was sufficient to
refer to him by the name of his mother as Krishna son of Devaki
for all to understand who was meant. In the same Upanishad
we find mention of King Dhritarashtra son of Vichitravirya,
and since tradition associated the two together so closely that
they are both of them leading personages in the action of the
Mahabharata, we may fairly conclude that they were actually
contemporaries and that the epic is to a great extent dealing
with historical characters and in the war of Kurukshetra with
a historical occurrence imprinted firmly on the memory of the
race. We know too that Krishna and Arjuna were the object
of religious worship in the pre-Christian centuries; and there is
some reason to suppose that they were so in connection with a
religious and philosophical tradition from which the Gita may
have gathered many of its elements and even the foundation of
its synthesis of knowledge, devotion and works, and perhaps
also that the human Krishna was the founder, restorer or at the
least one of the early teachers of this school. The Gita may well
in spite of its later form represent the outcome in Indian thought
of the teaching of Krishna and the connection of that teaching
with the historical Krishna, with Arjuna and with the war of
Kurukshetra may be something more than a dramatic fiction. In
the Mahabharata Krishna is represented both as the historical
character and the Avatar; his worship and Avatarhood must
therefore have been well established by the time — apparently
from the fifth to the first centuries B.C. — when the old story
and poem or epic tradition of the Bharatas took its present
form. There is a hint also in the poem of the story or legend
of the Avatar’s early life in Vrindavan which, as developed by
the Puranas into an intense and powerful spiritual symbol, has
exercised so profound an influence on the religious mind of
India. We have also in the Harivansha an account of the life of
Krishna, very evidently full of legends, which perhaps formed
the basis of the Puranic accounts.
The Divine Teacher
17
But all this, though of considerable historical importance,
has none whatever for our present purpose. We are concerned
only with the figure of the divine Teacher as it is presented to
us in the Gita and with the Power for which it there stands in
the spiritual illumination of the human being. The Gita accepts
the human Avatarhood; for the Lord speaks of the repeated,
the constant5 manifestation of the Divine in humanity, when He
the eternal Unborn assumes by his Maya, by the power of the
infinite Consciousness to clothe itself apparently in finite forms,
the conditions of becoming which we call birth. But it is not this
upon which stress is laid, but on the transcendent, the cosmic
and the internal Divine; it is on the Source of all things and the
Master of all and on the Godhead secret in man. It is this internal
divinity who is meant when the Gita speaks of the doer of violent
Asuric austerities troubling the God within or of the sin of those
who despise the Divine lodged in the human body or of the
same Godhead destroying our ignorance by the blazing lamp of
knowledge. It is then the eternal Avatar, this God in man, the
divine Consciousness always present in the human being who
manifested in a visible form speaks to the human soul in the Gita,
illumines the meaning of life and the secret of divine action and
gives it the light of the divine knowledge and guidance and the
assuring and fortifying word of the Master of existence in the
hour when it comes face to face with the painful mystery of the
world. This is what the Indian religious consciousness seeks to
make near to itself in whatever form, whether in the symbolic
human image it enshrines in its temples or in the worship of its
Avatars or in the devotion to the human Guru through whom
the voice of the one world-Teacher makes itself heard. Through
these it strives to awaken to that inner voice, unveil that form
of the Formless and stand face to face with that manifest divine
Power, Love and Knowledge.
Secondly, there is the typical, almost the symbolic significance of the human Krishna who stands behind the great action
of the Mahabharata, not as its hero, but as its secret centre
5
bahūni me vyatı̄tāni janmāni . . . sambhavāmi yuge yuge.
18
Essays on the Gita
and hidden guide. That action is the action of a whole world
of men and nations, some of whom have come as helpers of
an effort and result by which they do not personally profit,
and to these he is a leader, some as its opponents and to them
he also is an opponent, the baffler of their designs and their
slayer and he seems even to some of them an instigator of all
evil and destroyer of their old order and familiar world and
secure conventions of virtue and good; some are representatives
of that which has to be fulfilled and to them he is counsellor,
helper, friend. Where the action pursues its natural course or
the doers of the work have to suffer at the hands of its enemies
and undergo the ordeals which prepare them for mastery, the
Avatar is unseen or appears only for occasional comfort and
aid, but at every crisis his hand is felt, yet in such a way that all
imagine themselves to be the protagonists and even Arjuna, his
nearest friend and chief instrument, does not perceive that he is
an instrument and has to confess at last that all the while he did
not really know his divine Friend. He has received counsel from
his wisdom, help from his power, has loved and been loved,
has even adored without understanding his divine nature; but
he has been guided like all others through his own egoism and
the counsel, help and direction have been given in the language
and received by the thoughts of the Ignorance. Until the moment
when all has been pushed to the terrible issue of the struggle on
the field of Kurukshetra and the Avatar stands at last, still not as
fighter, but as the charioteer in the battle-car which carries the
destiny of the fight, he has not revealed Himself even to those
whom he has chosen.
Thus the figure of Krishna becomes, as it were, the symbol
of the divine dealings with humanity. Through our egoism and
ignorance we are moved, thinking that we are the doers of the
work, vaunting of ourselves as the real causes of the result,
and that which moves us we see only occasionally as some
vague or even some human and earthly fountain of knowledge,
aspiration, force, some Principle or Light or Power which we
acknowledge and adore without knowing what it is until the
occasion arises that forces us to stand arrested before the Veil.
The Divine Teacher
19
And the action in which this divine figure moves is the whole
wide action of man in life, not merely the inner life, but all this
obscure course of the world which we can judge only by the
twilight of the human reason as it opens up dimly before our
uncertain advance the little span in front. This is the distinguishing feature of the Gita that it is the culmination of such an action
which gives rise to its teaching and assigns that prominence and
bold relief to the gospel of works which it enunciates with an
emphasis and force we do not find in other Indian Scriptures.
Not only in the Gita, but in other passages of the Mahabharata
we meet with Krishna declaring emphatically the necessity of
action, but it is here that he reveals its secret and the divinity
behind our works.
The symbolic companionship of Arjuna and Krishna, the
human and the divine soul, is expressed elsewhere in Indian
thought, in the heavenward journey of Indra and Kutsa seated
in one chariot, in the figure of the two birds upon one tree in the
Upanishad, in the twin figures of Nara and Narayana, the seers
who do tapasyā together for the knowledge. But in all three it
is the idea of the divine knowledge in which, as the Gita says,
all action culminates that is in view; here it is instead the action
which leads to that knowledge and in which the divine Knower
figures himself. Arjuna and Krishna, this human and this divine,
stand together not as seers in the peaceful hermitage of meditation, but as fighter and holder of the reins in the clamorous field,
in the midst of the hurtling shafts, in the chariot of battle. The
Teacher of the Gita is therefore not only the God in man who
unveils himself in the word of knowledge, but the God in man
who moves our whole world of action, by and for whom all
our humanity exists and struggles and labours, towards whom
all human life travels and progresses. He is the secret Master of
works and sacrifice and the Friend of the human peoples.
III
The Human Disciple
S
UCH then is the divine Teacher of the Gita, the eternal
Avatar, the Divine who has descended into the human consciousness, the Lord seated within the heart of all beings,
He who guides from behind the veil all our thought and action
and heart’s seeking even as He directs from behind the veil of
visible and sensible forms and forces and tendencies the great
universal action of the world which He has manifested in His
own being. All the strife of our upward endeavour and seeking
finds its culmination and ceases in a satisfied fulfilment when we
can rend the veil and get behind our apparent self to this real
Self, can realise our whole being in this true Lord of our being,
can give up our personality to and into this one real Person,
merge our ever-dispersed and ever-converging mental activities
into His plenary light, offer up our errant and struggling will
and energies into His vast, luminous and undivided Will, at
once renounce and satisfy all our dissipated outward-moving
desires and emotions in the plenitude of His self-existent Bliss.
This is the world-Teacher of whose eternal knowledge all other
highest teaching is but the various reflection and partial word,
this the Voice to which the hearing of our soul has to awaken.
Arjuna, the disciple who receives his initiation on the battlefield, is a counterpart of this conception; he is the type of the
struggling human soul who has not yet received the knowledge,
but has grown fit to receive it by action in the world in a close
companionship and an increasing nearness to the higher and
divine Self in humanity. There is a method of explaining the
Gita in which not only this episode but the whole Mahabharata is turned into an allegory of the inner life and has nothing
to do with our outward human life and action, but only with
the battles of the soul and the powers that strive within us for
possession. That is a view which the general character and the
The Human Disciple
21
actual language of the epic does not justify and, if pressed, would
turn the straightforward philosophical language of the Gita into
a constant, laborious and somewhat puerile mystification. The
language of the Veda and part at least of the Puranas is plainly
symbolic, full of figures and concrete representations of things
that lie behind the veil, but the Gita is written in plain terms
and professes to solve the great ethical and spiritual difficulties
which the life of man raises, and it will not do to go behind
this plain language and thought and wrest them to the service
of our fancy. But there is this much of truth in the view, that
the setting of the doctrine though not symbolical, is certainly
typical, as indeed the setting of such a discourse as the Gita
must necessarily be if it is to have any relation at all with that
which it frames. Arjuna, as we have seen, is the representative
man of a great world-struggle and divinely-guided movement
of men and nations; in the Gita he typifies the human soul of
action brought face to face through that action in its highest
and most violent crisis with the problem of human life and its
apparent incompatibility with the spiritual state or even with a
purely ethical ideal of perfection.
Arjuna is the fighter in the chariot with the divine Krishna
as his charioteer. In the Veda also we have this image of the
human soul and the divine riding in one chariot through a great
battle to the goal of a high-aspiring effort. But there it is a pure
figure and symbol. The Divine is there Indra, the Master of the
World of Light and Immortality, the power of divine knowledge
which descends to the aid of the human seeker battling with the
sons of falsehood, darkness, limitation, mortality; the battle is
with spiritual enemies who bar the way to the higher world of
our being; and the goal is that plane of vast being resplendent
with the light of the supreme Truth and uplifted to the conscious
immortality of the perfected soul, of which Indra is the master.
The human soul is Kutsa, he who constantly seeks the seerknowledge, as his name implies, and he is the son of Arjuna or
Arjuni, the White One, child of Switra the White Mother; he is,
that is to say, the sattwic or purified and light-filled soul which
is open to the unbroken glories of the divine knowledge. And
22
Essays on the Gita
when the chariot reaches the end of its journey, the own home of
Indra, the human Kutsa has grown into such an exact likeness of
his divine companion that he can only be distinguished by Sachi,
the wife of Indra, because she is “truth-conscious”. The parable
is evidently of the inner life of man; it is a figure of the human
growing into the likeness of the eternal divine by the increasing
illumination of Knowledge. But the Gita starts from action and
Arjuna is the man of action and not of knowledge, the fighter,
never the seer or the thinker.
From the beginning of the Gita this characteristic temperament of the disciple is clearly indicated and it is maintained
throughout. It becomes first evident in the manner in which he
is awakened to the sense of what he is doing, the great slaughter
of which he is to be the chief instrument, in the thoughts which
immediately rise in him, in the standpoint and the psychological
motives which make him recoil from the whole terrible catastrophe. They are not the thoughts, the standpoint, the motives of
a philosophical or even of a deeply reflective mind or a spiritual
temperament confronted with the same or a similar problem.
They are those, as we might say, of the practical or the pragmatic
man, the emotional, sensational, moral and intelligent human
being not habituated to profound and original reflection or any
sounding of the depths, accustomed rather to high but fixed standards of thought and action and a confident treading through
all vicissitudes and difficulties, who now finds all his standards
failing him and all the basis of his confidence in himself and his
life shorn away from under him at a single stroke. That is the
nature of the crisis which he undergoes.
Arjuna is, in the language of the Gita, a man subject to
the action of the three gunas or modes of the Nature-Force
and habituated to move unquestioningly in that field, like the
generality of men. He justifies his name only in being so far pure
and sattwic as to be governed by high and clear principles and
impulses and habitually control his lower nature by the noblest
Law which he knows. He is not of a violent Asuric disposition,
not the slave of his passions, but has been trained to a high calm
and self-control, to an unswerving performance of his duties
The Human Disciple
23
and firm obedience to the best principles of the time and society
in which he has lived and the religion and ethics to which he
has been brought up. He is egoistic like other men, but with the
purer or sattwic egoism which regards the moral law and society
and the claims of others and not only or predominantly his own
interests, desires and passions. He has lived and guided himself
by the Shastra, the moral and social code. The thought which
preoccupies him, the standard which he obeys is the dharma,
that collective Indian conception of the religious, social and
moral rule of conduct, and especially the rule of the station
and function to which he belongs, he the Kshatriya, the highminded, self-governed, chivalrous prince and warrior and leader
of Aryan men. Following always this rule, conscious of virtue
and right dealing he has travelled so far and finds suddenly
that it has led him to become the protagonist of a terrific and
unparalleled slaughter, a monstrous civil war involving all the
cultured Aryan nations which must lead to the complete destruction of the flower of their manhood and threatens their ordered
civilisation with chaos and collapse.
It is typical again of the pragmatic man that it is through
his sensations that he awakens to the meaning of his action. He
has asked his friend and charioteer to place him between the
two armies, not with any profounder idea, but with the proud
intention of viewing and looking in the face these myriads of the
champions of unrighteousness whom he has to meet and conquer
and slay “in this holiday of fight” so that the right may prevail.
It is as he gazes that the revelation of the meaning of a civil and
domestic war comes home to him, a war in which not only men
of the same race, the same nation, the same clan, but those of
the same family and household stand upon opposite sides. All
whom the social man holds most dear and sacred, he must meet
as enemies and slay, — the worshipped teacher and preceptor,
the old friend, comrade and companion in arms, grandsires,
uncles, those who stood in the relation to him of father, of son,
of grandson, connections by blood and connections by marriage,
— all these social ties have to be cut asunder by the sword. It
is not that he did not know these things before, but he has
24
Essays on the Gita
never realised it all; obsessed by his claims and wrongs and by
the principles of his life, the struggle for the right, the duty of
the Kshatriya to protect justice and the law and fight and beat
down injustice and lawless violence, he has neither thought it
out deeply nor felt it in his heart and at the core of his life. And
now it is shown to his vision by the divine charioteer, placed
sensationally before his eyes, and comes home to him like a
blow delivered at the very centre of his sensational, vital and
emotional being.
The first result is a violent sensational and physical crisis
which produces a disgust of the action and its material objects
and of life itself. He rejects the vital aim pursued by egoistic
humanity in its action, — happiness and enjoyment; he rejects
the vital aim of the Kshatriya, victory and rule and power and
the government of men. What after all is this fight for justice
when reduced to its practical terms, but just this, a fight for the
interests of himself, his brothers and his party, for possession
and enjoyment and rule? But at such a cost these things are
not worth having. For they are of no value in themselves, but
only as a means to the right maintenance of social and national
life and it is these very aims that in the person of his kin and
his race he is about to destroy. And then comes the cry of the
emotions. These are they for whose sake life and happiness are
desired, our “own people”. Who would consent to slay these for
the sake of all the earth, or even for the kingdom of the three
worlds? What pleasure can there be in life, what happiness, what
satisfaction in oneself after such a deed? The whole thing is a
dreadful sin, — for now the moral sense awakens to justify the
revolt of the sensations and the emotions. It is a sin, there is no
right nor justice in mutual slaughter; especially are those who
are to be slain the natural objects of reverence and of love, those
without whom one would not care to live, and to violate these
sacred feelings can be no virtue, can be nothing but a heinous
crime. Granted that the offence, the aggression, the first sin, the
crimes of greed and selfish passion which have brought things
to such a pass came from the other side; yet armed resistance
to wrong under such circumstances would be itself a sin and
The Human Disciple
25
crime worse than theirs because they are blinded by passion and
unconscious of guilt, while on this side it would be with a clear
sense of guilt that the sin would be committed. And for what?
For the maintenance of family morality, of the social law and
the law of the nation? These are the very standards that will
be destroyed by this civil war; the family itself will be brought
to the point of annihilation, corruption of morals and loss of
the purity of race will be engendered, the eternal laws of the
race and moral law of the family will be destroyed. Ruin of the
race, the collapse of its high traditions, ethical degradation and
hell for the authors of such a crime, these are the only practical
results possible of this monstrous civil strife. “Therefore,” cries
Arjuna, casting down the divine bow and inexhaustible quiver
given to him by the gods for that tremendous hour, “it is more
for my welfare that the sons of Dhritarashtra armed should slay
me unarmed and unresisting. I will not fight.”
The character of this inner crisis is therefore not the questioning of the thinker; it is not a recoil from the appearances
of life and a turning of the eye inward in search of the truth of
things, the real meaning of existence and a solution or an escape
from the dark riddle of the world. It is the sensational, emotional
and moral revolt of the man hitherto satisfied with action and its
current standards who finds himself cast by them into a hideous
chaos where they are in violent conflict with each other and with
themselves and there is no moral standing-ground left, nothing
to lay hold of and walk by, no dharma.1 That for the soul of
action in the mental being is the worst possible crisis, failure
and overthrow. The revolt itself is the most elemental and simple
possible; sensationally, the elemental feeling of horror, pity and
disgust; vitally, the loss of attraction and faith in the recognised
and familiar objects of action and aims of life; emotionally, the
recoil of the ordinary feelings of social man, affection, reverence,
desire of a common happiness and satisfaction, from a stern duty
outraging them all; morally, the elementary sense of sin and
1
Dharma means literally that which one lays hold of and which holds things together,
the law, the norm, the rule of nature, action and life.
26
Essays on the Gita
hell and rejection of “blood-stained enjoyments”; practically,
the sense that the standards of action have led to a result which
destroys the practical aims of action. But the whole upshot is that
all-embracing inner bankruptcy which Arjuna expresses when
he says that his whole conscious being, not the thought alone
but heart and vital desires and all, are utterly bewildered and
can find nowhere the dharma, nowhere any valid law of action.
For this alone he takes refuge as a disciple with Krishna; give
me, he practically asks, that which I have lost, a true law, a clear
rule of action, a path by which I can again confidently walk. He
does not ask for the secret of life or of the world, the meaning
and purpose of it all, but for a dharma.
Yet it is precisely this secret for which he does not ask, or
at least so much of the knowledge as is necessary to lead him
into a higher life, to which the divine Teacher intends to lead
this disciple; for he means him to give up all dharmas except
the one broad and vast rule of living consciously in the Divine
and acting from that consciousness. Therefore after testing the
completeness of his revolt from the ordinary standards of conduct, he proceeds to tell him much that has to do with the state
of the soul, but nothing of any outward rule of action. He must
be equal in soul, abandon the desire of the fruits of work, rise
above his intellectual notions of sin and virtue, live and act in
Yoga with a mind in Samadhi, firmly fixed, that is to say, in the
Divine alone. Arjuna is not satisfied: he wishes to know how
the change to this state will affect the outward action of the
man, what result it will have on his speech, his movements, his
state, what difference it will make in this acting, living human
being. Krishna persists merely in enlarging upon the ideas he has
already brought forward, on the soul-state behind the action, not
on the action itself. It is the fixed anchoring of the intelligence
in a state of desireless equality that is the one thing needed.
Arjuna breaks out impatiently, — for here is no rule of conduct
such as he sought, but rather, as it seems to him, the negation of
all action, — “If thou holdest the intelligence to be greater than
action, why then dost thou appoint me to an action terrible in
its nature? Thou bewilderest my understanding with a mingled
The Human Disciple
27
word: speak one thing decisively by which I can attain to what
is the best.” It is always the pragmatic man who has no value for
metaphysical thought or for the inner life except when they help
him to his one demand, a dharma, a law of life in the world or,
if need be, of leaving the world; for that too is a decisive action
which he can understand. But to live and act in the world, yet
be above it, this is a “mingled” and confusing word the sense of
which he has no patience to grasp.
The rest of Arjuna’s questions and utterances proceed from
the same temperament and character. When he is told that once
the soul-state is assured there need be no apparent change in the
action, he must act always by the law of his nature, even if the
act itself seem faulty and deficient compared with that of another
law than his own, he is troubled. The nature! but what of this
sense of sin in the action with which he is preoccupied? is it not
this very nature which drives men as if by force and even against
their better will into sin and guilt? His practical intelligence is
baffled by Krishna’s assertion that it was he who in ancient times
revealed to Vivasvan this Yoga, since lost, which he is now again
revealing to Arjuna, and by his demand for an explanation he
provokes the famous and oft-quoted statement of Avatarhood
and its mundane purpose. He is again perplexed by the words
in which Krishna continues to reconcile action and renunciation
of action and asks once again for a decisive statement of that
which is the best and highest, not this “mingled” word. When
he realises fully the nature of the Yoga which he is bidden to
embrace, his pragmatic nature accustomed to act from mental
will and preference and desire is appalled by its difficulty and
he asks what is the end of the soul which attempts and fails,
whether it does not lose both this life of human activity and
thought and emotion which it has left behind and the Brahmic
consciousness to which it aspires and falling from both perish
like a dissolving cloud?
When his doubts and perplexities are resolved and he knows
that it is the Divine which must be his law, he aims again and
always at such clear and decisive knowledge as will guide him
practically to this source and this rule of his future action. How
28
Essays on the Gita
is the Divine to be distinguished among the various states of
being which constitute our ordinary experience? What are the
great manifestations of its self-energy in the world in which he
can recognise and realise it by meditation? May he not see even
now the divine cosmic Form of That which is actually speaking
to him through the veil of the human mind and body? And his
last questions demand a clear distinction between renunciation
of works and this subtler renunciation he is asked to prefer;
the actual difference between Purusha and Prakriti, the Field
and the Knower of the Field, so important for the practice of
desireless action under the drive of the divine Will; and finally
a clear statement of the practical operations and results of the
three modes of Prakriti which he is bidden to surmount.
To such a disciple the Teacher of the Gita gives his divine
teaching. He seizes him at a moment of his psychological development by egoistic action when all the mental, moral, emotional
values of the ordinary egoistic and social life of man have collapsed in a sudden bankruptcy, and he has to lift him up out
of this lower life into a higher consciousness, out of ignorant
attachment to action into that which transcends, yet originates
and orders action, out of ego into Self, out of life in mind,
vitality and body into that higher nature beyond mind which is
the status of the Divine. He has at the same time to give him that
for which he asks and for which he is inspired to seek by the
guidance within him, a new Law of life and action high above the
insufficient rule of the ordinary human existence with its endless
conflicts and oppositions, perplexities and illusory certainties, a
higher Law by which the soul shall be free from this bondage of
works and yet powerful to act and conquer in the vast liberty
of its divine being. For the action must be performed, the world
must fulfil its cycles and the soul of the human being must not
turn back in ignorance from the work it is here to do. The whole
course of the teaching of the Gita is determined and directed,
even in its widest wheelings, towards the fulfilment of these three
objects.
IV
The Core of the Teaching
W
E KNOW the divine Teacher, we see the human disciple; it remains to form a clear conception of the
doctrine. A clear conception fastening upon the essential idea, the central heart of the teaching is especially necessary
here because the Gita with its rich and many-sided thought, its
synthetical grasp of different aspects of the spiritual life and
the fluent winding motion of its argument lends itself, even
more than other scriptures, to one-sided misrepresentations born
of a partisan intellectuality. The unconscious or half-conscious
wresting of fact and word and idea to suit a preconceived notion
or the doctrine or principle of one’s preference is recognised by
Indian logicians as one of the most fruitful sources of fallacy;
and it is perhaps the one which it is most difficult for even
the most conscientious thinker to avoid. For the human reason
is incapable of always playing the detective upon itself in this
respect; it is its very nature to seize upon some partial conclusion, idea, principle, become its partisan and make it the key to
all truth, and it has an infinite faculty of doubling upon itself
so as to avoid detecting in its operations this necessary and
cherished weakness. The Gita lends itself easily to this kind of
error, because it is easy, by throwing particular emphasis on one
of its aspects or even on some salient and emphatic text and
putting all the rest of the eighteen chapters into the background
or making them a subordinate and auxiliary teaching, to turn it
into a partisan of our own doctrine or dogma.
Thus, there are those who make the Gita teach, not works
at all, but a discipline of preparation for renouncing life and
works: the indifferent performance of prescribed actions or of
whatever task may lie ready to the hands, becomes the means,
the discipline; the final renunciation of life and works is the sole
real object. It is quite easy to justify this view by citations from
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Essays on the Gita
the book and by a certain arrangement of stress in following out
its argument, especially if we shut our eyes to the peculiar way
in which it uses such a word as sannyāsa, renunciation; but it is
quite impossible to persist in this view on an impartial reading in
face of the continual assertion to the very end that action should
be preferred to inaction and that superiority lies with the true,
the inner renunciation of desire by equality and the giving up of
works to the supreme Purusha.
Others again speak of the Gita as if the doctrine of devotion
were its whole teaching and put in the background its monistic
elements and the high place it gives to quietistic immergence in
the one self of all. And undoubtedly its emphasis on devotion,
its insistence on the aspect of the Divine as Lord and Purusha
and its doctrine of the Purushottama, the Supreme Being who is
superior both to the mutable Being and to the Immutable and
who is what in His relation to the world we know as God, are
the most striking and among the most vital elements of the Gita.
Still, this Lord is the Self in whom all knowledge culminates and
the Master of sacrifice to whom all works lead as well as the
Lord of Love into whose being the heart of devotion enters, and
the Gita preserves a perfectly equal balance, emphasising now
knowledge, now works, now devotion, but for the purposes of
the immediate trend of the thought, not with any absolute separate preference of one over the others. He in whom all three meet
and become one, He is the Supreme Being, the Purushottama.
But at the present day, since in fact the modern mind began
to recognise and deal at all with the Gita, the tendency is to
subordinate its elements of knowledge and devotion, to take
advantage of its continual insistence on action and to find in it
a scripture of the Karmayoga, a Light leading us on the path of
action, a Gospel of Works. Undoubtedly, the Gita is a Gospel
of Works, but of works which culminate in knowledge, that is,
in spiritual realisation and quietude, and of works motived by
devotion, that is, a conscious surrender of one’s whole self first
into the hands and then into the being of the Supreme, and not
at all of works as they are understood by the modern mind, not
at all an action dictated by egoistic and altruistic, by personal,
The Core of the Teaching
31
social, humanitarian motives, principles, ideals. Yet this is what
present-day interpretations seek to make of the Gita. We are told
continually by many authoritative voices that the Gita, opposing
in this the ordinary ascetic and quietistic tendency of Indian
thought and spirituality, proclaims with no uncertain sound the
gospel of human action, the ideal of disinterested performance
of social duties, nay, even, it would seem, the quite modern
ideal of social service. To all this I can only reply that very
patently and even on the very surface of it the Gita does nothing
of the kind and that this is a modern misreading, a reading
of the modern mind into an ancient book, of the present-day
European or Europeanised intellect into a thoroughly antique,
a thoroughly Oriental and Indian teaching. That which the Gita
teaches is not a human, but a divine action; not the performance
of social duties, but the abandonment of all other standards
of duty or conduct for a selfless performance of the divine will
working through our nature; not social service, but the action of
the Best, the God-possessed, the Master-men done impersonally
for the sake of the world and as a sacrifice to Him who stands
behind man and Nature.
In other words, the Gita is not a book of practical ethics, but
of the spiritual life. The modern mind is just now the European
mind, such as it has become after having abandoned not only the
philosophic idealism of the highest Graeco-Roman culture from
which it started, but the Christian devotionalism of the Middle
Ages; these it has replaced by or transmuted into a practical
idealism and social, patriotic and philanthropic devotion. It has
got rid of God or kept Him only for Sunday use and erected in
His place man as its deity and society as its visible idol. At its
best it is practical, ethical, social, pragmatic, altruistic, humanitarian. Now all these things are good, are especially needed
at the present day, are part of the divine Will or they would
not have become so dominant in humanity. Nor is there any
reason why the divine man, the man who lives in the Brahmic
consciousness, in the God-being should not be all of these things
in his action; he will be, if they are the best ideal of the age, the
Yugadharma, and there is no yet higher ideal to be established,
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no great radical change to be effected. For he is, as the Teacher
points out to his disciple, the best who has to set the standard
for others; and in fact Arjuna is called upon to live according to
the highest ideals of his age and the prevailing culture, but with
knowledge, with understanding of that which lay behind, and
not as ordinary men, with a following of the merely outward
law and rule.
But the point here is that the modern mind has exiled from
its practical motive-power the two essential things, God or the
Eternal and spirituality or the God-state, which are the master
conceptions of the Gita. It lives in humanity only, and the Gita
would have us live in God, though for the world in God; in its
life, heart and intellect only, and the Gita would have us live in
the spirit; in the mutable Being who is “all creatures”, and the
Gita would have us live also in the Immutable and the Supreme;
in the changing march of Time, and the Gita would have us
live in the Eternal. Or if these higher things are now beginning
to be vaguely envisaged, it is only to make them subservient to
man and society; but God and spirituality exist in their own
right and not as adjuncts. And in practice the lower in us must
learn to exist for the higher, in order that the higher also may in
us consciously exist for the lower, to draw it nearer to its own
altitudes.
Therefore it is a mistake to interpret the Gita from the
standpoint of the mentality of today and force it to teach us the
disinterested performance of duty as the highest and all-sufficient
law. A little consideration of the situation with which the Gita
deals will show us that this could not be its meaning. For the
whole point of the teaching, that from which it arises, that which
compels the disciple to seek the Teacher, is an inextricable clash
of the various related conceptions of duty ending in the collapse
of the whole useful intellectual and moral edifice erected by
the human mind. In human life some sort of a clash arises fairly
often, as for instance between domestic duties and the call of the
country or the cause, or between the claim of the country and the
good of humanity or some larger religious or moral principle.
An inner situation may even arise, as with the Buddha, in which
The Core of the Teaching
33
all duties have to be abandoned, trampled on, flung aside in
order to follow the call of the Divine within. I cannot think
that the Gita would solve such an inner situation by sending
Buddha back to his wife and father and the government of the
Sakya State, or would direct a Ramakrishna to become a Pundit
in a vernacular school and disinterestedly teach little boys their
lessons, or bind down a Vivekananda to support his family and
for that to follow dispassionately the law or medicine or journalism. The Gita does not teach the disinterested performance
of duties but the following of the divine life, the abandonment
of all dharmas, sarvadharmān, to take refuge in the Supreme
alone, and the divine activity of a Buddha, a Ramakrishna, a
Vivekananda is perfectly in consonance with this teaching. Nay,
although the Gita prefers action to inaction, it does not rule out
the renunciation of works, but accepts it as one of the ways to
the Divine. If that can only be attained by renouncing works
and life and all duties and the call is strong within us, then into
the bonfire they must go, and there is no help for it. The call
of God is imperative and cannot be weighed against any other
considerations.
But here there is this farther difficulty that the action which
Arjuna must do is one from which his moral sense recoils. It
is his duty to fight, you say? But that duty has now become
to his mind a terrible sin. How does it help him or solve his
difficulty, to tell him that he must do his duty disinterestedly,
dispassionately? He will want to know which is his duty or how
it can be his duty to destroy in a sanguinary massacre his kin,
his race and his country. He is told that he has right on his
side, but that does not and cannot satisfy him, because his very
point is that the justice of his legal claim does not justify him in
supporting it by a pitiless massacre destructive to the future of
his nation. Is he then to act dispassionately in the sense of not
caring whether it is a sin or what its consequences may be so
long as he does his duty as a soldier? That may be the teaching of
a State, of politicians, of lawyers, of ethical casuists; it can never
be the teaching of a great religious and philosophical Scripture
which sets out to solve the problem of life and action from the
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very roots. And if that is what the Gita has to say on a most
poignant moral and spiritual problem, we must put it out of the
list of the world’s Scriptures and thrust it, if anywhere, then into
our library of political science and ethical casuistry.
Undoubtedly, the Gita does, like the Upanishads, teach the
equality which rises above sin and virtue, beyond good and evil,
but only as a part of the Brahmic consciousness and for the man
who is on the path and advanced enough to fulfil the supreme
rule. It does not preach indifference to good and evil for the
ordinary life of man, where such a doctrine would have the
most pernicious consequences. On the contrary it affirms that
the doers of evil shall not attain to God. Therefore if Arjuna
simply seeks to fulfil in the best way the ordinary law of man’s
life, disinterested performance of what he feels to be a sin, a
thing of Hell, will not help him, even though that sin be his duty
as a soldier. He must refrain from what his conscience abhors
though a thousand duties were shattered to pieces.
We must remember that duty is an idea which in practice
rests upon social conceptions. We may extend the term beyond
its proper connotation and talk of our duty to ourselves or we
may, if we like, say in a transcendent sense that it was Buddha’s
duty to abandon all, or even that it is the ascetic’s duty to sit
motionless in a cave! But this is obviously to play with words.
Duty is a relative term and depends upon our relation to others. It is a father’s duty, as a father, to nurture and educate his
children; a lawyer’s to do his best for his client even if he knows
him to be guilty and his defence to be a lie; a soldier’s to fight
and shoot to order even if he kill his own kin and countrymen;
a judge’s to send the guilty to prison and hang the murderer.
And so long as these positions are accepted, the duty remains
clear, a practical matter of course even when it is not a point
of honour or affection, and overrides the absolute religious or
moral law. But what if the inner view is changed, if the lawyer
is awakened to the absolute sinfulness of falsehood, the judge
becomes convinced that capital punishment is a crime against
humanity, the man called upon to the battlefield feels, like the
conscientious objector of today or as a Tolstoy would feel, that
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35
in no circumstances is it permissible to take human life any more
than to eat human flesh? It is obvious that here the moral law
which is above all relative duties must prevail; and that law
depends on no social relation or conception of duty but on the
awakened inner perception of man, the moral being.
There are in the world, in fact, two different laws of conduct
each valid on its own plane, the rule principally dependent on
external status and the rule independent of status and entirely
dependent on the thought and conscience. The Gita does not
teach us to subordinate the higher plane to the lower, it does
not ask the awakened moral consciousness to slay itself on the
altar of duty as a sacrifice and victim to the law of the social
status. It calls us higher and not lower; from the conflict of
the two planes it bids us ascend to a supreme poise above the
mainly practical, above the purely ethical, to the Brahmic consciousness. It replaces the conception of social duty by a divine
obligation. The subjection to external law gives place to a certain
principle of inner self-determination of action proceeding by the
soul’s freedom from the tangled law of works. And this, as we
shall see, — the Brahmic consciousness, the soul’s freedom from
works and the determination of works in the nature by the Lord
within and above us, — is the kernel of the Gita’s teaching with
regard to action.
The Gita can only be understood, like any other great work
of the kind, by studying it in its entirety and as a developing
argument. But the modern interpreters, starting from the great
writer Bankim Chandra Chatterji who first gave to the Gita this
new sense of a Gospel of Duty, have laid an almost exclusive
stress on the first three or four chapters and in those on the idea
of equality, on the expression kartavyaṁ karma, the work that is
to be done, which they render by duty, and on the phrase “Thou
hast a right to action, but none to the fruits of action” which
is now popularly quoted as the great word, mahāvākya, of the
Gita. The rest of the eighteen chapters with their high philosophy
are given a secondary importance, except indeed the great vision
in the eleventh. This is natural enough for the modern mind
which is, or has been till yesterday, inclined to be impatient of
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metaphysical subtleties and far-off spiritual seekings, eager to
get to work and, like Arjuna himself, mainly concerned for a
workable law of works, a dharma. But it is the wrong way to
handle this Scripture.
The equality which the Gita preaches is not disinterestedness, — the great command to Arjuna given after the foundation
and main structure of the teaching have been laid and built,
“Arise, slay thy enemies, enjoy a prosperous kingdom,” has not
the ring of an uncompromising altruism or of a white, dispassionate abnegation; it is a state of inner poise and wideness which
is the foundation of spiritual freedom. With that poise, in that
freedom we have to do the “work that is to be done,” a phrase
which the Gita uses with the greatest wideness including in it
all works, sarvakarmān.i, and which far exceeds, though it may
include, social duties or ethical obligations. What is the work to
be done is not to be determined by the individual choice; nor is
the right to the action and the rejection of claim to the fruit the
great word of the Gita, but only a preliminary word governing
the first state of the disciple when he begins ascending the hill
of Yoga. It is practically superseded at a subsequent stage. For
the Gita goes on to affirm emphatically that the man is not the
doer of the action; it is Prakriti, it is Nature, it is the great Force
with its three modes of action that works through him, and he
must learn to see that it is not he who does the work. Therefore
the “right to action” is an idea which is only valid so long as we
are still under the illusion of being the doer; it must necessarily
disappear from the mind like the claim to the fruit, as soon as
we cease to be to our own consciousness the doer of our works.
All pragmatic egoism, whether of the claim to fruits or of the
right to action, is then at an end.
But the determinism of Prakriti is not the last word of the
Gita. The equality of the will and the rejection of fruits are
only means for entering with the mind and the heart and the
understanding into the divine consciousness and living in it;
and the Gita expressly says that they are to be employed as a
means as long as the disciple is unable so to live or even to seek
by practice the gradual development of this higher state. And
The Core of the Teaching
37
what is this Divine, whom Krishna declares himself to be? It
is the Purushottama beyond the Self that acts not, beyond the
Prakriti that acts, foundation of the one, master of the other,
the Lord of whom all is the manifestation, who even in our
present subjection to Maya sits in the heart of His creatures
governing the works of Prakriti, He by whom the armies on
the field of Kurukshetra have already been slain while yet they
live and who uses Arjuna only as an instrument or immediate
occasion of this great slaughter. Prakriti is only His executive
force. The disciple has to rise beyond this Force and its three
modes or gun.as; he has to become trigun.ātı̄ta. Not to her has
he to surrender his actions, over which he has no longer any
claim or “right”, but into the being of the Supreme. Reposing
his mind and understanding, heart and will in Him, with selfknowledge, with God-knowledge, with world-knowledge, with
a perfect equality, a perfect devotion, an absolute self-giving,
he has to do works as an offering to the Master of all selfenergisings and all sacrifice. Identified in will, conscious with
that consciousness, That shall decide and initiate the action. This
is the solution which the Divine Teacher offers to the disciple.
What the great, the supreme word of the Gita is, its
mahāvākya, we have not to seek; for the Gita itself declares
it in its last utterance, the crowning note of the great diapason.
“With the Lord in thy heart take refuge with all thy being; by
His grace thou shalt attain to the supreme peace and the eternal
status. So have I expounded to thee a knowledge more secret
than that which is hidden. Further hear the most secret, the
supreme word that I shall speak to thee. Become my-minded,
devoted to Me, to Me do sacrifice and adoration; infallibly, thou
shalt come to Me, for dear to me art thou. Abandoning all laws
of conduct seek refuge in Me alone. I will release thee from all
sin; do not grieve.”
The argument of the Gita resolves itself into three great steps
by which action rises out of the human into the divine plane
leaving the bondage of the lower for the liberty of a higher law.
First, by the renunciation of desire and a perfect equality works
have to be done as a sacrifice by man as the doer, a sacrifice to
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a deity who is the supreme and only Self though by him not yet
realised in his own being. This is the initial step. Secondly, not
only the desire of the fruit, but the claim to be the doer of works
has to be renounced in the realisation of the Self as the equal, the
inactive, the immutable principle and of all works as simply the
operation of universal Force, of the Nature-Soul, Prakriti, the
unequal, active, mutable power. Lastly, the supreme Self has to
be seen as the supreme Purusha governing this Prakriti, of whom
the soul in Nature is a partial manifestation, by whom all works
are directed, in a perfect transcendence, through Nature. To him
love and adoration and the sacrifice of works have to be offered;
the whole being has to be surrendered to Him and the whole
consciousness raised up to dwell in this divine consciousness so
that the human soul may share in His divine transcendence of
Nature and of His works and act in a perfect spiritual liberty.
The first step is Karmayoga, the selfless sacrifice of works,
and here the Gita’s insistence is on action. The second is
Jnanayoga, the self-realisation and knowledge of the true nature of the self and the world; and here the insistence is on
knowledge; but the sacrifice of works continues and the path of
Works becomes one with but does not disappear into the path of
Knowledge. The last step is Bhaktiyoga, adoration and seeking
of the supreme Self as the Divine Being, and here the insistence is
on devotion; but the knowledge is not subordinated, only raised,
vitalised and fulfilled, and still the sacrifice of works continues;
the double path becomes the triune way of knowledge, works
and devotion. And the fruit of the sacrifice, the one fruit still
placed before the seeker, is attained, union with the divine Being
and oneness with the supreme divine nature.
V
Kurukshetra
B
EFORE we can proceed, following in the large steps of the
Teacher of the Gita, to watch his tracing of the triune path
of man, — the path which is that of his will, heart, thought
raising themselves to the Highest and into the being of that which
is the supreme object of all action, love and knowledge, we must
consider once more the situation from which the Gita arises, but
now in its largest bearings as a type of human life and even of all
world-existence. For although Arjuna is himself concerned only
with his own situation, his inner struggle and the law of action
he must follow, yet, as we have seen, the particular question he
raises, in the manner in which he raises it, does really bring up
the whole question of human life and action, what the world
is and why it is and how possibly, it being what it is, life here
in the world can be reconciled with life in the Spirit. And all
this deep and difficult matter the Teacher insists on resolving as
the very foundation of his command to an action which must
proceed from a new poise of being and by the light of a liberating
knowledge.
But what, then, is it that makes the difficulty for the man
who has to take the world as it is and act in it and yet would
live, within, the spiritual life? What is this aspect of existence
which appals his awakened mind and brings about what the title
of the first chapter of the Gita calls significantly the Yoga of the
dejection of Arjuna, the dejection and discouragement felt by
the human being when he is forced to face the spectacle of the
universe as it really is with the veil of the ethical illusion, the
illusion of self-righteousness torn from his eyes, before a higher
reconciliation with himself is effected? It is that aspect which is
figured outwardly in the carnage and massacre of Kurukshetra
and spiritually by the vision of the Lord of all things as Time
arising to devour and destroy the creatures whom it has made.
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This is the vision of the Lord of all existence as the universal
Creator but also the universal Destroyer, of whom the ancient
Scripture can say in a ruthless image, “The sages and the heroes
are his food and death is the spice of his banquet.” It is one
and the same truth seen first indirectly and obscurely in the
facts of life and then directly and clearly in the soul’s vision of
that which manifests itself in life. The outward aspect is that
of world-existence and human existence proceeding by struggle
and slaughter; the inward aspect is that of the universal Being
fulfilling himself in a vast creation and a vast destruction. Life a
battle and a field of death, this is Kurukshetra; God the Terrible,
this is the vision that Arjuna sees on that field of massacre.
War, said Heraclitus, is the father of all things, War is the
king of all; and the saying, like most of the apophthegms of
the Greek thinker, suggests a profound truth. From a clash of
material or other forces everything in this world, if not the world
itself, seems to be born; by a struggle of forces, tendencies, principles, beings it seems to proceed, ever creating new things, ever
destroying the old, marching one knows not very well whither,
— to a final self-destruction, say some; in an unending series
of vain cycles, say others; in progressive cycles, is the most
optimistic conclusion, leading through whatever trouble and
apparent confusion towards a higher and higher approximation
to some divine apocalypse. However that may be, this is certain
that there is not only no construction here without destruction,
no harmony except by a poise of contending forces won out
of many actual and potential discords, but also no continued
existence of life except by a constant self-feeding and devouring
of other life. Our very bodily life is a constant dying and being
reborn, the body itself a beleaguered city attacked by assailing,
protected by defending forces whose business is to devour each
other: and this is only a type of all our existence. The command
seems to have gone out from the beginning, “Thou shalt not
conquer except by battle with thy fellows and thy surroundings;
thou shalt not even live except by battle and struggle and by
absorbing into thyself other life. The first law of this world that
I have made is creation and preservation by destruction.”
Kurukshetra
41
Ancient thought accepted this starting-point so far as it
could see it by scrutiny of the universe. The old Upanishads saw
it very clearly and phrased it with an uncompromising thoroughness which will have nothing to do with any honeyed glosses or
optimistic scuttlings of the truth. Hunger that is Death, they said,
is the creator and master of this world, and they figured vital
existence in the image of the Horse of the sacrifice. Matter they
described by a name which means ordinarily food and they said,
we call it food because it is devoured and devours creatures. The
eater eating is eaten, this is the formula of the material world,
as the Darwinians rediscovered when they laid it down that the
struggle for life is the law of evolutionary existence. Modern
science has only rephrased the old truths that had already been
expressed in much more forcible, wide and accurate formulas
by the apophthegm of Heraclitus and the figures employed by
the Upanishads.
Nietzsche’s insistence upon war as an aspect of life and the
ideal man as a warrior, — the camel-man he may be to begin
with and the child-man hereafter, but the lion-man he must
become in the middle, if he is to attain his perfection, — these
now much-decried theories of Nietzsche have, however much we
may differ from many of the moral and practical conclusions he
drew from them, their undeniable justification and recall us to
a truth we like to hide out of sight. It is good that we should be
reminded of it; first, because to see it has for every strong soul
a tonic effect which saves us from the flabbiness and relaxation
encouraged by a too mellifluous philosophic, religious or ethical
sentimentalism, that which loves to look upon Nature as love
and life and beauty and good, but turns away from her grim
mask of death, adoring God as Shiva but refusing to adore him
as Rudra; secondly, because unless we have the honesty and
courage to look existence straight in the face, we shall never
arrive at any effective solution of its discords and oppositions.
We must see first what life and the world are; afterwards, we can
all the better set about finding the right way to transform them
into what they should be. If this repellent aspect of existence
holds in itself some secret of the final harmony, we shall by
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ignoring or belittling it miss that secret and all our efforts at a
solution will fail by fault of our self-indulgent ignoring of the
true elements of the problem. If, on the other hand, it is an
enemy to be beaten down, trampled on, excised, eliminated, still
we gain nothing by underrating its power and hold upon life or
refusing to see how firmly it is rooted in the effective past and
the actually operative principles of existence.
War and destruction are not only a universal principle of
our life here in its purely material aspects, but also of our mental
and moral existence. It is self-evident that in the actual life of
man intellectual, social, political, moral we can make no real
step forward without a struggle, a battle between what exists
and lives and what seeks to exist and live and between all that
stands behind either. It is impossible, at least as men and things
are, to advance, to grow, to fulfil and still to observe really
and utterly that principle of harmlessness which is yet placed
before us as the highest and best law of conduct. We will use
only soul-force and never destroy by war or any even defensive
employment of physical violence? Good, though until soul-force
is effective, the Asuric force in men and nations tramples down,
breaks, slaughters, burns, pollutes, as we see it doing today, but
then at its ease and unhindered, and you have perhaps caused as
much destruction of life by your abstinence as others by resort
to violence; still you have set up an ideal which may some day
and at any rate ought to lead up to better things. But even soulforce, when it is effective, destroys. Only those who have used it
with eyes open, know how much more terrible and destructive
it is than the sword and the cannon; and only those who do
not limit their view to the act and its immediate results, can see
how tremendous are its after-effects, how much is eventually
destroyed and with that much all the life that depended on it
and fed upon it. Evil cannot perish without the destruction of
much that lives by the evil, and it is no less destruction even if
we personally are saved the pain of a sensational act of violence.
Moreover, every time we use soul-force we raise a great
force of Karma against our adversary, the after-movements of
which we have no power to control. Vasishtha uses soul-force
Kurukshetra
43
against the military violence of Vishwamitra and armies of Huns
and Shakas and Pallavas hurl themselves on the aggressor. The
very quiescence and passivity of the spiritual man under violence
and aggression awakens the tremendous forces of the world to
a retributive action; and it may even be more merciful to stay
in their path, though by force, those who represent evil than to
allow them to trample on until they call down on themselves
a worse destruction than we would ever think of inflicting. It
is not enough that our own hands should remain clean and
our souls unstained for the law of strife and destruction to die
out of the world; that which is its root must first disappear
out of humanity. Much less will mere immobility and inertia
unwilling to use or incapable of using any kind of resistance
to evil, abrogate the law; inertia, tamas, indeed, injures much
more than can the rajasic principle of strife which at least creates more than it destroys. Therefore, so far as the problem
of the individual’s action goes, his abstention from strife and
its inevitable concomitant destruction in their more gross and
physical form may help his own moral being, but it leaves the
Slayer of creatures unabolished.
For the rest the whole of human history bears witness to the
inexorable vitality and persistent prevalence of this principle in
the world. It is natural that we should attempt to palliate, to lay
stress on other aspects. Strife and destruction are not all; there is
the saving principle of association and mutual help as well as the
force of dissociation and mutual strife; a power of love no less
than a power of egoistic self-assertion; an impulse to sacrifice
ourselves for others as well as the impulse to sacrifice others to
ourselves. But when we see how these have actually worked,
we shall not be tempted to gloss over or ignore the power
of their opposites. Association has been worked not only for
mutual help, but at the same time for defence and aggression, to
strengthen us against all that attacks or resists in the struggle for
life. Association itself has been a servant of war, egoism and the
self-assertion of life against life. Love itself has been constantly
a power of death. Especially the love of good and the love of
God, as embraced by the human ego, have been responsible for
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much strife, slaughter and destruction. Self-sacrifice is great and
noble, but at its highest it is an acknowledgment of the law
of Life by death and becomes an offering on the altar of some
Power that demands a victim in order that the work desired may
be done. The mother bird facing the animal of prey in defence
of its young, the patriot dying for his country’s freedom, the
religious martyr or the martyr of an idea, these in the lower
and the superior scale of animal life are highest examples of
self-sacrifice, and it is evident to what they bear witness.
But if we look at after results, an easy optimism becomes
even less possible. See the patriot dying in order that his country
may be free, and mark that country a few decades after the
Lord of Karma has paid the price of the blood and the suffering
that was given; you shall see it in its turn an oppressor, an exploiter and conqueror of colonies and dependencies devouring
others that it may live and succeed aggressively in life. The Christian martyrs perish in their thousands, setting soul-force against
empire-force that Christ may conquer, Christianity prevail. Soulforce does triumph, Christianity does prevail, — but not Christ;
the victorious religion becomes a militant and dominant Church
and a more fanatically persecuting power than the creed and the
empire which it replaced. The very religions organise themselves
into powers of mutual strife and battle together fiercely to live,
to grow, to possess the world.
All which seems to show that here is an element in existence, perhaps the initial element, which we do not know how
to conquer either because it cannot be conquered or because
we have not looked at it with a strong and impartial gaze so
as to recognise it calmly and fairly and know what it is. We
must look existence in the face if our aim is to arrive at a right
solution, whatever that solution may be. And to look existence
in the face is to look God in the face; for the two cannot be
separated, nor the responsibility for the laws of world-existence
be shifted away from Him who created them or from That which
constituted it. Yet here too we love to palliate and equivocate.
We erect a God of Love and Mercy, a God of good, a God just,
righteous and virtuous according to our own moral conceptions
Kurukshetra
45
of justice, virtue and righteousness, and all the rest, we say, is
not He or is not His, but was made by some diabolical Power
which He suffered for some reason to work out its wicked will
or by some dark Ahriman counterbalancing our gracious Ormuzd, or was even the fault of selfish and sinful man who has
spoiled what was made originally perfect by God. As if man had
created the law of death and devouring in the animal world or
that tremendous process by which Nature creates indeed and
preserves but in the same step and by the same inextricable
action slays and destroys. It is only a few religions which have
had the courage to say without any reserve, like the Indian,
that this enigmatic World-Power is one Deity, one Trinity, to lift
up the image of the Force that acts in the world in the figure
not only of the beneficent Durga, but of the terrible Kali in her
blood-stained dance of destruction and to say, “This too is the
Mother; this also know to be God; this too, if thou hast the
strength, adore.” And it is significant that the religion which
has had this unflinching honesty and tremendous courage, has
succeeded in creating a profound and wide-spread spirituality
such as no other can parallel. For truth is the foundation of real
spirituality and courage is its soul. Tasyai satyam āyatanam.
All this is not to say that strife and destruction are the alpha
and omega of existence, that harmony is not greater than war,
love more the manifest divine than death or that we must not
move towards the replacement of physical force by soul-force,
of war by peace, of strife by union, of devouring by love, of
egoism by universality, of death by immortal life. God is not
only the Destroyer, but the Friend of creatures; not only the
cosmic Trinity, but the Transcendent; the terrible Kali is also the
loving and beneficent Mother; the lord of Kurukshetra is the
divine comrade and charioteer, the attracter of beings, incarnate
Krishna. And whithersoever he is driving through all the strife
and clash and confusion, to whatever goal or godhead he may be
attracting us, it is — no doubt of that — to some transcendence
of all these aspects upon which we have been so firmly insisting.
But where, how, with what kind of transcendence, under what
conditions, this we have to discover; and to discover it, the first
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necessity is to see the world as it is, to observe and value rightly
his action as it reveals itself at the start and now; afterwards
the way and the goal will better reveal themselves. We must
acknowledge Kurukshetra; we must submit to the law of Life by
Death before we can find our way to the life immortal; we must
open our eyes, with a less appalled gaze than Arjuna’s, to the
vision of our Lord of Time and Death and cease to deny, hate
or recoil from the universal Destroyer.
VI
Man and the Battle of Life
T
HUS, if we are to appreciate in its catholicity the teaching
of the Gita, we must accept intellectually its standpoint
and courageous envisaging of the manifest nature and
process of the world. The divine charioteer of Kurukshetra reveals himself on one side as the Lord of all the worlds and
the Friend and omniscient Guide of all creatures, on the other as
Time the Destroyer “arisen for the destruction of these peoples.”
The Gita, following in this the spirit of the catholic Hindu religion, affirms this also as God; it does not attempt to evade the
enigma of the world by escaping from it through a side-door. If,
in fact, we do not regard existence merely as the mechanic action
of a brute and indifferent material Force or, on the other hand, as
an equally mechanical play of ideas and energies arising out of an
original Non-Existence or else reflected in the passive Soul or the
evolution of a dream or nightmare in the surface consciousness
of an indifferent, immutable Transcendence which is unaffected
by the dream and has no real part in it, — if we accept at all,
as the Gita accepts, the existence of God, that is to say of the
omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, yet always transcendent
Being who manifests the world and Himself in the world, who
is not the slave but the lord of His creative Consciousness, Nature or Force (Maya, Prakriti or Shakti), who is not baffled or
thwarted in His world-conception or design by His creatures,
man or devil, who does not need to justify Himself by shifting
the responsibility for any part of His creation or manifestation
on that which is created or manifested, then the human being
has to start from a great, a difficult act of faith. Finding himself
in a world which is apparently a chaos of battling powers, a
clash of vast and obscure forces, a life which subsists only by
constant change and death, menaced from every side by pain,
suffering, evil and destruction, he has to see the omnipresent
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Deity in it all and conscious that of this enigma there must
be a solution and beyond this Ignorance in which he dwells a
Knowledge that reconciles, he has to take his stand upon this
faith, “Though Thou slay me, yet will I trust in Thee.” All
human thought or faith that is active and affirmative, whether
it be theistic, pantheistic or atheistic, does in fact involve more
or less explicitly and completely such an attitude. It admits and
it believes: admits the discords of the world, believes in some
highest principle of God, universal Being or Nature which shall
enable us to transcend, overcome or harmonise these discords,
perhaps even to do all three at once, to harmonise by overcoming
and transcending.
Then, as to human life in its actualities, we have to accept
its aspect of a struggle and a battle mounting into supreme
crises such as that of Kurukshetra. The Gita, as we have seen,
takes for its frame such a period of transition and crisis as humanity periodically experiences in its history, in which great
forces clash together for a huge destruction and reconstruction,
intellectual, social, moral, religious, political, and these in the
actual psychological and social stage of human evolution culminate usually through a violent physical convulsion of strife,
war or revolution. The Gita proceeds from the acceptance of the
necessity in Nature for such vehement crises and it accepts not
only the moral aspect, the struggle between righteousness and
unrighteousness, between the self-affirming law of Good and the
forces that oppose its progression, but also the physical aspect,
the actual armed war or other vehement physical strife between
the human beings who represent the antagonistic powers. We
must remember that the Gita was composed at a time when
war was even more than it is now a necessary part of human
activity and the idea of its elimination from the scheme of life
would have been an absolute chimera. The gospel of universal
peace and goodwill among men — for without a universal and
entire mutual goodwill there can be no real and abiding peace —
has never succeeded for a moment in possessing itself of human
life during the historic cycle of our progress, because morally,
socially, spiritually the race was not prepared and the poise of
Man and the Battle of Life
49
Nature in its evolution would not admit of its being immediately prepared for any such transcendence. Even now we have
not actually progressed beyond the feasibility of a system of
accommodation between conflicting interests which may minimise the recurrence of the worst forms of strife. And towards
this consummation the method, the approach which humanity
has been forced by its own nature to adopt, is a monstrous
mutual massacre unparalleled in history; a universal war, full of
bitterness and irreconcilable hatred, is the straight way and the
triumphant means modern man has found for the establishment
of universal peace! That consummation, too, founded not upon
any fundamental change in human nature, but upon intellectual
notions, economic convenience, vital and sentimental shrinkings
from the loss of life, discomfort and horror of war, effected by
nothing better than political adjustments, gives no very certain
promise of firm foundation and long duration. A day may come,
must surely come, we will say, when humanity will be ready
spiritually, morally, socially for the reign of universal peace;
meanwhile the aspect of battle and the nature and function of
man as a fighter have to be accepted and accounted for by any
practical philosophy and religion. The Gita, taking life as it
is and not only as it may be in some distant future, puts the
question how this aspect and function of life, which is really
an aspect and function of human activity in general, can be
harmonised with the spiritual existence.
The Gita is therefore addressed to a fighter, a man of action,
one whose duty in life is that of war and protection, war as a part
of government for the protection of those who are excused from
that duty, debarred from protecting themselves and therefore at
the mercy of the strong and the violent, war, secondly and by
a moral extension of this idea, for the protection of the weak
and the oppressed and for the maintenance of right and justice
in the world. For all these ideas, the social and practical, the
moral and the chivalrous enter into the Indian conception of
the Kshatriya, the man who is a warrior and ruler by function
and a knight and king in his nature. Although the more general
and universal ideas of the Gita are those which are the most
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important to us, we ought not to leave out of consideration
altogether the colouring and trend they take from the peculiar
Indian culture and social system in the midst of which they
arose. That system differed from the modern in its conception.
To the modern mind man is a thinker, worker or producer and
a fighter all in one, and the tendency of the social system is to
lump all these activities and to demand from each individual
his contribution to the intellectual, economical and military life
and needs of the community without paying any heed to the
demands of his individual nature and temperament. The ancient
Indian civilisation laid peculiar stress on the individual nature,
tendency, temperament and sought to determine by it the ethical
type, function and place in the society. Nor did it consider man
primarily as a social being or the fullness of his social existence
as the highest ideal, but rather as a spiritual being in process
of formation and development and his social life, ethical law,
play of temperament and exercise of function as means and
stages of spiritual formation. Thought and knowledge, war and
government, production and distribution, labour and service
were carefully differentiated functions of society, each assigned
to those who were naturally called to it and providing the right
means by which they could individually proceed towards their
spiritual development and self-perfection.
The modern idea of a common obligation in all the main
departments of human activity has its advantages; it helps to
greater solidarity, unity and fullness in the life of the community
and a more all-round development of the complete human being
as opposed to the endless divisions and over-specialisation and
the narrowing and artificial shackling of the life of the individual to which the Indian system eventually led. But it has
also its disadvantages and in certain of its developments the
too logical application of it has led to grotesque and disastrous
absurdities. This is evident enough in the character of modern
war. From the idea of a common military obligation binding on
every individual to defend and fight for the community by which
he lives and profits, has arisen the system by which the whole
manhood of the nation is hurled into the bloody trench to slay
Man and the Battle of Life
51
and be slain, thinkers, artists, philosophers, priests, merchants,
artisans all torn from their natural functions, the whole life of
the community disorganised, reason and conscience overridden,
even the minister of religion who is salaried by the State or called
by his function to preach the gospel of peace and love forced
to deny his creed and become a butcher of his fellow-men!
Not only are conscience and nature violated by the arbitrary
fiat of the military State, but national defence carried to an
insane extreme makes its best attempt to become a national
suicide.
Indian civilisation on the contrary made it its chief aim to
minimise the incidence and disaster of war. For this purpose it
limited the military obligation to the small class who by their
birth, nature and traditions were marked out for this function
and found in it their natural means of self-development through
the flowering of the soul in the qualities of courage, disciplined
force, strong helpfulness and chivalrous nobility for which the
warrior’s life pursued under the stress of a high ideal gives a field
and opportunities. The rest of the community was in every way
guarded from slaughter and outrage; their life and occupations
were as little interfered with as possible and the combative and
destructive tendencies of human nature were given a restricted
field, confined in a sort of lists so as to do the minimum amount
of harm to the general life of the race, while at the same time
by being subjected to high ethical ideals and every possible rule
of humanity and chivalry the function of war was obliged to
help in ennobling and elevating instead of brutalising those who
performed it. It must be remembered that it is war of this kind
and under these conditions that the Gita had in view, war considered as an inevitable part of human life, but so restricted
and regulated as to serve like other activities the ethical and
spiritual development which was then regarded as the whole
real object of life, war destructive within certain carefully fixed
limits of the bodily life of individual men but constructive of
their inner life and of the ethical elevation of the race. That
war in the past has, when subjected to an ideal, helped in this
elevation, as in the development of knighthood and chivalry, the
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Indian ideal of the Kshatriya, the Japanese ideal of the Samurai,
can only be denied by the fanatics of pacifism. When it has
fulfilled its function, it may well disappear; for if it tries to
survive its utility, it will appear as an unrelieved brutality of
violence stripped of its ideal and constructive aspects and will
be rejected by the progressive mind of humanity; but its past
service to the race must be admitted in any reasonable view of
our evolution.
The physical fact of war, however, is only a special and outward manifestation of a general principle in life and the Kshatriya is only the outward manifestation and type of a general
characteristic necessary to the completeness of human perfection. War typifies and embodies physically the aspect of battle
and struggle which belongs to all life, both to our inner and our
outer living, in a world whose method is a meeting and wrestling
of forces which progress by mutual destruction towards a continually changing adjustment expressive of a progressive harmonising and hopeful of a perfect harmony based upon some
yet ungrasped potentiality of oneness. The Kshatriya is the type
and embodiment of the fighter in man who accepts this principle
in life and faces it as a warrior striving towards mastery, not
shrinking from the destruction of bodies and forms, but through
it all aiming at the realisation of some principle of right, justice,
law which shall be the basis of the harmony towards which
the struggle tends. The Gita accepts this aspect of the worldenergy and the physical fact of war which embodies it, and it
addresses itself to the man of action, the striver and fighter,
the Kshatriya, — war which is the extreme contradiction of the
soul’s high aspiration to peace within and harmlessness1 without,
the striver and fighter whose necessary turmoil of struggle and
action seems to be the very contradiction of the soul’s high ideal
of calm mastery and self-possession, — and it seeks for an issue
from the contradiction, a point at which its terms meet and a
poise which shall be the first essential basis of harmony and
transcendence.
1
ahiṁsā.
Man and the Battle of Life
53
Man meets the battle of life in the manner most consonant
with the essential quality most dominant in his nature. There are,
according to the Sankhya philosophy accepted in this respect
by the Gita, three essential qualities or modes of the worldenergy and therefore also of human nature, sattva, the mode of
poise, knowledge and satisfaction, rajas, the mode of passion,
action and struggling emotion, tamas, the mode of ignorance
and inertia. Dominated by tamas, man does not so much meet
the rush and shock of the world-energies whirling about him
and converging upon him as he succumbs to them, is overborne
by them, afflicted, subjected; or at the most, helped by the other
qualities, the tamasic man seeks only somehow to survive, to
subsist so long as he may, to shelter himself in the fortress of
an established routine of thought and action in which he feels
himself to a certain extent protected from the battle, able to
reject the demand which his higher nature makes upon him,
excused from accepting the necessity of farther struggle and the
ideal of an increasing effort and mastery. Dominated by rajas,
man flings himself into the battle and attempts to use the struggle
of forces for his own egoistic benefit, to slay, conquer, dominate,
enjoy; or, helped by a certain measure of the sattwic quality, the
rajasic man makes the struggle itself a means of increasing inner
mastery, joy, power, possession. The battle of life becomes his
delight and passion partly for its own sake, for the pleasure of
activity and the sense of power, partly as a means of his increase
and natural self-development. Dominated by sattva, man seeks
in the midst of the strife for a principle of law, right, poise,
harmony, peace, satisfaction. The purely sattwic man tends to
seek this within, whether for himself alone or with an impulse to
communicate it, when won, to other human minds, but usually
by a sort of inner detachment from or else an outer rejection
of the strife and turmoil of the active world-energy; but if the
sattwic mind accepts partly the rajasic impulse, it seeks rather
to impose this poise and harmony upon the struggle and apparent chaos, to vindicate a victory for peace, love and harmony
over the principle of war, discord and struggle. All the attitudes
adopted by the human mind towards the problem of life either
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derive from the domination of one or other of these qualities or
else from an attempt at balance and harmony between them.
But there comes also a stage in which the mind recoils from
the whole problem and, dissatisfied with the solutions given by
the threefold mode of Nature, traigun.ya, seeks for some higher
solution outside of it or else above it. It looks for an escape
either into something which is outside and void of all qualities
and therefore of all activity or in something which is superior
to the three qualities and master of them and therefore at once
capable of action and unaffected, undominated by its own action, in the nirgun.a or the trigun.ātı̄ta. It aspires to an absolute
peace and unconditioned existence or to a dominant calm and
superior existence. The natural movement of the former attitude
is towards the renunciation of the world, sannyāsa; of the latter
towards superiority to the claims of the lower nature and its
whirl of actions and reactions, and its principle is equality and
the inner renunciation of passion and desire. The former is the
first impulse of Arjuna recoiling from the calamitous culmination of all his heroic activity in the great cataclysm of battle
and massacre, Kurukshetra; losing his whole past principle of
action, inaction and the rejection of life and its claims seem to
him the only issue. But it is to an inner superiority and not to
the physical renunciation of life and action that he is called by
the voice of the divine Teacher.
Arjuna is the Kshatriya, the rajasic man who governs his
rajasic action by a high sattwic ideal. He advances to this gigantic
struggle, to this Kurukshetra with the full acceptance of the joy
of battle, as to “a holiday of fight”, but with a proud confidence
in the righteousness of his cause; he advances in his rapid chariot
tearing the hearts of his enemies with the victorious clamour of
his war-conch; for he wishes to look upon all these Kings of men
who have come here to champion against him the cause of unrighteousness and establish as a rule of life the disregard of law,
justice and truth which they would replace by the rule of a selfish
and arrogant egoism. When this confidence is shattered within
him, when he is smitten down from his customary attitude and
mental basis of life, it is by the uprush of the tamasic quality into
Man and the Battle of Life
55
the rajasic man, inducing a recoil of astonishment, grief, horror,
dismay, dejection, bewilderment of the mind and the war of reason against itself, a collapse towards the principle of ignorance
and inertia. As a result he turns towards renunciation. Better the
life of the mendicant living upon alms than this dharma of the
Kshatriya, this battle and action culminating in undiscriminating
massacre, this principle of mastery and glory and power which
can only be won by destruction and bloodshed, this conquest of
blood-stained enjoyments, this vindication of justice and right by
a means which contradicts all righteousness and this affirmation
of the social law by a war which destroys in its process and
result all that constitutes society.
Sannyāsa is the renunciation of life and action and of the
threefold modes of Nature, but it has to be approached through
one or other of the three qualities. The impulse may be tamasic, a
feeling of impotence, fear, aversion, disgust, horror of the world
and life; or it may be the rajasic quality tending towards tamas,
an impulse of weariness of the struggle, grief, disappointment,
refusal to accept any longer this vain turmoil of activity with its
pains and its eternal discontent. Or the impulse may be that of
rajas tending towards sattwa, the impulse to arrive at something
superior to anything life can give, to conquer a higher state, to
trample down life itself under the feet of an inner strength which
seeks to break all bonds and transcend all limits. Or it may be
sattwic, an intellectual perception of the vanity of life and the
absence of any real goal or justification for this ever-cycling
world-existence or else a spiritual perception of the Timeless,
the Infinite, the Silent, the nameless and formless Peace beyond.
The recoil of Arjuna is the tamasic recoil from action of the
sattwa-rajasic man. The Teacher may confirm it in its direction,
using it as a dark entry to the purity and peace of the ascetic
life; or he may purify it at once and raise it towards the rare
altitudes of the sattwic tendency of renunciation. In fact, he
does neither. He discourages the tamasic recoil and the tendency
to renunciation and enjoins the continuance of action and even
of the same fierce and terrible action, but he points the disciple
towards another and inner renunciation which is the real issue
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from his crisis and the way towards the soul’s superiority to
the world-Nature and yet its calm and self-possessed action in
the world. Not a physical asceticism, but an inner askesis is the
teaching of the Gita.
VII
The Creed of the Aryan Fighter
1
T
HE ANSWER of the divine Teacher to the first flood of
Arjuna’s passionate self-questioning, his shrinking from
slaughter, his sense of sorrow and sin, his grieving for an
empty and desolate life, his forecast of evil results of an evil deed,
is a strongly-worded rebuke. All this, it is replied, is confusion
of mind and delusion, a weakness of the heart, an unmanliness,
a fall from the virility of the fighter and the hero. Not this
was fitting in the son of Pritha, not thus should the champion
and chief hope of a righteous cause abandon it in the hour of
crisis and peril or suffer the sudden amazement of his heart and
senses, the clouding of his reason and the downfall of his will to
betray him into the casting away of his divine weapons and the
refusal of his God-given work. This is not the way cherished and
followed by the Aryan man; this mood came not from heaven
nor can it lead to heaven, and on earth it is the forfeiting of the
glory that waits upon strength and heroism and noble works.
Let him put from him this weak and self-indulgent pity, let him
rise and smite his enemies!
The answer of a hero to a hero, shall we say, but not that
which we should expect from a divine Teacher from whom we
demand rather that he shall encourage always gentleness and
saintliness and self-abnegation and the recoil from worldly aims
and cessation from the ways of the world? The Gita expressly
says that Arjuna has thus lapsed into unheroic weakness, “his
eyes full and distressed with tears, his heart overcome by depression and discouragement,” because he is invaded by pity,
kr.payāvis.t.am. Is this not then a divine weakness? Is not pity a
divine emotion which should not thus be discouraged with harsh
rebuke? Or are we in face of a mere gospel of war and heroic
1
Gita, II. 1-38.
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action, a Nietzschean creed of power and high-browed strength,
of Hebraic or old Teutonic hardness which holds pity to be
a weakness and thinks like the Norwegian hero who thanked
God because He had given him a hard heart? But the teaching
of the Gita springs from an Indian creed and to the Indian mind
compassion has always figured as one of the largest elements of
the divine nature. The Teacher himself enumerating in a later
chapter the qualities of the godlike nature in man places among
them compassion to creatures, gentleness, freedom from wrath
and from the desire to slay and do hurt, no less than fearlessness
and high spirit and energy. Harshness and hardness and fierceness and a satisfaction in slaying enemies and amassing wealth
and unjust enjoyments are Asuric qualities; they come from the
violent Titanic nature which denies the Divine in the world and
the Divine in man and worships Desire only as its deity. It is
not then from any such standpoint that the weakness of Arjuna
merits rebuke.
“Whence has come to thee this dejection, this stain and
darkness of the soul in the hour of difficulty and peril?” asks
Krishna of Arjuna. The question points to the real nature of
Arjuna’s deviation from his heroic qualities. There is a divine
compassion which descends to us from on high and for the man
whose nature does not possess it, is not cast in its mould, to
pretend to be the superior man, the master-man or the superman
is a folly and an insolence, for he alone is the superman who most
manifests the highest nature of the Godhead in humanity. This
compassion observes with an eye of love and wisdom and calm
strength the battle and the struggle, the strength and weakness
of man, his virtues and sins, his joy and suffering, his knowledge
and his ignorance, his wisdom and his folly, his aspiration and
his failure and it enters into it all to help and to heal. In the
saint and philanthropist it may cast itself into the mould of a
plenitude of love or charity; in the thinker and hero it assumes
the largeness and the force of a helpful wisdom and strength. It
is this compassion in the Aryan fighter, the soul of his chivalry,
which will not break the bruised reed, but helps and protects the
weak and the oppressed and the wounded and the fallen. But it
The Creed of the Aryan Fighter
59
is also the divine compassion that smites down the strong tyrant
and the confident oppressor, not in wrath and with hatred, —
for these are not the high divine qualities, the wrath of God
against the sinner, God’s hatred of the wicked are the fables of
half-enlightened creeds, as much a fable as the eternal torture
of the Hells they have invented, — but, as the old Indian spirituality clearly saw, with as much love and compassion for the
strong Titan erring by his strength and slain for his sins as for
the sufferer and the oppressed who have to be saved from his
violence and injustice.
But such is not the compassion which actuates Arjuna in
the rejection of his work and mission. That is not compassion
but an impotence full of a weak self-pity, a recoil from the
mental suffering which his act must entail on himself, — “I see
not what shall thrust from me the sorrow that dries up the
senses,” — and of all things self-pity is among the most ignoble
and un-Aryan of moods. Its pity for others is also a form of selfindulgence; it is the physical shrinking of the nerves from the
act of slaughter, the egoistic emotional shrinking of the heart
from the destruction of the Dhritarashtrians because they are
“one’s own people” and without them life will be empty. This
pity is a weakness of the mind and senses, — a weakness which
may well be beneficial to men of a lower grade of development,
who have to be weak because otherwise they will be hard and
cruel; for they have to cure the harsher by the gentler forms
of sensational egoism, they have to call in tamas, the debile
principle, to help sattwa, the principle of light, in quelling the
strength and excess of their rajasic passions. But this way is not
for the developed Aryan man who has to grow not by weakness, but by an ascension from strength to strength. Arjuna is
the divine man, the master-man in the making and as such he
has been chosen by the gods. He has a work given to him, he
has God beside him in his chariot, he has the heavenly bow
Gandiva in his hand, he has the champions of unrighteousness,
the opponents of the divine leading of the world in his front.
Not his is the right to determine what he shall do or not do
according to his emotions and his passions, or to shrink from
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a necessary destruction by the claim of his egoistic heart and
reason, or to decline his work because it will bring sorrow and
emptiness to his life or because its earthly result has no value to
him in the absence of the thousands who must perish. All that
is a weak falling from his higher nature. He has to see only the
work that must be done, kartavyaṁ karma, to hear only the
divine command breathed through his warrior nature, to feel
only for the world and the destiny of mankind calling to him
as its god-sent man to assist its march and clear its path of the
dark armies that beset it.
Arjuna in his reply to Krishna admits the rebuke even while
he strives against and refuses the command. He is aware of his
weakness and yet accepts subjection to it. It is poorness of spirit,
he owns, that has smitten away from him his true heroic nature;
his whole consciousness is bewildered in its view of right and
wrong and he accepts the divine Friend as his teacher; but the
emotional and intellectual props on which he had supported
his sense of righteousness have been entirely cast down and he
cannot accept a command which seems to appeal only to his old
standpoint and gives him no new basis for action. He attempts
still to justify his refusal of the work and puts forward in its
support the claim of his nervous and sensational being which
shrinks from the slaughter with its sequel of blood-stained enjoyments, the claim of his heart which recoils from the sorrow
and emptiness of life that will follow his act, the claim of his
customary moral notions which are appalled by the necessity of
slaying his gurus, Bhishma and Drona, the claim of his reason
which sees no good but only evil results of the terrible and violent
work assigned to him. He is resolved that on the old basis of
thought and motive he will not fight and he awaits in silence the
answer to objections that seem to him unanswerable. It is these
claims of Arjuna’s egoistic being that Krishna sets out first to
destroy in order to make place for the higher law which shall
transcend all egoistic motives of action.
The answer of the Teacher proceeds upon two different
lines, first, a brief reply founded upon the highest ideas of
the general Aryan culture in which Arjuna has been educated,
The Creed of the Aryan Fighter
61
secondly, another and larger founded on a more intimate knowledge, opening into deeper truths of our being, which is the real
starting-point of the teaching of the Gita. This first answer relies
on the philosophic and moral conceptions of the Vedantic philosophy and the social idea of duty and honour which formed the
ethical basis of Aryan society. Arjuna has sought to justify his refusal on ethical and rational grounds, but he has merely cloaked
by words of apparent rationality the revolt of his ignorant and
unchastened emotions. He has spoken of the physical life and
the death of the body as if these were the primary realities; but
they have no such essential value to the sage and the thinker. The
sorrow for the bodily death of his friends and kindred is a grief to
which wisdom and the true knowledge of life lend no sanction.
The enlightened man does not mourn either for the living or the
dead, for he knows that suffering and death are merely incidents
in the history of the soul. The soul, not the body, is the reality.
All these kings of men for whose approaching death he mourns,
have lived before, they will live again in the human body; for as
the soul passes physically through childhood and youth and age,
so it passes on to the changing of the body. The calm and wise
mind, the dhı̄ra, the thinker who looks upon life steadily and
does not allow himself to be disturbed and blinded by his sensations and emotions, is not deceived by material appearances;
he does not allow the clamour of his blood and his nerves and
his heart to cloud his judgment or to contradict his knowledge.
He looks beyond the apparent facts of the life of the body and
senses to the real fact of his being and rises beyond the emotional
and physical desires of the ignorant nature to the true and only
aim of the human existence.
What is that real fact? that highest aim? This, that human
life and death repeated through the aeons in the great cycles of
the world are only a long progress by which the human being
prepares and makes himself fit for immortality. And how shall
he prepare himself? who is the man that is fit? The man who rises
above the conception of himself as a life and a body, who does
not accept the material and sensational touches of the world at
their own value or at the value which the physical man attaches
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to them, who knows himself and all as souls, learns himself to
live in his soul and not in his body and deals with others too
as souls and not as mere physical beings. For by immortality is
meant not the survival of death, — that is already given to every
creature born with a mind, — but the transcendence of life and
death. It means that ascension by which man ceases to live as a
mind-informed body and lives at last as a spirit and in the Spirit.
Whoever is subject to grief and sorrow, a slave to the sensations
and emotions, occupied by the touches of things transient cannot
become fit for immortality. These things must be borne until they
are conquered, till they can give no pain to the liberated man,
till he is able to receive all the material happenings of the world
whether joyful or sorrowful with a wise and calm equality, even
as the tranquil eternal Spirit secret within us receives them. To be
disturbed by sorrow and horror as Arjuna has been disturbed,
to be deflected by them from the path that has to be travelled,
to be overcome by self-pity and intolerance of sorrow and recoil
from the unavoidable and trivial circumstance of the death of
the body, this is un-Aryan ignorance. It is not the way of the
Aryan climbing in calm strength towards the immortal life.
There is no such thing as death, for it is the body that dies
and the body is not the man. That which really is, cannot go out
of existence, though it may change the forms through which it
appears, just as that which is non-existent cannot come into being. The soul is and cannot cease to be. This opposition of is and
is not, this balance of being and becoming which is the mind’s
view of existence, finds its end in the realisation of the soul as
the one imperishable self by whom all this universe has been
extended. Finite bodies have an end, but that which possesses
and uses the body, is infinite, illimitable, eternal, indestructible.
It casts away old and takes up new bodies as a man changes
worn-out raiment for new; and what is there in this to grieve at
and recoil and shrink? This is not born, nor does it die, nor is it
a thing that comes into being once and passing away will never
come into being again. It is unborn, ancient, sempiternal; it is
not slain with the slaying of the body. Who can slay the immortal
spirit? Weapons cannot cleave it, nor the fire burn, nor do the
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63
waters drench it, nor the wind dry. Eternally stable, immobile,
all-pervading, it is for ever and for ever. Not manifested like the
body, but greater than all manifestation, not to be analysed by
the thought, but greater than all mind, not capable of change
and modification like the life and its organs and their objects,
but beyond the changes of mind and life and body, it is yet the
Reality which all these strive to figure.
Even if the truth of our being were a thing less sublime, vast,
intangible by death and life, if the self were constantly subject to
birth and death, still the death of beings ought not to be a cause
of sorrow. For that is an inevitable circumstance of the soul’s
self-manifestation. Its birth is an appearing out of some state in
which it is not non-existent but unmanifest to our mortal senses,
its death is a return to that unmanifest world or condition and
out of it it will again appear in the physical manifestation. The
to-do made by the physical mind and senses about death and
the horror of death whether on the sick-bed or the battlefield,
is the most ignorant of nervous clamours. Our sorrow for the
death of men is an ignorant grieving for those for whom there is
no cause to grieve, since they have neither gone out of existence
nor suffered any painful or terrible change of condition, but
are beyond death no less in being and no more unhappy in
circumstance than in life. But in reality the higher truth is the
real truth. All are that Self, that One, that Divine whom we look
on and speak and hear of as the wonderful beyond our comprehension, for after all our seeking and declaring of knowledge
and learning from those who have knowledge no human mind
has ever known this Absolute. It is this which is here veiled by
the world, the master of the body; all life is only its shadow; the
coming of the soul into physical manifestation and our passing
out of it by death is only one of its minor movements. When
we have known ourselves as this, then to speak of ourselves
as slayer or slain is an absurdity. One thing only is the truth
in which we have to live, the Eternal manifesting itself as the
soul of man in the great cycle of its pilgrimage with birth and
death for milestones, with worlds beyond as resting-places, with
all the circumstances of life happy or unhappy as the means of
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our progress and battle and victory and with immortality as the
home to which the soul travels.
Therefore, says the Teacher, put away this vain sorrow
and shrinking, fight, O son of Bharata. But wherefore such a
conclusion? This high and great knowledge, this strenuous selfdiscipline of the mind and soul by which it is to rise beyond
the clamour of the emotions and the cheat of the senses to true
self-knowledge, may well free us from grief and delusion; it may
well cure us of the fear of death and the sorrow for the dead;
it may well show us that those whom we speak of as dead are
not dead at all nor to be sorrowed for, since they have only gone
beyond; it may well teach us to look undisturbed upon the most
terrible assaults of life and upon the death of the body as a trifle;
it may exalt us to the conception of all life’s circumstances as a
manifestation of the One and as a means for our souls to raise
themselves above appearances by an upward evolution until we
know ourselves as the immortal Spirit. But how does it justify the
action demanded of Arjuna and the slaughter of Kurukshetra?
The answer is that this is the action required of Arjuna in the
path he has to travel; it has come inevitably in the performance
of the function demanded of him by his svadharma, his social
duty, the law of his life and the law of his being. This world,
this manifestation of the Self in the material universe is not only
a cycle of inner development, but a field in which the external
circumstances of life have to be accepted as an environment and
an occasion for that development. It is a world of mutual help
and struggle; not a serene and peaceful gliding through easy joys
is the progress it allows us, but every step has to be gained by
heroic effort and through a clash of opposing forces. Those who
take up the inner and the outer struggle even to the most physical
clash of all, that of war, are the Kshatriyas, the mighty men; war,
force, nobility, courage are their nature; protection of the right
and an unflinching acceptance of the gage of battle is their virtue
and their duty. For there is continually a struggle between right
and wrong, justice and injustice, the force that protects and
the force that violates and oppresses, and when this has once
been brought to the issue of physical strife, the champion and
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65
standard-bearer of the Right must not shake and tremble at the
violent and terrible nature of the work he has to do; he must not
abandon his followers or fellow-fighters, betray his cause and
leave the standard of Right and Justice to trail in the dust and
be trampled into mire by the blood-stained feet of the oppressor,
because of a weak pity for the violent and cruel and a physical
horror of the vastness of the destruction decreed. His virtue and
his duty lie in battle and not in abstention from battle; it is not
slaughter, but non-slaying which would here be the sin.
The Teacher then turns aside for a moment to give another
answer to the cry of Arjuna over the sorrow of the death of
kindred which will empty his life of the causes and objects of
living. What is the true object of the Kshatriya’s life and his true
happiness? Not self-pleasing and domestic happiness and a life
of comfort and peaceful joy with friends and relatives, but to
battle for the right is his true object of life and to find a cause for
which he can lay down his life or by victory win the crown and
glory of the hero’s existence is his greatest happiness. “There
is no greater good for the Kshatriya than righteous battle, and
when such a battle comes to them of itself like the open gate
of heaven, happy are the Kshatriyas then. If thou doest not this
battle for the right, then hast thou abandoned thy duty and virtue
and thy glory, and sin shall be thy portion.” He will by such a
refusal incur disgrace and the reproach of fear and weakness and
the loss of his Kshatriya honour. For what is worst grief for a
Kshatriya? It is the loss of his honour, his fame, his noble station
among the mighty men, the men of courage and power; that to
him is much worse than death. Battle, courage, power, rule, the
honour of the brave, the heaven of those who fall nobly, this
is the warrior’s ideal. To lower that ideal, to allow a smirch to
fall on that honour, to give the example of a hero among heroes
whose action lays itself open to the reproach of cowardice and
weakness and thus to lower the moral standard of mankind, is to
be false to himself and to the demand of the world on its leaders
and kings. “Slain thou shalt win Heaven, victorious thou shalt
enjoy the earth; therefore arise, O son of Kunti, resolved upon
battle.”
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This heroic appeal may seem to be on a lower level than
the stoical spirituality which precedes and the deeper spirituality
which follows; for in the next verse the Teacher bids him to make
grief and happiness, loss and gain, victory and defeat equal to
his soul and then turn to the battle, — the real teaching of the
Gita. But Indian ethics has always seen the practical necessity of
graded ideals for the developing moral and spiritual life of man.
The Kshatriya ideal, the ideal of the four orders is here placed
in its social aspect, not as afterwards in its spiritual meaning.
This, says Krishna in effect, is my answer to you if you insist on
joy and sorrow and the result of your actions as your motive of
action. I have shown you in what direction the higher knowledge
of self and the world points you; I have now shown you in what
direction your social duty and the ethical standard of your order
point you, svadharmam api cāveks.ya. Whichever you consider,
the result is the same. But if you are not satisfied with your social
duty and the virtue of your order, if you think that leads you
to sorrow and sin, then I bid you rise to a higher and not sink
to a lower ideal. Put away all egoism from you, disregard joy
and sorrow, disregard gain and loss and all worldly results; look
only at the cause you must serve and the work that you must
achieve by divine command; “so thou shalt not incur sin.” Thus
Arjuna’s plea of sorrow, his plea of the recoil from slaughter, his
plea of the sense of sin, his plea of the unhappy results of his
action, are answered according to the highest knowledge and
ethical ideals to which his race and age had attained.
It is the creed of the Aryan fighter. “Know God,” it says,
“know thyself, help man; protect the Right, do without fear or
weakness or faltering thy work of battle in the world. Thou
art the eternal and imperishable Spirit, thy soul is here on its
upward path to immortality; life and death are nothing, sorrow
and wounds and suffering are nothing, for these things have to
be conquered and overcome. Look not at thy own pleasure and
gain and profit, but above and around, above at the shining
summits to which thou climbest, around at this world of battle
and trial in which good and evil, progress and retrogression are
locked in stern conflict. Men call to thee, their strong man, their
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67
hero for help; help then, fight. Destroy when by destruction the
world must advance, but hate not that which thou destroyest,
neither grieve for all those who perish. Know everywhere the
one self, know all to be immortal souls and the body to be but
dust. Do thy work with a calm, strong and equal spirit; fight and
fall nobly or conquer mightily. For this is the work that God and
thy nature have given to thee to accomplish.”
VIII
Sankhya and Yoga
I
N THE moment of his turning from this first and summary
answer to Arjuna’s difficulties and in the very first words
which strike the keynote of a spiritual solution, the Teacher
makes at once a distinction which is of the utmost importance
for the understanding of the Gita, — the distinction of Sankhya
and Yoga. “Such is the intelligence (the intelligent knowledge of
things and will) declared to thee in the Sankhya, hear now this
in the Yoga, for if thou art in Yoga by this intelligence, O son of
Pritha, thou shalt cast away the bondage of works.” That is the
literal translation of the words in which the Gita announces the
distinction it intends to make.
The Gita is in its foundation a Vedantic work; it is one of
the three recognised authorities for the Vedantic teaching and,
although not described as a revealed Scripture, although, that
is to say, it is largely intellectual, ratiocinative, philosophical in
its method, founded indeed on the Truth, but not the directly
inspired Word which is the revelation of the Truth through the
higher faculties of the seer, it is yet so highly esteemed as to be
ranked almost as a thirteenth Upanishad. But still its Vedantic
ideas are throughout and thoroughly coloured by the ideas of
the Sankhya and the Yoga way of thinking and it derives from
this colouring the peculiar synthetic character of its philosophy.
It is in fact primarily a practical system of Yoga that it teaches
and it brings in metaphysical ideas only as explanatory of its
practical system; nor does it merely declare Vedantic knowledge, but it founds knowledge and devotion upon works, even
as it uplifts works to knowledge, their culmination, and informs
them with devotion as their very heart and kernel of their spirit.
Again its Yoga is founded upon the analytical philosophy of the
Sankhyas, takes that as a starting-point and always keeps it as a
large element of its method and doctrine; but still it proceeds far
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69
beyond it, negatives even some of its characteristic tendencies
and finds a means of reconciling the lower analytical knowledge
of Sankhya with the higher synthetic and Vedantic truth.
What, then, are the Sankhya and Yoga of which the Gita
speaks? They are certainly not the systems which have come
down to us under these names as enunciated respectively in the
Sankhya Karika of Ishwara Krishna and the Yoga aphorisms
of Patanjali. This Sankhya is not the system of the Karikas, —
at least as that is generally understood; for the Gita nowhere
for a moment admits the multiplicity of Purushas as a primal
truth of being and it affirms emphatically what the traditional
Sankhya strenuously denies, the One as Self and Purusha, that
One again as the Lord, Ishwara or Purushottama, and Ishwara as
the cause of the universe. The traditional Sankhya is, to use our
modern distinctions, atheistic; the Sankhya of the Gita admits
and subtly reconciles the theistic, pantheistic and monistic views
of the universe.
Nor is this Yoga the Yoga system of Patanjali; for that
is a purely subjective method of Rajayoga, an internal discipline, limited, rigidly cut out, severely and scientifically graded,
by which the mind is progressively stilled and taken up into
Samadhi so that we may gain the temporal and eternal results
of this self-exceeding, the temporal in a great expansion of the
soul’s knowledge and powers, the eternal in the divine union. But
the Yoga of the Gita is a large, flexible and many-sided system
with various elements, which are all successfully harmonised by
a sort of natural and living assimilation, and of these elements
Rajayoga is only one and not the most important and vital. This
Yoga does not adopt any strict and scientific gradation but is a
process of natural soul-development; it seeks by the adoption of
a few principles of subjective poise and action to bring about a
renovation of the soul and a sort of change, ascension or new
birth out of the lower nature into the divine. Accordingly, its
idea of Samadhi is quite different from the ordinary notion of
the Yogic trance; and while Patanjali gives to works only an
initial importance for moral purification and religious concentration, the Gita goes so far as to make works the distinctive
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characteristic of Yoga. Action to Patanjali is only a preliminary,
in the Gita it is a permanent foundation; in the Rajayoga it has
practically to be put aside when its result has been attained or
at any rate ceases very soon to be a means for the Yoga, for the
Gita it is a means of the highest ascent and continues even after
the complete liberation of the soul.
This much has to be said in order to avoid any confusion of
thought that might be created by the use of familiar words in a
connotation wider than the technical sense now familiar to us.
Still, all that is essential in the Sankhya and Yoga systems, all
in them that is large, catholic and universally true, is admitted
by the Gita, even though it does not limit itself by them like
the opposing schools. Its Sankhya is the catholic and Vedantic
Sankhya such as we find it in its first principles and elements in
the great Vedantic synthesis of the Upanishads and in the later
developments of the Puranas. Its idea of Yoga is that large idea
of a principally subjective practice and inner change, necessary
for the finding of the Self or the union with God, of which
the Rajayoga is only one special application. The Gita insists
that Sankhya and Yoga are not two different, incompatible and
discordant systems, but one in their principle and aim; they
differ only in their method and starting-point. The Sankhya also
is a Yoga, but it proceeds by knowledge; it starts, that is to say,
by intellectual discrimination and analysis of the principles of
our being and attains its aim through the vision and possession
of the Truth. Yoga, on the other hand, proceeds by works; it
is in its first principle Karmayoga; but it is evident from the
whole teaching of the Gita and its later definitions that the word
karma is used in a very wide sense and that by Yoga is meant
the selfless devotion of all the inner as well as the outer activities
as a sacrifice to the Lord of all works, offered to the Eternal
as Master of all the soul’s energies and austerities. Yoga is the
practice of the Truth of which knowledge gives the vision, and its
practice has for its motor-power a spirit of illumined devotion,
of calm or fervent consecration to that which knowledge sees to
be the Highest.
But what are the truths of Sankhya? The philosophy drew
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71
its name from its analytical process. Sankhya is the analysis, the
enumeration, the separative and discriminative setting forth of
the principles of our being of which the ordinary mind sees only
the combinations and results of combination. It did not seek at
all to synthetise. Its original standpoint is in fact dualistic, not
with the very relative dualism of the Vedantic schools which call
themselves by that name, Dwaita, but in a very absolute and
trenchant fashion. For it explains existence not by one, but by
two original principles whose inter-relation is the cause of the
universe, — Purusha, the inactive, Prakriti, the active. Purusha is
the Soul, not in the ordinary or popular sense of the word, but of
pure conscious Being immobile, immutable and self-luminous.
Prakriti is Energy and its process. Purusha does nothing, but
it reflects the action of Energy and its processes; Prakriti is
mechanical, but by being reflected in Purusha it assumes the
appearance of consciousness in its activities, and thus there are
created those phenomena of creation, conservation, dissolution,
birth and life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness,
sense-knowledge and intellectual knowledge and ignorance, action and inaction, happiness and suffering which the Purusha
under the influence of Prakriti attributes to itself although they
belong not at all to itself but to the action or movement of
Prakriti alone.
For Prakriti is constituted of three gun.as or essential modes
of energy; sattwa, the seed of intelligence, conserves the workings of energy; rajas, the seed of force and action, creates
the workings of energy; tamas, the seed of inertia and nonintelligence, the denial of sattwa and rajas, dissolves what they
create and conserve. When these three powers of the energy of
Prakriti are in a state of equilibrium, all is in rest, there is no
movement, action or creation and there is therefore nothing to
be reflected in the immutable luminous being of the conscious
Soul. But when the equilibrium is disturbed, then the three
gunas fall into a state of inequality in which they strive with
and act upon each other and the whole inextricable business
of ceaseless creation, conservation and dissolution begins, unrolling the phenomena of the cosmos. This continues so long as
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the Purusha consents to reflect the disturbance which obscures
his eternal nature and attributes to it the nature of Prakriti; but
when he withdraws his consent, the gunas fall into equilibrium
and the soul returns to its eternal, unchanging immobility; it is
delivered from phenomena. This reflection and this giving or
withdrawal of consent seem to be the only powers of Purusha;
he is the witness of Nature by virtue of reflection and the
giver of the sanction, sāks.ı̄ and anumantā of the Gita, but not
actively the Ishwara. Even his giving of consent is passive and
his withdrawing of consent is only another passivity. All action
subjective or objective is foreign to the Soul; it has neither an
active will nor an active intelligence. It cannot therefore be the
sole cause of the cosmos and the affirmation of a second cause
becomes necessary. Not Soul alone by its nature of conscious
knowledge, will and delight is the cause of the universe, but
Soul and Nature are the dual cause, a passive Consciousness
and an active Energy. So the Sankhya explains the existence of
the cosmos.
But whence then come this conscious intelligence and conscious will which we perceive to be so large a part of our
being and which we commonly and instinctively refer not to the
Prakriti, but to the Purusha? According to the Sankhya this intelligence and will are entirely a part of the mechanical energy of
Nature and are not properties of the soul; they are the principle
of Buddhi, one of the twenty-four tattvas, the twenty-four cosmic principles. Prakriti in the evolution of the world bases herself
with her three gunas in her as the original substance of things,
unmanifest, inconscient, out of which are evolved successively
five elemental conditions of energy or matter, — for Matter and
Force are the same in the Sankhya philosophy. These are called
by the names of the five concrete elements of ancient thought,
ether, air, fire, water and earth; but it must be remembered that
they are not elements in the modern scientific sense but subtle
conditions of material energy and nowhere to be found in their
purity in the gross material world. All objects are created by the
combination of these five subtle conditions or elements. Again,
each of these five is the base of one of five subtle properties of
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73
energy or matter, sound, touch, form, taste and smell, which
constitute the way in which the mind-sense perceives objects.
Thus by these five elements of Matter put forth from primary
energy and these five sense relations through which Matter is
known is evolved what we would call in modern language the
objective aspect of cosmic existence.
Thirteen other principles constitute the subjective aspect of
the cosmic Energy, — Buddhi or Mahat, Ahankara, Manas and
its ten sense-functions, five of knowledge, five of action. Manas,
mind, is the original sense which perceives all objects and reacts
upon them; for it has at once an inferent and an efferent activity,
receives by perception what the Gita calls the outward touches
of things, bāhya sparśa, and so forms its idea of the world and
exercises its reactions of active vitality. But it specialises its most
ordinary functions of reception by aid of the five perceptive
senses of hearing, touch, sight, taste and smell, which make the
five properties of things their respective objects, and specialises
certain necessary vital functions of reaction by aid of the five
active senses which operate for speech, locomotion, the seizing
of things, ejection and generation. Buddhi, the discriminating
principle, is at once intelligence and will; it is that power in
Nature which discriminates and coordinates. Ahankara, the egosense, is the subjective principle in Buddhi by which the Purusha
is induced to identify himself with Prakriti and her activities.
But these subjective principles are themselves as mechanical, as
much a part of the inconscient energy as those which constitute her objective operations. If we find it difficult to realise
how intelligence and will can be properties of the mechanical
Inconscient and themselves mechanical (jad.a), we have only to
remember that modern Science itself has been driven to the same
conclusion. Even in the mechanical action of the atom there is
a power which can only be called an inconscient will and in
all the works of Nature that pervading will does inconsciently
the works of intelligence. What we call mental intelligence is
precisely the same thing in its essence as that which discriminates and coordinates subconsciously in all the activities of the
material universe, and conscious Mind itself, Science has tried
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to demonstrate, is only a result and transcript of the mechanical
action of the inconscient. But Sankhya explains what modern
Science leaves in obscurity, the process by which the mechanical
and inconscient takes on the appearance of consciousness. It
is because of the reflection of Prakriti in Purusha; the light of
consciousness of the Soul is attributed to the workings of the
mechanical energy and it is thus that the Purusha, observing
Nature as the witness and forgetting himself, is deluded with
the idea generated in her that it is he who thinks, feels, wills,
acts, while all the time the operation of thinking, feeling, willing,
acting is conducted really by her and her three modes and not by
himself at all. To get rid of this delusion is the first step towards
the liberation of the soul from Nature and her works.
There are certainly plenty of things in our existence which
the Sankhya does not explain at all or does not explain satisfactorily, but if all we need is a rational explanation of the cosmic
processes in their principles as a basis for the great object common to the ancient philosophies, the liberation of the soul from
the obsession of cosmic Nature, then the Sankhya explanation
of the world and the Sankhya way of liberation seem as good
and as effective as any other. What we do not seize at first is why
it should bring in an element of pluralism into its dualism by affirming one Prakriti, but many Purushas. It would seem that the
existence of one Purusha and one Prakriti should be sufficient to
account for the creation and procession of the universe. But the
Sankhya was bound to evolve pluralism by its rigidly analytical
observation of the principles of things. First, actually, we find
that there are many conscious beings in the world and each
regards the same world in his own way and has his independent
experience of its subjective and objective things, his separate
dealings with the same perceptive and reactive processes. If
there were only one Purusha, there would not be this central
independence and separativeness, but all would see the world
in an identical fashion and with a common subjectivity and
objectivity. Because Prakriti is one, all witness the same world;
because her principles are everywhere the same, the general principles which constitute internal and external experience are the
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75
same for all; but the infinite difference of view and outlook and
attitude, action and experience and escape from experience, —
a difference not of the natural operations which are the same
but of the witnessing consciousness, — are utterly inexplicable
except on the supposition that there is a multiplicity of witnesses,
many Purushas. The separative ego-sense, we may say, is a sufficient explanation? But the ego-sense is a common principle of
Nature and need not vary; for by itself it simply induces the
Purusha to identify himself with Prakriti, and if there is only
one Purusha, all beings would be one, joined and alike in their
egoistic consciousness; however different in detail might be the
mere forms and combinations of their natural parts, there would
be no difference of soul-outlook and soul-experience. The variations of Nature ought not to make all this central difference, this
multiplicity of outlook and from beginning to end this separateness of experience in one Witness, one Purusha. Therefore the
pluralism of souls is a logical necessity to a pure Sankhya system
divorced from the Vedantic elements of the ancient knowledge
which first gave it birth. The cosmos and its process can be
explained by the commerce of one Prakriti with one Purusha,
but not the multiplicity of conscious beings in the cosmos.
There is another difficulty quite as formidable. Liberation is
the object set before itself by this philosophy as by others. This
liberation is effected, we have said, by the Purusha’s withdrawal
of his consent from the activities of Prakriti which she conducts
only for his pleasure; but, in sum, this is only a way of speaking.
The Purusha is passive and the act of giving or withdrawing
consent cannot really belong to it, but must be a movement in
Prakriti itself. If we consider, we shall see that it is, so far as it is
an operation, a movement of reversal or recoil in the principle of
Buddhi, the discriminative will. Buddhi has been lending itself
to the perceptions of the mind-sense; it has been busy discriminating and coordinating the operations of the cosmic energy
and by the aid of the ego-sense identifying the Witness with her
works of thought, sense and action. It arrives by the process of
discriminating things at the acid and dissolvent realisation that
this identity is a delusion; it discriminates finally the Purusha
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from Prakriti and perceives that all is mere disturbance of the
equilibrium of the gunas; the Buddhi, at once intelligence and
will, recoils from the falsehood which it has been supporting and
the Purusha, ceasing to be bound, no longer associates himself
with the interest of the mind in the cosmic play. The ultimate
result will be that Prakriti will lose her power to reflect herself
in the Purusha; for the effect of the ego-sense is destroyed and
the intelligent will becoming indifferent ceases to be the means
of her sanction: necessarily then her gunas must fall into a state
of equilibrium, the cosmic play must cease, the Purusha return
to his immobile repose. But if there were only the one Purusha
and this recoil of the discriminating principle from its delusions
took place, all cosmos would cease. As it is, we see that nothing
of the kind happens. A few beings among innumerable millions
attain to liberation or move towards it; the rest are in no way
affected, nor is cosmic Nature in her play with them one whit
inconvenienced by this summary rejection which should be the
end of all her processes. Only by the theory of many independent
Purushas can this fact be explained. The only at all logical explanation from the point of view of Vedantic monism is that of
the Mayavada; but there the whole thing becomes a dream, both
bondage and liberation are circumstances of the unreality, the
empirical blunderings of Maya; in reality there is none freed,
none bound. The more realistic Sankhya view of things does
not admit this phantasmagoric idea of existence and therefore
cannot adopt this solution. Here too we see that the multiplicity
of souls is an inevitable conclusion from the data of the Sankhya
analysis of existence.
The Gita starts from this analysis and seems at first, even in
its setting forth of Yoga, to accept it almost wholly. It accepts
Prakriti and her three gunas and twenty-four principles; accepts
the attribution of all action to the Prakriti and the passivity of
the Purusha; accepts the multiplicity of conscious beings in the
cosmos; accepts the dissolution of the identifying ego-sense, the
discriminating action of the intelligent will and the transcendence of the action of the three modes of energy as the means
of liberation. The Yoga which Arjuna is asked to practise from
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77
the outset is Yoga by the Buddhi, the intelligent will. But there is
one deviation of capital importance, — the Purusha is regarded
as one, not many; for the free, immaterial, immobile, eternal,
immutable Self of the Gita, but for one detail, is a Vedantic description of the eternal, passive, immobile, immutable Purusha
of the Sankhyas. But the capital difference is that there is One
and not many. This brings in the whole difficulty which the
Sankhya multiplicity avoids and necessitates a quite different
solution. This the Gita provides by bringing into its Vedantic
Sankhya the ideas and principles of Vedantic Yoga.
The first important new element we find is in the conception
of Purusha itself. Prakriti conducts her activities for the pleasure
of Purusha; but how is that pleasure determined? In the strict
Sankhya analysis it can only be by a passive consent of the
silent Witness. Passively the Witness consents to the action of
the intelligent will and the ego-sense, passively he consents to the
recoil of that will from the ego-sense. He is Witness, source of
the consent, by reflection upholder of the work of Nature, sāks.ı̄
anumantā bhartā, but nothing more. But the Purusha of the Gita
is also the Lord of Nature; he is Ishwara. If the operation of the
intelligent will belongs to Nature, the origination and power
of the will proceed from the conscious Soul; he is the Lord of
Nature. If the act of intelligence of the Will is the act of Prakriti,
the source and light of the intelligence are actively contributed
by the Purusha; he is not only the Witness, but the Lord and
Knower, master of knowledge and will, jñātā ı̄śvarah.. He is the
supreme cause of the action of Prakriti, the supreme cause of its
withdrawal from action. In the Sankhya analysis Purusha and
Prakriti in their dualism are the cause of the cosmos; in this
synthetic Sankhya Purusha by his Prakriti is the cause of the
cosmos. We see at once how far we have travelled from the rigid
purism of the traditional analysis.
But what of the one self immutable, immobile, eternally
free, with which the Gita began? That is free from all change
or involution in change, avikārya, unborn, unmanifested, the
Brahman, yet it is that “by which all this is extended.” Therefore
it would seem that the principle of the Ishwara is in its being;
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if it is immobile, it is yet the cause and lord of all action and
mobility. But how? And what of the multiplicity of conscious
beings in the cosmos? They do not seem to be the Lord, but
rather very much not the Lord, anı̄śa, for they are subject to the
action of the three gunas and the delusion of the ego-sense, and
if, as the Gita seems to say, they are all the one self, how did
this involution, subjection and delusion come about or how is
it explicable except by the pure passivity of the Purusha? And
whence the multiplicity? or how is it that the one self in one body
and mind attains to liberation while in others it remains under
the delusion of bondage? These are difficulties which cannot be
passed by without a solution.
The Gita answers them in its later chapters by an analysis of
Purusha and Prakriti which brings in new elements very proper
to a Vedantic Yoga, but alien to the traditional Sankhya. It
speaks of three Purushas or rather a triple status of the Purusha.
The Upanishads in dealing with the truths of Sankhya seem
sometimes to speak only of two Purushas. There is one unborn
of three colours, says a text, the eternal feminine principle of
Prakriti with its three gunas, ever creating; there are two unborn, two Purushas, of whom one cleaves to and enjoys her,
the other abandons her because he has enjoyed all her enjoyments. In another verse they are described as two birds on one
tree, eternally yoked companions, one of whom eats the fruits
of the tree, — the Purusha in Nature enjoying her cosmos, —
the other eats not, but watches his fellow, — the silent Witness,
withdrawn from the enjoyment; when the first sees the second
and knows that all is his greatness, then he is delivered from
sorrow. The point of view in the two verses is different, but they
have a common implication. One of the birds is the eternally
silent, unbound Self or Purusha by whom all this is extended
and he regards the cosmos he has extended, but is aloof from
it; the other is the Purusha involved in Prakriti. The first verse
indicates that the two are the same, represent different states,
bound and liberated, of the same conscious being, — for the
second Unborn has descended into the enjoyment of Nature and
withdrawn from her; the other verse brings out what we would
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79
not gather from the former, that in its higher status of unity the
self is for ever free, inactive, unattached, though it descends in
its lower being into the multiplicity of the creatures of Prakriti
and withdraws from it by reversion in any individual creature
to the higher status. This theory of the double status of the one
conscious soul opens a door; but the process of the multiplicity
of the One is still obscure.
To these two the Gita, developing the thought of other
passages in the Upanishads,1 adds yet another, the supreme,
the Purushottama, the highest Purusha, whose greatness all this
creation is. Thus there are three, the Kshara, the Akshara, the
Uttama. Kshara, the mobile, the mutable is Nature, svabhāva, it
is the various becoming of the soul; the Purusha here is the multiplicity of the divine Being; it is the Purusha multiple not apart
from, but in Prakriti. Akshara, the immobile, the immutable, is
the silent and inactive self, it is the unity of the divine Being,
Witness of Nature, but not involved in its movement; it is the
inactive Purusha free from Prakriti and her works. The Uttama is
the Lord, the supreme Brahman, the supreme Self, who possesses
both the immutable unity and the mobile multiplicity. It is by a
large mobility and action of His nature, His energy, His will and
power, that He manifests Himself in the world and by a greater
stillness and immobility of His being that He is aloof from it; yet
is He as Purushottama above both the aloofness from Nature
and the attachment to Nature. This idea of the Purushottama,
though continually implied in the Upanishads, is disengaged and
definitely brought out by the Gita and has exercised a powerful
influence on the later developments of the Indian religious consciousness. It is the foundation of the highest Bhaktiyoga which
claims to exceed the rigid definitions of monistic philosophy; it
is at the back of the philosophy of the devotional Puranas.
The Gita is not content, either, to abide within the Sankhya
analysis of Prakriti; for that makes room only for the ego-sense
and not for the multiple Purusha, which is there not a part of
1
Purus.ah. . . . aks.arāt paratah. parah., — although the Akshara is supreme, there is a
supreme Purusha higher than it, says the Upanishad.
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Prakriti, but separate from her. The Gita affirms on the contrary
that the Lord by His nature becomes the Jiva. How is that possible, since there are only the twenty-four principles of the cosmic
Energy and no others? Yes, says the divine Teacher in effect, that
is a perfectly valid account for the apparent operations of the
cosmic Prakriti with its three gunas, and the relation attributed
to Purusha and Prakriti there is also quite valid and of great
use for the practical purposes of the involution and the withdrawal. But this is only the lower Prakriti of the three modes,
the inconscient, the apparent; there is a higher, a supreme, a
conscient and divine Nature, and it is that which has become
the individual soul, the Jiva. In the lower nature each being
appears as the ego, in the higher he is the individual Purusha.
In other words multiplicity is part of the spiritual nature of the
One. This individual soul is myself, in the creation it is a partial
manifestation of me, mamaiva aṁśah., and it possesses all my
powers; it is witness, giver of the sanction, upholder, knower,
lord. It descends into the lower nature and thinks itself bound
by action, so to enjoy the lower being: it can draw back and
know itself as the passive Purusha free from all action. It can
rise above the three gunas and, liberated from the bondage of
action, yet possess action, even as I do myself, and by adoration
of the Purushottama and union with him it can enjoy wholly its
divine Nature.
Such is the analysis, not confining itself to the apparent
cosmic process but penetrating into the occult secrets of superconscious Nature, uttamaṁ rahasyam, by which the Gita founds
its synthesis of Vedanta, Sankhya and Yoga, its synthesis of
knowledge, works and devotion. By the pure Sankhya alone
the combining of works and liberation is contradictory and impossible. By pure Monism alone the permanent continuation
of works as a part of Yoga and the indulgence of devotion
after perfect knowledge and liberation and union are attained,
become impossible or at least irrational and otiose. The Sankhya
knowledge of the Gita dissipates and the Yoga system of the Gita
triumphs over all these obstacles.
IX
Sankhya, Yoga and Vedanta
T
HE WHOLE object of the first six chapters of the Gita
is to synthetise in a large frame of Vedantic truth the
two methods, ordinarily supposed to be diverse and even
opposite, of the Sankhyas and the Yogins. The Sankhya is taken
as the starting-point and the basis; but it is from the beginning
and with a progressively increasing emphasis permeated with
the ideas and methods of Yoga and remoulded in its spirit.
The practical difference, as it seems to have presented itself to
the religious minds of that day, lay first in this that Sankhya
proceeded by knowledge and through the Yoga of the intelligence, while Yoga proceeded by works and the transformation
of the active consciousness and, secondly, — a corollary of this
first distinction, — that Sankhya led to entire passivity and the
renunciation of works, sannyāsa, while Yoga held to be quite
sufficient the inner renunciation of desire, the purification of
the subjective principle which leads to action and the turning
of works Godwards, towards the divine existence and towards
liberation. Yet both had the same aim, the transcendence of birth
and of this terrestrial existence and the union of the human soul
with the Highest. This at least is the difference as it is presented
to us by the Gita.
The difficulty which Arjuna feels in understanding any possible synthesis of these oppositions is an indication of the hard
line that was driven in between these two systems in the normal
ideas of the time. The Teacher sets out by reconciling works and
the Yoga of the intelligence: the latter, he says, is far superior
to mere works; it is by the Yoga of the Buddhi, by knowledge
raising man out of the ordinary human mind and its desires
into the purity and equality of the Brahmic condition free from
all desire that works can be made acceptable. Yet are works
a means of salvation, but works thus purified by knowledge.
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Filled with the notions of the then prevailing culture, misled
by the emphasis which the Teacher lays upon the ideas proper
to Vedantic Sankhya, conquest of the senses, withdrawal from
mind into the Self, ascent into the Brahmic condition, extinction
of our lower personality in the Nirvana of impersonality, — for
the ideas proper to Yoga are as yet subordinated and largely
held back, — Arjuna is perplexed and asks, “If thou holdest
the intelligence to be greater than works, why then dost thou
appoint me to a terrible work? Thou seemest to bewilder my
intelligence with a confused and mingled speech; tell me then
decisively that one thing by which I may attain to my soul’s
weal.”
In answer Krishna affirms that the Sankhya goes by knowledge and renunciation, the Yoga by works; but the real renunciation is impossible without Yoga, without works done as a
sacrifice, done with equality and without desire of the fruit, with
the perception that it is Nature which does the actions and not
the soul; but immediately afterwards he declares that the sacrifice
of knowledge is the highest, all work finds its consummation
in knowledge, by the fire of knowledge all works are burnt
up; therefore by Yoga works are renounced and their bondage
overcome for the man who is in possession of his Self. Again
Arjuna is perplexed; here are desireless works, the principle of
Yoga, and renunciation of works, the principle of Sankhya, put
together side by side as if part of one method, yet there is no evident reconciliation between them. For the kind of reconciliation
which the Teacher has already given, — in outward inaction to
see action still persisting and in apparent action to see a real
inaction since the soul has renounced its illusion of the worker
and given up works into the hands of the Master of sacrifice,
— is for the practical mind of Arjuna too slight, too subtle and
expressed almost in riddling words; he has not caught their sense
or at least not penetrated into their spirit and reality. Therefore
he asks again, “Thou declarest to me the renunciation of works,
O Krishna, and again thou declarest to me Yoga; which one of
these is the better way, that tell me with a clear decisiveness.”
The answer is important, for it puts the whole distinction
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83
very clearly and indicates though it does not develop entirely
the line of reconciliation. “Renunciation and Yoga of works
both bring about the soul’s salvation, but of the two the Yoga
of works is distinguished above the renunciation of works. He
should be known as always a Sannyasin (even when he is doing action) who neither dislikes nor desires; for free from the
dualities he is released easily and happily from the bondage.
Children speak of Sankhya and Yoga apart from each other,
not the wise; if a man applies himself integrally to one, he gets
the fruit of both,” because in their integrality each contains the
other. “The status which is attained by the Sankhya, to that
the men of the Yoga also arrive; who sees Sankhya and Yoga
as one, he sees. But renunciation is difficult to attain without
Yoga; the sage who has Yoga attains soon to the Brahman; his
self becomes the self of all existences (of all things that have
become), and even though he does works, he is not involved in
them.” He knows that the actions are not his, but Nature’s and
by that very knowledge he is free; he has renounced works, does
no actions, though actions are done through him; he becomes
the Self, the Brahman, brahmabhūta, he sees all existences as
becomings (bhūtāni) of that self-existent Being, his own only
one of them, all their actions as only the development of cosmic
Nature working through their individual nature and his own
actions also as a part of the same cosmic activity. This is not
the whole teaching of the Gita; for as yet there is only the idea
of the immutable self or Purusha, the Akshara Brahman, and of
Nature, Prakriti, as that which is responsible for the cosmos and
not yet the idea, clearly expressed, of the Ishwara, the Purushottama; as yet only the synthesis of works and knowledge and not
yet, in spite of certain hints, the introduction of the supreme
element of devotion which becomes so important afterwards; as
yet only the one inactive Purusha and the lower Prakriti and not
yet the distinction of the triple Purusha and the double Prakriti.
It is true the Ishwara is spoken of, but his relation to the self
and nature is not yet made definite. The first six chapters only
carry the synthesis so far as it can be carried without the clear
expression and decisive entrance of these all-important truths
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which, when they come in, must necessarily enlarge and modify,
though without abolishing, these first reconciliations.
Twofold, says Krishna, is the self-application of the soul by
which it enters into the Brahmic condition: “that of the Sankhyas
by the Yoga of knowledge, that of the Yogins by the Yoga of
works.” This identification of Sankhya with Jnanayoga and of
Yoga with the way of works is interesting; for it shows that quite
a different order of ideas prevailed at that time from those we
now possess as the result of the great Vedantic development of
Indian thought, subsequent evidently to the composition of the
Gita, by which the other Vedic philosophies fell into desuetude
as practical methods of liberation. To justify the language of
the Gita we must suppose that at that time it was the Sankhya
method which was very commonly1 adopted by those who followed the path of knowledge. Subsequently, with the spread
of Buddhism, the Sankhya method of knowledge must have
been much overshadowed by the Buddhistic. Buddhism, like
the Sankhya non-Theistic and anti-Monistic, laid stress on the
impermanence of the results of the cosmic energy, which it
presented not as Prakriti but as Karma because the Buddhists
admitted neither the Vedantic Brahman nor the inactive Soul of
the Sankhyas, and it made the recognition of this impermanence
by the discriminating mind its means of liberation. When the reaction against Buddhism arrived, it took up not the old Sankhya
notion, but the Vedantic form popularised by Shankara who
replaced the Buddhistic impermanence by the cognate Vedantic
idea of illusion, Maya, and the Buddhistic idea of Non-Being,
indefinable Nirvana, a negative Absolute, by the opposite and
yet cognate Vedantic idea of the indefinable Being, Brahman, an
ineffably positive Absolute in which all feature and action and
energy cease because in That they never really existed and are
mere illusions of the mind. It is the method of Shankara based
upon these concepts of his philosophy, it is the renunciation of
life as an illusion of which we ordinarily think when we speak
1
The systems of the Puranas and Tantras are full of the ideas of the Sankhya, though
subordinated to the Vedantic idea and mingled with many others.
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85
now of the Yoga of knowledge. But in the time of the Gita Maya
was evidently not yet quite the master word of the Vedantic
philosophy, nor had it, at least with any decisive clearness, the
connotation which Shankara brought out of it with such a luminous force and distinctness; for in the Gita there is little talk of
Maya and much of Prakriti and, even, the former word is used as
little more than an equivalent of the latter but only in its inferior
status; it is the lower Prakriti of the three gunas, traigun.yamayı̄
māyā. Prakriti, not illusive Maya, is in the teaching of the Gita
the effective cause of cosmic existence.
Still, whatever the precise distinctions of their metaphysical
ideas, the practical difference between the Sankhya and Yoga
as developed by the Gita is the same as that which now exists between the Vedantic Yogas of knowledge and of works,
and the practical results of the difference are also the same.
The Sankhya proceeded like the Vedantic Yoga of knowledge
by the Buddhi, by the discriminating intelligence; it arrived by
reflective thought, vicāra, at right discrimination, viveka, of the
true nature of the soul and of the imposition on it of the works
of Prakriti through attachment and identification, just as the
Vedantic method arrives by the same means at the right discrimination of the true nature of the Self and of the imposition on it
of cosmic appearances by mental illusion which leads to egoistic
identification and attachment. In the Vedantic method Maya
ceases for the soul by its return to its true and eternal status as
the one Self, the Brahman, and the cosmic action disappears;
in the Sankhya method the working of the gun.as falls to rest
by the return of the soul to its true and eternal status as the
inactive Purusha and the cosmic action ends. The Brahman of
the Mayavadins is silent, immutable and inactive; so too is the
Purusha of the Sankhya; therefore for both ascetic renunciation
of life and works is a necessary means of liberation. But for the
Yoga of the Gita, as for the Vedantic Yoga of works, action is
not only a preparation but itself the means of liberation; and it
is the justice of this view which the Gita seeks to bring out with
such an unceasing force and insistence, — an insistence, unfortunately, which could not prevail in India against the tremendous
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tide of Buddhism,2 was lost afterwards in the intensity of ascetic
illusionism and the fervour of world-shunning saints and devotees and is only now beginning to exercise its real and salutary
influence on the Indian mind. Renunciation is indispensable, but
the true renunciation is the inner rejection of desire and egoism;
without that the outer physical abandoning of works is a thing
unreal and ineffective, with it it ceases even to be necessary,
although it is not forbidden. Knowledge is essential, there is
no higher force for liberation, but works with knowledge are
also needed; by the union of knowledge and works the soul
dwells entirely in the Brahmic status not only in repose and
inactive calm, but in the very midst and stress and violence of
action. Devotion is all-important, but works with devotion are
also important; by the union of knowledge, devotion and works
the soul is taken up into the highest status of the Ishwara to
dwell there in the Purushottama who is master at once of the
eternal spiritual calm and the eternal cosmic activity. This is the
synthesis of the Gita.
But, apart from the distinction between the Sankhya way of
knowledge and the Yoga way of works, there was another and
similar opposition in the Vedanta itself, and this also the Gita
has to deal with, to correct and to fuse into its large restatement
of the Aryan spiritual culture. This was the distinction between
Karmakanda and Jnanakanda, between the original thought that
led to the philosophy of the Purva Mimansa, the Vedavada,
and that which led to the philosophy of the Uttara Mimansa,3
the Brahmavada, between those who dwelt in the tradition of
the Vedic hymns and the Vedic sacrifice and those who put
these aside as a lower knowledge and laid stress on the lofty
metaphysical knowledge which emerges from the Upanishads.
2 At the same time the Gita seems to have largely influenced Mahayanist Buddhism and
texts are taken bodily from it into the Buddhist Scriptures. It may therefore have helped
largely to turn Buddhism, originally a school of quietistic and illuminated ascetics, into
that religion of meditative devotion and compassionate action which has so powerfully
influenced Asiatic culture.
3 Jaimini’s idea of liberation is the eternal Brahmaloka in which the soul that has come
to know Brahman still possesses a divine body and divine enjoyments. For the Gita the
Brahmaloka is not liberation; the soul must pass beyond to the supracosmic status.
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87
For the pragmatic mind of the Vedavadins the Aryan religion of
the Rishis meant the strict performance of the Vedic sacrifices
and the use of the sacred Vedic mantras in order to possess all
human desires in this world, wealth, progeny, victory, every kind
of good fortune, and the joys of immortality in Paradise beyond.
For the idealism of the Brahmavadins this was only a preliminary
preparation and the real object of man, true purus.ārtha, began
with his turning to the knowledge of the Brahman which would
give him the true immortality of an ineffable spiritual bliss far
beyond the lower joys of this world or of any inferior heaven.
Whatever may have been the true and original sense of the Veda,
this was the distinction which had long established itself and
with which therefore the Gita has to deal.
Almost the first word of the synthesis of works and knowledge is a strong, almost a violent censure and repudiation of the
Vedavada, “this flowery word which they declare who have not
clear discernment, devoted to the creed of the Veda, whose creed
is that there is nothing else, souls of desire, seekers of Paradise,
— it gives the fruits of the works of birth, it is multifarious with
specialities of rites, it is directed to enjoyment and lordship as
its goal.” The Gita even seems to go on to attack the Veda itself
which, though it has been practically cast aside, is still to Indian
sentiment intangible, inviolable, the sacred origin and authority
for all its philosophy and religion. “The action of the three gunas
is the subject matter of the Veda; but do thou become free from
the triple guna, O Arjuna.” The Vedas in the widest terms, “all
the Vedas”, — which might well include the Upanishads also and
seems to include them, for the general term Śruti is used later
on, — are declared to be unnecessary for the man who knows.
“As much use as there is in a well with water in flood on every
side, so much is there in all the Vedas for the Brahmin who has
the knowledge.” Nay, the Scriptures are even a stumbling-block;
for the letter of the Word — perhaps because of its conflict of
texts and its various and mutually dissentient interpretations —
bewilders the understanding, which can only find certainty and
concentration by the light within. “When thy intelligence shall
cross beyond the whorl of delusion, then shalt thou become
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indifferent to Scripture heard or that which thou hast yet to
hear, gantāsi nirvedaṁ śrotavyasya śrutasya ca. When thy intelligence which is bewildered by the Sruti, śrutivipratipannā, shall
stand unmoving and stable in Samadhi, then shalt thou attain
to Yoga.” So offensive is all this to conventional religious sentiment that attempts are naturally made by the convenient and
indispensable human faculty of text-twisting to put a different
sense on some of these verses, but the meaning is plain and hangs
together from beginning to end. It is confirmed and emphasised
by a subsequent passage in which the knowledge of the knower
is described as passing beyond the range of Veda and Upanishad,
śabdabrahmātivartate.
Let us see, however, what all this means; for we may be
sure that a synthetic and catholic system like the Gita’s will not
treat such important parts of the Aryan culture in a spirit of
mere negation and repudiation. The Gita has to synthetise the
Yoga doctrine of liberation by works and the Sankhya doctrine
of liberation by knowledge; it has to fuse karma with jñāna. It
has at the same time to synthetise the Purusha and Prakriti idea
common to Sankhya and Yoga with the Brahmavada of the current Vedanta in which the Purusha, Deva, Ishwara, — supreme
Soul, God, Lord, — of the Upanishads all became merged in the
one all-swallowing concept of the immutable Brahman; and it
has to bring out again from its overshadowing by that concept
but not with any denial of it the Yoga idea of the Lord or
Ishwara. It has too its own luminous thought to add, the crown
of its synthetic system, the doctrine of the Purushottama and of
the triple Purusha for which, though the idea is there, no precise
and indisputable authority can be easily found in the Upanishads
and which seems indeed at first sight to be in contradiction with
that text of the Sruti where only two Purushas are recognised.
Moreover, in synthetising works and knowledge it has to take
account not only of the opposition of Yoga and Sankhya, but of
the opposition of works to knowledge in Vedanta itself, where
the connotation of the two words and therefore their point of
conflict is not quite the same as the point of the Sankhya-Yoga
opposition. It is not surprising at all, one may observe in passing,
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89
that with the conflict of so many philosophical schools all founding themselves on the texts of the Veda and Upanishads, the Gita
should describe the understanding as being perplexed and confused, led in different directions by the Sruti, śrutivipratipannā.
What battles are even now delivered by Indian pundits and
metaphysicians over the meaning of the ancient texts and to
what different conclusions they lead! The understanding may
well get disgusted and indifferent, gantāsi nirvedam, refuse to
hear any more texts new or old, śrotavyasya śrutasya ca, and go
into itself to discover the truth in the light of a deeper and inner
and direct experience.
In the first six chapters the Gita lays a large foundation for
its synthesis of works and knowledge, its synthesis of Sankhya,
Yoga and Vedanta. But first it finds that karma, works, has a
particular sense in the language of the Vedantins; it means the
Vedic sacrifices and ceremonies or at most that and the ordering
of life according to the Grihyasutras in which these rites are the
most important part, the religious kernel of the life. By works
the Vedantins understood these religious works, the sacrificial
system, the yajña, full of a careful order, vidhi, of exact and
complicated rites, kriyā-viśes.a-bahulām. But in Yoga works had
a much wider significance. The Gita insists on this wider significance; in our conception of spiritual activity all works have
to be included, sarva-karmān.i. At the same time it does not,
like Buddhism, reject the idea of the sacrifice, it prefers to uplift
and enlarge it. Yes, it says in effect, not only is sacrifice, yajña,
the most important part of life, but all life, all works should
be regarded as sacrifice, are yajña, though by the ignorant they
are performed without the higher knowledge and by the most
ignorant not in the true order, avidhi-pūrvakam. Sacrifice is the
very condition of life; with sacrifice as their eternal companion
the Father of creatures created the peoples. But the sacrifices of
the Vedavadins are offerings of desire directed towards material
rewards, desire eager for the result of works, desire looking
to a larger enjoyment in Paradise as immortality and highest
salvation. This the system of the Gita cannot admit; for that in
its very inception starts with the renunciation of desire, with its
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rejection and destruction as the enemy of the soul. The Gita does
not deny the validity even of the Vedic sacrificial works; it admits
them, it admits that by these means one may get enjoyment here
and Paradise beyond; it is I myself, says the divine Teacher,
who accept these sacrifices and to whom they are offered, I
who give these fruits in the form of the gods since so men
choose to approach me. But this is not the true road, nor is
the enjoyment of Paradise the liberation and fulfilment which
man has to seek. It is the ignorant who worship the gods, not
knowing whom they are worshipping ignorantly in these divine
forms; for they are worshipping, though in ignorance, the One,
the Lord, the only Deva, and it is he who accepts their offering.
To that Lord must the sacrifice be offered, the true sacrifice of all
the life’s energies and activities, with devotion, without desire,
for His sake and for the welfare of the peoples. It is because
the Vedavada obscures this truth and with its tangle of ritual
ties man down to the action of the three gunas that it has to be
so severely censured and put roughly aside; but its central idea
is not destroyed; transfigured and uplifted, it is turned into a
most important part of the true spiritual experience and of the
method of liberation.
The Vedantic idea of knowledge does not present the same
difficulties. The Gita takes it over at once and completely
and throughout the six chapters quietly substitutes the still
immutable Brahman of the Vedantins, the One without a
second immanent in all cosmos, for the still immutable but
multiple Purusha of the Sankhyas. It accepts throughout these
chapters knowledge and realisation of the Brahman as the most
important, the indispensable means of liberation, even while it
insists on desireless works as an essential part of knowledge.
It accepts equally Nirvana of the ego in the infinite equality of
the immutable, impersonal Brahman as essential to liberation;
it practically identifies this extinction with the Sankhya return
of the inactive immutable Purusha upon itself when it emerges
out of identification with the actions of Prakriti; it combines
and fuses the language of the Vedanta with the language of the
Sankhya, as had already indeed been done by certain of the
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Upanishads.4 But still there is a defect in the Vedantic position
which has to be overcome. We may, perhaps, conjecture that at
this time the Vedanta had not yet redeveloped the later theistic
tendencies which in the Upanishads are already present as an
element, but not so prominent as in the Vaishnava philosophies
of the later Vedantins where they become indeed not only
prominent but paramount. We may take it that the orthodox
Vedanta was, at any rate in its main tendencies, pantheistic at
the basis, monistic at the summit.5 It knew of the Brahman, one
without a second; it knew of the Gods, Vishnu, Shiva, Brahma
and the rest, who all resolve themselves into the Brahman; but
the one supreme Brahman as the one Ishwara, Purusha, Deva —
words often applied to it in the Upanishads and justifying to that
extent, yet passing beyond the Sankhya and the theistic conceptions — was an idea that had fallen from its pride of place;6 the
names could only be applied in a strictly logical Brahmavada to
subordinate or inferior phases of the Brahman-idea. The Gita
proposes not only to restore the original equality of these names
and therefore of the conceptions they indicate, but to go a step
farther. The Brahman in its supreme and not in any lower aspect
has to be presented as the Purusha with the lower Prakriti for
its Maya, so to synthetise thoroughly Vedanta and Sankhya,
and as Ishwara, so to synthetise thoroughly both with Yoga; but
the Gita is going to represent the Ishwara, the Purushottama,
as higher even than the still and immutable Brahman, and the
loss of ego in the impersonal comes in at the beginning as
only a great initial and necessary step towards union with the
Purushottama. For the Purushottama is the supreme Brahman.
It therefore passes boldly beyond the Veda and the Upanishads
as they were taught by their best authorised exponents and
affirms a teaching of its own which it has developed from them,
4 Especially the Swetaswatara.
5 The pantheistic formula is that God and the All are one, the monistic adds that God
or Brahman alone exists and the cosmos is only an illusory appearance or else a real but
partial manifestation.
6 This is a little doubtful, but we may say at least that there was a strong tendency in
that direction of which Shankara’s philosophy was the last culmination.
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but which may not be capable of being fitted in within the
four corners of their meaning as ordinarily interpreted by the
Vedantins.7 In fact without this free and synthetic dealing with
the letter of the Scripture a work of large synthesis in the then
state of conflict between numerous schools and with the current
methods of Vedic exegesis would have been impossible.
The Gita in later chapters speaks highly of the Veda and the
Upanishads. They are divine Scriptures, they are the Word. The
Lord himself is the knower of Veda and the author of Vedanta,
vedavid vedāntakr.t; the Lord is the one object of knowledge
in all the Vedas, sarvair vedair aham eva vedyah., a language
which implies that the word Veda means the book of knowledge and that these Scriptures deserve their appellation. The
Purushottama from his high supremacy above the Immutable
and the mutable has extended himself in the world and in the
Veda. Still the letter of the Scripture binds and confuses, as the
apostle of Christianity warned his disciples when he said that
the letter killeth and it is the spirit that saves; and there is a
point beyond which the utility of the Scripture itself ceases. The
real source of knowledge is the Lord in the heart; “I am seated
in the heart of every man and from me is knowledge,” says the
Gita; the Scripture is only a verbal form of that inner Veda, of
that self-luminous Reality, it is śabdabrahma: the mantra, says
the Veda, has risen from the heart, from the secret place where
is the seat of the truth, sadanād r.tasya, guhāyām. That origin is
its sanction; but still the infinite Truth is greater than its word.
Nor shall you say of any Scripture that it alone is all-sufficient
and no other truth can be admitted, as the Vedavadins said of
the Veda, nānyad astı̄ti vādinah.. This is a saving and liberating
word which must be applied to all the Scriptures of the world.
Take all the Scriptures that are or have been, Bible and Koran
7 In reality the idea of the Purushottama is already announced in the Upanishads,
though in a more scattered fashion than in the Gita and, as in the Gita, the Supreme
Brahman or Supreme Purusha is constantly described as containing in himself the opposition of the Brahman with qualities and without qualities, nirgun.o gun.ı̄. He is not
one of these things to the exclusion of the other which seems to our intellect to be its
contrary.
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93
and the books of the Chinese, Veda and Upanishads and Purana
and Tantra and Shastra and the Gita itself and the sayings of
thinkers and sages, prophets and Avatars, still you shall not say
that there is nothing else or that the truth your intellect cannot
find there is not true because you cannot find it there. That is
the limited thought of the sectarian or the composite thought
of the eclectic religionist, not the untrammelled truth-seeking of
the free and illumined mind and God-experienced soul. Heard
or unheard before, that always is the truth which is seen by the
heart of man in its illumined depths or heard within from the
Master of all knowledge, the knower of the eternal Veda.
X
The Yoga of the Intelligent Will
I
HAVE had to deviate in the last two essays and to drag the
reader with me into the arid tracts of metaphysical dogma, —
however cursorily and with a very insufficient and superficial
treatment, — so that we might understand why the Gita follows
the peculiar line of development it has taken, working out first a
partial truth with only subdued hints of its deeper meaning, then
returning upon its hints and bringing out their significance until
it rises to its last great suggestion, its supreme mystery which it
does not work out at all, but leaves to be lived out, as the later
ages of Indian spirituality tried to live it out in great waves of
love, of surrender, of ecstasy. Its eye is always on its synthesis
and all its strains are the gradual preparation of the mind for its
high closing note.
I have declared to you the poise of a self-liberating intelligence in Sankhya, says the divine Teacher to Arjuna. I will now
declare to you another poise in Yoga. You are shrinking from
the results of your works, you desire other results and turn from
your right path in life because it does not lead you to them. But
this idea of works and their result, desire of result as the motive,
the work as a means for the satisfaction of desire, is the bondage
of the ignorant who know not what works are, nor their true
source, nor their real operation, nor their high utility. My Yoga
will free you from all bondage of the soul to its works, karmabandhaṁ prahāsyasi. You are afraid of many things, afraid of
sin, afraid of suffering, afraid of hell and punishment, afraid
of God, afraid of this world, afraid of the hereafter, afraid of
yourself. What is it that you are not afraid of at this moment,
you the Aryan fighter, the world’s chief hero? But this is the
great fear which besieges humanity, its fear of sin and suffering
now and hereafter, its fear in a world of whose true nature it
is ignorant, of a God whose true being also it has not seen and
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whose cosmic purpose it does not understand. My Yoga will
deliver you from the great fear and even a little of it will bring
deliverance. When you have once set out on this path, you will
find that no step is lost; every least movement will be a gain; you
will find there no obstacle that can baulk you of your advance.
A bold and absolute promise and one to which the fearful and
hesitating mind beset and stumbling in all its paths cannot easily
lend an assured trust; nor is the large and full truth of it apparent
unless with these first words of the message of the Gita we read
also the last, “Abandon all laws of conduct and take refuge in
Me alone; I will deliver you from all sin and evil; do not grieve.”
But it is not with this deep and moving word of God to
man, but rather with the first necessary rays of light on the
path, directed not like that to the soul, but to the intellect, that
the exposition begins. Not the Friend and Lover of man speaks
first, but the guide and teacher who has to remove from him
his ignorance of his true self and of the nature of the world
and of the springs of his own action. For it is because he acts
ignorantly, with a wrong intelligence and therefore a wrong will
in these matters, that man is or seems to be bound by his works;
otherwise works are no bondage to the free soul. It is because of
this wrong intelligence that he has hope and fear, wrath and grief
and transient joy; otherwise works are possible with a perfect
serenity and freedom. Therefore it is the Yoga of the buddhi, the
intelligence, that is first enjoined on Arjuna. To act with right
intelligence and, therefore, a right will, fixed in the One, aware of
the one self in all and acting out of its equal serenity, not running
about in different directions under the thousand impulses of our
superficial mental self, is the Yoga of the intelligent will.
There are, says the Gita, two types of intelligence in the human being. The first is concentrated, poised, one, homogeneous,
directed singly towards the Truth; unity is its characteristic, concentrated fixity is its very being. In the other there is no single
will, no unified intelligence, but only an endless number of ideas
many-branching, coursing about, that is to say, in this or that
direction in pursuit of the desires which are offered to it by life
and by the environment. Buddhi, the word used, means, properly
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speaking, the mental power of understanding but it is evidently
used by the Gita in a large philosophic sense for the whole action
of the discriminating and deciding mind which determines both
the direction and use of our thoughts and the direction and use of
our acts; thought, intelligence, judgment, perceptive choice and
aim are all included in its functioning: for the characteristic of the
unified intelligence is not only concentration of the mind that
knows, but especially concentration of the mind that decides
and persists in the decision, vyavasāya, while the sign of the
dissipated intelligence is not so much even discursiveness of the
ideas and perceptions as discursiveness of the aims and desires,
therefore of the will. Will, then, and knowledge are the two
functions of the Buddhi. The unified intelligent will is fixed in
the enlightened soul, it is concentrated in inner self-knowledge;
the many-branching and multifarious, busied with many things,
careless of the one thing needful is on the contrary subject to the
restless and discursive action of the mind, dispersed in outward
life and works and their fruits. “Works are far inferior,” says
the Teacher, “to Yoga of the intelligence; desire rather refuge in
the intelligence; poor and wretched souls are they who make the
fruit of their works the object of their thoughts and activities.”
We must remember the psychological order of the Sankhya
which the Gita accepts. On one side there is the Purusha, the
soul calm, inactive, immutable, one, not evolutive; on the other
side there is Prakriti or Nature-force inert without the conscious
Soul, active but only by juxtaposition to that consciousness,
by contact with it, as we would say, not so much one at first
as indeterminate, triple in its qualities, capable of evolution
and involution. The contact of soul and nature generates the
play of subjectivity and objectivity which is our experience of
being; what is to us the subjective first evolves, because the soulconsciousness is the first cause, inconscient Nature-force only
the second and dependent cause; but still it is Nature and not
Soul which supplies the instruments of our subjectivity. First
in order come Buddhi, discriminative or determinative power
evolving out of Nature-force, and its subordinate power of selfdiscriminating ego. Then as a secondary evolution there arises
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out of these the power which seizes the discriminations of objects, sense-mind or Manas, — we must record the Indian names
because the corresponding English words are not real equivalents. As a tertiary evolution out of sense-mind we have the
specialising organic senses, ten in number, five of perception,
five of action; next the powers of each sense of perception,
sound, form, scent, etc., which give their value to objects for
the mind and make things what they are to our subjectivity, —
and, as the substantial basis of these, the primary conditions
of the objects of sense, the five elements of ancient philosophy
or rather elementary conditions of Nature, pañca bhūta, which
constitute objects by their various combination.
Reflected in the pure consciousness of Purusha these degrees
and powers of Nature-force become the material of our impure
subjectivity, impure because its action is dependent on the perceptions of the objective world and on their subjective reactions.
Buddhi, which is simply the determinative power that determines
all inertly out of indeterminate inconscient Force, takes for us the
form of intelligence and will. Manas, the inconscient force which
seizes Nature’s discriminations by objective action and reaction
and grasps at them by attraction, becomes sense-perception and
desire, the two crude terms or degradations of intelligence and
will, — becomes the sense-mind sensational, emotive, volitional
in the lower sense of wish, hope, longing, passion, vital impulsion, all the deformations (vikāra) of will. The senses become
the instruments of sense-mind, the perceptive five of our senseknowledge, the active five of our impulsions and vital habits,
mediators between the subjective and objective; the rest are the
objects of our consciousness, vis.ayas of the senses.
This order of evolution seems contrary to that which we
perceive as the order of the material evolution; but if we remember that even Buddhi is in itself an inert action of inconscient
Nature and that there is certainly in this sense an inconscient
will and intelligence, a discriminative and determinative force
even in the atom, if we observe the crude inconscient stuff of
sensation, emotion, memory, impulsion in the plant and in the
subconscient forms of existence, if we look at these powers
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of Nature-force assuming the forms of our subjectivity in the
evolving consciousness of animal and man, we shall see that
the Sankhya system squares well enough with all that modern
enquiry has elicited by its observation of material Nature. In the
evolution of the soul back from Prakriti towards Purusha, the
reverse order has to be taken to the original Nature-evolution,
and that is how the Upanishads and the Gita following and
almost quoting the Upanishads state the ascending order of our
subjective powers. “Supreme, they say,” beyond their objects
“are the senses, supreme over the senses the mind, supreme
over the mind the intelligent will: that which is supreme over
the intelligent will, is he,” — is the conscious self, the Purusha.
Therefore, says the Gita, it is this Purusha, this supreme cause
of our subjective life which we have to understand and become
aware of by the intelligence; in that we have to fix our will. So
holding our lower subjective self in Nature firmly poised and
stilled by means of the greater really conscient self, we can destroy the restless ever-active enemy of our peace and self-mastery,
the mind’s desire.
For evidently there are two possibilities of the action of the
intelligent will. It may take its downward and outward orientation towards a discursive action of the perceptions and the
will in the triple play of Prakriti, or it may take its upward
and inward orientation towards a settled peace and equality
in the calm and immutable purity of the conscious silent soul
no longer subject to the distractions of Nature. In the former
alternative the subjective being is at the mercy of the objects
of sense, it lives in the outward contact of things. That life is
the life of desire. For the senses excited by their objects create a
restless or often violent disturbance, a strong or even headlong
outward movement towards the seizure of these objects and
their enjoyment, and they carry away the sense-mind, “as the
winds carry away a ship upon the sea”; the mind subjected
to the emotions, passions, longings, impulsions awakened by
this outward movement of the senses carries away similarly the
intelligent will, which loses therefore its power of calm discrimination and mastery. Subjection of the soul to the confused play
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of the three gunas of Prakriti in their eternal entangled twining
and wrestling, ignorance, a false, sensuous, objective life of the
soul, enslavement to grief and wrath and attachment and passion, are the results of the downward trend of the buddhi, —
the troubled life of the ordinary, unenlightened, undisciplined
man. Those who like the Vedavadins make sense-enjoyment the
object of action and its fulfilment the highest aim of the soul, are
misleading guides. The inner subjective self-delight independent
of objects is our true aim and the high and wide poise of our
peace and liberation.
Therefore, it is the upward and inward orientation of the
intelligent will that we must resolutely choose with a settled
concentration and perseverance, vyavasāya; we must fix it firmly
in the calm self-knowledge of the Purusha. The first movement
must be obviously to get rid of desire which is the whole root of
the evil and suffering; and in order to get rid of desire, we must
put an end to the cause of desire, the rushing out of the senses
to seize and enjoy their objects. We must draw them back when
they are inclined thus to rush out, draw them away from their
objects, — as the tortoise draws in his limbs into the shell, so
these into their source, quiescent in the mind, the mind quiescent
in intelligence, the intelligence quiescent in the soul and its selfknowledge, observing the action of Nature, but not subject to
it, not desiring anything that the objective life can give.
It is not an external asceticism, the physical renunciation
of the objects of sense that I am teaching, suggests Krishna
immediately to avoid a misunderstanding which is likely at once
to arise. Not the renunciation of the Sankhyas or the austerities
of the rigid ascetic with his fasts, his maceration of the body,
his attempt to abstain even from food; that is not the selfdiscipline or the abstinence which I mean, for I speak of an
inner withdrawal, a renunciation of desire. The embodied soul,
having a body, has to support it normally by food for its normal
physical action; by abstention from food it simply removes from
itself the physical contact with the object of sense, but does not
get rid of the inner relation which makes that contact hurtful.
It retains the pleasure of the sense in the object, the rasa, the
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liking and disliking, — for rasa has two sides; the soul must,
on the contrary, be capable of enduring the physical contact
without suffering inwardly this sensuous reaction. Otherwise
there is nivr.tti, cessation of the object, vis.ayā vinivartante, but
no subjective cessation, no nivr.tti of the mind; but the senses are
of the mind, subjective, and subjective cessation of the rasa is the
only real sign of mastery. But how is this desireless contact with
objects, this unsensuous use of the senses possible? It is possible,
paraṁ dr.s.t.vā, by the vision of the supreme, — param, the Soul,
the Purusha, — and by living in the Yoga, in union or oneness
of the whole subjective being with that, through the Yoga of
the intelligence; for the one Soul is calm, satisfied in its own
delight, and that delight free from duality can take, once we see
this supreme thing in us and fix the mind and will on that, the
place of the sensuous object-ridden pleasures and repulsions of
the mind. This is the true way of liberation.
Certainly self-discipline, self-control is never easy. All intelligent human beings know that they must exercise some control
over themselves and nothing is more common than this advice to
control the senses; but ordinarily it is only advised imperfectly
and practised imperfectly in the most limited and insufficient
fashion. Even, however, the sage, the man of clear, wise and discerning soul who really labours to acquire complete self-mastery
finds himself hurried and carried away by the senses. That is
because the mind naturally lends itself to the senses; it observes
the objects of sense with an inner interest, settles upon them and
makes them the object of absorbing thought for the intelligence
and of strong interest for the will. By that attachment comes, by
attachment desire, by desire distress, passion and anger when
the desire is not satisfied or is thwarted or opposed, and by
passion the soul is obscured, the intelligence and will forget to
see and be seated in the calm observing soul; there is a fall from
the memory of one’s true self, and by that lapse the intelligent
will is also obscured, destroyed even. For, for the time being, it
no longer exists to our memory of ourselves, it disappears in a
cloud of passion; we become passion, wrath, grief and cease to
be self and intelligence and will. This then must be prevented
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and all the senses brought utterly under control; for only by an
absolute control of the senses can the wise and calm intelligence
be firmly established in its proper seat.
This cannot be done perfectly by the act of the intelligence
itself, by a merely mental self-discipline; it can only be done by
Yoga with something which is higher than itself and in which
calm and self-mastery are inherent. And this Yoga can only arrive at its success by devoting, by consecrating, by giving up the
whole self to the Divine, “to Me”, says Krishna; for the Liberator
is within us, but it is not our mind, nor our intelligence, nor
our personal will, — they are only instruments. It is the Lord in
whom, as we are told in the end, we have utterly to take refuge.
And for that we must at first make him the object of our whole
being and keep in soul-contact with him. This is the sense of
the phrase “he must sit firm in Yoga, wholly given up to Me”;
but as yet it is the merest passing hint after the manner of the
Gita, three words only which contain in seed the whole gist of
the highest secret yet to be developed. Yukta āsı̄ta matparah..
If this is done, then it becomes possible to move among
the objects of sense, in contact with them, acting on them, but
with the senses entirely under the control of the subjective self,
— not at the mercy of the objects and their contacts and reactions, — and that self again obedient to the highest self, the
Purusha. Then, free from reactions, the senses will be delivered
from the affections of liking and disliking, escape the duality of
positive and negative desire, and calm, peace, clearness, happy
tranquillity, ātmaprasāda, will settle upon the man. That clear
tranquillity is the source of the soul’s felicity; all grief begins to
lose its power of touching the tranquil soul; the intelligence is
rapidly established in the peace of the self; suffering is destroyed.
It is this calm, desireless, griefless fixity of the buddhi in selfpoise and self-knowledge to which the Gita gives the name of
Samadhi.
The sign of the man in Samadhi is not that he loses consciousness of objects and surroundings and of his mental and
physical self and cannot be recalled to it even by burning or
torture of the body, — the ordinary idea of the matter; trance
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is a particular intensity, not the essential sign. The test is the
expulsion of all desires, their inability to get at the mind, and it is
the inner state from which this freedom arises, the delight of the
soul gathered within itself with the mind equal and still and highpoised above the attractions and repulsions, the alternations of
sunshine and storm and stress of the external life. It is drawn inward even when acting outwardly; it is concentrated in self even
when gazing out upon things; it is directed wholly to the Divine
even when to the outward vision of others busy and preoccupied
with the affairs of the world. Arjuna, voicing the average human
mind, asks for some outward, physical, practically discernible
sign of this great Samadhi; how does such a man speak, how
sit, how walk? No such signs can be given, nor does the Teacher
attempt to supply them; for the only possible test of its possession is inward and that there are plenty of hostile psychological
forces to apply. Equality is the great stamp of the liberated soul
and of that equality even the most discernible signs are still
subjective. “A man with mind untroubled by sorrows, who has
done with desire for pleasures, from whom liking and wrath and
fear have passed away, such is the sage whose understanding has
become founded in stability.” He is “without the triple action
of the qualities of Prakriti, without the dualities, ever based in
his true being, without getting or having, possessed of his self.”
For what gettings and havings has the free soul? Once we are
possessed of the Self, we are in possession of all things.
And yet he does not cease from work and action. There
is the originality and power of the Gita, that having affirmed
this static condition, this superiority to nature, this emptiness
even of all that constitutes ordinarily the action of Nature for
the liberated soul, it is still able to vindicate for it, to enjoin
on it even the continuance of works and thus avoid the great
defect of the merely quietistic and ascetic philosophies, — the
defect from which we find them today attempting to escape.
“Thou hast a right to action, but only to action, never to its
fruits; let not the fruits of thy works be thy motive, neither let
there be in thee any attachment to inactivity.” Therefore it is not
the works practised with desire by the Vedavadins, it is not the
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claim for the satisfaction of the restless and energetic mind by a
constant activity, the claim made by the practical or the kinetic
man, which is here enjoined. “Fixed in Yoga do thy actions,
having abandoned attachment, having become equal in failure
and success; for it is equality that is meant by Yoga.” Action is
distressed by the choice between a relative good and evil, the
fear of sin and the difficult endeavour towards virtue? But the
liberated who has united his reason and will with the Divine,
casts away from him even here in this world of dualities both
good doing and evil doing; for he rises to a higher law beyond
good and evil, founded in the liberty of self-knowledge. Such
desireless action can have no decisiveness, no effectiveness, no
efficient motive, no large or vigorous creative power? Not so;
action done in Yoga is not only the highest but the wisest, the
most potent and efficient even for the affairs of the world; for it
is informed by the knowledge and will of the Master of works:
“Yoga is skill in works.” But all action directed towards life leads
away from the universal aim of the Yogin which is by common
consent to escape from bondage to this distressed and sorrowful
human birth? Not so, either; the sages who do works without
desire for fruits and in Yoga with the Divine are liberated from
the bondage of birth and reach that other perfect status in which
there are none of the maladies which afflict the mind and life of
a suffering humanity.
The status he reaches is the Brahmic condition; he gets to
firm standing in the Brahman, brāhmı̄ sthiti. It is a reversal of
the whole view, experience, knowledge, values, seeings of earthbound creatures. This life of the dualities which is to them their
day, their waking, their consciousness, their bright condition
of activity and knowledge, is to him a night, a troubled sleep
and darkness of the soul; that higher being which is to them
a night, a sleep in which all knowledge and will cease, is to
the self-mastering sage his waking, his luminous day of true
being, knowledge and power. They are troubled and muddy
waters disturbed by every little inrush of desire; he is an ocean
of wide being and consciousness which is ever being filled, yet
ever motionless in its large poise of his soul; all the desires of the
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world enter into him as waters into the sea, yet he has no desire
nor is troubled. For while they are filled with the troubling sense
of ego and mine and thine, he is one with the one Self in all and
has no “I” or “mine”. He acts as others, but he has abandoned
all desires and their longings. He attains to the great peace and
is not bewildered by the shows of things; he has extinguished
his individual ego in the One, lives in that unity and, fixed in
that status at his end, can attain to extinction in the Brahman,
Nirvana, — not the negative self-annihilation of the Buddhists,
but the great immergence of the separate personal self into the
vast reality of the one infinite impersonal Existence.
Such, subtly unifying Sankhya, Yoga and Vedanta, is the
first foundation of the teaching of the Gita. It is far from being
all, but it is the first indispensable practical unity of knowledge
and works with a hint already of the third crowning intensest
element in the soul’s completeness, divine love and devotion.
XI
Works and Sacrifice
T
HE YOGA of the intelligent will and its culmination in
the Brahmic status, which occupies all the close of the
second chapter, contains the seed of much of the teaching
of the Gita, — its doctrine of desireless works, of equality, of the
rejection of outward renunciation, of devotion to the Divine;
but as yet all this is slight and obscure. What is most strongly
emphasised as yet is the withdrawal of the will from the ordinary
motive of human activities, desire, from man’s normal temperament of the sense-seeking thought and will with its passions
and ignorance, and from its customary habit of troubled manybranching ideas and wishes to the desireless calm unity and
passionless serenity of the Brahmic poise. So much Arjuna has
understood. He is not unfamiliar with all this; it is the substance
of the current teaching which points man to the path of knowledge and to the renunciation of life and works as his way of
perfection. The intelligence withdrawing from sense and desire
and human action and turning to the Highest, to the One, to the
actionless Purusha, to the immobile, to the featureless Brahman,
that surely is the eternal seed of knowledge. There is no room
here for works, since works belong to the Ignorance; action is
the very opposite of knowledge; its seed is desire and its fruit
is bondage. That is the orthodox philosophical doctrine, and
Krishna seems quite to admit it when he says that works are
far inferior to the Yoga of the intelligence. And yet works are
insisted upon as part of the Yoga; so that there seems to be in
this teaching a radical inconsistency. Not only so; for some kind
of work no doubt may persist for a while, the minimum, the
most inoffensive; but here is a work wholly inconsistent with
knowledge, with serenity and with the motionless peace of the
self-delighted soul, — a work terrible, even monstrous, a bloody
strife, a ruthless battle, a giant massacre. Yet it is this that is
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enjoined, this that it is sought to justify by the teaching of inner
peace and desireless equality and status in the Brahman! Here
then is an unreconciled contradiction. Arjuna complains that he
has been given a contradictory and confusing doctrine, not the
clear, strenuously single road by which the human intelligence
can move straight and trenchantly to the supreme good. It is in
answer to this objection that the Gita begins at once to develop
more clearly its positive and imperative doctrine of Works.
The Teacher first makes a distinction between the two means
of salvation on which in this world men can concentrate separately, the Yoga of knowledge, the Yoga of works, the one
implying, it is usually supposed, renunciation of works as an
obstacle to salvation, the other accepting works as a means
of salvation. He does not yet insist strongly on any fusion of
them, on any reconciliation of the thought that divides them,
but begins by showing that the renunciation of the Sankhyas,
the physical renunciation, Sannyasa, is neither the only way, nor
at all the better way. Nais.karmya, a calm voidness from works,
is no doubt that to which the soul, the Purusha has to attain;
for it is Prakriti which does the work and the soul has to rise
above involution in the activities of the being and attain to a
free serenity and poise watching over the operations of Prakriti,
but not affected by them. That, and not cessation of the works
of Prakriti, is what is really meant by the soul’s nais.karmya.
Therefore it is an error to think that by not engaging in any
kind of action this actionless state of the soul can be attained
and enjoyed. Mere renunciation of works is not a sufficient,
not even quite a proper means for salvation. “Not by abstention from works does a man enjoy actionlessness, nor by mere
renunciation (of works) does he attain to his perfection,” — to
siddhi, the accomplishment of the aims of his self-discipline by
Yoga.
But at least it must be one necessary means, indispensable,
imperative? For how, if the works of Prakriti continue, can the
soul help being involved in them? How can I fight and yet in my
soul not think or feel that I the individual am fighting, not desire
victory nor be inwardly touched by defeat? This is the teaching of
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the Sankhyas that the intelligence of the man who engages in the
activities of Nature, is entangled in egoism, ignorance and desire
and therefore drawn to action; on the contrary, if the intelligence
draws back, then the action must cease with the cessation of the
desire and the ignorance. Therefore the giving up of life and
works is a necessary part, an inevitable circumstance and an
indispensable last means of the movement to liberation. This
objection of a current logic, — it is not expressed by Arjuna,
but it is in his mind as the turn of his subsequent utterances
shows, — the Teacher immediately anticipates. No, he says, such
renunciation, far from being indispensable, is not even possible.
“For none stands even for a moment not doing work; everyone
is made to do action helplessly by the modes born of Prakriti.”
The strong perception of the great cosmic action and the eternal
activity and power of the cosmic energy which was so much
emphasised afterwards by the teaching of the Tantric Shaktas
who even made Prakriti or Shakti superior to Purusha, is a very
remarkable feature of the Gita. Although here an undertone, it is
still strong enough, coupled with what we might call the theistic
and devotional elements of its thought, to bring in that activism
which so strongly modifies in its scheme of Yoga the quietistic
tendencies of the old metaphysical Vedanta. Man embodied in
the natural world cannot cease from action, not for a moment,
not for a second; his very existence here is an action; the whole
universe is an act of God, mere living even is His movement.
Our physical life, its maintenance, its continuance is a journey, a pilgrimage of the body, śarı̄ra-yātrā, and that cannot be
effected without action. But even if a man could leave his body
unmaintained, otiose, if he could stand still always like a tree or
sit inert like a stone, tis.t.hati, that vegetable or material immobility would not save him from the hands of Nature; he would
not be liberated from her workings. For it is not our physical
movements and activities alone which are meant by works, by
karma; our mental existence also is a great complex action, it
is even the greater and more important part of the works of
the unresting energy, — subjective cause and determinant of the
physical. We have gained nothing if we repress the effect but
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retain the activity of the subjective cause. The objects of sense
are only an occasion for our bondage, the mind’s insistence on
them is the means, the instrumental cause. A man may control
his organs of action and refuse to give them their natural play,
but he has gained nothing if his mind continues to remember and
dwell upon the objects of sense. Such a man has bewildered himself with false notions of self-discipline; he has not understood
its object or its truth, nor the first principles of his subjective
existence; therefore all his methods of self-discipline are false and
null.1 The body’s actions, even the mind’s actions are nothing in
themselves, neither a bondage, nor the first cause of bondage.
What is vital is the mighty energy of Nature which will have
her way and her play in her great field of mind and life and
body; what is dangerous in her, is the power of her three gun.as,
modes or qualities to confuse and bewilder the intelligence and
so obscure the soul. That, as we shall see later, is the whole crux
of action and liberation for the Gita. Be free from obscuration
and bewilderment by the three gun.as and action can continue, as
it must continue, and even the largest, richest or most enormous
and violent action; it does not matter, for nothing then touches
the Purusha, the soul has nais.karmya.
But at present the Gita does not proceed to that larger point.
Since the mind is the instrumental cause, since inaction is impossible, what is rational, necessary, the right way is a controlled
action of the subjective and objective organism. The mind must
bring the senses under its control as an instrument of the intelligent will and then the organs of action must be used for their
proper office, for action, but for action done as Yoga. But what
is the essence of this self-control, what is meant by action done
as Yoga, Karmayoga? It is non-attachment, it is to do works
without clinging with the mind to the objects of sense and the
fruit of the works. Not complete inaction, which is an error, a
confusion, a self-delusion, an impossibility, but action full and
1
I cannot think that mithyācāra means a hypocrite. How is a man a hypocrite who
inflicts on himself so severe and complete a privation? He is mistaken and deluded,
vimūd.hātmā, and his ācāra, his formally regulated method of self-discipline, is a false
and vain method, — this surely is all that the Gita means.
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free done without subjection to sense and passion, desireless
and unattached works, are the first secret of perfection. Do
action thus self-controlled, says Krishna, niyataṁ kuru karma
tvam: I have said that knowledge, the intelligence, is greater
than works, jyāyası̄ karman.o buddhih., but I did not mean that
inaction is greater than action; the contrary is the truth, karma
jyāyo akarman.ah.. For knowledge does not mean renunciation of
works, it means equality and non-attachment to desire and the
objects of sense; and it means the poise of the intelligent will in
the Soul free and high-uplifted above the lower instrumentation
of Prakriti and controlling the works of the mind and the senses
and body in the power of self-knowledge and the pure objectless
self-delight of spiritual realisation, niyataṁ karma.2 Buddhiyoga
is fulfilled by karmayoga; the Yoga of the self-liberating intelligent will finds its full meaning by the Yoga of desireless works.
Thus the Gita founds its teaching of the necessity of desireless
works, nis.kāma karma, and unites the subjective practice of
the Sankhyas — rejecting their merely physical rule — with the
practice of Yoga.
But still there is an essential difficulty unsolved. Desire is
the ordinary motive of all human actions, and if the soul is
free from desire, then there is no farther rationale for action.
We may be compelled to do certain works for the maintenance
of the body, but even that is a subjection to the desire of the
body which we ought to get rid of if we are to attain perfection.
But granting that this cannot be done, the only way is to fix
a rule for action outside ourselves, not dictated by anything in
our subjectivity, the nityakarma of the Vedic rule, the routine
2
Again, I cannot accept the current interpretation of niyataṁ karma as if it meant
fixed and formal works and were equivalent to the Vedic nityakarma, the regular works
of sacrifice, ceremonial and the daily rule of Vedic living. Surely, niyata simply takes
up the niyamya of the last verse. Krishna makes a statement, “he who controlling the
senses by the mind engages with the organs of action in Yoga of action, he excels,”
manasā niyamya ārabhate karmayogam, and he immediately goes on to draw from the
statement an injunction, to sum it up and convert it into a rule. “Do thou do controlled
action,” niyataṁ kuru karma tvam: niyatam takes up the niyamya, kuru karma takes
up the ārabhate karmayogam. Not formal works fixed by an external rule, but desireless
works controlled by the liberated buddhi, is the Gita’s teaching.
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of ceremonial sacrifice, daily conduct and social duty, which the
man who seeks liberation may do simply because it is enjoined
upon him, without any personal purpose or subjective interest
in them, with an absolute indifference to the doing, not because
he is compelled by his nature but because it is enjoined by the
Shastra. But if the principle of the action is not to be external
to the nature but subjective, if the actions even of the liberated
and the sage are to be controlled and determined by his nature,
svabhāva-niyatam, then the only subjective principle of action is
desire of whatever kind, lust of the flesh or emotion of the heart
or base or noble aim of the mind, but all subject to the gun.as of
Prakriti. Let us then interpret the niyata karma of the Gita as the
nityakarma of the Vedic rule, its kartavya karma or work that
has to be done as the Aryan rule of social duty and let us take too
its work done as a sacrifice to mean simply these Vedic sacrifices
and this fixed social duty performed disinterestedly and without
any personal object. This is how the Gita’s doctrine of desireless
work is often interpreted. But it seems to me that the Gita’s
teaching is not so crude and simple, not so local and temporal
and narrow as all that. It is large, free, subtle and profound; it is
for all time and for all men, not for a particular age and country.
Especially, it is always breaking free from external forms, details,
dogmatic notions and going back to principles and the great facts
of our nature and our being. It is a work of large philosophic
truth and spiritual practicality, not of constrained religious and
philosophical formulas and stereotyped dogmas.
The difficulty is this, how, our nature being what it is and desire the common principle of its action, is it possible to institute
a really desireless action? For what we call ordinarily disinterested action is not really desireless; it is simply a replacement of
certain smaller personal interests by other larger desires which
have only the appearance of being impersonal, virtue, country,
mankind. All action, moreover, as Krishna insists, is done by
the gun.as of Prakriti, by our nature; in acting according to the
Shastra we are still acting according to our nature, — even if this
Shastric action is not, as it usually is, a mere cover for our desires,
prejudices, passions, egoisms, our personal, national, sectarian
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vanities, sentiments and preferences; but even otherwise, even at
the purest, still we obey a choice of our nature, and if our nature
were different and the gun.as acted on our intelligence and will in
some other combination, we would not accept the Shastra, but
live according to our pleasure or our intellectual notions or else
break free from the social law to live the life of the solitary or
the ascetic. We cannot become impersonal by obeying something
outside ourselves, for we cannot so get outside ourselves; we can
only do it by rising to the highest in ourselves, into our free Soul
and Self which is the same and one in all and has therefore
no personal interests, to the Divine in our being who possesses
Himself transcendent of cosmos and is therefore not bound by
His cosmic works or His individual action. That is what the
Gita teaches and desirelessness is only a means to this end, not
an aim in itself. Yes, but how is it to be brought about? By doing
all works with sacrifice as the only object, is the reply of the
divine Teacher. “By doing works otherwise than for sacrifice,
this world of men is in bondage to works; for sacrifice practise
works, O son of Kunti, becoming free from all attachment.” It is
evident that all works and not merely sacrifice and social duties
can be done in this spirit; any action may be done either from
the ego-sense narrow or enlarged or for the sake of the Divine.
All being and all action of Prakriti exist only for the sake of
the Divine; from that it proceeds, by that it endures, to that it
is directed. But so long as we are dominated by the ego-sense
we cannot perceive or act in the spirit of this truth, but act for
the satisfaction of the ego and in the spirit of the ego, otherwise
than for sacrifice. Egoism is the knot of the bondage. By acting
Godwards, without any thought of ego, we loosen this knot and
finally arrive at freedom.
At first, however, the Gita takes up the Vedic statement of
the idea of sacrifice and phrases the law of sacrifice in its current
terms. This it does with a definite object. We have seen that
the quarrel between renunciation and works has two forms, the
opposition of Sankhya and Yoga which is already in principle
reconciled and the opposition of Vedism and Vedantism which
the Teacher has yet to reconcile. The first is a larger statement of
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the opposition in which the idea of works is general and wide.
The Sankhya starts from the notion of the divine status as that of
the immutable and inactive Purusha which each soul is in reality
and makes an opposition between inactivity of Purusha and
activity of Prakriti; so its logical culmination is cessation of all
works. Yoga starts from the notion of the Divine as Ishwara, lord
of the operations of Prakriti and therefore superior to them, and
its logical culmination is not cessation of works but the soul’s
superiority to them and freedom even though doing all works.
In the opposition of Vedism and Vedantism works, karma, are
restricted to Vedic works and sometimes even to Vedic sacrifice
and ritualised works, all else being excluded as not useful to
salvation. Vedism of the Mimansakas insisted on them as the
means, Vedantism taking its stand on the Upanishads looked on
them as only a preliminary belonging to the state of ignorance
and in the end to be overpassed and rejected, an obstacle to the
seeker of liberation. Vedism worshipped the Devas, the gods,
with sacrifice and held them to be the powers who assist our
salvation. Vedantism was inclined to regard them as powers of
the mental and material world opposed to our salvation (men,
says the Upanishad, are the cattle of the gods, who do not desire
man to know and be free); it saw the Divine as the immutable
Brahman who has to be attained not by works of sacrifice and
worship but by knowledge. Works only lead to material results
and to an inferior Paradise; therefore they have to be renounced.
The Gita resolves this opposition by insisting that the Devas
are only forms of the one Deva, the Ishwara, the Lord of all
Yoga and worship and sacrifice and austerity, and if it is true
that sacrifice offered to the Devas leads only to material results
and to Paradise, it is also true that sacrifice offered to the Ishwara
leads beyond them to the great liberation. For the Lord and the
immutable Brahman are not two different beings, but one and
the same Being, and whoever strives towards either, is striving
towards that one divine Existence. All works in their totality
find their culmination and completeness in the knowledge of the
Divine, sarvaṁ karmākhilaṁ pārtha jñāne parisamāpyate. They
are not an obstacle, but the way to the supreme knowledge.
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Thus this opposition too is reconciled with the help of a large
elucidation of the meaning of sacrifice. In fact its conflict is only
a restricted form of the larger opposition between Yoga and
Sankhya. Vedism is a specialised and narrow form of Yoga; the
principle of the Vedantists is identical with that of the Sankhyas,
for to both the movement of salvation is the recoil of the intelligence, the buddhi, from the differentiating powers of Nature,
from ego, mind, senses, from the subjective and the objective,
and its return to the undifferentiated and the immutable. It is
with this object of reconciliation in his mind that the Teacher
first approaches his statement of the doctrine of sacrifice; but
throughout, even from the very beginning, he keeps his eye not
on the restricted Vedic sense of sacrifice and works, but on their
larger and universal application, — that widening of narrow and
formal notions to admit the great general truths they unduly
restrict which is always the method of the Gita.
XII
The Significance of Sacrifice
T
HE GITA’S theory of sacrifice is stated in two separate
passages; one we find in the third chapter, another in the
fourth; the first gives it in language which might, taken by
itself, seem to be speaking only of the ceremonial sacrifice; the
second interpreting that into the sense of a large philosophical
symbolism, transforms at once its whole significance and raises
it to a plane of high psychological and spiritual truth. “With
sacrifice the Lord of creatures of old created creatures and said,
By this shall you bring forth (fruits or offspring), let this be your
milker of desires. Foster by this the gods and let the gods foster
you; fostering each other, you shall attain to the supreme good.
Fostered by sacrifice the gods shall give you desired enjoyments;
who enjoys their given enjoyments and has not given to them,
he is a thief. The good who eat what is left from the sacrifice,
are released from all sin; but evil are they and enjoy sin who
cook (the food) for their own sake. From food creatures come
into being, from rain is the birth of food, from sacrifice comes
into being the rain, sacrifice is born of work; work know to be
born of Brahman, Brahman is born of the Immutable; therefore
is the all-pervading Brahman established in the sacrifice. He who
follows not here the wheel thus set in movement, evil is his being,
sensual is his delight, in vain, O Partha, that man lives.” Having
thus stated the necessity of sacrifice, — we shall see hereafter
in what sense we may understand a passage which seems at
first sight to convey only a traditional theory of ritualism and
the necessity of the ceremonial offering, — Krishna proceeds to
state the superiority of the spiritual man to works. “But the
man whose delight is in the Self and who is satisfied with the
enjoyment of the Self and in the Self he is content, for him there
exists no work that needs to be done. He has no object here to be
gained by action done and none to be gained by action undone;
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115
he has no dependence on all these existences for any object to
be gained.”
Here then are the two ideals, Vedist and Vedantist, standing
as if in all their sharp original separation and opposition, on
one side the active ideal of acquiring enjoyments here and the
highest good beyond by sacrifice and the mutual dependence of
the human being and the divine powers and on the other, facing
it, the austerer ideal of the liberated man who, independent in
the Spirit, has nothing to do with enjoyment or works or the
human or the divine worlds, but exists only in the peace of the
supreme Self, joys only in the calm joy of the Brahman. The next
verses create a ground for the reconciliation between the two
extremes; the secret is not inaction as soon as one turns towards
the higher truth, but desireless action both before and after it
is reached. The liberated man has nothing to gain by action,
but nothing also to gain by inaction, and it is not at all for
any personal object that he has to make his choice. “Therefore
without attachment perform ever the work that is to be done
(done for the sake of the world, lokasaṅgraha, as is made clear
immediately afterward); for by doing work without attachment
man attains to the highest. For it was even by works that Janaka
and the rest attained to perfection.” It is true that works and
sacrifice are a means of arriving at the highest good, śreyah.
param avāpsyatha; but there are three kinds of works, that done
without sacrifice for personal enjoyment which is entirely selfish
and egoistic and misses the true law and aim and utility of life,
moghaṁ pārtha sa jı̄vati, that done with desire, but with sacrifice
and the enjoyment only as a result of sacrifice and therefore to
that extent consecrated and sanctified, and that done without
desire or attachment of any kind. It is the last which brings the
soul of man to the highest, param āpnoti pūrus.ah..
The whole sense and drift of this teaching turns upon the
interpretation we are to give to the important words, yajña,
karma, brahma, sacrifice, work, Brahman. If the sacrifice is
simply the Vedic sacrifice, if the work from which it is born
is the Vedic rule of works and if the brahman from which the
work itself is born is the śabdabrahman in the sense only of the
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letter of the Veda, then all the positions of the Vedist dogma
are conceded and there is nothing more. Ceremonial sacrifice
is the right means of gaining children, wealth, enjoyment; by
ceremonial sacrifice rain is brought down from heaven and the
prosperity and continuity of the race assured; life is a continual
transaction between the gods and men in which man offers ceremonial gifts to the gods from the gifts they have bestowed on
him and in return is enriched, protected, fostered. Therefore all
human works have to be accompanied and turned into a sacrament by ceremonial sacrifice and ritualistic worship; work not so
dedicated is accursed, enjoyment without previous ceremonial
sacrifice and ritual consecration is a sin. Even salvation, even
the highest good is to be gained by ceremonial sacrifice. It must
never be abandoned. Even the seeker of liberation has to continue to do ceremonial sacrifice, although without attachment;
it is by ceremonial sacrifice and ritualistic works done without
attachment that men of the type of Janaka attained to spiritual
perfection and liberation.
Obviously, this cannot be the meaning of the Gita, for it
would be in contradiction with all the rest of the book. Even
in the passage itself, without the illumining interpretation afterwards given to it in the fourth chapter, we have already an
indication of a wider sense where it is said that sacrifice is born
from work, work from brahman, brahman from the Akshara,
and therefore the all-pervading Brahman, sarvagataṁ brahma,
is established in the sacrifice. The connecting logic of the “therefore” and the repetition of the word brahma are significant; for it
shows clearly that the brahman from which all work is born has
to be understood with an eye not so much to the current Vedic
teaching in which it means the Veda as to a symbolical sense in
which the creative Word is identical with the all-pervading Brahman, the Eternal, the one Self present in all existences, sarvabhūtes.u, and present in all the workings of existence. The Veda is
the knowledge of the Divine, the Eternal, — “I am He who is to
be known in all the books of the Knowledge,” vedaiś ca vedyah.,
Krishna will say in a subsequent chapter; but it is the knowledge
of him in the workings of Prakriti, in the workings of the three
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117
gun.as, first qualities or modes of Nature, traigun.yavis.ayā vedāh..
This Brahman or Divine in the workings of Nature is born, as
we may say, out of the Akshara, the immutable Purusha, the
Self who stands above all the modes or qualities or workings of
Nature, nistraigun.ya. The Brahman is one but self-displayed in
two aspects, the immutable Being and the creator and originator
of works in the mutable becoming, ātman, sarvabhūtāni; it is
the immobile omnipresent Soul of things and it is the spiritual
principle of the mobile working of things, Purusha poised in
himself and Purusha active in Prakriti; it is aks.ara and ks.ara. In
both of these aspects the Divine Being, Purushottama, manifests
himself in the universe; the immutable above all qualities is His
poise of peace, self-possession, equality, samaṁ brahma; from
that proceeds His manifestation in the qualities of Prakriti and
their universal workings; from the Purusha in Prakriti, from this
Brahman with qualities, proceed all the works1 of the universal
energy, Karma, in man and in all existences; from that work
proceeds the principle of sacrifice. Even the material interchange
between gods and men proceeds upon this principle, as typified
in the dependence of rain and its product food on this working
and on them the physical birth of creatures. For all the working
of Prakriti is in its true nature a sacrifice, yajña, with the Divine
Being as the enjoyer of all energisms and works and sacrifice
and the great Lord of all existences, bhoktāraṁ yajñatapasāṁ
sarvaloka-maheśvaram, and to know this Divine all-pervading
and established in sacrifice, sarvagataṁ yajñe pratis.t.hitam, is
the true, the Vedic knowledge.
1
That this is the right interpretation results also from the opening of the eighth chapter
where the universal principles are enumerated, aks.ara (brahma), svabhāva, karma, ks.ara
bhāva, purus.a, adhiyajña. Akshara is the immutable Brahman, spirit or self, Atman;
swabhava is the principle of the self, adhyātma, operative as the original nature of the
being, “own way of becoming”, and this proceeds out of the self, the Akshara; Karma
proceeds from that and is the creative movement, visarga, which brings all natural beings
and all changing subjective and objective shapes of being into existence; the result of
Karma therefore is all this mutable becoming, the changes of nature developed out
of the original self-nature, ks.ara bhāva out of svabhāva; Purusha is the soul, the divine
element in the becoming, adhidaivata, by whose presence the workings of Karma become
a sacrifice, yajña, to the Divine within; adhiyajña is this secret Divine who receives the
sacrifice.
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But he may be known in an inferior action through the
devas, the gods, the powers of the divine Soul in Nature and in
the eternal interaction of these powers and the soul of man, mutually giving and receiving, mutually helping, increasing, raising
each other’s workings and satisfaction, a commerce in which
man rises towards a growing fitness for the supreme good. He
recognises that his life is a part of this divine action in Nature
and not a thing separate and to be held and pursued for its
own sake. He regards his enjoyments and the satisfaction of his
desires as the fruit of sacrifice and the gift of the gods in their
divine universal workings and he ceases to pursue them in the
false and evil spirit of sinful egoistic selfishness as if they were a
good to be seized from life by his own unaided strength without
return and without thankfulness. As this spirit increases in him,
he subordinates his desires, becomes satisfied with sacrifice as the
law of life and works and is content with whatever remains over
from the sacrifice, giving up all the rest freely as an offering in the
great and beneficent interchange between his life and the worldlife. Whoever goes contrary to this law of action and pursues
works and enjoyment for his own isolated personal self-interest,
lives in vain; he misses the true meaning and aim and utility of
living and the upward growth of the soul; he is not on the path
which leads to the highest good. But the highest only comes
when the sacrifice is no longer to the gods, but to the one allpervading Divine established in the sacrifice, of whom the gods
are inferior forms and powers, and when he puts away the lower
self that desires and enjoys and gives up his personal sense of
being the worker to the true executrix of all works, Prakriti, and
his personal sense of being the enjoyer to the Divine Purusha,
the higher and universal Self who is the real enjoyer of the works
of Prakriti. In that Self and not in any personal enjoyment he
finds now his sole satisfaction, complete content, pure delight;
he has nothing to gain by action or inaction, depends neither
on gods nor men for anything, seeks no profit from any, for
the self-delight is all-sufficient to him, but does works for the
sake of the Divine only, as a pure sacrifice, without attachment
or desire. Thus he gains equality and becomes free from the
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modes of Nature, nistraigun.ya; his soul takes its poise not in
the insecurity of Prakriti, but in the peace of the immutable
Brahman, even while his actions continue in the movement of
Prakriti. Thus is sacrifice his way of attaining to the Highest.
That this is the sense of the passage is made clear in what
follows, by the affirmation of lokasaṅgraha as the object of
works, of Prakriti as the sole doer of works and the divine
Purusha as their equal upholder, to whom works have to be
given up even in their doing, — this inner giving up of works
and yet physical doing of them is the culmination of sacrifice,
— and by the affirmation that the result of such active sacrifice
with an equal and desireless mind is liberation from the bondage
of works. “He who is satisfied with whatever gain comes to
him and equal in failure and success, is not bound even when
he acts. When a man liberated, free from attachment, acts for
sacrifice, all his action is dissolved,” leaves, that is to say, no
result of bondage or after-impression on his free, pure, perfect
and equal soul. To these passages we shall have to return. They
are followed by a perfectly explicit and detailed interpretation of
the meaning of yajña in the language of the Gita which leaves no
doubt at all about the symbolic use of the words and the psychological character of the sacrifice enjoined by this teaching. In the
ancient Vedic system there was always a double sense physical
and psychological, outward and symbolic, the exterior form of
the sacrifice and the inner meaning of all its circumstances. But
the secret symbolism of the ancient Vedic mystics, exact, curious,
poetic, psychological, had been long forgotten by this time and
it is now replaced by another, large, general and philosophical in
the spirit of Vedanta and a later Yoga. The fire of sacrifice, agni,
is no material flame, but brahmāgni, the fire of the Brahman, or
it is the Brahman-ward energy, inner Agni, priest of the sacrifice,
into which the offering is poured; the fire is self-control or it is a
purified sense-action or it is the vital energy in that discipline of
the control of the vital being through the control of the breath
which is common to Rajayoga and Hathayoga, or it is the fire
of self-knowledge, the flame of the supreme sacrifice. The food
eaten as the leavings of the sacrifice is, it is explained, the nectar
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of immortality, amr.ta, left over from the offering; and here we
have still something of the old Vedic symbolism in which the
Soma-wine was the physical symbol of the amr.ta, the immortalising delight of the divine ecstasy won by the sacrifice, offered
to the gods and drunk by men. The offering itself is whatever
working of his energy, physical or psychological, is consecrated
by him in action of body or action of mind to the gods or God,
to the Self or to the universal powers, to one’s own higher Self
or to the Self in mankind and in all existences.
This elaborate explanation of the Yajna sets out with a vast
and comprehensive definition in which it is declared that the
act and energy and materials of the sacrifice, the giver and receiver of the sacrifice, the goal and object of the sacrifice are
all the one Brahman. “Brahman is the giving, Brahman is the
food-offering, by Brahman it is offered into the Brahman-fire,
Brahman is that which is to be attained by samadhi in Brahmanaction.” This then is the knowledge in which the liberated man
has to do works of sacrifice. It is the knowledge declared of old
in the great Vedantic utterances, “I am He”, “All this verily is
the Brahman, Brahman is this Self.” It is the knowledge of the
entire unity; it is the One manifest as the doer and the deed and
the object of works, knower and knowledge and the object of
knowledge. The universal energy into which the action is poured
is the Divine; the consecrated energy of the giving is the Divine;
whatever is offered is only some form of the Divine; the giver of
the offering is the Divine himself in man; the action, the work,
the sacrifice is itself the Divine in movement, in activity; the goal
to be reached by sacrifice is the Divine. For the man who has
this knowledge and lives and acts in it, there can be no binding
works, no personal and egoistically appropriated action; there
is only the divine Purusha acting by the divine Prakriti in His
own being, offering everything into the fire of His self-conscious
cosmic energy, while the knowledge and the possession of His
divine existence and consciousness by the soul unified with Him
is the goal of all this God-directed movement and activity. To
know that and to live and act in this unifying consciousness is
to be free.
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But all even of the Yogins have not attained to this knowledge. “Some Yogins follow after the sacrifice which is of the
gods; others offer the sacrifice by the sacrifice itself into the
Brahman-fire.” The former conceive of the Divine in various
forms and powers and seek him by various means, ordinances,
dharmas, laws or, as we might say, settled rites of action, selfdiscipline, consecrated works; for the latter, those who already
know, the simple fact of sacrifice, of offering whatever work to
the Divine itself, of casting all their activities into the unified
divine consciousness and energy, is their one means, their one
dharma. The means of sacrifice are various; the offerings are of
many kinds. There is the psychological sacrifice of self-control
and self-discipline which leads to the higher self-possession and
self-knowledge. “Some offer their senses into the fires of control, others offer the objects of sense into the fires of sense, and
others offer all the actions of the sense and all the actions of
the vital force into the fire of the Yoga of self-control kindled by
knowledge.” There is, that is to say, the discipline which receives
the objects of sense-perception without allowing the mind to be
disturbed or affected by its sense-activities, the senses themselves
becoming pure fires of sacrifice; there is the discipline which stills
the senses so that the soul in its purity may appear from behind
the veil of mind-action, calm and still; there is the discipline
by which, when the self is known, all the actions of the senseperceptions and all the action of the vital being are received into
that one still and tranquil soul. The offering of the striver after
perfection may be material and physical, dravya-yajña, like that
consecrated in worship by the devotee to his deity, or it may be
the austerity of his self-discipline and energy of his soul directed
to some high aim, tapo-yajña, or it may be some form of Yoga
like the Pranayama of the Rajayogins and Hathayogins, or any
other yoga-yajña. All these tend to the purification of the being;
all sacrifice is a way towards the attainment of the highest.
The one thing needful, the saving principle constant in all
these variations, is to subordinate the lower activities, to diminish the control of desire and replace it by a superior energy, to
abandon the purely egoistic enjoyment for that diviner delight
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which comes by sacrifice, by self-dedication, by self-mastery, by
the giving up of one’s lower impulses to a greater and higher aim.
“They who enjoy the nectar of immortality left over from the
sacrifice attain to the eternal Brahman.” Sacrifice is the law of
the world and nothing can be gained without it, neither mastery
here, nor the possession of heavens beyond, nor the supreme
possession of all; “this world is not for him who doeth not
sacrifice, how then any other world?” Therefore all these and
many other forms of sacrifice have been “extended in the mouth
of the Brahman,” the mouth of that Fire which receives all offerings; they are all means and forms of the one great Existence in
activity, means by which the action of the human being can be
offered up to That of which his outward existence is a part and
with which his inmost self is one. They are “all born of work”;
all proceed from and are ordained by the one vast energy of
the Divine which manifests itself in the universal karma and
makes all the cosmic activity a progressive offering to the one
Self and Lord and of which the last stage for the human being
is self-knowledge and the possession of the divine or Brahmic
consciousness. “So knowing thou shalt become free.”
But there are gradations in the range of these various forms
of sacrifice, the physical offering the lowest, the sacrifice of
knowledge the highest. Knowledge is that in which all this action
culminates, not any lower knowledge, but the highest, selfknowledge and God-knowledge, that which we can learn from
those who know the true principles of existence, that by possessing which we shall not fall again into the bewilderment of the
mind’s ignorance and into its bondage to mere sense-knowledge
and to the inferior activity of the desires and passions. The
knowledge in which all culminates is that by which “thou shalt
see all existences (becomings, bhūtāni) without exception in
the Self, then in Me.” For the Self is that one, immutable,
all-pervading, all-containing, self-existent reality or Brahman
hidden behind our mental being into which our consciousness
widens out when it is liberated from the ego; we come to see all
beings as becomings, bhūtāni, within that one self-existence.
But this Self or immutable Brahman we see too to be the
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self-presentation to our essential psychological consciousness of
a supreme Being who is the source of our existence and of whom
all that is mutable or immutable is the manifestation. He is God,
the Divine, the Purushottama. To Him we offer everything as a
sacrifice; into His hands we give up our actions; in His existence
we live and move; unified with Him in our nature and with all
existence in Him, we become one soul and one power of being
with Him and with all beings; with His supreme reality we
identify and unite our self-being. By works done for sacrifice,
eliminating desire, we arrive at knowledge and at the soul’s
possession of itself; by works done in self-knowledge and Godknowledge we are liberated into the unity, peace and joy of the
divine existence.
XIII
The Lord of the Sacrifice
W
E HAVE, before we can proceed further, to gather
up all that has been said in its main principles. The
whole of the Gita’s gospel of works rests upon its
idea of sacrifice and contains in fact the eternal connecting
truth of God and the world and works. The human mind seizes
ordinarily only fragmentary notions and standpoints of a manysided eternal truth of existence and builds upon them its various
theories of life and ethics and religion, stressing this or that sign
or appearance, but to some entirety of it it must always tend to
reawaken whenever it returns in an age of large enlightenment
to any entire and synthetic relation of its world-knowledge with
its God-knowledge and self-knowledge. The gospel of the Gita
reposes upon this fundamental Vedantic truth that all being is
the one Brahman and all existence the wheel of Brahman, a
divine movement opening out from God and returning to God.
All is the expressive activity of Nature and Nature a power of
the Divine which works out the consciousness and will of the
divine Soul master of her works and inhabitant of her forms. It
is for his satisfaction that she descends into the absorption of the
forms of things and the works of life and mind and returns again
through mind and self-knowledge to the conscious possession
of the Soul that dwells within her. There is first an involving of
self and all it is or means in an evolution of phenomena; there
is afterwards an evolution of self, a revelation of all it is and
means, all that is hidden and yet suggested by the phenomenal
creation. This cycle of Nature could not be what it is but for the
Purusha assuming and maintaining simultaneously three eternal
poises each of which is necessary to the totality of this action.
It must manifest itself in the mutable, and there we see it as
the finite, the many, all existences, sarvabhūtāni. It appears to
us as the finite personality of these million creatures with their
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infinite diversities and various relations and it appears to us
behind these as the soul and force of the action of the gods,
— that is to say, the cosmic powers and qualities of the Divine
which preside over the workings of the life of the universe and
constitute to our perception different universal forms of the one
Existence, or, it may be, various self-statements of personality
of the one supreme Person. Then, secret behind and within all
forms and existences, we perceive too an immutable, an infinite,
a timeless, an impersonal, a one unchanging spirit of existence,
an indivisible Self of all that is, in which all these many find
themselves to be really one. And therefore by returning to that
the active, finite personality of the individual being discovers
that it can release itself into a silent largeness of universality
and the peace and poise of an immutable and unattached unity
with all that proceeds from and is supported by this indivisible
Infinite. Or even he may escape into it from individual existence. But the highest secret of all, uttamaṁ rahasyam, is the
Purushottama. This is the supreme Divine, God, who possesses
both the infinite and the finite and in whom the personal and
the impersonal, the one Self and the many existences, being and
becoming, the world-action and the supracosmic peace, pravr.tti
and nivr.tti, meet, are united, are possessed together and in each
other. In God all things find their secret truth and their absolute
reconciliation.
All truth of works must depend upon the truth of being. All
active existence must be in its inmost reality a sacrifice of works
offered by Prakriti to Purusha, Nature offering to the supreme
and infinite Soul the desire of the multiple finite Soul within
her. Life is an altar to which she brings her workings and the
fruits of her workings and lays them before whatever aspect of
the Divinity the consciousness in her has reached for whatever
result of the sacrifice the desire of the living soul can seize on
as its immediate or its highest good. According to the grade of
consciousness and being which the soul has reached in Nature,
will be the Divinity it worships, the delight which it seeks and
the hope for which it sacrifices. And in the movement of the
mutable Purusha in Nature all is and must be interchange; for
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existence is one and its divisions must found themselves on some
law of mutual dependence, each growing by each and living by
all. Where sacrifice is not willingly given, Nature exacts it by
force, she satisfies the law of her living. A mutual giving and
receiving is the law of Life without which it cannot for one
moment endure, and this fact is the stamp of the divine creative
Will on the world it has manifested in its being, the proof that
with sacrifice as their eternal companion the Lord of creatures
has created all these existences. The universal law of sacrifice is
the sign that the world is of God and belongs to God and that
life is his dominion and house of worship and not a field for the
self-satisfaction of the independent ego; not the fulfilment of the
ego, — that is only our crude and obscure beginning, — but the
discovery of God, the worship and seeking of the Divine and the
Infinite through a constantly enlarging sacrifice culminating in
a perfect self-giving founded on a perfect self-knowledge, is that
to which the experience of life is at last intended to lead.
But the individual being begins with ignorance and persists
long in ignorance. Acutely conscious of himself he sees the ego
as the cause and whole meaning of life and not the Divine. He
sees himself as the doer of works and does not see that all the
workings of existence including his own internal and external
activities are the workings of one universal Nature and nothing
else. He sees himself as the enjoyer of works and imagines that
for him all exists and him Nature ought to satisfy and obey
his personal will; he does not see that she is not at all concerned
with satisfying him or at all careful of his will, but obeys a higher
universal will and seeks to satisfy a Godhead who transcends her
and her works and creations; his finite being, his will and his
satisfactions are hers and not his, and she offers them at every
moment as a sacrifice to the Divine of whose purpose in her
she makes all this the covert instrumentation. Because of this
ignorance whose seal is egoism, the creature ignores the law of
sacrifice and seeks to take all he can for himself and gives only
what Nature by her internal and external compulsion forces him
to give. He can really take nothing except what she allows him
to receive as his portion, what the divine Powers within her yield
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to his desire. The egoistic soul in a world of sacrifice is as if a
thief or robber who takes what these Powers bring to him and
has no mind to give in return. He misses the true meaning of life
and, since he does not use life and works for the enlargement
and elevation of his being through sacrifice, he lives in vain.
Only when the individual being begins to perceive and acknowledge in his acts the value of the self in others as well as the
power and needs of his own ego, begins to perceive universal
Nature behind his own workings and through the cosmic godheads gets some glimpse of the One and the Infinite, is he on
his way to the transcendence of his limitation by the ego and
the discovery of his soul. He begins to discover a law other than
that of his desires, to which his desires must be more and more
subordinated and subjected; he develops the purely egoistic into
the understanding and ethical being. He begins to give more
value to the claims of the self in others and less to the claims
of his ego; he admits the strife between egoism and altruism
and by the increase of his altruistic tendencies he prepares the
enlargement of his own consciousness and being. He begins to
perceive Nature and divine Powers in Nature to whom he owes
sacrifice, adoration, obedience, because it is by them and by
their law that the workings both of the mental and the material
world are controlled, and he learns that only by increasing their
presence and their greatness in his thought and will and life can
he himself increase his powers, knowledge, right action and the
satisfactions which these things bring to him. Thus he adds the
religious and supraphysical to the material and egoistic sense of
life and prepares himself to rise through the finite to the Infinite.
But this is only a long intermediate stage. It is still subject
to the law of desire, to the centrality of all things in the conceptions and needs of his ego and to the control of his being
as well as his works by Nature, though it is a regulated and
governed desire, a clarified ego and a Nature more and more
subtilised and enlightened by the sattwic, the highest natural
principle. All this is still within the domain, though the very
much enlarged domain, of the mutable, finite and personal. The
real self-knowledge and consequently the right way of works
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lies beyond; for the sacrifice done with knowledge is the highest
sacrifice and that alone brings a perfect working. That can only
come when he perceives that the self in him and the self in
others are one being and this self is something higher than the
ego, an infinite, an impersonal, a universal existence in whom
all move and have their being, — when he perceives that all the
cosmic gods to whom he offers his sacrifice are forms of one
infinite Godhead and when again, leaving all his limited and
limiting conceptions of that one Godhead, he perceives him to
be the supreme and ineffable Deity who is at once the finite and
the infinite, the one self and the many, beyond Nature though
manifesting himself through Nature, beyond limitation by qualities though formulating the power of his being through infinite
quality. This is the Purushottama to whom the sacrifice has to
be offered, not for any transient personal fruit of works, but for
the soul’s possession of God and in order to live in harmony and
union with the Divine.
In other words, man’s way to liberation and perfection
lies through an increasing impersonality. It is his ancient and
constant experience that the more he opens himself to the impersonal and infinite, to that which is pure and high and one and
common in all things and beings, the impersonal and infinite in
Nature, the impersonal and infinite in life, the impersonal and
infinite in his own subjectivity, the less he is bound by his ego and
by the circle of the finite, the more he feels a sense of largeness,
peace, pure happiness. The pleasure, joy, satisfaction which the
finite by itself can give or the ego in its own right attain, is
transitory, petty and insecure. To dwell entirely in the ego-sense
and its finite conceptions, powers, satisfactions is to find this
world for ever full of transience and suffering, anityam asukham;
the finite life is always troubled by a certain sense of vanity for
this fundamental reason that the finite is not the whole or the
highest truth of life; life is not entirely real until it opens into the
sense of the infinite. It is for this reason that the Gita opens its
gospel of works by insisting on the Brahmic consciousness, the
impersonal life, that great object of the discipline of the ancient
sages. For the impersonal, the infinite, the One in which all
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the impermanent, mutable, multiple activity of the world finds
above itself its base of permanence, security and peace, is the
immobile Self, the Akshara, the Brahman. If we see this, we
shall see that to raise one’s consciousness and the poise of one’s
being out of limited personality into this infinite and impersonal
Brahman is the first spiritual necessity. To see all beings in this
one Self is the knowledge which raises the soul out of egoistic
ignorance and its works and results; to live in it is to acquire
peace and firm spiritual foundation.
The way to bring about this great transformation follows
a double path; for there is the way of knowledge and there
is the way of works, and the Gita combines them in a firm
synthesis. The way of knowledge is to turn the understanding,
the intelligent will away from its downward absorption in the
workings of the mind and the senses and upward to the self, the
Purusha or Brahman; it is to make it dwell always on the one
idea of the one Self and not in the many-branching conceptions
of the mind and many-streaming impulses of desire. Taken by
itself this path would seem to lead to the complete renunciation
of works, to an immobile passivity and to the severance of the
soul from Nature. But in reality such an absolute renunciation,
passivity and severance are impossible. Purusha and Prakriti
are twin principles of being which cannot be severed, and so
long as we remain in Nature, our workings in Nature must
continue, even though they may take a different form or rather
a different sense from those of the unenlightened soul. The real
renunciation — for renunciation, sannyāsa, there must be — is
not the fleeing from works, but the slaying of ego and desire.
The way is to abandon attachment to the fruit of works even
while doing them, and the way is to recognise Nature as the
agent and leave her to do her works and to live in the soul
as the witness and sustainer, watching and sustaining her, but
not attached either to her actions or their fruits. The ego, the
limited and troubled personality is then quieted and merged in
the consciousness of the one impersonal Self, while the works
of Nature continue to our vision to operate through all these
“becomings” or existences who are now seen by us as living
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and acting and moving, under her impulsion entirely, in this one
infinite Being; our own finite existence is seen and felt to be
only one of these and its workings are seen and felt to be those
of Nature, not of our real self which is the silent, impersonal
unity. The ego claimed them as its own doings and therefore
we thought them ours; but the ego is now dead and henceforth
they are no longer ours, but Nature’s. We have achieved by the
slaying of ego impersonality in our being and consciousness;
we have achieved by the renunciation of desire impersonality
in the works of our nature. We are free not only in inaction,
but in action; our liberty does not depend on a physical and
temperamental immobility and vacancy, nor do we fall from
freedom directly we act. Even in a full current of natural action
the impersonal soul in us remains calm, still and free.
The liberation given by this perfect impersonality is real, is
complete, is indispensable; but is it the last word, the end of the
whole matter? All life, all world-existence, we have said, is the
sacrifice offered by Nature to the Purusha, the one and secret
soul in Nature, in whom all her workings take place; but its real
sense is obscured in us by ego, by desire, by our limited, active,
multiple personality. We have risen out of ego and desire and
limited personality and by impersonality, its great corrective,
we have found the impersonal Godhead; we have identified our
being with the one self and soul in whom all exist. The sacrifice
of works continues, conducted not by ourselves any longer, but
by Nature, — Nature operating through the finite part of our
being, mind, senses, body, — but in our infinite being. But to
whom then is this sacrifice offered and with what object? For the
impersonal has no activity and no desires, no object to be gained,
no dependence for anything on all this world of creatures; it
exists for itself, in its own self-delight, in its own immutable
eternal being. We may have to do works without desire as a
means in order to reach this impersonal self-existence and selfdelight, but, that movement once executed, the object of works is
finished; the sacrifice is no longer needed. Works may even then
continue because Nature continues and her activities; but there
is no longer any further object in these works. The sole reason
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for our continuing to act after liberation is purely negative; it is
the compulsion of Nature on our finite parts of mind and body.
But if that be all, then, first, works may well be whittled down
and reduced to a minimum, may be confined to what Nature’s
compulsion absolutely will have from our bodies; and secondly,
even if there is no reduction to a minimum, — since action does
not matter and inaction also is no object, — then the nature of
the works also does not matter. Arjuna, once having attained
knowledge, may continue to fight out the battle of Kurukshetra,
following his old Kshatriya nature, or he may leave it and live the
life of the Sannyasin, following his new quietistic impulse. Which
of these things he does, becomes quite indifferent; or rather the
second is the better way, since it will discourage more quickly the
impulses of Nature which still have a hold on his mind owing to
past created tendency and, when his body has fallen from him,
he will securely depart into the Infinite and Impersonal with no
necessity of returning again to the trouble and madness of life
in this transient and sorrowful world, anityam asukham imaṁ
lokam.
If this were so, the Gita would lose all its meaning; for its
first and central object would be defeated. But the Gita insists
that the nature of the action does matter and that there is a positive sanction for continuance in works, not only that one quite
negative and mechanical reason, the objectless compulsion of
Nature. There is still, after the ego has been conquered, a divine
Lord and enjoyer of the sacrifice, bhoktāraṁ yajñatapasām, and
there is still an object in the sacrifice. The impersonal Brahman
is not the very last word, not the utterly highest secret of our
being; for impersonal and personal, finite and infinite turn out
to be only two opposite, yet concomitant aspects of a divine
Being unlimited by these distinctions who is both these things
at once. God is an ever unmanifest Infinite ever self-impelled to
manifest himself in the finite; he is the great impersonal Person of
whom all personalities are partial appearances; he is the Divine
who reveals himself in the human being, the Lord seated in the
heart of man. Knowledge teaches us to see all beings in the
one impersonal self, for so we are liberated from the separative
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ego-sense, and then through this delivering impersonality to see
them in this God, ātmani atho mayi, “in the Self and then in
Me.” Our ego, our limiting personalities stand in the way of our
recognising the Divine who is in all and in whom all have their
being; for, subject to personality, we see only such fragmentary aspects of Him as the finite appearances of things suffer
us to seize. We have to arrive at him not through our lower
personality, but through the high, infinite and impersonal part
of our being, and that we find by becoming this self one in all
in whose existence the whole world is comprised. This infinite
containing, not excluding all finite appearances, this impersonal
admitting, not rejecting all individualities and personalities, this
immobile sustaining, pervading, containing, not standing apart
from all the movement of Nature, is the clear mirror in which
the Divine will reveal His being. Therefore it is to the Impersonal
that we have first to attain; through the cosmic deities, through
the aspects of the finite alone the perfect knowledge of God
cannot be totally obtained. But neither is the silent immobility
of the impersonal Self, conceived as shut into itself and divorced
from all that it sustains, contains and pervades, the whole allrevealing all-satisfying truth of the Divine. To see that we have
to look through its silence to the Purushottama, and he in his
divine greatness possesses both the Akshara and the Kshara;
he is seated in the immobility, but he manifests himself in the
movement and in all the action of cosmic Nature; to him even
after liberation the sacrifice of works in Nature continues to be
offered.
The real goal of the Yoga is then a living and self-completing
union with the divine Purushottama and is not merely a selfextinguishing immergence in the impersonal Being. To raise our
whole existence to the Divine Being, to dwell in him (mayyeva
nivasis.yasi), to be at one with him, unify our consciousness
with his, to make our fragmentary nature a reflection of his
perfect nature, to be inspired in our thought and sense wholly
by the divine knowledge, to be moved in will and action utterly
and faultlessly by the divine will, to lose desire in his love and
delight, is man’s perfection; it is that which the Gita describes as
The Lord of the Sacrifice
133
the highest secret. It is the true goal and the last sense of human
living and the highest step in our progressive sacrifice of works.
For he remains to the end the master of works and the soul of
sacrifice.
XIV
The Principle of Divine Works
T
HIS THEN is the sense of the Gita’s doctrine of sacrifice. Its full significance depends on the idea of the
Purushottama which as yet is not developed, — we find
it set forth clearly only much later in the eighteen chapters, —
and therefore we have had to anticipate, at whatever cost of
infidelity to the progressive method of the Gita’s exposition,
that central teaching. At present the Teacher simply gives a hint,
merely adumbrates this supreme presence of the Purushottama
and his relation to the immobile Self in whom it is our first
business, our pressing spiritual need to find our poise of perfect
peace and equality by attainment to the Brahmic condition. He
speaks as yet not at all in set terms of the Purushottama, but
of himself, — “I”, Krishna, Narayana, the Avatar, the God in
man who is also the Lord in the universe incarnated in the figure
of the divine charioteer of Kurukshetra. “In the Self, then in
Me,” is the formula he gives, implying that the transcendence
of the individual personality by seeing it as a “becoming” in
the impersonal self-existent Being is simply a means of arriving
at that great secret impersonal Personality, which is thus silent,
calm and uplifted above Nature in the impersonal Being, but
also present and active in Nature in all these million becomings.
Losing our lower individual personality in the Impersonal, we
arrive finally at union with that supreme Personality which is
not separate and individual, but yet assumes all individualities.
Transcending the lower nature of the three gunas and seating
the soul in the immobile Purusha beyond the three gunas, we
can ascend finally into the higher nature of the infinite Godhead
which is not bound by the three gunas even when it acts through
Nature. Reaching the inner actionlessness of the silent Purusha,
nais.karmya, and leaving Prakriti to do her works, we can attain
supremely beyond to the status of the divine Mastery which is
The Principle of Divine Works
135
able to do all works and yet be bound by none. The idea of the
Purushottama, seen here as the incarnate Narayana, Krishna,
is therefore the key. Without it the withdrawal from the lower
nature to the Brahmic condition leads necessarily to inaction of
the liberated man, his indifference to the works of the world;
with it the same withdrawal becomes a step by which the works
of the world are taken up in the spirit, with the nature and in
the freedom of the Divine. See the silent Brahman as the goal
and the world with all its activities has to be forsaken; see God,
the Divine, the Purushottama as the goal, superior to action
yet its inner spiritual cause and object and original will, and
the world with all its activities is conquered and possessed in a
divine transcendence of the world. It can become instead of a
prison-house an opulent kingdom, rājyaṁ samr.ddham, which
we have conquered for the spiritual life by slaying the limitation
of the tyrant ego and overcoming the bondage of our gaoler
desires and breaking the prison of our individualistic possession
and enjoyment. The liberated universalised soul becomes svarāt.
samrāt., self-ruler and emperor.
The works of sacrifice are thus vindicated as a means
of liberation and absolute spiritual perfection, saṁsiddhi. So
Janaka and other great Karmayogins of the mighty ancient
Yoga attained to perfection, by equal and desireless works done
as a sacrifice, without the least egoistic aim or attachment —
karman.aiva hi saṁsiddhim āsthitā janakādayah.. So too and with
the same desirelessness, after liberation and perfection, works
can and have to be continued by us in a large divine spirit,
with the calm high nature of a spiritual royalty. “Thou shouldst
do works regarding also the holding together of the peoples,
lokasaṅgraham evāpi sampaśyan kartum arhasi. Whatsoever the
Best doeth, that the lower kind of man puts into practice; the
standard he creates, the people follows. O son of Pritha, I have
no work that I need to do in all the three worlds, I have nothing
that I have not gained and have yet to gain, and I abide verily
in the paths of action,” varta eva ca karman.i, — eva implying,
I abide in it and do not leave it as the Sannyasin thinks himself
bound to abandon works. “For if I did not abide sleeplessly in
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the paths of action, men follow in every way my path, these
peoples would sink to destruction if I did not works and I
should be the creator of confusion and slay these creatures. As
those who know not act with attachment to the action, he who
knows should act without attachment, having for his motive to
hold together the peoples. He should not create a division of
their understanding in the ignorant who are attached to their
works; he should set them to all actions, doing them himself
with knowledge and in Yoga.” There are few more important
passages in the Gita than these seven striking couplets.
But let us clearly understand that they must not be interpreted, as the modern pragmatic tendency concerned much more
with the present affairs of the world than with any high and
far-off spiritual possibility seeks to interpret them, as no more
than a philosophical and religious justification of social service,
patriotic, cosmopolitan and humanitarian effort and attachment
to the hundred eager social schemes and dreams which attract
the modern intellect. It is not the rule of a large moral and intellectual altruism which is here announced, but that of a spiritual
unity with God and with this world of beings who dwell in him
and in whom he dwells. It is not an injunction to subordinate
the individual to society and humanity or immolate egoism on
the altar of the human collectivity, but to fulfil the individual
in God and to sacrifice the ego on the one true altar of the allembracing Divinity. The Gita moves on a plane of ideas and
experiences higher than those of the modern mind which is at
the stage indeed of a struggle to shake off the coils of egoism, but
is still mundane in its outlook and intellectual and moral rather
than spiritual in its temperament. Patriotism, cosmopolitanism,
service of society, collectivism, humanitarianism, the ideal or
religion of humanity are admirable aids towards our escape from
our primary condition of individual, family, social, national egoism into a secondary stage in which the individual realises, as
far as it can be done on the intellectual, moral and emotional
level, — on that level he cannot do it entirely in the right and
perfect way, the way of the integral truth of his being, — the
oneness of his existence with the existence of other beings. But
The Principle of Divine Works
137
the thought of the Gita reaches beyond to a tertiary condition of
our developing self-consciousness towards which the secondary
is only a partial stage of advance.
The Indian social tendency has been to subordinate the individual to the claims of society, but Indian religious thought
and spiritual seeking have been always loftily individualistic in
their aims. An Indian system of thought like the Gita’s cannot
possibly fail to put first the development of the individual, the
highest need of the individual, his claim to discover and exercise
his largest spiritual freedom, greatness, splendour, royalty, — his
aim to develop into the illumined seer and king in the spiritual
sense of seerdom and kingship, which was the first great charter
of the ideal humanity promulgated by the ancient Vedic sages.
To exceed himself was their goal for the individual, not by losing
all his personal aims in the aims of an organised human society, but by enlarging, heightening, aggrandising himself into the
consciousness of the Godhead. The rule given here by the Gita is
the rule for the master man, the superman, the divinised human
being, the Best, not in the sense of any Nietzschean, any onesided and lopsided, any Olympian, Apollonian or Dionysian,
any angelic or demoniac supermanhood, but in that of the man
whose whole personality has been offered up into the being,
nature and consciousness of the one transcendent and universal
Divinity and by loss of the smaller self has found its greater self,
has been divinised.
To exalt oneself out of the lower imperfect Prakriti, traigun.yamayı̄ māyā, into unity with the divine being, consciousness
and nature,1 madbhāvam āgatāh., is the object of the Yoga. But
when this object is fulfilled, when the man is in the Brahmic
status and sees no longer with the false egoistic vision himself
and the world, but sees all beings in the Self, in God, and the
Self in all beings, God in all beings, what shall be the action,
— since action there still is, — which results from that seeing,
and what shall be the cosmic or individual motive of all his
1
Sāyujya, sālokya and sādr.śya or sādharmya. Sādharmya is becoming of one law of
being and action with the Divine.
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Essays on the Gita
works? It is the question of Arjuna,2 but answered from a standpoint other than that from which Arjuna had put it. The motive
cannot be personal desire on the intellectual, moral, emotional
level, for that has been abandoned, — even the moral motive
has been abandoned, since the liberated man has passed beyond
the lower distinction of sin and virtue, lives in a glorified purity
beyond good and evil. It cannot be the spiritual call to his perfect
self-development by means of disinterested works, for the call
has been answered, the development is perfect and fulfilled. His
motive of action can only be the holding together of the peoples, cikı̄rs.ur lokasaṅgraham. This great march of the peoples
towards a far-off divine ideal has to be held together, prevented
from falling into the bewilderment, confusion and utter discord
of the understanding which would lead to dissolution and destruction and to which the world moving forward in the night
or dark twilight of ignorance would be too easily prone if it
were not held together, conducted, kept to the great lines of its
discipline by the illumination, by the strength, by the rule and
example, by the visible standard and the invisible influence of
its Best. The best, the individuals who are in advance of the
general line and above the general level of the collectivity, are
the natural leaders of mankind, for it is they who can point to
the race both the way they must follow and the standard or
ideal they have to keep to or to attain. But the divinised man is
the Best in no ordinary sense of the word and his influence, his
example must have a power which that of no ordinarily superior
man can exercise. What example then shall he give? What rule
or standard shall he uphold?
In order to indicate more perfectly his meaning, the divine
Teacher, the Avatar gives his own example, his own standard to
Arjuna. “I abide in the path of action,” he seems to say, “the path
that all men follow; thou too must abide in action. In the way I
act, in that way thou too must act. I am above the necessity of
works, for I have nothing to gain by them; I am the Divine who
possess all things and all beings in the world and I am myself
2
kiṁ prabhās.eta kim āsı̄ta vrajeta kim.
The Principle of Divine Works
139
beyond the world as well as in it and I do not depend upon
anything or anyone in all the three worlds for any object; yet I
act. This too must be thy manner and spirit of working. I, the
Divine, am the rule and the standard; it is I who make the path
in which men tread; I am the way and the goal. But I do all this
largely, universally, visibly in part, but far more invisibly; and
men do not really know the way of my workings. Thou, when
thou knowest and seest, when thou hast become the divinised
man, must be the individual power of God, the human yet divine
example, even as I am in my avatars. Most men dwell in the
ignorance, the God-seer dwells in the knowledge; but let him
not confuse the minds of men by a dangerous example, rejecting
in his superiority the works of the world; let him not cut short
the thread of action before it is spun out, let him not perplex and
falsify the stages and gradations of the ways I have hewn. The
whole range of human action has been decreed by me with a
view to the progress of man from the lower to the higher nature,
from the apparent undivine to the conscious Divine. The whole
range of human works must be that in which the God-knower
shall move. All individual, all social action, all the works of the
intellect, the heart and the body are still his, not any longer for
his own separate sake, but for the sake of God in the world, of
God in all beings and that all those beings may move forward,
as he has moved, by the path of works towards the discovery of
the Divine in themselves. Outwardly his actions may not seem to
differ essentially from theirs; battle and rule as well as teaching
and thought, all the various commerce of man with man may
fall in his range; but the spirit in which he does them must be
very different, and it is that spirit which by its influence shall be
the great attraction drawing men upwards to his own level, the
great lever lifting the mass of men higher in their ascent.”
The giving of the example of God himself to the liberated
man is profoundly significant; for it reveals the whole basis of the
Gita’s philosophy of divine works. The liberated man is he who
has exalted himself into the divine nature and according to that
divine nature must be his actions. But what is the divine nature?
It is not entirely and solely that of the Akshara, the immobile,
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inactive, impersonal self; for that by itself would lead the liberated man to actionless immobility. It is not characteristically
that of the Kshara, the multitudinous, the personal, the Purusha
self-subjected to Prakriti; for that by itself would lead him back
into subjection to his personality and to the lower nature and its
qualities. It is the nature of the Purushottama who holds both
these together and by his supreme divinity reconciles them in
a divine reconciliation which is the highest secret of his being,
rahasyaṁ hyetad uttamam. He is not the doer of works in the
personal sense of our action involved in Prakriti; for God works
through his power, conscious nature, effective force, — Shakti,
Maya, Prakriti, — but yet above it, not involved in it, not subject
to it, not unable to lift himself beyond the laws, workings, habits
of action it creates, not affected or bound by them, not unable to
distinguish himself, as we are unable, from the workings of life,
mind and body. He is the doer of works who acts not, kartāram
akartāram. “Know me,” says Krishna, “for the doer of this (the
fourfold law of human workings) who am yet the imperishable
non-doer. Works fix not themselves on me (na limpanti), nor
have I desire for the fruits of action.” But neither is he the
inactive, impassive, unpuissant Witness and nothing else; for it
is he who works in the steps and measures of his power; every
movement of it, every particle of the world of beings it forms is
instinct with his presence, full of his consciousness, impelled by
his will, shaped by his knowledge.
He is, besides, the Supreme without qualities who is possessed of all qualities, nirgun.o gun.ı̄.3 He is not bound by any
mode of nature or action, nor consists, as our personality consists, of a sum of qualities, modes of nature, characteristic operations of the mental, moral, emotional, vital, physical being, but
is the source of all modes and qualities, capable of developing
any he wills in whatever way and to whatever degree he wills;
he is the infinite being of which they are ways of becoming, the
immeasurable quantity and unbound ineffable of which they are
measures, numbers and figures, which they seem to rhythmise
3
Swetaswatara Upanishad.
The Principle of Divine Works
141
and arithmise in the standards of the universe. Yet neither is
he merely an impersonal indeterminate, nor a mere stuff of
conscious existence for all determinations and personalisings
to draw upon for their material, but a supreme Being, the one
original conscious Existent, the perfect Personality capable of
all relations even to the most human, concrete and intimate; for
he is friend, comrade, lover, playmate, guide, teacher, master,
ministrant of knowledge or ministrant of joy, yet in all relations
unbound, free and absolute. This too the divinised man becomes
in the measure of his attainment, impersonal in his personality, unbound by quality or action even when maintaining the
most personal and intimate relations with men, unbound by
any dharma even when following in appearance this or that
dharma. Neither the dynamism of the kinetic man nor the actionless light of the ascetic or quietist, neither the vehement
personality of the man of action nor the indifferent impersonality
of the philosophic sage is the complete divine ideal. These are
the two conflicting standards of the man of this world and the
ascetic or the quietist philosopher, one immersed in the action
of the Kshara, the other striving to dwell entirely in the peace
of the Akshara; but the complete divine ideal proceeds from the
nature of the Purushottama which transcends this conflict and
reconciles all divine possibilities.
The kinetic man is not satisfied with any ideal which does
not depend upon the fulfilment of this cosmic nature, this play of
the three qualities of that nature, this human activity of mind and
heart and body. The highest fulfilment of that activity, he might
say, is my idea of human perfection, of the divine possibility in
man; some ideal that satisfies the intellect, the heart, the moral
being, some ideal of our human nature in its action can alone
satisfy the human being; he must have something that he can
seek in the workings of his mind and life and body. For that is
his nature, his dharma, and how can he be fulfilled in something
outside his nature? For to his nature each being is bound and
within it he must seek for his perfection. According to our human
nature must be our human perfection; and each man must strive
for it according to the line of his personality, his svadharma, but
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in life, in action, not outside life and action. Yes, there is a truth
in that, replies the Gita; the fulfilment of God in man, the play
of the Divine in life is part of the ideal perfection. But if you
seek it only in the external, in life, in the principle of action, you
will never find it; for you will then not only act according to
your nature, which is in itself a rule of perfection, but you will
be — and this is a rule of the imperfection — eternally subject to
its modes, its dualities of liking and dislike, pain and pleasure
and especially to the rajasic mode with its principle of desire
and its snare of wrath and grief and longing, — the restless, alldevouring principle of desire, the insatiable fire which besieges
your worldly action, the eternal enemy of knowledge by which
it is covered over here in your nature as is a fire by smoke or a
mirror by dust and which you must slay in order to live in the
calm, clear, luminous truth of the spirit. The senses, mind and
intellect are the seat of this eternal cause of imperfection and
yet it is within this sense, mind and intellect, this play of the
lower nature that you would limit your search for perfection!
The effort is vain. The kinetic side of your nature must first seek
to add to itself the quietistic; you must uplift yourself beyond
this lower nature to that which is above the three gunas, that
which is founded in the highest principle, in the soul. Only when
you have attained to peace of soul, can you become capable of
a free and divine action.
The quietist, the ascetic, on the other hand cannot see any
possibility of perfection into which life and action enter. Are they
not the very seat of bondage and imperfection? Is not all action
imperfect in its nature, like a fire that must produce smoke, is
not the principle of action itself rajasic, the father of desire, a
cause that must have its effect of obscuration of knowledge, its
round of longing and success and failure, its oscillations of joy
and grief, its duality of virtue and sin? God may be in the world,
but he is not of the world; he is a God of renunciation and not
the Master or cause of our works; the master of our works is
desire and the cause of works is ignorance. If the world, the
Kshara is in a sense a manifestation or a lı̄lā of the Divine, it is
an imperfect play with the ignorance of Nature, an obscuration
The Principle of Divine Works
143
rather than a manifestation. That is surely evident from our very
first glance at the nature of the world and does not the fullest
experience of the world teach us always the same truth? is it not
a wheel of the ignorance binding the soul to continual birth by
the impulse of desire and action until at last that is exhausted
or cast away? Not only desire, but action also must be flung
away; seated in the silent self the soul will then pass away into
the motionless, actionless, imperturbable, absolute Brahman. To
this objection of the impersonalising quietist the Gita is at more
pains to answer than to that of the man of the world, the kinetic
individual. For this quietism having hold of a higher and more
powerful truth which is yet not the whole or the highest truth, its
promulgation as the universal, complete, highest ideal of human
life is likely to be more confusing and disastrous to the advance
of the human race towards its goal than the error of an exclusive
kinetism. A strong one-sided truth, when set forth as the whole
truth, creates a strong light but also a strong confusion; for the
very strength of its element of truth increases the strength of its
element of error. The error of the kinetic ideal can only prolong
the ignorance and retard the human advance by setting it in
search of perfection where perfection cannot be found; but the
error of the quietistic ideal contains in itself the very principle of
world-destruction. Were I to act upon it, says Krishna, I should
destroy the peoples and be the author of confusion; and though
the error of an individual human being, even though a nearly
divine man, cannot destroy the whole race, it may produce a
widespread confusion which may be in its nature destructive of
the principle of human life and disturbing to the settled line of
its advance.
Therefore the quietistic tendency in man must be got to
recognise its own incompleteness and admit on an equality with
itself the truth which lies behind the kinetic tendency, — the
fulfilment of God in man and the presence of the Divine in all
the action of the human race. God is there not only in the silence,
but in the action; the quietism of the impassive soul unaffected
by Nature and the kinetism of the soul giving itself to Nature
so that the great world-sacrifice, the Purusha-Yajna, may be
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effected, are not a reality and a falsehood in perpetual struggle
nor yet two hostile realities, one superior, the other inferior,
each fatal to the other; they are the double term of the divine
manifestation. The Akshara alone is not the whole key of their
fulfilment, not the very highest secret. The double fulfilment, the
reconciliation is to be sought in the Purushottama represented
here by Krishna, at once supreme Being, Lord of the worlds and
Avatar. The divinised man entering into his divine nature will
act even as he acts; he will not give himself up to inaction. The
Divine is at work in man in the ignorance and at work in man in
the knowledge. To know Him is our soul’s highest welfare and
the condition of its perfection, but to know and realise Him as
a transcendent peace and silence is not all; the secret that has to
be learned is at once the secret of the eternal and unborn Divine
and the secret of the divine birth and works, janma karma ca
me divyam. The action which proceeds from that knowledge,
will be free from all bondage; “he who so knoweth me,” says
the Teacher, “is not bound by works.” If the escape from the
obligation of works and desire and from the wheel of rebirth is
to be the aim and the ideal, then this knowledge is to be taken
as the true, the broad way of escape; for, says the Gita, “he
who knows in their right principles my divine birth and works,
comes when he leaves his body, not to rebirth, but to Me, O
Arjuna.” Through the knowledge and possession of the divine
birth he comes to the unborn and imperishable Divine who is
the self of all beings, ajo avyaya ātmā; through the knowledge
and execution of divine works to the Master of works, the lord
of all beings, bhūtānām ı̄śvara. He lives in that unborn being;
his works are those of that universal Mastery.
XV
The Possibility and Purpose
of Avatarhood
I
N SPEAKING of this Yoga in which action and knowledge
become one, the Yoga of the sacrifice of works with knowledge, in which works are fulfilled in knowledge, knowledge
supports, changes and enlightens works, and both are offered to
the Purushottama, the supreme Divinity who becomes manifest
within us as Narayana, Lord of all our being and action seated
secret in our hearts for ever, who becomes manifest even in the
human form as the Avatar, the divine birth taking possession
of our humanity, Krishna has declared in passing that this was
the ancient and original Yoga which he gave to Vivasvan, the
Sun-God, Vivasvan gave it to Manu, the father of men, Manu
gave it to Ikshvaku, head of the Solar line, and so it came down
from royal sage to royal sage till it was lost in the great lapse
of Time and is now renewed for Arjuna, because he is the lover
and devotee, friend and comrade of the Avatar. For this, he
says, is the highest secret, — thus claiming for it a superiority
to all other forms of Yoga, because those others lead to the
impersonal Brahman or to a personal Deity, to a liberation in
actionless knowledge or a liberation in absorbed beatitude, but
this gives the highest secret and the whole secret; it brings us
to divine peace and divine works, to divine knowledge, action
and ecstasy unified in a perfect freedom; it unites into itself all
the Yogic paths as the highest being of the Divine reconciles and
makes one in itself all the different and even contrary powers
and principles of its manifested being. Therefore this Yoga of
the Gita is not, as some contend, only the Karmayoga, one and
the lowest, according to them, of the three paths, but a highest
Yoga synthetic and integral directing Godward all the powers of
our being.
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Arjuna takes the declaration about the transmission of the
Yoga in its most physical sense, — there is another significance
in which it can be taken, — and asks how the Sun-God, one
of the first-born of beings, ancestor of the Solar dynasty, can
have received the Yoga from the man Krishna who is only now
born into the world. Krishna does not reply, as we might have
expected him to have done, that it was as the Divine who is the
source of all knowledge that he gave the Word to the Deva who
is his form of knowledge, giver of all inner and outer light, —
bhargah. savitur devasya yo no dhiyah. pracodayāt; he accepts
instead the opportunity which Arjuna gives him of declaring his
concealed Godhead, a declaration for which he had prepared
when he gave himself as the divine example for the worker who
is not bound by his works, but which he has not yet quite explicitly made. He now openly announces himself as the incarnate
Godhead, the Avatar.
We have had occasion already, when speaking of the divine
Teacher, to state briefly the doctrine of Avatarhood as it appears
to us in the light of Vedanta, the light in which the Gita presents it
to us. We must now look a little more closely at this Avatarhood
and at the significance of the divine Birth of which it is the outward expression; for that is a link of considerable importance in
the integral teaching of the Gita. And we may first translate the
words of the Teacher himself in which the nature and purpose of
Avatarhood are given summarily and remind ourselves also of
other passages or references which bear upon it. “Many are my
lives that are past, and thine also, O Arjuna; all of them I know,
but thou knowest not, O scourge of the foe. Though I am the
unborn, though I am imperishable in my self-existence, though
I am the Lord of all existences, yet I stand upon my own Nature
and I come into birth by my self-Maya. For whensoever there is
the fading of the Dharma and the uprising of unrighteousness,
then I loose myself forth into birth. For the deliverance of the
good, for the destruction of the evil-doers, for the enthroning of
the Right I am born from age to age. He who knoweth thus in
its right principles my divine birth and my divine work, when
he abandons his body, comes not to rebirth, he comes to Me,
The Possibility and Purpose of Avatarhood
147
O Arjuna. Delivered from liking and fear and wrath, full of me,
taking refuge in me, many purified by austerity of knowledge
have arrived at my nature of being (madbhāvam, the divine
nature of the Purushottama). As men approach me, so I accept
them to my love (bhajāmi); men follow in every way my path,
O son of Pritha.”
But most men, the Gita goes on to say, desiring the fulfilment of their works, sacrifice to the gods, to various forms
and personalities of the one Godhead, because the fulfilment
(siddhi) that is born of works, — of works without knowledge,
— is very swift and easy in the human world; it belongs indeed to
that world alone. The other, the divine self-fulfilment in man by
the sacrifice with knowledge to the supreme Godhead, is much
more difficult; its results belong to a higher plane of existence
and they are less easily grasped. Men therefore have to follow
the fourfold law of their nature and works and on this plane
of mundane action they seek the Godhead through his various
qualities. But, says Krishna, though I am the doer of the fourfold
works and creator of its fourfold law, yet I must be known also
as the non-doer, the imperishable, the immutable Self. “Works
affect me not, nor have I desire for the fruit of works;” for
God is the impersonal beyond this egoistic personality and this
strife of the modes of Nature, and as the Purushottama also,
the impersonal Personality, he possesses this supreme freedom
even in works. Therefore the doer of divine works even while
following the fourfold law has to know and live in that which is
beyond, in the impersonal Self and so in the supreme Godhead.
“He who thus knows me is not bound by his works. So knowing
was work done by the men of old who sought liberation; do
therefore, thou also, work of that more ancient kind done by
ancient men.”
The second portion of these passages which has here been
given in substance, explains the nature of divine works, divyaṁ
karma, with the principle of which we have had to deal in the
last essay; the first, which has been fully translated, explains
the way of the divine birth, divyaṁ janma, the Avatarhood. But
we have to remark carefully that the upholding of Dharma in
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the world is not the only object of the descent of the Avatar,
that great mystery of the Divine manifest in humanity; for the
upholding of the Dharma is not an all-sufficient object in itself,
not the supreme possible aim for the manifestation of a Christ, a
Krishna, a Buddha, but is only the general condition of a higher
aim and a more supreme and divine utility. For there are two
aspects of the divine birth; one is a descent, the birth of God
in humanity, the Godhead manifesting itself in the human form
and nature, the eternal Avatar; the other is an ascent, the birth
of man into the Godhead, man rising into the divine nature and
consciousness, madbhāvam āgatah.; it is the being born anew in
a second birth of the soul. It is that new birth which Avatarhood
and the upholding of the Dharma are intended to serve. This
double aspect in the Gita’s doctrine of Avatarhood is apt to be
missed by the cursory reader satisfied, as most are, with catching
a superficial view of its profound teachings, and it is missed
too by the formal commentator petrified in the rigidity of the
schools. Yet it is necessary, surely, to the whole meaning of the
doctrine. Otherwise the Avatar idea would be only a dogma,
a popular superstition, or an imaginative or mystic deification
of historical or legendary supermen, not what the Gita makes
all its teaching, a deep philosophical and religious truth and an
essential part of or step to the supreme mystery of all, rahasyam
uttamam.
If there were not this rising of man into the Godhead to
be helped by the descent of God into humanity, Avatarhood for
the sake of the Dharma would be an otiose phenomenon, since
mere Right, mere justice or standards of virtue can always be
upheld by the divine omnipotence through its ordinary means,
by great men or great movements, by the life and work of sages
and kings and religious teachers, without any actual incarnation.
The Avatar comes as the manifestation of the divine nature in the
human nature, the apocalypse of its Christhood, Krishnahood,
Buddhahood, in order that the human nature may by moulding
its principle, thought, feeling, action, being on the lines of that
Christhood, Krishnahood, Buddhahood transfigure itself into
the divine. The law, the Dharma which the Avatar establishes
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is given for that purpose chiefly; the Christ, Krishna, Buddha
stands in its centre as the gate, he makes through himself the
way men shall follow. That is why each Incarnation holds before
men his own example and declares of himself that he is the way
and the gate; he declares too the oneness of his humanity with
the divine being, declares that the Son of Man and the Father
above from whom he has descended are one, that Krishna in the
human body, mānus.ı̄ṁ tanum āśritam, and the supreme Lord
and Friend of all creatures are but two revelations of the same
divine Purushottama, revealed there in his own being, revealed
here in the type of humanity.
That the Gita contains as its kernel this second and real
object of the Avatarhood, is evident even from this passage by
itself rightly considered; but it becomes much clearer if we take
it, not by itself, — always the wrong way to deal with the texts of
the Gita, — but in its right close connection with other passages
and with the whole teaching. We have to remember and take
together its doctrine of the one Self in all, of the Godhead seated
in the heart of every creature, its teaching about the relations
between the Creator and his creation, its strongly emphasised
idea of the vibhūti, — noting too the language in which the
Teacher gives his own divine example of selfless works which
applies equally to the human Krishna and the divine Lord of
the worlds, and giving their due weight to such passages as that
in the ninth chapter, “Deluded minds despise me lodged in the
human body because they know not my supreme nature of being,
Lord of all existences”; and we have to read in the light of these
ideas this passage we find before us and its declaration that by
the knowledge of his divine birth and divine works men come
to the Divine and by becoming full of him and even as he and
taking refuge in him they arrive at his nature and status of being,
madbhāvam. For then we shall understand the divine birth and
its object, not as an isolated and miraculous phenomenon, but in
its proper place in the whole scheme of the world-manifestation;
without that we cannot arrive at its divine mystery, but shall
either scout it altogether or accept it ignorantly and, it may be,
superstitiously or fall into the petty and superficial ideas of the
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modern mind about it by which it loses all its inner and helpful
significance.
For to the modern mind Avatarhood is one of the most difficult to accept or to understand of all the ideas that are streaming
in from the East upon the rationalised human consciousness. It
is apt to take it at the best for a mere figure for some high manifestation of human power, character, genius, great work done
for the world or in the world, and at the worst to regard it as a
superstition, — to the heathen a foolishness and to the Greeks a
stumbling-block. The materialist, necessarily, cannot even look
at it, since he does not believe in God; to the rationalist or the
Deist it is a folly and a thing of derision; to the thoroughgoing
dualist who sees an unbridgeable gulf between the human and
the divine nature, it sounds like a blasphemy. The rationalist
objects that if God exists, he is extracosmic or supracosmic and
does not intervene in the affairs of the world, but allows them
to be governed by a fixed machinery of law, — he is, in fact,
a sort of far-off constitutional monarch or spiritual King Log,
at the best an indifferent inactive Spirit behind the activity of
Nature, like some generalised or abstract witness Purusha of the
Sankhyas; he is pure Spirit and cannot put on a body, infinite
and cannot be finite as the human being is finite, the ever unborn
creator and cannot be the creature born into the world, — these
things are impossible even to his absolute omnipotence. To these
objections the thoroughgoing dualist would add that God is in
his person, his role and his nature different and separate from
man; the perfect cannot put on human imperfection; the unborn
personal God cannot be born as a human personality; the Ruler
of the worlds cannot be limited in a nature-bound human action
and in a perishable human body. These objections, so formidable
at first sight to the reason, seem to have been present to the mind
of the Teacher in the Gita when he says that although the Divine
is unborn, imperishable in his self-existence, the Lord of all
beings, yet he assumes birth by a supreme resort to the action
of his Nature and by force of his self-Maya; that he whom the
deluded despise because lodged in a human body, is verily in
his supreme being the Lord of all; that he is in the action of
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the divine consciousness the creator of the fourfold Law and
the doer of the works of the world and at the same time in the
silence of the divine consciousness the impartial witness of the
works of his own Nature, — for he is always, beyond both the
silence and the action, the supreme Purushottama. And the Gita
is able to meet all these oppositions and to reconcile all these
contraries because it starts from the Vedantic view of existence,
of God and the universe.
For in the Vedantic view of things all these apparently
formidable objections are null and void from the beginning.
The idea of the Avatar is not indeed indispensable to its scheme,
but it comes in naturally into it as a perfectly rational and logical
conception. For all here is God, is the Spirit or Self-existence,
is Brahman, ekamevādvitı̄yam, — there is nothing else, nothing
other and different from it and there can be nothing else, can
be nothing other and different from it; Nature is and can be
nothing else than a power of the divine consciousness; all beings
are and can be nothing else than inner and outer, subjective
and objective soul-forms and bodily forms of the divine being
which exist in or result from the power of its consciousness. Far
from the Infinite being unable to take on finiteness, the whole
universe is nothing else but that; we can see, look as we may,
nothing else at all in the whole wide world we inhabit. Far from
the Spirit being incapable of form or disdaining to connect itself
with form of matter or mind and to assume a limited nature or
a body, all here is nothing but that, the world exists only by that
connection, that assumption. Far from the world being a mechanism of law with no soul or spirit intervening in the movement
of its forces or the action of its minds and bodies, — only some
original indifferent Spirit passively existing somewhere outside
or above it, — the whole world and every particle of it is on the
contrary nothing but the divine force in action and that divine
force determines and governs its every movement, inhabits its
every form, possesses here every soul and mind; all is in God
and in him moves and has its being, in all he is, acts and displays
his being; every creature is the disguised Narayana.
Far from the unborn being unable to assume birth, all beings
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are even in their individuality unborn spirits, eternal without
beginning or end, and in their essential existence and their universality all are the one unborn Spirit of whom birth and death
are only a phenomenon of the assumption and change of forms.
The assumption of imperfection by the perfect is the whole mystic phenomenon of the universe; but the imperfection appears in
the form and action of the mind or body assumed, subsists in
the phenomenon, — in that which assumes it there is no imperfection, even as in the Sun which illumines all there is no defect
of light or of vision, but only in the capacities of the individual
organ of vision. Nor does God rule the world from some remote
heaven, but by his intimate omnipresence; each finite working of
force is an act of infinite Force and not of a limited separate selfexistent energy labouring in its own underived strength; in every
finite working of will and knowledge we can discover, supporting it, an act of the infinite all-will and all-knowledge. God’s rule
is not an absentee, foreign and external government; he governs
all because he exceeds all, but also because he dwells within all
movements and is their absolute soul and spirit. Therefore none
of the objections opposed by our reason to the possibility of
Avatarhood can stand in their principle; for the principle is a
vain division made by the intellectual reason which the whole
phenomenon and the whole reality of the world are busy every
moment contradicting and disproving.
But still, apart from the possibility, there is the question of
the actual divine working, — whether actually the divine consciousness does appear coming forward from beyond the veil to
act at all directly in the phenomenal, the finite, the mental and
material, the limited, the imperfect. The finite is indeed nothing
but a definition, a face-value of the Infinite’s self-representations
to its own variations of consciousness; the real value of each
finite phenomenon is an infinite value, is indeed the very Infinite. Each being is infinite in its self-existence, whatever it may
be in the action of its phenomenal nature, its temporal selfrepresentation. The man is not, when we look closely, himself
alone, a rigidly separate self-existent individual, but humanity
in a mind and body of itself; and humanity too is no rigidly
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separate self-existent species or genus, it is the All-existence, the
universal Godhead figuring itself in the type of humanity; there it
works out certain possibilities, develops, evolves, as we now say,
certain powers of its manifestations. What it evolves, is itself, is
the Spirit.
For what we mean by Spirit is self-existent being with an
infinite power of consciousness and unconditioned delight in
its being; it is either that or nothing, or at least nothing which
has anything to do with man and the world or with which,
therefore, man or the world has anything to do. Matter, body
is only a massed motion of force of conscious being employed
as a starting-point for the variable relations of consciousness
working through its power of sense; nor is Matter anywhere
really void of consciousness, for even in the atom, the cell there
is, as is now made abundantly clear in spite of itself by modern
Science, a power of will, an intelligence at work; but that power
is the power of will and intelligence of the Self, Spirit or Godhead
within it, it is not the separate, self-derived will or idea of the
mechanical cell or atom. This universal will and intelligence,
involved, develops its powers from form to form, and on earth
at least it is in man that it draws nearest to the full divine and
there first becomes, even in the outward intelligence in the form,
obscurely conscious of its divinity. But still there too there is a
limitation, there is that imperfection of the manifestation which
prevents the lower forms from having the self-knowledge of their
identity with the Divine. For in each limited being the limitation
of the phenomenal action is accompanied by a limitation also
of the phenomenal consciousness which defines the nature of
the being and makes the inner difference between creature and
creature. The Divine works behind indeed and governs its special
manifestation through this outer and imperfect consciousness
and will, but is itself secret in the cavern, guhāyām, as the Veda
puts it, or as the Gita expresses it, “In the heart of all existences
the Lord abides turning all existences as if mounted on a machine
by Maya.” This secret working of the Lord hidden in the heart
from the egoistic nature-consciousness through which he works,
is God’s universal method with creatures. Why then should we
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suppose that in any form he comes forward into the frontal, the
phenomenal consciousness for a more direct and consciously
divine action? Obviously, if at all, then to break the veil between
himself and humanity which man limited in his own nature could
never lift.
The Gita explains the ordinary imperfect action of the creature by its subjection to the mechanism of Prakriti and its
limitation by the self-representations of Maya. These two terms
are only complementary aspects of one and the same effective
force of divine consciousness. Maya is not essentially illusion, —
the element or appearance of illusion only enters in by the ignorance of the lower Prakriti, Maya of the three modes of Nature,
— it is the divine consciousness in its power of various selfrepresentation of its being, while Prakriti is the effective force
of that consciousness which operates to work out each such
self-representation according to its own law and fundamental
idea, svabhāva and svadharma, in its own proper quality and
particular force of working, gun.a-karma. “Leaning — pressing
down upon my own Nature (Prakriti) I create (loose forth into
various being) all this multitude of existences, all helplessly subject to the control of Nature.” Those who know not the Divine
lodged in the human body, are ignorant of it because they are
grossly subject to this mechanism of Prakriti, helplessly subject
to its mental limitations and acquiescent in them, and dwell in
an Asuric nature that deludes with desire and bewilders with
egoism the will and the intelligence, mohinı̄ṁ prakr.tiṁ śritāh..
For the Purushottama within is not readily manifest to any and
every being; he conceals himself in a thick cloud of darkness or
a bright cloud of light, utterly he envelops and wraps himself in
his Yogamaya.1 “All this world,” says the Gita, “because it is
bewildered by the three states of being determined by the modes
of Nature, fails to recognise me, for this my divine Maya of the
modes of Nature is hard to get beyond; those cross beyond it
who approach Me; but those who dwell in the Asuric nature
of being, have their knowledge reft from them by Maya.” In
1
nāhaṁ prakāśah. sarvasya yogamāyā-samāvr.tah..
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other words, there is the inherent consciousness of the divine in
all, for in all the Divine dwells; but he dwells there covered by
his Maya and the essential self-knowledge of beings is reft from
them, turned into the error of egoism by the action of Maya, the
action of the mechanism of Prakriti. Still by drawing back from
the mechanism of Nature to her inner and secret Master man
can become conscious of the indwelling Divinity.
Now it is notable that with a slight but important variation
of language the Gita describes in the same way both the action
of the Divine in bringing about the ordinary birth of creatures
and his action in his birth as the Avatar. “Leaning upon my own
Nature, prakr.tiṁ svām avas.t.abhya,” it will say later, “I loose
forth variously, visr.jāmi, this multitude of creatures helplessly
subject owing to the control of Prakriti, avaśaṁ prakr.ter vaśāt.”
“Standing upon my own Nature,” it says here, “I am born
by my self-Maya, prakr.tiṁ svām adhis.t.hāya . . . ātmamāyayā, I
loose forth myself, ātmānaṁ sr.jāmi.” The action implied in the
word avas.t.abhya is a forceful downward pressure by which the
object controlled is overcome, oppressed, blocked or limited in
its movement or working and becomes helplessly subject to the
controlling power, avaśaṁ vaśāt; Nature in this action becomes
mechanical and its multitude of creatures are held helpless in
the mechanism, not lords of their own action. On the contrary
the action implied in the word adhis.t.hāya is a dwelling in, but
also a standing upon and over the Nature, a conscious control
and government by the indwelling Godhead, adhis.t.hātrı̄ devatā,
in which the Purusha is not helplessly driven by the Prakriti
through ignorance, but rather the Prakriti is full of the light and
the will of the Purusha. Therefore in the normal birth that which
is loosed forth, — created, as we say, — is the multitude of creatures or becomings, bhūtagrāmam; in the divine birth that which
is loosed forth, self-created, is the self-conscious self-existent
being, ātmānam; for the Vedantic distinction between ātmā and
bhūtāni is that which is made in European philosophy between
the Being and its becomings. In both cases Maya is the means
of the creation or manifestation, but in the divine birth it is by
self-Maya, ātmamāyayā, not the involution in the lower Maya
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of the ignorance, but the conscious action of the self-existent
Godhead in its phenomenal self-representation, well aware of its
operation and its purpose, — that which the Gita calls elsewhere
Yogamaya. In the ordinary birth Yogamaya is used by the Divine
to envelop and conceal itself from the lower consciousness, so
it becomes for us the means of the ignorance, avidyā-māyā; but
it is by this same Yogamaya that self-knowledge also is made
manifest in the return of our consciousness to the Divine, it is
the means of the knowledge, vidyā-māyā; and in the divine birth
it so operates — as the knowledge controlling and enlightening
the works which are ordinarily done in the Ignorance.
The language of the Gita shows therefore that the divine
birth is that of the conscious Godhead in our humanity and essentially the opposite of the ordinary birth even though the same
means are used, because it is not the birth into the Ignorance,
but the birth of the knowledge, not a physical phenomenon, but
a soul-birth. It is the Soul’s coming into birth as the self-existent
Being controlling consciously its becoming and not lost to selfknowledge in the cloud of the ignorance. It is the Soul born into
the body as Lord of Nature, standing above and operating in
her freely by its will, not entangled and helplessly driven round
and round in the mechanism; for it works in the knowledge
and not, as most do, in the ignorance. It is the secret Soul in
all coming forward from its governing secrecy behind the veil
to possess wholly in a human type, but as the Divine, the birth
which ordinarily it possesses only from behind the veil as the
Ishwara while the outward consciousness in front of the veil is
rather possessed than in possession because there it is a partially
conscious being, the Jiva lost to self-knowledge and bound in its
works through a phenomenal subjection to Nature. The Avatar2
therefore is a direct manifestation in humanity by Krishna the
divine Soul of that divine condition of being to which Arjuna,
the human soul, the type of a highest human being, a Vibhuti,
is called upon by the Teacher to arise, and to which he can
2
The word Avatara means a descent; it is a coming down of the Divine below the line
which divides the divine from the human world or status.
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only arise by climbing out of the ignorance and limitation of his
ordinary humanity. It is the manifestation from above of that
which we have to develop from below; it is the descent of God
into that divine birth of the human being into which we mortal
creatures must climb; it is the attracting divine example given
by God to man in the very type and form and perfected model
of our human existence.
XVI
The Process of Avatarhood
W
E SEE that the mystery of the divine Incarnation in
man, the assumption by the Godhead of the human
type and the human nature, is in the view of the Gita
only the other side of the eternal mystery of human birth itself
which is always in its essence, though not in its phenomenal
appearance, even such a miraculous assumption. The eternal and
universal self of every human being is God; even his personal
self is a part of the Godhead, mamaivāṁśah., — not a fraction
or fragment, surely, since we cannot think of God as broken
up into little pieces, but a partial consciousness of the one Consciousness, a partial power of the one Power, a partial enjoyment
of world-being by the one and universal Delight of being, and
therefore in manifestation or, as we say, in Nature a limited and
finite being of the one infinite and illimitable Being. The stamp
of that limitation is an ignorance by which he forgets, not only
the Godhead from which he came forth, but the Godhead which
is always within him, there living in the secret heart of his own
nature, there burning like a veiled Fire on the inner altar in his
own temple-house of human consciousness.
He is ignorant because there is upon the eyes of his soul and
all its organs the seal of that Nature, Prakriti, Maya, by which
he has been put forth into manifestation out of God’s eternal
being; she has minted him like a coin out of the precious metal
of the divine substance, but overlaid with a strong coating of
the alloy of her phenomenal qualities, stamped with her own
stamp and mark of animal humanity, and although the secret
sign of the Godhead is there, it is at first indistinguishable and
always with difficulty decipherable, not to be really discovered
except by that initiation into the mystery of our own being
which distinguishes a Godward from an earthward humanity.
In the Avatar, the divinely-born Man, the real substance shines
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through the coating; the mark of the seal is there only for form,
the vision is that of the secret Godhead, the power of the life is
that of the secret Godhead, and it breaks through the seals of
the assumed human nature; the sign of the Godhead, an inner
soul-sign, not outward, not physical, stands out legible for all
to read who care to see or who can see; for the Asuric nature is
always blind to these things, it sees the body and not the soul,
the external being and not the internal, the mask and not the
Person. In the ordinary human birth the Nature-aspect of the
universal Divine assuming humanity prevails; in the incarnation
the God-aspect of the same phenomenon takes its place. In the
one he allows the human nature to take possession of his partial
being and to dominate it; in the other he takes possession of his
partial type of being and its nature and divinely dominates it.
Not by evolution or ascent like the ordinary man, the Gita seems
to tell us, not by a growing into the divine birth, but by a direct
descent into the stuff of humanity and a taking up of its moulds.
But it is to assist that ascent or evolution the descent is
made or accepted; that the Gita makes very clear. It is, we
might say, to exemplify the possibility of the Divine manifest
in the human being, so that man may see what that is and take
courage to grow into it. It is also to leave the influence of that
manifestation vibrating in the earth-nature and the soul of that
manifestation presiding over its upward endeavour. It is to give
a spiritual mould of divine manhood into which the seeking
soul of the human being can cast itself. It is to give a dharma,
a religion, — not a mere creed, but a method of inner and outer
living, — a way, a rule and law of self-moulding by which he can
grow towards divinity. It is too, since this growth, this ascent is
no mere isolated and individual phenomenon, but like all in the
divine world-activities a collective business, a work and the work
for the race, to assist the human march, to hold it together in
its great crises, to break the forces of the downward gravitation
when they grow too insistent, to uphold or restore the great
dharma of the Godward law in man’s nature, to prepare even,
however far off, the kingdom of God, the victory of the seekers
of light and perfection, sādhūnām, and the overthrow of those
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who fight for the continuance of the evil and the darkness. All
these are recognised objects of the descent of the Avatar, and it is
usually by his work that the mass of men seek to distinguish him
and for that that they are ready to worship him. It is only the
spiritual who see that this external Avatarhood is a sign, in the
symbol of a human life, of the eternal inner Godhead making
himself manifest in the field of their own human mentality and
corporeality so that they can grow into unity with that and be
possessed by it. The divine manifestation of a Christ, Krishna,
Buddha in external humanity has for its inner truth the same
manifestation of the eternal Avatar within in our own inner
humanity. That which has been done in the outer human life of
earth, may be repeated in the inner life of all human beings.
This is the object of the incarnation, but what is the method?
First, we have the rational or minimising view of Avatarhood
which sees in it only an extraordinary manifestation of the diviner qualities moral, intellectual and dynamic by which average
humanity is exceeded. In this idea there is a certain truth. The
Avatar is at the same time the Vibhuti. This Krishna who in his
divine inner being is the Godhead in a human form, is in his
outer human being the leader of his age, the great man of the
Vrishnis. This is from the point of view of the Nature, not of the
soul. The Divine manifests himself through infinite qualities of
his nature and the intensity of the manifestation is measured by
their power and their achievement. The vibhūti of the Divine is
therefore, impersonally, the manifest power of his quality, it is
his outflowing, in whatever form, of Knowledge, Energy, Love,
Strength and the rest; personally, it is the mental form and the
animate being in whom this power is achieved and does its great
works. A pre-eminence in this inner and outer achievement, a
greater power of divine quality, an effective energy is always
the sign. The human vibhūti is the hero of the race’s struggle
towards divine achievement, the hero in the Carlylean sense of
heroism, a power of God in man. “I am Vasudeva (Krishna)
among the Vrishnis,” says the Lord in the Gita, “Dhananjaya
(Arjuna) among the Pandavas, Vyasa among the sages, the seerpoet Ushanas among the seer-poets,” the first in each category,
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the greatest of each group, the most powerfully representative
of the qualities and works in which its characteristic soul-power
manifests itself. This heightening of the powers of the being is a
very necessary step in the progress of the divine manifestation.
Every great man who rises above our average level, raises by
that very fact our common humanity; he is a living assurance of
our divine possibilities, a promise of the Godhead, a glow of the
divine Light and a breath of the divine Power.
It is this truth which lies behind the natural human tendency
to the deification of great minds and heroic characters; it comes
out clearly enough in the Indian habit of mind which easily sees
a partial (aṁśa) Avatar in great saints, teachers, founders, or
most significantly in the belief of southern Vaishnavas that some
of their saints were incarnations of the symbolic living weapons
of Vishnu, — for that is what all great spirits are, living powers
and weapons of the Divine in the upward march and battle. This
idea is innate and inevitable in any mystic or spiritual view of
life which does not draw an inexorable line between the being
and nature of the Divine and our human being and nature; it is
the sense of the divine in humanity. But still the Vibhuti is not
the Avatar; otherwise Arjuna, Vyasa, Ushanas would be Avatars
as well as Krishna, even if in a less degree of the power of
Avatarhood. The divine quality is not enough; there must be the
inner consciousness of the Lord and Self governing the human
nature by his divine presence. The heightening of the power of
the qualities is part of the becoming, bhūtagrāma, an ascent in
the ordinary manifestation; in the Avatar there is the special
manifestation, the divine birth from above, the eternal and universal Godhead descended into a form of individual humanity,
ātmānaṁ sr.jāmi, and conscious not only behind the veil but in
the outward nature.
There is an intermediary idea, a more mystical view of
Avatarhood which supposes that a human soul calls down this
descent into himself and is either possessed by the divine consciousness or becomes an effective reflection or channel of it.
This view rests upon certain truths of spiritual experience. The
divine birth in man, his ascent, is itself a growing of the human
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into the divine consciousness, and in its intensest culmination
is a losing of the separate self in that. The soul merges its individuality in an infinite and universal being or loses it in the
heights of a transcendent being; it becomes one with the Self,
the Brahman, the Divine or, as it is sometimes more absolutely
put, becomes the one Self, the Brahman, the Divine. The Gita
itself speaks of the soul becoming the Brahman, brahmabhūta,
and of its thereby dwelling in the Lord, in Krishna, but it does
not, it must be marked, speak of it as becoming the Lord or
the Purushottama, though it does declare that the Jiva himself
is always Ishwara, the partial being of the Lord, mamaivāṁśah..
For this greatest union, this highest becoming is still part of the
ascent; while it is the divine birth to which every Jiva arrives, it
is not the descent of the Godhead, not Avatarhood, but at most
Buddhahood according to the doctrine of the Buddhists, it is the
soul awakened from its present mundane individuality into an
infinite superconsciousness. That need not carry with it either
the inner consciousness or the characteristic action of the Avatar.
On the other hand, this entering into the divine consciousness may be attended by a reflex action of the Divine entering
or coming forward into the human parts of our being, pouring
himself into the nature, the activity, the mentality, the corporeality even of the man; and that may well be at least a partial
Avatarhood. The Lord stands in the heart, says the Gita, — by
which it means of course the heart of the subtle being, the nodus
of the emotions, sensations, mental consciousness, where the
individual Purusha also is seated, — but he stands there veiled,
enveloped by his Maya. But above, on a plane within us but now
superconscient to us, called heaven by the ancient mystics, the
Lord and the Jiva stand together revealed as of one essence of
being, the Father and the Son of certain symbolisms, the Divine
Being and the divine Man who comes forth from Him born of
the higher divine Nature,1 the virgin Mother, parā prakr.ti, parā
1
In the Buddhist legend the name of the mother of Buddha makes the symbolism
clear; in the Christian the symbol seems to have been attached by a familiar mythopoeic
process to the actual human mother of Jesus of Nazareth.
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māyā, into the lower or human nature. This seems to be the inner
doctrine of the Christian incarnation; in its Trinity the Father is
above in this inner Heaven; the Son or supreme Prakriti become
Jiva of the Gita descends as the divine Man upon earth, in the
mortal body; the Holy Spirit, pure Self, Brahmic consciousness
is that which makes them one and that also in which they communicate; for we hear of the Holy Spirit descending upon Jesus
and it is the same descent which brings down the powers of the
higher consciousness into the simple humanity of the Apostles.
But also the higher divine consciousness of the Purushottama may itself descend into the humanity and that of the Jiva
disappear into it. This is said by his contemporaries to have
happened in the occasional transfigurations of Chaitanya when
he who in his normal consciousness was only the lover and
devotee of the Lord and rejected all deification, became in these
abnormal moments the Lord himself and so spoke and acted,
with all the outflooding light and love and power of the divine
Presence. Supposing this to be the normal condition, the human
receptacle to be constantly no more than a vessel of this divine
Presence and divine Consciousness, we should have the Avatar
according to this intermediary idea of the incarnation. That easily recommends itself as possible to our human notions; for if the
human being can elevate his nature so as to feel a unity with the
being of the Divine and himself a mere channel of its consciousness, light, power, love, his own will and personality lost in that
will and that being, — and this is a recognised spiritual status,
— then there is no inherent impossibility of the reflex action of
that Will, Being, Power, Love, Light, Consciousness occupying
the whole personality of the human Jiva. And this would not be
merely an ascent of our humanity into the divine birth and the
divine nature, but a descent of the divine Purusha into humanity,
an Avatar.
The Gita, however, goes much farther. It speaks clearly of
the Lord himself being born; Krishna speaks of his many births
that are past and makes it clear by his language that it is not
merely the receptive human being but the Divine of whom he
makes this affirmation, because he uses the very language of
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the Creator, the same language which he will employ when he
has to describe his creation of the world. “Although I am the
unborn Lord of creatures, I create (loose forth) my self by my
Maya,” presiding over the actions of my Prakriti. Here there is
no question of the Lord and the human Jiva or of the Father and
the Son, the divine Man, but only of the Lord and his Prakriti.
The Divine descends by his own Prakriti into birth in its human
form and type and brings into it the divine Consciousness and
the divine Power, though consenting, though willing to act in the
form, type, mould of humanity, and he governs its actions in the
body as the indwelling and over-dwelling Soul, adhis.t.hāya. From
above he governs always, indeed, for so he governs all nature,
the human included; from within also he governs all nature,
always, but hidden; the difference here is that he is manifest,
that the nature is conscious of the divine Presence as the Lord,
the Inhabitant, and it is not by his secret will from above, “the
will of the Father which is in heaven,” but by his quite direct and
apparent will that he moves the nature. And here there seems to
be no room for the human intermediary; for it is by resort to his
own nature, prakr.tiṁ svām, and not the special nature of the
Jiva that the Lord of all existence thus takes upon himself the
human birth.
This doctrine is a hard saying, a difficult thing for the human
reason to accept; and for an obvious reason, because of the
evident humanity of the Avatar. The Avatar is always a dual
phenomenon of divinity and humanity; the Divine takes upon
himself the human nature with all its outward limitations and
makes them the circumstances, means, instruments of the divine
consciousness and the divine power, a vessel of the divine birth
and the divine works. But so surely it must be, since otherwise
the object of the Avatar’s descent is not fulfilled; for that object
is precisely to show that the human birth with all its limitations can be made such a means and instrument of the divine
birth and divine works, precisely to show that the human type
of consciousness can be compatible with the divine essence of
consciousness made manifest, can be converted into its vessel,
drawn into nearer conformity with it by a change of its mould
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and a heightening of its powers of light and love and strength and
purity; and to show also how it can be done. If the Avatar were
to act in an entirely supernormal fashion, this object would not
be fulfilled. A merely supernormal or miraculous Avatar would
be a meaningless absurdity; not that there need be an entire
absence of the use of supernormal powers such as Christ’s socalled miracles of healing, for the use of supernormal powers is
quite a possibility of human nature; but there need not be that
at all, nor in any case is it the root of the matter, nor would it at
all do if the life were nothing else but a display of supernormal
fireworks. The Avatar does not come as a thaumaturgic magician, but as the divine leader of humanity and the exemplar of
a divine humanity. Even human sorrow and physical suffering
he must assume and use so as to show, first, how that suffering
may be a means of redemption, — as did Christ, — secondly,
to show how, having been assumed by the divine soul in the
human nature, it can also be overcome in the same nature, — as
did Buddha. The rationalist who would have cried to Christ, “If
thou art the Son of God, come down from the cross,” or points
out sagely that the Avatar was not divine because he died and
died too by disease, — as a dog dieth, — knows not what he is
saying: for he has missed the root of the whole matter. Even, the
Avatar of sorrow and suffering must come before there can be
the Avatar of divine joy; the human limitation must be assumed
in order to show how it can be overcome; and the way and the
extent of the overcoming, whether internal only or external also,
depends upon the stage of the human advance; it must not be
done by a non-human miracle.
The question then arises, and it is the sole real difficulty,
for here the intellect falters and stumbles over its own limits,
how is this human mind and body assumed? For they were
not created suddenly and all of a piece, but by some kind of
evolution, physical or spiritual or both. No doubt, the descent of
the Avatar, like the divine birth from the other side, is essentially
a spiritual phenomenon, as is shown by the Gita’s ātmānaṁ
sr.jāmi, it is a soul-birth; but still there is here an attendant
physical birth. How then were this human mind and body of
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the Avatar created? If we suppose that the body is always created by the hereditary evolution, by inconscient Nature and its
immanent Life-spirit without the intervention of the individual
soul, the matter becomes simple. A physical and mental body is
prepared fit for the divine incarnation by a pure or great heredity and the descending Godhead takes possession of it. But the
Gita in this very passage applies the doctrine of reincarnation,
boldly enough, to the Avatar himself, and in the usual theory
of reincarnation the reincarnating soul by its past spiritual and
psychological evolution itself determines and in a way prepares
its own mental and physical body. The soul prepares its own
body, the body is not prepared for it without any reference to
the soul. Are we then to suppose an eternal or continual Avatar
himself evolving, we might say, his own fit mental and physical
body according to the needs and pace of the human evolution
and so appearing from age to age, yuge yuge? In some such
spirit some would interpret the ten incarnations of Vishnu, first
in animal forms, then in the animal man, then in the dwarf mansoul, Vamana, the violent Asuric man, Rama of the axe, the
divinely-natured man, a greater Rama, the awakened spiritual
man, Buddha, and, preceding him in time, but final in place,
the complete divine manhood, Krishna, — for the last Avatar,
Kalki, only accomplishes the work Krishna began, — he fulfils
in power the great struggle which the previous Avatars prepared
in all its potentialities. It is a difficult assumption to our modern
mentality, but the language of the Gita seems to demand it. Or,
since the Gita does not expressly solve the problem, we may solve
it in some other way of our own, as that the body is prepared
by the Jiva but assumed from birth by the Godhead or that it
is prepared by one of the four Manus, catvāro manavah., of the
Gita, the spiritual Fathers of every human mind and body. This
is going far into the mystic field from which the modern reason
is still averse; but once we admit Avatarhood, we have already
entered into it and, once entered, may as well tread in it with
firm footsteps.
There the Gita’s doctrine of Avatarhood stands. We have
had to advert to it at length in this aspect of its method, as we
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167
did to the question of its possibility, because it is necessary to
look at it and face the difficulties which the reasoning mind of
man is likely to offer to it. It is true that the physical Avatarhood
does not fill a large space in the Gita, but still it does occupy a
definite place in the chain of its teachings and is implied in the
whole scheme, the very framework being the Avatar leading the
vibhūti, the man who has risen to the greatest heights of mere
manhood, to the divine birth and divine works. No doubt, too,
the inner descent of the Godhead to raise the human soul into
himself is the main thing, — it is the inner Christ, Krishna or
Buddha that matters. But just as the outer life is of immense importance for the inner development, so the external Avatarhood
is of no mean importance for this great spiritual manifestation.
The consummation in the mental and physical symbol assists the
growth of the inner reality; afterwards the inner reality expresses
itself with greater power in a more perfect symbolisation of itself
through the outer life. Between these two, spiritual reality and
mental and physical expression, acting and returning upon each
other constantly the manifestation of the Divine in humanity
has elected to move always in the cycles of its concealment and
its revelation.
XVII
The Divine Birth and Divine Works
T
HE WORK for which the Avatar descends has like his
birth a double sense and a double form. It has an outward
side of the divine force acting upon the external world in
order to maintain there and to reshape the divine law by which
the Godward effort of humanity is kept from decisive retrogression and instead decisively carried forward in spite of the
rule of action and reaction, the rhythm of advance and relapse
by which Nature proceeds. It has an inward side of the divine
force of the Godward consciousness acting upon the soul of the
individual and the soul of the race, so that it may receive new
forms of revelation of the Divine in man and may be sustained,
renewed and enriched in its power of upward self-unfolding. The
Avatar does not descend merely for a great outward action, as
the pragmatic sense in humanity is too often tempted to suppose.
Action and event have no value in themselves, but only take their
value from the force which they represent and the idea which
they symbolise and which the force is there to serve.
The crisis in which the Avatar appears, though apparent to
the outward eye only as a crisis of events and great material
changes, is always in its source and real meaning a crisis in the
consciousness of humanity when it has to undergo some grand
modification and effect some new development. For this action
of change a divine force is needed; but the force varies always
according to the power of consciousness which it embodies;
hence the necessity of a divine consciousness manifesting in the
mind and soul of humanity. Where, indeed, the change is mainly
intellectual and practical, the intervention of the Avatar is not
needed; there is a great uplifting of consciousness, a great manifestation of power in which men are for the time being exalted
above their normal selves, and this surge of consciousness and
power finds its wave-crests in certain exceptional individuals,
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169
vibhūtis, whose action leading the general action is sufficient
for the change intended. The Reformation in Europe and the
French Revolution were crises of this character; they were not
great spiritual events, but intellectual and practical changes, one
in religious, the other in social and political ideas, forms and motives, and the modification of the general consciousness brought
about was a mental and dynamic, but not a spiritual modification. But when the crisis has a spiritual seed or intention, then a
complete or a partial manifestation of the God-consciousness in
a human mind and soul comes as its originator or leader. That
is the Avatar.
The outward action of the Avatar is described in the Gita
as the restoration of the Dharma; when from age to age the
Dharma fades, languishes, loses force and its opposite arises,
strong and oppressive, then the Avatar comes and raises it again
to power; and as these things in idea are always represented by
things in action and by human beings who obey their impulsion,
his mission is, in its most human and outward terms, to relieve
the seekers of the Dharma who are oppressed by the reign of the
reactionary darkness and to destroy the wrong-doers who seek
to maintain the denial of the Dharma. But the language used
can easily be given a poor and insufficient connotation which
would deprive Avatarhood of all its spiritual depth of meaning.
Dharma is a word which has an ethical and practical, a natural
and philosophical and a religious and spiritual significance, and
it may be used in any of these senses exclusive of the others,
in a purely ethical, a purely philosophical or a purely religious
sense. Ethically it means the law of righteousness, the moral rule
of conduct, or in a still more outward and practical significance
social and political justice, or even simply the observation of
the social law. If used in this sense we shall have to understand
that when unrighteousness, injustice and oppression prevail, the
Avatar descends to deliver the good and destroy the wicked,
to break down injustice and oppression and restore the ethical
balance of mankind.
Thus the popular and mythical account of the Krishna
avatar is that the unrighteousness of the Kurus as incarnated
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in Duryodhana and his brothers became so great a burden to
the earth that she had to call upon God to descend and lighten
her load; accordingly Vishnu incarnated as Krishna, delivered
the oppressed Pandavas and destroyed the unjust Kauravas. A
similar account is given of the descent of the previous Vishnu
avatars, of Rama to destroy the unrighteous oppression of Ravana, of Parashurama to destroy the unrighteous license of the
military and princely caste, the Kshatriyas, of the dwarf Vamana
to destroy the rule of the Titan Bali. But obviously the purely
practical, ethical or social and political mission of the Avatar
which is thus thrown into popular and mythical form, does not
give a right account of the phenomenon of Avatarhood. It does
not cover its spiritual sense, and if this outward utility were all,
we should have to exclude Buddha and Christ whose mission
was not at all to destroy evil-doers and deliver the good, but to
bring to all men a new spiritual message and a new law of divine
growth and spiritual realisation. On the other hand, if we give
to the word dharma only its religious sense, in which it means
a law of religious and spiritual life, we shall indeed get to the
kernel of the matter, but we shall be in danger of excluding a
most important part of the work done by the Avatar. Always we
see in the history of the divine incarnations the double work, and
inevitably, because the Avatar takes up the workings of God in
human life, the way of the divine Will and Wisdom in the world,
and that always fulfils itself externally as well as internally, by
inner progress in the soul and by an outer change in the life.
The Avatar may descend as a great spiritual teacher and
saviour, the Christ, the Buddha, but always his work leads,
after he has finished his earthly manifestation, to a profound
and powerful change not only in the ethical, but in the social
and outward life and ideals of the race. He may, on the other
hand, descend as an incarnation of the divine life, the divine
personality and power in its characteristic action, for a mission
ostensibly social, ethical and political, as is represented in the
story of Rama or Krishna; but always then this descent becomes
in the soul of the race a permanent power for the inner living
and the spiritual rebirth. It is indeed curious to note that the
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171
permanent, vital, universal effect of Buddhism and Christianity
has been the force of their ethical, social and practical ideals and
their influence even on the men and the ages which have rejected
their religious and spiritual beliefs, forms and disciplines; later
Hinduism which rejected Buddha, his saṅgha and his dharma,
bears the ineffaceable imprint of the social and ethical influence
of Buddhism and its effect on the ideas and the life of the race,
while in modern Europe, Christian only in name, humanitarianism is the translation into the ethical and social sphere and
the aspiration to liberty, equality and fraternity the translation
into the social and political sphere of the spiritual truths of
Christianity, the latter especially being effected by men who aggressively rejected the Christian religion and spiritual discipline
and by an age which in its intellectual effort of emancipation
tried to get rid of Christianity as a creed. On the other hand the
life of Rama and Krishna belongs to the prehistoric past which
has come down only in poetry and legend and may even be
regarded as myths; but it is quite immaterial whether we regard
them as myths or historical facts, because their permanent truth
and value lie in their persistence as a spiritual form, presence,
influence in the inner consciousness of the race and the life of the
human soul. Avatarhood is a fact of divine life and consciousness
which may realise itself in an outward action, but must persist,
when that action is over and has done its work, in a spiritual
influence; or may realise itself in a spiritual influence and teaching, but must then have its permanent effect, even when the new
religion or discipline is exhausted, in the thought, temperament
and outward life of mankind.
We must then, in order to understand the Gita’s description
of the work of the Avatar, take the idea of the Dharma in its
fullest, deepest and largest conception, as the inner and the outer
law by which the divine Will and Wisdom work out the spiritual
evolution of mankind and its circumstances and results in the
life of the race. Dharma in the Indian conception is not merely
the good, the right, morality and justice, ethics; it is the whole
government of all the relations of man with other beings, with
Nature, with God, considered from the point of view of a divine
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principle working itself out in forms and laws of action, forms
of the inner and the outer life, orderings of relations of every
kind in the world. Dharma1 is both that which we hold to and
that which holds together our inner and outer activities. In its
primary sense it means a fundamental law of our nature which
secretly conditions all our activities, and in this sense each being,
type, species, individual, group has its own dharma. Secondly,
there is the divine nature which has to develop and manifest in
us, and in this sense dharma is the law of the inner workings by
which that grows in our being. Thirdly, there is the law by which
we govern our outgoing thought and action and our relations
with each other so as to help best both our own growth and that
of the human race towards the divine ideal.
Dharma is generally spoken of as something eternal and
unchanging, and so it is in the fundamental principle, in the
ideal, but in its forms it is continually changing and evolving,
because man does not already possess the ideal or live in it,
but aspires more or less perfectly towards it, is growing towards its knowledge and practice. And in this growth dharma
is all that helps us to grow into the divine purity, largeness,
light, freedom, power, strength, joy, love, good, unity, beauty,
and against it stands its shadow and denial, all that resists its
growth and has not undergone its law, all that has not yielded
up and does not will to yield up its secret of divine values, but
presents a front of perversion and contradiction, of impurity,
narrowness, bondage, darkness, weakness, vileness, discord and
suffering and division, and the hideous and the crude, all that
man has to leave behind in his progress. This is the adharma, notdharma, which strives with and seeks to overcome the dharma,
to draw backward and downward, the reactionary force which
makes for evil, ignorance and darkness. Between the two there
is perpetual battle and struggle, oscillation of victory and defeat
in which sometimes the upward and sometimes the downward
forces prevail. This has been typified in the Vedic image of the
struggle between the divine and the Titanic powers, the sons
1
The word means “holding” from the root dhr., to hold.
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173
of the Light and the undivided Infinity and the children of the
Darkness and Division, in Zoroastrianism by Ahuramazda and
Ahriman, and in later religions in the contest between God and
his angels and Satan or Iblis and his demons for the possession
of human life and the human soul.
It is these things that condition and determine the work
of the Avatar. In the Buddhistic formula the disciple takes
refuge from all that opposes his liberation in three powers,
the dharma, the saṅgha, the Buddha. So in Christianity we
have the law of Christian living, the Church and the Christ.
These three are always the necessary elements of the work
of the Avatar. He gives a dharma, a law of self-discipline
by which to grow out of the lower into the higher life and
which necessarily includes a rule of action and of relations with
our fellowmen and other beings, endeavour in the eightfold
path or the law of faith, love and purity or any other such
revelation of the nature of the divine in life. Then because
every tendency in man has its collective as well as its individual aspect, because those who follow one way are naturally
drawn together into spiritual companionship and unity, he
establishes the saṅgha, the fellowship and union of those whom
his personality and his teaching unite. In Vaishnavism there is
the same trio, bhāgavata, bhakta, bhagavān, — the bhāgavata,
which is the law of the Vaishnava dispensation of adoration
and love, the bhakta representing the fellowship of those in
whom that law is manifest, bhagavān, the divine Lover and
Beloved in whose being and nature the divine law of love
is founded and fulfils itself. The Avatar represents this third
element, the divine personality, nature and being who is the
soul of the dharma and the saṅgha, informs them with himself,
keeps them living and draws men towards the felicity and the
liberation.
In the teaching of the Gita, which is more catholic and
complex than other specialised teachings and disciplines, these
things assume a larger meaning. For the unity here is the allembracing Vedantic unity by which the soul sees all in itself and
itself in all and makes itself one with all beings. The dharma
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is therefore the taking up of all human relations into a higher
divine meaning; starting from the established ethical, social and
religious rule which binds together the whole community in
which the God-seeker lives, it lifts it up by informing it with
the Brahmic consciousness; the law it gives is the law of oneness, of equality, of liberated, desireless, God-governed action, of
God-knowledge and self-knowledge enlightening and drawing
to itself all the nature and all the action, drawing it towards
divine being and divine consciousness, and of God-love as the
supreme power and crown of the knowledge and the action.
The idea of companionship and mutual aid in God-love and
God-seeking which is at the basis of the idea of the saṅgha or
divine fellowship, is brought in when the Gita speaks of the
seeking of God through love and adoration, but the real saṅgha
of this teaching is all humanity. The whole world is moving
towards this dharma, each man according to his capacity, — “it
is my path that men follow in every way,” — and the God-seeker,
making himself one with all, making their joy and sorrow and
all their life his own, the liberated made already one self with
all beings, lives in the life of humanity, lives for the one Self
in humanity, for God in all beings, acts for lokasaṅgraha, for
the maintaining of all in their dharma and the Dharma, for
the maintenance of their growth in all its stages and in all its
paths towards the Divine. For the Avatar here, though he is
manifest in the name and form of Krishna, lays no exclusive
stress on this one form of his human birth, but on that which it
represents, the Divine, the Purushottama, of whom all Avatars
are the human births, of whom all forms and names of the
Godhead worshipped by men are the figures. The way declared
by Krishna here is indeed announced as the way by which man
can reach the real knowledge and the real liberation, but it is one
that is inclusive of all paths and not exclusive. For the Divine
takes up into his universality all Avatars and all teachings and
all dharmas.
The Gita lays stress upon the struggle of which the world
is the theatre, in its two aspects, the inner struggle and the
outer battle. In the inner struggle the enemies are within, in
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175
the individual, and the slaying of desire, ignorance, egoism is
the victory. But there is an outer struggle between the powers
of the Dharma and the Adharma in the human collectivity. The
former is supported by the divine, the godlike nature in man,
and by those who represent it or strive to realise it in human
life, the latter by the Titanic or demoniac, the Asuric and Rakshasic nature whose head is a violent egoism, and by those who
represent and strive to satisfy it. This is the war of the Gods
and Titans, the symbol of which the old Indian literature is
full, the struggle of the Mahabharata of which Krishna is the
central figure being often represented in that image; the Pandavas who fight for the establishment of the kingdom of the
Dharma, are the sons of the Gods, their powers in human form,
their adversaries are incarnations of the Titanic powers, they are
Asuras. This outer struggle too the Avatar comes to aid, directly
or indirectly, to destroy the reign of the Asuras, the evil-doers,
and in them depress the power they represent and to restore
the oppressed ideals of the Dharma. He comes to bring nearer
the kingdom of heaven on earth in the collectivity as well as
to build the kingdom of heaven within in the individual human
soul.
The inner fruit of the Avatar’s coming is gained by those
who learn from it the true nature of the divine birth and the
divine works and who, growing full of him in their consciousness and taking refuge in him with their whole being, manmayā
mām upāśritāh., purified by the realising force of their knowledge
and delivered from the lower nature, attain to the divine being
and divine nature, madbhāvam. The Avatar comes to reveal the
divine nature in man above this lower nature and to show what
are the divine works, free, unegoistic, disinterested, impersonal,
universal, full of the divine light, the divine power and the divine love. He comes as the divine personality which shall fill
the consciousness of the human being and replace the limited
egoistic personality, so that it shall be liberated out of ego into
infinity and universality, out of birth into immortality. He comes
as the divine power and love which calls men to itself, so that
they may take refuge in that and no longer in the insufficiency
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of their human wills and the strife of their human fear, wrath
and passion, and liberated from all this unquiet and suffering
may live in the calm and bliss of the Divine.2 Nor does it matter
essentially in what form and name or putting forward what
aspect of the Divine he comes; for in all ways, varying with their
nature, men are following the path set to them by the Divine
which will in the end lead them to him and the aspect of him
which suits their nature is that which they can best follow when
he comes to lead them; in whatever way men accept, love and
take joy in God, in that way God accepts, loves and takes joy in
man. Ye yathā māṁ prapadyante tāṁs tathaiva bhajāmyaham.
2 janma karma ca me divyam evaṁ yo vetti tattvatah,
.
tyaktvā dehaṁ punarjanma naiti mām eti so’rjuna.
vı̄tarāgabhayakrodhā manmayā mām upāśritāh.,
bahavo jñānatapasā pūtā madbhāvam āgatāh..
XVIII
The Divine Worker
T
O ATTAIN to the divine birth, — a divinising new birth of
the soul into a higher consciousness, — and to do divine
works both as a means towards that before it is attained
and as an expression of it after it is attained, is then all the
Karmayoga of the Gita. The Gita does not try to define works
by any outward signs through which it can be recognisable to
an external gaze, measurable by the criticism of the world; it
deliberately renounces even the ordinary ethical distinctions by
which men seek to guide themselves in the light of the human
reason. The signs by which it distinguishes divine works are all
profoundly intimate and subjective; the stamp by which they are
known is invisible, spiritual, supra-ethical.
They are recognisable only by the light of the soul from
which they come. For, it says, “what is action and what is inaction, as to this even the sages are perplexed and deluded,”
because, judging by practical, social, ethical, intellectual standards, they discriminate by accidentals and do not go to the root
of the matter; “I will declare to thee that action by the knowledge
of which thou shalt be released from all ills. One has to understand about action as well as to understand about wrong action
and about inaction one has to understand; thick and tangled is
the way of works.” Action in the world is like a deep forest,
gahana, through which man goes stumbling as best he can, by
the light of the ideas of his time, the standards of his personality,
his environment, or rather of many times, many personalities,
layers of thought and ethics from many social stages all inextricably confused together, temporal and conventional amidst
all their claim to absoluteness and immutable truth, empirical
and irrational in spite of their aping of right reason. And finally
the sage seeking in the midst of it all a highest foundation of
fixed law and an original truth finds himself obliged to raise the
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last supreme question, whether all action and life itself are not a
delusion and a snare and whether cessation from action, akarma,
is not the last resort of the tired and disillusioned human soul.
But, says Krishna, in this matter even the sages are perplexed
and deluded. For by action, by works, not by inaction comes the
knowledge and the release.
What then is the solution? what is that type of works by
which we shall be released from the ills of life, from this doubt,
this error, this grief, from this mixed, impure and baffling result
even of our purest and best-intentioned acts, from these million
forms of evil and suffering? No outward distinctions need be
made, is the reply; no work the world needs, be shunned; no
limit or hedge set round our human activities; on the contrary, all
actions should be done, but from a soul in Yoga with the Divine,
yuktah. kr.tsna-karma-kr.t. Akarma, cessation from action is not
the way; the man who has attained to the insight of the highest
reason, perceives that such inaction is itself a constant action, a
state subject to the workings of Nature and her qualities. The
mind that takes refuge in physical inactivity, is still under the
delusion that it and not Nature is the doer of works; it has
mistaken inertia for liberation; it does not see that even in what
seems absolute inertia greater than that of the stone or clod,
Nature is at work, keeps unimpaired her hold. On the contrary
in the full flood of action the soul is free from its works, is not
the doer, not bound by what is done, and he who lives in the
freedom of the soul, not in the bondage of the modes of Nature,
alone has release from works. This is what the Gita clearly means
when it says that he who in action can see inaction and can see
action still continuing in cessation from works, is the man of true
reason and discernment among men. This saying hinges upon
the Sankhya distinction between Purusha and Prakriti, between
the free inactive soul, eternally calm, pure and unmoved in the
midst of works, and ever active Nature operative as much in
inertia and cessation as in the overt turmoil of her visible hurry
of labour. This is the knowledge which the highest effort of the
discriminating reason, the buddhi, gives to us, and therefore
whoever possesses it is the truly rational and discerning man, sa
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buddhimān manus.yes.u, — not the perplexed thinker who judges
life and works by the external, uncertain and impermanent distinctions of the lower reason. Therefore the liberated man is not
afraid of action, he is a large and universal doer of all works,
kr.tsna-karma-kr.t; not as others do them in subjection to Nature,
but poised in the silent calm of the soul, tranquilly in Yoga with
the Divine. The Divine is the lord of his works, he is only their
channel through the instrumentality of his nature conscious of
and subject to her Lord. By the flaming intensity and purity of
this knowledge all his works are burned up as in a fire and his
mind remains without any stain or disfiguring mark from them,
calm, silent, unperturbed, white and clean and pure. To do all
in this liberating knowledge, without the personal egoism of the
doer, is the first sign of the divine worker.
The second sign is freedom from desire; for where there is
not the personal egoism of the doer, desire becomes impossible;
it is starved out, sinks for want of a support, dies of inanition.
Outwardly the liberated man seems to undertake works of all
kinds like other men, on a larger scale perhaps with a more
powerful will and driving-force, for the might of the divine will
works in his active nature; but from all his inceptions and undertakings the inferior concept and nether will of desire is entirely
banished, sarve samārambhāh. kāmasaṅkalpavarjitāh.. He has
abandoned all attachment to the fruits of his works, and where
one does not work for the fruit, but solely as an impersonal
instrument of the Master of works, desire can find no place, —
not even the desire to serve successfully, for the fruit is the Lord’s
and determined by him and not by the personal will and effort,
or to serve with credit and to the Master’s satisfaction, for the
real doer is the Lord himself and all glory belongs to a form of
his Shakti missioned in the nature and not to the limited human
personality. The human mind and soul of the liberated man
does nothing, na kiñcit karoti; even though through his nature
he engages in action, it is the Nature, the executive Shakti, it is
the conscious Goddess governed by the divine Inhabitant who
does the work.
It does not follow that the work is not to be done perfectly,
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with success, with a right adaptation of means to ends: on the
contrary a perfect working is easier to action done tranquilly in
Yoga than to action done in the blindness of hopes and fears,
lamed by the judgments of the stumbling reason, running about
amidst the eager trepidations of the hasty human will: Yoga,
says the Gita elsewhere, is the true skill in works, yogah. karmasu
kauśalam. But all this is done impersonally by the action of a
great universal light and power operating through the individual
nature. The Karmayogin knows that the power given to him will
be adapted to the fruit decreed, the divine thought behind the
work equated with the work he has to do, the will in him, —
which will not be wish or desire, but an impersonal drive of
conscious power directed towards an aim not his own, — subtly
regulated in its energy and direction by the divine wisdom. The
result may be success, as the ordinary mind understands it, or
it may seem to that mind to be defeat and failure; but to him it
is always the success intended, not by him, but by the all-wise
manipulator of action and result, because he does not seek for
victory, but only for the fulfilment of the divine will and wisdom
which works out its ends through apparent failure as well as and
often with greater force than through apparent triumph. Arjuna,
bidden to fight, is assured of victory; but even if certain defeat
were before him, he must still fight because that is the present
work assigned to him as his immediate share in the great sum of
energies by which the divine will is surely accomplished.
The liberated man has no personal hopes; he does not seize
on things as his personal possessions; he receives what the divine
Will brings him, covets nothing, is jealous of none: what comes
to him he takes without repulsion and without attachment; what
goes from him he allows to depart into the whirl of things without repining or grief or sense of loss. His heart and self are under
perfect control; they are free from reaction and passion, they
make no turbulent response to the touches of outward things.
His action is indeed a purely physical action, śārı̄raṁ kevalaṁ
karma; for all else comes from above, is not generated on the
human plane, is only a reflection of the will, knowledge, joy of
the divine Purushottama. Therefore he does not by a stress on
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doing and its objects bring about in his mind and heart any of
those reactions which we call passion and sin. For sin consists
not at all in the outward deed, but in an impure reaction of the
personal will, mind and heart which accompanies it or causes
it; the impersonal, the spiritual is always pure, apāpaviddham,
and gives to all that it does its own inalienable purity. This
spiritual impersonality is a third sign of the divine worker. All
human souls, indeed, who have attained to a certain greatness
and largeness are conscious of an impersonal Force or Love
or Will and Knowledge working through them, but they are
not free from egoistic reactions, sometimes violent enough, of
their human personality. But this freedom the liberated soul
has attained; for he has cast his personality into the impersonal,
where it is no longer his, but is taken up by the divine Person, the
Purushottama, who uses all finite qualities infinitely and freely
and is bound by none. He has become a soul and ceased to be
a sum of natural qualities; and such appearance of personality
as remains for the operations of Nature, is something unbound,
large, flexible, universal; it is a free mould for the Infinite, it is a
living mask of the Purushottama.
The result of this knowledge, this desirelessness and this
impersonality is a perfect equality in the soul and the nature.
Equality is the fourth sign of the divine worker. He has, says
the Gita, passed beyond the dualities; he is dvandvātı̄ta. We
have seen that he regards with equal eyes, without any disturbance of feeling, failure and success, victory and defeat; but not
only these, all dualities are in him surpassed and reconciled.
The outward distinctions by which men determine their psychological attitude towards the happenings of the world, have
for him only a subordinate and instrumental meaning. He does
not ignore them, but he is above them. Good happening and
evil happening, so all-important to the human soul subject to
desire, are to the desireless divine soul equally welcome since
by their mingled strand are worked out the developing forms
of the eternal good. He cannot be defeated, since all for him is
moving towards the divine victory in the Kurukshetra of Nature,
dharmaks.etre kuruks.etre, the field of doings which is the field
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of the evolving Dharma, and every turn of the conflict has been
designed and mapped by the foreseeing eye of the Master of the
battle, the Lord of works and Guide of the dharma. Honour
and dishonour from men cannot move him, nor their praise nor
their blame; for he has a greater clear-seeing judge and another
standard for his action, and his motive admits no dependence
upon worldly rewards. Arjuna the Kshatriya prizes naturally
honour and reputation and is right in shunning disgrace and the
name of coward as worse than death; for to maintain the point
of honour and the standard of courage in the world is part of
his dharma: but Arjuna the liberated soul need care for none
of these things, he has only to know the kartavyaṁ karma, the
work which the supreme Self demands from him, and to do that
and leave the result to the Lord of his actions. He has passed
even beyond that distinction of sin and virtue which is so allimportant to the human soul while it is struggling to minimise
the hold of its egoism and lighten the heavy and violent yoke of
its passions, — the liberated has risen above these struggles and
is seated firmly in the purity of the witnessing and enlightened
soul. Sin has fallen away from him, and not a virtue acquired
and increased by good action and impaired or lost by evil action,
but the inalienable and unalterable purity of a divine and selfless
nature is the peak to which he has climbed and the seat upon
which he is founded. There the sense of sin and the sense of
virtue have no starting-point or applicability.
Arjuna, still in the ignorance, may feel in his heart the call of
right and justice and may argue in his mind that abstention from
battle would be a sin entailing responsibility for all the suffering
that injustice and oppression and the evil karma of the triumph
of wrong bring upon men and nations, or he may feel in his heart
the recoil from violence and slaughter and argue in his mind that
all shedding of blood is a sin which nothing can justify. Both
of these attitudes would appeal with equal right to virtue and
reason and it would depend upon the man, the circumstances
and the time which of these might prevail in his mind or before
the eyes of the world. Or he might simply feel constrained by his
heart and his honour to support his friends against his enemies,
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the cause of the good and just against the cause of the evil and
oppressive. The liberated soul looks beyond these conflicting
standards; he sees simply what the supreme Self demands from
him as needful for the maintenance or for the bringing forward
of the evolving Dharma. He has no personal ends to serve, no
personal loves and hatreds to satisfy, no rigidly fixed standard
of action which opposes its rock-line to the flexible advancing
march of the progress of the human race or stands up defiant
against the call of the Infinite. He has no personal enemies to be
conquered or slain, but sees only men who have been brought
up against him by circumstances and the will in things to help
by their opposition the march of destiny. Against them he can
have no wrath or hatred; for wrath and hatred are foreign to the
divine nature. The Asura’s desire to break and slay what opposes
him, the Rakshasa’s grim lust of slaughter are impossible to his
calm and peace and his all-embracing sympathy and understanding. He has no wish to injure, but on the contrary a universal
friendliness and compassion, maitrah. karun.a eva ca: but this
compassion is that of a divine soul overlooking men, embracing
all other souls in himself, not the shrinking of the heart and
the nerves and the flesh which is the ordinary human form of
pity: nor does he attach a supreme importance to the life of the
body, but looks beyond to the life of the soul and attaches to the
other only an instrumental value. He will not hasten to slaughter
and strife, but if war comes in the wave of the Dharma, he will
accept it with a large equality and a perfect understanding and
sympathy for those whose power and pleasure of domination he
has to break and whose joy of triumphant life he has to destroy.
For in all he sees two things, the Divine inhabiting every
being equally, the varying manifestation unequal only in its
temporary circumstances. In the animal and man, in the dog,
the unclean outcaste and the learned and virtuous Brahmin,
in the saint and the sinner, in the indifferent and the friendly
and the hostile, in those who love him and benefit and those
who hate him and afflict, he sees himself, he sees God and has at
heart for all the same equal kindliness, the same divine affection.
Circumstances may determine the outward clasp or the outward
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conflict, but can never affect his equal eye, his open heart, his
inner embrace of all. And in all his actions there will be the same
principle of soul, a perfect equality, and the same principle of
work, the will of the Divine in him active for the need of the
race in its gradually developing advance towards the Godhead.
Again, the sign of the divine worker is that which is central
to the divine consciousness itself, a perfect inner joy and peace
which depends upon nothing in the world for its source or its
continuance; it is innate, it is the very stuff of the soul’s consciousness, it is the very nature of divine being. The ordinary
man depends upon outward things for his happiness; therefore
he has desire; therefore he has anger and passion, pleasure and
pain, joy and grief; therefore he measures all things in the balance of good fortune and evil fortune. None of these things
can affect the divine soul; it is ever satisfied without any kind
of dependence, nitya-tr.pto nirāśrayah.; for its delight, its divine
ease, its happiness, its glad light are eternal within, ingrained in
itself, ātma-ratih., antah.-sukho ’ntar-ārāmas tathāntar-jyotir eva
yah.. What joy it takes in outward things is not for their sake, not
for things which it seeks in them and can miss, but for the self in
them, for their expression of the Divine, for that which is eternal
in them and which it cannot miss. It is without attachment to
their outward touches, but finds everywhere the same joy that it
finds in itself, because its self is theirs, has become one self with
the self of all beings, because it is united with the one and equal
Brahman in them through all their differences, brahmayogayuktātmā, sarvabhūtātma-bhūtātmā. It does not rejoice in the
touches of the pleasant or feel anguish in the touches of the
unpleasant; neither the wounds of things, nor the wounds of
friends, nor the wounds of enemies can disturb the firmness of
its outgazing mind or bewilder its receiving heart; this soul is in
its nature, as the Upanishad puts it, avran.am, without wound or
scar. In all things it has the same imperishable Ananda, sukham
aks.ayam aśnute.
That equality, impersonality, peace, joy, freedom do not depend on so outward a thing as doing or not doing works. The
Gita insists repeatedly on the difference between the inward and
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the outward renunciation, tyāga and sannyāsa. The latter, it says,
is valueless without the former, hardly possible even to attain
without it, and unnecessary when there is the inward freedom.
In fact tyāga itself is the real and sufficient Sannyasa. “He should
be known as the eternal Sannyasin who neither hates nor desires;
free from the dualities he is happily and easily released from all
bondage.” The painful process of outward Sannyasa, duh.kham
āptum, is an unnecessary process. It is perfectly true that all
actions, as well as the fruit of action, have to be given up, to be
renounced, but inwardly, not outwardly, not into the inertia of
Nature, but to the Lord in sacrifice, into the calm and joy of the
Impersonal from whom all action proceeds without disturbing
his peace. The true Sannyasa of action is the reposing of all
works on the Brahman. “He who, having abandoned attachment, acts reposing (or founding) his works on the Brahman,
brahman.yādhāya karmān.i, is not stained by sin even as water
clings not to the lotus-leaf.” Therefore the Yogins first “do works
with the body, mind, understanding, or even merely with the
organs of action, abandoning attachment, for self-purification,
saṅgaṁ tyaktvātmaśuddhaye. By abandoning attachment to the
fruits of works the soul in union with Brahman attains to peace
of rapt foundation in Brahman, but the soul not in union is
attached to the fruit and bound by the action of desire.” The
foundation, the purity, the peace once attained, the embodied
soul perfectly controlling its nature, having renounced all its
actions by the mind, inwardly, not outwardly, “sits in its ninegated city neither doing nor causing to be done.” For this soul is
the one impersonal Soul in all, the all-pervading Lord, prabhu,
vibhu, who, as the impersonal, neither creates the works of the
world, nor the mind’s idea of being the doer, na kartr.tvaṁ na
karmān.i, nor the coupling of works to their fruits, the chain of
cause and effect. All that is worked out by the Nature in the man,
svabhāva, his principle of self-becoming, as the word literally
means. The all-pervading Impersonal accepts neither the sin nor
the virtue of any: these are things created by the ignorance in
the creature, by his egoism of the doer, by his ignorance of his
highest self, by his involution in the operations of Nature, and
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when the self-knowledge within him is released from this dark
envelope, that knowledge lights up like a sun the real self within
him; he knows himself then to be the soul supreme above the
instruments of Nature. Pure, infinite, inviolable, immutable, he
is no longer affected; no longer does he imagine himself to be
modified by her workings. By complete identification with the
Impersonal he can, too, release himself from the necessity of
returning by birth into her movement.
And yet this liberation does not at all prevent him from
acting. Only, he knows that it is not he who is active, but the
modes, the qualities of Nature, her triple gun.as. “The man who
knows the principles of things thinks, his mind in Yoga (with
the inactive Impersonal), ‘I am doing nothing’; when he sees,
hears, touches, smells, eats, moves, sleeps, breathes, speaks,
takes, ejects, opens his eyes or closes them, he holds that it
is only the senses acting upon the objects of the senses.” He
himself, safe in the immutable, unmodified soul, is beyond the
grip of the three gunas, trigun.ātı̄ta; he is neither sattwic, rajasic
nor tamasic; he sees with a clear untroubled spirit the alternations of the natural modes and qualities in his action, their
rhythmic play of light and happiness, activity and force, rest and
inertia. This superiority of the calm soul observing its action but
not involved in it, this traigun.ātı̄tya, is also a high sign of the
divine worker. By itself the idea might lead to a doctrine of the
mechanical determinism of Nature and the perfect aloofness and
irresponsibility of the soul; but the Gita effectively avoids this
fault of an insufficient thought by its illumining supertheistic
idea of the Purushottama. It makes it clear that it is not in the
end Nature which mechanically determines its own action; it is
the will of the Supreme which inspires her; he who has already
slain the Dhritarashtrians, he of whom Arjuna is only the human instrument, a universal Soul, a transcendent Godhead is the
master of her labour. The reposing of works in the Impersonal
is a means of getting rid of the personal egoism of the doer, but
the end is to give up all our actions to that great Lord of all,
sarva-loka-maheśvara. “With a consciousness identified with the
Self, renouncing all thy actions into Me, mayi sarvān.i karmān.i
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sannyasyādhyātmacetasā, freed from personal hopes and desires, from the thought of ‘I’ and ‘mine’, delivered from the fever
of the soul, fight,” work, do my will in the world. The Divine
motives, inspires, determines the entire action; the human soul
impersonal in the Brahman is the pure and silent channel of his
power; that power in the Nature executes the divine movement.
Such only are the works of the liberated soul, muktasya karma,
for in nothing does he act from a personal inception; such are the
actions of the accomplished Karmayogin. They rise from a free
spirit and disappear without modifying it, like waves that rise
and disappear on the surface of conscious, immutable depths.
Gata-saṅgasya muktasya jñānāvasthita-cetasah., yajñāyācaratah.
karma samagraṁ pravilı̄yate.
XIX
Equality
S
INCE knowledge, desirelessness, impersonality, equality,
the inner self-existent peace and bliss, freedom from or at
least superiority to the tangled interlocking of the three
modes of Nature are the signs of the liberated soul, they must
accompany it in all its activities. They are the condition of that
unalterable calm which this soul preserves in all the movement,
all the shock, all the clash of forces which surround it in the
world. That calm reflects the equable immutability of the Brahman in the midst of all mutations, and it belongs to the indivisible
and impartial Oneness which is for ever immanent in all the
multiplicities of the universe. For an equal and all-equalising
spirit is that Oneness in the midst of the million differences and
inequalities of the world; and equality of the spirit is the sole real
equality. For in all else in existence there can only be similarity,
adjustment and balance; but even in the greatest similarities
of the world we find difference of inequality and difference of
unlikeness and the adjusted balancings of the world can only
come about by a poising of combined unequal weights.
Hence the immense importance attached by the Gita in its
elements of Karmayoga to equality; it is the nodus of the free
spirit’s free relations with the world. Self-knowledge, desirelessness, impersonality, bliss, freedom from the modes of Nature,
when withdrawn into themselves, self-absorbed, inactive, have
no need of equality; for they take no cognisance of the things
in which the opposition of equality and inequality arises. But
the moment the spirit takes cognisance of and deals with the
multiplicities, personalities, differences, inequalities of the action of Nature, it has to effectuate these other signs of its free
status by this one manifesting sign of equality. Knowledge is
the consciousness of unity with the One; and in relation with
the many different beings and existences of the universe it must
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show itself by an equal oneness with all. Impersonality is the one
immutable spirit’s superiority to the variations of its multiple
personality in the world; in its dealings with the personalities of
the universe it must show itself in the equal and impartial spirit
of its action with regard to all, however various that action may
be made by the variety of relations into which it is moulded or
of the conditions under which it has to take place. So Krishna
in the Gita says that none is dear to him, none hated, to all he
is equal in spirit; yet is the God-lover the special receiver of his
grace, because the relation he has created is different and the one
impartial Lord of all yet meets each soul according to its way of
approach to him. Desirelessness is the illimitable Spirit’s superiority to the limiting attraction of the separate objects of desire in
the world; when it has to enter into relations with those objects,
it must show it either by an equal and impartial indifference in
their possession or by an equal and impartial unattached delight
in all and love for all which, because it is self-existent, does not
depend upon possession or non-possession, but is in its essence
unperturbed and immutable. For the spirit’s bliss is in itself, and
if this bliss is to enter into relations with things and creatures,
it is only in this way that it can manifest its free spirituality.
Traigun.ātı̄tya, transcendence of the gunas, is the unperturbed
spirit’s superiority to that flux of action of the modes of Nature
which is in its constant character perturbed and unequal; if it has
to enter into relations with the conflicting and unequal activities
of Nature, if the free soul is to allow its nature any action at all,
it must show its superiority by an impartial equality towards all
activities, results or happenings.
Equality is the sign and also for the aspirant the test. Where
there is inequality in the soul, there there is in evidence some
unequal play of the modes of Nature, motion of desire, play
of personal will, feeling and action, activity of joy and grief or
that disturbed and disturbing delight which is not true spiritual
bliss but a mental satisfaction bringing in its train inevitably
a counterpart or recoil of mental dissatisfaction. Where there
is inequality of soul, there there is deviation from knowledge,
loss of steadfast abiding in the all-embracing and all-reconciling
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oneness of the Brahman and unity of things. By his equality the
Karmayogin knows in the midst of his action that he is free.
It is the spiritual nature of the equality enjoined, high and
universal in its character and comprehension, which gives its
distinctive note to the teaching of the Gita in this matter. For
otherwise the mere teaching of equality in itself as the most
desirable status of the mind, feelings and temperament in which
we rise superior to human weakness, is by no means peculiar
to the Gita. Equality has always been held up to admiration
as the philosophic ideal and the characteristic temperament of
the sages. The Gita takes up indeed this philosophic ideal, but
carries it far beyond into a higher region where we find ourselves
breathing a larger and purer air. The Stoic poise, the philosophic
poise of the soul are only its first and second steps of ascension
out of the whirl of the passions and the tossings of desire to a
serenity and bliss, not of the Gods, but of the Divine himself in
his supreme self-mastery. The Stoic equality, making character its
pivot, founds itself upon self-mastery by austere endurance; the
happier and serener philosophic equality prefers self-mastery by
knowledge, by detachment, by a high intellectual indifference
seated above the disturbances to which our nature is prone,
udāsı̄navad āsı̄nah., as the Gita expresses it; there is also the
religious or Christian equality which is a perpetual kneeling or
a prostrate resignation and submission to the will of God. These
are the three steps and means towards divine peace, heroic endurance, sage indifference, pious resignation, titiks.ā, udāsı̄natā,
namas or nati. The Gita takes them all in its large synthetic
manner and weaves them into its upward soul-movement, but
it gives to each a profounder root, a larger outlook, a more
universal and transcendent significance. For to each it gives the
values of the spirit, its power of spiritual being beyond the strain
of character, beyond the difficult poise of the understanding,
beyond the stress of the emotions.
The ordinary human soul takes a pleasure in the customary
disturbances of its nature-life; it is because it has this pleasure
and because, having it, it gives a sanction to the troubled play
of the lower nature that the play continues perpetually; for the
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Prakriti does nothing except for the pleasure and with the sanction of its lover and enjoyer, the Purusha. We do not recognise
this truth because under the actual stroke of the adverse disturbance, smitten by grief, pain, discomfort, misfortune, failure,
defeat, blame, dishonour, the mind shrinks back from the blow,
while it leaps eagerly to the embrace of the opposite and pleasurable disturbances, joy, pleasure, satisfactions of all kinds,
prosperity, success, victory, glory, praise; but this does not alter
the truth of the soul’s pleasure in life which remains constant
behind the dualities of the mind. The warrior does not feel
physical pleasure in his wounds or find mental satisfaction in
his defeats; but he has a complete delight in the godhead of
battle which brings to him defeat and wounds as well as the
joy of victory, and he accepts the chances of the former and
the hope of the latter as part of the mingled weft of war, the
thing which the delight in him pursues. Even, wounds bring him
a joy and pride in memory, complete when the pain of them
has passed, but often enough present even while it is there and
actually fed by the pain. Defeat keeps for him the joy and pride
of indomitable resistance to a superior adversary, or, if he is of a
baser kind, the passions of hatred and revenge which also have
their darker and crueller pleasures. So it is with the pleasure of
the soul in the normal play of our life.
The mind recoils by pain and dislike from the adverse
strokes of life; that is Nature’s device for enforcing a principle
of self-protection, jugupsā, so that the vulnerable nervous and
bodily parts of us may not unduly rush upon self-destruction
to embrace it: it takes joy in the favourable touches of life;
that is Nature’s lure of rajasic pleasure, so that the force in the
creature may overcome the tamasic tendencies of inertia and
inactivity and be impelled fully towards action, desire, struggle,
success, and by its attachment to these things her ends may be
worked out. Our secret soul takes a pleasure in this strife and
effort, and even a pleasure in adversity and suffering, which can
be complete enough in memory and retrospect, but is present
too behind at the time and often even rises to the surface of
the afflicted mind to support it in its passion; but what really
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attracts the soul is the whole mingled weft of the thing we call
life with all its disturbance of struggle and seeking, its attractions
and repulsions, its offer and its menace, its varieties of every
kind. To the rajasic desire-soul in us a monotonous pleasure,
success without struggle, joy without a shadow must after a
time become fatiguing, insipid, cloying; it needs a background
of darkness to give full value to its enjoyment of light: for the
happiness it seeks and enjoys is of that very nature, it is in
its very essence relative and dependent on the perception and
experience of its opposite. The joy of the soul in the dualities is
the secret of the mind’s pleasure in living.
Ask it to rise out of all this disturbance to the unmingled
joy of the pure bliss-soul which all the time secretly supports its
strength in the struggle and makes its own continued existence
possible, — it will draw back at once from the call. It does not
believe in such an existence; or it believes that it would not be
life, that it would not be at all the varied existence in the world
around it in which it is accustomed to take pleasure; it would
be something tasteless and without savour. Or it feels that the
effort would be too difficult for it; it recoils from the struggle of
the ascent, although in reality the spiritual change is not at all
more difficult than the realisation of the dreams the desire-soul
pursues, nor entails more struggle and labour in the attainment
than the tremendous effort which the desire-soul expends in its
passionate chase after its own transient objects of pleasure and
desire. The true cause of its unwillingness is that it is asked to
rise above its own atmosphere and breathe a rarer and purer
air of life, whose bliss and power it cannot realise and hardly
even conceives as real, while the joy of this lower turbid nature
is to it the one thing familiar and palpable. Nor is this lower
satisfaction in itself a thing evil and unprofitable; it is rather the
condition for the upward evolution of our human nature out of
the tamasic ignorance and inertia to which its material being is
most subject; it is the rajasic stage of the graded ascent of man
towards the supreme self-knowledge, power and bliss. But if we
rest eternally on this plane, the madhyamā gatih. of the Gita, our
ascent remains unfinished, the evolution of the soul incomplete.
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Through the sattwic being and nature to that which is beyond
the three gunas lies the way of the soul to its perfection.
The movement which will lead us out of the disturbances
of the lower nature must be necessarily a movement towards
equality in the mind, in the emotional temperament, in the soul.
But it is to be noted that, although in the end we must arrive
at a superiority to all the three gunas of the lower nature, it
is yet in its incipience by a resort to one or other of the three
that the movement must begin. The beginning of equality may
be sattwic, rajasic or tamasic; for there is a possibility in the
human nature of a tamasic equality. It may be purely tamasic,
the heavy equability of a vital temperament rendered inertly irresponsive to the shocks of existence by a sort of dull insensibility
undesirous of the joy of life. Or it may result from a weariness
of the emotions and desires accumulated by a surfeit and satiety
of the pleasure or else, on the contrary, a disappointment and a
disgust and shrinking from the pain of life, a lassitude, a fear and
horror and dislike of the world: it is then in its nature a mixed
movement, rajaso-tamasic, but the lower quality predominates.
Or, approaching the sattwic principle, it may aid itself by the
intellectual perception that the desires of life cannot be satisfied,
that the soul is too weak to master life, that the whole thing is
nothing but sorrow and transient effort and nowhere in it is there
any real truth or sanity or light or happiness; this is the sattwotamasic principle of equality and is not so much equality, though
it may lead to that, as indifference or equal refusal. Essentially,
the movement of tamasic equality is a generalisation of Nature’s
principle of jugupsā or self-protecting recoil extended from the
shunning of particular painful effects to a shunning of the whole
life of Nature itself as in sum leading to pain and self-tormenting
and not to the delight which the soul demands.
In tamasic equality by itself there is no real liberation; but it
can be made a powerful starting-point, if, as in Indian asceticism,
it is turned into the sattwic by the perception of the greater existence, the truer power, the higher delight of the immutable Self
above Nature. The natural turn of such a movement, however,
is towards Sannyasa, the renunciation of life and works, rather
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than to that union of inner renunciation of desire with continued
activity in the world of Nature which the Gita advocates. The
Gita, however, admits and makes room for this movement; it
allows as a recoiling starting-point the perception of the defects
of the world-existence, birth and disease and death and old age
and sorrow, the historic starting-point of the Buddha, janmamr.tyu-jarā-vyādhi-duh.kha-dos.ānudarśanam, and it accepts the
effort of those whose self-discipline is motived by a desire for
release, even in this spirit, from the curse of age and death,
jarā-maran.a-moks.āya mām āśritya yatanti ye. But that, to be of
any profit, must be accompanied by the sattwic perception of a
higher state and the taking delight and refuge in the existence of
the Divine, mām āśritya. Then the soul by its recoil comes to a
greater condition of being, lifted beyond the three gunas and free
from birth and death and age and grief, and enjoys the immortality of its self-existence, janma-mr.tyu-jarā-duh.khair vimukto
’mr.tam aśnute. The tamasic unwillingness to accept the pain
and effort of life is indeed by itself a weakening and degrading
thing, and in this lies the danger of preaching to all alike the
gospel of asceticism and world-disgust, that it puts the stamp of
a tamasic weakness and shrinking on unfit souls, confuses their
understanding, buddhibhedaṁ janayet, diminishes the sustained
aspiration, the confidence in living, the power of effort which the
soul of man needs for its salutary, its necessary rajasic struggle
to master its environment, without really opening to it — for it
is yet incapable of that — a higher goal, a greater endeavour,
a mightier victory. But in souls that are fit this tamasic recoil
may serve a useful spiritual purpose by slaying their rajasic
attraction, their eager preoccupation with the lower life which
prevents the sattwic awakening to a higher possibility. Seeking
then for a refuge in the void they have created, they are able to
hear the divine call, “O soul that findest thyself in this transient
and unhappy world, turn and put thy delight in Me,” anityam
asukhaṁ lokam imaṁ prāpya bhajasva mām.
Still, in this movement, the equality consists only in an equal
recoil from all that constitutes the world; and it arrives at indifference and aloofness, but does not include that power to
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accept equally all the touches of the world pleasurable or painful
without attachment or disturbance which is a necessary element
in the discipline of the Gita. Therefore, even if we begin with the
tamasic recoil, — which is not at all necessary, — it can only be
as a first incitement to a greater endeavour, not as a permanent
pessimism. The real discipline begins with the movement to mastery over these things from which we were first inclined merely
to flee. It is here that the possibility of a kind of rajasic equality
comes in, which is at its lowest the strong nature’s pride in selfmastery, self-control, superiority to passion and weakness; but
the Stoic ideal seizes upon this point of departure and makes it
the key to an entire liberation of the soul from subjection to all
weakness of its lower nature. As the tamasic inward recoil is a
generalisation of Nature’s principle of jugupsā or self-protection
from suffering, so the rajasic upward movement is a generalisation of Nature’s other principle of the acceptance of struggle and
effort and the innate impulse of life towards mastery and victory; but it transfers the battle to the field where alone complete
victory is possible. Instead of a struggle for scattered outward
aims and transient successes, it proposes nothing less than the
conquest of Nature and the world itself by a spiritual struggle
and an inner victory. The tamasic recoil turns from both the
pains and pleasures of the world to flee from them; the rajasic
movement turns upon them to bear, master and rise superior to
them. The Stoic self-discipline calls desire and passion into its
embrace of the wrestler and crushes them between its arms, as
did old Dhritarashtra in the epic the iron image of Bhima. It
endures the shock of things painful and pleasurable, the causes
of the physical and mental affections of the nature, and breaks
their effects to pieces; it is complete when the soul can bear all
touches without being pained or attracted, excited or troubled.
It seeks to make man the conqueror and king of his nature.
The Gita, making its call on the warrior nature of Arjuna,
starts with this heroic movement. It calls on him to turn on the
great enemy desire and slay it. Its first description of equality is
that of the Stoic philosopher. “He whose mind is undisturbed in
the midst of sorrows and amid pleasures is free from desire, from
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whom liking and fear and wrath have passed away, is the sage
of settled understanding. Who in all things is without affection
though visited by this good or that evil and neither hates nor
rejoices, his intelligence sits firmly founded in wisdom.” If one
abstains from food, it says, giving a physical example, the object
of sense ceases to affect, but the affection itself of the sense, the
rasa, remains; it is only when, even in the exercise of the sense,
it can keep back from seeking its sensuous aim in the object,
artha, and abandon the affection, the desire for the pleasure of
taste, that the highest level of the soul is reached. It is by using
the mental organs on the objects, “ranging over them with the
senses,” vis.ayān indriyaiś caran, but with senses subject to the
self, freed from liking and disliking, that one gets into a large
and sweet clearness of soul and temperament in which passion
and grief find no place. All desires have to enter into the soul, as
waters into the sea, and yet it has to remain immovable, filled
but not disturbed: so in the end all desires can be abandoned.
To be freed from wrath and passion and fear and attraction
is repeatedly stressed as a necessary condition of the liberated
status, and for this we must learn to bear their shocks, which
cannot be done without exposing ourselves to their causes. “He
who can bear here in the body the velocity of wrath and desire,
is the Yogin, the happy man.” Titiks.ā, the will and power to
endure, is the means. “The material touches which cause heat
and cold, happiness and pain, things transient which come and
go, these learn to endure. For the man whom these do not
trouble nor pain, the firm and wise who is equal in pleasure
and suffering, makes himself apt for immortality.” The equalsouled has to bear suffering and not hate, to receive pleasure and
not rejoice. Even the physical affections are to be mastered by
endurance and this too is part of the Stoic discipline. Age, death,
suffering, pain are not fled from, but accepted and vanquished
by a high indifference.1 Not to flee appalled from Nature in her
1
Dhı̄ras tatra na muhyati, says the Gita; the strong and wise soul is not perplexed, troubled or moved by them. But still they are accepted only to be conquered,
jarā-maran.a-moks.āya yatanti.
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lower masks, but to meet and conquer her is the true instinct of
the strong nature, purus.ars.abha, the leonine soul among men.
Thus compelled, she throws aside her mask and reveals to him
his true nature as the free soul, not her subject but her king and
lord, svarāt., samrāt..
But the Gita accepts this Stoic discipline, this heroic philosophy, on the same condition that it accepts the tamasic recoil,
— it must have above it the sattwic vision of knowledge, at its
root the aim at self-realisation and in its steps the ascent to the
divine Nature. A Stoic discipline which merely crushed down
the common affections of our human nature, — although less
dangerous than a tamasic weariness of life, unfruitful pessimism
and sterile inertia, because it would at least increase the power
and self-mastery of the soul, — would still be no unmixed good,
since it might lead to insensibility and an inhuman isolation
without giving the true spiritual release. The Stoic equality is
justified as an element in the discipline of the Gita because it
can be associated with and can help to the realisation of the
free immutable Self in the mobile human being, paraṁ dr.s.t.vā,
and to status in that new self-consciousness, es.ā brāhmı̄ sthitih..
“Awakening by the understanding to the Highest which is beyond even the discerning mind, put force on the self by the
self to make it firm and still, and slay this enemy who is so
hard to assail, Desire.” Both the tamasic recoil of escape and
the rajasic movement of struggle and victory are only justified
when they look beyond themselves through the sattwic principle
to the self-knowledge which legitimises both the recoil and the
struggle.
The pure philosopher, the thinker, the born sage not only relies upon the sattwic principle in him as his ultimate justification,
but uses it from the beginning as his instrument of self-mastery.
He starts from the sattwic equality. He too observes the transitoriness of the material and external world and its failure to
satisfy the desires or to give the true delight, but this causes in
him no grief, fear or disappointment. He observes all with an eye
of tranquil discernment and makes his choice without repulsion
or perplexity. “The enjoyments born of the touches of things are
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causes of sorrow, they have a beginning and an end; therefore
the sage, the man of awakened understanding, budhah., does not
place his delight in these.” “The self in him is unattached to the
touches of external things; he finds his happiness in himself.”
He sees, as the Gita puts it, that he is himself his own enemy
and his own friend, and therefore he takes care not to dethrone
himself by casting his being into the hands of desire and passion,
nātmānam avasādayet, but delivers himself out of that imprisonment by his own inner power, uddhared ātmanātmānam; for
whoever has conquered his lower self, finds in his higher self
his best friend and ally. He becomes satisfied with knowledge,
master of his senses, a Yogin by sattwic equality, — for equality is
Yoga, samatvaṁ yoga ucyate, — regarding alike clod and stone
and gold, tranquil and self-poised in heat and cold, suffering and
happiness, honour and disgrace. He is equal in soul to friend and
enemy and to neutral and indifferent, because he sees that these
are transitory relations born of the changing conditions of life.
Even by the pretensions of learning and purity and virtue and
the claims to superiority which men base upon these things, he
is not led away. He is equal-souled to all men, to the sinner and
the saint, to the virtuous, learned and cultured Brahmin and the
fallen outcaste. All these are the Gita’s descriptions of the sattwic
equality, and they sum up well enough what is familiar to the
world as the calm philosophic equality of the sage.
Where then is the difference between this and the larger
equality taught by the Gita? It lies in the difference between
the intellectual and philosophic discernment and the spiritual,
the Vedantic knowledge of unity on which the Gita founds its
teaching. The philosopher maintains his equality by the power
of the buddhi, the discerning mind; but even that by itself is a
doubtful foundation. For, though master of himself on the whole
by a constant attention or an acquired habit of mind, in reality he
is not free from his lower nature, and it does actually assert itself
in many ways and may at any moment take a violent revenge for
its rejection and suppression. For, always, the play of the lower
nature is a triple play, and the rajasic and tamasic qualities are
ever lying in wait for the sattwic man. “Even the mind of the
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wise man who labours for perfection is carried away by the
vehement insistence of the senses.” Perfect security can only be
had by resorting to something higher than the sattwic quality,
something higher than the discerning mind, to the Self, — not
the philosopher’s intelligent self, but the divine sage’s spiritual
self which is beyond the three gunas. All must be consummated
by a divine birth into the higher spiritual nature.
And the philosopher’s equality is like the Stoic’s, like the
world-fleeing ascetic’s, inwardly a lonely freedom, remote and
aloof from men; but the man born to the divine birth has found
the Divine not only in himself, but in all beings. He has realised
his unity with all and his equality is therefore full of sympathy
and oneness. He sees all as himself and is not intent on his
lonely salvation; he even takes upon himself the burden of their
happiness and sorrow by which he is not himself affected or
subjected. The perfect sage, the Gita more than once repeats,
is ever engaged with a large equality in doing good to all creatures and makes that his occupation and delight, sarvabhūtahite
ratah.. The perfect Yogin is no solitary musing on the Self in his
ivory tower of spiritual isolation, but yuktah. kr.tsna-karma-kr.t,
a many-sided universal worker for the good of the world, for
God in the world. For he is a bhakta, a lover and devotee of
the Divine, as well as a sage and a Yogin, a lover who loves
God wherever he finds Him and who finds Him everywhere;
and what he loves, he does not disdain to serve, nor does action
carry him away from the bliss of union, since all his acts proceed
from the One in him and to the One in all they are directed. The
equality of the Gita is a large synthetic equality in which all is
lifted up into the integrality of the divine being and the divine
nature.
XX
Equality and Knowledge
Y
OGA and knowledge are, in this early part of the Gita’s
teaching, the two wings of the soul’s ascent. By Yoga is
meant union through divine works done without desire,
with equality of soul to all things and all men, as a sacrifice to the
Supreme, while knowledge is that on which this desirelessness,
this equality, this power of sacrifice is founded. The two wings
indeed assist each other’s flight; acting together, yet with a subtle
alternation of mutual aid, like the two eyes in a man which
see together because they see alternately, they increase one another mutually by interchange of substance. As the works grow
more and more desireless, equal-minded, sacrificial in spirit, the
knowledge increases; with the increase of the knowledge the soul
becomes firmer in the desireless, sacrificial equality of its works.
The sacrifice of knowledge, says the Gita therefore, is greater
than any material sacrifice. “Even if thou art the greatest doer of
sin beyond all sinners, thou shalt cross over all the crookedness
of evil in the ship of knowledge. . . . There is nothing in the
world equal in purity to knowledge.” By knowledge desire and
its first-born child, sin, are destroyed. The liberated man is able
to do works as a sacrifice because he is freed from attachment
through his mind, heart and spirit being firmly founded in selfknowledge, gata-saṅgasya jñānāvasthita-cetasah.. All his work
disappears completely as soon as done, suffers laya, as one
might say, in the being of the Brahman, pravilı̄yate; it has no
reactionary consequence on the soul of the apparent doer. The
work is done by the Lord through his Nature, it is no longer
personal to the human instrument. The work itself becomes but
power of the nature and substance of the being of the Brahman.
It is in this sense that the Gita is speaking when it says that
all the totality of work finds its completion, culmination, end
in knowledge, sarvaṁ karmākhilaṁ jñāne parisamāpyate. “As
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a fire kindled turns to ashes its fuel, so the fire of knowledge
turns all works to ashes.” By this it is not at all meant that when
knowledge is complete, there is cessation from works. What
is meant is made clear by the Gita when it says that he who
has destroyed all doubt by knowledge and has by Yoga given
up all works and is in possession of the Self is not bound by
his works, yoga-sannyasta-karmān.am ātmavantaṁ na karmān.i
nibadhnanti, and that he whose self has become the self of all
existences, acts and yet is not affected by his works, is not caught
in them, receives from them no soul-ensnaring reaction, kurvann
api na lipyate. Therefore, it says, the Yoga of works is better than
the physical renunciation of works, because, while Sannyasa is
difficult for embodied beings who must do works so long as
they are in the body, Yoga of works is entirely sufficient and
it rapidly and easily brings the soul to Brahman. That Yoga of
works is, we have seen, the offering of all action to the Lord,
which induces as its culmination an inner and not an outer, a
spiritual, not a physical giving up of works into the Brahman,
into the being of the Lord, brahman.i ādhāya karmān.i, mayi
sannyasya. When works are thus “reposed on the Brahman,”
the personality of the instrumental doer ceases; though he acts,
he does nothing; for he has given up not only the fruits of his
works, but the works themselves and the doing of them to the
Lord. The Divine then takes the burden of works from him; the
Supreme becomes the doer and the act and the result.
This knowledge of which the Gita speaks, is not an intellectual activity of the mind; it is a luminous growth into the
highest state of being by the outshining of the light of the divine
sun of Truth, “that Truth, the Sun lying concealed in the darkness” of our ignorance of which the Rigveda speaks, tat satyaṁ
sūryaṁ tamasi ks.iyantam. The immutable Brahman is there in
the spirit’s skies above this troubled lower nature of the dualities,
untouched either by its virtue or by its sin, accepting neither our
sense of sin nor our self-righteousness, untouched by its joy
and its sorrow, indifferent to our joy in success and our grief
in failure, master of all, supreme, all-pervading, prabhu vibhu,
calm, strong, pure, equal in all things, the source of Nature,
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not the direct doer of our works, but the witness of Nature and
her works, not imposing on us either the illusion of being the
doer, for that illusion is the result of the ignorance of this lower
Nature. But this freedom, mastery, purity we cannot see; we are
bewildered by the natural ignorance which hides from us the
eternal self-knowledge of the Brahman secret within our being.
But knowledge comes to its persistent seeker and removes the
natural self-ignorance; it shines out like a long-hidden sun and
lights up to our vision that self-being supreme beyond the dualities of this lower existence, ādityavat prakāśayati tat param. By a
long whole-hearted endeavour, by directing our whole conscious
being to that, by making that our whole aim, by turning it into
the whole object of our discerning mind and so seeing it not only
in ourselves but everywhere, we become one thought and self
with that, tad-buddhayas tad-ātmānah., we are washed clean of
all the darkness and suffering of the lower man by the waters of
knowledge,1 jñāna-nirdhūta-kalmas.āh..
The result is, says the Gita, a perfect equality to all things
and all persons; and then only can we repose our works completely in the Brahman. For the Brahman is equal, samaṁ
brahma, and it is only when we have this perfect equality, sāmye
sthitaṁ manah., “seeing with an equal eye the learned and
cultured Brahmin, the cow, the elephant, the dog, the outcaste”
and knowing all as one Brahman, that we can, living in that
oneness, see like the Brahman our works proceeding from the
nature freely without any fear of attachment, sin or bondage. Sin
and stain then cannot be; for we have overcome that creation
full of desire and its works and reactions which belongs to
the ignorance, tair jitah. sargah., and living in the supreme and
divine Nature there is no longer fault or defect in our works;
for these are created by the inequalities of the ignorance. The
equal Brahman is faultless, nirdos.aṁ hi samaṁ brahma, beyond
the confusion of good and evil, and living in the Brahman we
1
The Rigveda so speaks of the streams of the Truth, the waters that have perfect
knowledge, the waters that are full of the divine sunlight, r.tasya dhārāh., āpo vicetasah.,
svarvatı̄r apah.. What are here metaphors, are there concrete symbols.
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too rise beyond good and evil; we act in that purity, stainlessly,
with an equal and single purpose of fulfilling the welfare of
all existences, ks.ı̄n.a-kalmas.āh. sarvabhūta-hite ratāh.. The Lord
in our hearts is in the ignorance also the cause of our actions,
but through his Maya, through the egoism of our lower nature
which creates the tangled web of our actions and brings back
upon our egoism the recoil of their tangled reactions affecting
us inwardly as sin and virtue, affecting us outwardly as suffering
and pleasure, evil fortune and good fortune, the great chain of
Karma. When we are freed by knowledge, the Lord, no longer
hidden in our hearts, but manifest as our supreme self, takes up
our works and uses us as faultless instruments, nimitta-mātram,
for the helping of the world. Such is the intimate union between
knowledge and equality; knowledge here in the buddhi reflected
as equality in the temperament; above, on a higher plane of
consciousness, knowledge as the light of the Being, equality as
the stuff of the Nature.
Always in this sense of a supreme self-knowledge is this
word jñāna used in Indian philosophy and Yoga; it is the light
by which we grow into our true being, not the knowledge by
which we increase our information and our intellectual riches; it
is not scientific or psychological or philosophic or ethical or
aesthetic or worldly and practical knowledge. These too no
doubt help us to grow, but only in the becoming, not in the
being; they enter into the definition of Yogic knowledge only
when we use them as aids to know the Supreme, the Self, the
Divine, — scientific knowledge, when we can get through the
veil of processes and phenomena and see the one Reality behind
which explains them all; psychological knowledge, when we
use it to know ourselves and to distinguish the lower from the
higher, so that this we may renounce and into that we may
grow; philosophical knowledge, when we turn it as a light upon
the essential principles of existence so as to discover and live
in that which is eternal; ethical knowledge, when by it having
distinguished sin from virtue we put away the one and rise above
the other into the pure innocence of the divine Nature; aesthetic
knowledge, when we discover by it the beauty of the Divine;
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knowledge of the world, when we see through it the way of the
Lord with his creatures and use it for the service of the Divine
in man. Even then they are only aids; the real knowledge is
that which is a secret to the mind, of which the mind only gets
reflections, but which lives in the spirit.
The Gita in describing how we come by this knowledge, says
that we get first initiation into it from the men of knowledge
who have seen, not those who know merely by the intellect,
its essential truths; but the actuality of it comes from within
ourselves: “the man who is perfected by Yoga, finds it of himself in the self by the course of Time,” it grows within him,
that is to say, and he grows into it as he goes on increasing
in desirelessness, in equality, in devotion to the Divine. It is
only of the supreme knowledge that this can altogether be said;
the knowledge which the intellect of man amasses, is gathered
laboriously by the senses and the reason from outside. To get
this other knowledge, self-existent, intuitive, self-experiencing,
self-revealing, we must have conquered and controlled our mind
and senses, saṁyatendriyah., so that we are no longer subject to
their delusions, but rather the mind and senses become its pure
mirror; we must have fixed our whole conscious being on the
truth of that supreme reality in which all exists, tat-parah., so
that it may display in us its luminous self-existence.
Finally, we must have a faith which no intellectual doubt
can be allowed to disturb, śraddhāvān labhate jñānam. “The
ignorant who has not faith, the soul of doubt goeth to perdition;
neither this world, nor the supreme world, nor any happiness
is for the soul full of doubts.” In fact, it is true that without
faith nothing decisive can be achieved either in this world or for
possession of the world above, and that it is only by laying hold
of some sure basis and positive support that man can attain any
measure of terrestrial or celestial success and satisfaction and
happiness; the merely sceptical mind loses itself in the void. But
still in the lower knowledge doubt and scepticism have their
temporary uses; in the higher they are stumbling-blocks: for
there the whole secret is not the balancing of truth and error,
but a constantly progressing realisation of revealed truth. In
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intellectual knowledge there is always a mixture of falsehood
or incompleteness which has to be got rid of by subjecting the
truth itself to sceptical inquiry; but in the higher knowledge
falsehood cannot enter and that which intellect contributes by
attaching itself to this or that opinion, cannot be got rid of by
mere questioning, but will fall away of itself by persistence in
realisation. Whatever incompleteness there is in the knowledge
attained, it must be got rid of, not by questioning in its roots
what has already been realised, but by proceeding to further and
more complete realisation through a deeper, higher and wider
living in the Spirit. And what is not yet realised must be prepared
for by faith, not by sceptical questioning, because this truth is
one which the intellect cannot give and which is indeed often
quite opposed to the ideas in which the reasoning and logical
mind gets entangled: it is not a truth which has to be proved,
but a truth which has to be lived inwardly, a greater reality
into which we have to grow. Finally, it is in itself a self-existent
truth and would be self-evident if it were not for the sorceries
of the ignorance in which we live; the doubts, the perplexities
which prevent us from accepting and following it, arise from that
ignorance, from the sense-bewildered, opinion-perplexed heart
and mind, living as they do in a lower and phenomenal truth and
therefore questioning the higher realities, ajñāna-sambhūtaṁ
hr.tsthaṁ saṁśayam. They have to be cut away by the sword
of knowledge, says the Gita, by the knowledge that realises,
by resorting constantly to Yoga, that is, by living out the union
with the Supreme whose truth being known all is known, yasmin
vijñāte sarvaṁ vijñātam.
The higher knowledge we then get is that which is to the
knower of Brahman his constant vision of things when he lives
uninterruptedly in the Brahman, brahmavid brahman.i sthitah..
That is not a vision or knowledge or consciousness of Brahman
to the exclusion of all else, but a seeing of all in Brahman and as
the Self. For, it is said, the knowledge by which we rise beyond
all relapse back into the bewilderment of our mental nature, is
“that by which thou shalt see all existences without exception
in the Self, then in Me.” Elsewhere the Gita puts it more largely,
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“Equal-visioned everywhere, he sees the Self in all existences and
all existences in the Self. He who sees Me everywhere and all and
each in Me, is never lost to Me nor I to him. He who has reached
oneness and loves Me in all beings, that Yogin, howsoever he
lives and acts, is living and acting in Me. O Arjuna, he who
sees all equally everywhere as himself, whether it be happiness
or suffering, I hold him to be the supreme Yogin.” That is the
old Vedantic knowledge of the Upanishads which the Gita holds
up constantly before us; but it is its superiority to other later
formulations of it that it turns persistently this knowledge into
a great practical philosophy of divine living. Always it insists on
the relation between this knowledge of oneness and Karmayoga,
and therefore on the knowledge of oneness as the basis of a
liberated action in the world. Whenever it speaks of knowledge,
it turns at once to speak of equality which is its result; whenever
it speaks of equality, it turns to speak too of the knowledge
which is its basis. The equality it enjoins does not begin and end
in a static condition of the soul useful only for self-liberation;
it is always a basis of works. The peace of the Brahman in the
liberated soul is the foundation; the large, free, equal, worldwide action of the Lord in the liberated nature radiates the
power which proceeds from that peace; these two made one
synthesise divine works and God-knowledge.
We see at once what a profound extension we get here
for the ideas which otherwise the Gita has in common with
other systems of philosophic, ethical or religious living. Endurance, philosophic indifference, resignation are, we have said,
the foundation of three kinds of equality; but the Gita’s truth
of knowledge not only gathers them all up together, but gives
them an infinitely profound, a magnificently ample significance.
The Stoic knowledge is that of the soul’s power of self-mastery
by fortitude, an equality attained by a struggle with one’s nature, maintained by a constant vigilance and control against its
natural rebellions: it gives a noble peace, an austere happiness,
but not the supreme joy of the liberated self living not by a
rule, but in the pure, easy, spontaneous perfection of its divine
being, so that “however it may act and live, it acts and lives
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in the Divine,” because here perfection is not only attained but
possessed in its own right and has no longer to be maintained by
effort, for it has become the very nature of the soul’s being. The
Gita accepts the endurance and fortitude of our struggle with the
lower nature as a preliminary movement; but if a certain mastery
comes by our individual strength, the freedom of mastery only
comes by our union with God, by a merging or dwelling of the
personality in the one divine Person and the loss of the personal
will in the divine Will. There is a divine Master of Nature and her
works, above her though inhabiting her, who is our highest being
and our universal self; to be one with him is to make ourselves
divine. By union with God we enter into a supreme freedom
and a supreme mastery. The ideal of the Stoic, the sage who is
king because by self-rule he becomes master also of outward
conditions, resembles superficially the Vedantic idea of the selfruler and all-ruler, svarāt. samrāt.; but it is on a lower plane.
The Stoic kingship is maintained by a force put upon self and
environment; the entirely liberated kingship of the Yogin exists
naturally by the eternal royalty of the divine nature, a union
with its unfettered universality, a finally unforced dwelling in
its superiority to the instrumental nature through which it acts.
His mastery over things is because he has become one soul with
all things. To take an image from Roman institutions, the Stoic
freedom is that of the libertus, the freedman, who is still really
a dependent on the power that once held him enslaved; his is
a freedom allowed by Nature because he has merited it. The
freedom of the Gita is that of the freeman, the true freedom
of the birth into the higher nature, self-existent in its divinity.
Whatever he does and however he lives, the free soul lives in
the Divine; he is the privileged child of the mansion, bālavat,
who cannot err or fall because all he is and does is full of the
Perfect, the All-blissful, the All-loving, the All-beautiful. The
kingdom which he enjoys, rājyaṁ samr.ddham, is a sweet and
happy dominion of which it may be said, in the pregnant phrase
of the Greek thinker, “The kingdom is of the child.”
The knowledge of the philosopher is that of the true nature
of mundane existence, the transience of outward things, the
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vanity of the world’s differences and distinctions, the superiority
of the inner calm, peace, light, self-dependence. It is an equality
of philosophic indifference; it brings a high calm, but not the
greater spiritual joy; it is an isolated freedom, a wisdom like that
of the Lucretian sage high in his superiority upon the cliff-top
whence he looks down on men tossed still upon the tempestuous
waters from which he has escaped, — in the end something after
all aloof and ineffective. The Gita admits the philosophic motive
of indifference as a preliminary movement; but the indifference
to which it finally arrives, if indeed that inadequate word can be
at all applied, has nothing in it of the philosophic aloofness. It
is indeed a position as of one seated above, udāsı̄navat, but as
the Divine is seated above, having no need at all in the world,
yet he does works always and is present everywhere supporting,
helping, guiding the labour of creatures. This equality is founded
upon oneness with all beings. It brings in what is wanting to the
philosophic equality; for its soul is the soul of peace, but also it is
the soul of love. It sees all beings without exception in the Divine,
it is one self with the Self of all existences and therefore it is in
supreme sympathy with all of them. Without exception, aśes.en.a,
not only with all that is good and fair and pleases; nothing and
no one, however vile, fallen, criminal, repellent in appearance,
can be excluded from this universal, this whole-souled sympathy
and spiritual oneness. Here there is no room, not merely for
hatred or anger or uncharitableness, but for aloofness, disdain
or any petty pride of superiority. A divine compassion for the
ignorance of the struggling mind, a divine will to pour forth on
it all light and power and happiness there will be, indeed, for the
apparent man; but for the divine Soul within him there will be
more, there will be adoration and love. For from all, from the
thief and the harlot and the outcaste as from the saint and the
sage, the Beloved looks forth and cries to us, “This is I.” “He
who loves Me in all beings,” — what greater word of power for
the utmost intensities and profundities of divine and universal
love, has been uttered by any philosophy or any religion?
Resignation is the basis of a kind of religious equality,
submission to the divine will, a patient bearing of the cross, a
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submissive forbearance. In the Gita this element takes the more
ample form of an entire surrender of the whole being to God. It
is not merely a passive submission, but an active self-giving; not
only a seeing and an accepting of the divine Will in all things, but
a giving up of one’s own will to be the instrument of the Master
of works, and this not with the lesser idea of being a servant of
God, but, eventually at least, of such a complete renunciation
both of the consciousness and the works to him that our being
becomes one with his being and the impersonalised nature only
an instrument and nothing else. All result good or bad, pleasing
or unpleasing, fortunate or unfortunate, is accepted as belonging
to the Master of our actions, so that finally not only are grief and
suffering borne, but they are banished: a perfect equality of the
emotional mind is established. There is no assumption of personal will in the instrument; it is seen that all is already worked
out in the omniscient prescience and omnipotent effective power
of the universal Divine and that the egoism of men cannot alter
the workings of that Will. Therefore, the final attitude is that
enjoined on Arjuna in a later chapter, “All has been already
done by Me in my divine will and foresight; become only the
occasion, O Arjuna,” nimitta-mātraṁ bhava savyasācin. This
attitude must lead finally to an absolute union of the personal
with the Divine Will and, with the growth of knowledge, bring
about a faultless response of the instrument to the divine Power
and Knowledge. A perfect, an absolute equality of self-surrender,
the mentality a passive channel of the divine Light and Power,
the active being a mightily effective instrument for its work
in the world, will be the poise of this supreme union of the
Transcendent, the universal and the individual.
Equality too there will be with regard to the action of others
upon us. Nothing that they can do will alter the inner oneness,
love, sympathy which arises from the perception of the one Self
in all, the Divine in all beings. But a resigned forbearance and
submission to them and their deeds, a passive non-resistance,
will be no necessary part of the action; it cannot be, since a
constant instrumental obedience to the divine and universal Will
must mean in the shock of opposite forces that fill the world a
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conflict with personal wills which seek rather their own egoistic
satisfaction. Therefore Arjuna is bidden to resist, to fight, to conquer; but, to fight without hatred or personal desire or personal
enmity or antagonism, since to the liberated soul these feelings
are impossible. To act for the lokasaṅgraha, impersonally, for
the keeping and leading of the peoples on the path to the divine
goal, is a rule which rises necessarily from the oneness of the
soul with the Divine, the universal Being, since that is the whole
sense and drift of the universal action. Nor does it conflict with
our oneness with all beings, even those who present themselves
here as opponents and enemies. For the divine goal is their goal
also, since it is the secret aim of all, even of those whose outward
minds, misled by ignorance and egoism, would wander from the
path and resist the impulsion. Resistance and defeat are the best
outward service that can be done to them. By this perception
the Gita avoids the limiting conclusion which might have been
drawn from a doctrine of equality impracticably overriding all
relations and of a weakening love without knowledge, while it
keeps the one thing essential unimpaired. For the soul oneness
with all, for the heart calm universal love, sympathy, compassion, but for the hands freedom to work out impersonally the
good, not of this or that person only without regard to or to the
detriment of the divine plan, but the purpose of the creation, the
progressing welfare and salvation of men, the total good of all
existences.
Oneness with God, oneness with all beings, the realisation
of the eternal divine unity everywhere and the drawing onwards
of men towards that oneness are the law of life which arises
from the teachings of the Gita. There can be none greater, wider,
more profound. Liberated oneself, to live in this oneness, to
help mankind on the path that leads towards it and meanwhile
to do all works for God and help man also to do with joy and
acceptance all the works to which he is called, kr.tsna-karma-kr.t,
sarvakarmān.i jos.ayan, no greater or more liberal rule of divine
works can be given. This freedom and this oneness are the secret
goal of our human nature and the ultimate will in the existence
of the race. It is that to which it must turn for the happiness all
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mankind is now vainly seeking, when once men lift their eyes
and their hearts to see the Divine in them and around, in all and
everywhere, sarves.u, sarvatra, and learn that it is in him they
live, while this lower nature of division is only a prison-wall
which they must break down or at best an infant-school which
they must outgrow, so that they may become adult in nature
and free in spirit. To be made one self with God above and God
in man and God in the world is the sense of liberation and the
secret of perfection.
XXI
The Determinism of Nature
W
HEN we can live in the higher Self by the unity of
works and self-knowledge, we become superior to
the method of the lower workings of Prakriti. We
are no longer enslaved to Nature and her gunas, but, one with
the Ishwara, the master of our nature, we are able to use her
without subjection to the chain of Karma, for the purposes of
the Divine Will in us; for that is what the greater Self in us is, he
is the Lord of her works and unaffected by the troubled stress
of her reactions. The soul ignorant in Nature, on the contrary, is
enslaved by that ignorance to her modes, because it is identified
there, not felicitously with its true self, not with the Divine who
is seated above her, but stupidly and unhappily with the egomind which is a subordinate factor in her operations in spite
of the exaggerated figure it makes, a mere mental knot and
point of reference for the play of the natural workings. To break
this knot, no longer to make the ego the centre and beneficiary
of our works, but to derive all from and refer all to the divine
Supersoul is the way to become superior to all the restless trouble
of Nature’s modes. For it is to live in the supreme consciousness,
of which the ego-mind is a degradation, and to act in an equal
and unified Will and Force and not in the unequal play of the
gunas which is a broken seeking and striving, a disturbance, an
inferior Maya.
The passages in which the Gita lays stress on the subjection
of the ego-soul to Nature, have by some been understood as
the enunciation of an absolute and a mechanical determinism
which leaves no room for any freedom within the cosmic existence. Certainly, the language it uses is emphatic and seems very
absolute. But we must take, here as elsewhere, the thought of the
Gita as a whole and not force its affirmations in their solitary
sense quite detached from each other, — as indeed every truth,
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213
however true in itself, yet, taken apart from others which at
once limit and complete it, becomes a snare to bind the intellect
and a misleading dogma; for in reality each is one thread of
a complex weft and no thread must be taken apart from the
weft. Everything in the Gita is even so interwoven and must be
understood in its relation to the whole. The Gita itself makes
a distinction between those who have not the knowledge of
the whole, akr.tsnavidah., and are misled by the partial truths of
existence, and the Yogin who has the synthetic knowledge of the
totality, kr.tsna-vit. To see all existence steadily and see it whole
and not be misled by its conflicting truths, is the first necessity
for the calm and complete wisdom to which the Yogin is called
upon to rise. A certain absolute freedom is one aspect of the
soul’s relations with Nature at one pole of our complex being;
a certain absolute determinism by Nature is the opposite aspect
at its opposite pole; and there is also a partial and apparent,
therefore an unreal eidolon of liberty which the soul receives
by a contorted reflection of these two opposite truths in the
developing mentality. It is the latter to which we ordinarily give,
more or less inaccurately, the name of free will; but the Gita
regards nothing as freedom which is not a complete liberation
and mastery.
We have always to keep in mind the two great doctrines
which stand behind all the Gita’s teachings with regard to
the soul and Nature, — the Sankhya truth of the Purusha and
Prakriti corrected and completed by the Vedantic truth of the
threefold Purusha and the double Prakriti of which the lower
form is the Maya of the three gunas and the higher is the
divine nature and the true soul-nature. This is the key which
reconciles and explains what we might have otherwise to leave as
contradictions and inconsistencies. There are, in fact, different
planes of our conscious existence, and what is practical truth on
one plane ceases to be true, because it assumes a quite different
appearance, as soon as we rise to a higher level from which we
can see things more in the whole. Recent scientific discovery
has shown that man, animal, plant and even the metal have
essentially the same vital reactions and they would, therefore,
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if each has a certain kind of what for want of a better word
we must call nervous consciousness, possess the same basis of
mechanical psychology. Yet if each of these could give its own
mental account of what it experiences, we should have four
quite different and largely contradictory statements of the same
reactions and the same natural principles, because they get, as
we rise in the scale of being, a different meaning and value
and have to be judged by a different outlook. So it is with the
levels of the human soul. What we now call in our ordinary
mentality our free will and have a certain limited justification for
so calling it, yet appears to the Yogin who has climbed beyond
and to whom our night is day and our day night, not free will
at all, but a subjection to the modes of Nature. He regards the
same facts, but from the higher outlook of the whole-knower,
kr.tsna-vit, while we view it altogether from the more limited
mentality of our partial knowledge, akr.tsnavidah., which is an
ignorance. What we vaunt of as our freedom is to him bondage.
The perception of the ignorance of our assumption of freedom while one is all the time in the meshes of this lower nature, is
the view-point at which the Gita arrives and it is in contradiction
to this ignorant claim that it affirms the complete subjection of
the ego-soul on this plane to the gunas. “While the actions are
being entirely done by the modes of Nature,” it says, “he whose
self is bewildered by egoism thinks that it is his ‘I’ which is doing
them. But one who knows the true principles of the divisions of
the modes and of works, realises that it is the modes which are
acting and reacting on each other and is not caught in them
by attachment. Those who are bewildered by the modes, get
attached to the modes and their works; dull minds, not knowers
of the whole, let not the knower of the whole disturb them
in their mental standpoint. Giving up thy works to Me, free
from desire and egoism, fight delivered from the fever of thy
soul.” Here there is the clear distinction between two levels of
consciousness, two standpoints of action, that of the soul caught
in the web of its egoistic nature and doing works with the idea,
but not the reality of free will, under the impulsion of Nature,
and that of the soul delivered from its identification with the
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215
ego, observing, sanctioning and governing the works of Nature
from above her.
We speak of the soul being subject to Nature; but on the
other hand the Gita in distinguishing the properties of the soul
and Nature affirms that while Nature is the executrix, the soul is
always the lord, ı̄śvara. It speaks here of the self being bewildered
by egoism, but the real Self to the Vedantin is the divine, eternally
free and self-aware. What then is this self that is bewildered by
Nature, this soul that is subject to her? The answer is that we are
speaking here in the common parlance of our lower or mental
view of things; we are speaking of the apparent self, of the apparent soul, not of the real self, not of the true Purusha. It is really
the ego which is subject to Nature, inevitably, because it is itself
part of Nature, one functioning of her machinery; but when the
self-awareness in the mind-consciousness identifies itself with
the ego, it creates the appearance of a lower self, an ego-self.
And so too what we think of ordinarily as the soul is really the
natural personality, not the true Person, the Purusha, but the
desire-soul in us which is a reflection of the consciousness of
the Purusha in the workings of Prakriti: it is, in fact, itself only
an action of the three modes and therefore a part of Nature.
Thus there are, we may say, two souls in us, the apparent or
desire-soul, which changes with the mutations of the gunas and
is entirely constituted and determined by them, and the free and
eternal Purusha not limited by Nature and her gunas. We have
two selves, the apparent self, which is only the ego, that mental
centre in us which takes up this mutable action of Prakriti, this
mutable personality, and which says “I am this personality, I
am this natural being who am doing these works,” — but the
natural being is simply Nature, a composite of the gunas, — and
the true self which is, indeed, the upholder, the possessor and the
lord of Nature and figured in her, but is not itself the mutable
natural personality. The way to be free must then be to get rid
of the desires of this desire-soul and the false self-view of this
ego. “Having become free from desire and egoism,” cries the
Teacher, “fight with all the fever of thy soul passed away from
thee,” — nirāśı̄r nirmamo bhūtvā.
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This view of our being starts from the Sankhya analysis of
the dual principle in our nature, Purusha and Prakriti. Purusha is
inactive, akartā; Prakriti is active, kartrı̄: Purusha is the being full
of the light of consciousness; Prakriti is the Nature, mechanical,
reflecting all her works in the conscious witness, the Purusha.
Prakriti works by the inequality of her three modes, gunas, in
perpetual collision and intermixture and mutation with each
other; and by her function of ego-mind she gets the Purusha to
identify himself with all this working and so creates the sense
of active, mutable, temporal personality in the silent eternity of
the Self. The impure natural consciousness overclouds the pure
soul-consciousness; the mind forgets the Person in the ego and
the personality; we suffer the discriminating intelligence to be
carried away by the sense-mind and its outgoing functions and
by the desire of the life and the body. So long as the Purusha
sanctions this action, ego and desire and ignorance must govern
the natural being.
But if this were all, then the only remedy would be to withdraw altogether the sanction, suffer or compel all our nature
by this withdrawal to fall into a motionless equilibrium of the
three gunas and so cease from all action. But this is precisely
the remedy, — though it is undoubtedly a remedy, one which
abolishes, we might say, the patient along with the disease, —
which the Gita constantly discourages. Especially, to resort to a
tamasic inaction is just what the ignorant will do if this truth is
thrust upon them; the discriminating mind in them will fall into
a false division, a false opposition, buddhibheda; their active
nature and their intelligence will be divided against each other
and produce a disturbance and confusion without true issue, a
false and self-deceiving line of action, mithyācāra, or else a mere
tamasic inertia, cessation of works, diminution of the will to life
and action, not therefore a liberation, but rather a subjection to
the lowest of the three gunas, to tamas, the principle of ignorance
and of inertia. Or else they will not be able to understand at all,
they will find fault with this higher teaching, assert against it
their present mental experience, their ignorant idea of free will
and, yet more confirmed by the plausibility of their logic in their
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217
bewilderment and the deception of ego and desire, lose their
chance of liberation in a deeper, more obstinate confirmation of
the ignorance.
In fact, these higher truths can only be helpful, because there
only they are true to experience and can be lived, on a higher
and vaster plane of consciousness and being. To view these
truths from below is to mis-see, misunderstand and probably
to misuse them. It is a higher truth that the distinction of good
and evil is indeed a practical fact and law valid for the egoistic
human life which is the stage of transition from the animal to
the divine, but on a higher plane we rise beyond good and evil,
are above their duality even as the Godhead is above it. But
the unripe mind, seizing on this truth without rising from the
lower consciousness where it is not practically valid, will simply
make it a convenient excuse for indulging its Asuric propensities,
denying the distinction between good and evil altogether and
falling by self-indulgence deeper into the morass of perdition,
sarva-jñāna-vimūd.hān nas.t.ān acetasah.. So too with this truth
of the determinism of Nature; it will be mis-seen and misused,
as those misuse it who declare that a man is what his nature has
made him and cannot do otherwise than as his nature compels
him. It is true in a sense, but not in the sense which is attached
to it, not in the sense that the ego-self can claim irresponsibility
and impunity for itself in its works; for it has will and it has
desire and so long as it acts according to its will and desire,
even though that be its nature, it must bear the reactions of its
Karma. It is in a net, if you will, a snare which may well seem
perplexing, illogical, unjust, terrible to its present experience, to
its limited self-knowledge, but a snare of its own choice, a net
of its own weaving.
The Gita says, indeed, “All existences follow their nature
and what shall coercing it avail?” which seems, if we take it by
itself, a hopelessly absolute assertion of the omnipotence of Nature over the soul; “even the man of knowledge acts according to
his own nature.” And on this it founds the injunction to follow
faithfully in our action the law of our nature. “Better is one’s own
law of works, svadharma, though in itself faulty than an alien
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law well wrought out; death in one’s own law of being is better,
perilous is it to follow an alien law.” What is precisely meant by
this svadharma we have to wait to see until we get to the more
elaborate disquisition in the closing chapters about Purusha and
Prakriti and the gunas; but certainly it does not mean that we
are to follow any impulse, even though evil, which what we call
our nature dictates to us. For between these two verses the Gita
throws in this further injunction, “In the object of this or that
sense liking and disliking are set in ambush; fall not into their
power, for they are the besetters of the soul in its path.” And
immediately after this, in answer to Arjuna’s objection who asks
him, if there is no fault in following our Nature, what are we
then to say of that in us which drives a man to sin, as if by force,
even against his own struggling will, the Teacher replies that this
is desire and its companion wrath, children of rajas, the second
guna, the principle of passion, and this desire is the soul’s great
enemy and has to be slain. Abstention from evil-doing it declares
to be the first condition for liberation, and always it enjoins selfmastery, self-control, saṁyama, control of the mind, senses, all
the lower being.
There is therefore a distinction to be made between what is
essential in the nature, its native and inevitable action, which it
avails not at all to repress, suppress, coerce, and what is accidental to it, its wanderings, confusions, perversions, over which
we must certainly get control. There is a distinction implied too
between coercion and suppression, nigraha, and control with
right use and right guidance, saṁyama. The former is a violence
done to the nature by the will, which in the end depresses the
natural powers of the being, ātmānam avasādayet; the latter is
the control of the lower by the higher self, which successfully
gives to those powers their right action and their maximum
efficiency, — yogah. karmasu kauśalam. This nature of saṁyama
is made very clear by the Gita in the opening of its sixth chapter,
“By the self thou shouldst deliver the self, thou shouldst not
depress and cast down the self (whether by self-indulgence or
suppression); for the self is the friend of the self and the self is
the enemy. To the man is his self a friend in whom the (lower)
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219
self has been conquered by the (higher) self, but to him who
is not in possession of his (higher) self, the (lower) self is as if
an enemy and it acts as an enemy.” When one has conquered
one’s self and attained to the calm of a perfect self-mastery and
self-possession, then is the supreme self in a man founded and
poised even in his outwardly conscious human being, samāhita.
In other words, to master the lower self by the higher, the natural
self by the spiritual is the way of man’s perfection and liberation.
Here then is a very great qualification of the determinism of
Nature, a precise limitation of its meaning and scope. How the
passage from subjection to mastery works out is best seen if we
observe the working of the gunas in the scale of Nature from
the bottom to the top. At the bottom are the existences in which
the principle of tamas is supreme, the beings who have not yet
attained to the light of self-consciousness and are utterly driven
by the current of Nature. There is a will even in the atom, but we
see clearly enough that it is not free will, because it is mechanical
and the atom does not possess the will, but is possessed by it.
Here the buddhi, the element of intelligence and will in Prakriti,
is actually and plainly what the Sankhya asserts it to be, jad.a,
a mechanical, even an inconscient principle in which the light
of the conscious Soul has not at all struggled to the surface: the
atom is not conscious of an intelligent will; tamas, the inert and
ignorant principle, has its grip on it, contains rajas, conceals
sattva within itself and holds a high holiday of mastery, Nature
compelling this form of existence to act with a stupendous force
indeed, but as a mechanical instrument, yantrārūd.haṁ māyayā.
Next, in the plant the principle of rajas has struggled to the
surface, with its power of life, with its capacity of the nervous
reactions which in us are recognisable as pleasure and suffering,
but sattva is quite involved, has not yet emerged to awaken
the light of a conscious intelligent will; all is still mechanical,
subconscient or half-conscient, tamas stronger than rajas, both
gaolers of the imprisoned sattwa.
In the animal, though tamas is still strong, though we may
still describe him as belonging to the tamasic creation, tāmasa
sarga, yet rajas prevails much more against tamas, brings with
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it its developed power of life, desire, emotion, passion, pleasure,
suffering, while sattwa, emerging, but still dependent on the
lower action, contributes to these the first light of the conscious
mind, the mechanical sense of ego, conscious memory, a certain
kind of thought, especially the wonders of instinct and animal
intuition. But as yet the buddhi, the intelligent will, has not
developed the full light of consciousness; therefore, no responsibility can be attributed to the animal for its actions. The tiger
can be no more blamed for killing and devouring than the atom
for its blind movements, the fire for burning and consuming or
the storm for its destructions. If it could answer the question, the
tiger would indeed say, like man, that it had free will, it would
have the egoism of the doer, it would say, “I kill, I devour”;
but we can see clearly enough that it is not really the tiger,
but Nature in the tiger that kills, it is Nature in the tiger that
devours; and if it refrains from killing or devouring, it is from
satiety, from fear or from indolence, from another principle of
Nature in it, from the action of the guna called tamas. As it was
Nature in the animal that killed, so it is Nature in the animal
that refrained from killing. Whatever soul is in it, sanctions
passively the action of Nature, is as much passive in its passion
and activity as in its indolence or inaction. The animal like the
atom acts according to the mechanism of its Nature, and not
otherwise, sadr.śaṁ ces.t.ate svasyāh. prakr.teh., as if mounted on
a machine, yantrārūd.ho māyayā.
Well, but in man at least there is another action, a free soul, a
free will, a sense of responsibility, a real doer other than Nature,
other than the mechanism of Maya? So it seems, because in man
there is a conscious intelligent will; buddhi is full of the light
of the observing Purusha, who through it, it seems, observes,
understands, approves or disapproves, gives or withholds the
sanction, seems indeed at last to begin to be the lord of his
nature. Man is not like the tiger or the fire or the storm; he
cannot kill and say as a sufficient justification, “I am acting
according to my nature”, and he cannot do it, because he has
not the nature and not, therefore, the law of action, svadharma,
of the tiger, storm or fire. He has a conscious intelligent will,
The Determinism of Nature
221
a buddhi, and to that he must refer his actions. If he does not
do so, if he acts blindly according to his impulses and passions,
then the law of his being is not rightly worked out, svadharmah.
su-anus.t.hitah., he has not acted according to the full measure
of his humanity, but even as might the animal. It is true that
the principle of rajas or the principle of tamas gets hold of his
buddhi and induces it to justify any and every action he commits
or any avoidance of action; but still the justification or at least
the reference to the buddhi must be there either before or after
the action is committed. And, besides, in man sattva is awake
and acts not only as intelligence and intelligent will, but as a
seeking for light, for right knowledge and right action according
to that knowledge, as a sympathetic perception of the existence
and claims of others, as an attempt to know the higher law of his
own nature, which the sattwic principle in him creates, and to
obey it, and as a conception of the greater peace and happiness
which virtue, knowledge and sympathy bring in their train. He
knows more or less imperfectly that he has to govern his rajasic
and tamasic by his sattwic nature and that thither tends the
perfection of his normal humanity.
But is the condition of the predominantly sattwic nature
freedom and is this will in man a free will? That the Gita from
the standpoint of a higher consciousness in which alone is true
freedom, denies. The buddhi or conscious intelligent will is still
an instrument of Nature and when it acts, even in the most
sattwic sense, it is still Nature which acts and the soul which
is carried on the wheel by Maya. At any rate, at least ninetenths of our freedom of will is a palpable fiction; that will is
created and determined not by its own self-existent action at
a given moment, but by our past, our heredity, our training,
our environment, the whole tremendous complex thing we call
Karma, which is, behind us, the whole past action of Nature
on us and the world converging in the individual, determining
what he is, determining what his will shall be at a given moment
and determining, as far as analysis can see, even its action at
that moment. The ego associates itself always with its Karma
and it says “I did” and “I will” and “I suffer”, but if it looks at
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itself and sees how it was made, it is obliged to say of man as
of the animal, “Nature did this in me, Nature wills in me”, and
if it qualifies by saying “my Nature”, that only means “Nature
as self-determined in this individual creature”. It was the strong
perception of this aspect of existence which compelled the Buddhists to declare that all is Karma and that there is no self in
existence, that the idea of self is only a delusion of the ego-mind.
When the ego thinks “I choose and will this virtuous and not
that evil action”, it is simply associating itself, somewhat like
the fly on the wheel, or rather as might a cog or other part of a
mechanism if it were conscious, with a predominant wave or a
formed current of the sattwic principle by which Nature chooses
through the buddhi one type of action in preference to another.
Nature forms itself in us and wills in us, the Sankhya would say,
for the pleasure of the inactive observing Purusha.
But even if this extreme statement has to be qualified, and
we shall see hereafter in what sense, still the freedom of our
individual will, if we choose to give it that name, is very relative
and almost infinitesimal, so much is it mixed up with other
determining elements. Its strongest power does not amount to
mastery. It cannot be relied upon to resist the strong wave of circumstance or of other nature which either overbears or modifies
or mixes up with it or at the best subtly deceives and circumvents
it. Even the most sattwic will is so overborne or mixed up with
or circumvented by the rajasic and tamasic gunas as to be only in
part sattwic, and thence arises that sufficiently strong element of
self-deception, of a quite involuntary and even innocent makebelieve and hiding from oneself which the merciless eye of the
psychologist detects even in the best human action. When we
think that we are acting quite freely, powers are concealed behind our action which escape the most careful self-introspection;
when we think that we are free from ego, the ego is there,
concealed, in the mind of the saint as in that of the sinner. When
our eyes are really opened on our action and its springs, we are
obliged to say with the Gita “gun.ā gun.es.u vartante”, “it was
the modes of Nature that were acting upon the modes.”
For this reason even a high predominance of the sattwic
The Determinism of Nature
223
principle does not constitute freedom. For, as the Gita points
out, the sattwa binds, as much as the other gunas, and binds
just in the same way, by desire, by ego; a nobler desire, a purer
ego, — but so long as in any form these two hold the being, there
is no freedom. The man of virtue, of knowledge, has his ego of
the virtuous man, his ego of knowledge, and it is that sattwic ego
which he seeks to satisfy; for his own sake he seeks virtue and
knowledge. Only when we cease to satisfy the ego, to think and
to will from the ego, the limited “I” in us, then is there a real
freedom. In other words, freedom, highest self-mastery begin
when above the natural self we see and hold the supreme Self
of which the ego is an obstructing veil and a blinding shadow.
And that can only be when we see the one Self in us seated
above Nature and make our individual being one with it in
being and consciousness and in its individual nature of action
only an instrument of a supreme Will, the one Will that is really
free. For that we must rise high above the three gunas, become
trigun.ātı̄ta; for that Self is beyond even the sattwic principle. We
have to climb to it through the sattwa, but we attain to it only
when we get beyond sattwa; we reach out to it from the ego,
but only reach it by leaving the ego. We are drawn towards it by
the highest, most passionate, most stupendous and ecstatic of all
desires; but we can securely live in it only when all desire drops
away from us. We have at a certain stage to liberate ourselves
even from the desire of our liberation.
XXII
Beyond the Modes of Nature
S
O FAR then extends the determinism of Nature, and what
it amounts to is this that the ego from which we act is
itself an instrument of the action of Prakriti and cannot
therefore be free from the control of Prakriti; the will of the
ego is a will determined by Prakriti, it is a part of the nature
as it has been formed in us by the sum of its own past action
and self-modification, and by the nature in us so formed and
the will in it so formed our present action also is determined. It
is said by some that the first initiating action is always free to
our choice however much all that follows may be determined by
that, and in this power of initiation and its effect on our future
lies our responsibility. But where is that first action in Nature
which has no determining past behind it, where that present
condition of our nature which is not in sum and detail the result
of the action of our past nature? We have that impression of
a free initial act because we are living at every moment from
our present on towards our future and we do not live back constantly from our present into our past, so that what is strongly
vivid to our minds is the present and its consequences while
we have a much less vivid hold of our present as entirely the
consequence of our past; this latter we are apt to look on as if
it were dead and done with. We speak and act as if we were
perfectly free in the pure and virgin moment to do what we
will with ourselves using an absolute inward independence of
choice. But there is no such absolute liberty, our choice has no
such independence.
Certainly, the will in us has always to choose between a
certain number of possibilities, for that is the way in which
Nature always acts; even our passivity, our refusal to will, is
itself a choice, itself an act of the will of Nature in us; even in
the atom there is a will always at its work. The whole difference
Beyond the Modes of Nature
225
is the extent to which we associate our idea of self with the
action of the will in Nature; when we so associate ourselves,
we think of it as our will and say that it is a free will and that
it is we who are acting. And error or not, illusion or not, this
idea of our will, of our action is not a thing of no consequence,
of no utility; everything in Nature has a consequence and a
utility. It is rather that process of our conscious being by which
Nature in us becomes more and more aware of and responsive
to the presence of the secret Purusha within her and opens by
that increase of knowledge to a greater possibility of action;
it is by the aid of the ego-idea and the personal will that she
raises herself to her own higher possibilities, rises out of the
sheer or else the predominant passivity of the tamasic nature
into the passion and the struggle of the rajasic nature and from
the passion and the struggle of the rajasic nature to the greater
light, happiness and purity of the sattwic nature. The relative
self-mastery gained by the natural man over himself is the dominion achieved by the higher possibilities of his nature over its
lower possibilities, and this is done in him when he associates
his idea of self with the struggle of the higher guna to get the
mastery, the predominance over the lower guna. The sense of
free will, illusion or not, is a necessary machinery of the action
of Nature, necessary for man during his progress, and it would
be disastrous for him to lose it before he is ready for a higher
truth. If it be said, as it has been said, that Nature deludes man
to fulfil her behests and that the idea of a free individual will is
the most powerful of these delusions, then it must also be said
that the delusion is for his good and without it he could not rise
to his full possibilities.
But it is not a sheer delusion, it is only an error of standpoint and an error of placement. The ego thinks that it is the
real self and acts as if it were the true centre of action and
as if all existed for its sake, and there it commits an error of
standpoint and placement. It is not wrong in thinking that there
is something or someone within ourselves, within this action of
our nature, who is the true centre of its action and for whom
all exists; but this is not the ego, it is the Lord secret within
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our hearts, the divine Purusha, and the Jiva, other than ego,
who is a portion of his being. The self-assertion of ego-sense is
the broken and distorted shadow in our minds of the truth that
there is a real Self within us which is the master of all and for
whom and at whose behest Nature goes about her works. So
too the ego’s idea of free will is a distorted and misplaced sense
of the truth that there is a free Self within us and that the will
in Nature is only a modified and partial reflection of its will,
modified and partial because it lives in the successive moments
of Time and acts by a constant series of modifications which
forget much of their own precedents and are only imperfectly
conscious of their own consequences and aims. But the Will
within, exceeding the moments of Time, knows all these, and the
action of Nature in us is an attempt, we might say, to work out
under the difficult conditions of a natural and egoistic ignorance
what is foreseen in full supramental light by the inner Will and
Knowledge.
But a time must come in our progress when we are ready to
open our eyes to the real truth of our being, and then the error
of our egoistic free will must fall away from us. The rejection
of the idea of egoistic free will does not imply a cessation of
action, because Nature is the doer and carries out her action
after this machinery is dispensed with even as she did before it
came into usage in the process of her evolution. In the man who
has rejected it, it may even be possible for her to develop a greater
action; for his mind may be more aware of all that his nature
is by the self-creation of the past, more aware of the powers
that environ and are working upon it to help or to hinder its
growth, more aware too of the latent greater possibilities which
it contains by virtue of all in it that is unexpressed, yet capable of
expression; and this mind may be a freer channel for the sanction
of the Purusha to the greater possibilities that it sees and a freer
instrument for the response of Nature, for her resultant attempt
at their development and realisation. But the rejection of free
will must not be a mere fatalism or idea of natural determinism
in the understanding without any vision of the real Self in us;
for then the ego still remains as our sole idea of self and, as that
Beyond the Modes of Nature
227
is always the instrument of Prakriti, we still act by the ego and
with our will as her instrument, and the idea in us brings no real
change, but only a modification of our intellectual attitude. We
shall have accepted the phenomenal truth of the determination
of our egoistic being and action by Nature, we shall have seen
our subjection: but we shall not have seen the unborn Self within
which is above the action of the gunas; we shall not have seen
wherein lies our gate of freedom. Nature and ego are not all we
are; there is the free soul, the Purusha.
But in what consists this freedom of the Purusha? The Purusha of the current Sankhya philosophy is free in the essence of
his being, but because he is the non-doer, akartā; and in so far as
he permits Nature to throw on the inactive Soul her shadow of
action, he becomes bound phenomenally by the actions of the
gunas and cannot recover his freedom except by dissociation
from her and by cessation of her activities. If then a man casts
from him the idea of himself as the doer or of the works as his, if,
as the Gita enjoins, he fixes himself in the view of himself as the
inactive non-doer, ātmānam akartāram, and all action as not his
own but Nature’s, as the play of her gunas, will not a like result
follow? The Sankhya Purusha is the giver of the sanction, but
a passive sanction only, anumati, the work is entirely Nature’s;
essentially he is the witness and sustainer, not the governing and
active consciousness of the universal Godhead. He is the Soul
that sees and accepts, as a spectator accepts the representation of
a play he is watching, not the Soul that both governs and watches
the play planned by himself and staged in his own being. If then
he withdraws the sanction, if he refuses to acknowledge the
illusion of doing by which the play continues, he ceases also to
be the sustainer and the action comes to a stop, since it is only
for the pleasure of the witnessing conscious Soul that Nature
performs it and only by his support that she can maintain it.
Therefore it is evident that the Gita’s conception of the relations
of the Purusha and Prakriti are not the Sankhya’s, since the same
movement leads to a quite different result, in one case to cessation of works, in the other to a great, a selfless and desireless, a
divine action. In the Sankhya Soul and Nature are two different
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entities, in the Gita they are two aspects, two powers of one selfexistent being; the Soul is not only giver of the sanction, but lord
of Nature, Ishwara, through her enjoying the play of the world,
through her executing divine will and knowledge in a scheme of
things supported by his sanction and existing by his immanent
presence, existing in his being, governed by the law of his being
and by the conscious will within it. To know, to respond to, to
live in the divine being and nature of this Soul is the object of
withdrawing from the ego and its action. One rises then above
the lower nature of the gunas to the higher divine nature.
The movement by which this ascension is determined results
from the complex poise of the Soul in its relations with Nature;
it depends on the Gita’s idea of the triple Purusha. The Soul that
immediately informs the action, the mutations, the successive
becomings of Nature, is the Kshara, that which seems to change
with her changes, to move in her motion, the Person who follows
in his idea of his being the changes of his personality brought
about by the continuous action of her Karma. Nature here is
Kshara, a constant movement and mutation in Time, a constant
becoming. But this Nature is simply the executive power of
the Soul itself; for only by what he is, can she become, only
according to the possibilities of his becoming, can she act; she
works out the becoming of his being. Her Karma is determined
by Swabhava, the own-nature, the law of self-becoming of the
soul, even though, because it is the agent and executive of the
becoming, the action rather seems often to determine the nature. According to what we are, we act, and by our action we
develop, we work out what we are. Nature is the action, the
mutation, the becoming, and it is the Power that executes all
these; but the Soul is the conscious Being from which that Power
proceeds, from whose luminous stuff of consciousness she has
drawn the variable will that changes and expresses its changes
in her actions. And this Soul is One and Many; it is the one
Life-being out of which all life is constituted and it is all these
living beings; it is the cosmic Existent and it is all this multitude
of cosmic existences, sarvabhūtāni, for all these are One; all
the many Purushas are in their original being the one and only
Beyond the Modes of Nature
229
Purusha. But the mechanism of the ego-sense in Nature, which
is part of her action, induces the mind to identify the soul’s
consciousness with the limited becoming of the moment, with
the sum of her active consciousness in a given field of space and
time, with the result from moment to moment of the sum of
her past actions. It is possible to realise in a way the unity of
all these beings even in Nature herself and to become aware of
a cosmic Soul which is manifest in the whole action of cosmic
Nature, Nature manifesting the Soul, the Soul constituting the
Nature. But this is to become aware only of the great cosmic
Becoming, which is not false or unreal, but the knowledge of
which alone does not give us the true knowledge of our Self; for
our true Self is always something more than this and something
beyond it.
For, beyond the soul manifest in Nature and bound up with
its action, is another status of the Purusha, which is entirely a status and not at all an action; that is the silent, the immutable, the
all-pervading, self-existent, motionless Self, sarvagatam acalam,
immutable Being and not Becoming, the Akshara. In the Kshara
the Soul is involved in the action of Nature, therefore it is concentrated, loses itself, as it were, in the moments of Time, in the
waves of the Becoming, not really, but only in appearance and
by following the current; in the Akshara Nature falls to silence
and rest in the Soul, therefore it becomes aware of its immutable
Being. The Kshara is the Sankhya’s Purusha when it reflects the
varied workings of the gunas of Nature, and it knows itself as
the Saguna, the Personal; the Akshara is the Sankhya’s Purusha
when these gunas have fallen into a state of equilibrium, and
it knows itself as the Nirguna, the Impersonal. Therefore while
the Kshara, associating itself with the work of Prakriti, seems
to be the doer of works, kartā, the Akshara dissociated from all
the workings of the gunas is the inactive non-doer, akartā, and
witness. The soul of man, when it takes the poise of the Kshara,
identifies itself with the play of personality and readily clouds its
self-knowledge with the ego-sense in Nature, so that he thinks
of himself as the ego-doer of works; when it takes its poise in
the Akshara, it identifies itself with the Impersonal and is aware
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of Nature as the doer and itself as the inactive witnessing Self,
akartāram. The mind of man has to tend to one of these poises,
it takes them as alternatives; it is bound by Nature to action in
the mutations of quality and personality or it is free from her
workings in immutable impersonality.
But these two, the status and immutability of the Soul and
the action of the Soul and its mutability in Nature, actually
coexist. And this would be an anomaly irreconcilable except by
some such theory as that of Maya or else of a double and divided
being, if there were not a supreme reality of the Soul’s existence
of which these are the two contrary aspects, but which is limited
by neither of them. We have seen that the Gita finds this in the Purushottama. The supreme Soul is the Ishwara, God, the Master
of all being, sarvaloka-maheśvara. He puts forth his own active
nature, his Prakriti, — svāṁ prakr.tim, says the Gita, — manifest
in the Jiva, worked out by the svabhāva, “own-becoming”, of
each Jiva according to the law of the divine being in it, the great
lines of which each Jiva must follow, but worked out too in the
egoistic nature by the bewildering play of the three gunas upon
each other, gun.ā gun.es.u vartante. That is the traigun.yamayı̄
māyā, the Maya hard for man to get beyond, duratyayā, — yet
can one get beyond it by transcending the three gunas. For while
all this is done by the Ishwara through his Nature-Power in the
Kshara, in the Akshara he is untouched, indifferent, regarding
all equally, extended within all, yet above all. In all three he is
the Lord, the supreme Ishwara in the highest, the presiding and
all-pervading Impersonality, prabhu and vibhu, in the Akshara,
and the immanent Will and present active Lord in the Kshara.
He is free in his impersonality even while working out the play
of his personality; he is not either merely impersonal or personal,
but one and the same being in two aspects; he is the impersonalpersonal, nirgun.o gun.ı̄, of the Upanishad. By him all has been
willed even before it is worked out, — as he says of the still living
Dhartarashtrians, “already have they been slain by Me,” mayā
nihatāh. pūrvam eva, — and the working out by Nature is only
the result of his Will; yet by virtue of his impersonality behind
he is not bound by his works, kartāram akartāram.
Beyond the Modes of Nature
231
But man as the individual self, owing to his ignorant selfidentification with the work and the becoming, as if that were all
his soul and not a power of his soul, a power proceeding from it,
is bewildered by the ego-sense. He thinks that it is he and others
who are doing all; he does not see that Nature is doing all and
that he is misrepresenting and disfiguring her works to himself
by ignorance and attachment. He is enslaved by the gunas, now
hampered in the dull case of tamas, now blown by the strong
winds of rajas, now limited by the partial lights of sattwa, not
distinguishing himself at all from the nature-mind which alone is
thus modified by the gunas. He is therefore mastered by pain and
pleasure, happiness and grief, desire and passion, attachment
and disgust: he has no freedom.
He must, to be free, get back from the Nature action to the
status of the Akshara; he will then be trigun.ātı̄ta, beyond the
gunas. Knowing himself as the Akshara Brahman, the unchanging Purusha, he will know himself as an immutable impersonal
self, the Atman, tranquilly observing and impartially supporting
the action, but himself calm, indifferent, untouched, motionless,
pure, one with all beings in their self, not one with Nature
and her workings. This self, though by its presence authorising
the works of Nature, though by its all-pervading existence supporting and consenting to them, prabhu vibhu, does not itself
create works or the state of the doer or the joining of the works
to their fruit, na kartr.tvaṁ na karmān.i sr.jati na karma-phalasaṁyogam, but only watches nature in the Kshara working out
these things, svabhāvas tu pravartate; it accepts neither the sin
nor the virtue of the living creatures born into this birth as its
own, nādatte kasyacit pāpaṁ na caiva sukr.tam; it preserves its
spiritual purity. It is the ego bewildered by ignorance which
attributes these things to itself, because it assumes the responsibility of the doer and chooses to figure as that and not as
the instrument of a greater power, which is all that it really is;
ajñānenāvr.taṁ jñānaṁ tena muhyanti jantavah.. By going back
into the impersonal self the soul gets back into a greater selfknowledge and is liberated from the bondage of the works of
Nature, untouched by her gunas, free from her shows of good
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and evil, suffering and happiness. The natural being, the mind,
body, life, still remain, Nature still works; but the inner being
does not identify himself with these, nor while the gunas play in
the natural being, does he rejoice or grieve. He is the calm and
free immutable Self observing all.
Is this the last state, the utmost possibility, the highest secret?
It cannot be, since this is a mixed or divided, not a perfectly harmonised status, a double, not a unified being, a freedom in the
soul, an imperfection in the Nature. It can only be a stage. What
then is there beyond it? One solution is that of the Sannyasin who
rejects the nature, the action altogether, so far at least as action
can be rejected, so that there may be an unmixed undivided
freedom; but this solution, though admitted, is not preferred by
the Gita. The Gita also insists on the giving up of actions, sarvakarmān.i sannyasya, but inwardly to the Brahman. Brahman in
the Kshara supports wholly the action of Prakriti, Brahman in
the Akshara, even while supporting, dissociates itself from the
action, preserves its freedom; the individual soul, unified with
the Brahman in the Akshara, is free and dissociated, yet, unified
with the Brahman in the Kshara, supports but is not affected.
This it can do best when it sees that both are aspects of the
one Purushottama. The Purushottama, inhabiting all existences
as the secret Ishwara, controls the Nature and by his will, now
no longer distorted and disfigured by the ego-sense, the Nature works out the actions by the swabhava; the individual soul
makes the divinised natural being an instrument of the divine
Will, nimitta-mātram. He remains even in action trigun.ātı̄ta,
beyond the gunas, free from the gunas, nistraigun.ya, he fulfils
entirely at last the early injunction of the Gita, nistraigun.yo
bhavārjuna. He is indeed still the enjoyer of the gunas, as is the
Brahman, though not limited by them, nirgun.aṁ gun.abhoktr.
ca, unattached, yet all-supporting, even as is that Brahman,
asaktaṁ sarvabhr.t: but the action of the gunas within him is
quite changed; it is lifted above their egoistic character and reactions. For he has unified his whole being in the Purushottama,
has assumed the divine being and the higher divine nature of
becoming, madbhāva, has unified even his mind and natural
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consciousness with the Divine, manmanā maccittah.. This change
is the final evolution of the nature and the consummation of the
divine birth, rahasyam uttamam. When it is accomplished, the
soul is aware of itself as the master of its nature and, grown a
light of the divine Light and will of the divine Will, is able to
change its natural workings into a divine action.
XXIII
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T
HE UNION of the soul with the Purushottama by a Yoga
of the whole being is the complete teaching of the Gita
and not only the union with the immutable Self as in the
narrower doctrine which follows the exclusive way of knowledge. That is why the Gita subsequently, after it has effected
the reconciliation of knowledge and works, is able to develop
the idea of love and devotion, unified with both works and
knowledge, as the highest height of the way to the supreme
secret. For if the union with the immutable Self were the sole
secret or the highest secret, that would not at all be possible; for
then at a given point our inner basis for love and devotion, no
less than our inner foundation of works, would crumble away
and collapse. Union utter and exclusive with the immutable
Self alone means the abolition of the whole point of view of
the mutable being, not only in its ordinary and inferior action
but in its very roots, in all that makes its existence possible,
not only in the works of its ignorance, but in the works of its
knowledge. It would mean the abolition of all that difference
in conscious poise and activity between the human soul and the
Divine which makes possible the play of the Kshara; for the
action of the Kshara would become then entirely a play of the
ignorance without any root or basis of divine reality in it. On
the contrary, union by Yoga with the Purushottama means the
knowledge and enjoyment of our oneness with him in our selfexistent being and of a certain differentiation in our active being.
It is the persistence of the latter in a play of divine works which
are urged by the motive power of divine love and constituted by a
perfected divine Nature, it is the vision of the Divine in the world
harmonised with a realisation of the Divine in the self which
makes action and devotion possible to the liberated man, and
not only possible but inevitable in the perfect mode of his being.
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But the direct way to union lies through the firm realisation
of the immutable Self, and it is the Gita’s insistence on this as a
first necessity, after which alone works and devotion can acquire
their whole divine meaning, that makes it possible for us to mistake its drift. For if we take the passages in which it insists most
rigorously upon this necessity and neglect to observe the whole
sequence of thought in which they stand, we may easily come to
the conclusion that it does really teach actionless absorption as
the final state of the soul and action only as a preliminary means
towards stillness in the motionless Immutable. It is in the close of
the fifth and throughout the sixth chapter that this insistence is
strongest and most comprehensive. There we get the description
of a Yoga which would seem at first sight to be incompatible
with works and we get the repeated use of the word Nirvana to
describe the status to which the Yogin arrives.
The mark of this status is the supreme peace of a calm selfextinction, śāntiṁ nirvān.a-paramām, and, as if to make it quite
clear that it is not the Buddhist’s Nirvana in a blissful negation
of being, but the Vedantic loss of a partial in a perfect being
that it intends, the Gita uses always the phrase brahma-nirvān.a,
extinction in the Brahman; and the Brahman here certainly seems
to mean the Immutable, to denote primarily at least the inner
timeless Self withdrawn from active participation even though
immanent in the externality of Nature. We have to see then
what is the drift of the Gita here, and especially whether this
peace is the peace of an absolute inactive cessation, whether the
self-extinction in the Akshara means the absolute excision of all
knowledge and consciousness of the Kshara and of all action in
the Kshara. We are accustomed indeed to regard Nirvana and
any kind of existence and action in the world as incompatible
and we might be inclined to argue that the use of the word is by
itself sufficient and decides the question. But if we look closely at
Buddhism, we shall doubt whether the absolute incompatibility
really existed even for the Buddhists; and if we look closely at
the Gita, we shall see that it does not form part of this supreme
Vedantic teaching.
The Gita after speaking of the perfect equality of the
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Brahman-knower who has risen into the Brahman-consciousness, brahmavid brahman.i sthitah., develops in nine verses that
follow its idea of Brahmayoga and of Nirvana in the Brahman.
“When the soul is no longer attached to the touches of outward
things,” it begins, “then one finds the happiness that exists in
the Self; such a one enjoys an imperishable happiness, because
his self is in Yoga, yukta, by Yoga with the Brahman.” The
non-attachment is essential, it says, in order to be free from
the attacks of desire and wrath and passion, a freedom without
which true happiness is not possible. That happiness and that
equality are to be gained entirely by man in the body: he is not
to suffer any least remnant of the subjection to the troubled
lower nature to remain in the idea that the perfect release will
come by a putting off of the body; a perfect spiritual freedom
is to be won here upon earth and possessed and enjoyed in
the human life, prāk śarı̄ra-vimoks.an.āt. It then continues, “He
who has the inner happiness and the inner ease and repose
and the inner light, that Yogin becomes the Brahman and
reaches self-extinction in the Brahman, brahma-nirvān.am.”
Here, very clearly, Nirvana means the extinction of the ego in
the higher spiritual, inner Self, that which is for ever timeless,
spaceless, not bound by the chain of cause and effect and the
changes of the world-mutation, self-blissful, self-illumined and
for ever at peace. The Yogin ceases to be the ego, the little
person limited by the mind and the body; he becomes the
Brahman; he is unified in consciousness with the immutable
divinity of the eternal Self which is immanent in his natural
being.
But is this a going in into some deep sleep of samadhi away
from all world-consciousness, or is it the preparatory movement
for a dissolution of the natural being and the individual soul into
some absolute Self who is utterly and for ever beyond Nature
and her works, laya, moks.a? Is that withdrawal necessary before
we can enter into Nirvana, or is Nirvana, as the context seems
to suggest, a state which can exist simultaneously with worldconsciousness and even in its own way include it? Apparently
the latter, for in the succeeding verse the Gita goes on to say,
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“Sages win Nirvana in the Brahman, they in whom the stains
of sin are effaced and the knot of doubt is cut asunder, masters
of their selves, who are occupied in doing good to all creatures,
sarvabhūta-hite ratāh..” That would almost seem to mean that to
be thus is to be in Nirvana. But the next verse is quite clear and
decisive, “Yatis (those who practise self-mastery by Yoga and
austerity) who are delivered from desire and wrath and have
gained self-mastery, for them Nirvana in the Brahman exists all
about them, encompasses them, they already live in it because
they have knowledge of the Self.” That is to say, to have knowledge and possession of the self is to exist in Nirvana. This is
clearly a large extension of the idea of Nirvana. Freedom from all
stain of the passions, the self-mastery of the equal mind on which
that freedom is founded, equality to all beings, sarvabhūtes.u,
and beneficial love for all, final destruction of that doubt and
obscurity of the ignorance which keeps us divided from the allunifying Divine and the knowledge of the One Self within us
and in all are evidently the conditions of Nirvana which are laid
down in these verses of the Gita, go to constitute it and are its
spiritual substance.
Thus Nirvana is clearly compatible with world-consciousness and with action in the world. For the sages who possess
it are conscious of and in intimate relation by works with the
Divine in the mutable universe; they are occupied with the good
of all creatures, sarvabhūta-hite. They have not renounced the
experiences of the Kshara Purusha, they have divinised them; for
the Kshara, the Gita tells us, is all existences, sarvabhūtāni, and
the doing universal good to all is a divine action in the mutability
of Nature. This action in the world is not inconsistent with living
in Brahman, it is rather its inevitable condition and outward result because the Brahman in whom we find Nirvana, the spiritual
consciousness in which we lose the separative ego-consciousness,
is not only within us but within all these existences, exists not
only above and apart from all these universal happenings, but
pervades them, contains them and is extended in them. Therefore by Nirvana in the Brahman must be meant a destruction
or extinction of the limited separative consciousness, falsifying
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and dividing, which is brought into being on the surface of
existence by the lower Maya of the three gunas, and entry into
Nirvana is a passage into this other true unifying consciousness
which is the heart of existence and its continent and its whole
containing and supporting, its whole original and eternal and
final truth. Nirvana when we gain it, enter into it, is not only
within us, but all around, abhito vartate, because this is not
only the Brahman-consciousness which lives secret within us,
but the Brahman-consciousness in which we live. It is the Self
which we are within, the supreme Self of our individual being
but also the Self which we are without, the supreme Self of the
universe, the self of all existences. By living in that self we live in
all, and no longer in our egoistic being alone; by oneness with
that self a steadfast oneness with all in the universe becomes
the very nature of our being and the root status of our active
consciousness and root motive of all our action.
But again we get immediately afterwards two verses which
might seem to lead away from this conclusion. “Having put
outside of himself all outward touches and concentrated the
vision between the eyebrows and made equal the prān.a and the
apāna moving within the nostrils, having controlled the senses,
the mind and the understanding, the sage devoted to liberation,
from whom desire and wrath and fear have passed away is
ever free.” Here we have a process of Yoga that brings in an
element which seems quite other than the Yoga of works and
other even than the pure Yoga of knowledge by discrimination
and contemplation; it belongs in all its characteristic features to
the system, introduces the psycho-physical askesis of Rajayoga.
There is the conquest of all the movements of the mind, cittavr.ttinirodha; there is the control of the breathing, Pranayama; there
is the drawing in of the sense and the vision. All of them are
processes which lead to the inner trance of Samadhi, the object
of all of them moks.a, and moks.a signifies in ordinary parlance
the renunciation not only of the separative ego-consciousness,
but of the whole active consciousness, a dissolution of our being
into the highest Brahman. Are we to suppose that the Gita gives
this process in that sense as the last movement of a release by
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dissolution or only as a special means and a strong aid to overcome the outward-going mind? Is this the finale, the climax, the
last word? We shall find reason to regard it as both a special
means, an aid, and at least one gate of a final departure, not
by dissolution, but by an uplifting to the supracosmic existence.
For even here in this passage this is not the last word; the last
word, the finale, the climax comes in a verse that follows and
is the last couplet of the chapter. “When a man has known
Me as the Enjoyer of sacrifice and tapasya (of all askesis and
energisms), the mighty lord of all the worlds, the friend of all
creatures, he comes by the peace.” The power of the Karmayoga
comes in again; the knowledge of the active Brahman, the cosmic
supersoul, is insisted on among the conditions of the peace of
Nirvana.
We get back to the great idea of the Gita, the idea of the Purushottama, — though that name is not given till close upon the
end, it is always that which Krishna means by his “I” and “Me”,
the Divine who is there as the one self in our timeless immutable
being, who is present too in the world, in all existences, in all
activities, the master of the silence and the peace, the master of
the power and the action, who is here incarnate as the divine
charioteer of the stupendous conflict, the Transcendent, the Self,
the All, the master of every individual being. He is the enjoyer
of all sacrifice and of all tapasya, therefore shall the seeker of
liberation do works as a sacrifice and as a tapasya; he is the
lord of all the worlds, manifested in Nature and in these beings,
therefore shall the liberated man still do works for the right
government and leading on of the peoples in these worlds, lokasaṅgraha; he is the friend of all existences, therefore is the sage
who has found Nirvana within him and all around, still and
always occupied with the good of all creatures, — even as the
Nirvana of Mahayana Buddhism took for its highest sign the
works of a universal compassion. Therefore too, even when he
has found oneness with the Divine in his timeless and immutable
self, is he still capable, since he embraces the relations also of
the play of Nature, of divine love for man and of love for the
Divine, of bhakti.
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That this is the drift of the meaning, becomes clearer when
we have fathomed the sense of the sixth chapter which is a large
comment on and a full development of the idea of these closing
verses of the fifth, — that shows the importance which the Gita
attaches to them. We shall therefore run as briefly as possible
through the substance of this sixth chapter. First the Teacher
emphasises — and this is very significant — his often repeated
asseveration about the real essence of Sannyasa, that it is an
inward, not an outward renunciation. “Whoever does the work
to be done without resort to its fruits, he is the Sannyasin and
the Yogin, not the man who lights not the sacrificial fire and does
not the works. What they have called renunciation (Sannyasa),
know to be in truth Yoga; for none becomes a Yogin who has not
renounced the desire-will in the mind.” Works are to be done,
but with what purpose and in what order? They are first to be
done while ascending the hill of Yoga, for then works are the
cause, kāran.am. The cause of what? The cause of self-perfection,
of liberation, of nirvana in the Brahman; for by doing works with
a steady practice of the inner renunciation this perfection, this
liberation, this conquest of the desire-mind and the ego-self and
the lower nature are easily accomplished.
But when one has got to the top? Then works are no longer
the cause; the calm of self-mastery and self-possession gained by
works becomes the cause. Again, the cause of what? Of fixity
in the Self, in the Brahman-consciousness and of the perfect
equality in which the divine works of the liberated man are
done. “For when one does not get attached to the objects of
sense or to works and has renounced all will of desire in the
mind, then is he said to have ascended to the top of Yoga.” That,
as we know already, is the spirit in which the liberated man does
works; he does them without desire and attachment, without the
egoistic personal will and the mental seeking which is the parent
of desire. He has conquered his lower self, reached the perfect
calm in which his highest self is manifest to him, that highest
self always concentrated in its own being, samāhita, in Samadhi,
not only in the trance of the inward-drawn consciousness, but
always, in the waking state of the mind as well, in exposure to
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241
the causes of desire and of the disturbance of calm, to grief and
pleasure, heat and cold, honour and disgrace, all the dualities,
śı̄tos.n.a-sukhaduh.khes.u tathā mānāpamānayoh.. This higher self
is the Akshara, kūt.astha, which stands above the changes and
the perturbations of the natural being; and the Yogin is said to
be in Yoga with it when he also is like it, kūt.astha, when he is
superior to all appearances and mutations, when he is satisfied
with self-knowledge, when he is equal-minded to all things and
happenings and persons.
But this Yoga is after all no easy thing to acquire, as Arjuna
indeed shortly afterwards suggests, for the restless mind is always liable to be pulled down from these heights by the attacks
of outward things and to fall back into the strong control of
grief and passion and inequality. Therefore, it would seem, the
Gita proceeds to give us in addition to its general method of
knowledge and works a special process of Rajayogic meditation
also, a powerful method of practice, abhyāsa, a strong way to
the complete control of the mind and all its workings. In this
process the Yogin is directed to practise continually union with
the Self so that that may become his normal consciousness. He
is to sit apart and alone, with all desire and idea of possession
banished from his mind, self-controlled in his whole being and
consciousness. “He should set in a pure spot his firm seat, neither
too high, nor yet too low, covered with a cloth, with a deer-skin,
with sacred grass, and there seated with a concentrated mind and
with the workings of the mental consciousness and the senses under control he should practise Yoga for self-purification, ātmaviśuddhaye.” The posture he takes must be the motionless erect
posture proper to the practice of Rajayoga; the vision should
be drawn in and fixed between the eye-brows, “not regarding
the regions.” The mind is to be kept calm and free from fear
and the vow of Brahmacharya observed; the whole controlled
mentality must be devoted and turned to the Divine so that the
lower action of the consciousness shall be merged in the higher
peace. For the object to be attained is the still peace of Nirvana.
“Thus always putting himself in Yoga by control of his mind
the Yogin attains to the supreme peace of Nirvana which has its
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foundation in Me, śāntiṁ nirvān.a-paramāṁ matsaṁsthām.”
This peace of Nirvana is reached when all the mental consciousness is perfectly controlled and liberated from desire and
remains still in the Self, when, motionless like the light of a lamp
in a windless place, it ceases from its restless action, shut in from
its outward motion, and by the silence and stillness of the mind
the Self is seen within, not disfigured as in the mind, but in the
Self, seen, not as it is mistranslated falsely or partially by the
mind and represented to us through the ego, but self-perceived
by the Self, svaprakāśa. Then the soul is satisfied and knows
its own true and exceeding bliss, not that untranquil happiness
which is the portion of the mind and the senses, but an inner and
serene felicity in which it is safe from the mind’s perturbations
and can no longer fall away from the spiritual truth of its being.
Not even the fieriest assault of mental grief can disturb it; for
mental grief comes to us from outside, is a reaction to external
touches, and this is the inner, the self-existent happiness of those
who no longer accept the slavery of the unstable mental reactions
to external touches. It is the putting away of the contact with
pain, the divorce of the mind’s marriage with grief, duh.khasaṁyoga-viyogam. The firm winning of this inalienable spiritual
bliss is Yoga, it is the divine union; it is the greatest of all gains
and the treasure beside which all others lose their value. Therefore is this Yoga to be resolutely practised without yielding to
any discouragement by difficulty or failure until the release, until
the bliss of Nirvana is secured as an eternal possession.
The main stress here has fallen on the stilling of the emotive
mind, the mind of desire and the senses which are the recipients
of outward touches and reply to them with our customary emotional reactions; but even the mental thought has to be stilled in
the silence of the self-existent being. First, all the desires born
of the desire-will have to be wholly abandoned without any
exception or residue and the senses have to be held in by the
mind so that they shall not run out to all sides after their usual
disorderly and restless habit; but next the mind itself has to
be seized by the buddhi and drawn inward. One should slowly
cease from mental action by a buddhi held in the grasp of fixity
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243
and having fixed the mind in the higher self one should not
think of anything at all. Whenever the restless and unquiet mind
goes forth, it should be controlled and brought into subjection
in the Self. When the mind is thoroughly quieted, then there
comes upon the Yogin the highest, stainless, passionless bliss of
the soul that has become the Brahman. “Thus freed from stain
of passion and putting himself constantly into Yoga, the Yogin
easily and happily enjoys the touch of the Brahman which is an
exceeding bliss.”
And yet the result is not, while one yet lives, a Nirvana
which puts away every possibility of action in the world, every relation with beings in the world. It would seem at first
that it ought to be so. When all the desires and passions have
ceased, when the mind is no longer permitted to throw itself
out in thought, when the practice of this silent and solitary
Yoga has become the rule, what farther action or relation with
the world of outward touches and mutable appearances is any
longer possible? No doubt, the Yogin for a time still remains in
the body, but the cave, the forest, the mountain-top seem now
the fittest, the only possible scene of his continued living and
constant trance of Samadhi his sole joy and occupation. But,
first, while this solitary Yoga is being pursued, the renunciation
of all other action is not recommended by the Gita. This Yoga,
it says, is not for the man who gives up sleep and food and play
and action, even as it is not for those who indulge too much in
these things of the life and the body; but the sleep and waking,
the food, the play, the putting forth of effort in works should
all be yukta. This is generally interpreted as meaning that all
should be moderate, regulated, done in fit measure, and that
may indeed be the significance. But at any rate when the Yoga is
attained, all this has to be yukta in another sense, the ordinary
sense of the word everywhere else in the Gita. In all states, in
waking and in sleeping, in food and play and action, the Yogin
will then be in Yoga with the Divine, and all will be done by
him in the consciousness of the Divine as the self and as the All
and as that which supports and contains his own life and his
action. Desire and ego and personal will and the thought of the
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mind are the motives of action only in the lower nature; when
the ego is lost and the Yogin becomes Brahman, when he lives in
and is, even, a transcendent and universal consciousness, action
comes spontaneously out of that, luminous knowledge higher
than the mental thought comes out of that, a power other and
mightier than the personal will comes out of that to do for him
his works and bring its fruits:1 personal action has ceased, all
has been taken up into the Brahman and assumed by the Divine,
mayi sannyasya karmān.i.
For when the Gita describes the nature of this self-realisation
and the result of the Yoga which comes by Nirvana of the separative ego-mind and its motives of thought and feeling and
action into the Brahman-consciousness, it includes the cosmic
sense, though lifted into a new kind of vision. “The man whose
self is in Yoga, sees the self in all beings and all beings in the self,
he sees all with an equal vision.” All that he sees is to him the
Self, all is his self, all is the Divine. But is there no danger, if he
dwells at all in the mutability of the Kshara, of his losing all the
results of this difficult Yoga, losing the Self and falling back into
the mind, of the Divine losing him and the world getting him, of
his losing the Divine and getting back in its place the ego and the
lower nature? No, says the Gita; “he who sees Me everywhere
and sees all in Me, to him I do not get lost, nor does he get lost
to Me.” For this peace of Nirvana, though it is gained through
the Akshara, is founded upon the being of the Purushottama,
mat-saṁsthām, and that is extended, the Divine, the Brahman
is extended too in the world of beings and, though transcendent
of it, not imprisoned in its own transcendence. One has to see
all things as He and live and act wholly in that vision; that is the
perfect fruit of the Yoga.
But why act? Is it not safer to sit in one’s solitude looking out
upon the world, if you will, seeing it in Brahman, in the Divine,
but not taking part in it, not moving in it, not living in it, not
acting in it, living rather ordinarily in the inner Samadhi? Should
not that be the law, the rule, the dharma of this highest spiritual
1
yoga-ks.emaṁ vahāmyaham.
Nirvana and Works in the World
245
condition? No, again; for the liberated Yogin there is no other
law, rule, dharma than simply this, to live in the Divine and love
the Divine and be one with all beings; his freedom is an absolute
and not a contingent freedom, self-existent and not dependent
any longer on any rule of conduct, law of life or limitation of any
kind. He has no longer any need of a process of Yoga, because
he is now perpetually in Yoga. “The Yogin who has taken his
stand upon oneness and loves Me in all beings, however and
in all ways he lives and acts, lives and acts in Me.” The love
of the world spiritualised, changed from a sense-experience to
a soul-experience, is founded on the love of God and in that
love there is no peril and no shortcoming. Fear and disgust of
the world may often be necessary for the recoil from the lower
nature, for it is really the fear and disgust of our own ego which
reflects itself in the world. But to see God in the world is to fear
nothing, it is to embrace all in the being of God; to see all as the
Divine is to hate and loathe nothing, but love God in the world
and the world in God.
But at least the things of the lower nature will be shunned
and feared, the things which the Yogin has taken so much trouble
to surmount? Not this either; all is embraced in the equality of
the self-vision. “He, O Arjuna, who sees with equality everything
in the image of the Self, whether it be grief or it be happiness, him
I hold to be the supreme Yogin.” And by this it is not meant at
all that he himself shall fall from the griefless spiritual bliss and
feel again worldly unhappiness, even in the sorrow of others, but
seeing in others the play of the dualities which he himself has left
and surmounted, he shall still see all as himself, his self in all,
God in all and, not disturbed or bewildered by the appearances
of these things, moved only by them to help and heal, to occupy
himself with the good of all beings, to lead men to the spiritual
bliss, to work for the progress of the world Godwards, he shall
live the divine life, so long as days upon earth are his portion.
The God-lover who can do this, can thus embrace all things in
God, can look calmly on the lower nature and the works of the
Maya of the three gunas and act in them and upon them without
perturbation or fall or disturbance from the height and power
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of the spiritual oneness, free in the largeness of the God-vision,
sweet and great and luminous in the strength of the God-nature,
may well be declared to be the supreme Yogin. He indeed has
conquered the creation, jitah. sargah..
The Gita brings in here as always bhakti as the climax of
the Yoga, sarvabhūtasthitaṁ yo māṁ bhajati ekatvam āsthitah.;
that may almost be said to sum up the whole final result of
the Gita’s teaching — whoever loves God in all and his soul is
founded upon the divine oneness, however he lives and acts,
lives and acts in God. And to emphasise it still more, after an
intervention of Arjuna and a reply to his doubt as to how so
difficult a Yoga can be at all possible for the restless mind of
man, the divine Teacher returns to this idea and makes it his
culminating utterance. “The Yogin is greater than the doers of
askesis, greater than the men of knowledge, greater than the men
of works; become then the Yogin, O Arjuna,” the Yogin, one
who seeks for and attains, by works and knowledge and askesis
or by whatever other means, not even spiritual knowledge or
power or anything else for their own sake, but the union with
God alone; for in that all else is contained and in that lifted
beyond itself to a divinest significance. But even among Yogins
the greatest is the Bhakta. “Of all Yogins he who with all his
inner self given up to Me, for Me has love and faith, śraddhāvān
bhajate, him I hold to be the most united with Me in Yoga.”
It is this that is the closing word of these first six chapters and
contains in itself the seed of the rest, of that which still remains
unspoken and is nowhere entirely spoken; for it is always and
remains something of a mystery and a secret, rahasyam, the
highest spiritual mystery and the divine secret.
XXIV
The Gist of the Karmayoga
T
HE FIRST six chapters of the Gita form a sort of preliminary block of the teaching; all the rest, all the other
twelve chapters are the working out of certain unfinished
figures in this block which here are seen only as hints behind the
large-size execution of the main motives, yet are in themselves
of capital importance and are therefore reserved for a yet larger
treatment on the other two faces of the work. If the Gita were
not a great written Scripture which must be carried to its end,
if it were actually a discourse by a living teacher to a disciple
which could be resumed in good time, when the disciple was
ready for farther truth, one could conceive of his stopping here
at the end of the sixth chapter and saying, “Work this out first,
there is plenty for you to do to realise it and you have the largest
possible basis; as difficulties arise, they will solve themselves
or I will solve them for you. But at present live out what I
have told you; work in this spirit.” True, there are many things
here which cannot be properly understood except in the light
thrown on them by what is to come after. In order to clear up
immediate difficulties and obviate possible misunderstandings, I
have had myself to anticipate a good deal, to bring in repeatedly,
for example, the idea of the Purushottama, for without that
it would have been impossible to clear up certain obscurities
about the Self and action and the Lord of action, which the Gita
deliberately accepts so that it may not disturb the firmness of
the first steps by reaching out prematurely to things too great as
yet for the mind of the human disciple.
Arjuna, himself, if the Teacher were to break off his discourse here, might well object: “You have spoken much of the
destruction of desire and attachment, of equality, of the conquest of the senses and the stilling of the mind, of passionless
and impersonal action, of the sacrifice of works, of the inner as
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preferable to the outer renunciation, and these things I understand intellectually, however difficult they may appear to me in
practice. But you have also spoken of rising above the gunas,
while yet one remains in action, and you have not told me how
the gunas work, and unless I know that, it will be difficult for
me to detect and rise above them. Besides, you have spoken of
bhakti as the greatest element in Yoga, yet you have talked much
of works and knowledge, but very little or nothing of bhakti.
And to whom is bhakti, this greatest thing, to be offered? Not
to the still impersonal Self, certainly, but to you, the Lord. Tell
me, then, what you are, who, as bhakti is greater even than this
self-knowledge, are greater than the immutable Self, which is
yet itself greater than mutable Nature and the world of action,
even as knowledge is greater than works. What is the relation
between these three things? between works and knowledge and
divine love? between the soul in Nature and the immutable Self
and that which is at once the changeless Self of all and the Master
of knowledge and love and works, the supreme Divinity who is
here with me in this great battle and massacre, my charioteer in
the chariot of this fierce and terrible action?” It is to answer these
questions that the rest of the Gita is written, and in a complete
intellectual solution they have indeed to be taken up without
delay and resolved. But in actual sādhanā one has to advance
from stage to stage, leaving many things, indeed the greatest
things to arise subsequently and solve themselves fully by the
light of the advance we have made in spiritual experience. The
Gita follows to a certain extent this curve of experience and puts
first a sort of large preliminary basis of works and knowledge
which contains an element leading up to bhakti and to a greater
knowledge, but not yet fully arriving. The six chapters present
us with that basis.
We may then pause to consider how far they have carried
the solution of the original problem with which the Gita started.
The problem in itself, it may be useful again to remark, need not
necessarily have led up to the whole question of the nature of
existence and of the replacement of the normal by the spiritual
life. It might have been dealt with on a pragmatical or an ethical
The Gist of the Karmayoga
249
basis or from an intellectual or an ideal standpoint or by a consideration of all of these together; that in fact would have been
our modern method of solving the difficulty. By itself it raises
in the first instance just this question, whether Arjuna should
be governed by the ethical sense of personal sin in slaughter
or by the consideration equally ethical of his public and social
duty, the defence of the Right, the opposition demanded by
conscience from all noble natures to the armed forces of injustice and oppression? That question has been raised in our own
time and the present hour, and it can be solved, as we solve it
now, by one or other of very various solutions, but all from the
standpoint of our normal life and our normal human mind. It
may be answered as a question between the personal conscience
and our duty to the society and the State, between an ideal and a
practical morality, between “soul-force” and the recognition of
the troublesome fact that life is not yet at least all soul and that
to take up arms for the right in a physical struggle is sometimes
inevitable. All these solutions are, however, intellectual, temperamental, emotional; they depend upon the individual standpoint
and are at the best our own proper way of meeting the difficulty
offered to us, proper because suitable to our nature and the
stage of our ethical and intellectual evolution, the best we can,
with the light we have, see and do; it leads to no final solution.
And this is so because it proceeds from the normal mind which
is always a tangle of various tendencies of our being and can
only arrive at a choice or an accommodation between them,
between our reason, our ethical being, our dynamic needs, our
life-instincts, our emotional being and those rarer movements
which we may perhaps call soul-instincts or psychical preferences. The Gita recognises that from this standpoint there can
be no absolute, only an immediate practical solution and, after
offering to Arjuna from the highest ideals of his age just such a
practical solution, which he is in no mood to accept and indeed is
evidently not intended to accept, it proceeds to quite a different
standpoint and to quite another answer.
The Gita’s solution is to rise above our natural being and
normal mind, above our intellectual and ethical perplexities into
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another consciousness with another law of being and therefore
another standpoint for our action; where personal desire and
personal emotions no longer govern it; where the dualities fall
away; where the action is no longer our own and where therefore
the sense of personal virtue and personal sin is exceeded; where
the universal, the impersonal, the divine spirit works out through
us its purpose in the world; where we are ourselves by a new and
divine birth changed into being of that Being, consciousness of
that Consciousness, power of that Power, bliss of that Bliss, and,
living no longer in our lower nature, have no works to do of our
own, no personal aim to pursue of our own, but if we do works
at all, — and that is the one real problem and difficulty left, —
do only the divine works, those of which our outward nature
is only a passive instrument and no longer the cause, no longer
provides the motive; for the motive-power is above us in the will
of the Master of our works. And this is presented to us as the
true solution, because it goes back to the real truth of our being
and to live according to the real truth of our being is evidently
the highest solution and the sole entirely true solution of the
problems of our existence. Our mental and vital personality is a
truth of our natural existence, but a truth of the ignorance, and
all that attaches itself to it is also truth of that order, practically
valid for the works of the ignorance, but no longer valid when
we get back to the real truth of our being. But how can we
actually be sure that this is the truth? We cannot so long as we
remain satisfied with our ordinary mental experience; for our
normal mental experience is wholly that of this lower nature
full of the ignorance. We can only know this greater truth by
living it, that is to say, by passing beyond the mental into the
spiritual experience, by Yoga. For the living out of spiritual
experience until we cease to be mind and become spirit, until,
liberated from the imperfections of our present nature, we are
able to live entirely in our true and divine being is what in the
end we mean by Yoga.
This upward transference of our centre of being and the consequent transformation of our whole existence and consciousness, with a resultant change in the whole spirit and motive of
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251
our action, the action often remaining precisely the same in all its
outward appearances, makes the gist of the Gita’s Karmayoga.
Change your being, be reborn into the spirit and by that new
birth proceed with the action to which the Spirit within has
appointed you, may be said to be the heart of its message. Or
again, put otherwise, with a deeper and more spiritual import,
— make the work you have to do here your means of inner
spiritual rebirth, the divine birth, and, having become divine, do
still divine works as an instrument of the Divine for the leading
of the peoples. Therefore there are here two things which have
to be clearly laid down and clearly grasped, the way to the
change, to this upward transference, this new divine birth, and
the nature of the work or rather the spirit in which it has to
be done, since the outward form of it need not at all change,
although really its scope and aim become quite different. But
these two things are practically the same, for the elucidation of
one elucidates the other. The spirit of our action arises from the
nature of our being and the inner foundation it has taken, but
also this nature is itself affected by the trend and spiritual effect
of our action; a very great change in the spirit of our works
changes the nature of our being and alters the foundation it has
taken; it shifts the centre of conscious force from which we act.
If life and action were entirely illusory, as some would have it, if
the Spirit had nothing to do with works or life, this would not
be so; but the soul in us develops itself by life and works and,
not indeed so much the action itself, but the way of our soul’s
inner force of working determines its relations to the Spirit. This
is, indeed, the justification of Karmayoga as a practical means
of the higher self-realisation.
We start from this foundation that the present inner life
of man, almost entirely dependent as it is upon his vital and
physical nature, only lifted beyond it by a limited play of mental
energy, is not the whole of his possible existence, not even the
whole of his present real existence. There is within him a hidden
Self, of which his present nature is either only an outer appearance or is a partial dynamic result. The Gita seems throughout
to admit its dynamic reality and not to adopt the severer view
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of the extreme Vedantists that it is only an appearance, a view
which strikes at the very roots of all works and action. Its way of
formulating this element of its philosophical thought, — it might
be done in a different way, — is to admit the Sankhya distinction
between the Soul and Nature, the power that knows, supports
and informs and the power that works, acts, provides all the
variations of instrument, medium and process. Only it takes the
free and immutable Soul of the Sankhyas, calls it in Vedantic
language the one immutable omnipresent Self or Brahman, and
distinguishes it from this other soul involved in Nature, which
is our mutable and dynamic being, the multiple soul of things,
the basis of variation and personality. But in what then consists
this action of Nature?
It consists in a power of process, Prakriti, which is the interplay of three fundamental modes of its working, three qualities,
gunas. And what is the medium? It is the complex system of
existence created by a graded evolution of the instruments of
Prakriti, which, as they are reflected here in the soul’s experience
of her workings, we may call successively the reason and the ego,
the mind, the senses and the elements of material energy which
are the basis of its forms. These are all mechanical, a complex
engine of Nature, yantra; and from our modern point of view
we may say that they are all involved in material energy and
manifest themselves in it as the soul in Nature becomes aware
of itself by an upward evolution of each instrument, but in the
inverse order to that which we have stated, matter first, then
sensation, then mind, next reason, last spiritual consciousness.
Reason, which is at first only preoccupied with the workings of
Nature, may then detect their ultimate character, may see them
only as a play of the three gunas in which the soul is entangled,
may distinguish between the soul and these workings; then the
soul gets a chance of disentangling itself and of going back to
its original freedom and immutable existence. In Vedantic language, it sees the spirit, the being; it ceases to identify itself with
the instruments and workings of Nature, with its becoming;
it identifies itself with its true Self and being and recovers its
immutable spiritual self-existence. It is then from this spiritual
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253
self-existence, according to the Gita, that it can freely and as
the master of its being, the Ishwara, support the action of its
becoming.
Looking only at the psychological facts on which these
philosophical distinctions are founded, — philosophy is only a
way of formulating to ourselves intellectually in their essential
significance the psychological and physical facts of existence
and their relation to any ultimate reality that may exist, — we
may say that there are two lives we can lead, the life of the
soul engrossed in the workings of its active nature, identified
with its psychological and physical instruments, limited by them,
bound by its personality, subject to Nature, and the life of the
Spirit, superior to these things, large, impersonal, universal, free,
unlimited, transcendent, supporting with an infinite equality its
natural being and action, but exceeding them by its freedom
and infinity. We may live in what is now our natural being or we
may live in our greater and spiritual being. This is the first great
distinction on which the Karmayoga of the Gita is founded.
The whole question and the whole method lie then in the
liberation of the soul from the limitations of our present natural
being. In our natural life the first dominating fact is our subjection to the forms of material Nature, the outward touches of
things. These present themselves to our life through the senses,
and the life through the senses immediately returns upon these
objects to seize upon them and deal with them, desires, attaches
itself, seeks for results. The mind in all its inner sensations,
reactions, emotions, habitual ways of perceiving, thinking and
feeling obeys this action of the senses; the reason too carried
away by the mind gives itself up to this life of the senses, this
life in which the inner being is subject to the externality of
things and cannot for a moment really get above it or outside
the circle of its action upon us and its psychological results and
reactions within us. It cannot get beyond them because there is
the principle of ego by which the reason differentiates the sum
of the action of Nature upon our mind, will, sense, body from
her action in other minds, wills, nervous organisms, bodies; and
life to us means only the way she affects our ego and the way our
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ego replies to her touches. We know nothing else, we seem to be
nothing else; the soul itself seems then only a separate mass of
mind, will, emotional and nervous reception and reaction. We
may enlarge our ego, identify ourselves with the family, clan,
class, country, nation, humanity even, but still the ego remains
in all these disguises the root of our actions, only it finds a larger
satisfaction of its separate being by these wider dealings with
external things.
What acts in us is still the will of the natural being seizing
upon the touches of the external world to satisfy the different
phases of its personality, and the will in this seizing is always
a will of desire and passion and attachment to our works and
their results, the will of Nature in us; our personal will, we say,
but our ego personality is a creation of Nature, it is not and
cannot be our free self, our independent being. The whole is the
action of the modes of Nature. It may be a tamasic action, and
then we have an inert personality subject to and satisfied with
the mechanical round of things, incapable of any strong effort
at a freer action and mastery. Or it may be the rajasic action,
and then we have the restless active personality which throws
itself upon Nature and tries to make her serve its needs and
desires, but does not see that its apparent mastery is a servitude,
since its needs and desires are those of Nature, and while we are
subject to them, there can be for us no freedom. Or it may be
a sattwic action, and then we have the enlightened personality
which tries to live by reason or to realise some preferred ideal
of good, truth or beauty; but this reason is still subject to the
appearances of Nature and these ideals are only changing phases
of our personality in which we find in the end no sure rule
or permanent satisfaction. We are still carried on a wheel of
mutation, obeying in our circlings through the ego some Power
within us and within all this, but not ourselves that Power or in
union and communion with it. Still there is no freedom, no real
mastery.
Yet freedom is possible. For that we have to get first away
into ourselves from the action of the external world upon our
senses; that is to say, we have to live inwardly and be able to
The Gist of the Karmayoga
255
hold back the natural running of the senses after their external
objects. A mastery of the senses, an ability to do without all
that they hanker after, is the first condition of the true soullife; only so can we begin to feel that there is a soul within
us which is other than the mutations of mind in its reception
of the touches of outward things, a soul which in its depths
goes back to something self-existent, immutable, tranquil, selfpossessed, grandiose, serene and august, master of itself and
unaffected by the eager runnings of our external nature. But
this cannot be done so long as we are subject to desire. For it
is desire, the principle of all our superficial life, which satisfies
itself with the life of the senses and finds its whole account in
the play of the passions. We must get rid then of desire and, that
propensity of our natural being destroyed, the passions which
are its emotional results will fall into quietude; for the joy and
grief of possession and of loss, success and failure, pleasant and
unpleasant touches, which entertain them, will pass out of our
souls. A calm equality will then be gained. And since we have
still to live and act in the world and our nature in works is to seek
for the fruits of our works, we must change that nature and do
works without attachment to their fruits, otherwise desire and all
its results remain. But how can we change this nature of the doer
of works in us? By dissociating works from ego and personality,
by seeing through the reason that all this is only the play of the
gunas of Nature, and by dissociating our soul from the play, by
making it first of all the observer of the workings of Nature and
leaving those works to the Power that is really behind them, the
something in Nature which is greater than ourselves, not our
personality, but the Master of the universe. But the mind will
not permit all this; its nature is to run out after the senses and
carry the reason and will with it. Then we must learn to still the
mind. We must attain that absolute peace and stillness in which
we become aware of the calm, motionless, blissful Self within
us which is eternally untroubled and unaffected by the touches
of things, is sufficient to itself and finds there alone its eternal
satisfaction.
This Self is our self-existent being. It is not limited by our
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personal existence. It is the same in all existences, pervasive,
equal to all things, supporting the whole universal action with
its infinity, but unlimited by all that is finite, unmodified by the
changings of Nature and personality. When this Self is revealed
within us, when we feel its peace and stillness, we can grow
into that; we can transfer the poise of our soul from its lower
immergence in Nature and draw it back into the Self. We can
do this by the force of the things we have attained, calm, equality, passionless impersonality. For as we grow in these things,
carry them to their fullness, subject all our nature to them, we
are growing into this calm, equal, passionless, impersonal, allpervading Self. Our senses fall into that stillness and receive
the touches of the world on us with a supreme tranquillity; our
mind falls into stillness and becomes the calm, universal witness;
our ego dissolves itself into this impersonal existence. All things
we see in this self which we have become in ourself; and we
see this self in all; we become one being with all beings in the
spiritual basis of their existence. By doing works in this selfless
tranquillity and impersonality, our works cease to be ours, cease
to bind or trouble us with their reactions. Nature and her gunas
weave the web of her works, but without affecting our griefless
self-existent tranquillity. All is given up into that one equal and
universal Brahman.
But here there are two difficulties. First, there seems to be
an antinomy between this tranquil and immutable Self and the
action of Nature. How then does the action at all exist or how
can it continue once we have entered into the immutable Selfexistence? Where in that is the will to works which would make
the action of our nature possible? If we say with the Sankhya
that the will is in Nature and not in the Self, still there must be
a motive in Nature and the power in her to draw the soul into
its workings by interest, ego and attachment, and when these
things cease to reflect themselves in the soul-consciousness, her
power ceases and the motive of works ceases with it. But the
Gita does not accept this view, which seems indeed to necessitate
the existence of many Purushas and not one universal Purusha,
otherwise the separate experience of the soul and its separate
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257
liberation while millions of others are still involved, would not
be intelligible. Nature is not a separate principle, but the power
of the Supreme going forth in cosmic creation. But if the Supreme
is only this immutable Self and the individual is only something
that has gone forth from him in the Power, then the moment
it returns and takes its poise in the self, everything must cease
except the supreme unity and the supreme calm. Secondly, even
if in some mysterious way action still continues, yet since the Self
is equal to all things, it cannot matter whether works are done or,
if they are done, it cannot matter what work is done. Why then
this insistence on the most violent and disastrous form of action,
this chariot, this battle, this warrior, this divine charioteer?
The Gita answers by presenting the Supreme as something
greater even than the immutable Self, more comprehensive, one
who is at once this Self and the Master of works in Nature. But he
directs the works of Nature with the eternal calm, the equality,
the superiority to works and personality which belong to the
immutable. This, we may say, is the poise of being from which
he directs works, and by growing into this we are growing into
his being and into the poise of divine works. From this he goes
forth as the Will and Power of his being in Nature, manifests
himself in all existences, is born as Man in the world, is there in
the heart of all men, reveals himself as the Avatar, the divine birth
in man; and as man grows into his being, it is into the divine
birth that he grows. Works must be done as a sacrifice to this
Lord of our works, and we must by growing into the Self realise
our oneness with him in our being and see our personality as a
partial manifestation of him in Nature. One with him in being,
we grow one with all beings in the universe and do divine works,
not as ours, but as his workings through us for the maintenance
and leading of the peoples.
This is the essential thing to be done, and once this is done,
the difficulties which present themselves to Arjuna will disappear. The problem is no longer one of our personal action, for
that which makes our personality becomes a thing temporal and
subordinate, the question is then only one of the workings of the
divine Will through us in the universe. To understand that we
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must know what this supreme Being is in himself and in Nature,
what the workings of Nature are and what they lead to, and the
intimate relation between the soul in Nature and this supreme
Soul, of which bhakti with knowledge is the foundation. The
elucidation of these questions is the subject of the rest of the
Gita.
END OF THE FIRST SERIES
ESSAYS ON THE GITA
SECOND SERIES
PART I
THE SYNTHESIS OF WORKS,
LOVE AND KNOWLEDGE
I
The Two Natures
1
T
HE FIRST six chapters of the Gita have been treated as a
single block of teachings, its primary basis of practice and
knowledge; the remaining twelve may be similarly treated
as two closely connected blocks which develop the rest of the
doctrine from this primary basis. The seventh to the twelfth
chapters lay down a large metaphysical statement of the nature
of the Divine Being and on that foundation closely relate and
synthetise knowledge and devotion, just as the first part of the
Gita related and synthetised works and knowledge. The vision
of the World-Purusha intervenes in the eleventh chapter, gives a
dynamic turn to this stage of the synthesis and relates it vividly to
works and life. Thus again all is brought powerfully back to the
original question of Arjuna round which the whole exposition
revolves and completes its cycle. Afterwards the Gita proceeds
by the differentiation of the Purusha and Prakriti to work out
its ideas of the action of the gunas, of the ascension beyond the
gunas and of the culmination of desireless works with knowledge where that coalesces with Bhakti, — knowledge, works
and love made one, — and it rises thence to its great finale, the
supreme secret of self-surrender to the Master of Existence.
In this second part of the Gita we come to a more concise
and easy manner of statement than we have yet had. In the
first six chapters the definitions have not yet been made which
give the key to the underlying truth; difficulties are being met
and solved; the progress is a little laboured and moves through
several involutions and returns; much is implied the bearing of
which is not yet clear. Here we seem to get on to clearer ground
and to lay hold of a more compact and pointed expression. But
because of this very conciseness we have to be careful always
1
Gita, VII. 1-14.
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of our steps in order to avoid error and a missing of the real
sense. For we are here no longer steadily on the safe ground of
psychological and spiritual experience, but have to deal with intellectual statements of spiritual and often of supracosmic truth.
Metaphysical statement has always this peril and uncertainty
about it that it is an attempt to define to our minds what is
really infinite, an attempt which has to be made, but can never
be quite satisfactory, quite final or ultimate. The highest spiritual
truth can be lived, can be seen, but can only be partially stated.
The deeper method and language of the Upanishads with its free
resort to image and symbol, its intuitive form of speech in which
the hard limiting definiteness of intellectual utterance is broken
down and the implications of words are allowed to roll out into
an illimitable wave of suggestion, is in these realms the only
right method and language. But the Gita cannot resort to this
form, because it is designed to satisfy an intellectual difficulty,
answers a state of mind in which the reason, the arbiter to which
we refer the conflicts of our impulses and sentiments, is at war
with itself and impotent to arrive at a conclusion. The reason
has to be led to a truth beyond itself, but by its own means and
in its own manner. Offered a spiritually psychological solution,
of the data of which it has no experience, it can only be assured
of its validity if it is satisfied by an intellectual statement of the
truths of being upon which the solution rests.
So far the justifying truths that have been offered to it are
those with which it is already familiar, and they are only sufficient as a starting-point. There is first the distinction between
the Self and the individual being in Nature. The distinction has
been used to point out that this individual being in Nature is
necessarily subject, so long as he lives shut up within the action
of the ego, to the workings of the three gunas which make up
by their unstable movements the whole scope and method of
the reason, the mind and the life and senses in the body. And
within this circle there is no solution. Therefore the solution has
to be found by an ascent out of the circle, above this nature of
the gunas, to the one immutable Self and silent Spirit, because
then one gets beyond that action of the ego and desire which
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265
is the whole root of the difficulty. But since this by itself seems
to lead straight towards inaction, as beyond Nature there is
no instrumentality of action and no cause or determinant of
action, — for the immutable self is inactive, impartial and equal
to all things, all workings and all happenings, — the Yoga idea
is brought in of the Ishwara, the Divine as master of works and
sacrifice, and it is hinted but not yet expressly stated that this
Divine exceeds even the immutable self and that in him lies the
key to cosmic existence. Therefore by rising to him through the
Self it is possible to have spiritual freedom from our works and
yet to continue in the works of Nature. But it has not yet been
stated who is this Supreme, incarnate here in the divine teacher
and charioteer of works, or what are his relations to the Self and
to the individual being in Nature. Nor is it clear how the Will to
works coming from him can be other than the will in the nature
of the three gunas. And if it is only that, then the soul obeying
it can hardly fail to be in subjection to the gunas in its action, if
not in its spirit, and if so, at once the freedom promised becomes
either illusory or incomplete. Will seems to be an aspect of the
executive part of being, to be power and active force of nature,
Shakti, Prakriti. Is there then a higher Nature than that of the
three gunas? Is there a power of pragmatic creation, will, action
other than that of ego, desire, mind, sense, reason and the vital
impulse?
Therefore, in this uncertainty, what has now to be done is to
give more completely the knowledge on which divine works are
to be founded. And this can only be the complete, the integral
knowledge of the Divine who is the source of works and in whose
being the worker becomes by knowledge free; for he knows the
free Spirit from whom all works proceed and participates in
his freedom. Moreover this knowledge must bring a light that
justifies the assertion with which the first part of the Gita closes.
It must ground the supremacy of bhakti over all other motives
and powers of spiritual consciousness and action; it must be a
knowledge of the supreme Lord of all creatures to whom alone
the soul can offer itself in the perfect self-surrender which is
the highest height of all love and devotion. This is what the
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Teacher proposes to give in the opening verses of the seventh
chapter which initiate the development that occupies all the rest
of the book. “Hear,” he says, “how by practising Yoga with a
mind attached to me and with me as āśraya (the whole basis,
lodgment, point of resort of the conscious being and action)
thou shalt know me without any remainder of doubt, integrally,
samagraṁ mām. I will speak to thee without omission or remainder, aśes.atah.,” (for otherwise a ground of doubt may remain),
“the essential knowledge, attended with all the comprehensive
knowledge, by knowing which there shall be no other thing
here left to be known.” The implication of the phrase is that
the Divine Being is all, vāsudevah. sarvam, and therefore if he
is known integrally in all his powers and principles, then all
is known, not only the pure Self, but the world and action and
Nature. There is then nothing else here left to be known, because
all is that Divine Existence. It is only because our view here is not
thus integral, because it rests on the dividing mind and reason
and the separative idea of the ego, that our mental perception of
things is an ignorance. We have to get away from this mental and
egoistic view to the true unifying knowledge, and that has two
aspects, the essential, jñāna, and the comprehensive, vijñāna,
the direct spiritual awareness of the supreme Being and the right
intimate knowledge of the principles of his existence, Prakriti,
Purusha and the rest, by which all that is can be known in its
divine origin and in the supreme truth of its nature. That integral
knowledge, says the Gita, is a rare and difficult thing; “among
thousands of men one here and there strives after perfection,
and of those who strive and attain to perfection one here and
there knows me in all the principles of my existence, tattvatah..”
Then, to start with and in order to found this integral
knowledge, the Gita makes that deep and momentous distinction
which is the practical basis of all its Yoga, the distinction between
the two Natures, the phenomenal and the spiritual Nature. “The
five elements (conditions of material being), mind, reason, ego,
this is my eightfold divided Nature. But know my other Nature
different from this, the supreme which becomes the Jiva and by
which this world is upheld.” Here is the first new metaphysical
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idea of the Gita which helps it to start from the notions of the
Sankhya philosophy and yet exceed them and give to their terms,
which it keeps and extends, a Vedantic significance. An eightfold
Nature constituted of the five bhūtas, — elements, as it is rendered, but rather elemental or essential conditions of material
being to which are given the concrete names of earth, water, fire,
air and ether, — the mind with its various senses and organs, the
reason-will and the ego, is the Sankhya description of Prakriti.
The Sankhya stops there, and because it stops there, it has to set
up an unbridgeable division between the soul and Nature; it has
to posit them as two quite distinct primary entities. The Gita
also, if it stopped there, would have to make the same incurable
antinomy between the Self and cosmic Nature which would then
be only the Maya of the three gunas and all this cosmic existence
would be simply the result of this Maya; it could be nothing else.
But there is something else, there is a higher principle, a nature of
spirit, parā prakr.tir me. There is a supreme nature of the Divine
which is the real source of cosmic existence and its fundamental
creative force and effective energy and of which the other lower
and ignorant Nature is only a derivation and a dark shadow.
In this highest dynamis Purusha and Prakriti are one. Prakriti
there is only the will and the executive power of the Purusha, his
activity of being, — not a separate entity, but himself in Power.
This supreme Prakriti is not merely a presence of the power
of spiritual being immanent in cosmic activities. For then it
might be only the inactive presence of the all-pervading Self,
immanent in all things or containing them, compelling in a way
the world action but not itself active. Nor is this highest Prakriti
the avyakta of the Sankhyas, the primary unmanifest seed-state
of the manifest active eightfold nature of things, the one productive original force of Prakriti out of which her many instrumental
and executive powers evolve. Nor is it sufficient to interpret that
idea of avyakta in the Vedantic sense and say that this supreme
Nature is the power involved and inherent in unmanifest Spirit
or Self out of which cosmos comes and into which it returns. It
is that, but it is much more; for that is only one of its spiritual
states. It is the integral conscious-power of the supreme Being,
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cit-śakti, which is behind the self and cosmos. In the immutable
Self it is involved in the Spirit; it is there, but in nivr.tti or a
holding back from action: in the mutable self and the cosmos it
comes out into action, pravr.tti. There by its dynamic presence it
evolves in the Spirit all existences and appears in them as their
essential spiritual nature, the persistent truth behind their play
of subjective and objective phenomena. It is the essential quality
and force, svabhāva, the self-principle of all their becoming, the
inherent principle and divine power behind their phenomenal
existence. The balance of the gunas is only a quantitative and
quite derivative play evolved out of this supreme Principle. All
this activity of forms, all this mental, sensuous, intelligential
striving of the lower nature is only a phenomenon, which could
not be at all except for this spiritual force and this power of
being; it comes from that and it exists in that and by that solely.
If we dwell in the phenomenal nature only and see things only by
the notions it impresses on us, we shall not get at the real truth
of our active existence. The real truth is this spiritual power, this
divine force of being, this essential quality of the spirit in things
or rather of the spirit in which things are and from which they
draw all their potencies and the seeds of their movements. Get
at that truth, power, quality and we shall get at the real law of
our becoming and the divine principle of our living, its source
and sanction in the Knowledge and not only its process in the
Ignorance.
This is to throw the sense of the Gita into language suited
to our modern way of thinking; but if we look at its description
of the Para Prakriti, we shall find that this is practically the
substance of what it says. For first, this other higher Prakriti is,
says Krishna, my supreme nature, prakr.tiṁ me parām. And this
“I” here is the Purushottama, the supreme Being, the supreme
Soul, the transcendent and universal Spirit. The original and
eternal nature of the Spirit and its transcendent and originating
Shakti is what is meant by the Para Prakriti. For speaking first of
the origin of the world from the point of view of the active power
of his Nature, Krishna assevers, “This is the womb of all beings,”
etad-yonı̄ni bhūtāni. And in the next line of the couplet, again
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stating the same fact from the point of view of the originating
Soul, he continues, “I am the birth of the whole world and so
too its dissolution; there is nothing else supreme beyond Me.”
Here then the supreme Soul, Purushottama, and the supreme
Nature, Para Prakriti, are identified: they are put as two ways of
looking at one and the same reality. For when Krishna declares,
I am the birth of the world and its dissolution, it is evident that
it is this Para Prakriti, supreme Nature, of his being which is
both these things. The Spirit is the supreme Being in his infinite
consciousness and the supreme Nature is the infinity of power
or will of being of the Spirit, — it is his infinite consciousness
in its inherent divine energy and its supernal divine action. The
birth is the movement of evolution of this conscious Energy out
of the Spirit, parā prakr.tir jı̄vabhūtā, its activity in the mutable
universe; the dissolution is the withdrawing of that activity by
involution of the Energy into the immutable existence and selfgathered power of the Spirit. That then is what is initially meant
by the supreme Nature.
The supreme Nature, parā prakr.tih., is then the infinite timeless conscious power of the self-existent Being out of which
all existences in the cosmos are manifested and come out of
timelessness into Time. But in order to provide a spiritual basis
for this manifold universal becoming in the cosmos the supreme
Nature formulates itself as the Jiva. To put it otherwise, the
eternal multiple soul of the Purushottama appears as individual
spiritual existence in all the forms of the cosmos. All existences
are instinct with the life of the one indivisible Spirit; all are
supported in their personality, actions and forms by the eternal
multiplicity of the one Purusha. We must be careful not to make
the mistake of thinking that this supreme Nature is identical with
the Jiva manifested in Time in the sense that there is nothing else
or that it is only nature of becoming and not at all nature of
being: that could not be the supreme nature of the Spirit. Even
in Time it is something more; for otherwise the only truth of it
in the cosmos would be nature of multiplicity and there would
be no nature of unity in the world. That is not what the Gita
says: it does not say that the supreme Prakriti is in its essence the
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Jiva, jı̄vātmikām, but that it has become the Jiva, jı̄vabhūtām;
and it is implied in that expression that behind its manifestation
as the Jiva here it is originally something else and higher, it
is nature of the one supreme spirit. The Jiva, as we are told
later on, is the Lord, ı̄śvara, but in his partial manifestation,
mamaivāṁśah.; even all the multiplicity of beings in the universe
or in numberless universes could not be in their becoming the
integral Divine, but only a partial manifestation of the infinite
One. In them Brahman the one indivisible existence resides as
if divided, avibhaktaṁ ca bhūtes.u vibhaktam iva ca sthitam.
The unity is the greater truth, the multiplicity is the lesser truth,
though both are a truth and neither of them is an illusion.
It is by the unity of this spiritual nature that the world is
sustained, yayedaṁ dhāryate jagat, even as it is that from which
it is born with all its becomings, etad-yonı̄ni bhūtāni sarvān.i, and
that also which withdraws the whole world and its existences
into itself in the hour of dissolution, ahaṁ kr.tsnasya jagatah.
prabhavah. pralayas tathā. But in the manifestation which is
thus put forth in the Spirit, upheld in its action, withdrawn in its
periodical rest from action, the Jiva is the basis of the multiple
existence; it is the multiple soul, if we may so call it, or, if we
prefer, the soul of the multiplicity we experience here. It is one
always with the Divine in its being, different from it only in the
power of its being, — different not in the sense that it is not at
all the same power, but in this sense that it only supports the
one power in a partial multiply individualised action. Therefore
all things are initially, ultimately and in the principle of their
continuance too the Spirit. The fundamental nature of all is nature of the Spirit, and only in their lower differential phenomena
do they seem to be something else, to be nature of body, life,
mind, reason, ego and the senses. But these are phenomenal
derivatives, they are not the essential truth of our nature and
our existence.
The supreme nature of spiritual being gives us then both an
original truth and power of existence beyond cosmos and a first
basis of spiritual truth for the manifestation in the cosmos. But
where is the link between this supreme nature and the lower
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phenomenal nature? On me, says Krishna, all this, all that is
here — sarvam idam, the common phrase in the Upanishads for
the totality of phenomena in the mobility of the universe — is
strung like pearls upon a thread. But this is only an image which
we cannot press very far; for the pearls are only kept in relation
to each other by the thread and have no other oneness or relation with the pearl-string except their dependence on it for this
mutual connection. Let us go then from the image to that which
it images. It is the supreme nature of Spirit, the infinite conscious
power of its being, self-conscient, all-conscient, all-wise, which
maintains these phenomenal existences in relation to each other,
penetrates them, abides in and supports them and weaves them
into the system of its manifestation. This one supreme power
manifests not only in all as the One, but in each as the Jiva, the
individual spiritual presence; it manifests also as the essence of
all quality of Nature. These are therefore the concealed spiritual
powers behind all phenomena. This highest quality is not the
working of the three gunas, which is phenomenon of quality
and not its spiritual essence. It is rather the inherent, one, yet
variable inner power of all these superficial variations. It is a
fundamental truth of the Becoming, a truth that supports and
gives a spiritual and divine significance to all its appearances.
The workings of the gunas are only the superficial unstable
becomings of reason, mind, sense, ego, life and matter, sāttvikā
bhāvā rājasās tāmasāś ca; but this is rather the essential stable
original intimate power of the becoming, svabhāva. It is that
which determines the primary law of all becoming and of each
Jiva; it constitutes the essence and develops the movement of
the nature. It is a principle in each creature that derives from
and is immediately related to a transcendent divine Becoming,
that of the Ishwara, madbhāvah.. In this relation of the divine
bhāva to the svabhāva and of the svabhāva to the superficial
bhāvāh., of the divine Nature to the individual self-nature and of
the self-nature in its pure and original quality to the phenomenal
nature in all its mixed and confused play of qualities, we find
the link between that supreme and this lower existence. The
degraded powers and values of the inferior Prakriti derive from
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the absolute powers and values of the supreme Shakti and must
go back to them to find their own source and truth and the
essential law of their operation and movement. So too the soul
or Jiva involved here in the shackled, poor and inferior play
of the phenomenal qualities, if he would escape from it and
be divine and perfect, must by resort to the pure action of his
essential quality of Swabhava go back to that higher law of his
own being in which he can discover the will, the power, the
dynamic principle, the highest working of his divine nature.
This is clear from the immediately subsequent passage in
which the Gita gives a number of instances to show how the
Divine in the power of his supreme nature manifests and acts
within the animate and so-called inanimate existences of the
universe. We may disentangle them from the loose and free order
which the exigence of the poetical form imposes and put them
in their proper philosophical series. First, the divine Power and
Presence works within the five elemental conditions of matter.
“I am taste in the waters, sound in ether, scent in earth, energy
of light in fire,” and, it may be added for more completeness,
touch or contact in air. That is to say, the Divine himself in his
Para Prakriti is the energy at the basis of the various sensory
relations of which, according to the ancient Sankhya system,
the ethereal, the radiant, electric and gaseous, the liquid and the
other elemental conditions of matter are the physical medium.
The five elemental conditions of matter are the quantitative or
material element in the lower nature and are the basis of material forms. The five Tanmatras — taste, touch, scent, and the
others — are the qualitative element. These Tanmatras are the
subtle energies whose action puts the sensory consciousness in
relation to the gross forms of matter, — they are the basis of
all phenomenal knowledge. From the material point of view
matter is the reality and the sensory relations are derivative; but
from the spiritual point of view the truth is the opposite. Matter
and the material media are themselves derivative powers and
at bottom are only concrete ways or conditions in which the
workings of the quality of Nature in things manifest themselves
to the sensory consciousness of the Jiva. The one original and
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eternal fact is the energy of Nature, the power and quality of
being which so manifests itself to the soul through the senses.
And what is essential in the senses, most spiritual, most subtle
is itself stuff of that eternal quality and power. But energy or
power of being in Nature is the Divine himself in his Prakriti;
each sense in its purity is therefore that Prakriti, each sense is
the Divine in his dynamic conscious force.
This we gather better from the other terms of the series. “I
am the light of sun and moon, the manhood in man, the intelligence of the intelligent, the energy of the energetic, the strength
of the strong, the ascetic force of those who do askesis, tapasyā.”
“I am life in all existences.” In each case it is the energy of the
essential quality on which each of these becomings depends for
what it has become, that is given as the characteristic sign indicating the presence of the divine Power in their nature. Again,
“I am pranava in all the Vedas,” that is to say, the basic syllable
OM, which is the foundation of all the potent creative sounds
of the revealed word; OM is the one universal formulation of
the energy of sound and speech, that which contains and sums
up, synthetises and releases all the spiritual power and all the
potentiality of Vak and Shabda and of which the other sounds,
out of whose stuff words of speech are woven, are supposed
to be the developed evolutions. That makes it quite clear. It is
not the phenomenal developments of the senses or of life or of
light, intelligence, energy, strength, manhood, ascetic force that
are proper to the supreme Prakriti. It is the essential quality in
its spiritual power that constitutes the Swabhava. It is the force
of spirit so manifesting, it is the light of its consciousness and
the power of its energy in things revealed in a pure original sign
that is the self-nature. That force, light, power is the eternal seed
from which all other things are the developments and derivations
and variabilities and plastic circumstances. Therefore the Gita
throws in as the most general statement in the series, “Know
me to be the eternal seed of all existences, O son of Pritha.”
This eternal seed is the power of spiritual being, the conscious
will in the being, the seed which, as is said elsewhere, the Divine
casts into the great Brahman, into the supramental vastness,
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and from that all are born into phenomenal existence. It is that
seed of spirit which manifests itself as the essential quality in all
becomings and constitutes their swabhava.
The practical distinction between this original power of
essential quality and the phenomenal derivations of the lower
nature, between the thing itself in its purity and the thing in
its lower appearances, is indicated very clearly at the close of
the series. “I am the strength of the strong devoid of desire and
liking,” stripped of all attachment to the phenomenal pleasure of
things. “I am in beings the desire which is not contrary to their
dharma.” And as for the secondary subjective becomings of
Nature, bhāvāh. (states of mind, affections of desire, movements
of passion, the reactions of the senses, the limited and dual play
of reason, the turns of the feeling and moral sense), which are
sattwic, rajasic and tamasic, as for the working of the three
gunas, they are, says the Gita, not themselves the pure action of
the supreme spiritual nature, but are derivations from it; “they
are verily from me,” matta eva, they have no other origin, “but I
am not in them, it is they that are in me.” Here is indeed a strong
and yet subtle distinction. “I am” says the Divine “the essential
light, strength, desire, power, intelligence, but these derivations
from them I am not in my essence, nor am I in them, yet are
they all of them from me and they are all in my being.” It is
then upon the basis of these statements that we have to view the
transition of things from the higher to the lower and again from
the lower back to the higher nature.
The first statement offers no difficulty. The strong man in
spite of the divine nature of the principle of strength in him falls
into subjection to desire and to attachment, stumbles into sin,
struggles towards virtue. But that is because he descends in all
his derivative action into the grasp of the three gunas and does
not govern that action from above, from his essential divine
nature. The divine nature of his strength is not affected by these
derivations, it remains the same in its essence in spite of every
obscuration and every lapse. The Divine is there in that nature
and supports him by its strength through the confusions of his
lower existence till he is able to recover the light, illumine wholly
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his life with the true sun of his being and govern his will and its
acts by the pure power of the divine will in his higher nature.
But how can the Divine be desire, kāma? for this desire, this
kāma has been declared to be our one great enemy who has to
be slain. But that desire was the desire of the lower nature of the
gunas which has its native point of origin in the rajasic being,
rajogun.a-samudbhavah.; for this is what we usually mean when
we speak of desire. This other, the spiritual, is a will not contrary
to the dharma.
Is it meant that the spiritual kāma is a virtuous desire, ethical
in its nature, a sattwic desire, — for virtue is always sattwic in its
origin and motive force? But then there would be here an obvious
contradiction, — since in the very next line all sattwic affections
are declared to be not the Divine, but only lower derivations.
Undoubtedly sin has to be abandoned if one is to get anywhere
near the Godhead; but so too has virtue to be overpassed if we
are to enter into the Divine Being. The sattwic nature has to be
attained, but it has then to be exceeded. Ethical action is only a
means of purification by which we can rise towards the divine
nature, but that nature itself is lifted beyond the dualities, —
and indeed there could otherwise be no pure divine presence or
divine strength in the strong man who is subjected to the rajasic
passions. Dharma in the spiritual sense is not morality or ethics.
Dharma, says the Gita elsewhere, is action governed by the
swabhava, the essential law of one’s nature. And this swabhava
is at its core the pure quality of the spirit in its inherent power
of conscious will and in its characteristic force of action. The
desire meant here is therefore the purposeful will of the Divine
in us searching for and discovering not the pleasure of the lower
Prakriti, but the Ananda of its own play and self-fulfilling; it is
the desire of the divine Delight of existence unrolling its own
conscious force of action in accordance with the law of the
swabhava.
But what again is meant by saying that the Divine is not
in the becomings, the forms and affections of the lower nature,
even the sattwic, though they all are in his being? In a sense he
must evidently be in them, otherwise they could not exist. But
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what is meant is that the true and supreme spiritual nature of
the Divine is not imprisoned there; they are only phenomena
in his being created out of it by the action of the ego and the
ignorance. The ignorance presents everything to us in an inverted
vision and at least a partially falsified experience. We imagine
that the soul is in the body, almost a result and derivation from
the body; even we so feel it: but it is the body that is in the soul
and a result and derivation from the soul. We think of the spirit
as a small part of us — the Purusha who is no bigger than the
thumb — in this great mass of material and mental phenomena:
in reality, the latter for all its imposing appearance is a very
small thing in the infinity of the being of the spirit. So it is here;
in much the same sense these things are in the Divine rather
than the Divine in these things. This lower nature of the three
gunas which creates so false a view of things and imparts to
them an inferior character is a Maya, a power of illusion, by
which it is not meant that it is all non-existent or deals with
unrealities, but that it bewilders our knowledge, creates false
values, envelops us in ego, mentality, sense, physicality, limited
intelligence and there conceals from us the supreme truth of our
existence. This illusive Maya hides from us the Divine that we
are, the infinite and imperishable spirit. “By these three kinds
of becoming which are of the nature of the gunas, this whole
world is bewildered and does not recognise Me supreme beyond
them and imperishable.” If we could see that that Divine is the
real truth of our existence, all else also would change to our
vision, assume its true character and our life and action acquire
the divine values and move in the law of the divine nature.
But why then, since the Divine is there after all and the
divine nature at the root even of these bewildering derivations,
since we are the Jiva and the Jiva is that, is this Maya so hard to
overcome, māyā duratyayā? Because it is still the Maya of the
Divine, daivı̄ hyes.ā gun.amayı̄ mama māyā; “this is my divine
Maya of the gunas.” It is itself divine and a development from
the nature of the Divine, but the Divine in the nature of the gods;
it is daivı̄, of the godheads or, if you will, of the Godhead, but of
the Godhead in its divided subjective and lower cosmic aspects,
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sattwic, rajasic and tamasic. It is a cosmic veil which the Godhead has spun around our understanding; Brahma, Vishnu and
Rudra have woven its complex threads; the Shakti, the Supreme
Nature is there at its base and is hidden in its every tissue. We
have to work out this web in ourselves and turn through it and
from it leaving it behind us when its use is finished, turn from the
gods to the original and supreme Godhead in whom we shall
discover at the same time the last sense of the gods and their
works and the inmost spiritual verities of our own imperishable
existence. “To Me who turn and come, they alone cross over
beyond this Maya.”
II
The Synthesis of
Devotion and Knowledge
1
T
HE GITA is not a treatise of metaphysical philosophy, in
spite of the great mass of metaphysical ideas which arise
incidentally in its pages; for here no metaphysical truth
is brought into expression solely for its own sake. It seeks the
highest truth for the highest practical utility, not for intellectual
or even for spiritual satisfaction, but as the truth that saves and
opens to us the passage from our present mortal imperfection
to an immortal perfection. Therefore after giving us in the first
fourteen verses of this chapter a leading philosophical truth of
which we stand in need, it hastens in the next sixteen verses
to make an immediate application of it. It turns it into a first
starting-point for the unification of works, knowledge and devotion, — for the preliminary synthesis of works and knowledge
by themselves has already been accomplished.
We have before us three powers, the Purushottama as the
supreme truth of that into which we have to grow, the Self and
the Jiva. Or, as we may put it, there is the Supreme, there is
the impersonal spirit, and there is the multiple soul, timeless
foundation of our spiritual personality, the true and eternal individual, mamaivāṁśah. sanātanah.. All these three are divine,
all three are the Divine. The supreme spiritual nature of being,
the Para Prakriti free from any limitation by the conditioning
Ignorance, is the nature of the Purushottama. In the impersonal
Self there is the same divine nature, but here it is in its state of
eternal rest, equilibrium, inactivity, nivritti. Finally, for activity,
for pravritti, the Para Prakriti becomes the multiple spiritual
personality, the Jiva. But the intrinsic activity of this supreme
1
Gita, VII. 15-28.
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279
Nature is always a spiritual, a divine working. It is force of
the supreme divine Nature, it is the conscious will of the being
of the Supreme that throws itself out in various essential and
spiritual power of quality in the Jiva: that essential power is
the swabhava of the Jiva. All act and becoming which proceed
directly from this spiritual force are a divine becoming and a
pure and spiritual action. Therefore it follows that in action the
effort of the human individual must be to get back to his true
spiritual personality and to make all his works flow from the
power of its supernal Shakti, to develop action through the soul
and the inmost intrinsic being, not through the mental idea and
vital desire, and to turn all his acts into a pure outflowing of
the will of the Supreme, all his life into a dynamic symbol of the
Divine Nature.
But there is also this lower nature of the three gunas whose
character is the character of the ignorance and whose action is
the action of the ignorance, mixed, confused, perverted; it is the
action of the lower personality, of the ego, of the natural and
not of the spiritual individual. It is in order to recede from that
false personality that we have to resort to the impersonal Self
and make ourselves one with it. Then, freed so from the ego
personality, we can find the relation of the true individual to the
Purushottama. It is one with him in being, even though necessarily partial and determinative, because individual, in action and
temporal manifestation of nature. Freed too from the lower nature we can realise the higher, the divine, the spiritual. Therefore
to act from the soul does not mean to act from the desire soul; for
that is not the high intrinsic being, but only the lower natural and
superficial appearance. To act in accordance with the intrinsic
nature, the swabhava, does not mean to act out of the passions
of the ego, to enact with indifference or with desire sin and
virtue according to the natural impulses and the unstable play
of the gunas. Yielding to passion, an active or an inert indulgence
of sin is no way either to the spiritual quietism of the highest
impersonality or to the spiritual activity of the divine individual
who is to be a channel for the will of the supreme Person, a
direct power and visible becoming of the Purushottama.
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The Gita has laid it down from the beginning that the very
first precondition of the divine birth, the higher existence is the
slaying of rajasic desire and its children, and that means the
exclusion of sin. Sin is the working of the lower nature for the
crude satisfaction of its own ignorant, dull or violent rajasic and
tamasic propensities in revolt against any high self-control and
self-mastery of the nature by the spirit. And in order to get rid
of this crude compulsion of the being by the lower Prakriti in its
inferior modes we must have recourse to the highest mode of that
Prakriti, the sattwic, which is seeking always for a harmonious
light of knowledge and for a right rule of action. The Purusha,
the soul within us which assents in Nature to the varying impulse
of the gunas, has to give its sanction to that sattwic impulse and
that sattwic will and temperament in our being which seeks after
such a rule. The sattwic will in our nature has to govern us and
not the rajasic and tamasic will. This is the meaning of all high
reason in action as of all true ethical culture; it is the law of
Nature in us striving to evolve from her lower and disorderly to
her higher and orderly action, to act not in passion and ignorance with the result of grief and unquiet, but in knowledge and
enlightened will with the result of inner happiness, poise and
peace. We cannot get beyond the three gunas, if we do not first
develop within ourselves the rule of the highest guna, sattwa.
“The evil-doers attain not to me,” says the Purushottama,
“souls bewildered, low in the human scale; for their knowledge
is reft away from them by Maya and they resort to the nature
of being of the Asura.” This bewilderment is a befooling of the
soul in Nature by the deceptive ego. The evil-doer cannot attain
to the Supreme because he is for ever trying to satisfy the idol
ego on the lowest scale of human nature; his real God is this
ego. His mind and will, hurried away in the activities of the
Maya of the three gunas, are not instruments of the spirit, but
willing slaves or self-deceived tools of his desires. He sees this
lower nature only and not his supreme self and highest being
or the Godhead within himself and in the world: he explains all
existence to his will in the terms of ego and desire and serves
only ego and desire. To serve ego and desire without aspiration
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to a higher nature and a higher law is to have the mind and the
temperament of the Asura. A first necessary step upward is to
aspire to a higher nature and a higher law, to obey a better rule
than the rule of desire, to perceive and worship a nobler godhead
than the ego or than any magnified image of the ego, to become a
right thinker and a right doer. This too is not in itself enough; for
even the sattwic man is subject to the bewilderment of the gunas,
because he is still governed by wish and disliking, icchā-dves.a.
He moves within the circle of the forms of Nature and has not
the highest, not the transcendental and integral knowledge. Still
by the constant upward aspiration in his ethical aim he in the
end gets rid of the obscuration of sin which is the obscuration of
rajasic desire and passion and acquires a purified nature capable
of deliverance from the rule of the triple Maya. By virtue alone
man cannot attain to the highest, but by virtue2 he can develop
a first capacity for attaining to it, adhikāra. For the crude rajasic
or the dull tamasic ego is difficult to shake off and put below
us; the sattwic ego is less difficult and at last, when it sufficiently
subtilises and enlightens itself, becomes even easy to transcend,
transmute or annihilate.
Man, therefore, has first of all to become ethical, sukr.tı̄, and
then to rise to heights beyond any mere ethical rule of living, to
the light, largeness and power of the spiritual nature, where he
gets beyond the grasp of the dualities and its delusion, dvandvamoha. There he no longer seeks his personal good or pleasure
or shuns his personal suffering or pain, for by these things he
is no longer affected, nor says any longer, “I am virtuous,” “I
am sinful,” but acts in his own high spiritual nature by the will
of the Divine for the universal good. We have already seen that
for this end self-knowledge, equality, impersonality are the first
necessities, and that that is the way of reconciliation between
knowledge and works, between spirituality and activity in the
world, between the ever immobile quietism of the timeless self
and the eternal play of the pragmatic energy of Nature. But
2
Obviously, by the true inner pun.ya, a sattwic clarity in thought, feeling, temperament,
motive and conduct, not a merely conventional or social virtue.
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the Gita now lays down another and greater necessity for the
Karmayogin who has unified his Yoga of works with the Yoga
of knowledge. Not knowledge and works alone are demanded
of him now, but bhakti also, devotion to the Divine, love and
adoration and the soul’s desire of the Highest. This demand,
not expressly made until now, had yet been prepared when the
Teacher laid down as the necessary turn of his Yoga the conversion of all works into a sacrifice to the Lord of our being and
fixed as its culmination the giving up of all works, not only into
our impersonal Self, but through impersonality into the Being
from whom all our will and power originate. What was there
implied is now brought out and we begin to see more fully the
Gita’s purpose.
We have now set before us three interdependent movements
of our release out of the normal nature and our growth into the
divine and spiritual being. “By the delusion of the dualities which
arises from wish and disliking, all existences in the creation are
led into bewilderment,” says the Gita. That is the ignorance, the
egoism which fails to see and lay hold on the Divine everywhere,
because it sees only the dualities of Nature and is constantly
occupied with its own separate personality and its seekings and
shrinkings. For escape from this circle the first necessity in our
works is to get clear of the sin of the vital ego, the fire of passion,
the tumult of desire of the rajasic nature, and this has to be done
by the steadying sattwic impulse of the ethical being. When that
is done, yes.āṁ tvantagataṁ pāpaṁ janānāṁ pun.yakarman.ām,
— or rather as it is being done, for after a certain point all
growth in the sattwic nature brings an increasing capacity for a
high quietude, equality and transcendence, — it is necessary to
rise above the dualities and to become impersonal, equal, one self
with the Immutable, one self with all existences. This process of
growing into the spirit completes our purification. But while this
is being done, while the soul is enlarging into self-knowledge, it
has also to increase in devotion. For it has not only to act in a
large spirit of equality, but to do also sacrifice to the Lord, to
that Godhead in all beings which it does not yet know perfectly,
but which it will be able so to know, integrally, samagraṁ mām,
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when it has firmly the vision of the one self everywhere and in all
existences. Equality and vision of unity once perfectly gained, te
dvandva-moha-nirmuktāh., a supreme bhakti, an all-embracing
devotion to the Divine, becomes the whole and the sole law
of the being. All other law of conduct merges into that surrender, sarva-dharmān parityajya. The soul then becomes firm in
this bhakti and in the vow of self-consecration of all its being,
knowledge, works; for it has now for its sure base, its absolute
foundation of existence and action the perfect, the integral, the
unifying knowledge of the all-originating Godhead, te bhajante
māṁ dr.d.ha-vratāh..
From the ordinary point of view any return towards bhakti
or continuation of the heart’s activities after knowledge and
impersonality have been gained, might seem to be a relapse. For
in bhakti there is always the element, the foundation even of
personality, since its motive-power is the love and adoration of
the individual soul, the Jiva, turned towards the supreme and
universal Being. But from the standpoint of the Gita, where the
aim is not inaction and immergence in the eternal Impersonal,
but a union with the Purushottama through the integrality of
our being, this objection cannot at all intervene. In this Yoga
the soul escapes indeed its lower personality by the sense of its
impersonal and immutable self-being; but it still acts and all
action belongs to the multiple soul in the mutability of Nature.
If we do not bring in as a corrective to an excessive quietism the
idea of sacrifice to the Highest, we have to regard this element
of action as something not at all ourselves, some remnant of the
play of the gunas without any divine reality behind it, a last dissolving form of ego, of I-ness, a continued impetus of the lower
Nature for which we are not responsible since our knowledge
rejects it and aims at escape from it into pure inaction. But by
combining the tranquil impersonality of the one self with the
stress of the works of Nature done as a sacrifice to the Lord,
we by this double key escape from the lower egoistic personality
and grow into the purity of our true spiritual person. Then are
we no longer the bound and ignorant ego in the lower, but the
free Jiva in the supreme Nature. Then we no longer live in the
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knowledge of the one immutable and impersonal self and this
mutable multiple Nature as two opposite entities, but rise to the
very embrace of the Purushottama discovered simultaneously
through both of these powers of our being. All three are the
spirit, and the two which are apparent opposites prove to be
only confronting faces of the third which is the highest. “There
is the immutable and impersonal spiritual being (Purusha),” says
Krishna later on, “and there is the mutable and personal spiritual
being. But there is too another Highest (uttama purus.a) called
the supreme self, Paramatman, he who has entered into this
whole world and upbears it, the Lord, the imperishable. I am
this Purushottama who am beyond the mutable and am greater
and higher even than the immutable. He who has knowledge of
me as the Purushottama, adores me (has bhakti for me, bhajati),
with all-knowledge and in every way of his natural being.” And
it is this bhakti of an integral knowledge and integral self-giving
which the Gita now begins to develop.
For note that it is bhakti with knowledge which the Gita
demands from the disciple and it regards all other forms of
devotion as good in themselves but still inferior; they may do
well by the way, but they are not the thing at which it aims in
the soul’s culmination. Among those who have put away the
sin of the rajasic egoism and are moving towards the Divine,
the Gita distinguishes between four kinds of bhaktas. There are
those who turn to him as a refuge from sorrow and suffering in
the world, ārta. There are those who seek him as the giver of
good in the world, arthārthı̄. There are those who come to him
in the desire for knowledge, jijñāsu. And lastly there are those
who adore him with knowledge, jñānı̄. All are approved by the
Gita, but only on the last does it lay the seal of its complete
sanction. All these movements without exception are high and
good, udārāh. sarva evaite, but the bhakti with knowledge excels
them all, viśis.yate. We may say that these forms are successively
the bhakti of the vital-emotional and affective nature,3 that of the
3
The later bhakti of ecstatic love is at its roots psychic in nature; it is vital-emotional
only in its inferior forms or in some of its more outward manifestations.
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practical and dynamic nature, that of the reasoning intellectual
nature, and that of the highest intuitive being which takes up
all the rest of the nature into unity with the Divine. Practically,
however, the others may be regarded as preparatory movements.
For the Gita itself here says that it is only at the end of many
existences that one can, after possession of the integral knowledge and after working that out in oneself through many lives,
attain at the long last to the Transcendent. For the knowledge
of the Divine as all things that are is difficult to attain and rare
on earth is the great soul, mahātmā, who is capable of fully so
seeing him and of entering into him with his whole being, in
every way of his nature, by the wide power of this all-embracing
knowledge, sarvavit sarvabhāvena.
It may be asked how is that devotion high and noble, udāra,
which seeks God only for the worldly boons he can give or as
a refuge in sorrow and suffering, and not the Divine for its
own sake? Do not egoism, weakness, desire reign in such an
adoration and does it not belong to the lower nature? Moreover,
where there is not knowledge, the devotee does not approach
the Divine in his integral all-embracing truth, vāsudevah. sarvam
iti, but constructs imperfect names and images of the Godhead
which are only reflections of his own need, temperament and
nature, and he worships them to help or appease his natural
longings. He constructs for the Godhead the name and form
of Indra or Agni, of Vishnu or Shiva, of a divinised Christ or
Buddha, or else some composite of natural qualities, an indulgent God of love and mercy, or a severe God of righteousness
and justice, or an awe-inspiring God of wrath and terror and
flaming punishments, or some amalgam of any of these, and
to that he raises his altars without and in his heart and mind
and falls down before it to demand from it worldly good and
joy or healing of his wounds or a sectarian sanction for an
erring, dogmatic, intellectual, intolerent knowledge. All this up
to a certain point is true enough. Very rare is the great soul
who knows that Vasudeva the omnipresent Being is all that
is, vāsudevah. sarvam iti sa mahātmā sudurlabhah.. Men are led
away by various outer desires which take from them the working
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of the inner knowledge, kāmais tais tair hr.tajñānāh.. Ignorant,
they resort to other godheads, imperfect forms of the deity which
correspond to their desire, prapadyante ’nyadevatāh.. Limited,
they set up this or that rule and cult, taṁ taṁ niyamam āsthāya,
which satisfies the need of their nature. And in all this it is a
compelling personal determination, it is this narrow need of
their own nature that they follow and take for the highest truth,
— incapable yet of the infinite and its largeness. The Godhead
in these forms gives them their desires if their faith is whole;
but these fruits and gratifications are temporary and it is a petty
intelligence and unformed reason which makes the pursuit of
them its principle of religion and life. And so far as there is a
spiritual attainment by this way, it is only to the gods; it is only
the Divine in formations of mutable nature and as the giver of
her results that they realise. But those who adore the transcendent and integral Godhead embrace all this and transform it
all, exalt the gods to their highest, Nature to her summits, and
go beyond them to the very Godhead, realise and attain to the
Transcendent. Devān deva-yajo yānti mad-bhaktā yānti mām
api.
Still the supreme Godhead does not at all reject these devotees because of their imperfect vision. For the Divine in his
supreme transcendent being, unborn, imminuable and superior
to all these partial manifestations, cannot be easily known to
any living creature. He is self-enveloped in this immense cloak
of Maya, that Maya of his Yoga, by which he is one with the
world and yet beyond it, immanent but hidden, seated in all
hearts but not revealed to any and every being. Man in Nature
thinks that these manifestations in Nature are all the Divine,
when they are only his works and his powers and his veils. He
knows all past and all present and future existences, but him
none yet knoweth. If then after thus bewildering them with his
workings in Nature, he were not to meet them in these at all,
there would be no divine hope for man or for any soul in Maya.
Therefore according to their nature, as they approach him, he
accepts their bhakti and answers to it with the reply of divine
love and compassion. These forms are after all a certain kind of
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287
manifestation through which the imperfect human intelligence
can touch him, these desires are first means by which our souls
turn towards him: nor is any devotion worthless or ineffective,
whatever its limitations. It has the one grand necessity, faith.
“Whatever form of me any devotee with faith desires to worship,
I make that faith of his firm and undeviating.” By the force of
that faith in his cult and worship he gets his desire and the
spiritual realisation for which he is at the moment fitted. By
seeking all his good from the Divine, he shall come in the end to
seek in the Divine all his good. By depending for his joys on the
Divine, he shall learn to fix in the Divine all his joy. By knowing
the Divine in his forms and qualities, he shall come to know him
as the All and the Transcendent who is the source of all things.4
Thus by spiritual development devotion becomes one with
knowledge. The Jiva comes to delight in the one Godhead, —
in the Divine known as all being and consciousness and delight
and as all things and beings and happenings, known in Nature,
known in the self, known for that which exceeds self and Nature.
He is ever in constant union with him, nityayukta; his whole life
and being are an eternal Yoga with the Transcendent than whom
there is nothing higher, with the Universal besides whom there is
none else and nothing else. On him is concentred all his bhakti,
ekabhaktih., not on any partial godhead, rule or cult. This single
devotion is his whole law of living and he has gone beyond all
creeds of religious belief, rules of conduct, personal aims of life.
He has no griefs to be healed, for he is in possession of the Allblissful. He has no desires to hunger after, for he possesses the
highest and the All and is close to the All-Power that brings
all fulfilment. He has no doubts or baffled seekings left, for all
knowledge streams upon him from the Light in which he lives.
He loves perfectly the Divine and is his beloved; for as he takes
joy in the Divine, so too the Divine takes joy in him. This is
4
There is a place also for the three lesser seekings even after the highest attainment,
but transformed, not narrowly personal, — for there can still be a passion for the removal of sorrow and evil and ignorance and for the increasing evolution and integral
manifestation of the supreme good, power, joy and knowledge in this phenomenal
Nature.
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the God-lover who has the knowledge, jñānı̄ bhakta. And this
knower, says the Godhead in the Gita, is my self; the others seize
only motives and aspects in Nature, but he the very self-being
and all-being of the Purushottama with which he is in union.
His is the divine birth in the supreme Nature, integral in being,
completed in will, absolute in love, perfected in knowledge. In
him the Jiva’s cosmic existence is justified because it has exceeded
itself and so found its own whole and highest truth of being.
III
The Supreme Divine
1
A
LREADY what has been said in the seventh chapter provides us with the starting-point of our new and fuller
position and fixes it with sufficient precision. Substantially it comes to this that we are to move inwardly towards a
greater consciousness and a supreme existence, not by a total
exclusion of our cosmic nature, but by a higher, a spiritual
fulfilment of all that we now essentially are. Only there is to
be a change from our mortal imperfection to a divine perfection
of being. The first idea on which this possibility is founded, is the
conception of the individual soul in man as in its eternal essence
and its original power a ray of the supreme Soul and Godhead,
here a veiled manifestation of him, a being of his being, a consciousness of his consciousness, a nature of his nature, but in the
obscurity of this mental and physical existence self-forgetful of
its source, its reality, its true character. The second idea is that
of the double nature of the Soul in manifestation, — the original
nature in which it is one with its own true spiritual being, and
the derived in which it is subject to the confusions of egoism and
ignorance. The latter has to be cast away and the spiritual has
to be inwardly recovered, fulfilled, made dynamic and active.
Through an inner self-fulfilment, the opening of a new status,
our birth into a new power, we return to the nature of the Spirit
and re-become a portion of the Godhead from whom we have
descended into this mortal figure of being.
There is here at once a departure from the general contemporary mind of Indian thought, a less negating attitude, a greater
affirmation. In place of its obsessing idea of a self-annulment of
Nature we get the glimpse of an ampler solution, the principle
of a self-fulfilment in divine Nature. There is, even, at least
1
Gita, VII. 29-30, VIII.
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a foreshadowing of the later developments of the religions of
Bhakti. Our first experience of what is beyond our normal status,
concealed behind the egoistic being in which we live, is still for
the Gita the calm of a vast impersonal immutable self in whose
equality and oneness we lose our petty egoistic personality and
cast off in its tranquil purity all our narrow motives of desire and
passion. But our second completer vision reveals to us a living
Infinite, a divine immeasurable Being from whom all that we are
proceeds and to which all that we are belongs, self and nature,
world and spirit. When we are one with him in self and spirit,
we do not lose ourselves, but rather recover our true selves in
him poised in the supremacy of this Infinite. And this is done
at one and the same time by three simultaneous movements, —
an integral self-finding through works founded in his and our
spiritual nature, an integral self-becoming through knowledge
of the Divine Being in whom all exists and who is all, and —
most sovereign and decisive movement of all — an integral selfgiving through love and devotion of our whole being to this All
and this Supreme, attracted to the Master of our works, to the
Inhabitant of our hearts, to the continent of all our conscious
existence. To him who is the source of all that we are, we give all
that we are. Our persistent consecration turns into knowledge
of him all our knowing and into light of his power all our action.
The passion of love in our self-giving carries us up to him and
opens the mystery of his deepest heart of being. Love completes
the triple cord of the sacrifice, perfects the triune key of the
highest secret, uttamaṁ rahasyam.
An integral knowledge in our self-giving is the first condition
of its effective force. And therefore we have first of all to know
this Purusha in all the powers and principles of his divine existence, tattvatah., in the whole harmony of it, in its eternal essence
and living process. But to the ancient thought all the value of
this knowledge, tattvajñāna, lay in its power for release out of
our mortal birth into the immortality of a supreme existence.
The Gita therefore proceeds next to show how this liberation
too in the highest degree is a final outcome of its own movement
of spiritual self-fulfilment. The knowledge of the Purushottama,
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it says in effect, is the perfect knowledge of the Brahman. Those
who have resort to Me as their refuge, mām āśritya, their divine
light, their deliverer, receiver and harbourer of their souls, those
who turn to Me in their spiritual effort towards release from
age and death, from the mortal being and its limitations, says
Krishna, come to know that Brahman and all the integrality
of the spiritual nature and the entirety of Karma. And because
they know Me and know at the same time the material and the
divine nature of being and the truth of the Master of sacrifice,
they keep knowledge of Me also in the critical moment of their
departure from physical existence and have at that moment
their whole consciousness in union with Me. Therefore they
attain to Me. No longer bound to the mortal existence, they
reach the very highest status of the Divine quite as effectively as
those who lose their separate personality in the impersonal and
immutable Brahman. Thus the Gita closes this important and
decisive seventh chapter.
Here we have certain expressions which give us in their
brief sum the chief essential truths of the manifestation of the
supreme Divine in the cosmos. All the originative and effective
aspects of it are there, all that concerns the soul in its return to
integral self-knowledge. First there is that Brahman, tad brahma;
adhyātma, second, the principle of the self in Nature; adhibhūta
and adhidaiva next, the objective phenomenon and subjective
phenomenon of being; adhiyajña last, the secret of the cosmic
principle of works and sacrifice. I, the Purushottama (māṁ
viduh.), says in effect Krishna, I who am above all these things,
must yet be sought and known through all together and by
means of their relations, — that is the only complete way for the
human consciousness which is seeking its path back towards
Me. But these terms in themselves are not at first quite clear or
at least they are open to different interpretations, they have to
be made precise in their connotation, and Arjuna the disciple at
once asks for their elucidation. Krishna answers very briefly, —
nowhere does the Gita linger very long upon any purely metaphysical explanation; it gives only so much and in such a way as
will make their truth just seizable for the soul to proceed on to
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experience. By that Brahman, a phrase which in the Upanishads
is more than once used for the self-existent as opposed to the
phenomenal being, the Gita intends, it appears, the immutable
self-existence which is the highest self-expression of the Divine
and on whose unalterable eternity all the rest, all that moves and
evolves, is founded, aks.araṁ paramam. By adhyātma it means
svabhāva, the spiritual way and law of being of the soul in the
supreme Nature. Karma, it says, is the name given to the creative
impulse and energy, visargah., which looses out things from this
first essential self-becoming, this Swabhava, and effects, creates,
works out under its influence the cosmic becoming of existences
in Prakriti. By adhibhūta is to be understood all the result of
mutable becoming, ks.aro bhāvah.. By adhidaiva is intended the
Purusha, the soul in Nature, the subjective being who observes
and enjoys as the object of his consciousness all that is this
mutable becoming of his essential existence worked out here by
Karma in Nature. By adhiyajña, the Lord of works and sacrifice, I mean, says Krishna, myself, the Divine, the Godhead,
the Purushottama here secret in the body of all these embodied
existences. All that is, therefore, falls within this formula.
The Gita immediately proceeds from this brief statement
to work out the idea of the final release by knowledge which
it has suggested in the last verse of the preceding chapter. It
will return indeed upon its thought hereafter to give such ulterior light as is needed for action and inner realisation, and
we may wait till then for a fuller knowledge of all that these
terms indicate. But before we proceed farther, it is necessary to
bring out as much of the connection between these things as we
are justified in understanding from this passage itself and from
what has gone before. For here is indicated the Gita’s idea of the
process of the cosmos. First there is the Brahman, the highest
immutable self-existent being which all existences are behind
the play of cosmic Nature in time and space and causality, deśakāla-nimitta. For by that self-existence alone time and space and
causality are able to exist, and without that unchanging support
omnipresent, yet indivisible they could not proceed to their divisions and results and measures. But of itself the immutable
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Brahman does nothing, causes nothing, determines nothing; it is
impartial, equal, all-supporting, but does not select or originate.
What then originates, what determines, what gives the divine
impulsion of the Supreme? what is it that governs Karma and
actively unrolls the cosmic becoming in Time out of the eternal
being? It is Nature as Swabhava. The Supreme, the Godhead, the
Purushottama is there and supports on his eternal immutability
the action of his higher spiritual Shakti. He displays the divine
Being, Consciousness, Will or Power, yayedaṁ dhāryate jagat:
that is the Para Prakriti. The self-awareness of the Spirit in this
supreme Nature perceives in the light of self-knowledge the
dynamic idea, the authentic truth of whatever he separates in
his own being and expresses it in the Swabhava, the spiritual
nature of the Jiva. The inherent truth and principle of the self
of each Jiva, that which works itself out in manifestation, the
essential divine nature in all which remains constant behind all
conversions, perversions, reversions, that is the Swabhava. All
that is in the Swabhava is loosed out into cosmic Nature for
her to do what she can with it under the inner eye of the Purushottama. Out of the constant svabhāva, out of the essential
nature and self-principle of being of each becoming, she creates
the varied mutations by which she strives to express it, unrolls
all her changes in name and form, in time and space and those
successions of condition developed one out of the other in time
and space which we call causality, nimitta.
All this bringing out and continual change from state to
state is Karma, is action of Nature, is the energy of Prakriti,
the worker, the goddess of processes. It is first a loosing forth
of the svabhāva into its creative action, visargah.. The creation
is of existences in the becoming, bhūta-karah., and of all that
they subjectively or otherwise become, bhāva-karah.. All taken
together, it is a constant birth of things in Time, udbhava, of
which the creative energy of Karma is the principle. All this
mutable becoming emerges by a combination of the powers and
energies of Nature, adhibhūta, which constitutes the world and
is the object of the soul’s consciousness. In it all the soul is the
enjoying and observing Deity in Nature; the divine powers of
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mind and will and sense, all the powers of its conscious being
by which it reflects this working of Prakriti are its godheads,
adhidaiva. This soul in Nature is therefore the ks.ara purus.a, it
is the mutable soul, the eternal activity of the Godhead: the same
soul in the Brahman drawn back from her is the aks.ara purus.a,
the immutable self, the eternal silence of the Godhead. But in
the form and body of the mutable being inhabits the supreme
Godhead. Possessing at once the calm of the immutable existence
and the enjoyment of the mutable action there dwells in man the
Purushottama. He is not only remote from us in some supreme
status beyond, but he is here too in the body of every being, in
the heart of man and in Nature. There he receives the works of
Nature as a sacrifice and awaits the conscious self-giving of the
human soul: but always even in the human creature’s ignorance
and egoism he is the Lord of his swabhava and the Master of
all his works, who presides over the law of Prakriti and Karma.
From him the soul came forth into the play of Nature’s mutations; to him the soul returns through immutable self-existence
to the highest status of the Divine, paraṁ dhāma.
Man, born into the world, revolves between world and
world in the action of Prakriti and Karma. Purusha in Prakriti
is his formula: what the soul in him thinks, contemplates and
acts, that always he becomes. All that he had been, determined
his present birth; and all that he is, thinks, does in this life up to
the moment of his death, determines what he will become in the
worlds beyond and in lives yet to be. If birth is a becoming, death
also is a becoming, not by any means a cessation. The body is
abandoned, but the soul goes on its way, tyaktvā kalevaram.
Much then depends on what he is at the critical moment of his
departure. For whatever form of becoming his consciousness is
fixed on at the time of death and has been full of that always in
his mind and thought before death, to that form he must attain,
since the Prakriti by Karma works out the soul’s thoughts and
energies and that is in real fact her whole business. Therefore, if
the soul in the human being desires to attain to the status of the
Purushottama, there are two necessities, two conditions which
must be satisfied before that can be possible. He must have
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moulded towards that ideal his whole inner life in his earthly
living; and he must be faithful to his aspiration and will in his
departing. “Whoever leaves his body and departs” says Krishna
“remembering me at his time of end, comes to my bhāva,” that
of the Purushottama, my status of being. He is united with the
original being of the Divine and that is the ultimate becoming
of the soul, paro bhāvah., the last result of Karma in its return
upon itself and towards its source. The soul which has followed
the play of cosmic evolution that veils here its essential spiritual
nature, its original form of becoming, svabhāva, and has passed
through all these other ways of becoming of its consciousness
which are only its phenomena, taṁ taṁ bhāvam, returns to that
essential nature and, finding through this return its true self and
spirit, comes to the original status of being which is from the
point of view of the return a highest becoming, mad-bhāvam. In
a certain sense we may say that it becomes God, since it unites
itself with nature of the Divine in a last transformation of its
own phenomenal nature and existence.
The Gita here lays a great stress on the thought and state of
mind at the time of death, a stress which will with difficulty be
understood if we do not recognise what may be called the selfcreative power of the consciousness. What the thought, the inner
regard, the faith, śraddhā, settles itself upon with a complete and
definite insistence, into that our inner being tends to change. This
tendency becomes a decisive force when we go to those higher
spiritual and self-evolved experiences which are less dependent
on external things than is our ordinary psychology, enslaved as
that is to outward Nature. There we can see ourselves steadily
becoming that on which we keep our minds fixed and to which
we constantly aspire. Therefore there any lapse of the thought,
any infidelity of the memory means always a retardation of the
change or some fall in its process and a going back towards what
we were before, — at least so long as we have not substantially
and irrevocably fixed our new becoming. When we have done
that, when we have made it normal to our experience, the memory of it remains self-existently because that now is the natural
form of our consciousness. In the critical moment of passing
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from the mortal plane of living, the importance of our then
state of consciousness becomes evident. But it is not a deathbed remembrance at variance with or insufficiently prepared by
the whole tenor of our life and our past subjectivity that can
have this saving power. The thought of the Gita here is not on a
par with the indulgences and facilities of popular religion; it has
nothing in common with the crude fancies that make the absolution and last unction of the priest, an edifying “Christian” death
after an unedifying profane life or the precaution or accident of
a death in sacred Benares or holy Ganges a sufficient machinery
of salvation. The divine subjective becoming on which the mind
has to be fixed firmly in the moment of the physical death, yaṁ
smaran bhāvaṁ tyajati ante kalevaram, must have been one into
which the soul was at each moment growing inwardly during
the physical life, sadā tad-bhāva-bhāvitah.. “Therefore,” says the
divine Teacher, “at all times remember me and fight; for if thy
mind and thy understanding are always fixed on and given up to
Me, mayi arpita-mano-buddhih., to Me thou shalt surely come.
For it is by thinking always of him with a consciousness united
with him in an undeviating Yoga of constant practice that one
comes to the divine and supreme Purusha.”
We arrive here at the first description of this supreme Purusha, — the Godhead who is even more and greater than the
Immutable and to whom the Gita gives subsequently the name
of Purushottama. He too in his timeless eternity is immutable
and far beyond all this manifestation and here in Time there
dawn on us only faint glimpses of his being conveyed through
many varied symbols and disguises, avyakto aks.arah.. Still he is
not merely a featureless or indiscernible existence, anirdeśyam;
or he is indiscernible only because he is subtler than the last
subtlety of which the mind is aware and because the form of the
Divine is beyond our thought, an.or an.ı̄yāṁsam acintya-rūpam.
This supreme Soul and Self is the Seer, the Ancient of Days and
in his eternal self-vision and wisdom the Master and Ruler of all
existence who sets in their place in his being all things that are,
kaviṁ purān.am anuśāsitāraṁ sarvasya dhātāram. This supreme
Soul is the immutable self-existent Brahman of whom the Veda-
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knowers speak, and this is that into which the doers of askesis
enter when they have passed beyond the affections of the mind
of mortality and for the desire of which they practise the control
of the bodily passions.2 That eternal reality is the highest step,
place, foothold of being (padam); therefore is it the supreme goal
of the soul’s movement in Time, itself no movement but a status
original, sempiternal and supreme, paraṁ sthānam ādyam.
The Gita describes the last state of the mind of the Yogin in
which he passes from life through death to this supreme divine
existence. A motionless mind, a soul armed with the strength of
Yoga, a union with God in bhakti, — the union by love is not
here superseded by the featureless unification through knowledge, it remains to the end a part of the supreme force of the
Yoga, — and the life-force entirely drawn up and set between
the brows in the seat of mystic vision. All the doors of the
sense are closed, the mind is shut in into the heart, the life-force
taken up out of its diffused movement into the head, the intelligence concentrated in the utterance of the sacred syllable OM
and its conceptive thought in the remembrance of the supreme
Godhead, mām anusmaran. That is the established Yogic way
of going, a last offering up of the whole being to the Eternal,
the Transcendent. But still that is only a process; the essential
condition is the constant undeviating memory of the Divine in
life, even in action and battle — mām anusmara yudhya ca —
and the turning of the whole act of living into an uninterrupted
Yoga, nitya-yoga. Whoever does that, finds Me easy to attain,
says the Godhead; he is the great soul who reaches the supreme
perfection.
The condition to which the soul arrives when it thus departs
from life is supracosmic. The highest heavens of the cosmic plan
are subject to a return to rebirth; but there is no rebirth imposed on the soul that departs to the Purushottama. Therefore
whatever fruit can be had from the aspiration of knowledge to
the indefinable Brahman, is acquired also by this other and comprehensive aspiration through knowledge, works and love to the
2
The language here is taken bodily from the Upanishads.
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self-existent Godhead who is the Master of works and the Friend
of mankind and of all beings. To know him so and so to seek
him does not bind to rebirth or to the chain of Karma; the soul
can satisfy its desire to escape permanently from the transient
and painful condition of our mortal being. And the Gita here,
in order to make more precise to the mind this circling round of
births and the escape from it, adopts the ancient theory of the
cosmic cycles which became a fixed part of Indian cosmological
notions. There is an eternal cycle of alternating periods of cosmic
manifestation and non-manifestation, each period called respectively a day and a night of the creator Brahma, each of equal
length in Time, the long aeon of his working which endures for
a thousand ages, the long aeon of his sleep of another thousand
silent ages. At the coming of the Day all manifestations are born
into being out of the unmanifest, at the coming of the Night all
vanish or are dissolved into it. Thus all these existences alternate
helplessly in the cycle of becoming and non-becoming; they come
into the becoming again and again, bhūtvā bhūtvā, and they go
back constantly into the unmanifest. But this unmanifest is not
the original divinity of the Being; there is another status of his
existence, bhāvo ’nyo, a supracosmic unmanifest beyond this
cosmic non-manifestation, which is eternally self-seated, is not
an opposite of this cosmic status of manifestation but far above
and unlike it, changeless, eternal, not forced to perish with the
perishing of all these existences. “He is called the unmanifest immutable, him they speak of as the supreme soul and status, and
those who attain to him return not; that is my supreme place of
being, paramaṁ dhāma.” For the soul attaining to it has escaped
out of the cycle of cosmic manifestation and non-manifestation.
Whether we entertain or we dismiss this cosmological notion, — which depends on the value we are inclined to assign
to the knowledge of “the knowers of day and night,” — the
important thing is the turn the Gita gives to it. One might
easily imagine that this eternally unmanifested Being whose status seems to have nothing to do with the manifestation or the
non-manifestation, must be the ever undefined and indefinable
Absolute, and the proper way to reach him is to get rid of all
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that we have become in the manifestation, not to carry up to it
our whole inner consciousness in a combined concentration of
the mind’s knowledge, the heart’s love, the Yogic will, the vital
life-force. Especially, bhakti seems inapplicable to the Absolute
who is void of every relation, avyavahārya. “But” insists the
Gita, — although this condition is supracosmic and although it
is eternally unmanifest, — still “that supreme Purusha has to be
won by a bhakti which turns to him alone in whom all beings
exist and by whom all this world has been extended in space.” In
other words, the supreme Purusha is not an entirely relationless
Absolute aloof from our illusions, but he is the Seer, Creator
and Ruler of the worlds, kavim anuśāsitāram, dhātāram, and
it is by knowing and by loving Him as the One and the All,
vāsudevah. sarvam iti, that we ought by a union with him of
our whole conscious being in all things, all energies, all actions
to seek the supreme consummation, the perfect perfection, the
absolute release.
Then there comes a more curious thought which the Gita has
adopted from the mystics of the early Vedanta. It gives the different times at which the Yogin has to leave his body according
as he wills to seek rebirth or to avoid it. Fire and light and smoke
or mist, the day and the night, the bright fortnight of the lunar
month and the dark, the northern solstice and the southern,
these are the opposites. By the first in each pair the knowers of
the Brahman go to the Brahman; but by the second the Yogin
reaches the “lunar light” and returns subsequently to human
birth. These are the bright and the dark paths, called the path of
the gods and the path of the fathers in the Upanishads, and the
Yogin who knows them is not misled into any error. Whatever
psycho-physical fact or else symbolism there may be behind this
notion,3 — it comes down from the age of the mystics who saw
in every physical thing an effective symbol of the psychological
3
Yogic experience shows in fact that there is a real psycho-physical truth, not indeed
absolute in its application, behind this idea, viz., that in the inner struggle between the
powers of the Light and the powers of the Darkness, the former tend to have a natural
prevalence in the bright periods of the day or the year, the latter in the dark periods, and
this balance may last until the fundamental victory is won.
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and who traced everywhere an interaction and a sort of identity
of the outward with the inward, light and knowledge, the fiery
principle and the spiritual energy, — we need observe only the
turn by which the Gita closes the passage: “Therefore at all times
be in Yoga.”
For that is after all the essential, to make the whole being
one with the Divine, so entirely and in all ways one as to be
naturally and constantly fixed in union, and thus to make all
living, not only thought and meditation, but action, labour, battle, a remembering of God. “Remember me and fight,” means
not to lose the ever-present thought of the Eternal for one single
moment in the clash of the temporal which normally absorbs our
minds, and that seems sufficiently difficult, almost impossible.
It is entirely possible indeed only if the other conditions are
satisfied. If we have become in our consciousness one self with
all, one self which is always to our thought the Divine, and even
our eyes and our other senses see and sense the Divine Being
everywhere so that it is impossible for us at any time at all to
feel or think of anything as that merely which the unenlightened
sense perceives, but only as the Godhead at once concealed and
manifested in that form, and if our will is one in consciousness
with a supreme will and every act of will, of mind, of body is felt
to come from it, to be its movement, instinct with it or identical,
then what the Gita demands can be integrally done. The remembrance of the Divine Being becomes no longer an intermittent
act of the mind, but the natural condition of our activities and
in a way the very substance of the consciousness. The Jiva has
become possessed of its right and natural, its spiritual relation
to the Purushottama and all our life is a Yoga, an accomplished
and yet an eternally self-accomplishing oneness.
IV
The Secret of Secrets
A
LL THE truth that has developed itself at this length
step by step, each bringing forward a fresh aspect of the
integral knowledge and founding on it some result of
spiritual state and action, has now to take a turn of immense
importance. The Teacher therefore takes care first to draw attention to the decisive character of what he is about to say, so
that the mind of Arjuna may be awakened and attentive. For
he is going to open his mind to the knowledge and sight of the
integral Divinity and lead up to the vision of the eleventh book,
by which the warrior of Kurukshetra becomes conscious of the
author and upholder of his being and action and mission, the
Godhead in man and the world, whom nothing in man and
the world limits or binds, because all proceeds from him, is a
movement in his infinite being, continues and is supported by
his will, is justified in his divine self-knowledge, has him always
for its origin, substance and end. Arjuna is to become aware
of himself as existing only in God and as acting only by the
power within him, his workings only an instrumentality of the
divine action, his egoistic consciousness only a veil and to his
ignorance a misrepresentation of the real being within him which
is an immortal spark and portion of the supreme Godhead.
This vision is to remove whatever doubt may still remain
within his mind; it is to make him strong for the action from
which he has shrunk, but to which he is irrevocably commanded
and can no more recoil from it, — for to recoil would be the
negation and denial of the divine will and sanction within him
already expressed in his individual consciousness but soon to
assume the appearance of the greater cosmic sanction. For now
the world Being appears to him as the body of God ensouled by
the eternal Time-spirit and with its majestic and dreadful voice
missions him to the crash of the battle. He is called by it to
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the liberation of his spirit, to the fulfilment of his action in the
cosmic mystery, and the two — liberation and action — are to
be one movement. His intellectual doubts are clearing away as
a greater light of self-knowledge and the knowledge of God and
Nature is being unfolded before him. But intellectual clarity is
not enough; he must see with the inner sight illumining his blind
outward human vision, so that he may act with the consent of
his whole being, with a perfect faith in all his members, śraddhā,
with a perfect devotion to the Self of his self and the Master of
his being and to the same Self of the world and Master of all
being in the universe.
All that has gone before laid the foundations of the knowledge or prepared its first necessary materials or scaffolding, but
now the full frame of the structure is to be placed before his
unsealed vision. All that is to come after will have its great
importance because it will analyse parts of this frame, show in
what this or that in it consists; but in substance the integral
knowledge of the Being who is speaking to him is to be now unveiled to his eyes so that he cannot choose but see. What has gone
before showed him that he is not bound fatally to the knot of the
ignorance and egoistic action in which he had hitherto remained
contented till its partial solutions sufficed no longer to satisfy his
mind bewildered by the conflict of opposite appearances that
make up the action of the world and his heart troubled by the
entanglement of his works from which he feels himself unable
to escape except by renunciation of life and works. He has been
shown that there are two opposed ways of working and living,
one in the ignorance of the ego, one in the clear self-knowledge
of a divine being. He may act with desire, with passion, an
ego driven by the qualities of the lower Nature, subject to the
balance of virtue and sin, joy and sorrow, preoccupied with the
fruits and consequences of his works, success and defeat, good
result and evil result, bound on the world machine, caught up in
a great tangle of action and inaction and perverse action which
perplex the heart and mind and soul of man with their changing
and contrary masks and appearances. But he is not utterly tied
down to the works of the ignorance; he may do if he will the
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works of knowledge. He may act here as the higher thinker, the
knower, the Yogin, the seeker of freedom first and afterwards
the liberated spirit. To perceive that great possibility and to keep
his will and intelligence fixed on the knowledge and self-vision
which will realise and make it effectual, is the path of escape
from his sorrow and bewilderment, the way out of the human
riddle.
There is a spirit within us calm, superior to works, equal,
not bound in this external tangle, surveying it as its supporter,
source, immanent witness, but not involved in it. Infinite, containing all, one self in all, it surveys impartially the whole action
of nature and it sees that it is only the action of Nature, not its
own action. It sees that the ego and its will and its intelligence
are all a machinery of Nature and that all their activities are
determined by the complexity of her triple modes and qualities.
The eternal spirit itself is free from these things. It is free from
them because it knows; it knows that Nature and ego and the
personal being of all these creatures do not make up the whole
of existence. For existence is not merely a glorious or a vain,
a wonderful or a dismal panorama of a constant mutation of
becoming. There is something eternal, immutable, imperishable,
a timeless self-existence; that is not affected by the mutations
of Nature. It is their impartial witness, neither affecting nor
affected, neither acting nor acted upon, neither virtuous nor
sinful, but always pure, complete, great and unwounded. Neither grieving nor rejoicing at all that afflicts and attracts the
egoistic being, it is the friend of none, the enemy of none, but
one equal self of all. Man is not now conscious of this self,
because he is wrapped up in his outward-going mind, because
he will not learn or has not learned to live within; he does not
detach himself, draw back from his action and observe it as the
work of Nature. Ego is the obstacle, the linch-pin of the wheel of
delusion, the loss of the ego in the soul’s self the first condition
of freedom. To become spirit, no longer merely a mind and ego,
is the opening word of this message of liberation.
Arjuna has been therefore called upon first to give up all
desire of the fruits of his works and become simply the desireless
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impartial doer of whatever has to be done, — leaving the fruit to
whatever power may be the master of the cosmic workings. For
he very evidently is not the master; it is not for the satisfaction
of his personal ego that Nature was set upon her ways, not for
the fulfilment of his desires and preferences that the universal
Life is living, not for the justification of his intellectual opinions,
judgments and standards that the universal Mind is working,
nor is it to that petty tribunal that it has to refer its cosmic
aims or its terrestrial method and purposes. These claims can
only be made by the ignorant souls who live in their personality
and see everything from that poor and narrow standpoint. He
must stand back first from his egoistic demand on the world and
work only as one among the millions who contributes his share
of effort and labour to a result determined not by himself, but by
the universal action and purpose. But he has to do yet more, he
has to give up the idea of being the doer and to see, freed from
all personality, that it is the universal intelligence, will, mind, life
that is at work in him and in all others. Nature is the universal
worker; his works are hers, even as the fruits of her works in him
are part of the grand sum of result guided by a greater Power
than his own. If he can do these two things spiritually, then the
tangle and bondage of his works will fall far away from him;
for the whole knot of that bondage lay in his egoistic demand
and participation. Passion and sin and personal joy and grief will
fade away from his soul, which will now live within, pure, large,
calm, equal to all persons and all things. Action will produce no
subjective reaction and will leave no stain nor any mark on his
spirit’s purity and peace. He will have the inner joy, rest, ease and
inalienable bliss of a free unaffected being. Neither within nor
without will he have any more the old little personality, for he
will feel consciously one self and spirit with all, even as his outer
nature will have become to his consciousness an inseparable
part of the universal mind, life and will. His separative egoistic
personality will have been taken up and extinguished in the
impersonality of spiritual being; his separative egoistic nature
will be unified with the action of cosmic Nature.
But this liberation is dependent on two simultaneous, but
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not yet reconciled perceptions, the clear vision of spirit and the
clear vision of Nature. This is not the scientific and intelligent
detachment which is quite possible even to the materialistic
philosopher who has some clear vision of Nature alone, but
not the perception of his own soul and self-being. Nor is it the
intellectual detachment of the idealistic sage who escapes from
the more limiting and disturbing forms of his ego by a luminous
use of the reason. This is a larger, more living, more perfect
spiritual detachment which comes by a vision of the Supreme
who is more than Nature and greater than mind and reason. But
even this detachment is only the initial secret of freedom and
of the clear vision of knowledge, it is not the whole clue to the
divine mystery, — for by itself it would leave Nature unexplained
and the natural active part of being isolated from the spiritual
and quietistic self-existence. The divine detachment must be the
foundation for a divine participation in Nature which will replace the old egoistic participation, the divine quietism must
support a divine activism and kinetism. This truth which the
Teacher has had in view all along and therefore insisted on the
sacrifice of works, the recognition of the Supreme as the master
of our works and the doctrine of the Avatar and the divine birth,
has yet been at first kept subordinate to the primary necessity of a
quietistic liberation. Only the truths which lead to spiritual calm,
detachment, equality and oneness, in a word, to the perception
and becoming of the immutable self, have been fully developed
and given their largest amplitude of power and significance. The
other great and necessary truth, its complement, has been left in
a certain obscurity of a lesser or relative light; it has been hinted
at constantly, but not as yet developed. Now in these successive
chapters it is being rapidly released into expression.
Throughout Krishna, the Avatar, the Teacher, the charioteer
of the human soul in the world-action, has been preparing the
revelation of the secret of himself, Nature’s deepest secret. He
has kept one note always sounding across his preparatory strain
and insistently coming in as a warning and prelude of the larger
ultimate harmony of his integral Truth. That note was the idea
of a supreme Godhead which dwells within man and Nature,
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but is greater than man and Nature, is found by impersonality of the self, but of which impersonal self is not the whole
significance. We now see the meaning of that strong recurring
insistence. It was this one Godhead, the same in universal self
and man and Nature who through the voice of the Teacher in
the chariot was preparing for his absolute claim to the whole
being of the awakened seer of things and doer of works. “I
who am within thee,” he was saying, “I who am here in this
human body, I for whom all exists, acts, strives, am at once the
secret of the self-existent spirit and of the cosmic action. This ‘I’
is the greater I of whom the largest human personality is only
a partial and fragmentary manifestation, Nature itself only an
inferior working. Master of the soul, master of all the works of
the cosmos, I am the one Light, the sole Power, the only Being.
This Godhead within thee is the Teacher, the Sun, the lifter of the
clear blaze of knowledge in which thou becomest aware of the
difference between thy immutable self and thy mutable nature.
But look beyond the light itself to its source; then shalt thou
know the supreme Soul in which is recovered the spiritual truth
of personality and Nature. See then the one self in all beings that
thou mayst see me in all beings; see all beings in one spiritual
self and reality, because that is the way to see all beings in me;
know one Brahman in all that thou mayst see God who is the
supreme Brahman. Know thyself, be thyself that thou mayst be
united with me of whom this timeless self is the clear light or the
transparent curtain. I the Godhead am the highest truth of self
and spirit.”
Arjuna has to see that the same Godhead is the higher truth
too not only of self and spirit but of Nature and his own personality, the secret at once of the individual and the universe.
That was the Will universal in Nature, greater than the acts of
Nature which proceed from him, to whom belong her actions
and man’s and the fruits of them. Therefore has he to do works
as a sacrifice, because that is the truth of his works and of all
works. Nature is the worker and not ego, but Nature is only a
power of the Being who is the sole master of all her works and
energisms and of all the aeons of the cosmic sacrifice. Therefore
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since his works are that Being’s, he has to give up all his actions
to the Godhead in him and the world by whom they are done in
the divine mystery of Nature. This is the double condition of the
divine birth of the soul, of its release from the mortality of the
ego and the body into the spiritual and eternal, — knowledge
first of one’s timeless immutable self and union through it with
the timeless Godhead, but knowledge too of that which lives
behind the riddle of cosmos, the Godhead in all existences and
their workings. Thus only can we aspire through the offering
of all our nature and being to a living union with the One who
has become in Time and Space all that is. Here is the place of
bhakti in the scheme of the Yoga of an integral self-liberation.
It is an adoration and aspiration towards that which is greater
than imperishable self or changing Nature. All knowledge then
becomes an adoration and aspiration, but all works too become
an adoration and aspiration. Works of nature and freedom of
soul are unified in this adoration and become one self-uplifting
to the one Godhead. The final release, a passing away from the
lower nature to the source of the higher spiritual becoming, is not
an extinction of the soul, — only its form of ego becomes extinct,
— but a departure of our whole self of knowledge, will and love
to dwell no longer in his universal, but in his supracosmic reality,
a fulfilment, not an annullation.
Necessarily, to make this knowledge clear to the mind of
Arjuna, the divine Teacher sets out by removing the source of
two remaining difficulties, the antinomy between the impersonal
self and the human personality and the antinomy between the
self and Nature. While these two antinomies last, the Godhead
in Nature and man remains obscure, irrational and unbelievable.
Nature has been represented as the mechanical bondage of the
gunas, the soul as the egoistic being subject to that bondage.
But if that be all their truth, they are not and cannot be divine.
Nature, ignorant and mechanical, cannot be a power of God; for
divine Power must be free in its workings, spiritual in its origin,
spiritual in its greatness. The soul bound and egoistic in Nature,
mental, vital, physical only, cannot be a portion of the Divine
and itself a divine being; for such a divine being must be itself of
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the very nature of the Divine, free, spiritual, self-developing, selfexistent, superior to mind, life and body. Both these difficulties
and the obscurities they bring in are removed by one illumining
ray of truth. Mechanical Nature is only a lower truth; it is the
formula of an inferior phenomenal action. There is a higher
which is the spiritual and that is the nature of our spiritual
personality, our true person. God is at once impersonal and
personal. His impersonality is to our psychological realisation
an infinite of timeless being, consciousness, bliss of existence;
his personality represents itself here as a conscious power of
being, a conscious centre of knowledge and will and the joy of
multiple self-manifestation. We are that one impersonality in the
static essence of our being; we are each of us the multitude of that
essential power in our spiritual person. But the distinction is only
for the purposes of self-manifestation; the divine impersonality
is, when one goes behind it, at the same time infinite He, a
supreme soul and spirit. It is the great “I” — so aham, I am
He, from which all personality and nature proceed and disport
themselves here diversely in the appearance of an impersonal
world. Brahman is all this that is, says the Upanishad, for Brahman is one self which sees itself in four successive positions of
consciousness. Vasudeva, the eternal Being, is all, says the Gita.
He is the Brahman, consciously supports and originates all from
his higher spiritual nature, consciously here becomes all things
in a nature of intelligence, mind, life and sense and objective
phenomenon of material existence. The Jiva is he in that spiritual
nature of the Eternal, his eternal multiplicity, his self-vision from
many centres of conscious self-power. God, Nature and Jiva are
the three terms of existence, and these three are one being.
How does this Being manifest himself in cosmos? First as the
immutable timeless self omnipresent and all-supporting which
is in its eternity being and not becoming. Then, held in that
being there is an essential power or spiritual principle of selfbecoming, svabhāva, through which by spiritual self-vision it
determines and expresses, creates by liberation all that is latent
or contained in its own existence. The power or the energy of
that self-becoming looses forth into universal action, Karma, all
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that is thus determined in the spirit. All creation is this action, is
this working of the essential nature, is Karma. But it is developed
here in a mutable Nature of intelligence, mind, life, sense and
form-objectivity of material phenomenon actually cut off from
the absolute light and limited by the Ignorance. All its workings
become there a sacrifice of the soul in Nature to the supreme Soul
secret within her, and the supreme Godhead dwells therefore in
all as the Master of their sacrifice, whose presence and power
govern it and whose self-knowledge and delight of being receive
it. To know this is to have the right knowledge of the universe
and the vision of God in the cosmos and to find out the door of
escape from the Ignorance. For this knowledge, made effective
for man by the offering up of his works and all his consciousness
to the Godhead in all, enables him to return to his spiritual
existence and through it to the supracosmic Reality eternal and
luminous above this mutable Nature.
This truth is the secret of being which the Gita is now going
to apply in its amplitude of result for our inner life and our outer
works. What it is going to say is the most secret thing of all.1 It
is the knowledge of the whole Godhead, samagraṁ mām, which
the Master of his being has promised to Arjuna, that essential
knowledge attended with the complete knowledge of it in all its
principles which will leave nothing yet to be known. The whole
knot of the ignorance which has bewildered his human mind
and has made his will recoil from his divinely appointed work,
will have been cut entirely asunder. This is the wisdom of all
wisdoms, the secret of all secrets, the king-knowledge, the kingsecret. It is a pure and supreme light which one can verify by
direct spiritual experience and see in oneself as the truth: it is
the right and just knowledge, the very law of being. It is easy to
practise when one gets hold of it, sees it, tries faithfully to live
in it.
But faith is necessary; if faith is absent, if one trusts to the
critical intelligence which goes by outward facts and jealously
questions the revelatory knowledge because that does not square
1
Gita, IX. 1-3.
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with the divisions and imperfections of the apparent nature and
seems to exceed it and state something which carries us beyond
the first practical facts of our present existence, its grief, its
pain, evil, defect, undivine error and stumbling, aśubham, then
there is no possibility of living out that greater knowledge. The
soul that fails to get faith in the higher truth and law, must
return into the path of ordinary mortal living subject to death
and error and evil: it cannot grow into the Godhead which it
denies. For this is a truth which has to be lived, — and lived in
the soul’s growing light, not argued out in the mind’s darkness.
One has to grow into it, one has to become it, — that is the
only way to verify it. It is only by an exceeding of the lower self
that one can become the real divine self and live the truth of
our spiritual existence. All the apparent truths one can oppose
to it are appearances of the lower Nature. The release from
the evil and the defect of the lower Nature, aśubham, can only
come by accepting a higher knowledge in which all this apparent
evil becomes convinced of ultimate unreality, is shown to be a
creation of our darkness. But to grow thus into the freedom of
the divine Nature one must accept and believe in the Godhead
secret within our present limited nature. For the reason why
the practice of this Yoga becomes possible and easy is that in
doing it we give up the whole working of all that we naturally
are into the hands of that inner divine Purusha. The Godhead
works out the divine birth in us progressively, simply, infallibly,
by taking up our being into his and by filling it with his own
knowledge and power, jñānadı̄pena bhāsvatā; he lays hands on
our obscure ignorant nature and transforms it into his own light
and wideness. What with entire faith and without egoism we
believe in and impelled by him will to be, the God within will
surely accomplish. But the egoistic mind and life we now and
apparently are, must first surrender itself for transmutation into
the hands of that inmost secret Divinity within us.
V
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T
HE GITA then proceeds to unveil the supreme and integral secret, the one thought and truth in which the
seeker of perfection and liberation must learn to live
and the one law of perfection of his spiritual members and
of all their movements. This supreme secret is the mystery
of the transcendent Godhead who is all and everywhere,
yet so much greater and other than the universe and all
its forms that nothing here contains him, nothing expresses
him really, and no language which is borrowed from the
appearances of things in space and time and their relations
can suggest the truth of his unimaginable being. The consequent law of our perfection is an adoration by our whole
nature and its self-surrender to its divine source and possessor. Our one ultimate way is the turning of our entire
existence in the world, and not merely of this or that in it,
into a single movement towards the Eternal. By the power
and mystery of a divine Yoga we have come out of his inexpressible secrecies into this bounded nature of phenomenal
things. By a reverse movement of the same Yoga we must
transcend the limits of phenomenal nature and recover the
greater consciousness by which we can live in the Divine and
the Eternal.
The supreme being of the Divine is beyond manifestation:
the true sempiternal image of him is not revealed in matter,
nor is it seized by life, nor is it cognisable by mind, acintyarūpa, avyaktamūrti. What we see is only a self-created form,
rūpa, not the eternal form of the Divinity, svarūpa. There is
someone or there is something that is other than the universe,
inexpressible, unimaginable, an ineffably infinite Godhead beyond anything that our largest or subtlest conceptions of infinity can shadow. All this weft of things to which we give the
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name of universe, all this immense sum of motion to which we
can fix no limits and vainly seek in its forms and movements
for any stable reality, any status, level and point of cosmic
leverage, has been spun out, shaped, extended by this highest
Infinite, founded upon this ineffable supracosmic Mystery. It
is founded upon a self-formulation which is itself unmanifest
and unthinkable. All this mass of becomings always changing
and in motion, all these creatures, existences, things, breathing
and living forms cannot contain him either in their sum or in
their separate existence. He is not in them; it is not in them
or by them that he lives, moves or has his being, — God is
not the Becoming. It is they that are in him, it is they that
live and move in him and draw their truth from him; they are
his becomings, he is their being.1 In the unthinkable timeless
and spaceless infinity of his existence he has extended this minor phenomenon of a boundless universe in an endless space
and time.
And even to say of him that all exists in him is not the whole
truth of the matter, not the entirely real relation: for it is to
speak of him with the idea of space, and the Divine is spaceless
and timeless. Space and time, immanence and pervasion and
exceeding are all of them terms and images of his consciousness.
There is a Yoga of divine Power, me yoga aiśvarah., by which
the Supreme creates phenomena of himself in a spiritual, not a
material, self-formulation of his own extended infinity, an extension of which the material is only an image. He sees himself
as one with that, is identified with that and all it harbours. In
that infinite self-seeing, which is not his whole seeing, — the
pantheist’s identity of God and universe is a still more limited
view, — he is at once one with all that is and yet exceeds it; but
he is other also than this self or extended infinity of spiritual
being which contains and exceeds the universe. All exists here
in his world-conscious infinite, but that again is upheld as a selfconception by the supracosmic reality of the Godhead which
exceeds all our terms of world and being and consciousness.
1
matsthāni sarvabhūtāni na cāhaṁ tes.vavasthitah..
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This is the mystery of his being that he is supracosmic, yet not in
any exclusive sense extracosmic. For he pervades it all as its self;
there is a luminous uninvolved presence of the self-being of God,
mama ātmā, which is in constant relation with the becoming
and brings all its existences into manifestation by his simple
presence.2 Therefore it is that we have these terms of Being and
becoming, existence in itself, ātman, and existences dependent
upon it, bhūtāni, mutable beings and immutable being. But
the highest truth of these two relations and the resolution of
their antinomy must be found in that which exceeds it; it is the
supreme Godhead who manifests both containing self and its
contained phenomena by the power of his spiritual consciousness, yogamāyā. And it is only through union with him in our
spiritual consciousness that we can arrive at our real relations
with his being.
Metaphysically stated, this is the intention of these verses
of the Gita: but they rest founded not upon any intellectual
speculation, but on spiritual experience; they synthetise because
they arise globally from certain truths of spiritual consciousness.
When we attempt to put ourselves into conscious relations with
whatever supreme or universal Being there exists concealed or
manifest in the world, we arrive at a very various experience
and one or other variant term of this experience is turned by
different intellectual conceptions into their fundamental idea
of existence. We have, to start with, the crude experience first
of a Divine who is something quite different from and greater
than ourselves, quite different from and greater than the universe in which we live; and so it is and no more so long as
we live only in our phenomenal selves and see around us only
the phenomenal face of the world. For the highest truth of the
Supreme is supracosmic and all that is phenomenal seems a
thing other than the infinity of the self-conscious spirit, seems
an image of a lesser truth if not an illusion. When we dwell
in this difference only, we regard the Divine as if extracosmic.
That he is only in this sense that he is not, being supracosmic,
2
bhūtabhr.n na ca bhūtastho mamātmā bhūtabhāvanah..
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contained in the cosmos and its creations, but not in the sense
that they are outside his being: for there is nothing outside the
one Eternal and Real. We realise this first truth of the Godhead spiritually when we get the experience that we live and
move and have our being in him alone, that however different
from him we may be, we depend on him for our existence and
the universe itself is only a phenomenon and movement in the
Spirit.
But again we have the farther and more transcendent experience that our self-existence is one with his self-existence.
We perceive a one self of all and of that we have the consciousness and the vision: we can no longer say or think that
we are entirely different from him, but that there is self and
there is phenomenon of the self-existent; all is one in self, but
all is variation in the phenomenon. By an exclusive intensity
of union with the self we may even come to experience the
phenomenon as a thing dreamlike and unreal. But again by a
double intensity we may have too the double experience of a
supreme self-existent oneness with him and yet of ourselves as
living with him and in many relations to him in a persistent
form, an actual derivation of his being. The universe, and our
existence in the universe, becomes to us a constant and real
form of the self-aware existence of the Divine. In that lesser
truth we have our relations of difference between us and him
and all these other living or inanimate powers of the Eternal and
our dealings with his cosmic self in the nature of the universe.
These relations are other than the supracosmic truth, they are
derivative creations of a certain power of consciousness of the
spirit, and because they are other and because they are creations
the exclusive seekers of the supracosmic Absolute tax them with
an unreality relative or complete. Yet are they from him, they
are existent forms derived from his being, not figments created
out of nothing. For it is ever itself and figures of itself and not
things quite other than itself that the Spirit sees everywhere.
Nor can we say that there is nothing at all in the supracosmic
that corresponds to these relations. We cannot say that they
are derivations of consciousness sprung from that source but
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yet with nothing in the source which at all supports or justifies
them, nothing that is the eternal reality and supernal principle
of these forms of his being.
Again if we press in yet another way the difference between
the self and the forms of self, we may come to regard the
Self as containing and immanent, we may admit the truth of
omnipresent spirit, and yet the forms of spirit, the moulds of
its presence may affect us not only as something other than
it, not only as transient, but as unreal images. We have the
experience of the Spirit, the Divine Being immutable and ever
containing in his vision the mutabilities of the universe; we have
too the separate, the simultaneous or the coincident experience
of the Divine immanent in ourselves and in all creatures. And
yet the universe may be to us only an empirical form of his and
our consciousness, or only an image or a symbol of existence
by which we have to construct our significant relations with
him and to grow gradually aware of him. But on the other
hand, we get another revealing spiritual experience in which
we are forced to see as the very Divine all things, not only
that Spirit which dwells immutable in the universe and in its
countless creatures, but all this inward and outward becoming. All is then to us a divine Reality manifesting himself in
us and in the cosmos. If this experience is exclusive, we get
the pantheistic identity, the One that is all: but the pantheistic
vision is only a partial seeing. This extended universe is not all
that the Spirit is, there is an Eternal greater than it by which
alone its existence is possible. Cosmos is not the Divine in all
his utter reality, but a single self-expression, a true but minor
motion of his being. All these spiritual experiences, however
different or opposed at first sight, are yet reconcilable if we
cease to press on one or other exclusively and if we see this
simple truth that the divine Reality is something greater than
the universal existence, but yet that all universal and particular things are that Divine and nothing else, — significative of
him, we might say, and not entirely That in any part or sum
of their appearance, but still they could not be significative of
him if they were something else and not term and stuff of the
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divine existence. That is the Real; but they are its expressive
realities.3
This is what is intended by the phrase, vāsudevah. sarvam iti;
the Godhead is all that is universe and all that is in the universe
and all that is more than the universe. The Gita lays stress first
on his supracosmic existence. For otherwise the mind would
miss its highest goal and remain turned towards the cosmic only
or else attached to some partial experience of the Divine in the
cosmos. It lays stress next on his universal existence in which
all moves and acts. For that is the justification of the cosmic
effort and that is the vast spiritual self-awareness in which the
Godhead self-seen as the Time-Spirit does his universal works.
Next it insists with a certain austere emphasis on the acceptance
of the Godhead as the divine inhabitant in the human body.
For he is the Immanent in all existences, and if the indwelling
divinity is not recognised, not only will the divine meaning of
individual existence be missed, the urge to our supreme spiritual
possibilities deprived of its greatest force, but the relations of
soul with soul in humanity will be left petty, limited and egoistic.
Finally, it insists at great length on the divine manifestation in
all things in the universe and affirms the derivation of all that is
from the nature, power and light of the one Godhead. For that
seeing too is essential to the God-knowledge; on it is founded
the integral turn of the whole being and the whole nature Godwards, the acceptance by man of the works of the divine Power
in the world and the possibility of remoulding his mentality and
will into the type of the God-action, transcendent in initiation,
cosmic in motive, transmitted through the individual, the Jiva.
The supreme Godhead, the Self immutable behind the cosmic consciousness, the individual Divinity in the human being
3
Even if in the mind we feel them to be comparatively unreal in face of the absolutely
Real. Shankara’s Mayavada apart from its logical scaffolding comes when reduced to
terms of spiritual experience to no more than an exaggerated expression of this relative
unreality. Beyond mind the difficulty disappears, for there it never existed. The separate
experiences that lie behind the differences of religious sects and schools of philosophy
or Yoga, transmuted, shed their divergent mental sequences, are harmonised and, when
exalted to their highest common intensity, unified in the supramental infinite.
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and the Divine secretly conscious or partially manifested in cosmic Nature and all her works and creatures, are then one reality,
one Godhead. But the truths that we can put forward the most
confidently of one, are reversed or they alter their sense when
we try to apply them to the other poises of the one Being. Thus
the Divine is always the Lord, Ishwara; but we cannot therefore
crudely apply the idea of his essential lordship and mastery in
exactly the same way without change in all four fields. As the
Divine manifest in cosmic Nature he acts in close identity with
Nature. He is himself then Nature, so to speak, but with a spirit
within her workings which foresees and forewills, understands
and enforces, compels the action, overrules in the result. As the
one silent self of all he is the non-doer, and Nature alone is the
doer. He leaves all these works to be done by her according
to the law of our being, svabhāvas tu pravartate, and yet he is
still the lord, prabhu vibhu, because he views and upholds our
action and enables Nature to work by his silent sanction. He
by his immobility transmits the power of the supreme Godhead
through the compulsion of his pervading motionless Presence
and supports its workings by the equal regard of his witness Self
in all things. As the supreme supracosmic Godhead he originates
all, but is above all; he compels all to manifest, but does not lose
himself in what he creates or attach himself to the works of his
Nature. His is the free presiding Will of being that is antecedent
to all the necessities of the natural action. In the individual he is
during the ignorance the secret Godhead in us who compels all
to revolve on the machine of Nature on which the ego is carried
round as part of the machinery, at once a clog and a convenience.
But since all the Divine is within each being, we can rise above
this relation by transcending the ignorance. For we can identify
ourselves with the one Self supporter of all things and become the
witness and non-doer. Or else we can put our individual being
into the human soul’s right relation with the supreme Godhead
within us and make it in its parts of nature the immediate cause
and instrument, nimitta, and in its spiritual self and person a
high participant in the supreme, free and unattached mastery
of that inner Numen. This is a thing we have to see clearly in
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the Gita; we have to allow for this variation of the sense of
the same truth according to the nodus of relation from which
its application comes into force. Otherwise we shall see mere
contradiction and inconsistency where none exists or be baffled
like Arjuna by what seems to us a riddling utterance.
Thus the Gita begins by affirming that the Supreme contains
all things in himself, but is not in any, matsthāni sarva-bhūtāni,
“all are situated in Me, not I in them,” and yet it proceeds
immediately to say, “and yet all existences are not situated in
Me, my self is the bearer of all existences and it is not situated
in existences.” And yet again it insists with an apparent selfcontradiction that the Divine has lodged himself, has taken up
his abode in the human body, mānus.ı̄ṁ tanum āśritam, and that
the recognition of this truth is necessary for the soul’s release
by the integral way of works and love and knowledge. These
statements are only in appearance inconsistent with each other.
It is as the supracosmic Godhead that he is not in existences, nor
even they in him; for the distinction we make between Being and
becoming applies only to the manifestation in the phenomenal
universe. In the supracosmic existence all is eternal Being and all,
if there too there is any multiplicity, are eternal beings; nor can
the spatial idea of indwelling come in, since a supracosmic absolute being is not affected by the concepts of time and space which
are created here by the Lord’s Yogamaya. There a spiritual, not
a spatial or temporal coexistence, a spiritual identity and coincidence must be the foundation. But on the other hand in the
cosmic manifestation there is an extension of universe in space
and time by the supreme unmanifest supracosmic Being, and in
that extension he appears first as a self who supports all these
existences; bhūta-bhr.t, he bears them in his all-pervading selfexistence. And, even, through this omnipresent self the supreme
Self too, the Paramatman, can be said to bear the universe;
he is its invisible spiritual foundation and the hidden spiritual
cause of the becoming of all existences. He bears the universe
as the secret spirit in us bears our thoughts, works, movements.
He seems to pervade and to contain mind, life and body, to
support them by his presence: but this pervasion is itself an act
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of consciousness, not material; the body itself is only a constant
act of consciousness of the spirit.
This divine Self contains all existences; all are situated in
him, not materially in essence, but in that extended spiritual
conception of self-being of which our too rigid notion of a
material and etheric space is only a rendering in the terms of
the physical mind and senses. In reality all even here is spiritual
coexistence, identity and coincidence; but that is a fundamental
truth which we cannot apply until we get back to the supreme
consciousness. Till then such an idea would only be an intellectual concept to which nothing corresponds in our practical
experience. We have to say, then, using these terms of relation
in space and time, that the universe and all its beings exist in
the divine Self-existent as everything else exists in the spatial
primacy of ether. “It is as the great, the all-pervading aerial
principle dwells in the etheric that all existences dwell in Me,
that is how you have to conceive of it,” says the Teacher here
to Arjuna. The universal existence is all-pervading and infinite
and the Self-existent too is all-pervading and infinite; but the
self-existent infinity is stable, static, immutable, the universal is
an all-pervading movement, sarvatragah.. The Self is one, not
many; but the universal expresses itself as all existence and is,
as it seems, the sum of all existences. One is Being; the other is
Power of Being which moves and creates and acts in the existence
of the fundamental, supporting, immutable Spirit. The Self does
not dwell in all these existences or in any of them; that is to
say, he is not contained by any, — just as the ether here is not
contained in any form, though all forms are derived ultimately
from the ether. Nor is he contained in or constituted by all
existences together — any more than the ether is contained in
the mobile extension of the aerial principle or is constituted by
the sum of its forms or its forces. But still in the movement also
is the Divine; he dwells in the many as the Lord in each being.
Both these relations are true of him at one and the same time.
The one is a relation of self-existence to the universal movement;
the other, the immanence, is a relation of the universal existence
to its own forms. The one is a truth of being in its all-containing
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immutability, self-existent: the other is a truth of Power of the
same being manifest in the government and information of its
own self-veiling and self-revealing movements.
The Supreme from above cosmic existence leans, it is here
said, or presses down upon his Nature to loose from it in an
eternal cyclic recurrence all that it contains in it, all that was once
manifest and has become latent. All existences act in the universe
in subjection to this impelling movement and to the laws of
manifested being by which is expressed in cosmic harmonies
the phenomenon of the divine All-existence. The Jiva follows
the cycle of its becoming in the action of this divine Nature,
prakr.tiṁ māmikām, svāṁ prakr.tim, the “own nature” of the
Divine. It becomes in the turns of her progression this or that
personality; it follows always the curve of its own law of being as
a manifestation of the divine Nature, whether in her higher and
direct or her lower and derived movement, whether in ignorance
or in knowledge; it returns out of her action into her immobility
and silence in the lapse of the cycle. Ignorant, it is subject to her
cyclic whirl, not master of itself, but dominated by her, avaśah.
prakr.ter vaśāt; only by return to the divine consciousness can
it attain to mastery and freedom. The Divine too follows the
cycle, not as subject to it, but as its informing Spirit and guide,
not with his whole being involved in it, but with his power of
being accompanying and shaping it. He is the presiding control
of his own action of Nature, adhyaks.a, — not a spirit born in
her, but the creative spirit who causes her to produce all that
appears in the manifestation. If in his power he accompanies
her and causes all her workings, he is outside it too, as if One
seated above her universal action in the supracosmic mastery,
not attached to her by any involving and mastering desire and
not therefore bound by her works, because he infinitely exceeds
them and precedes them, is the same before, during and after
all their procession in the cycles of Time. All their mutations
make no difference to his immutable being. The silent self that
pervades and supports the cosmos is not affected by its changes
because, though supporting, it does not participate in them. This
greatest supreme supracosmic Self also is not affected because it
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exceeds and eternally transcends them.
But also since this action is the action of the divine Nature,
svā prakr.tih., and the divine Nature can never be separate from
the Divine, in everything she creates the Godhead must be immanent. That is a relation which is not the whole truth of his being,
but neither is it a truth which we can at all afford to ignore. He is
lodged in the human body. Those who ignore his presence, who
despise because of its masks the divinity in the human form, are
bewildered and befooled by the appearances of Nature and they
cannot realise that there is the secret Godhead within, whether
conscious in humanity as in the Avatar or veiled by his Maya.
Those who are great-souled, who are not shut up in their idea
of ego, who open themselves to the indwelling Divinity, know
that the secret spirit in man which appears here bounded by the
limited human nature, is the same ineffable splendour which we
worship beyond as the supreme Godhead. They become aware
of the highest status of him in which he is master and lord of
all existences and yet see that in each existence he is still the
supreme Deity and the indwelling Godhead. All the rest is a selflimitation for the manifesting of the variations of Nature in the
cosmos. They see too that as it is his Nature which has become
all that is in the universe, everything here is in its inner fact
nothing but one Divine, all is Vasudeva, and they worship him
not only as the supreme Godhead beyond, but here in the world,
in his oneness and in every separate being. They see this truth
and in this truth they live and act; him they adore, live, serve
both as the Transcendent of things and as God in the world and
as the Godhead in all that is, serve him with works of sacrifice,
seek him out by knowledge, see nothing else but him everywhere
and lift their whole being to him both in its self and in all its
inward and outward nature. This they know to be the large
and perfect way; for it is the way of the whole truth of the one
supreme and universal and individual Godhead.4
4
Gita, IX. 4-11, 13-15, 34.
VI
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T
HIS THEN is the integral truth, the highest and widest
knowledge. The Divine is supracosmic, the eternal Parabrahman who supports with his timeless and spaceless
existence all this cosmic manifestation of his own being and
nature in Space and Time. He is the supreme spirit who ensouls
the forms and movements of the universe, Paramatman. He is
the supernal Person of whom all self and nature, all being and
becoming in this or any universe are the self-conception and
the self-energising, Purushottama. He is the ineffable Lord of
all existence who by his spiritual control of his own manifested
Power in Nature unrolls the cycles of the world and the natural
evolution of creatures in the cycles, Parameshwara. From him
the Jiva, individual spirit, soul in Nature, existent by his being, conscious by the light of his consciousness, empowered to
knowledge, to will and to action by his will and power, enjoying
existence by his divine enjoyment of the cosmos, has come here
into the cosmic rounds.
The inner soul in man is here a partial self-manifestation of
the Divine, self-limited for the works of his Nature in the universe, prakr.tir jı̄va-bhūtā. In his spiritual essence the individual is
one with the Divine. In the works of the divine Prakriti he is one
with him, yet there is an operative difference and many deep relations with God in Nature and with God above cosmic Nature.
In the works of the lower appearance of Prakriti he seems by
an ignorance and egoistic separation to be quite other than the
One and to think, will, act, enjoy in this separative consciousness
for the egoistic pleasure and purpose of his personal existence
in the universe and its surface relations with other embodied
minds and lives. But in fact all his being, all his thinking, all
his willing and action and enjoyment are only a reflection —
egoistic and perverted so long as he is in the ignorance — of the
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Divine’s being, the Divine’s thought, will, action and enjoyment
of Nature. To get back to this truth of himself is his direct means
of salvation, his largest and nearest door of escape from subjection to the Ignorance. Since he is a spirit, a soul with a nature
of mind and reason, of will and dynamic action, of emotion
and sensation and life’s seeking for the delight of existence, it
is by turning all these powers Godwards that the return to the
highest truth of himself can be made entirely possible. He must
know with the knowledge of the supreme Self and Brahman;
he must turn his love and adoration to the supreme Person; he
must subject his will and works to the supreme Lord of cosmos.
Then he passes from the lower to the divine Nature: he casts
from him the thought and will and works of the Ignorance and
thinks, wills and works in his divine identity as soul of that Soul,
power and light of that Spirit; he enjoys all the inner infinite of
the Divine and no longer only these outward touches, masks and
appearances. Thus divinely living, thus directing his whole self
and soul and nature Godwards, he is taken up into the truest
truth of the supreme Brahman.
To know Vasudeva as all and live in that knowledge is the
secret. He knows him as the Self, immutable, continent of all as
well as immanent in all things. He draws back from the confused
and perturbed whirl of the lower nature to dwell in the still
and inalienable calm and light of the self-existent spirit. There
he realises a constant unity with this self of the Divine that is
present in all existences and supports all cosmic movement and
action and phenomenon. He looks upward from this eternal
unchanging spiritual hypostasis of the mutable universe to the
greater Eternal, the supracosmic, the Real. He knows him as the
divine Inhabitant in all things that are, the Lord in the heart
of man, the secret Ishwara, and removes the veil between his
natural being and this inner spiritual Master of his being. He
makes his will, thought and works one in knowledge with the
Ishwara’s, attuned by an ever-present realisation to the sense of
the indwelling Divinity, sees and adores him in all and changes
the whole human action to the highest meaning of the divine
nature. He knows him as the source and the substance of all that
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is around him in the universe. All things that are he sees as at once
in their appearance the veils and in their secret trend the means
and signs of self-manifestation of that one unthinkable Reality
and everywhere discovers that oneness, Brahman, Purusha, Atman, Vasudeva, the Being that has become all these creatures.
Therefore too his whole inner existence comes into tune and
harmony with the Infinite now self-revealed in all that lives or
is within and around him and his whole outer existence turns
into an exact instrumentation of the cosmic purpose. He looks
up through the Self to the Parabrahman who there and here
is the one and only existence. He looks up through the divine
Inhabitant in all to that supernal Person who in his supreme
status is beyond all habitation. He looks up through the Lord
manifested in the universe to the Supreme who exceeds and
rules all his manifestation. Thus he arises through a limitless
unfolding of knowledge and upward vision and aspiration to
that to which he has turned with an all-compelling integrality,
sarvabhāvena.
This integral turning of the soul Godwards bases royally
the Gita’s synthesis of knowledge and works and devotion. To
know God thus integrally is to know him as One in the self
and in all manifestation and beyond all manifestation, — and
all this unitedly and at once. And yet even so to know him is not
enough unless it is accompanied by an intense uplifting of the
heart and soul Godwards, unless it kindles a one-pointed and at
the same time all-embracing love, adoration, aspiration. Indeed
the knowledge which is not companioned by an aspiration and
vivified by an uplifting is no true knowledge, for it can be only an
intellectual seeing and a barren cognitive endeavour. The vision
of God brings infallibly the adoration and passionate seeking of
the Divine, — a passion for the Divine in his self-existent being,
but also for the Divine in ourselves and for the Divine in all
that is. To know with the intellect is simply to understand and
may be an effective starting-point, — or, too, it may not be, and
it will not be if there is no sincerity in the knowledge, no urge
towards inner realisation in the will, no power upon the soul,
no call in the spirit: for that would mean that the brain has
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externally understood, but inwardly the soul has seen nothing.
True knowledge is to know with the inner being, and when the
inner being is touched by the light, then it arises to embrace that
which is seen, it yearns to possess, it struggles to shape that in
itself and itself to it, it labours to become one with the glory of its
vision. Knowledge in this sense is an awakening to identity and,
since the inner being realises itself by consciousness and delight,
by love, by possession and oneness with whatever of itself it has
seen, knowledge awakened must bring an overmastering impulse
towards this true and only perfect realisation. Here that which
is known is not an externalised object, but the divine Purusha,
self and lord of all that we are. An all-seizing delight in him
and a deep and moved love and adoration of him must be the
inevitable result and is the very soul of this knowledge. And this
adoration is no isolated seeking of the heart, but an offering of
the whole existence. Therefore it must take also the form of a
sacrifice; there is a giving of all our works to the Ishwara, there
is a surrender of all our active inward and outward nature to
the Godhead of our adoration in its every subjective and in its
every objective movement. All our subjective workings move in
him and they seek him, the Lord and Self, as the source and goal
of their power and endeavour. All our objective workings move
out towards him in the world and make him their object, initiate
a service of God in the world of which the controlling power is
the Divinity within us in whom we are one self with the universe
and its creatures. For both world and self, Nature and the soul
in her are enlightened by the consciousness of the One, are inner
and outer bodies of the transcendent Purushottama. So comes
a synthesis of mind and heart and will in the one self and spirit
and with it the synthesis of knowledge, love and works in this
integral union, this embracing God-realisation, this divine Yoga.
But to arrive at this movement at all is difficult for the egobound nature. And to arrive at its victorious and harmonious
integrality is not easy even when we have set our feet on the way
finally and for ever. Mortal mind is bewildered by its ignorant
reliance upon veils and appearances; it sees only the outward
human body, human mind, human way of living and catches no
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liberating glimpse of the Divinity who is lodged in the creature.
It ignores the divinity within itself and cannot see it in other
men, and even though the Divine manifest himself in humanity
as Avatar and Vibhuti, it is still blind and ignores or despises
the veiled Godhead, avajānanti māṁ mūd.hā mānus.ı̄ṁ tanum
āśritam. And if it ignores him in the living creature, still less
can it see him in the objective world on which it looks out
from its prison of separative ego through the barred windows
of the finite mind. It does not see God in the universe; it knows
nothing of the supreme Divinity who is master of these planes
full of various existences and dwells within them; it is blind
to the vision by which all in the world grows divine and the
soul itself awakens to its own inherent divinity and becomes of
the Godhead, godlike. What it does see readily, and to that it
attaches itself with passion, is only the life of the ego hunting
after finite things for their own sake and for the satisfaction
of the earthly hunger of the intellect, body, senses. Those who
have given themselves up too entirely to this outward drive of
the mentality, fall into the hands of the lower nature, cling to it
and make it their foundation. They become a prey to the nature
of the Rakshasa in man who sacrifices everything to a violent
and inordinate satisfaction of his separate vital ego and makes
that the dark godhead of his will and thought and action and
enjoyment. Or they are hurried onward in a fruitless cycle by
the arrogant self-will, self-sufficient thought, self-regarding act,
self-satisfied and yet ever unsatisfied intellectualised appetite of
enjoyment of the Asuric nature. But to live persistently in this
separative ego-consciousness and make that the centre of all
our activities is to miss altogether the true self-awareness. The
charm it throws upon the misled instruments of the spirit is an
enchantment that chains life to a profitless circling. All its hope,
action, knowledge are vain things when judged by the divine
and eternal standard, for it shuts out the great hope, excludes
the liberating action, banishes the illuminating knowledge. It
is a false knowledge that sees the phenomenon but misses the
truth of the phenomenon, a blind hope that chases after the
transient but misses the eternal, a sterile action whose every
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327
profit is annulled by loss and amounts to a perennial labour of
Sisyphus.1
The great-souled who open themselves to the light and largeness of the diviner nature of which man is capable, are alone on
the path narrow in the beginning, inexpressibly wide in the end
that leads to liberation and perfection. The growth of the god
in man is man’s proper business; the steadfast turning of this
lower Asuric and Rakshasic into the divine nature is the carefully
hidden meaning of human life. As this growth increases, the veil
falls and the soul comes to see the greater significance of action
and the real truth of existence. The eye opens to the Godhead in
man, to the Godhead in the world; it sees inwardly and comes to
know outwardly the infinite Spirit, the Imperishable from whom
all existences originate and who exists in all and by him and in
him all exist always. Therefore when this vision, this knowledge
seizes on the soul, its whole life-aspiration becomes a surpassing
love and fathomless adoration of the Divine and Infinite. The
mind attaches itself singly to the eternal, the spiritual, the living,
the universal, the Real; it values nothing but for its sake, it
delights only in the all-blissful Purusha. All the word and all
the thought become one hymning of the universal greatness,
Light, Beauty, Power and Truth that has revealed itself in its
glory to the human spirit and a worship of the one supreme
Soul and infinite Person. All the long stress of the inner self to
break outward becomes a form now of spiritual endeavour and
aspiration to possess the Divine in the soul and realise the Divine
in the nature. All life becomes a constant Yoga and unification
of that Divine and this human spirit. This is the manner of the
integral devotion; it creates a single uplifting of our whole being
and nature through sacrifice by the dedicated heart to the eternal
Purushottama.2
Those who lay a predominant stress on knowledge, arrive
to the same point by an always increasing, engrossing, enforcing
power of the vision of the Divine on the soul and the nature.
Theirs is the sacrifice of knowledge and by an ineffable ecstasy
1
Gita, IX. 11-12.
2
IX. 13-14.
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of knowledge they come to the adoration of the Purushottama,
jñāna-yajñena yajanto mām upāsate. This is a comprehension
filled with Bhakti, because it is integral in its instruments, integral in its objective. It is not a pursuit of the Supreme merely as
an abstract unity or an indeterminable Absolute. It is a heartfelt seeking and seizing of the Supreme and the Universal, a
pursuit of the Infinite in his infinity and of the Infinite in all that
is finite, a vision and embracing of the One in his oneness and
of the One in all his several principles, his innumerable visages,
forces, forms, here, there, everywhere, timelessly and in time,
multiply, multitudinously, in endless aspects of his Godhead, in
beings without number, all his million universal faces fronting
us in the world and its creatures, ekatvena pr.thaktvena bahudhā
viśvatomukham. This knowledge becomes easily an adoration,
a large devotion, a vast self-giving, an integral self-offering because it is the knowledge of a Spirit, the contact of a Being, the
embrace of a supreme and universal Soul which claims all that
we are even as it lavishes on us when we approach it all the
treasures of its endless delight of existence.3
The way of works too turns into an adoration and a devotion of self-giving because it is an entire sacrifice of all our will
and its activities to the one Purushottama. The outward Vedic
rite is a powerful symbol, effective for a slighter though still a
heavenward purpose; but the real sacrifice is that inner oblation
in which the Divine All becomes himself the ritual action, the
sacrifice and every single circumstance of the sacrifice. All the
working and forms of that inner rite are the self-ordinance and
self-expression of his power in us mounting by our aspiration
towards the source of its energies. The Divine Inhabitant becomes himself the flame and the offering, because the flame is
the Godward will and that will is God himself within us. And
the offering too is form and force of the constituent Godhead
in our nature and being; all that has been received from him
is given up to the service and the worship of its own Reality,
3
IX. 15.
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329
its own supreme Truth and Origin. The Divine Thinker becomes himself the sacred mantra; it is the Light of his being
that expresses itself in the thought directed Godward and is
effective in the revealing word of splendour that enshrines the
thought’s secret and in the rhythm that repeats for man the
rhythms of the Eternal. The illumining Godhead is himself the
Veda and that which is made known by the Veda. He is both
the knowledge and the object of the knowledge. The Rik, the
Yajur, the Sama, the word of illumination which lights up the
mind with the rays of knowledge, the word of power for the
right ordaining of action, the word of calm and harmonious
attainment for the bringing of the divine desire of the spirit,
are themselves the Brahman, the Godhead. The mantra of the
divine Consciousness brings its light of revelation, the mantra
of the divine Power its will of effectuation, the mantra of the
divine Ananda its equal fulfilment of the spiritual delight of existence. All word and thought are an outflowering of the great
OM, — OM, the Word, the Eternal. Manifest in the forms of
sensible objects, manifest in that conscious play of creative selfconception of which forms and objects are the figures, manifest
behind in the self-gathered superconscient power of the Infinite,
OM is the sovereign source, seed, womb of thing and idea,
form and name, — it is itself, integrally, the supreme Intangible,
the original Unity, the timeless Mystery self-existent above all
manifestation in supernal being.4 This sacrifice is therefore at
once works and adoration and knowledge.5
To the soul that thus knows, adores, offers up all its workings in a great self-surrender of its being to the Eternal, God is all
and all is the Godhead. It knows God as the Father of this world
who nourishes and cherishes and watches over his children. It
knows God as the divine Mother who holds us in her bosom,
lavishes upon us the sweetness of her love and fills the universe
with her forms of beauty. It knows him as the first Creator from
4
AUM, — A the spirit of the gross and external, Virat, U the spirit of the subtle and
internal, Taijasa, M the spirit of the secret superconscient omnipotence, Prajna, OM the
Absolute, Turiya. — Mandukya Upanishad.
5
IX. 16-17.
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whom has originated all that originates and creates in space and
time and relation. It knows him as the Master and ordainer of
all universal and of every individual dispensation. The world
and fate and uncertain eventuality cannot terrify, the aspect of
suffering and evil cannot bewilder the man who has surrendered
himself to the Eternal. God to the soul that sees is the path and
God is the goal of his journey, a path in which there is no selflosing and a goal to which his wisely guided steps are surely
arriving at every moment. He knows the Godhead as the master
of his and all being, the upholder of his nature, the husband
of the nature-soul, its lover and cherisher, the inner witness of
all his thoughts and actions. God is his house and country, the
refuge of his seekings and desires, the wise and close and benignant friend of all beings. All birth and status and destruction
of apparent existences is to his vision and experience the One
who brings forward, maintains and withdraws his temporal selfmanifestation in its system of perpetual recurrences. He alone is
the imperishable seed and origin of all that seem to be born and
perish and their eternal resting-place in their non-manifestation.
It is he that burns in the heat of the sun and the flame; it is
he who is the plenty of the rain and its withholding; he is all
this physical Nature and her workings. Death is his mask and
immortality is his self-revelation. All that we call existent is he
and all that we look upon as non-existent still is there secret in
the Infinite and is part of the mysterious being of the Ineffable.6
Nothing but the highest knowledge and adoration, no other
way than an entire self-giving and surrender to this Highest who
is all, will bring us to the Highest. Other religion, other worship,
other knowledge, other seeking has always its fruits, but these
are transient and limited to the enjoyment of divine symbols
and appearances. There are always open for our following according to the balance of our mentality an outer and an inmost
knowledge, an outer and an inmost seeking. Outward religion is
the worship of an outward deity and the pursuit of an external
beatitude: its devotees purify their conduct from sin and attain
6
IX. 17-19.
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331
to an active ethical righteousness in order to satisfy the fixed
law, the Shastra, the external dispensation; they perform the
ceremonial symbol of the outer communion. But their object
is to secure after the mortal pleasure and pain of earthly life
the bliss of heavenly worlds, a greater happiness than earth can
give but still a personal and mundane enjoyment though in a
larger world than the field of this limited and suffering terrestrial
nature. And to that to which they aspire, they attain by faith and
right endeavour; for material existence and earthly activities are
not the whole scope of our personal becoming or the whole
formula of the cosmos. Other worlds there are of a larger felicity,
svargalokaṁ viśālam. Thus the Vedic ritualist of old learned the
exoteric sense of the triple Veda, purified himself from sin, drank
the wine of communion with the gods and sought by sacrifice
and good deeds the rewards of heaven. This firm belief in a
Beyond and this seeking of a diviner world secures to the soul in
its passing the strength to attain to the joys of heaven on which its
faith and seeking were centred: but the return to mortal existence
imposes itself because the true aim of that existence has not been
found and realised. Here and not elsewhere the highest Godhead
has to be found, the soul’s divine nature developed out of the
imperfect physical human nature and through unity with God
and man and universe the whole large truth of being discovered
and lived and made visibly wonderful. That completes the long
cycle of our becoming and admits us to a supreme result; that
is the opportunity given to the soul by the human birth and,
until that is accomplished, it cannot cease. The God-lover advances constantly towards this ultimate necessity of our birth in
cosmos through a concentrated love and adoration by which he
makes the supreme and universal Divine the whole object of his
living — not either egoistic terrestrial satisfaction or the celestial
worlds — and the whole object of his thought and his seeing. To
see nothing but the Divine, to be at every moment in union with
him, to love him in all creatures and have the delight of him in all
things is the whole condition of his spiritual existence. His Godvision does not divorce him from life, nor does he miss anything
of the fullness of life; for God himself becomes the spontaneous
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Essays on the Gita
bringer to him of every good and of all his inner and outer getting
and having, yoga-ks.emaṁ vahāmyaham. The joy of heaven and
the joy of earth are only a small shadow of his possessions; for
as he grows into the Divine, the Divine too flows out upon him
with all the light, power and joy of an infinite existence.7
Ordinary religion is a sacrifice to partial godheads other
than the integral Divinity. The Gita takes its direct examples
from the old Vedic religion on its exoteric side as it had then developed; it describes this outward worship as a sacrifice to other
godheads, anya-devatāh., to the gods, or to the divinised Ancestors, or to elemental powers and spirits, devān, pitr̄.n, bhūtāni.
Men consecrate their life and works ordinarily to partial powers
or aspects of the divine Existence as they see or conceive them —
mostly powers and aspects that ensoul to them things prominent
in Nature and man or else reflect to them their own humanity in
a divine exceeding symbol. If they do this with faith, then their
faith is justified; for the Divine accepts whatever symbol, form
or conception of himself is present to the mind of the worshipper, yāṁ yāṁ tanuṁ śraddhayā arcati, as it is said elsewhere,
and meets him according to the faith that is in him. All sincere
religious belief and practice is really a seeking after the one
supreme and universal Godhead; for he always is the sole master
of man’s sacrifice and askesis and infinite enjoyer of his effort
and aspiration. However small or low the form of the worship,
however limited the idea of the godhead, however restricted the
giving, the faith, the effort to get behind the veil of one’s own egoworship and limitation by material Nature, it yet forms a thread
of connection between the soul of man and the All-soul and there
is a response. Still the response, the fruit of the adoration and offering is according to the knowledge, the faith and the work and
cannot exceed their limitations, and therefore from the point of
view of the greater God-knowledge, which alone gives the entire
truth of being and becoming, this inferior offering is not given
according to the true and highest law of the sacrifice. It is not
founded on a knowledge of the supreme Godhead in his integral
7
IX. 20-22.
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333
existence and the true principles of his self-manifestation, but
attaches itself to external and partial appearances, — na mām
abhijānanti tattvena. Therefore its sacrifice too is limited in its
object, largely egoistic in its motive, partial and mistaken in
its action and its giving, yajanti avidhi-pūrvakam. An entire
seeing of the Divine is the condition of an entire conscious selfsurrender; the rest attains to things that are incomplete and
partial, and has to fall back from them and return to enlarge itself in a greater seeking and wider God-experience. But to follow
after the supreme and universal Godhead alone and utterly is to
attain to all knowledge and result which other ways acquire,
while yet one is not limited by any aspect, though one finds the
truth of him in all aspects. This movement embraces all forms
of divine being on its way to the supreme Purushottama.8
This absolute self-giving, this one-minded surrender is the
devotion which the Gita makes the crown of its synthesis. All
action and effort are by this devotion turned into an offering
to the supreme and universal Godhead. “Whatever thou doest,
whatever thou enjoyest, whatever thou sacrificest, whatever
thou givest, whatever energy of tapasya, of the soul’s will or
effort thou puttest forth, make it an offering unto Me.” Here
the least, the slightest circumstance of life, the most insignificant
gift out of oneself or what one has, the smallest action assumes a
divine significance and it becomes an acceptable offering to the
Godhead who makes it a means for his possession of the soul
and life of the God-lover. The distinctions made by desire and
ego then disappear. As there is no straining after the good result
of one’s action, no shunning of unhappy result, but all action
and result are given up to the Supreme to whom all work and
fruit in the world belong for ever, there is no farther bondage.
For by an absolute self-giving all egoistic desire disappears from
the heart and there is a perfect union between the Divine and
the individual soul through an inner renunciation of its separate
living. All will, all action, all result become that of the Godhead,
work divinely through the purified and illumined nature and no
8
IX. 23-25.
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Essays on the Gita
longer belong to the limited personal ego. The finite nature thus
surrendered becomes a free channel of the Infinite; the soul in its
spiritual being, uplifted out of the ignorance and the limitation,
returns to its oneness with the Eternal. The Divine Eternal is
the inhabitant in all existences; he is equal in all and the equal
friend, father, mother, creator, lover, supporter of all creatures.
He is the enemy of none and he is the partial lover of none; none
has he cast out, none has he eternally condemned, none has he
favoured by any despotism of arbitrary caprice: all at last equally
come to him through their circlings in the ignorance. But it is
only this perfect adoration that can make this indwelling of God
in man and man in God a conscious thing and an engrossing
and perfect union. Love of the Highest and a total self-surrender
are the straight and swift way to this divine oneness.9
The equal Divine Presence in all of us makes no other preliminary condition, if once this integral self-giving has been made
in faith and in sincerity and with a fundamental completeness.
All have access to this gate, all can enter into this temple: our
mundane distinctions disappear in the mansion of the All-lover.
There the virtuous man is not preferred, nor the sinner shut out
from the Presence; together by this road the Brahmin pure of life
and exact in observance of the law and the outcaste born from
a womb of sin and sorrow and rejected of men can travel and
find an equal and open access to the supreme liberation and the
highest dwelling in the Eternal. Man and woman find their equal
right before God; for the divine Spirit is no respecter of persons
or of social distinctions and restrictions: all can go straight to
him without intermediary or shackling condition. “If” says the
divine Teacher “even a man of very evil conduct turns to me
with a sole and entire love, he must be regarded as a saint, for
the settled will of endeavour in him is a right and complete will.
Swiftly he becomes a soul of righteousness and obtains eternal
peace.” In other words a will of entire self-giving opens wide all
the gates of the spirit and brings in response an entire descent
and self-giving of the Godhead to the human being, and that at
9
IX. 26-29.
Works, Devotion and Knowledge
335
once reshapes and assimilates everything in us to the law of the
divine existence by a rapid transformation of the lower into the
spiritual nature. The will of self-giving forces away by its power
the veil between God and man; it annuls every error and annihilates every obstacle. Those who aspire in their human strength
by effort of knowledge or effort of virtue or effort of laborious
self-discipline, grow with much anxious difficulty towards the
Eternal; but when the soul gives up its ego and its works to the
Divine, God himself comes to us and takes up our burden. To
the ignorant he brings the light of the divine knowledge, to the
feeble the power of the divine will, to the sinner the liberation
of the divine purity, to the suffering the infinite spiritual joy
and Ananda. Their weakness and the stumblings of their human
strength make no difference. “This is my word of promise,”
cries the voice of the Godhead to Arjuna, “that he who loves
me shall not perish.” Previous effort and preparation, the purity
and the holiness of the Brahmin, the enlightened strength of
the king-sage great in works and knowledge have their value,
because they make it easier for the imperfect human creature to
arrive at this wide vision and self-surrender; but even without
this preparation all who take refuge in the divine Lover of man,
the Vaishya once preoccupied with the narrowness of wealthgetting and the labour of production, the Shudra hampered by
a thousand hard restrictions, woman shut in and stunted in
her growth by the narrow circle society has drawn around her
self-expansion, those too, pāpa-yonayah., on whom their past
Karma has imposed even the very worst of births, the outcaste,
the Pariah, the Chandala, find at once the gates of God opening
before them. In the spiritual life all the external distinctions of
which men make so much because they appeal with an oppressive force to the outward mind, cease before the equality of the
divine Light and the wide omnipotence of an impartial Power.10
The earthly world preoccupied with the dualities and bound
to the immediate transient relations of the hour and the moment
is for man, so long as he dwells here attached to these things
10
IX. 30-32.
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Essays on the Gita
and while he accepts the law they impose on him for the law of
his life, a world of struggle, suffering and sorrow. The way to
liberation is to turn from the outward to the inward, from the
appearance created by the material life which lays its burden on
the mind and imprisons it in the grooves of the life and the body
to the divine Reality which waits to manifest itself through the
freedom of the spirit. Love of the world, the mask, must change
into the love of God, the Truth. Once this secret and inner
Godhead is known and is embraced, the whole being and the
whole life will undergo a sovereign uplifting and a marvellous
transmutation. In place of the ignorance of the lower Nature
absorbed in its outward works and appearances the eye will open
to the vision of God everywhere, to the unity and universality
of the spirit. The world’s sorrow and pain will disappear in the
bliss of the All-blissful; our weakness and error and sin will be
changed into the all-embracing and all-transforming strength,
truth and purity of the Eternal. To make the mind one with
the divine consciousness, to make the whole of our emotional
nature one love of God everywhere, to make all our works one
sacrifice to the Lord of the worlds and all our worship and
aspiration one adoration of him and self-surrender, to direct the
whole self Godwards in an entire union is the way to rise out of
a mundane into a divine existence. This is the Gita’s teaching of
divine love and devotion, in which knowledge, works and the
heart’s longing become one in a supreme unification, a merging
of all their divergences, an intertwining of all their threads, a
high fusion, a wide identifying movement.11
11
IX. 33-34.
VII
The Supreme Word of the Gita
W
E HAVE now got to the inmost kernel of the Gita’s
Yoga, the whole living and breathing centre of its
teaching. We can see now quite clearly that the ascent
of the limited human soul when it withdraws from the ego and
the lower nature into the immutable Self calm, silent and stable,
was only a first step, an initial change. And now too we can
see why the Gita from the first insisted on the Ishwara, the
Godhead in the human form, who speaks always of himself,
“aham, mām,” as of some great secret and omnipresent Being,
lord of all the worlds and master of the human soul, one who
is greater even than that immutable self-existence which is still
and unmoved for ever and abides for ever untouched by the
subjective and objective appearances of the natural universe.
All Yoga is a seeking after the Divine, a turn towards union
with the Eternal. According to the adequacy of our perception
of the Divine and the Eternal will be the way of the seeking, the
depth and fullness of the union and the integrality of the realisation. Man, the mental being, approaches the Infinite through his
finite mind and has to open some near gate of this finite upon that
Infinite. He seeks for some conception on which his mind is able
to seize, selects some power of his nature which by force of an
absolute self-heightening can reach out and lay its touch on the
infinite Truth that in itself is beyond his mental comprehension.
Some face of that infinite Truth — for, because it is infinite, it
has numberless faces, words of its meaning, self-suggestions —
he attempts to see, so that by attaching himself to it he can arrive
through direct experience to the immeasurable reality it figures.
However narrow the gate may be, he is satisfied if it offers some
prospect into the wideness which attracts him, if it sets him on
the way to the fathomless profundity and unreachable heights
of that which calls to his spirit. And as he approaches it, so it
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receives him, ye yathā māṁ prapadyante.
Philosophic mind attempts to attain to the Eternal by an
abstractive knowledge. The business of knowledge is to comprehend and for the finite intellect that means to define and
determine. But the only way to determine the indeterminable
is by some kind of universal negation, neti neti. Therefore the
mind proceeds to exclude from the conception of the Eternal
all that offers itself as limitable by the senses and the heart and
the understanding. An entire opposition is made between the
Self and the not-self, between an eternal, immutable, indefinable
self-existence and all forms of existence, — between Brahman
and Maya, between the ineffable Reality and all that undertakes
to express, but cannot express the Ineffable, — between Karma
and Nirvana, between the ever continuous but ever impermanent
action and conception of the universal Energy and some absolute
ineffable supreme Negation of its action and conception which
is empty of all life and mentality and dynamic significance. That
strong drive of knowledge towards the Eternal leads away from
everything that is transient. It negates life in order to return to its
source, cuts away from us all that we seem to be in order to get
from it to the nameless and impersonal reality of our being. The
desires of the heart, the works of the will and the conceptions of
the mind are rejected; even in the end knowledge itself is negated
and abolished in the Identical and Unknowable. By the way of
an increasing quietude ending in an absolute passivity the Mayacreated soul or the bundle of associations we call ourselves enters
into annihilation of its idea of personality, makes an end of the
lie of living, disappears into Nirvana.
But this difficult abstractive method of self-negation, however it may draw to it some exceptional natures, cannot satisfy
universally the embodied soul in man, because it does not give
an outlet to all the straining of his complex nature towards the
perfect Eternal. Not only his abstracting contemplative intellect
but his yearning heart, his active will, his positive mind in search
of some Truth to which his existence and the existence of the
world is a manifold key, have their straining towards the Eternal
and Infinite and seek to find in it their divine Source and the jus-
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339
tification of their being and their nature. From this need arise the
religions of love and works, whose strength is that they satisfy
and lead Godwards the most active and developed powers of our
humanity, — for only by starting from these can knowledge be
effective. Even Buddhism with its austere and uncompromising
negation both of subjective self and objective things had still to
found itself initially on a divine discipline of works and to admit
as a substitute for bhakti the spiritualised emotionalism of a
universal love and compassion, since so only could it become
an effective way for mankind, a truly liberating religion. Even
illusionist Mayavada with its ultralogical intolerance of action
and the creations of mentality had to allow a provisional and
practical reality to man and the universe and to God in the world
in order to have a first foothold and a feasible starting-point; it
had to affirm what it denied in order to give some reality to
man’s bondage and to his effort for liberation.
But the weakness of the kinetic and the emotional religions
is that they are too much absorbed in some divine Personality
and in the divine values of the finite. And, even when they have
a conception of the infinite Godhead, they do not give us the
full satisfaction of knowledge because they do not follow it out
into its most ultimate and supernal tendencies. These religions
fall short of a complete absorption in the Eternal and the perfect
union by identity, — and yet to that identity in some other way,
if not in the abstractive, since there all oneness has its basis, the
spirit that is in man must one day arrive. On the other hand,
the weakness of a contemplative quietistic spirituality is that it
arrives at this result by a too absolute abstraction and in the
end it turns into a nothing or a fiction the human soul whose
aspiration was yet all the time the whole sense of this attempt
at union; for without the soul and its aspiration liberation and
union could have no meaning. The little that this way of thinking recognises of his other powers of existence, it relegates to
an inferior preliminary action which never arrives at any full
or satisfying realisation in the Eternal and Infinite. Yet these
things too which it restricts unduly, the potent will, the strong
yearning of love, the positive light and all-embracing intuition
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of the conscious mental being are from the Divine, represent
essential powers of him and must have some justification in
their Source and some dynamic way of self-fulfilment in him. No
God-knowledge can be integral, perfect or universally satisfying
which leaves unfulfilled their absolute claim, no wisdom utterly
wise which in its intolerant asceticism of search negates or in
the pride of pure knowledge belittles the spiritual reality behind
these ways of the Godhead.
The greatness of the central thought of the Gita in which all
its threads are gathered up and united, consists in the synthetic
value of a conception which recognises the whole nature of
the soul of man in the universe and validates by a large and
wise unification its many-sided need of the supreme and infinite
Truth, Power, Love, Being to which our humanity turns in its
search for perfection and immortality and some highest joy and
power and peace. There is a strong and wide endeavour towards
a comprehensive spiritual view of God and man and universal
existence. Not indeed that everything without any exception is
seized in these eighteen chapters, no spiritual problem left for
solution; but still so large a scheme is laid out that we have only
to fill in, to develop, to modify, to stress, to follow out points, to
work out hint and illuminate adumbration in order to find a clue
to any further claim of our intelligence and need of our spirit.
The Gita itself does not evolve any quite novel solution out of its
own questionings. To arrive at the comprehensiveness at which
it aims, it goes back behind the great philosophical systems to
the original Vedanta of the Upanishads; for there we have the
widest and profoundest extant synthetic vision of spirit and man
and cosmos. But what is in the Upanishads undeveloped to the
intelligence because wrapped up in a luminous kernel of intuitive
vision and symbolic utterance, the Gita brings out in the light of
a later intellectual thinking and distinctive experience.
In the frame of its synthesis it admits the seeking of the
abstractive thinkers for the Indefinable, anirdeśyam, the ever
unmanifest Immutable, avyaktam aks.aram. Those who devote
themselves to this search, find, they also, the Purushottama,
the supreme Divine Person, mām, the Spirit and highest Soul
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341
and Lord of things. For his utmost self-existent way of being is
indeed an unthinkable, acintyarūpam, an unimaginable positive,
an absolute quintessence of all absolutes far beyond the determination of the intelligence. The method of negative passivity,
quietude, renunciation of life and works by which men feel after
this intangible Absolute is admitted and ratified in the Gita’s
philosophy, but only with a minor permissive sanction. This
negating knowledge approaches the Eternal by one side only of
the truth and that side the most difficult to reach and follow for
the embodied soul in Nature, duh.khaṁ dehavadbhir avāpyate;
it proceeds by a highly specialised, even an unnecessarily arduous way, “narrow and difficult to tread as a razor’s edge.”
Not by denying all relations, but through all relations is the
Divine Infinite naturally approachable to man and most easily,
widely, intimately seizable. This seeing is not after all the largest
or the truest truth that the Supreme is without any relations
with the mental, vital, physical existence of man in the universe,
avyavahāryam, nor that what is described as the empirical truth
of things, the truth of relations, vyavahāra, is altogether the opposite of the highest spiritual truth, paramārtha. On the contrary
there are a thousand relations by which the supreme Eternal is
secretly in contact and union with our human existence and by
all essential ways of our nature and of the world’s nature, sarvabhāvena, can that contact be made sensible and that union made
real to our soul, heart, will, intelligence, spirit. Therefore is this
other way natural and easy for man, sukham āptum. God does
not make himself difficult of approach to us: only one thing is
needed, one demand made on us, the single indomitable will
to break through the veil of our ignorance and the whole, the
persistent seeking of the mind and heart and life for that which is
all the time near to it, within it, its own soul of being and spiritual
essence and the secret of its personality and its impersonality, its
self and its nature. This is our one difficulty; the rest the Master
of our existence will himself see to and accomplish, ahaṁ tvāṁ
moks.ayis.yāmi mā śucah..
In the very part of its teaching in which the Gita’s synthesis leans most towards the side of pure knowledge, we have
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seen that it constantly prepares for this fuller truth and more
pregnant experience. Indeed, it is implied in the very form the
Gita gives to the realisation of the self-existent Immutable. That
immutable Self of all existences seems indeed to stand back from
any active intervention in the workings of Nature; but it is not
void of all relation whatever and remote from all connection.
It is our witness and supporter; it gives a silent and impersonal
sanction; it has even an impassive enjoyment. The many-sided
action of Nature is still possible even when the soul is poised in
that calm self-existence: for the witness soul is the immutable
Purusha, and Purusha has always some relation with Prakriti.
But now the reason of this double aspect of silence and of activity is revealed in its entire significance, — because the silent
all-pervading Self is only one side of the truth of the divine
Being. He who pervades the world as the one unchanging self
that supports all its mutations, is equally the Godhead in man,
the Lord in the heart of every creature, the conscient Cause
and Master of all our subjective becoming and all our inwardtaking and outward-going objectivised action. The Ishwara of
the Yogins is one with the Brahman of the seeker of knowledge,
one supreme and universal Spirit, one supreme and universal
Godhead.
This Godhead is not the limited personal God of so many
exoteric religions; for those are all only partial and outward
formations of this other, this creative and directive, this personal side of his complete truth of existence. This is the one
supreme Person, Soul, Being, Purusha of whom all godheads
are aspects, all individual personality a limited development in
cosmic Nature. This Godhead is not a particularised name and
form of Divinity, is.t.a-devatā, constructed by the intelligence or
embodying the special aspiration of the worshipper. All such
names and forms are only powers and faces of the one Deva
who is the universal Lord of all worshippers and all religions:
but this is itself that universal Deity, deva-deva. This Ishwara is
not a reflection of the impersonal and indeterminable Brahman
in illusive Maya: for from beyond all cosmos as well as within it
he rules and is the Lord of the worlds and their creatures. He is
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343
Parabrahman who is Parameshwara, supreme Lord because he
is the supreme Self and Spirit, and from his highest original existence he originates and governs the universe, not self-deceived,
but with an all-knowing omnipotence. Nor is the working of his
divine Nature in the cosmos an illusion whether of his or our
consciousness. The only illusive Maya is the ignorance of the
lower Prakriti which is not a creator of non-existent things on the
impalpable background of the One and Absolute, but because of
its blind encumbered and limited working misrepresents to the
human mind by the figure of ego and other inadequate figures
of mind, life and matter the greater sense, the deeper realities
of existence. There is a supreme, a divine Nature which is the
true creatrix of the universe. All creatures and all objects are
becomings of the one divine Being; all life is a working of the
power of the one Lord; all nature is a manifestation of the one
Infinite. He is the Godhead in man; the Jiva is spirit of his Spirit.
He is the Godhead in the universe; this world in Space and Time
is his phenomenal self-extension.
In the unrolling of this comprehensive vision of existence
and super-existence the Yoga of the Gita finds its unified significance and unexampled amplitude. This supreme Godhead is the
one unchanging imperishable Self in all that is; therefore to the
spiritual sense of this unchanging imperishable self man has to
awake and to unify with it his inner impersonal being. He is the
Godhead in man who originates and directs all his workings;
therefore man has to awake to the Godhead within himself, to
know the divinity he houses, to rise out of all that veils and
obscures it and to become united with this inmost Self of his
self, this greater consciousness of his consciousness, this hidden
Master of all his will and works, this Being within him who is the
fount and object of all his various becoming. He is the Godhead
whose divine nature, origin of all that we are, is thickly veiled
by these lower natural derivations; therefore man has to get
back from his lower apparent existence, imperfect and mortal,
to his essential divine nature of immortality and perfection. This
Godhead is one in all things that are, the self who lives in all
and the self in whom all live and move; therefore man has to
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discover his spiritual unity with all creatures, to see all in the
self and the self in all beings, even to see all things and creatures
as himself, ātmaupamyena sarvatra, and accordingly think, feel
and act in all his mind, will and living. This Godhead is the
origin of all that is here or elsewhere and by his Nature he has
become all these innumerable existences, abhūt sarvān.i bhūtāni;
therefore man has to see and adore the One in all things animate
and inanimate, to worship the manifestation in sun and star and
flower, in man and every living creature, in the forms and forces,
qualities and powers of Nature, vāsudevah. sarvam iti. He has to
make himself by divine vision and divine sympathy and finally by
a strong inner identity one universality with the universe. A passive relationless identity excludes love and action, but this larger
and richer oneness fulfils itself by works and by a pure emotion:
it becomes the source and continent and substance and motive
and divine purpose of all our acts and feelings. Kasmai devāya
havis.ā vidhema, to what Godhead shall we give all our life and
activities as an offering? This is that Godhead, this the Lord who
claims our sacrifice. A passive relationless identity excludes the
joy of adoration and devotion; but bhakti is the very soul and
heart and summit of this richer, completer, more intimate union.
This Godhead is the fulfilment of all relations, father, mother,
lover, friend and refuge of the soul of every creature. He is the
one supreme and universal Deva, Atman, Purusha, Brahman,
Ishwara of the secret wisdom. He has manifested the world in
himself in all these ways by his divine Yoga: its multitudinous
existences are one in him and he is one in them in many aspects.
To awaken to the revelation of him in all these ways together is
man’s side of the same divine Yoga.
To make it perfectly and indisputably clear that this is the
supreme and entire truth of his teaching, this the integral knowledge which he had promised to reveal, the divine Avatar declares,
in a brief reiteration of the upshot of all that he has been saying,
that this and no other is his supreme word, paramaṁ vacah..
“Again hearken to my supreme word,” bhūya eva śr.n.u me
paramaṁ vacah.. This supreme word of the Gita is, we find,
first the explicit and unmistakable declaration that the highest
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345
worship and highest knowledge of the Eternal are the knowledge
and the adoration of him as the supreme and divine Origin of
all that is in existence and the mighty Lord of the world and
its peoples of whose being all things are the becomings. It is,
secondly, the declaration of a unified knowledge and bhakti as
the supreme Yoga; that is the destined and the natural way
given to man to arrive at union with the eternal Godhead. And
to make more significant this definition of the way, to give an
illuminating point to this highest importance of bhakti founded
upon and opening to knowledge and made the basis and motivepower for divinely appointed works, the acceptance of it by the
heart and mind of the disciple is put as a condition for the farther
development by which the final command to action comes at last
to be given to the human instrument, Arjuna. “I will speak this
supreme word to thee” says the Godhead “from my will for
thy soul’s good, now that thy heart is taking delight in me,” te
prı̄yamān.āya vaks.yāmi. For this delight of the heart in God is
the whole constituent and essence of true bhakti, bhajanti prı̄tipūrvakam. As soon as the supreme word is given, Arjuna is
made to utter his acceptance of it and to ask for a practical way
of seeing God in all things in Nature, and from that question
immediately and naturally there develops the vision of the Divine
as the Spirit of the universe and there arises the tremendous
command to the world-action.1
The idea of the Divine on which the Gita insists as the secret
of the whole mystery of existence, the knowledge that leads
to liberation, is one that bridges the opposition between the
cosmic procession in Time and a supracosmic eternity without
denying either of them or taking anything from the reality of
either. It harmonises the pantheistic, the theistic and the highest
transcendental terms of our spiritual conception and spiritual
experience. The Divine is the unborn Eternal who has no origin;
there is and can be nothing before him from which he proceeds,
because he is one and timeless and absolute. “Neither the gods
nor the great Rishis know any birth of me. . . . He who knows
1
Gita, X. 1-18.
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Essays on the Gita
me as the unborn without origin . . . ” are the opening utterances
of this supreme word. And it gives the high promise that this
knowledge, not limiting, not intellectual, but pure and spiritual,
— for the form and nature, if we can use such language, of this
transcendental Being, his svarūpa, are necessarily unthinkable
by the mind, acintyarūpa, — liberates mortal man from all confusion of ignorance and from all bondage of sin, suffering and
evil, yo vetti asammūd.hah. sa martyes.u sarva-pāpaih. pramucyate. The human soul that can dwell in the light of this supreme
spiritual knowledge is lifted by it beyond the ideative or sensible
formulations of the universe. It rises into the ineffable power
of an all-exceeding, yet all-fulfilling identity, the same beyond
and here. This spiritual experience of the transcendental Infinite
breaks down the limitations of the pantheistic conception of
existence. The infinite of a cosmic monism which makes God
and the universe one, tries to imprison the Divine in his world
manifestation and leaves us that as our sole possible means of
knowing him; but this experience liberates us into the timeless
and spaceless Eternal. “Neither the Gods nor the Titans know
thy manifestation” cries Arjuna in his reply: the whole universe
or even numberless universes cannot manifest him, cannot contain his ineffable light and infinite greatness. All other lesser
God-knowledge has its truth only by dependence on the ever
unmanifested and ineffable reality of the transcendent Godhead.
But at the same time the divine Transcendence is not a negation, nor is it an Absolute empty of all relation to the universe. It
is a supreme positive, it is an absolute of all absolutes. All cosmic
relations derive from this Supreme; all cosmic existences return
to it and find in it alone their true and immeasurable existence.
“For I am altogether and in every way the origin of the gods
and the great Rishis.” The gods are the great undying Powers
and immortal Personalities who consciously inform, constitute,
preside over the subjective and objective forces of the cosmos.
The gods are spiritual forms of the eternal and original Deity
who descend from him into the many processes of the world.
Multitudinous, universal, the gods weave out of the primary
principles of being and its thousand complexities the whole web
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347
of this diversified existence of the One. All their own existence,
nature, power, process proceeds in every way, in every principle,
in its every strand from the truth of the transcendent Ineffable.
Nothing is independently created here, nothing is caused selfsufficiently by these divine agents; everything finds its origin,
cause, first spiritual reason for being and will to be in the absolute and supreme Godhead, — aham ādih. sarvaśah.. Nothing in
the universe has its real cause in the universe; all proceeds from
this supernal Existence.
The great Rishis, called here as in the Veda the seven original
Seers, mahars.ayah. sapta pūrve, the seven Ancients of the world,
are intelligence-powers of that divine Wisdom which has evolved
all things out of its own self-conscious infinitude, prajñā purān.ı̄,
— developed them down the range of the seven principles of
its own essence. These Rishis embody the all-upholding, allillumining, all-manifesting seven Thoughts of the Veda, sapta
dhiyah., — the Upanishad speaks of all things as being arranged
in septettes, sapta sapta. Along with these are coupled the four
eternal Manus, fathers of man, — for the active nature of the
Godhead is fourfold and humanity expresses this nature in its
fourfold character. These also, as their name implies, are mental
beings. Creators of all this life that depends on manifest or latent
mind for its action, from them are all these living creatures in
the world; all are their children and offspring, yes.āṁ loka imāh.
prajāh.. And these great Rishis and these Manus are themselves
perpetual mental becomings of the supreme Soul 2 and born out
of his spiritual transcendence into cosmic Nature, — originators,
but he the origin of all that originates in the universe. Spirit of
all spirits, Soul of all souls, Mind of all mind, Life of all life,
Substance of all form, this transcendent Absolute is no complete
opposite of all we are, but on the contrary the originating and
illuminating Absolute of all the principles and powers of our
and the world’s being and nature.
This transcendent Origin of our existence is not separated
2
mad-bhāvā mānasā jātāh..
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Essays on the Gita
from us by any unbridgeable gulf and does not disown the creatures that derive from him or condemn them to be only the
figments of an illusion. He is the Being, all are his becomings.
He does not create out of a void, out of a Nihil or out of an unsubstantial matrix of dream. Out of himself he creates, in himself
he becomes; all are in his being and all is of his being. This truth
admits and exceeds the pantheistic seeing of things. Vasudeva
is all, vāsudevah. sarvam; but Vasudeva is all that appears in
the cosmos because he is too all that does not appear in it, all
that is never manifested. His being is in no way limited by his
becoming; he is in no degree bound by this world of relations.
Even in becoming all he is still a Transcendence; even in assuming
finite forms he is always the Infinite. Nature, Prakriti, is in her
essence his spiritual power, self-power, ātmaśakti; this spiritual
self-power develops infinite primal qualities of becoming in the
inwardness of things and turns them into an external surface of
form and action. For in her essential, secret and divine order
the spiritual truth of each and all comes first, a thing of her
deep identities; their psychological truth of quality and nature is
dependent on the spiritual for all in it that is authentic, it derives
from the spirit; least in necessity, last in order the objective truth
of form and action derives from inner quality of nature and
depends on it for all these variable presentations of existence
here in the external order. Or in other words, the objective fact
is only an expression of a sum of soul factors and these go back
always to a spiritual cause of their appearance.
This finite outward becoming is an expressive phenomenon
of the divine Infinite. Nature is, secondarily, the lower Nature,
a subordinate variable development of a few selective combinations out of the many possibilities of the Infinite. Evolved out
of essential and psychological quality of being and becoming,
svabhāva, these combinations of form and energy, action and
movement exist for a quite limited relation and mutual experience in the cosmic oneness. And in this lower, outward and
apparent order of things Nature as an expressive power of the
Godhead is disfigured by the perversions of an obscure cosmic
Ignorance and her divine significances lost in the materialised,
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349
separative and egoistic mechanism of our mental and vital experience. But still here also all is from the supreme Godhead,
a birth, a becoming, an evolution,3 a process of development
through action of Nature out of the Transcendent. Ahaṁ sarvasya prabhavo mattah. sarvaṁ pravartate; “I am the birth of
everything and from me all proceeds into development of action
and movement.” Not only is this true of all that we call good
or praise and recognise as divine, all that is luminous, sattwic,
ethical, peace-giving, spiritually joy-giving, “understanding and
knowledge and freedom from the bewilderment of the Ignorance, forgiveness and truth and self-government and calm of
inner control, non-injuring and equality, contentment and austerity and giving.” It is true also of the oppositions that perplex
the mortal mind and bring in ignorance and its bewilderment,
“grief and pleasure, coming into being and destruction, fear and
fearlessness, glory and ingloriousness” with all the rest of the
interplay of light and darkness, all the myriad mixed threads
that quiver so painfully and yet with a constant stimulation
through the entanglement of our nervous mind and its ignorant
subjectivities. All here in their separate diversities are subjective becomings of existences in the one great Becoming and
they get their birth and being from Him who transcends them.
The Transcendent knows and originates these things, but is not
caught as in a web in that diversified knowledge and is not
overcome by his creation. We must observe here the emphatic
collocation of the three words from the verb bhū, to become,
bhavanti, bhāvāh., bhūtānām. All existences are becomings of
the Divine, bhūtāni; all subjective states and movements are
his and their psychological becomings, bhāvāh.. These even, our
lesser subjective conditions and their apparent results no less
than the highest spiritual states, are all becomings from the
supreme Being,4 bhavanti matta eva. The Gita recognises and
stresses the distinction between Being and becoming, but does
3
prabhava, bhāva, pravr.tti.
4
Cf. the Upanishad, ātmā eva abhūt sarvān.i bhūtāni, the Self has become all existences,
with this contained significance in the choice of the words, the Self-existent has become
all these becomings.
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not turn it into an opposition. For that would be to abrogate
the universal oneness. The Godhead is one in his transcendence,
one all-supporting Self of things, one in the unity of his cosmic
nature. These three are one Godhead; all derives from him, all
becomes from his being, all is eternal portion or temporal expression of the Eternal. In the Transcendence, in the Absolute,
if we are to follow the Gita, we must look, not for a supreme
negation of all things, but for the positive key of their mystery,
the reconciling secret of their existence.
But there is another supreme reality of the Infinite that must
also be recognised as an indispensable element of the liberating
knowledge. This reality is that of the transcendent downlook as
well as the close immanent presence of the divine government
of the universe. The Supreme who becomes all creation, yet
infinitely transcends it, is not a will-less cause aloof from his
creation. He is not an involuntary originator who disowns all
responsibility for these results of his universal Power or casts
them upon an illusive consciousness entirely different from his
own or leaves them to a mechanical Law or to a Demiurge
or to a Manichean conflict of Principles. He is not an aloof and
indifferent Witness who waits impassively for all to abolish itself
or return to its unmoved original principle. He is the mighty
lord of the worlds and peoples, loka-maheśvara, and governs
all not only from within but from above, from his supreme
transcendence. Cosmos cannot be governed by a Power that
does not transcend cosmos. A divine government implies the
free mastery of an omnipotent Ruler and not an automatic force
or mechanical law of determinative becoming limited by the
apparent nature of the cosmos. This is the theistic seeing of the
universe, but it is no shrinking and gingerly theism afraid of the
world’s contradictions, but one which sees God as the omniscient
and omnipotent, the sole original Being who manifests in himself all, whatever it may be, good and evil, pain and pleasure,
light and darkness as stuff of his own existence and governs
himself what in himself he has manifested. Unaffected by its
oppositions, unbound by his creation, exceeding, yet intimately
related to this Nature and closely one with her creatures, their
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Spirit, Self, highest Soul, Lord, Lover, Friend, Refuge, he is ever
leading them from within them and from above through the
mortal appearances of ignorance and suffering and sin and evil,
ever leading each through his nature and all through universal
Nature towards a supreme light and bliss and immortality and
transcendence. This is the fullness of the liberating knowledge.
It is a knowledge of the Divine within us and in the world as
at the same time a transcendent Infinite. An Absolute who has
become all that is by his divine Nature, his effective power of
Spirit, he governs all from his transcendence. He is intimately
present within every creature and the cause, ruler, director of
all cosmic happenings and yet is he far too great, mighty and
infinite to be limited by his creation.
This character of the knowledge is emphasised in three
separate verses of promise. “Whosoever knows me,” says the
Godhead, “as the unborn who is without origin, mighty lord
of the worlds and peoples, lives unbewildered among mortals
and is delivered from all sin and evil. . . . Whosoever knows in
its right principles this my pervading lordship and this my Yoga
(the divine Yoga, aiśvara yoga, by which the Transcendent is one
with all existences, even while more than them all, and dwells in
them and contains them as becomings of his own Nature), unites
himself to me by an untrembling Yoga. . . . The wise hold me for
the birth of each and all, hold each and all as developing from
me its action and movement, and so holding they love and adore
me . . . and I give them the Yoga of the understanding by which
they come to me and I destroy for them the darkness which is
born of the ignorance.” These results must arise inevitably from
the very nature of the knowledge and from the very nature of
the Yoga which converts that knowledge into spiritual growth
and spiritual experience. For all the perplexity of man’s mind and
action, all the stumbling, insecurity and affliction of his mind, his
will, his ethical turn, his emotional, sensational and vital urgings
can be traced back to the groping and bewildered cognition and
volition natural to his sense-obscured mortal mind in the body,
sammoha. But when he sees the divine Origin of all things, when
he looks steadily from the cosmic appearance to its transcendent
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Reality and back from that Reality to the appearance, he is then
delivered from this bewilderment of the mind, will, heart and
senses, he walks enlightened and free, asammūd.hah. martyes.u.
Assigning to everything its supernal and real and not any longer
only its present and apparent value, he finds the hidden links
and connections; he consciously directs all life and act to their
high and true object and governs them by the light and power
which comes to him from the Godhead within him. Thus he
escapes from the wrong cognition, the wrong mental and volitional reaction, the wrong sensational reception and impulse
which here originate sin and error and suffering, sarva-pāpaih.
pramucyate. For living thus in the transcendent and universal
he sees his own and every other individuality in their greater
values and is released from the falsehood and ignorance of his
separative and egoistic will and knowledge. That is always the
essence of the spiritual liberation.
The wisdom of the liberated man is not then, in the view
of the Gita, a consciousness of abstracted and unrelated impersonality, a do-nothing quietude. For the mind and soul of the
liberated man are firmly settled in a constant sense, an integral
feeling of the pervasion of the world by the actuating and directing presence of the divine Master of the universe, etāṁ vibhūtiṁ
mama yo vetti. He is aware of his spirit’s transcendence of the
cosmic order, but he is aware also of his oneness with it by
the divine Yoga, yogaṁ ca mama. And he sees each aspect of
the transcendent, the cosmic and the individual existence in its
right relation to the supreme Truth and puts all in their right
place in the unity of the divine Yoga. He no longer sees each
thing in its separateness, — the separate seeing that leaves all
either unexplained or one-sided to the experiencing consciousness. Nor does he see all confusedly together, — the confused
seeing that gives a wrong light and a chaotic action. Secure in
the transcendence, he is not affected by the cosmic stress and the
turmoil of Time and circumstance. Untroubled in the midst of
all this creation and destruction of things, his spirit adheres to an
unshaken and untrembling, an unvacillating Yoga of union with
the eternal and spiritual in the universe. He watches through it all
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the divine persistence of the Master of the Yoga and acts out of
a tranquil universality and oneness with all things and creatures.
And this close contact with all things implies no involution of
soul and mind in the separative lower nature, because his basis
of spiritual experience is not the inferior phenomenal form and
movement but the inner All and the supreme Transcendence.
He becomes of like nature and law of being with the Divine,
sādharmyam āgatah., transcendent even in universality of spirit,
universal even in the individuality of mind, life and body. By this
Yoga once perfected, undeviating and fixed, avikampena yogena
yujyate, he is able to take up whatever poise of nature, assume
whatever human condition, do whatever world-action without
any fall from his oneness with the divine Self, without any loss
of his constant communion with the Master of existence.5
This knowledge translated into the affective, emotional,
temperamental plane becomes a calm love and intense adoration
of the original and transcendental Godhead above us, the everpresent Master of all things here, God in man, God in Nature.
It is at first a wisdom of the intelligence, the buddhi; but that
is accompanied by a moved spiritualised state of the affective
nature,6 bhāva. This change of the heart and mind is the beginning of a total change of all the nature. A new inner birth
and becoming prepares us for oneness with the supreme object
of our love and adoration, madbhāvāya. There is an intense
delight of love in the greatness and beauty and perfection of this
divine Being now seen everywhere in the world and above it,
prı̄ti. That deeper ecstasy assumes the place of the scattered and
external pleasure of the mind in existence or rather it draws all
other delight into it and transforms by a marvellous alchemy
the mind’s and the heart’s feelings and all sense movements. The
whole consciousness becomes full of the Godhead and replete
with his answering consciousness; the whole life flows into one
sea of bliss-experience. All the speech and thought of such Godlovers becomes a mutual utterance and understanding of the
5
sarvathā vartamāno’pi sa yogı̄ mayi vartate.
6
budhā bhāva-samanvitāh..
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Divine. In that one joy is concentrated all the contentment of
the being, all the play and pleasure of the nature. There is a
continual union from moment to moment in the thought and
memory, there is an unbroken continuity of the experience of
oneness in the spirit. And from the moment that this inner state
begins, even in the stage of imperfection, the Divine confirms it
by the perfect Yoga of the will and intelligence. He uplifts the
blazing lamp of knowledge within us, he destroys the ignorance
of the separative mind and will, he stands revealed in the human
spirit. By the Yoga of the will and intelligence founded on an
illumined union of works and knowledge the transition was
effected from our lower troubled mind-ranges to the immutable
calm of the witnessing Soul above the active nature. But now by
this greater yoga of the Buddhi founded on an illumined union
of love and adoration with an all-comprehending knowledge the
soul rises in a vast ecstasy to the whole transcendental truth of
the absolute and all-originating Godhead. The Eternal is fulfilled
in the individual spirit and individual nature; the individual spirit
is exalted from birth in time to the infinitudes of the Eternal.
VIII
God in Power of Becoming
A
VERY important step has been reached, a decisive statement of its metaphysical and psychological synthesis has
been added to the development of the Gita’s gospel of
spiritual liberation and divine works. The Godhead has been
revealed in thought to Arjuna; he has been made visible to the
mind’s search and the heart’s seeing as the supreme and universal
Being, the supernal and universal Person, the inward-dwelling
Master of our existence for whom man’s knowledge, will and
adoration were seeking through the mists of the Ignorance.
There remains only the vision of the multiple Virat Purusha
to complete the revelation on one more of its many sides.
The metaphysical synthesis is complete. Sankhya has been
admitted for the separation of the soul from the lower nature, —
a separation that must be effected by self-knowledge through the
discriminating reason and by transcendence of our subjection to
the three gunas constituent of that nature. It has been completed
and its limitations exceeded by a large revelation of the unity
of the supreme Soul and supreme Nature, para purus.a, parā
prakr.ti. Vedanta of the philosophers has been admitted for the
self-effacement of the natural separative personality built round
the ego. Its method has been used to replace the little personal
by the large impersonal being, to annul the separative illusion in
the unity of the Brahman and to substitute for the blind seeing
of the ego the truer vision of all things in one Self and one Self in
all things. Its truth has been completed by the impartial revelation of the Parabrahman from whom originate both the mobile
and the immobile, the mutable and the immutable, the action
and the silence. Its possible limitations have been transcended
by the intimate revelation of the supreme Soul and Lord who
becomes here in all Nature, manifests himself in all personality
and puts forth the power of his Nature in all action. Yoga has
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been admitted for the self-surrender of the will, mind, heart, all
the psychological being to the Ishwara, the divine Lord of the
nature. It has been completed by the revelation of the supernal
Master of existence as the original Godhead of whom the Jiva
is the partial being in Nature. Its possible limitations have been
exceeded by the soul’s seeing of all things as the Lord in the light
of a perfect spiritual oneness.
There results an integral vision of the Divine Existent at once
as the transcendent Reality, supracosmic origin of cosmos, as the
impersonal Self of all things, calm continent of the cosmos, and
as the immanent Divinity in all beings, personalities, objects,
powers and qualities, the Immanent who is the constituent self,
the effective nature and the inward and outward becoming of all
existences. The Yoga of knowledge has been fulfilled sovereignly
in this integral seeing and knowing of the One. The Yoga of
works has been crowned by the surrender of all works to their
Master, — for the natural man is now only an instrument of his
will. The Yoga of love and adoration has been declared in its
amplest forms. The intense consummation of knowledge and
works, love conducts to a crowning union of soul and Oversoul
in a highest amplitude. In that union the revelations of knowledge are made real to the heart as well as to the intelligence. In
that union the difficult sacrifice of self in an instrumental action
becomes the easy, free and blissful expression of a living oneness.
The whole means of the spiritual liberation has been given; the
whole foundation of the divine action has been constructed.
Arjuna accepts the entire knowledge that has thus been given
to him by the divine Teacher. His mind is already delivered from
its doubts and seekings; his heart, turned now from the outward
aspect of the world, from its baffling appearance to its supreme
sense and origin and its inner realities, is already released from
sorrow and affliction and touched with the ineffable gladness
of a divine revelation. The language which he is made to use
in voicing his acceptance is such as to emphasise and insist
once again on the profound integrality of this knowledge and its
all-embracing finality and fullness. He accepts first the Avatar,
the Godhead in man who is speaking to him as the supreme
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Brahman, as the supracosmic All and Absolute of existence in
which the soul can dwell when it rises out of this manifestation
and this partial becoming to its source, paraṁ brahma, paraṁ
dhāma. He accepts him as the supreme purity of the ever free
Existence to which one arrives through the effacement of ego
in the self’s immutable impersonality calm and still for ever,
pavitraṁ paramam. He accepts him next as the one Permanent,
the eternal Soul, the divine Purusha, purus.aṁ śāśvataṁ divyam.
He acclaims in him the original Godhead, adores the Unborn
who is the pervading, indwelling, self-extending master of all
existence, ādi-devam ajaṁ vibhum. He accepts him therefore not
only as that Wonderful who is beyond expression of any kind,
for nothing is sufficient to manifest him, — “neither the Gods
nor the Titans, O blessed Lord, know thy manifestation,” na hi
te bhagavan vyaktiṁ vidur devā na dānavāh., — but as the lord
of all existences and the one divine efficient cause of all their becoming, God of the gods from whom all godheads have sprung,
master of the universe who manifests and governs it from above
by the power of his supreme and his universal Nature, bhūtabhāvana bhūteśa deva-deva jagat-pate. And lastly he accepts him
as that Vasudeva in and around us who is all things here by virtue
of the world-pervading, all-inhabiting, all-constituting master
powers of his becoming, vibhūtayah., “the sovereign powers of
thy becoming by which thou standest pervading these worlds,”
yābhir vibhūtibhir lokān imāṁs tvaṁ vyāpya tis.t.hasi.1
He has accepted the truth with the adoration of his heart, the
submission of his will and the understanding of his intelligence.
He is already prepared to act as the divine instrument in this
knowledge and with this self-surrender. But a desire for a deeper
constant spiritual realisation has been awakened in his heart and
will. This is a truth which is evident only to the supreme Soul
in its own self-knowledge, — for, cries Arjuna, “thou alone, O
Purushottama, knowest thyself by thyself,” ātmanā ātmānaṁ
vettha. This is a knowledge that comes by spiritual identity and
the unaided heart, will, intelligence of the natural man cannot
1
Gita, X. 12-15.
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arrive at it by their own motion and can only get at imperfect
mental reflections that reveal less than they conceal and disfigure.
This is a secret wisdom which one must hear from the seers who
have seen the face of this Truth, have heard its word and have
become one with it in self and spirit. “All the Rishis say this of
thee and the divine seer Narada, Asita, Devala, Vyasa.” Or else
one must receive it from within by revelation and inspiration
from the inner Godhead who lifts in us the blazing lamp of
knowledge. Svayañcaiva bravı̄s.i me, “and thou thyself sayest it
to me.” Once revealed, it has to be accepted by the assent of
the mind, the consent of the will and the heart’s delight and
submission, the three elements of the complete mental faith,
śraddhā. It is so that Arjuna has accepted it; “all this that thou
sayest, my mind holds for the truth.” But still there will remain
the need of that deeper possession in the very self of our being
out from its most intimate psychic centre, the soul’s demand for
that inexpressible permanent spiritual realisation of which the
mental is only a preliminary or a shadow and without which
there cannot be a complete union with the Eternal.
Now the way to arrive at that realisation has been given
to Arjuna. And so far as regards the great self-evident divine
principles, these do not baffle the mind; it can open to the idea
of the supreme Godhead, to the experience of the immutable
Self, to the direct perception of the immanent Divinity, to the
contact of the conscient universal Being. One can, once the mind
is illumined with the idea, follow readily the way and, with
whatever preliminary difficult effort to exceed the normal mental perceptions, come in the end to the self-experience of these
essential truths that stand behind our and all existence, ātmanā
ātmānam. One can do it with this readiness because these, once
conceived, are evidently divine realities; there is nothing in our
mental associations to prevent us from admitting God in these
high aspects. But the difficulty is to see him in the apparent
truths of existence, to detect him in this fact of Nature and in
these disguising phenomena of the world’s becoming; for here
all is opposed to the sublimity of this unifying conception. How
can we consent to see the Divine as man and animal being and
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inanimate object, in the noble and the low, the sweet and the
terrible, the good and the evil? If, assenting to some idea of God
extended in the things of the cosmos, we see him in ideal light
of knowledge and greatness of power and charm of beauty and
beneficence of love and ample largeness of spirit, how shall we
avoid the breaking of the unity by their opposites which in actual
fact cling to these high things and envelop them and obscure?
And if in spite of the limitations of human mind and nature
we can see God in the man of God, how shall we see him in
those who oppose him and represent in act and nature all that
we conceive of as undivine? If Narayana is without difficulty
visible in the sage and the saint, how shall he be easily visible
to us in the sinner, the criminal, the harlot and the outcaste? To
all the differentiations of the world-existence the sage, looking
everywhere for the supreme purity and oneness, returns the austere cry, “not this, not this,” neti neti. Even if to many things
in the world we give a willing or reluctant assent and admit the
Divine in the universe, still before most must not the mind persist
in that cry “not this, not this”? Here constantly the assent of
the understanding, the consent of the will and the heart’s faith
become difficult to a human mentality anchored always on phenomenon and appearance. At least some compelling indications
are needed, some links and bridges, some supports to the difficult
effort at oneness.
Arjuna, though he accepts the revelation of Vasudeva as all
and though his heart is full of the delight of it, — for already
he finds that it is delivering him from the perplexity and stumbling differentiations of his mind which was crying for a clue, a
guiding truth amid the bewildering problems of a world of oppositions, and it is to his hearing the nectar of immortality, amr.tam,
— yet feels the need of such supports and indices. He feels that
they are indispensable to overcome the difficulty of a complete
and firm realisation; for how else can this knowledge be made a
thing of the heart and life? He requires guiding indications, asks
Krishna even for a complete and detailed enumeration of the
sovereign powers of his becoming and desires that nothing shall
be left out of the vision, nothing remain to baffle him. “Thou
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shouldst tell me” he says “of thy divine self-manifestations in
thy sovereign power of becoming, divyā ātma-vibhūtayah., all
without exception, — aśes.en.a, nothing omitted, — thy Vibhutis
by which thou pervadest these worlds and peoples. How shall
I know thee, O Yogin, by thinking of thee everywhere at all
moments and in what pre-eminent becomings should I think
of thee?” This Yoga by which thou art one with all and one
in all and all are becomings of thy being, all are pervading or
pre-eminent or disguised powers of thy nature, tell me of it,
he cries, in its detail and extent, and tell me ever more of it;
it is nectar of immortality to me, and however much of it I
hear, I am not satiated. Here we get an indication in the Gita of
something which the Gita itself does not bring out expressly, but
which occurs frequently in the Upanishads and was developed
later on by Vaishnavism and Shaktism in a greater intensity of
vision, man’s possible joy of the Divine in the world-existence,
the universal Ananda, the play of the Mother, the sweetness and
beauty of God’s Lila.2
The divine Teacher accedes to the request of the disciple,
but with an initial reminder that a full reply is not possible. For
God is infinite and his manifestation is infinite. The forms of
his manifestation too are innumerable. Each form is a symbol
of some divine power, vibhūti, concealed in it and to the seeing
eye each finite carries in it its own revelation of the infinite.
Yes, he says, I will tell thee of my divine Vibhutis, but only in
some of my principal pre-eminences and as an indication and by
the example of things in which thou canst most readily see the
power of the Godhead, prādhānyatah., uddeśatah.. For there is no
end to the innumerable detail of the Godhead’s self-extension in
the universe, nāsti anto vistarasya me. This reminder begins the
passage and is repeated at the end in order to give it a greater
and unmistakable emphasis. And then throughout the rest of
the chapter3 we get a summary description of these principal
indications, these pre-eminent signs of the divine force present
in the things and persons of the universe. It seems at first as
2
X. 16-18.
3
X. 19-42.
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if they were given pell-mell, without any order, but still there
is a certain principle in the enumeration, which, if it is once
disengaged, can lead by a helpful guidance to the inner sense of
the idea and its consequences. The chapter has been called the
Vibhuti-Yoga, — an indispensable yoga. For while we must identify ourselves impartially with the universal divine Becoming in
all its extension, its good and evil, perfection and imperfection,
light and darkness, we must at the same time realise that there is
an ascending evolutionary power in it, an increasing intensity of
its revelation in things, a hierarchic secret something that carries
us upward from the first concealing appearances through higher
and higher forms towards the large ideal nature of the universal
Godhead.
This summary enumeration begins with a statement of the
primal principle that underlies all the power of this manifestation in the universe. It is this that in every being and object God
dwells concealed and discoverable; he is housed as in a crypt in
the mind and heart of every thing and creature, an inner self in
the core of its subjective and its objective becoming, one who
is the beginning and middle and end of all that is, has been or
will be. For it is this inner divine Self hidden from the mind
and heart which he inhabits, this luminous Inhabitant concealed
from the view of the soul in Nature which he has put forth
into Nature as his representative, who is all the time evolving
the mutations of our personality in Time and our sensational
existence in Space, — Time and Space that are the conceptual
movement and extension of the Godhead in us. All is this selfseeing Soul, this self-representing Spirit. For ever from within
all beings, from within all conscient and inconscient existences,
this All-conscient develops his manifested self in quality and
power, develops it in the forms of objects, in the instruments
of our subjectivity, in knowledge and word and thinking, in the
creations of the mind and in the passion and actions of the doer,
in the measures of Time, in cosmic powers and godheads and in
the forces of Nature, in plant life, in animal life, in human and
superhuman beings.
If we look at things with this eye of vision unblinded by
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differentiations of quality and quantity or by difference of values and oppositions of nature, we shall see that all things are
in fact and can be nothing but powers of his manifestation,
vibhutis of this universal Soul and Spirit, Yoga of this great
Yogin, self-creations of this marvellous self-Creator. He is the
unborn and the all-pervading Master of his own innumerable
becomings in the universe, ajo vibhuh.; all things are his powers
and effectuations in his self-Nature, vibhutis. He is the origin
of all they are, their beginning; he is their support in their everchanging status, their middle; he is their end too, the culmination
or the disintegration of each created thing in its cessation or its
disappearance. He brings them out from his consciousness and
is hidden in them, he withdraws them into his consciousness
and they are hidden in him for a time or for ever. What is
apparent to us is only a power of becoming of the One: what
disappears from our sense and vision is effect of that power of
becoming of the One. All classes, genera, species, individuals
are such vibhutis. But since it is through power in his becoming
that he is apparent to us, he is especially apparent in whatever
is of a pre-eminent value or seems to act with a powerful and
pre-eminent force. And therefore in each kind of being we can
see him most in those in whom the power of nature of that
kind reaches its highest, its leading, its most effectively selfrevealing manifestation. These are in a special sense Vibhutis.
Yet the highest power and manifestation is only a very partial
revelation of the Infinite; even the whole universe is informed
by only one degree of his greatness, illumined by one ray of his
splendour, glorious with a faint hint of his delight and beauty.
This is in sum the gist of the enumeration, the result we carry
away from it, the heart of its meaning.
God is imperishable, beginningless, unending Time; this is
his most evident Power of becoming and the essence of the
whole universal movement. Aham eva aks.ayah. kālah.. In that
movement of Time and Becoming God appears to our conception or experience of him by the evidence of his works as
the divine Power who ordains and sets all things in their place
in the movement. In his form of Space it is he who fronts us
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in every direction, million-bodied, myriad-minded, manifest in
each existence; we see his faces on all sides of us. Dhātā ’haṁ
viśvato-mukhah.. For simultaneously in all these many million
persons and things, sarva-bhūtes.u, there works the mystery of
his self and thought and force and his divine genius of creation
and his marvellous art of formation and his impeccable ordering of relations and possibilities and inevitable consequences.
He appears to us too in the universe as the universal spirit of
Destruction, who seems to create only to undo his creations
in the end, — “I am all-snatching Death,” ahaṁ mr.tyuh. sarvaharah.. And yet his Power of becoming does not cease from its
workings, for the force of rebirth and new creation ever keeps
pace with the force of death and destruction, — “and I am too
the birth of all that shall come into being.” The divine Self in
things is the sustaining Spirit of the present, the withdrawing
Spirit of the past, the creative Spirit of the future.
Then among all these living beings, cosmic godheads, superhuman and human and subhuman creatures, and amid all these
qualities, powers and objects, the chief, the head, the greatest in
quality of each class is a special power of the becoming of the
Godhead. I am, says the Godhead, Vishnu among the Adityas,
Shiva among the Rudras, Indra among the gods, Prahlada among
the Titans, Brihaspati the chief of the high priests of the world,
Skanda the war-god, leader of the leaders of battle, Marichi
among the Maruts, the lord of wealth among the Yakshas and
Rakshasas, the serpent Ananta among the Nagas, Agni among
the Vasus, Chitraratha among the Gandharvas, Kandarpa the
love-God among the progenitors, Varuna among the peoples of
the sea, Aryaman among the Fathers, Narada among the divine
sages, Yama lord of the Law among those who maintain rule and
law, among the powers of storm the Wind-God. At the other end
of the scale I am the radiant sun among lights and splendours,
the moon among the stars of night, the ocean among the flowing
waters, Meru among the peaks of the world, Himalaya among
the mountain-ranges, Ganges among the rivers, the divine thunderbolt among weapons. Among all plants and trees I am the
Aswattha, among horses Indra’s horse Uchchaihsravas, Airavata
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among the elephants, among the birds Garuda, Vasuki the snakegod among the serpents, Kamadhuk the cow of plenty among
cattle, the alligator among fishes, the lion among the beasts of
the forest. I am Margasirsha, first of the months; I am spring,
the fairest of the seasons.
In living beings, the Godhead tells Arjuna, I am consciousness by which they are aware of themselves and their surroundings. I am mind among the senses, mind by which they receive
the impressions of objects and react upon them. I am man’s
qualities of mind and character and body and action; I am glory
and speech and memory and intelligence and steadfastness and
forgiveness, the energy of the energetic and the strength of the
mighty. I am resolution and perseverance and victory, I am the
sattwic quality of the good, I am the gambling of the cunning; I
am the mastery and power of all who rule and tame and vanquish
and the policy of all who succeed and conquer; I am the silence
of things secret, the knowledge of the knower, the logic of those
who debate. I am the letter A among letters, the dual among
compounds, the sacred syllable OM among words, the Gayatri
among metres, the Sama-veda among the Vedas and the great
Sama among the mantras. I am Time the head of all reckoning
to those who reckon and measure. I am spiritual knowledge
among the many philosophies, arts and sciences. I am all the
powers of the human being and all the energies of the universe
and its creatures.
Those in whom my powers rise to the utmost heights of
human attainment are myself always, my special Vibhutis. I am
among men the king of men, the leader, the mighty man, the
hero. I am Rama among warriors, Krishna among the Vrishnis,
Arjuna among the Pandavas. The illumined Rishi is my Vibhuti;
I am Bhrigu among the great Rishis. The great seer, the inspired
poet who sees and reveals the truth by the light of the idea
and sound of the word, is myself luminous in the mortal; I am
Ushanas among the seer-poets. The great sage, thinker, philosopher is my power among men, my own vast intelligence; I am
Vyasa among the sages. But, with whatever variety of degree
in manifestation, all beings are in their own way and nature
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powers of the Godhead; nothing moving or unmoving, animate
or inanimate in the world can be without me. I am the divine
seed of all existences and of that seed they are the branches and
flowers; what is in the seed of self, that only they can develop in
Nature. There is no numbering or limit to my divine Vibhutis;
what I have spoken is nothing more than a summary development and I have given only the light of a few leading indications
and a strong opening to endless verities. Whatever beautiful
and glorious creature thou seest in the world, whatever being is
mighty and forceful among men and above man and below him,
know to be a very splendour, light and energy of Me and born
of a potent portion and intense power of my existence. But what
need is there of a multitude of details for this knowledge? Take
it thus, that I am here in this world and everywhere, I am in all
and I constitute all: there is nothing else than I, nothing without
Me. I support this entire universe with a single degree of my
illimitable power and an infinitesimal portion of my fathomless
spirit; all these worlds are only sparks, hints, glintings of the I
Am eternal and immeasurable.
IX
The Theory of the Vibhuti
T
HE IMPORTANCE of this chapter of the Gita is very
much greater than appears at first view or to an eye of
prepossession which is looking into the text only for the
creed of the last transcendence and the detached turning of the
human soul away from the world to a distant Absolute. The
message of the Gita is the gospel of the Divinity in man who by
force of an increasing union unfolds himself out of the veil of
the lower Nature, reveals to the human soul his cosmic spirit,
reveals his absolute transcendences, reveals himself in man and
in all beings. The potential outcome here of this union, this
divine Yoga, man growing towards the Godhead, the Godhead
manifest in the human soul and to the inner human vision, is
our liberation from limited ego and our elevation to the higher
nature of a divine humanity. For dwelling in this greater spiritual
nature and not in the mortal weft, the tangled complexity of the
three gunas, man, one with God by knowledge, love and will and
the giving up of his whole being into the Godhead, is able indeed
to rise to the absolute Transcendence, but also to act upon the
world, no longer in ignorance, but in the right relation of the
individual to the Supreme, in the truth of the Spirit, fulfilled in
immortality, for God in the world and no longer for the ego. To
call Arjuna to this action, to make him aware of the being and
power that he is and of the Being and Power whose will acts
through him, is the purpose of the embodied Godhead. To this
end the divine Krishna is his charioteer; to this end there came
upon him that great discouragement and deep dissatisfaction
with the lesser human motives of his work; to substitute for them
the larger spiritual motive this revelation is given to him in the
supreme moment of the work to which he has been appointed.
The vision of the World-Purusha and the divine command to
action is the culminating point to which he was being led. That
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is already imminent; but without the knowledge now given to
him through the Vibhuti-Yoga it would not bring with it its full
meaning.
The mystery of the world-existence is in part revealed by the
Gita. In part, for who shall exhaust its infinite depths or what
creed or philosophy say that it has enlightened in a narrow space
or shut up in a brief system all the significance of the cosmic
miracle? But so far as is essential for the Gita’s purpose, it is
revealed to us. We have the way of the origination of the world
from God, the immanence of the Divine in it and its immanence
in the Divine, the essential unity of all existence, the relation of
the human soul obscured in Nature to the Godhead, its awakening to self-knowledge, its birth into a greater consciousness,
its ascension into its own spiritual heights. But when this new
self-vision and consciousness have been acquired in place of the
original ignorance, what will be the liberated man’s view of the
world around him, his attitude towards the cosmic manifestation
of which he has now the central secret? He will have first the
knowledge of the unity of existence and the regarding eye of that
knowledge. He will see all around him as souls and forms and
powers of the one divine Being. Henceforward that vision will be
the starting-point of all the inward and outward operations of
his consciousness; it will be the fundamental seeing, the spiritual
basis of all his actions. He will see all things and every creature
living, moving and acting in the One, contained in the divine and
eternal Existence. But he will also see that One as the Inhabitant
in all, their Self, the essential Spirit within them without whose
secret presence in their conscious nature they could not at all
live, move or act and without whose will, power, sanction or
sufferance not one of their movements at any moment would be
in the least degree possible. Themselves too, their soul, mind, life
and physical mould he will see only as a result of the power, will
and force of this one Self and Spirit. All will be to him a becoming
of this one universal Being. Their consciousness he will see to
be derived entirely from its consciousness, their power and will
to be drawn from and dependent on its power and will, their
partial phenomenon of nature to be a resultant from its greater
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divine Nature, whether in the immediate actuality of things it
strikes the mind as a manifestation or a disguise, a figure or
a disfigurement of the Godhead. No untoward or bewildering
appearance of things will in any smallest degree diminish or
conflict with the completeness of this vision. It is the essential
foundation of the greater consciousness into which he has arisen,
it is the indispensable light that has opened around him and the
one perfect way of seeing, the one Truth that makes all others
possible.
But the world is only a partial manifestation of the Godhead,
it is not itself that Divinity. The Godhead is infinitely greater
than any natural manifestation can be. By his very infinity, by
its absolute freedom he exists beyond all possibility of integral
formulation in any scheme of worlds or extension of cosmic
Nature, however wide, complex, endlessly varied this and every
world may seem to us, — nāsti anto vistarasya me, — however
to our finite view infinite. Therefore beyond cosmos the eye of
the liberated spirit will see the utter Divine. Cosmos he will see
as a figure drawn from the Divinity who is beyond all figure, a
constant minor term in the absolute existence. Every relative and
finite he will see as a figure of the divine Absolute and Infinite,
and both beyond all finites and through each finite he will arrive
at that alone, see always that beyond each phenomenon and
natural creature and relative action and every quality and every
happening; looking at each of these things and beyond it, he will
find in the Divinity its spiritual significance.
These things will not be to his mind intellectual concepts
or this attitude to the world simply a way of thinking or a
pragmatic dogma. For if his knowledge is conceptual only, it
is a philosophy, an intellectual construction, not a spiritual
knowledge and vision, not a spiritual state of consciousness.
The spiritual seeing of God and world is not ideative only, not
even mainly or primarily ideative. It is direct experience and
as real, vivid, near, constant, effective, intimate as to the mind
its sensuous seeing and feeling of images, objects and persons.
It is only the physical mind that thinks of God and spirit as
an abstract conception which it cannot visualise or represent
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to itself except by words and names and symbolic images and
fictions. Spirit sees spirit, the divinised consciousness sees God
as directly and more directly, as intimately and more intimately
than bodily consciousness sees matter. It sees, feels, thinks, senses
the Divine. For to the spiritual consciousness all manifest existence appears as a world of spirit and not a world of matter,
not a world of life, not a world even of mind; these other things
are to its view only God-thought, God-force, God-form. That
is what the Gita means by living and acting in Vasudeva, mayi
vartate. The spiritual consciousness is aware of the Godhead
with that close knowledge by identity which is so much more
tremendously real than any mental perception of the thinkable
or any sensuous experience of the sensible. It is so aware even
of the Absolute who is behind and beyond all world-existence
and who originates and surpasses it and is for ever outside its
vicissitudes. And of the immutable self of this Godhead that
pervades and supports the world’s mutations with his unchanging eternity, this consciousness is similarly aware, by identity,
by the oneness of this self with our own timeless unchanging
immortal spirit. It is aware again in the same manner of the
divine Person who knows himself in all these things and persons
and becomes all things and persons in his consciousness and
shapes their thoughts and forms and governs their actions by his
immanent will. It is intimately conscious of God absolute, God
as self, God as spirit, soul and nature. Even this external Nature
it knows by identity and self-experience, but an identity freely
admitting variation, admitting relations, admitting greater and
lesser degrees of the action of the one power of existence. For
Nature is God’s power of various self-becoming, ātma-vibhūti.
But this spiritual consciousness of world-existence will not
see Nature in the world as the normal mind of man sees it in
the ignorance or only as it is in the effects of the ignorance.
All in this Nature that is of the ignorance, all that is imperfect
or painful or perverse and repellent, does not exist as an absolute opposite of the nature of the Godhead, but goes back to
something behind itself, goes back to a saving power of spirit in
which it can find its own true being and redemption. There is an
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original and originating Supreme Prakriti, in which the divine
power and will to be enjoys its own absolute quality and pure
revelation. There is found the highest, there the perfect energy
of all the energies we see in the universe. That is what presents
itself to us as the ideal nature of the Godhead, a nature of
absolute knowledge, absolute power and will, absolute love and
delight. And all the infinite variations of its quality and energy,
ananta-gun.a, agan.ana-śakti, are there wonderfully various, admirably and spontaneously harmonised free self-formulations of
this absolute wisdom and will and power and delight and love.
All is there a many-sided untrammelled unity of infinites. Each
energy, each quality is in the ideal divine nature pure, perfect,
self-possessed, harmonious in its action; nothing there strives for
its own separate limited self-fulfilment, all act in an inexpressible
oneness. There all dharmas, all laws of being — dharma, law of
being, is only characteristic action of divine energy and quality,
gun.a-karma, — are one free and plastic dharma. The one divine
Power of being1 works with an immeasurable liberty and, tied
to no single excluding law, not limited by any binding system,
rejoices in her own play of infinity and never falters in her truth
of self-expression perfect for ever.
But in the universe in which we live, there is a separating
principle of selection and differentiation. There we see each energy, each quality which comes out for expression labouring as
if for its own hand, trying to get as much self-expression as it can
in whatever way it can, and accommodating somehow as best or
as worst it may that effort with the concomitant or rival effort
of other energies and qualities for their separate self-expression.
The Spirit, the Divine dwells in this struggling world-nature
and imposes on it a certain harmony by the inalienable law
of the inner secret oneness on which the action of all these
powers is based. But it is a relative harmony which seems to
result from an original division, to emerge from and subsist by
the shock of divisions and not from an original oneness. Or
at least the oneness seems to be suppressed and latent, not to
1
tapas, cit-śakti.
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371
find itself, never to put off its baffling disguises. And in fact it
does not find itself till the individual being in this world-nature
discovers in himself the higher divine Prakriti from whom this
lesser movement is a derivation. Nevertheless, the qualities and
energies at work in the world, operating variously in man, animal, plant, inanimate thing, are, whatever forms they may take,
always divine qualities and energies. All energies and qualities
are powers of the Godhead. Each comes from the divine Prakriti
there, works for its self-expression in the lower Prakriti here,
increases its potency of affirmation and actualised values under
these hampering conditions, and as it reaches its heights of selfpower, comes near to the visible expression of the Divinity and
directs itself upward to its own absolute in the supreme, the
ideal, the divine Nature. For each energy is being and power of
the Godhead and the expansion and self-expression of energy is
always the expansion and expression of the Godhead.
One might even say that at a certain point of intensity each
force in us, force of knowledge, force of will, force of love,
force of delight, can result in an explosion which breaks the
shell of the lower formulation and liberates the energy from
its separative action into union with the infinite freedom and
power of the divine Being. A highest Godward tension liberates
the mind through an absolute seeing of knowledge, liberates the
heart through an absolute love and delight, liberates the whole
existence through an absolute concentration of will towards a
greater existence. But the percussion and the delivering shock
come by the touch of the Divine on our actual nature which directs the energy away from its normal limited separative action
and objects towards the Eternal, Universal and Transcendent,
orientates it towards the infinite and absolute Godhead. This
truth of the dynamic omnipresence of the divine Power of being
is the foundation of the theory of the Vibhuti.
The infinite divine Shakti is present everywhere and secretly
supports the lower formulation, parā prakr.tir me yayā dhāryate
jagat, but it holds itself back, hidden in the heart of each natural
existence, sarvabhūtānāṁ hr.ddeśe, until the veil of Yogamaya is
rent by the light of knowledge. The spiritual being of man, the
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Jiva, possesses the divine Nature. He is a manifestation of God in
that Nature, parā prakr.tir jı̄va-bhūtā, and he has latent in him all
the divine energies and qualities, the light, the force, the power
of being of the Godhead. But in this inferior Prakriti in which
we live, the Jiva follows the principle of selection and finite
determination, and there whatever nexus of energy, whatever
quality or spiritual principle he brings into birth with him or
brings forward as the seed of his self-expression, becomes an
operative portion of his swabhava, his law of self-becoming,
and determines his swadharma, his law of action. And if that
were all, there would be no perplexity or difficulty; the life of
man would be a luminous unfolding of godhead. But this lower
energy of our world is a nature of ignorance, of egoism, of
the three gunas. Because this is a nature of egoism, the Jiva
conceives of himself as the separative ego: he works out his selfexpression egoistically as a separative will to be in conflict as
well as in association with the same will to be in others. He
attempts to possess the world by strife and not by unity and
harmony; he stresses an ego-centric discord. Because this is a
nature of ignorance, a blind seeing and an imperfect or partial
self-expression, he does not know himself, does not know his
law of being, but follows it instinctively under the ill-understood
compulsion of the world-energy, with a struggle, with much
inner conflict, with a very large possibility of deviation. Because
this is a nature of the three gunas, this confused and striving
self-expression takes various forms of incapacity, perversion or
partial self-finding. Dominated by the guna of tamas, the mode
of darkness and inertia, the power of being works in a weak
confusion, a prevailing incapacity, an unaspiring subjection to
the blind mechanism of the forces of the Ignorance. Dominated
by the guna of rajas, the mode of action, desire and possession,
there is a struggle, there is an effort, there is a growth of power
and capacity, but it is stumbling, painful, vehement, misled by
wrong notions, methods and ideals, impelled to a misuse, corruption and perversion of right notions, methods or ideals and
prone, especially, to a great, often an enormous exaggeration of
the ego. Dominated by the guna of sattwa, the mode of light
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373
and poise and peace, there is a more harmonious action, a right
dealing with the nature, but right only within the limits of an
individual light and a capacity unable to exceed the better forms
of this lower mental will and knowledge. To escape from this
tangle, to rise beyond the ignorance, the ego and the gunas is the
first real step towards divine perfection. By that transcendence
the Jiva finds his own divine nature and his true existence.
The liberated eye of knowledge in the spiritual consciousness does not in its outlook on the world see this struggling
lower Nature alone. If we perceive only the apparent outward
fact of our nature and others’ nature, we are looking with the
eye of the ignorance and cannot know God equally in all, in the
sattwic, the rajasic, the tamasic creature, in God and Titan, in
saint and sinner, in the wise man and the ignorant, in the great
and in the little, in man, animal, plant and inanimate existence.
The liberated vision sees three things at once as the whole occult
truth of the natural being. First and foremost it sees the divine
Prakriti in all, secret, present, waiting for evolution; it sees her
as the real power in all things, that which gives its value to all
this apparent action of diverse quality and force, and it reads the
significance of these latter phenomena not in their own language
of ego and ignorance, but in the light of the divine Nature. Therefore it sees too, secondly, the differences of the apparent action
in Deva and Rakshasa, man and beast and bird and reptile,
good and wicked, ignorant and learned, but as action of divine
quality and energy under these conditions, under these masks.
It is not deluded by the mask, but detects behind every mask
the Godhead. It observes the perversion or the imperfection, but
it pierces to the truth of the spirit behind, it discovers it even
in the perversion and imperfection self-blinded, struggling to
find itself, groping through various forms of self-expression and
experience towards complete self-knowledge, towards its own
infinite and absolute. The liberated eye does not lay undue stress
on the perversion and imperfection, but is able to see all with a
complete love and charity in the heart, a complete understanding
in the intelligence, a complete equality in the spirit. Finally, it
sees the upward urge of the striving powers of the Will to be
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towards Godhead; it respects, welcomes, encourages all high
manifestations of energy and quality, the flaming tongues of
the Divinity, the mounting greatnesses of soul and mind and
life in their intensities uplifted from the levels of the lower
nature towards heights of luminous wisdom and knowledge,
mighty power, strength, capacity, courage, heroism, benignant
sweetness and ardour and grandeur of love and self-giving, preeminent virtue, noble action, captivating beauty and harmony,
fine and godlike creation. The eye of the spirit sees and marks
out the rising godhead of man in the great Vibhuti.
This is a recognition of the Godhead as Power, but power
in its widest sense, power not only of might, but of knowledge,
will, love, work, purity, sweetness, beauty. The Divine is being,
consciousness and delight, and in the world all throws itself out
and finds itself again by energy of being, energy of consciousness
and energy of delight; this is a world of the works of the divine
Shakti. That Shakti shapes herself here in innumerable kinds of
beings and each of them has its own characteristic powers of
her force. Each power is the Divine himself in that form, in the
lion as in the hind, in the Titan as in the God, in the inconscient
sun that flames through ether as in man who thinks upon earth.
The deformation given by the gunas is the minor, not really
the major aspect; the essential thing is the divine power that is
finding self-expression. It is the Godhead who manifests himself
in the great thinker, the hero, the leader of men, the great teacher,
sage, prophet, religious founder, saint, lover of man, the great
poet, the great artist, the great scientist, the ascetic self-tamer,
the tamer of things and events and forces. The work itself, the
high poem, the perfect form of beauty, the deep love, the noble
act, the divine achievement is a movement of godhead; it is the
Divine in manifestation.
This is a truth which all ancient cultures recognised and
respected, but one side of the modern mind has singular repugnances to the idea, sees in it a worship of mere strength and
power, an ignorant or self-degrading hero-worship or a doctrine
of the Asuric superman. Certainly, there is an ignorant way
of taking this truth, as there is an ignorant way of taking all
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truths; but it has its proper place, its indispensable function in
the divine economy of Nature. The Gita puts it in that right
place and perspective. It must be based on the recognition of
the divine self in all men and all creatures; it must be consistent
with an equal heart to the great and the small, the eminent
and the obscure manifestation. God must be seen and loved in
the ignorant, the humble, the weak, the vile, the outcaste. In
the Vibhuti himself it is not, except as a symbol, the outward
individual that is to be thus recognised and set high, but the
one Godhead who displays himself in the power. But this does
not abrogate the fact that there is an ascending scale in manifestation and that Nature mounts upward in her degrees of
self-expression from her groping, dark or suppressed symbols to
the first visible expressions of the Godhead. Each great being,
each great achievement is a sign of her power of self-exceeding
and a promise of the final, the supreme exceeding. Man himself
is a superior degree of natural manifestation to the beast and
reptile, though in both there is the one equal Brahman. But man
has not reached his own highest heights of self-exceeding and
meanwhile every hint of a greater power of the Will to be in him
must be recognised as a promise and an indication. Respect for
the divinity in man, in all men, is not diminished, but heightened
and given a richer significance by lifting our eyes to the trail of
the great Pioneers who lead or point him by whatever step of
attainment towards supermanhood.
Arjuna himself is a Vibhuti; he is a man high in the spiritual
evolution, a figure marked out in the crowd of his contemporaries, a chosen instrument of the divine Narayana, the Godhead
in humanity. In one place the Teacher speaking as the supreme
and equal Self of all declares that there is none dear to him, none
hated, but in others he says that Arjuna is dear to him and his
bhakta and therefore guided and safe in his hands, chosen for
the vision and the knowledge. There is here only an apparent
inconsistency. The Power as the self of the cosmos is equal to all,
therefore to each being he gives according to the workings of his
nature; but there is also a personal relation of the Purushottama
to the human being in which he is especially near to the man
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who has come near to him. All these heroes and men of might
who have joined in battle on the plain of Kurukshetra are vessels
of the divine Will and through each he works according to his
nature but behind the veil of his ego. Arjuna has reached that
point when the veil can be rent and the embodied Godhead
can reveal the mystery of his workings to his Vibhuti. It is even
essential that there should be the revelation. He is the instrument
of a great work, a work terrible in appearance but necessary
for a long step forward in the march of the race, a decisive
movement in its struggle towards the kingdom of the Right and
the Truth, dharmarājya. The history of the cycles of man is a
progress towards the unveiling of the Godhead in the soul and
life of humanity; each high event and stage of it is a divine
manifestation. Arjuna, the chief instrument of the hidden Will,
the great protagonist, must become the divine man capable of
doing the work consciously as the action of the Divine. So only
can that action become psychically alive and receive its spiritual
import and its light and power of secret significance. He is called
to self-knowledge; he must see God as the Master of the universe
and the origin of the world’s creatures and happenings, all as the
Godhead’s self-expression in Nature, God in all, God in himself
as man and as Vibhuti, God in the lownesses of being and on
its heights, God on the topmost summits, man too upon heights
as the Vibhuti and climbing to the last summits in the supreme
liberation and union. Time in its creation and destruction must
be seen by him as the figure of the Godhead in its steps, — steps
that accomplish the cycles of the cosmos on whose spires of
movement the divine spirit in the human body rises doing God’s
work in the world as his Vibhuti to the supreme transcendences.
This knowledge has been given; the Time-figure of the Godhead
is now to be revealed and from the million mouths of that figure
will issue the command for the appointed action to the liberated
Vibhuti.
X
The Vision of the World-Spirit
Time the Destroyer
T
HE VISION of the universal Purusha is one of the best
known and most powerfully poetic passages in the Gita,
but its place in the thought is not altogether on the surface. It is evidently intended for a poetic and revelatory symbol
and we must see how it is brought in and for what purpose and
discover to what it points in its significant aspects before we can
capture its meaning. It is invited by Arjuna in his desire to see the
living image, the visible greatness of the unseen Divine, the very
embodiment of the Spirit and Power that governs the universe.
He has heard the highest spiritual secret of existence, that all is
from God and all is the Divine and in all things God dwells and
is concealed and can be revealed in every finite appearance. The
illusion which so persistently holds man’s sense and mind, the
idea that things at all exist in themselves or for themselves apart
from God or that anything subject to Nature can be self-moved
and self-guided, has passed from him, — that was the cause of his
doubt and bewilderment and refusal of action. Now he knows
what is the sense of the birth and passing away of existences. He
knows that the imperishable greatness of the divine conscious
Soul is the secret of all these appearances. All is a Yoga of this
great eternal Spirit in things and all happenings are the result and
expression of that Yoga; all Nature is full of the secret Godhead
and in labour to reveal him in her. But he would see too the
very form and body of this Godhead, if that be possible. He has
heard of his attributes and understood the steps and ways of
his self-revelation; but now he asks of this Master of the Yoga
to discover his very imperishable Self to the eye of Yoga. Not,
evidently, the formless silence of his actionless immutability, but
the Supreme from whom is all energy and action, of whom forms
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are the masks, who reveals his force in the Vibhuti, — the Master
of works, the Master of knowledge and adoration, the Lord of
Nature and all her creatures. For this greatest all-comprehending
vision he is made to ask because it is so, from the Spirit revealed
in the universe, that he must receive the command to his part in
the world-action.
What thou hast to see, replies the Avatar, the human eye
cannot grasp, — for the human eye can see only the outward
appearances of things or make out of them separate symbol
forms, each of them significant of only a few aspects of the
eternal Mystery. But there is a divine eye, an inmost seeing, by
which the supreme Godhead in his Yoga can be beheld and that
eye I now give to thee. Thou shalt see, he says, my hundreds
and thousands of divine forms, various in kind, various in shape
and hue; thou shalt see the Adityas and the Rudras and the
Maruts and the Aswins; thou shalt see many wonders that none
has beheld; thou shalt see today the whole world related and
unified in my body and whatever else thou willest to behold.
This then is the keynote, the central significance. It is the vision
of the One in the many, the Many in the One, — and all are the
One. It is this vision that to the eye of the divine Yoga liberates,
justifies, explains all that is and was and shall be. Once seen and
held, it lays the shining axe of God at the root of all doubts and
perplexities and annihilates all denials and oppositions. It is the
vision that reconciles and unifies. If the soul can arrive at unity
with the Godhead in this vision, — Arjuna has not yet done that,
therefore we find that he has fear when he sees, — all even that
is terrible in the world loses its terror. We see that it too is an
aspect of the Godhead and once we have found his meaning
in it, not looking at it by itself alone, we can accept the whole
of existence with an all-embracing joy and a mighty courage,
go forward with sure steps to the appointed work and envisage
beyond it the supreme consummation. The soul admitted to the
divine knowledge which beholds all things in one view, not with
a divided, partial and therefore bewildered seeing, can make a
new discovery of the world and all else that it wills to see, yac
cānyad dras.t.um icchasi; it can move on the basis of this all-
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379
relating and all-unifying vision from revelation to completing
revelation.
The supreme Form is then made visible. It is that of the
infinite Godhead whose faces are everywhere and in whom
are all the wonders of existence, who multiplies unendingly
all the many marvellous revelations of his being, a world-wide
Divinity seeing with innumerable eyes, speaking from innumerable mouths, armed for battle with numberless divine uplifted
weapons, glorious with divine ornaments of beauty, robed in
heavenly raiment of deity, lovely with garlands of divine flowers,
fragrant with divine perfumes. Such is the light of this body of
God as if a thousand suns had risen at once in heaven. The
whole world multitudinously divided and yet unified is visible
in the body of the God of Gods. Arjuna sees him, God magnificent and beautiful and terrible, the Lord of souls who has
manifested in the glory and greatness of his spirit this wild and
monstrous and orderly and wonderful and sweet and terrible
world, and overcome with marvel and joy and fear he bows
down and adores with words of awe and with clasped hands
the tremendous vision. “I see” he cries “all the gods in thy body,
O God, and different companies of beings, Brahma the creating
lord seated in the Lotus, and the Rishis and the race of the divine
Serpents. I see numberless arms and bellies and eyes and faces,
I see thy infinite forms on every side, but I see not thy end nor
thy middle nor thy beginning, O Lord of the universe, O Form
universal. I see thee crowned and with thy mace and thy discus,
hard to discern because thou art a luminous mass of energy on
all sides of me, an encompassing blaze, a sun-bright fire-bright
Immeasurable. Thou art the supreme Immutable whom we have
to know, thou art the high foundation and abode of the universe,
thou art the imperishable guardian of the eternal laws, thou art
the sempiternal soul of existence.”
But in the greatness of this vision there is too the terrific image of the Destroyer. This Immeasurable without end or middle
or beginning is he in whom all things begin and exist and end.
This Godhead who embraces the worlds with his numberless
arms and destroys with his million hands, whose eyes are suns
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and moons, has a face of blazing fire and is ever burning up
the whole universe with the flame of his energy. The form of
him is fierce and marvellous and alone it fills all the regions
and occupies the whole space between earth and heaven. The
companies of the gods enter it, afraid, adoring; the Rishis and
the Siddhas crying “May there be peace and weal” praise it with
many praises; the eyes of Gods and Titans and Giants are fixed
on it in amazement. It has enormous burning eyes; it has mouths
that gape to devour, terrible with many tusks of destruction;
it has faces like the fires of Death and Time. The kings and
the captains and the heroes on both sides of the world-battle
are hastening into its tusked and terrible jaws and some are
seen with crushed and bleeding heads caught between its teeth
of power; the nations are rushing to destruction with helpless
speed into its mouths of flame like many rivers hurrying in their
course towards the ocean or like moths that cast themselves on
a kindled fire. With those burning mouths the Form of Dread
is licking all the regions around; the whole world is full of his
burning energies and baked in the fierceness of his lustres. The
world and its nations are shaken and in anguish with the terror
of destruction and Arjuna shares in the trouble and panic around
him; troubled and in pain is the soul within him and he finds no
peace or gladness. He cries to the dreadful Godhead, “Declare to
me who thou art that wearest this form of fierceness. Salutation
to thee, O thou great Godhead, turn thy heart to grace. I would
know who thou art who wast from the beginning, for I know
not the will of thy workings.”
This last cry of Arjuna indicates the double intention in the
vision. This is the figure of the supreme and universal Being, the
Ancient of Days who is for ever, sanātanaṁ purus.aṁ purān.am,
this is he who for ever creates, for Brahma the Creator is one of
the Godheads seen in his body, he who keeps the world always
in existence, for he is the guardian of the eternal laws, but who
is always too destroying in order that he may new-create, who
is Time, who is Death, who is Rudra the Dancer of the calm and
awful dance, who is Kali with her garland of skulls trampling
naked in battle and flecked with the blood of the slaughtered
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Titans, who is the cyclone and the fire and the earthquake and
pain and famine and revolution and ruin and the swallowing
ocean. And it is this last aspect of him which he puts forward at
the moment. It is an aspect from which the mind in men willingly
turns away and ostrich-like hides its head so that perchance,
not seeing, it may not be seen by the Terrible. The weakness
of the human heart wants only fair and comforting truths or
in their absence pleasant fables; it will not have the truth in
its entirety because there there is much that is not clear and
pleasant and comfortable, but hard to understand and harder to
bear. The raw religionist, the superficial optimistic thinker, the
sentimental idealist, the man at the mercy of his sensations and
emotions agree in twisting away from the sterner conclusions,
the harsher and fiercer aspects of universal existence. Indian
religion has been ignorantly reproached for not sharing in this
general game of hiding, because on the contrary it has built and
placed before it the terrible as well as the sweet and beautiful
symbols of the Godhead. But it is the depth and largeness of
its long thought and spiritual experience that prevent it from
feeling or from giving countenance to these feeble shrinkings.
Indian spirituality knows that God is Love and Peace and
calm Eternity, — the Gita which presents us with these terrible
images, speaks of the Godhead who embodies himself in them as
the lover and friend of all creatures. But there is too the sterner
aspect of his divine government of the world which meets us
from the beginning, the aspect of destruction, and to ignore it is
to miss the full reality of the divine Love and Peace and Calm
and Eternity and even to throw on it an aspect of partiality and
illusion, because the comforting exclusive form in which it is put
is not borne out by the nature of the world in which we live. This
world of our battle and labour is a fierce dangerous destructive
devouring world in which life exists precariously and the soul
and body of man move among enormous perils, a world in which
by every step forward, whether we will it or no, something is
crushed and broken, in which every breath of life is a breath too
of death. To put away the responsibility for all that seems to
us evil or terrible on the shoulders of a semi-omnipotent Devil,
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or to put it aside as part of Nature, making an unbridgeable
opposition between world-nature and God-Nature, as if Nature
were independent of God, or to throw the responsibility on man
and his sins, as if he had a preponderant voice in the making of
this world or could create anything against the will of God, are
clumsily comfortable devices in which the religious thought of
India has never taken refuge. We have to look courageously in
the face of the reality and see that it is God and none else who
has made this world in his being and that so he has made it.
We have to see that Nature devouring her children, Time eating
up the lives of creatures, Death universal and ineluctable and
the violence of the Rudra forces in man and Nature are also the
supreme Godhead in one of his cosmic figures. We have to see
that God the bountiful and prodigal creator, God the helpful,
strong and benignant preserver is also God the devourer and
destroyer. The torment of the couch of pain and evil on which
we are racked is his touch as much as happiness and sweetness
and pleasure. It is only when we see with the eye of the complete
union and feel this truth in the depths of our being that we can
entirely discover behind that mask too the calm and beautiful
face of the all-blissful Godhead and in this touch that tests our
imperfection the touch of the friend and builder of the spirit in
man. The discords of the worlds are God’s discords and it is only
by accepting and proceeding through them that we can arrive at
the greater concords of his supreme harmony, the summits and
thrilled vastnesses of his transcendent and his cosmic Ananda.
The problem raised by the Gita and the solution it gives
demand this character of the vision of the World-Spirit. It is the
problem of a great struggle, ruin and massacre which has been
brought about by the all-guiding Will and in which the eternal
Avatar himself has descended as the charioteer of the protagonist
in the battle. The seer of the vision is himself the protagonist,
the representative of the battling soul of man who has to strike
down tyrant and oppressive powers that stand in the path of his
evolution and to establish and enjoy the kingdom of a higher
right and nobler law of being. Perplexed by the terrible aspect of
the catastrophe in which kindred smite at kindred, whole nations
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are to perish and society itself seems doomed to sink down in a
pit of confusion and anarchy, he has shrunk back, refused the
task of destiny and demanded of his divine Friend and Guide
why he is appointed to so dreadful a work, kiṁ karman.i ghore
māṁ niyojayasi. He has been shown then how individually to
rise above the apparent character of whatever work he may do,
to see that Nature the executive force is the doer of the work,
his natural being the instrument, God the master of Nature
and of works to whom he must offer them without desire or
egoistic choice as a sacrifice. He has been shown too that the
Divine who is above all these things and untouched by them, yet
manifests himself in man and Nature and their action and that
all is a movement in the cycles of this divine manifestation. But
now when he is put face to face with the embodiment of this
truth, he sees in it magnified by the image of the divine greatness
this aspect of terror and destruction and is appalled and can
hardly bear it. For why should it be thus that the All-spirit
manifests himself in Nature? What is the significance of this
creating and devouring flame that is mortal existence, this worldwide struggle, these constant disastrous revolutions, this labour
and anguish and travail and perishing of creatures? He puts the
ancient question and breathes the eternal prayer, “Declare to me
who art thou that comest to us in this form of fierceness. I would
know who art thou who wast from the beginning, for I know
not the will of thy workings. Turn thy heart to grace.”
Destruction, replies the Godhead, is the will of my workings
with which I stand here on this field of Kurukshetra, the field of
the working out of the Dharma, the field of human action, — as
we might symbolically translate the descriptive phrase, dharmaks.etre kuru-ks.etre, — a world-wide destruction which has come
in the process of the Time-Spirit. I have a foreseeing purpose
which fulfils itself infallibly and no participation or abstention
of any human being can prevent, alter or modify it; all is done by
me already in my eternal eye of will before it can at all be done
by man upon earth. I as Time have to destroy the old structures
and to build up a new, mighty and splendid kingdom. Thou as a
human instrument of the divine Power and Wisdom hast in this
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struggle which thou canst not prevent to battle for the right and
slay and conquer its opponents. Thou too, the human soul in
Nature, hast to enjoy in Nature the fruit given by me, the empire
of right and justice. Let this be sufficient for thee, — to be one
with God in thy soul, to receive his command, to do his will,
to see calmly a supreme purpose fulfilled in the world. “I am
Time the waster of the peoples arisen and increased whose will
in my workings is here to destroy the nations. Even without thee
all these warriors shall be not, who are ranked in the opposing
armies. Therefore arise, get thee glory, conquer thy enemies and
enjoy an opulent kingdom. By me and none other already even
are they slain, do thou become the occasion only, O Savyasachin.
Slay, by me who are slain, Drona, Bhishma, Jayadratha, Karna
and other heroic fighters; be not pained and troubled. Fight,
thou shalt conquer the adversary in the battle.” The fruit of the
great and terrible work is promised and prophesied, not as a
fruit hungered for by the individual, — for to that there is to be
no attachment, — but as the result of the divine will, the glory
and success of the thing to be done accomplished, the glory
given by the Divine to himself in his Vibhuti. Thus is the final
and compelling command to action given to the protagonist of
the world-battle.
It is the Timeless manifest as Time and World-Spirit from
whom the command to action proceeds. For certainly the Godhead when he says, “I am Time the Destroyer of beings,” does
not mean either that he is the Time-Spirit alone or that the whole
essence of the Time-Spirit is destruction. But it is this which is
the present will of his workings, pravr.tti. Destruction is always
a simultaneous or alternate element which keeps pace with creation and it is by destroying and renewing that the Master of
Life does his long work of preservation. More, destruction is
the first condition of progress. Inwardly, the man who does not
destroy his lower self-formations, cannot rise to a greater existence. Outwardly also, the nation or community or race which
shrinks too long from destroying and replacing its past forms
of life, is itself destroyed, rots and perishes and out of its debris
other nations, communities and races are formed. By destruction
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of the old giant occupants man made himself a place upon earth.
By destruction of the Titans the gods maintain the continuity of
the divine Law in the cosmos. Whoever prematurely attempts
to get rid of this law of battle and destruction, strives vainly
against the greater will of the World-Spirit. Whoever turns from
it in the weakness of his lower members, as did Arjuna in the
beginning, — therefore was his shrinking condemned as a small
and false pity, an inglorious, an un-Aryan and unheavenly feebleness of heart and impotence of spirit, klaibyam, ks.udraṁ
hr.daya-daurbalyam, — is showing not true virtue, but a want
of spiritual courage to face the sterner truths of Nature and of
action and existence. Man can only exceed the law of battle
by discovering the greater law of his immortality. There are
those who seek this where it always exists and must primarily
be found, in the higher reaches of the pure spirit, and to find it
turn away from a world governed by the law of Death. That is
an individual solution which makes no difference to mankind
and the world, or rather makes only this difference that they are
deprived of so much spiritual power which might have helped
them forward in the painful march of their evolution.
What then is the master man, the divine worker, the opened
channel of the universal Will to do when he finds the WorldSpirit turned towards some immense catastrophe, figured before
his eyes as Time the destroyer arisen and increased for the destruction of the nations, and himself put there in the forefront
whether as a fighter with physical weapons or a leader and
guide or an inspirer of men, as he cannot fail to be by the very
force of his nature and the power within him, svabhāvajena
svena karman.ā? To abstain, to sit silent, to protest by nonintervention? But abstention will not help, will not prevent the
fulfilment of the destroying Will, but rather by the lacuna it creates increase confusion. Even without thee, cries the Godhead,
my will of destruction would still be accomplished, r.te’pi tvām. If
Arjuna were to abstain or even if the battle of Kurukshetra were
not to be fought, that evasion would only prolong and make
worse the inevitable confusion, disorder, ruin that are coming.
For these things are no accident, but an inevitable seed that
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has been sown and a harvest that must be reaped. They who
have sown the wind, must reap the whirlwind. Nor indeed will
his own nature allow him any real abstention, prakr.tis tvāṁ
niyoks.yati. This the Teacher tells Arjuna at the close, “That
which in thy egoism thou thinkest saying, I will not fight, vain
is this thy resolve: Nature shall yoke thee to thy work. Bound
by thy own action which is born of the law of thy being, what
from delusion thou desirest not to do, that thou shalt do even
perforce.” Then to give another turn, to use some kind of soul
force, spiritual method and power, not physical weapons? But
that is only another form of the same action; the destruction
will still take place, and the turn given too will be not what the
individual ego, but what the World-Spirit wills. Even, the force
of destruction may feed on this new power, may get a more
formidable impetus and Kali arise filling the world with a more
terrible sound of her laughters. No real peace can be till the heart
of man deserves peace; the law of Vishnu cannot prevail till the
debt to Rudra is paid. To turn aside then and preach to a still
unevolved mankind the law of love and oneness? Teachers of
the law of love and oneness there must be, for by that way must
come the ultimate salvation. But not till the Time-Spirit in man
is ready, can the inner and ultimate prevail over the outer and
immediate reality. Christ and Buddha have come and gone, but
it is Rudra who still holds the world in the hollow of his hand.
And meanwhile the fierce forward labour of mankind tormented
and oppressed by the Powers that are profiteers of egoistic force
and their servants cries for the sword of the Hero of the struggle
and the word of its prophet.
The highest way appointed for him is to carry out the will of
God without egoism, as the human occasion and instrument of
that which he sees to be decreed, with the constant supporting
memory of the Godhead in himself and man, mām anusmaran,
and in whatever ways are appointed for him by the Lord of his
Nature. Nimittamātraṁ bhava savyasācin. He will not cherish
personal enmity, anger, hatred, egoistic desire and passion, will
not hasten towards strife or lust after violence and destruction
like the fierce Asura, but he will do his work, lokasaṅgrahāya.
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Beyond the action he will look towards that to which it leads,
that for which he is warring. For God the Time-Spirit does
not destroy for the sake of destruction, but to make the ways
clear in the cyclic process for a greater rule and a progressing
manifestation, rājyaṁ samr.ddham. He will accept in its deeper
sense, which the superficial mind does not see, the greatness
of the struggle, the glory of the victory, — if need be, the glory
of the victory which comes masked as defeat, — and lead man
too in the enjoyment of his opulent kingdom. Not appalled
by the face of the Destroyer, he will see within it the eternal
Spirit imperishable in all these perishing bodies and behind it
the face of the Charioteer, the Leader of man, the Friend of
all creatures, suhr.daṁ sarvabhūtānām. This formidable WorldForm once seen and acknowledged, it is to that reassuring truth
that the rest of the chapter is directed; it discloses in the end a
more intimate face and body of the Eternal.
XI
The Vision of the World-Spirit
The Double Aspect
E
1
VEN WHILE the effects of the terrible aspect of this vision are still upon him, the first words uttered by Arjuna
after the Godhead has spoken are eloquent of a greater
uplifting and reassuring reality behind this face of death and this
destruction. “Rightly and in good place,” he cries, “O Krishna,
does the world rejoice and take pleasure in thy name, the Rakshasas are fleeing from thee in terror to all the quarters and the
companies of the Siddhas bow down before thee in adoration.
How should they not do thee homage, O great Spirit? For thou
art the original Creator and Doer of works and greater even than
creative Brahma. O thou Infinite, O thou Lord of the gods, O
thou abode of the universe, thou art the Immutable and thou art
what is and is not and thou art that which is the Supreme. Thou
art the ancient Soul and the first and original Godhead and the
supreme resting-place of this All; thou art the knower and that
which is to be known and the highest status; O infinite in form,
by thee was extended the universe. Thou art Yama and Vayu and
Agni and Soma and Varuna and Prajapati, father of creatures,
and the great-grandsire. Salutation to thee a thousand times over
and again and yet again salutation, in front and behind and from
every side, for thou art each and all that is. Infinite in might and
immeasurable in strength of action thou pervadest all and art
every one.”
But this supreme universal Being has lived here before him
with the human face, in the mortal body, the divine Man, the
embodied Godhead, the Avatar, and till now he has not known
him. He has seen the humanity only and has treated the Divine as
1
Gita, XI. 35-55.
The Double Aspect
389
a mere human creature. He has not pierced through the earthly
mask to the Godhead of which the humanity was a vessel and
a symbol, and he prays now for that Godhead’s forgiveness
of his unseeing carelessness and his negligent ignorance. “For
whatsoever I have spoken to thee in rash vehemence, thinking
of thee only as my human friend and companion, ‘O Krishna,
O Yadava, O comrade,’ not knowing this thy greatness, in negligent error or in love, and for whatsoever disrespect was shown
by me to thee in jest, on the couch and the seat and in the
banquet, alone or in thy presence, I pray forgiveness from thee
the immeasurable. Thou art the father of all this world of the
moving and unmoving; thou art one to be worshipped and the
most solemn object of veneration. None is equal to thee, how
then another greater in all the three worlds, O incomparable
in might? Therefore I bow down before thee and prostrate my
body and I demand grace of thee the adorable Lord. As a father
to his son, as a friend to his friend and comrade, as one dear
with him he loves, so shouldst thou, O Godhead, bear with me. I
have seen what never was seen before and I rejoice, but my mind
is troubled with fear. O Godhead, show me that other form of
thine. I would see thee even as before crowned and with thy mace
and discus. Assume thy four-armed shape, O thousand-armed,
O Form universal.”
From the first words there comes the suggestion that the
hidden truth behind these terrifying forms is a reassuring, a
heartening and delightful truth. There is something that makes
the heart of the world to rejoice and take pleasure in the name
and nearness of the Divine. It is the profound sense of that which
makes us see in the dark face of Kali the face of the Mother and to
perceive even in the midst of destruction the protecting arms of
the Friend of creatures, in the midst of evil the presence of a pure
unalterable Benignity and in the midst of death the Master of
Immortality. From the terror of the King of the divine action the
Rakshasas, the fierce giant powers of darkness, flee destroyed,
defeated and overpowered. But the Siddhas, but the complete
and perfect who know and sing the names of the Immortal and
live in the truth of his being, bow down before every form of
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Him and know what every form enshrines and signifies. Nothing
has real need to fear except that which is to be destroyed, the
evil, the ignorance, the veilers in Night, the Rakshasa powers.
All the movement and action of Rudra the Terrible is towards
perfection and divine light and completeness.
For this Spirit, this Divine is only in outward form the Destroyer, Time who undoes all these finite forms: but in himself he
is the Infinite, the Master of the cosmic Godheads, in whom the
world and all its action are securely seated. He is the original and
ever originating Creator, one greater than that figure of creative
Power called Brahma which he shows to us in the form of things
as one aspect of his trinity, creation chequered by a balance of
preservation and destruction. The real divine creation is eternal;
it is the Infinite manifested sempiternally in finite things, the
Spirit who conceals and reveals himself for ever in his innumerable infinity of souls and in the wonder of their actions and in
the beauty of their forms. He is the eternal Immutable; he is the
dual appearance of the Is and Is-not, of the manifest and the
never manifested, of things that were and seem to be no more,
are and appear doomed to perish, shall be and shall pass. But
what he is beyond all these is That, the Supreme, who holds all
things mutable in the single eternity of a Time to which all is ever
present. He possesses his immutable self in a timeless eternity of
which Time and creation are an ever extending figure.
This is the Truth of him in which all is reconciled; a harmony of simultaneous and interdependent truths start from and
amount to the one that is real. It is the truth of a supreme
Soul of whose supreme nature the world is a derivation and an
inferior figure of that Infinite; of the Ancient of Days who for
ever presides over the long evolutions of Time; of the original
Godhead of whom Gods and men and all living creatures are the
children, the powers, the souls, spiritually justified in their being
by his truth of existence; of the Knower who develops in man
the knowledge of himself and world and God; of the one Object
of all knowing who reveals himself to man’s heart and mind
and soul, so that every new opening form of our knowledge
is a partial unfolding of him, up to the highest by which he is
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391
intimately, profoundly and integrally seen and discovered. This
is the high supreme Stability who originates and supports and
receives to himself all that are in the universe. By him in his own
existence the world is extended, by his omnipotent power, by
his miraculous self-conception and energy and Ananda of neverending creation. All is an infinity of his material and spiritual
forms. He is all the many gods from the least to the greatest; he
is the father of creatures and all are his children and his people.
He is the origin of Brahma, the father to the first father of the
divine creators of these different races of living things. On this
truth there is a constant insistence. Again it is repeated that he
is the All, he is each and every one, sarvah.. He is the infinite
Universal and he is each individual and everything that is, the
one Force and Being in every one of us, the infinite Energy that
throws itself out in these multitudes, the immeasurable Will and
mighty Power of motion and action that forms out of itself all the
courses of Time and all the happenings of the spirit in Nature.
And from that insistence the thought naturally turns to the
presence of this one great Godhead in man. There the soul of the
seer of the vision is impressed by three successive suggestions.
First, it is borne in upon him that in the body of this son of Man
who moved beside him as a transient creature upon earth and sat
by his side and lay with him on the same couch and ate with him
in the banquet and was the object of jest and careless word, actor
in war and council and common things, in this figure of mortal
man was all the time something great, concealed, of tremendous
significance, a Godhead, an Avatar, a universal Power, a One Reality, a supreme Transcendence. To this occult divinity in which
all the significance of man and his long race is wrapped and from
which all world-existence receives its inner meaning of ineffable
greatness, he had been blind. Now only he sees the universal
Spirit in the individual frame, the Divine embodied in humanity,
the transcendent Inhabitant of this symbol of Nature. He has
seen now only this tremendous, infinite, immeasurable Reality of
all these apparent things, this boundless universal Form which so
exceeds every individual form and yet of whom each individual
thing is a house for his dwelling. For that great Reality is equal
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and infinite and the same in the individual and in the universe.
And at first his blindness, his treatment of this Divine as the
mere outward man, his seeing of only the mental and physical
relation seems to him a sin against the Mightiness that was
there. For the being whom he called Krishna, Yadava, comrade,
was this immeasurable Greatness, this incomparable Might, this
Spirit one in all of whom all are the creations. That and not the
veiling outward humanity, avajānan mānus.ı̄ṁ tanum āśritam,
was what he should have seen with awe and with submission
and veneration.
But the second suggestion is that what was figured in the
human manifestation and the human relation is also a reality
which accompanies and mitigates for our mind the tremendous
character of the universal vision. The transcendence and cosmic
aspect have to be seen, for without that seeing the limitations of
humanity cannot be exceeded. In that unifying oneness all has to
be included. But by itself that would set too great a gulf between
the transcendent spirit and this soul bound and circumscribed
in an inferior Nature. The infinite presence in its unmitigated
splendour would be too overwhelming for the separate littleness
of the limited, individual and natural man. A link is needed by
which he can see this universal Godhead in his own individual
and natural being, close to him, not only omnipotently there
to govern all he is by universal and immeasurable Power, but
humanly figured to support and raise him to unity by an intimate
individual relation. The adoration by which the finite creature
bows down before the Infinite, receives all its sweetness and
draws near to a closest truth of companionship and oneness
when it deepens into the more intimate adoration which lives in
the sense of the fatherhood of God, the friendhood of God, the
attracting love between the Divine Spirit and our human soul
and nature. For the Divine inhabits the human soul and body;
he draws around him and wears like a robe the human mind and
figure. He assumes the human relations which the soul affects in
the mortal body and they find in God their own fullest sense and
greatest realisation. This is the Vaishnava bhakti of which the
seed is here in the Gita’s words, but which received afterwards
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a more deep, ecstatic and significant extension.
And from this second suggestion a third immediately arises.
The form of the transcendent and universal Being is to the
strength of the liberated spirit a thing mighty, encouraging and
fortifying, a source of power, an equalising, sublimating, alljustifying vision; but to the normal man it is overwhelming,
appalling, incommunicable. The truth that reassures, even when
known, is grasped with difficulty behind the formidable and
mighty aspect of all-destructive Time and an incalculable Will
and a vast immeasurable inextricable working. But there is too
the gracious mediating form of divine Narayana, the God who
is so close to man and in man, the Charioteer of the battle and
the journey, with his four arms of helpful power, a humanised
symbol of Godhead, not this million-armed universality. It is
this mediating aspect which man must have for his support
constantly before him. For it is this figure of Narayana which
symbolises the truth that reassures. It makes close, visible, living,
seizable the vast spiritual joy in which for the inner spirit and
life of man the universal workings behind all their stupendous
circling, retrogression, progression sovereignly culminate, their
marvellous and auspicious upshot. To this humanised embodied
soul their end becomes here a union, a closeness, a constant
companionship of man and God, man living in the world for
God, God dwelling in man and turning to his own divine ends
in him the enigmatic world-process. And beyond the end is a yet
more wonderful oneness and inliving in the last transfigurations
of the Eternal.
The Godhead in answer to Arjuna’s prayer reassumes his
own normal Narayana image, svakaṁ rūpam, the desired form
of grace and love and sweetness and beauty. But first he declares
the incalculable significance of the other mighty Image which he
is about to veil. “This that thou now seest,” he tells him, “is my
supreme shape, my form of luminous energy, the universal, the
original which none but thou amongst men has yet seen. I have
shown it by my self-Yoga. For it is an image of my very Self and
Spirit, it is the very Supreme self-figured in cosmic existence and
the soul in perfect Yoga with me sees it without any trembling
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of the nervous parts or any bewilderment and confusion of the
mind, because he descries not only what is terrible and overwhelming in its appearance, but also its high and reassuring
significance. And thou also shouldst so envisage it without fear,
without confusion of mind, without any sinking of the members;
but since the lower nature in thee is not yet prepared to look
upon it with that high strength and tranquillity, I will reassume
again for thee my Narayana figure in which the human mind
sees isolated and toned to its humanity the calm, helpfulness
and delight of a friendly Godhead. The greater Form” — and
this is repeated again after it has disappeared — “is only for the
rare highest souls. The gods themselves ever desire to look upon
it. It cannot be won by Veda or austerities or gifts or sacrifice;
it can be seen, known, entered into only by that bhakti which
regards, adores and loves Me alone in all things.”
But what then is the uniqueness of this Form by which it
is lifted so far beyond cognizance that all the ordinary endeavour of human knowledge and even the inmost austerity of its
spiritual effort are insufficient, unaided, to reach the vision? It
is this that man can know by other means this or that exclusive
aspect of the one existence, its individual, cosmic or worldexcluding figures, but not this greatest reconciling Oneness of
all the aspects of the Divinity in which at one and the same time
and in one and the same vision all is manifested, all is exceeded
and all is consummated. For here transcendent, universal and
individual Godhead, Spirit and Nature, Infinite and finite, space
and time and timelessness, Being and Becoming, all that we
can strive to think and know of the Godhead, whether of the
absolute or the manifested existence, are wonderfully revealed in
an ineffable oneness. This vision can be reached only by the absolute adoration, the love, the intimate unity that crowns at their
summit the fullness of works and knowledge. To know, to see,
to enter into it, to be one with this supreme form of the Supreme
becomes then possible, and it is that end which the Gita proposes
for its Yoga. There is a supreme consciousness through which
it is possible to enter into the glory of the Transcendent and
contain in him the immutable Self and all mutable Becoming, —
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it is possible to be one with all, yet above all, to exceed world
and yet embrace the whole nature at once of the cosmic and the
supracosmic Godhead. This is difficult indeed for limited man
imprisoned in his mind and body: but, says the Godhead, “be a
doer of my works, accept me as the supreme being and object,
become my bhakta, be free from attachment and without enmity
to all existences; for such a man comes to me.” In other words
superiority to the lower nature, unity with all creatures, oneness
with the cosmic Godhead and the Transcendence, oneness of will
with the Divine in works, absolute love for the One and for God
in all, — this is the way to that absolute spiritual self-exceeding
and that unimaginable transformation.
XII
The Way and the Bhakta
I
N THE eleventh chapter of the Gita the original object of
the teaching has been achieved and brought up to a certain
completeness. The command to divine action done for the
sake of the world and in union with the Spirit who dwells in
it and in all its creatures and in whom all its working takes
place, has been given and accepted by the Vibhuti. The disciple
has been led away from the old poise of the normal man and
the standards, motives, outlook, egoistic consciousness of his
ignorance, away from all that had finally failed him in the hour
of his spiritual crisis. The very action which on that standing
he had rejected, the terrible function, the appalling labour, he
has now been brought to admit and accept on a new inner
basis. A reconciling greater knowledge, a diviner consciousness,
a high impersonal motive, a spiritual standard of oneness with
the will of the Divine acting on the world from the fountain
light and with the motive power of the spiritual nature, — this
is the new inner principle of works which is to transform the
old ignorant action. A knowledge which embraces oneness with
the Divine and arrives through the Divine at conscious oneness
with all things and beings, a will emptied of egoism and acting
only by the command and as an instrumentation of the secret
Master of works, a divine love whose one aspiration is towards
a close intimacy with the supreme Soul of all existence, accomplished by the unity of these three perfected powers an inner
all-comprehending unity with the transcendent and universal
Spirit and Nature and all creatures are the foundation offered
for his activities to the liberated man. For from that foundation
the soul in him can suffer the instrumental nature to act in safety;
he is lifted above all cause of stumbling, delivered from egoism
and its limitations, rescued from all fear of sin and evil and
consequence, exalted out of that bondage to the outward nature
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and the limited action which is the knot of the Ignorance. He can
act in the power of the Light, no longer in twilight or darkness,
and a divine sanction upholds every step of his conduct. The
difficulty which had been raised by the antinomy between the
freedom of the Spirit and the bondage of the soul in Nature, has
been solved by a luminous reconciliation of Spirit with Nature.
That antinomy exists for the mind in the ignorance; it ceases to
exist for the spirit in its knowledge.
But there is something more to be said in order to bring
out all the meaning of the great spiritual change. The twelfth
chapter leads up to this remaining knowledge and the last six
that follow develop it to a grand final conclusion. This thing
that remains still to be said turns upon the difference between
the current Vedantic view of spiritual liberation and the larger
comprehensive freedom which the teaching of the Gita opens to
the spirit. There is now a pointed return to that difference. The
current Vedantic way led through the door of an austere and
exclusive knowledge. The Yoga, the oneness which it recognised
as the means and the absorbing essence of the spiritual release,
was a Yoga of pure knowledge and a still oneness with a supreme
Immutable, an absolute Indefinable, — the unmanifested Brahman, infinite, silent, intangible, aloof, far above all this universe
of relations. In the way proposed by the Gita knowledge is
indeed the indispensable foundation, but an integral knowledge.
Impersonal integral works are the first indispensable means; but
a deep and large love and adoration, to which a relationless
Unmanifest, an aloof and immovable Brahman can return no
answer, since these things ask for a relation and an intimate
personal closeness, are the strongest and highest power for release and spiritual perfection and the immortal Ananda. The
Godhead with whom the soul of man has to enter into this
closest oneness, is indeed in his supreme status a transcendent
Unthinkable too great for any manifestation, Parabrahman; but
he is at the same time the living supreme Soul of all things. He
is the supreme Lord, the Master of works and universal nature.
He at once exceeds and inhabits as its self the soul and mind and
body of the creature. He is Purushottama, Parameshwara and
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Paramatman and in all these equal aspects the same single and
eternal Godhead. It is an awakening to this integral reconciling
knowledge that is the wide gate to the utter release of the soul
and an unimaginable perfection of the nature. It is this Godhead
in the unity of all his aspects to whom our works and our adoration and our knowledge have to be directed as a constant inner
sacrifice. It is this supreme soul, Purushottama, transcendent of
the universe, but also its containing spirit, inhabitant and possessor, even as it is mightily figured in the vision of Kurukshetra,
into whom the liberated spirit has to enter once it has reached
to the vision and knowledge of him in all the principles and
powers of his existence, once it is able to grasp and enjoy his
multitudinous oneness, jñātuṁ dras.t.uṁ tattvena praves.t.uṁ ca.
The liberation of the Gita is not a self-oblivious abolition of
the soul’s personal being in the absorption of the One, sāyujya
mukti; it is all kinds of union at once. There is an entire unification with the supreme Godhead in essence of being and intimacy
of consciousness and identity of bliss, sāyujya, — for one object
of this Yoga is to become Brahman, brahmabhūta. There is an
eternal ecstatic dwelling in the highest existence of the Supreme,
sālokya, — for it is said, “Thou shalt dwell in me,” nivasis.yasi
mayyeva. There is an eternal love and adoration in a uniting
nearness, there is an embrace of the liberated spirit by its divine
Lover and the enveloping Self of its infinitudes, sāmı̄pya. There
is an identity of the soul’s liberated nature with the divine nature,
sādr.śya mukti, — for the perfection of the free spirit is to become
even as the Divine, madbhāvam āgatah., and to be one with him
in the law of its being and the law of its works and nature,
sādharmyam āgatah.. The orthodox Yoga of knowledge aims at
a fathomless immergence in the one infinite existence, sāyujya;
it looks upon that alone as the entire liberation. The Yoga of
adoration envisages an eternal habitation or nearness as the
greater release, sālokya, sāmı̄pya. The Yoga of works leads to
oneness in power of being and nature, sādr.śya. But the Gita
envelops them all in its catholic integrality and fuses them all
into one greatest and richest divine freedom and perfection.
Arjuna is made to raise the question of this difference. It
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399
must be remembered that the distinction between the impersonal immutable Akshara Purusha and the supreme Soul that is
at once impersonality and divine Person and much more than
either — that this capital distinction implied in the later chapters
and in the divine “I” of which Krishna has constantly spoken,
aham, mām, has as yet not been quite expressly and definitely
drawn. We have been throughout anticipating it in order to
understand from the beginning the full significance of the Gita’s
message and not have to go back again, as we would otherwise
be obliged, over the same ground newly seen and prospected in
the light of this greater truth. Arjuna has been enjoined first to
sink his separate personality in the calm impersonality of the
one eternal and immutable self, a teaching which agreed well
with his previous notions and offered no difficulties. But now
he is confronted with the vision of this greatest transcendent,
this widest universal Godhead and commanded to seek oneness
with him by knowledge and works and adoration. Therefore he
asks the better to have a doubt cleared which might otherwise
have arisen, “Those devotees who thus by a constant union
seek after thee, tvām, and those who seek after the unmanifest Immutable, which of these have the greater knowledge of
Yoga?” This recalls the distinction made in the beginning by
such phrases as “in the self, then in me,” ātmani atho mayi:
Arjuna points the distinction, tvām, aks.aram avyaktam. Thou,
he says in substance, art the supreme Source and Origin of all
beings, a Presence immanent in all things, a Power pervading
the universe with thy forms, a Person manifest in thy Vibhutis,
manifest in creatures, manifest in Nature, seated as the Lord of
works in the world and in our hearts by thy mighty world-Yoga.
As such I have to know, adore, unite myself with thee in all
my being, consciousness, thoughts, feelings and actions, satatayukta. But what then of this Immutable who never manifests,
never puts on any form, stands back and apart from all action,
enters into no relation with the universe or with anything in it,
is eternally silent and one and impersonal and immobile? This
eternal Self is the greater Principle according to all current notions and the Godhead in the manifestation is an inferior figure:
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the unmanifest and not the manifest is the eternal Spirit. How
then does the union which admits the manifestation, admits the
lesser thing, come yet to be the greater Yoga-knowledge?
To this question Krishna replies with an emphatic decisiveness. “Those who found their mind in Me and by constant
union, possessed of a supreme faith, seek after Me, I hold to be
the most perfectly in union of Yoga.” The supreme faith is that
which sees God in all and to its eye the manifestation and the
non-manifestation are one Godhead. The perfect union is that
which meets the Divine at every moment, in every action and
with all the integrality of the nature. But those also who seek by
a hard ascent after the indefinable unmanifest Immutable alone,
arrive, says the Godhead, to Me. For they are not mistaken in
their aim, but they follow a more difficult and a less complete
and perfect path. At the easiest, to reach the unmanifest Absolute
they have to climb through the manifest Immutable here. This
manifest Immutable is my own all-pervading impersonality and
silence; vast, unthinkable, immobile, constant, omnipresent, it
supports the action of personality but does not share in it. It
offers no hold to the mind; it can only be gained by a motionless
spiritual impersonality and silence and those who follow after
it alone have to restrain altogether and even draw in completely
the action of the mind and senses. But still by the equality of
their understanding and by their seeing of one self in all things
and by their tranquil benignancy of silent will for the good of all
existences they too meet me in all objects and creatures. No less
than those who unite themselves with the Divine in all ways of
their existence, sarva-bhāvena, and enter largely and fully into
the unthinkable living fountainhead of universal things, divyaṁ
purus.am acintya-rūpam, these seekers too who climb through
this more difficult exclusive oneness towards a relationless unmanifest Absolute find in the end the same Eternal. But this is a
less direct and more arduous way; it is not the full and natural
movement of the spiritualised human nature.
And it must not be thought that because it is more arduous,
therefore it is a higher and more effective process. The easier
way of the Gita leads more rapidly, naturally and normally to
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the same absolute liberation. For its acceptance of the divine
Person does not imply any attachment to the mental and sensuous limitations of embodied Nature. On the contrary it brings
a swift and effectual unchaining from the phenomenal bondage
of death and birth. The Yogin of exclusive knowledge imposes
on himself a painful struggle with the manifold demands of his
nature; he denies them even their highest satisfaction and cuts
away from him even the upward impulses of his spirit whenever
they imply relations or fall short of a negating absolute. The
living way of the Gita on the contrary finds out the most intense
upward trend of all our being and by turning it Godwards uses
knowledge, will, feeling and the instinct for perfection as so
many puissant wings of a mounting liberation. The unmanifest
Brahman in its indefinable unity is a thing to which embodied
souls can only arrive and that hardly by a constant mortification, a suffering of all the repressed members, a stern difficulty
and anguish of the nature, duh.kham avāpyate, kleśo ’dhikataras
tes.ām. The indefinable Oneness accepts all that climb to it, but
offers no help of relation and gives no foothold to the climber.
All has to be done by a severe austerity and a stern and lonely
individual effort. How different is it for those who seek after
the Purushottama in the way of the Gita! When they meditate
on him with a Yoga which sees none else, because it sees all to
be Vasudeva, he meets them at every point, in every movement,
at all times, with innumerable forms and faces, holds up the
lamp of knowledge within and floods with its divine and happy
lustre the whole of existence. Illumined, they discern the supreme
Spirit in every form and face, arrive at once through all Nature
to the Lord of Nature, arrive through all beings to the Soul of
all being, arrive through themselves to the Self of all that they
are; incontinently they break through a hundred opening issues
at once into that from which everything has its origin. The other
method of a difficult relationless stillness tries to get away from
all action even though that is impossible to embodied creatures.
Here the actions are all given up to the supreme Master of action
and he as the supreme Will meets the will of sacrifice, takes from
it its burden and assumes to himself the charge of the works of
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the divine Nature in us. And when too in the high passion of love
the devotee of the Lover and Friend of man and of all creatures
casts upon him all his heart of consciousness and yearning of
delight, then swiftly the Supreme comes to him as the saviour
and deliverer and exalts him by a happy embrace of his mind
and heart and body out of the waves of the sea of death in this
mortal nature into the secure bosom of the Eternal.
This then is the swiftest, largest and greatest way. On me,
says the Godhead to the soul of man, repose all thy mind and
lodge all thy understanding in me: I will lift them up bathed in
the supernal blaze of the divine love and will and knowledge
to myself from whom these things flow. Doubt not that thou
shalt dwell in me above this mortal existence. The chain of the
limiting earthly nature cannot hold the immortal spirit exalted
by the passion, the power and the light of the eternal love, will
and knowledge. No doubt, on this way too there are difficulties;
for there is the lower nature with its fierce or dull downward
gravitation which resists and battles against the motion of ascent
and clogs the wings of the exaltation and the upward rapture.
The divine consciousness even when it has been found at first in
a wonder of great moments or in calm and splendid durations,
cannot at once be altogether held or called back at will; there is
felt often an inability to keep the personal consciousness fixed
steadily in the Divine; there are nights of long exile from the
Light, there are hours or moments of revolt, doubt or failure.
But still by the practice of union and by constant repetition of
the experience, that highest spirit grows upon the being and
takes permanent possession of the nature. Is this also found too
difficult because of the power and persistence of the outwardgoing movement of the mind? Then the way is simple, to do
all actions for the sake of the Lord of the action, so that every
outward-going movement of the mind shall be associated with
the inner spiritual truth of the being and called back even in
the very movement to the eternal reality and connected with its
source. Then the presence of the Purushottama will grow upon
the natural man till he is filled with it and becomes a godhead
and a spirit; all life will become a constant remembering of God
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and perfection too will grow and the unity of the whole existence
of the human soul with the supreme Existence.
But it may be that even this constant remembering of God
and lifting up of our works to him is felt to be beyond the power
of the limited mind, because in its forgetfulness it turns to the act
and its outward object and will not remember to look within
and lay our every movement on the divine altar of the Spirit.
Then the way is to control the lower self in the act and do works
without desire of the fruit. All fruit has to be renounced, to be
given up to the Power that directs the work, and yet the work has
to be done that is imposed by It on the nature. For by this means
the obstacle steadily diminishes and easily disappears; the mind
is left free to remember the Lord and to fix itself in the liberty of
the divine consciousness. And here the Gita gives an ascending
scale of potencies and assigns the palm of excellence to this Yoga
of desireless action. Abhyāsa, practice of a method, repetition of
an effort and experience is a great and powerful thing; but better
than this is knowledge, the successful and luminous turning of
the thought to the Truth behind things. This thought-knowledge
too is excelled by a silent complete concentration on the Truth
so that the consciousness shall eventually live in it and be always
one with it. But more powerful still is the giving up of the fruit
of one’s works, because that immediately destroys all causes
of disturbance and brings and preserves automatically an inner
calm and peace, and calm and peace are the foundation on
which all else becomes perfect and secure in possession by the
tranquil spirit. Then the consciousness can be at ease, happily
fix itself in the Divine and rise undisturbed to perfection. Then
too knowledge, will and devotion can lift their pinnacles from a
firm soil of solid calm into the ether of Eternity.
What then will be the divine nature, what will be the greater
state of consciousness and being of the bhakta who has followed
this way and turned to the adoration of the Eternal? The Gita in
a number of verses rings the changes on its first insistent demand,
on equality, on desirelessness, on freedom of spirit. This is to be
the base always, — and that was why so much stress was laid
on it in the beginning. And in that equality bhakti, the love and
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adoration of the Purushottama must rear the spirit towards some
greatest highest perfection of which this calm equality will be
the wide foundation. Several formulas of this fundamental equal
consciousness are given here. First, an absence of egoism, of Iness and my-ness, nirmamo nirahaṅkārah.. The bhakta of the
Purushottama is one who has a universal heart and mind which
has broken down all the narrow walls of the ego. A universal
love dwells in his heart, a universal compassion flows from it
like an encompassing sea. He will have friendship and pity for
all beings and hate for no living thing: for he is patient, longsuffering, enduring, a well of forgiveness. A desireless content
is his, a tranquil equality to pleasure and pain, suffering and
happiness, the steadfast control of self and the firm unshakable
will and resolution of the Yogin and a love and devotion which
gives up the whole mind and reason to the Lord, to the Master
of his consciousness and knowledge. Or, simply, he will be one
who is freed from the troubled agitated lower nature and from
its waves of joy and fear and anxiety and resentment and desire,
a spirit of calm by whom the world is not afflicted or troubled,
nor is he afflicted or troubled by the world, a soul of peace with
whom all are at peace.
Or he will be one who has given up all desire and action
to the Master of his being, one pure and still, indifferent to
whatever comes, not pained or afflicted by any result or happening, one who has flung away from him all egoistic, personal
and mental initiative whether of the inner or the outer act, one
who lets the divine will and divine knowledge flow through
him undeflected by his own resolves, preferences and desires,
and yet for that very reason is swift and skilful in all action of
his nature, because this flawless unity with the supreme will,
this pure instrumentation is the condition of the greatest skill in
works. Again, he will be one who neither desires the pleasant and
rejoices at its touch nor abhors the unpleasant and sorrows at
its burden. He has abolished the distinction between fortunate
and unfortunate happenings, because his devotion receives all
things equally as good from the hands of his eternal Lover and
Master. The God-lover dear to God is a soul of wide equality,
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equal to friend and enemy, equal to honour and insult, pleasure
and pain, praise and blame, grief and happiness, heat and cold,
to all that troubles with opposite affections the normal nature.
He will have no attachment to person or thing, place or home;
he will be content and well-satisfied with whatever surroundings, whatever relation men adopt to him, whatever station or
fortune. He will keep a mind firm in all things, because it is
constantly seated in the highest self and fixed for ever on the one
divine object of his love and adoration. Equality, desirelessness
and freedom from the lower egoistic nature and its claims are
always the one perfect foundation demanded by the Gita for
the great liberation. There is to the end an emphatic repetition
of its first fundamental teaching and original desideratum, the
calm soul of knowledge that sees the one self in all things, the
tranquil egoless equality that results from this knowledge, the
desireless action offered in that equality to the Master of works,
the surrender of the whole mental nature of man into the hands
of the mightier indwelling spirit. And the crown of this equality
is love founded on knowledge, fulfilled in instrumental action,
extended to all things and beings, a vast absorbing and allcontaining love for the divine Self who is Creator and Master of
the universe, suhr.daṁ sarva-bhūtānāṁ sarva-loka-maheśvaram.
This is the foundation, the condition, the means by which
the supreme spiritual perfection is to be won, and those who
have it in any way are all dear to me, says the Godhead, bhaktimān me priyah.. But exceedingly dear, atı̄va me priyāh., are those
souls nearest to the Godhead whose love of me is completed by
the still wider and greatest perfection of which I have just shown
to you the way and the process. These are the bhaktas who make
the Purushottama their one supreme aim and follow out with a
perfect faith and exactitude the immortalising Dharma described
in this teaching. Dharma in the language of the Gita means the
innate law of the being and its works and an action proceeding
from and determined by the inner nature, svabhāva-niyataṁ
karma. In the lower ignorant consciousness of mind, life and
body there are many dharmas, many rules, many standards and
laws because there are many varying determinations and types
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of the mental, vital and physical nature. The immortal Dharma
is one; it is that of the highest spiritual divine consciousness
and its powers, parā prakr.tih.. It is beyond the three gunas,
and to reach it all these lower dharmas have to be abandoned,
sarva-dharmān parityajya. Alone in their place the one liberating
unifying consciousness and power of the Eternal has to become
the infinite source of our action, its mould, determinant and
exemplar. To rise out of our lower personal egoism, to enter
into the impersonal and equal calm of the immutable eternal
all-pervading Akshara Purusha, to aspire from that calm by a
perfect self-surrender of all one’s nature and existence to that
which is other and higher than the Akshara, is the first necessity
of this Yoga. In the strength of that aspiration one can rise to the
immortal Dharma. There, made one in being, consciousness and
divine bliss with the greatest Uttama Purusha, made one with
his supreme dynamic nature-force, svā prakr.tih., the liberated
spirit can know infinitely, love illimitably, act unfalteringly in the
authentic power of a highest immortality and a perfect freedom.
The rest of the Gita is written to throw a fuller light on this
immortal Dharma.
PART II
THE SUPREME SECRET
XIII
The Field and its Knower
1
T
HE GITA in its last six chapters, in order to found on a
clear and complete knowledge the way of the soul’s rising
out of the lower into the divine nature, restates in another
form the enlightenment the Teacher has already imparted to
Arjuna. Essentially it is the same knowledge, but details and
relations are now made prominent and assigned their entire significance, thoughts and truths brought out in their full value that
were alluded to only in passing or generally stated in the light
of another purpose. Thus in the first six chapters the knowledge
necessary for the distinction between the immutable self and the
soul veiled in nature was accorded an entire prominence. The
references to the supreme Self and Purusha were summary and
not at all explicit; it was assumed in order to justify works in
the world and it was affirmed to be the Master of being, but
there was otherwise nothing to show what it was and its relations to the rest were not even hinted at, much less developed.
The remaining chapters are devoted to the bringing out of this
suppressed knowledge in a conspicuous light and strong preeminence. It is to the Lord, the Ishwara, it is to the distinction
of the higher and the lower nature and to the vision of the alloriginating and all-constituting Godhead in Nature, it is to the
One in all beings that prominence has been assigned in the next
six Adhyayas (7-12) in order to found a root-unity of works and
love with knowledge. But now it is necessary to bring out more
definitely the precise relations between the supreme Purusha,
the immutable self, the Jiva and Prakriti in her action and her
gunas. Arjuna is therefore made to put a question which shall
evoke a clearer elucidation of these still ill-lighted matters. He
asks to learn of the Purusha and the Prakriti; he inquires of the
1
Gita, XIII.
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field of being and the knower of the field and of knowledge and
the object of knowledge. Here is contained the sum of all the
knowledge of self and the world that is still needed if the soul
is to throw off its natural ignorance and staying its steps on a
right use of knowledge, of life, of works and of its own relations
with the Divine in these things ascend into unity of being with
the eternal Spirit of existence.
The essence of the Gita’s ideas in these matters has already,
anticipating the final evolution of its thought, been elucidated
in a certain measure; but, following its example, we may state
them again from the point of view of its present preoccupation.
Action being admitted, a divine action done with self-knowledge
as the instrument of the divine Will in the cosmos being accepted
as perfectly consistent with the Brahmic status and an indispensable part of the Godward movement, that action being uplifted
inwardly as a sacrifice with adoration to the Highest, how does
this way practically affect the great object of spiritual life, the
rising from the lower into the higher nature, from mortal into
immortal being? All life, all works are a transaction between the
soul and Nature. What is the original character of that transaction? what does it become at its spiritual culminating point?
to what perfection does it lead the soul that gets free from its
lower and external motives and grows inwardly into the very
highest poise of the Spirit and deepest motive-force of the works
of its energy in the universe? These are the questions involved,
— there are others which the Gita does not raise or answer, for
they were not pressingly present to the human mind of that day,
— and they are replied to in the sense of the solution drawn
from a large-sighted combination of the Vedantic, Sankhya and
Yoga views of existence which is the starting-point of the whole
thought of the Gita.
The Soul which finds itself here embodied in Nature has a
triple reality to its own self-experience. First it is a spiritual being
apparently subjected by ignorance to the outward workings of
Prakriti and represented in her mobility as an acting, thinking,
mutable personality, a creature of Nature, an ego. Next when
it gets behind all this action and motion, it finds its own higher
The Field and its Knower
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reality to be an eternal and impersonal self and immutable spirit
which has no other share in the action and movement than to
support it by its presence and regard it as an undisturbed equal
witness. And last, when it looks beyond these two opposite
selves, it discovers a greater ineffable Reality from which both
proceed, the Eternal who is Self of the self and the Master of all
Nature and all action, and not only the Master, but the origin and
the spiritual support and scene of these workings of his own energy in Cosmos, and not only the origin and spiritual container,
but the spiritual inhabitant in all forces, in all things and in all
beings, and not only the inhabitant but, by the developments of
this eternal energy of his being which we call Nature, himself
all energies and forces, all things and all beings. This Nature
itself is of two kinds, one derived and inferior, another original
and supreme. There is a lower nature of the cosmic mechanism
by association with which the soul in Prakriti lives in a certain
ignorance born of Maya, traigun.yamayı̄ māyā, conceives of itself
as an ego of embodied mind and life, works under the power of
the modes of Nature, thinks itself bound, suffering, limited by
personality, chained to the obligation of birth and the wheel of
action, a thing of desires, transient, mortal, a slave of its own
nature. Above this inferior power of existence there is a higher
divine and spiritual nature of its own true being in which this
soul is for ever a conscious portion of the Eternal and Divine,
blissful, free, superior to its mask of becoming, immortal, imperishable, a power of the Godhead. To rise by this higher nature to
the Eternal through divine knowledge, love and works founded
on a spiritual universality is the key of the complete spiritual
liberation. This much has been made clear; and we have to see
now more in detail what farther considerations this change of
being involves and especially what is the difference between these
two natures and how our action and our soul-status are affected
by the liberation. For that purpose the Gita enters largely into
certain details of the highest knowledge which it had hitherto
kept in the background. Especially it dwells on the relation between Being and becoming, Soul and Nature, the action of the
three gunas, the highest liberation, the largest fullest self-giving
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of the human soul to the Divine Spirit. There is in all that it says
in these closing six chapters much of the greatest importance,
but it is the last thought with which it closes that is of supreme
interest; for in it we shall find the central idea of its teaching, its
great word to the soul of man, its highest message.
First, the whole of existence must be regarded as a field of
the soul’s construction and action in the midst of Nature. The
Gita explains the ks.etram, field, by saying that it is this body
which is called the field of the spirit, and in this body there
is someone who takes cognizance of the field, ks.etrajña, the
knower of Nature. It is evident, however, from the definitions
that succeed that it is not the physical body alone which is the
field, but all too that the body supports, the working of nature,
the mentality, the natural action of the objectivity and subjectivity of our being.2 This wider body too is only the individual
field; there is a larger, a universal, a world-body, a world-field
of the same Knower. For in each embodied creature there is this
one Knower: in each existence he uses mainly and centrally this
single outward result of the power of his nature which he has
formed for his habitation, ı̄śā vāsyaṁ sarvaṁ yat kiñca, makes
each separate sustained knot of his mobile Energy the first base
and scope of his developing harmonies. In Nature he knows the
world as it affects and is reflected by the consciousness in this
one limited body; the world exists to us as it is seen in our single
mind, — and in the end, even, this seemingly small embodied
consciousness can so enlarge itself that it contains in itself the
whole universe, ātmani viśva-darśanam. But, physically, it is a
microcosm in a macrocosm, and the macrocosm too, the large
world too, is a body and field inhabited by the spiritual knower.
That becomes evident when the Gita proceeds to state the
character, nature, source, deformations, powers of this sensible
embodiment of our being. We see then that it is the whole working of the lower Prakriti that is meant by the ks.etra. That totality
is the field of action of the embodied spirit here within us, the
2
The Upanishad speaks of a fivefold body or sheath of Nature, a physical, vital,
mental, ideal and divine body; this may be regarded as the totality of the field, ks.etram.
The Field and its Knower
413
field of which it takes cognizance. For a varied and detailed
knowledge of all this world of Nature in its essential action as
seen from the spiritual view-point we are referred to the verses
of the ancient seers, the seers of the Veda and Upanishads, in
which we get the inspired and intuitive account of these creations
of the Spirit, and to the Brahma Sutras which will give us the
rational and philosophic analysis. The Gita contents itself with a
brief practical statement of the lower nature of our being in the
terms of the Sankhya thinkers. First there is the indiscriminate
unmanifest Energy; out of that has come the objective evolution of the five elemental states of matter; as also the subjective
evolution of the senses, intelligence and ego; there are too five
objects of the senses, or rather five different ways of sense cognizance of the world, powers evolved by the universal energy
in order to deal with all the forms of things she has created
from the five elemental states assumed by her original objective
substance, — organic relations by which the ego endowed with
intelligence and sense acts on the formations of the cosmos:
this is the constitution of the kshetra. Then there is a general
consciousness that first informs and then illumines the Energy
in its works; there is a faculty of that consciousness by which
the Energy holds together the relations of objects; there is too a
continuity, a persistence of the subjective and objective relations
of our consciousness with its objects. These are the necessary
powers of the field; all these are common and universal powers
at once of the mental, vital and physical Nature. Pleasure and
pain, liking and disliking are the principal deformations of the
kshetra. From the Vedantic point of view we may say that pleasure and pain are the vital or sensational deformations given
by the lower energy to the spontaneous Ananda or delight of
the spirit when brought into contact with her workings. And
we may say from the same view-point that liking and disliking
are the corresponding mental deformations given by her to the
reactive Will of the spirit that determines its response to her
contacts. These dualities are the positive and negative terms in
which the ego soul of the lower nature enjoys the universe. The
negative terms, pain, dislike, sorrow, repulsion and the rest, are
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perverse or at the best ignorantly reverse responses: the positive
terms, liking, pleasure, joy, attraction, are ill-guided responses
or at the best insufficient and in character inferior to those of
the true spiritual experience.
All these things taken together constitute the fundamental
character of our first transactions with the world of Nature, but
it is evidently not the whole description of our being; it is our
actuality but not the limit of our possibilities. There is something
beyond to be known, jñeyam, and it is when the knower of the
field turns from the field itself to learn of himself within it and
of all that is behind its appearances that real knowledge begins,
jñānam, — the true knowledge of the field no less than of the
knower. That turning inward alone delivers from ignorance. For
the farther we go inward, the more we seize on greater and fuller
realities of things and grasp the complete truth both of God
and the soul and of the world and its movements. Therefore,
says the divine Teacher, it is the knowledge at once of the field
and its knower, ks.etra-ks.etrajñayor jñānam, a united and even
unified self-knowledge and world-knowledge, which is the real
illumination and the only wisdom. For both soul and nature are
the Brahman, but the true truth of the world of Nature can only
be discovered by the liberated sage who possesses also the truth
of the spirit. One Brahman, one reality in Self and Nature is the
object of all knowledge.
The Gita then tells us what is the spiritual knowledge or
rather it tells us what are the conditions of knowledge, the
marks, the signs of the man whose soul is turned towards the
inner wisdom. These signs are the recognised and traditional
characteristics of the sage, — his strong turning away of the
heart from attachment to outward and worldly things, his inward and brooding spirit, his steady mind and calm equality, the
settled fixity of his thought and will upon the greatest inmost
truths, upon the things that are real and eternal. First, there
comes a certain moral condition, a sattwic government of the
natural being. There is fixed in him a total absence of worldly
pride and arrogance, a candid soul, a tolerant, long-suffering
and benignant heart, purity of mind and body, tranquil firmness
The Field and its Knower
415
and steadfastness, self-control and a masterful government of
the lower nature and the heart’s worship given to the Teacher,
whether to the divine Teacher within or to the human Master in
whom the divine Wisdom is embodied, — for that is the sense
of the reverence given to the Guru. Then there is a nobler and
freer attitude towards the outward world, an attitude of perfect
detachment and equality, a firm removal of the natural being’s
attraction to the objects of the senses and a radical freedom
from the claims of that constant clamorous ego-sense, ego-idea,
ego-motive which tyrannises over the normal man. There is no
longer any clinging to the attachment and absorption of family
and home. There is instead of these vital and animal movements
an unattached will and sense and intelligence, a keen perception
of the defective nature of the ordinary life of physical man with
its aimless and painful subjection to birth and death and disease and age, a constant equalness to all pleasant or unpleasant
happenings, — for the soul is seated within and impervious to
the shocks of external events, — and a meditative mind turned
towards solitude and away from the vain noise of crowds and the
assemblies of men. Finally, there is a strong turn within towards
the things that really matter, a philosophic perception of the true
sense and large principles of existence, a tranquil continuity of
inner spiritual knowledge and light, the Yoga of an unswerving
devotion, love of God, the heart’s deep and constant adoration
of the universal and eternal Presence.
The one object to which the mind of spiritual knowledge
must be turned is the Eternal by fixity in whom the soul clouded
here and swathed in the mists of Nature recovers and enjoys
its native and original consciousness of immortality and transcendence. To be fixed on the transient, to be limited in the
phenomenon is to accept mortality; the constant truth in things
that perish is that in them which is inward and immutable.
The soul when it allows itself to be tyrannised over by the
appearances of Nature, misses itself and goes whirling about
in the cycle of the births and deaths of its bodies. There, passionately following without end the mutations of personality
and its interests, it cannot draw back to the possession of its
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impersonal and unborn self-existence. To be able to do that is to
find oneself and get back to one’s true being, that which assumes
these births but does not perish with the perishing of its forms.
To enjoy the eternity to which birth and life are only outward
circumstances, is the soul’s true immortality and transcendence.
That Eternal or that Eternity is the Brahman. Brahman is That
which is transcendent and That which is universal: it is the
free spirit who supports in front the play of soul with nature
and assures behind their imperishable oneness; it is at once the
mutable and the immutable, the All that is the One. In his highest
supracosmic status Brahman is a transcendent Eternity without
origin or change far above the phenomenal oppositions of existence and non-existence, persistence and transience between
which the outward world moves. But once seen in the substance
and light of this eternity, the world also becomes other than it
seems to the mind and senses; for then we see the universe no
longer as a whirl of mind and life and matter or a mass of the
determinations of energy and substance, but as no other than this
eternal Brahman. A spirit who immeasurably fills and surrounds
all this movement with himself — for indeed the movement too
is himself — and who throws on all that is finite the splendour
of his garment of infinity, a bodiless and million-bodied spirit
whose hands of strength and feet of swiftness are on every side
of us, whose heads and eyes and faces are those innumerable
visages which we see wherever we turn, whose ear is everywhere
listening to the silence of eternity and the music of the worlds,
is the universal Being in whose embrace we live.
All relations of Soul and Nature are circumstances in the
eternity of Brahman; sense and quality, their reflectors and constituents, are this supreme Soul’s devices for the presentation of
the workings that his own energy in things constantly liberates
into movement. He is himself beyond the limitation of the senses,
sees all things but not with the physical eye, hears all things but
not with the physical ear, is aware of all things but not with the
limiting mind — mind which represents but cannot truly know.
Not determined by any qualities, he possesses and determines in
his substance all qualities and enjoys this qualitative action of
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417
his own Nature. He is attached to nothing, bound by nothing,
fixed to nothing that he does; calm, he supports in a large and
immortal freedom all the action and movement and passion
of his universal Shakti. He becomes all that is in the universe;
that which is in us is he and all that we experience outside
ourselves is he. The inward and the outward, the far and the
near, the moving and the unmoving, all this he is at once. He is
the subtlety of the subtle which is beyond our knowledge, even
as he is the density of force and substance which offers itself to
the grasp of our minds. He is indivisible and the One, but seems
to divide himself in forms and creatures and appears as all these
separate existences. All things can get back in him, can return
in the Spirit to the indivisible unity of their self-existence. All is
eternally born from him, upborne in his eternity, taken eternally
back into his oneness. He is the light of all lights and luminous
beyond all the darkness of our ignorance. He is knowledge and
the object of knowledge. The spiritual supramental knowledge
that floods the illumined mind and transfigures it is this spirit
manifesting himself in light to the force-obscured soul which he
has put forth into the action of Nature. This eternal Light is in
the heart of every being; it is he who is the secret knower of the
field, ks.etrajña, and presides as the Lord in the heart of things
over this province and over all these kingdoms of his manifested
becoming and action. When man sees this eternal and universal
Godhead within himself, when he becomes aware of the soul in
all things and discovers the spirit in Nature, when he feels all the
universe as a wave mounting in this Eternity and all that is as the
one existence, he puts on the light of Godhead and stands free
in the midst of the worlds of Nature. A divine knowledge and a
perfect turning with adoration to this Divine is the secret of the
great spiritual liberation. Freedom, love and spiritual knowledge
raise us from mortal nature to immortal being.
The Soul and Nature are only two aspects of the eternal
Brahman, an apparent duality which founds the operations of
his universal existence. The Soul is without origin and eternal, Nature too is without origin and eternal; but the modes
of Nature and the lower forms she assumes to our conscious
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experience have an origin in the transactions of these two entities. They come from her, wear by her the outward chain of
cause and effect, doing and the results of doing, force and its
workings, all that is here transient and mutable. Constantly they
change and the soul and Nature seem to change with them,
but in themselves these two powers are eternal and always the
same. Nature creates and acts, the Soul enjoys her creation and
action; but in this inferior form of her action she turns this enjoyment into the obscure and petty figures of pain and pleasure.
Forcibly the soul, the individual Purusha, is attracted by her
qualitative workings and this attraction of her qualities draws
him constantly to births of all kinds in which he enjoys the
variations and vicissitudes, the good and evil of birth in Nature.
But this is only the outward experience of the soul mutable in
conception by identification with mutable Nature. Seated in this
body is her and our Divinity, the supreme Self, Paramatman, the
supreme Soul, the mighty Lord of Nature, who watches her action, sanctions her operations, upholds all she does, commands
her manifold creation, enjoys with his universal delight this play
of her figures of his own being. That is the self-knowledge to
which we have to accustom our mentality before we can truly
know ourselves as an eternal portion of the Eternal. Once that is
fixed, no matter how the soul in us may comport itself outwardly
in its transactions with Nature, whatever it may seem to do or
however it may seem to assume this or that figure of personality
and active force and embodied ego, it is in itself free, no longer
bound to birth because one through impersonality of self with
the inner unborn spirit of existence. That impersonality is our
union with the supreme egoless I of all that is in cosmos.
This knowledge comes by an inner meditation through
which the eternal self becomes apparent to us in our own
self-existence. Or it comes by the Yoga of the Sankhyas, the
separation of the soul from nature. Or it comes by the Yoga
of works in which the personal will is dissolved through the
opening up of our mind and heart and all our active forces
to the Lord who assumes to himself the whole of our works
in nature. The spiritual knowledge may be awakened by the
The Field and its Knower
419
urging of the spirit within us, its call to this or that Yoga, this
or that way of oneness. Or it may come to us by hearing of the
truth from others and the moulding of the mind into the sense
of that to which it listens with faith and concentration. But
however arrived at, it carries us beyond death to immortality.
Knowledge shows us high above the mutable transactions of
the soul with the mortality of nature our highest Self as the
supreme Lord of her actions, one and equal in all objects and
creatures, not born in the taking up of a body, not subject to
death in the perishing of all these bodies. That is the true seeing,
the seeing of that in us which is eternal and immortal. As we
perceive more and more this equal spirit in all things, we pass
into that equality of the spirit; as we dwell more and more
in this universal being, we become ourselves universal beings;
as we grow more and more aware of this eternal, we put on
our own eternity and are for ever. We identify ourselves with
the eternity of the self and no longer with the limitation and
distress of our mental and physical ignorance. Then we see that
all our works are an evolution and operation of Nature and
our real self not the executive doer, but the free witness and
lord and unattached enjoyer of the action. All this surface of
cosmic movement is a diverse becoming of natural existences
in the one eternal Being, all is extended, manifested, rolled out
by the universal Energy from the seeds of her Idea deep in his
existence; but the spirit even though it takes up and enjoys her
workings in this body of ours, is not affected by its mortality
because it is eternal beyond birth and death, is not limited by
the personalities which it multiply assumes in her because it is
the one supreme self of all these personalities, is not changed
by the mutations of quality because it is itself undetermined by
quality, does not act even in action, kartāram api akartāram,
because it supports natural action in a perfect spiritual freedom
from its effects, is the originator indeed of all activities, but in
no way changed or affected by the play of its Nature. As the allpervading ether is not affected or changed by the multiple forms
it assumes, but remains always the same pure subtle original
substance, even so this spirit when it has done and become all
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possible things, remains through it all the same pure immutable
subtle infinite essence. That is the supreme status of the soul,
parā gatih., that is the divine being and nature, madbhāva, and
whoever arrives at spiritual knowledge, rises to that supreme
immortality of the Eternal.
This Brahman, this eternal and spiritual knower of the field
of his own natural becoming, this Nature, his perpetual energy,
which converts herself into that field, this immortality of the
soul in mortal nature, — these things together make the whole
reality of our existence. The spirit within, when we turn to it,
illumines the entire field of Nature with its own truth in all the
splendour of its rays. In the light of that sun of knowledge the eye
of knowledge opens in us and we live in that truth and no longer
in this ignorance. Then we perceive that our limitation to our
present mental and physical nature was an error of the darkness,
then we are liberated from the law of the lower Prakriti, the law
of the mind and body, then we attain to the supreme nature of the
spirit. That splendid and lofty change is the last, the divine and
infinite becoming, the putting off of mortal nature, the putting
on of an immortal existence.
XIV
Above the Gunas
1
T
HE DISTINCTIONS between the Soul and Nature
rapidly drawn in the verses of the thirteenth chapter by a
few decisive epithets, a few brief but packed characterisations of their separate power and functioning, and especially the
distinction between the embodied soul subjected to the action of
Nature by its enjoyment of her gunas, qualities or modes and the
Supreme Soul which dwells enjoying the gunas, but not subject
because it is itself beyond them, are the basis on which the
Gita rests its whole idea of the liberated being made one in the
conscious law of its existence with the Divine. That liberation,
that oneness, that putting on of the divine nature, sādharmya,
it declares to be the very essence of spiritual freedom and the
whole significance of immortality. This supreme importance
assigned to sādharmya is a capital point in the teaching of the
Gita.
To be immortal was never held in the ancient spiritual teaching to consist merely in a personal survival of the death of the
body: all beings are immortal in that sense and it is only the
forms that perish. The souls that do not arrive at liberation, live
through the returning aeons; all exist involved or secret in the
Brahman during the dissolution of the manifest worlds and are
born again in the appearance of a new cycle. Pralaya, the end of
a cycle of aeons, is the temporary disintegration of a universal
form of existence and of all the individual forms which move in
its rounds, but that is only a momentary pause, a silent interval followed by an outburst of new creation, reintegration and
reconstruction in which they reappear and recover the impetus
of their progression. Our physical death is also a pralaya, —
the Gita will presently use the word in the sense of this death,
1
Gita, XIV.
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pralayaṁ yāti deha-bhr.t, “the soul bearing the body comes to a
pralaya,” to a disintegration of that form of matter with which
its ignorance identified its being and which now dissolves into
the natural elements. But the soul itself persists and after an
interval resumes in a new body formed from those elements its
round of births in the cycle, just as after the interval of pause and
cessation the universal Being resumes his endless round of the
cyclic aeons. This immortality in the rounds of Time is common
to all embodied spirits.
To be immortal in the deeper sense is something different
from this survival of death and this constant recurrence. Immortality is that supreme status in which the Spirit knows itself to
be superior to death and birth, not conditioned by the nature
of its manifestation, infinite, imperishable, immutably eternal,
— immortal, because never being born it never dies. The divine
Purushottama, who is the supreme Lord and supreme Brahman,
possesses for ever this immortal eternity and is not affected
by his taking up a body or by his continuous assumption of
cosmic forms and powers because he exists always in this selfknowledge. His very nature is to be unchangeably conscious of
his own eternity; he is self-aware without end or beginning. He
is here the Inhabitant of all bodies, but as the unborn in every
body, not limited in his consciousness by that manifestation, not
identified with the physical nature which he assumes; for that
is only a minor circumstance of his universal activised play of
existence. Liberation, immortality is to live in this unchangeably
conscious eternal being of the Purushottama.2 But to arrive here
at this greater spiritual immortality the embodied soul must
cease to live according to the law of the lower nature; it must
2
Mark that nowhere in the Gita is there any indication that dissolution of the individual spiritual being into the unmanifest, indefinable or absolute Brahman, avyaktam
anirdeśyam, is the true meaning or condition of immortality or the true aim of Yoga.
On the contrary it describes immortality later on as an indwelling in the Ishwara in his
supreme status, mayi nivasis.yasi, paraṁ dhāma, and here as sādharmya, parāṁ siddhim,
a supreme perfection, a becoming of one law of being and nature with the Supreme,
persistent still in existence and conscious of the universal movement but above it, as all
the sages still exist, munayah. sarve, not bound to birth in the creation, not troubled by
the dissolution of the cycles.
Above the Gunas
423
put on the law of the Divine’s supreme way of existence which
is in fact the real law of its own eternal essence. In the spiritual
evolution of its becoming, no less than in its secret original being,
it must grow into the likeness of the Divine.
And this great thing, to rise from the human into the divine
nature, we can only do by an effort of Godward knowledge,
will and adoration. For the soul sent forth by the Supreme as his
eternal portion, his immortal representative into the workings
of universal Nature is yet obliged by the character of those
workings, avaśaṁ prakr.ter vaśāt, to identify itself in its external
consciousness with her limiting conditions, to identify itself with
a life, mind and body that are oblivious of their inner spiritual
reality and of the innate Godhead. To get back to self-knowledge
and to the knowledge of the real as distinct from the apparent
relations of the soul with Nature, to know God and ourselves
and the world with a spiritual and no longer with a physical or
externalised experience, through the deepest truth of the inner
soul-consciousness and not through the misleading phenomenal
significances of the sense-mind and the outward understanding,
is an indispensable means of this perfection. Perfection cannot
come without self-knowledge and God-knowledge and a spiritual attitude towards our natural existence, and that is why the
ancient wisdom laid so much stress on salvation by knowledge,
— not an intellectual cognizance of things, but a growing of man
the mental being into a greater spiritual consciousness. The soul’s
salvation cannot come without the soul’s perfection, without its
growing into the divine nature; the impartial Godhead will not
effect it for us by an act of caprice or an arbitrary sanad of
his favour. Divine works are effective for salvation because they
lead us towards this perfection and to a knowledge of self and
nature and God by a growing unity with the inner Master of
our existence. Divine love is effective because by it we grow into
the likeness of the sole and supreme object of our adoration and
call down the answering love of the Highest to flood us with
the light of his knowledge and the uplifting power and purity of
his eternal spirit. Therefore, says the Gita, this is the supreme
knowledge and the highest of all knowings because it leads to
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the highest perfection and spiritual status, parāṁ siddhim, and
brings the soul to likeness with the Divine, sādharmya. It is the
eternal wisdom, the great spiritual experience by which all the
sages attained to that highest perfection, grew into one law of
being with the Supreme and live for ever in his eternity, not born
in the creation, not troubled by the anguish of the universal
dissolution. This perfection, then, this sādharmya is the way of
immortality and the indispensable condition without which the
soul cannot consciously live in the Eternal.
The soul of man could not grow into the likeness of the
Divine, if it were not in its secret essence imperishably one with
the Divine and part and parcel of his divinity: it could not be or
become immortal if it were merely a creature of mental, vital and
physical Nature. All existence is a manifestation of the divine
Existence and that which is within us is spirit of the eternal
Spirit. We have come indeed into the lower material nature and
are under its influence, but we have come there from the supreme
spiritual nature: this inferior imperfect status is our apparent,
but that our real being. The Eternal puts all this movement
forth as his self-creation. He is at once the Father and Mother
of the universe; the substance of the infinite Idea, vijñāna, the
Mahad Brahman, is the womb into which he casts the seed of
his self-conception. As the Over-Soul he casts the seed; as the
Mother, the Nature-Soul, the Energy filled with his conscious
power, he receives it into this infinite substance of being made
pregnant with his illimitable, yet self-limiting Idea. He receives
into this Vast of self-conception and develops there the divine
embryo into mental and physical form of existence born from
the original act of conceptive creation. All we see springs from
that act of creation; but that which is born here is only finite idea
and form of the unborn and infinite. The Spirit is eternal and
superior to all its manifestation: Nature, eternal without beginning in the Spirit, proceeds for ever with the rhythm of the cycles
by unending act of creation and unconcluding act of cessation;
the Soul too which takes on this or that form in Nature, is no
less eternal than she, anādı̄ ubhāv api. Even while in Nature it
follows the unceasing round of the cycles, it is, in the Eternal
Above the Gunas
425
from which it proceeds into them, for ever raised above the terms
of birth and death, and even in its apparent consciousness here
it can become aware of that innate and constant transcendence.
What is it then that makes the difference, what is it that gets
the soul into the appearance of birth and death and bondage, —
for this is patent that it is only an appearance? It is a subordinate
act or state of consciousness, it is a self-oblivious identification
with the modes of Nature in the limited workings of this lower
motivity and with this self-wrapped ego-bounded knot of action
of the mind, life and body. To rise above the modes of Nature,
to be traigun.yātı̄ta, is indispensable, if we are to get back into
our fully conscious being away from the obsessing power of the
lower action and to put on the free nature of the spirit and its
eternal immortality. That condition of the sādharmya is what
the Gita next proceeds to develop. It has already alluded to it
and laid it down with a brief emphasis in a previous chapter; but
it has now to indicate more precisely what are these modes, these
gunas, how they bind the soul and keep it back from spiritual
freedom and what is meant by rising above the modes of Nature.
The modes of Nature are all qualitative in their essence and
are called for that reason its gunas or qualities. In any spiritual
conception of the universe this must be so, because the connecting medium between spirit and matter must be psyche or soul
power and the primary action psychological and qualitative, not
physical and quantitative; for quality is the immaterial, the more
spiritual element in all the action of the universal Energy, her
prior dynamics. The predominance of physical Science has accustomed us to a different view of Nature, because there the first
thing that strikes us is the importance of the quantitative aspect
of her workings and her dependence for the creation of forms on
quantitative combinations and dispositions. And yet even there
the discovery that matter is rather substance or act of energy
than energy a motive power of self-existent material substance
or an inherent power acting in matter has led to some revival of
an older reading of universal Nature. The analysis of the ancient
Indian thinkers allowed for the quantitative action of Nature,
mātrā; but that it regarded as proper to its more objective and
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formally executive working, while the innately ideative executive
power which disposes things according to the quality of their
being and energy, gun.a, svabhāva, is the primary determinant
and underlies all the outer quantitative dispositions. In the basis
of the physical world this is not apparent only because there
the underlying ideative spirit, the Mahad Brahman, is overlaid
and hidden up by the movement of matter and material energy.
But even in the physical world the miraculous varying results
of different combinations and quantities of elements otherwise
identical with each other admits of no conceivable explanation
if there is not a superior power of variative quality of which
these material dispositions are only the convenient mechanical
devices. Or let us say at once, there must be a secret ideative
capacity of the universal energy, vijñāna, — even if we suppose
that energy and its instrumental idea, buddhi, to be themselves
mechanical in their nature, — which fixes the mathematics and
decides the resultants of these outer dispositions: it is the omnipotent Idea in the spirit which invents and makes use of these
devices. And in the vital and mental existence quality at once
openly appears as the primary power and amount of energy is
only a secondary factor. But in fact the mental, the vital, the
physical existence are all subject to the limitations of quality, all
are governed by its determinations, even though that truth seems
more and more obscured as we descend the scale of existence.
Only the Spirit, which by the power of its idea-being and its ideaforce called mahat and vijñāna fixes these conditions, is not so
determined, not subject to any limitations either of quality or
quantity because its immeasurable and indeterminable infinity is
superior to the modes which it develops and uses for its creation.
But, again, the whole qualitative action of Nature, so infinitely intricate in its detail and variety, is figured as cast into the
mould of three general modes of quality everywhere present, intertwined, almost inextricable, sattva, rajas, tamas. These modes
are described in the Gita only by their psychological action in
man, or incidentally in things such as food according as they
produce a psychological or vital effect on human beings. If we
look for a more general definition, we shall perhaps catch a
Above the Gunas
427
glimpse of it in the symbolic idea of Indian religion which attributes each of these qualities respectively to one member of
the cosmic Trinity, sattwa to the preserver Vishnu, rajas to the
creator Brahma, tamas to the destroyer Rudra. Looking behind
this idea for the rationale of the triple ascription, we might
define the three modes or qualities in terms of the motion of
the universal Energy as Nature’s three concomitant and inseparable powers of equilibrium, kinesis and inertia. But that is
only their appearance in terms of the external action of Force.
It is otherwise if we regard consciousness and force as twin
terms of the one Existence, always coexistent in the reality of
being, however in the primal outward phenomenon of material
Nature light of consciousness may seem to disappear in a vast
action of nescient unillumined energy, while at an opposite pole
of spiritual quiescence action of force may seem to disappear
in the stillness of the observing or witness consciousness. These
two conditions are the two extremes of an apparently separated
Purusha and Prakriti, but each at its extreme point does not
abolish but at the most only conceals its eternal mate in the
depths of its own characteristic way of being. Therefore, since
consciousness is always there even in an apparently inconscient
Force, we must find a corresponding psychological power of
these three modes which informs their more outward executive
action. On their psychological side the three qualities may be
defined, tamas as Nature’s power of nescience, rajas as her power
of active seeking ignorance enlightened by desire and impulsion,
sattwa as her power of possessing and harmonising knowledge.
The three qualitative modes of Nature are inextricably intertwined in all cosmic existence. Tamas, the principle of inertia,
is a passive and inert nescience which suffers all shocks and
contacts without any effort of mastering response and by itself
would lead to a disintegration of the whole action of the energy
and a radical dispersion of substance. But it is driven by the
kinetic power of rajas and even in the nescience of Matter is
met and embraced by an innate though unpossessed preserving principle of harmony and balance and knowledge. Material
energy appears to be tamasic in its basic action, jad.a, nescient,
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mechanic and in movement disintegrative. But it is dominated by
a huge force and impulsion of mute rajasic kinesis which drives
it, even in and even by its dispersion and disintegration, to build
and create and again by a sattwic ideative element in its apparently inconscient force which is always imposing a harmony
and preservative order on the two opposite tendencies. Rajas,
the principle of creative endeavour and motion and impulsion
in Prakriti, kinesis, pravr.tti, so seen in Matter, appears more
evidently as a conscious or half-conscious passion of seeking
and desire and action in the dominant character of Life, — for
that passion is the nature of all vital existence. And it would lead
by itself in its own nature to a persistent but always mutable and
unstable life and activity and creation without any settled result.
But met on one side by the disintegrating power of tamas with
death and decay and inertia, its ignorant action is on the other
side of its functioning settled and harmonised and sustained by
the power of sattwa, subconscient in the lower forms of life,
more and more conscient in the emergence of mentality, most
conscious in the effort of the evolved intelligence figuring as
will and reason in the fully developed mental being. Sattwa, the
principle of understanding knowledge and of according assimilation, measure and equilibrium, which by itself would lead only
to some lasting concord of fixed and luminous harmonies, is in
the motions of this world impelled to follow the mutable strife
and action of the eternal kinesis and constantly overpowered
or hedged in by the forces of inertia and nescience. This is the
appearance of a world governed by the interlocked and mutually
limited play of the three qualitative modes of Nature.
The Gita applies this generalised analysis of the universal
Energy to the psychological nature of man in relation to his
bondage to Prakriti and the realisation of spiritual freedom.
Sattwa, it tells us, is by the purity of its quality a cause of
light and illumination and by virtue of that purity it produces
no disease or morbidity or suffering in the nature. When into
all the doors in the body there comes a flooding of light, as
if the doors and windows of a closed house were opened to
sunshine, a light of understanding, perception and knowledge,
Above the Gunas
429
— when the intelligence is alert and illumined, the senses quickened, the whole mentality satisfied and full of brightness and
the nervous being calmed and filled with an illumined ease and
clarity, prasāda, one should understand that there has been a
great increase and uprising of the sattwic guna in the nature.
For knowledge and a harmonious ease and pleasure and happiness are the characteristic results of sattwa. The pleasure that is
sattwic is not only that contentment which an inner clarity of
satisfied will and intelligence brings with it, but all delight and
content produced by the soul’s possession of itself in light or
by an accord or an adequate and truthful adjustment between
the regarding soul and the surrounding Nature and her offered
objects of desire and perception.
Rajas, again, the Gita tells us, has for its essence attraction of
liking and longing. Rajas is a child of the attachment of the soul
to the desire of objects; it is born from the nature’s thirst for an
unpossessed satisfaction. It is therefore full of unrest and fever
and lust and greed and excitement, a thing of seeking impulsions,
and all this mounts in us when the middle guna increases. It is the
force of desire which motives all ordinary personal initiative of
action and all that movement of stir and seeking and propulsion
in our nature which is the impetus towards action and works,
pravr.tti. Rajas, then, is evidently the kinetic force in the modes
of Nature. Its fruit is the lust of action, but also grief, pain, all
kinds of suffering; for it has no right possession of its object —
desire in fact implies non-possession — and even its pleasure of
acquired possession is troubled and unstable because it has not
clear knowledge and does not know how to possess nor can it
find the secret of accord and right enjoyment. All the ignorant
and passionate seeking of life belongs to the rajasic mode of
Nature.
Tamas, finally, is born of inertia and ignorance and its fruit
too is inertia and ignorance. It is the darkness of tamas which obscures knowledge and causes all confusion and delusion. Therefore it is the opposite of sattwa, for the essence of sattwa is
enlightenment, prakāśa, and the essence of tamas is absence
of light, nescience, aprakāśa. But tamas brings incapacity and
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negligence of action as well as the incapacity and negligence of
error, inattention and misunderstanding or non-understanding;
indolence, languor and sleep belong to this guna. Therefore it is
the opposite too of rajas; for the essence of rajas is movement
and impulsion and kinesis, pravr.tti, but the essence of tamas
is inertia, apravr.tti. Tamas is inertia of nescience and inertia of
inaction, a double negative.
These three qualities of Nature are evidently present and
active in all human beings and none can be said to be quite
devoid of one and another or free from any one of the three;
none is cast in the mould of one guna to the exclusion of the
others. All men have in them in whatever degree the rajasic
impulse of desire and activity and the sattwic boon of light and
happiness, some balance, some adjustment of mind to itself and
its surroundings and objects, and all have their share of tamasic
incapacity and ignorance or nescience. But these qualities are not
constant in any man in the quantitative action of their force or in
the combination of their elements; for they are variable and in a
continual state of mutual impact, displacement and interaction.
Now one leads, now another increases and predominates, and
each subjects us to its characteristic action and consequences.
Only by a general and ordinary predominance of one or other
of the qualities can a man be said to be either sattwic or rajasic
or tamasic in his nature; but this can only be a general and not
an exclusive or absolute description. The three qualities are a
triple power which by their interaction determine the character
and disposition and through that and its various motions the
actions of the natural man. But this triple power is at the same
time a triple cord of bondage. “The three gunas born of Prakriti”
says the Gita “bind in the body the imperishable dweller in the
body.” In a certain sense we can see at once that there must
be this bondage in following the action of the gunas; for they
are all limited by their finite of quality and operation and cause
limitation. Tamas is on both its sides an incapacity and therefore
very obviously binds to limitation. Rajasic desire as an initiator
of action is a more positive power, but still we can see well
enough that desire with its limiting and engrossing hold on man
Above the Gunas
431
must always be a bondage. But how does sattwa, the power
of knowledge and happiness, become a chain? It so becomes
because it is a principle of mental nature, a principle of limited
and limiting knowledge and of a happiness which depends upon
right following or attainment of this or that object or else on
particular states of the mentality, on a light of mind which can
be only a more or less clear twilight. Its pleasure can only be a
passing intensity or a qualified ease. Other is the infinite spiritual knowledge and the free self-existent delight of our spiritual
being.
But then there is the question, how does our infinite and imperishable spirit, even involved in Nature, come thus to confine
itself to the lower action of Prakriti and undergo this bondage
and how is it not, like the supreme spirit of which it is a portion,
free in its infinity even while enjoying the self-limitations of its
active evolution? The reason, says the Gita, is our attachment
to the gunas and to the result of their workings. Sattwa, it says,
attaches to happiness, rajas attaches to action, tamas covers up
the knowledge and attaches to negligence of error and inaction.
Or again, “sattwa binds by attachment to knowledge and attachment to happiness, rajas binds the embodied spirit by attachment
to works, tamas binds by negligence and indolence and sleep.”
In other words, the soul by attachment to the enjoyment of
the gunas and their results concentrates its consciousness on
the lower and outward action of life, mind and body in Nature,
imprisons itself in the form of these things and becomes oblivious
of its own greater consciousness behind in the spirit, unaware of
the free power and scope of the liberating Purusha. Evidently, in
order to be liberated and perfect, we must get back from these
things, away from the gunas and above them and return to the
power of that free spiritual consciousness above Nature.
But this would seem to imply a cessation of all doing, since
all natural action is done by the gunas, by Nature through her
modes. The soul cannot act by itself, it can only act through
Nature and her modes. And yet the Gita, while it demands freedom from the modes, insists upon the necessity of action. Here
comes in the importance of its insistence on the abandonment
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of the fruits; for it is the desire of the fruits which is the most
potent cause of the soul’s bondage and by abandoning it the
soul can be free in action. Ignorance is the result of tamasic
action, pain the consequence of rajasic works, pain of reaction,
disappointment, dissatisfaction or transience, and therefore in
attachment to the fruits of this kind of activity attended as they
are with these undesirable accompaniments there is no profit.
But of works rightly done the fruit is pure and sattwic, the inner
result is knowledge and happiness. Yet attachment even to these
pleasurable things must be entirely abandoned, first, because
in the mind they are limited and limiting forms and, secondly,
because, since sattwa is constantly entangled with and besieged
by rajas and tamas which may at any moment overcome it, there
is a perpetual insecurity in their tenure. But, even if one is free
from any clinging to the fruit, there may be an attachment to the
work itself, either for its own sake, the essential rajasic bond, or
owing to a lax subjection to the drive of Nature, the tamasic, or
for the sake of the attracting rightness of the thing done, which
is the sattwic attaching cause powerful on the virtuous man or
the man of knowledge. And here evidently the resource is in
that other injunction of the Gita, to give up the action itself to
the Lord of works and be only a desireless and equal-minded
instrument of his will. To see that the modes of Nature are the
whole agency and cause of our works and to know and turn to
that which is supreme above the gunas, is the way to rise above
the lower nature. Only so can we attain to the movement and
status of the Divine, mad-bhāva, by which free from subjection
to birth and death and their concomitants, decay, old age and
suffering, the liberated soul shall enjoy in the end immortality
and all that is eternal.
But what, asks Arjuna, are the signs of such a man, what
his action and how is he said even in action to be above the
three gunas? The sign, says Krishna, is that equality of which I
have so constantly spoken; the sign is that inwardly he regards
happiness and suffering alike, gold and mud and stone as of
equal value and that to him the pleasant and the unpleasant,
praise and blame, honour and insult, the faction of his friends
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433
and the faction of his enemies are equal things. He is steadfast in
a wise imperturbable and immutable inner calm and quietude.
He initiates no action, but leaves all works to be done by the
gunas of Nature. Sattwa, rajas or tamas may rise or cease in his
outer mentality and his physical movements with their results
of enlightenment, of impulsion to works or of inaction and the
clouding over of the mental and nervous being, but he does not
rejoice when this comes or that ceases, nor on the other hand
does he abhor or shrink from the operation or the cessation
of these things. He has seated himself in the conscious light of
another principle than the nature of the gunas and that greater
consciousness remains steadfast in him, above these powers and
unshaken by their motions like the sun above clouds to one who
has risen into a higher atmosphere. He from that height sees that
it is the gunas that are in process of action and that their storm
and calm are not himself but only a movement of Prakriti; his
self is immovable above and his spirit does not participate in that
shifting mutability of things unstable. This is the impersonality
of the Brahmic status; for that higher principle, that greater wide
high-seated consciousness, kūt.astha, is the immutable Brahman.
But still there is evidently here a double status, there is a
scission of the being between two opposites; a liberated spirit
in the immutable Self or Brahman watches the action of an
unliberated mutable Nature, — Akshara and Kshara. Is there
no greater status, no principle of more absolute perfection, or
is this division the highest consciousness possible in the body,
and is the end of Yoga to drop the mutable nature and the
gunas born of the embodiment in Nature and disappear into
the impersonality and everlasting peace of the Brahman? Is that
laya or dissolution of the individual Purusha the greatest liberation? There is, it would seem, something else; for the Gita says
at the close, always returning to this one final note, “He also
who loves and strives after Me with an undeviating love and
adoration, passes beyond the three gunas and he too is prepared
for becoming the Brahman.” This “I” is the Purushottama who
is the foundation of the silent Brahman and of immortality and
imperishable spiritual existence and of the eternal dharma and
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of an utter bliss of happiness. There is a status then which is
greater than the peace of the Akshara as it watches unmoved
the strife of the gunas. There is a highest spiritual experience
and foundation above the immutability of the Brahman, there is
an eternal dharma greater than the rajasic impulsion to works,
pravr.tti, there is an absolute delight which is untouched by
rajasic suffering and beyond the sattwic happiness, and these
things are found and possessed by dwelling in the being and
power of the Purushottama. But since it is acquired by bhakti,
its status must be that divine delight, Ananda, in which is experienced the union of utter love3 and possessing oneness, the crown
of bhakti. And to rise into that Ananda, into that imperishable
oneness must be the completion of spiritual perfection and the
fulfilment of the eternal immortalising dharma.
3
niratiśayapremāspadatvam ānandatattvam.
XV
The Three Purushas
T
1
HE DOCTRINE of the Gita from the beginning to the
end converges on all its lines and through all the flexibility
of its turns towards one central thought, and to that it is
arriving in all its balancing and reconciliation of the disagreements of various philosophic systems and its careful synthetising
of the truths of spiritual experience, lights often conflicting or at
least divergent when taken separately and exclusively pursued
along their outer arc and curve of radiation, but here brought
together into one focus of grouping vision. This central thought
is the idea of a triple consciousness, three and yet one, present
in the whole scale of existence.
There is a spirit here at work in the world that is one in
innumerable appearances. It is the developer of birth and action, the moving power of life, the inhabiting and associating
consciousness in the myriad mutabilities of Nature; it is the
constituting reality of all this stir in Time and Space; it is itself
Time and Space and Circumstance. It is this multitude of souls in
the worlds; it is the gods and men and creatures and things and
forces and qualities and quantities and powers and presences.
It is Nature, which is power of the Spirit, and objects, which
are its phenomena of name and idea and form, and existences,
who are portions and births and becomings of this single selfexistent spiritual entity, the One, the Eternal. But what we see
obviously at work before us is not this Eternal and his conscious
Shakti, but a Nature which in the blind stress of her operations is
ignorant of the spirit within her action. Her work is a confused,
ignorant and limiting play of certain fundamental modes, qualities, principles of force in mechanical operation and the fixity or
the flux of their consequences. And whatever soul comes to the
1
Gita, XV.
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surface in her action, is itself in appearance ignorant, suffering,
bound to the incomplete and unsatisfying play of this inferior
Nature. The inherent Power in her is yet other than what it thus
seems to be; for, hidden in its truth, manifest in its appearances,
it is the Kshara, the universal Soul, the spirit in the mutability
of cosmic phenomenon and becoming, one with the Immutable
and the Supreme. We have to arrive at the hidden truth behind its
manifest appearances; we have to discover the Spirit behind these
veils and to see all as the One, vāsudevah. sarvam iti, individual,
universal, transcendent. But this is a thing impossible to achieve
with any completeness of inner reality, so long as we live concentrated in the inferior Nature. For in this lesser movement Nature
is an ignorance, a Maya; she shelters the Divine within its folds
and conceals him from herself and her creatures. The Godhead
is hidden by the Maya of his own all-creating Yoga, the Eternal
figured in transience, Being absorbed and covered up by its own
manifesting phenomena. In the Kshara taken alone as a thing in
itself, the mutable universal apart from the undivided Immutable
and the Transcendent, there is no completeness of knowledge,
no completeness of our being and therefore no liberation.
But then there is another spirit of whom we become aware
and who is none of these things, but self and self only. This
Spirit is eternal, always the same, never changed or affected by
manifestation, the one, the stable, a self-existence undivided and
not even seemingly divided by the division of things and powers
in Nature, inactive in her action, immobile in her motion. It is the
Self of all and yet unmoved, indifferent, intangible, as if all these
things which depend upon it were not-self, not its own results
and powers and consequences, but a drama of action developed
before the eye of an unmoved unparticipating spectator. For the
mind that stages and shares in the drama is other than the Self
which indifferently contains the action. This spirit is timeless,
though we see it in Time; it is unextended in space, though we
see it as if pervading space. We become aware of it in proportion
as we draw back from out inward, or look behind the action and
motion for something that is eternal and stable, or get away from
time and its creation to the uncreated, away from phenomenon
The Three Purushas
437
to being, from the personal to impersonality, from becoming to
unalterable self-existence. This is the Akshara, the immutable
in the mutable, the immobile in the mobile, the imperishable in
things perishable. Or rather, since there is only an appearance
of pervasion, it is the immutable, immobile and imperishable
in which proceeds all the mobility of mutable and perishable
things.
The Kshara spirit visible to us as all natural existence and
the totality of all existences moves and acts pervadingly in the
immobile and eternal Akshara. This mobile Power of Self acts
in that fundamental stability of Self, as the second principle of
material Nature, Vayu, with its contactual force of aggregation
and separation, attraction and repulsion, supporting the formative force of the fiery (radiant, gaseous and electric) and other
elemental movements, ranges pervadingly in the subtly massive
stability of ether. This Akshara is the self higher than the buddhi
— it exceeds even that highest subjective principle of Nature
in our being, the liberating intelligence, through which man
returning beyond his restless mobile mental to his calm eternal
spiritual self is at last free from the persistence of birth and the
long chain of action, of Karma. This self in its highest status,
paraṁ dhāma, is an unmanifest beyond even the unmanifest
principle of the original cosmic Prakriti, Avyakta, and, if the
soul turns to this Immutable, the hold of cosmos and Nature falls
away from it and it passes beyond birth to an unchanging eternal
existence. These two then are the two spirits we see in the world;
one emerges in front in its action, the other remains behind it
steadfast in that perpetual silence from which the action comes
and in which all actions cease and disappear into timeless being,
Nirvana. Dvāv imau purus.au loke ks.araś cāks.ara eva ca.
The difficulty which baffles our intelligence is that these two
seem to be irreconcilable opposites with no real nexus between
them or any transition from the one to the other except by an
intolerant movement of separation. The Kshara acts, or at least
motives action, separately in the Akshara; the Akshara stands
apart, self-centred, separate in its inactivity from the Kshara. At
first sight it would almost seem better, more logical, more easy
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of comprehension, if we admitted with the Sankhyas an original
and eternal duality of Purusha and Prakriti, if not even an eternal
plurality of souls. Our experience of the Akshara would then be
simply the withdrawal of each Purusha into himself, his turning
away from Nature and therefore from all contact with other
souls in the relations of existence; for each is self-sufficient and
infinite and complete in his own essence. But after all the final
experience is that of a unity of all beings which is not merely a
community of experience, a common subjection to one force of
Nature, but a oneness in the spirit, a vast identity of conscious
being beyond all this endless variety of determination, behind all
this apparent separativism of relative existence. The Gita takes
its stand in that highest spiritual experience. It appears indeed
to admit an eternal plurality of souls subject to and sustained by
their eternal unity, for cosmos is for ever and manifestation goes
on in unending cycles; nor does it affirm anywhere or use any
expression that would indicate an absolute disappearance, laya,
the annullation of the individual soul in the Infinite. But at the
same time it affirms with a strong insistence that the Akshara is
the one self of all these many souls, and it is therefore evident that
these two spirits are a dual status of one eternal and universal
existence. That is a very ancient doctrine; it is the whole basis of
the largest vision of the Upanishads, — as when the Isha tells us
that Brahman is both the mobile and the immobile, is the One
and the Many, is the Self and all existences, ātman, sarvabhūtāni,
is the Knowledge and the Ignorance, is the eternal unborn status
and also the birth of existences, and that to dwell only on one
of these things to the rejection of its eternal counterpart is a
darkness of exclusive knowledge or a darkness of ignorance. It
too insists like the Gita that man must know and must embrace
both and learn of the Supreme in his entirety — samagraṁ mām,
as the Gita puts it — in order to enjoy immortality and live in the
Eternal. The teaching of the Gita and this side of the teaching of
the Upanishads are so far at one; for they look at and admit both
sides of the reality and still arrive at identity as the conclusion
and the highest truth of existence.
But this greater knowledge and experience, however true
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439
and however powerful in its appeal to our highest seeing, has still
to get rid of a very real and pressing difficulty, a practical as well
as a logical contradiction which seems at first sight to persist up
to the highest heights of spiritual experience. The Eternal is other
than this mobile subjective and objective experience, there is a
greater consciousness, na idaṁ yad upāsate:2 and yet at the same
time all this is the Eternal, all this is the perennial self-seeing of
the Self, sarvaṁ khalu idaṁ brahma,3 ayam ātmā brahma.4 The
Eternal has become all existences, ātmā abhūt sarvān.i bhūtāni;5
as the Swetaswatara puts it, “Thou art this boy and yonder
girl and that old man walking supported on his staff,” — even
as in the Gita the Divine says that he is Krishna and Arjuna
and Vyasa and Ushanas, and the lion and the aswattha tree, and
consciousness and intelligence and all qualities and the self of all
creatures. But how are these two the same, when they seem not
only so opposite in nature, but so difficult to unify in experience?
For when we live in the mobility of the becoming, we may be
aware of but hardly live in the immortality of timeless selfexistence. And when we fix ourselves in timeless being, Time
and Space and circumstance fall away from us and begin to
appear as a troubled dream in the Infinite. The most persuasive
conclusion would be, at first sight, that the mobility of the spirit
in Nature is an illusion, a thing real only when we live in it, but
not real in essence, and that is why, when we go back into self,
it falls away from our incorruptible essence. That is the familiar
cutting of the knot of the riddle, brahma satyaṁ jagan mithyā.
The Gita does not take refuge in this explanation which has
enormous difficulties of its own, besides its failure to account
for the illusion, — for it only says that it is all a mysterious and
incomprehensible Maya, and then we might just as well say that
it is all a mysterious and incomprehensible double reality, spirit
concealing itself from spirit. The Gita speaks of Maya, but only
as a bewildering partial consciousness which loses hold of the
2
Kena Upanishad.
3
Chhandogya Upanishad: Verily all this that is is the Brahman.
4
Mandukya Upanishad: The Self is the Brahman.
5
Isha Upanishad.
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complete reality, lives in the phenomenon of mobile Nature and
has no sight of the Spirit of which she is the active Power, me
prakr.tih.. When we transcend this Maya, the world does not
disappear, it only changes its whole heart of meaning. In the
spiritual vision we find not that all this does not really exist, but
rather that all is, but with a sense quite other than its present
mistaken significance: all is self and soul and nature of the Godhead, all is Vasudeva. The world for the Gita is real, a creation
of the Lord, a power of the Eternal, a manifestation from the
Parabrahman, and even this lower nature of the triple Maya
is a derivation from the supreme divine Nature. Nor can we
take refuge altogether in this distinction that there is a double,
an inferior active and temporal and a superior calm, still and
eternal reality beyond action and that our liberation is to pass
from this partiality to that greatness, from the action to the
silence. For the Gita insists that we can and should, while we
live, be conscious in the self and its silence and yet act with
power in the world of Nature. And it gives the example of the
Divine himself who is not bound by necessity of birth, but free,
superior to the cosmos, and yet abides eternally in action, varta
eva ca karman.i. Therefore it is by putting on a likeness of the
divine nature in its completeness that the unity of this double
experience becomes entirely possible. But what is the principle
of that oneness?
The Gita finds it in its supreme vision of the Purushottama;
for that is the type, according to its doctrine, of the complete and
the highest experience, it is the knowledge of the whole-knowers,
kr.tsnavidah.. The Akshara is para, supreme in relation to the elements and action of cosmic Nature. It is the immutable Self of all,
and the immutable Self of all is the Purushottama. The Akshara
is he in the freedom of his self-existence unaffected by the action
of his own power in Nature, not impinged on by the urge of
his own becoming, undisturbed by the play of his own qualities.
But this is only one aspect though a great aspect of the integral
knowledge. The Purushottama is at the same time greater than
the Akshara, because he is more than this immutability and he is
not limited even by the highest eternal status of his being, paraṁ
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dhāma. Still, it is through whatever is immutable and eternal in
us that we arrive at that highest status from which there is no
returning to birth, and that was the liberation which was sought
by the wise of old, the ancient sages. But when pursued through
the Akshara alone, this attempt at liberation becomes the seeking of the Indefinable, a thing hard for our nature embodied as
we are here in Matter. The Indefinable, to which the Akshara,
the pure intangible self here in us rises in its separative urge,
is some supreme Unmanifest, paro avyaktah., and that highest
unmanifest Akshara is still the Purushottama. Therefore, the
Gita has said, those also who follow after the Indefinable, come
to me, the eternal Godhead. But yet is he more even than a
highest unmanifest Akshara, more than any negative Absolute,
neti neti, because he is to be known also as the supreme Purusha
who extends this whole universe in his own existence. He is
a supreme mysterious All, an ineffable positive Absolute of all
things here. He is the Lord in the Kshara, Purushottama not only
there, but here in the heart of every creature, Ishwara. And there
too even in his highest eternal status, paro avyaktah., he is the
supreme Lord, Parameshwara, no aloof and unrelated Indefinable, but the origin and father and mother and first foundation
and eternal abode of self and cosmos and Master of all existences
and enjoyer of askesis and sacrifice. It is by knowing him at
once in the Akshara and the Kshara, it is by knowing him as
the Unborn who partially manifests himself in all birth and even
himself descends as the constant Avatar, it is by knowing him
in his entirety, samagraṁ mām, that the soul is easily released
from the appearances of the lower Nature and returns by a
vast sudden growth and broad immeasurable ascension into the
divine being and supreme Nature. For the truth of the Kshara too
is a truth of the Purushottama. The Purushottama is in the heart
of every creature and is manifested in his countless Vibhutis; the
Purushottama is the cosmic spirit in Time and it is he that gives
the command to the divine action of the liberated human spirit.
He is both Akshara and Kshara, and yet he is other because
he is more and greater than either of these opposites. Uttamah.
purus.as tvanyah. paramātmetyudāhr.tah., yo lokatrayam āviśya
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bibhartyavyaya ı̄śvarah., “But other than these two is that highest
spirit called the supreme Self, who enters the three worlds and
upbears them, the imperishable Lord.” This verse is the keyword
of the Gita’s reconciliation of these two apparently opposite
aspects of our existence.
The idea of the Purushottama has been prepared, alluded
to, adumbrated, assumed even from the beginning, but it is only
now in the fifteenth chapter that it is expressly stated and the
distinction illuminated by a name. And it is instructive to see
how it is immediately approached and developed. To ascend
into the divine nature, we have been told, one must first fix
oneself in a perfect spiritual equality and rise above the lower
nature of the three gunas. Thus transcending the lower Prakriti
we fix ourselves in the impersonality, the imperturbable superiority to all action, the purity from all definition and limitation
by quality which is one side of the manifested nature of the
Purushottama, his manifestation as the eternity and unity of the
self, the Akshara. But there is also an ineffable eternal multiplicity of the Purushottama, a highest truest truth behind the primal
mystery of soul manifestation. The Infinite has an eternal power,
an unbeginning and unending action of his divine Nature, and
in that action the miracle of soul personality emerges from a
play of apparently impersonal forces, prakr.tir jı̄vabhūtā. This is
possible because personality too is a character of the Divine and
finds in the Infinite its highest spiritual truth and meaning. But
the Person in the Infinite is not the egoistic, separative, oblivious personality of the lower Prakriti; it is something exalted,
universal and transcendent, immortal and divine. That mystery
of the supreme Person is the secret of love and devotion. The
spiritual person, purus.a, the eternal soul in us offers itself and
all it has and is to the eternal Divine, the supreme Person and
Godhead of whom it is a portion, aṁśa. The completeness of
knowledge finds itself in this self-offering, this uplifting of our
personal nature by love and adoration to the ineffable Master
of our personality and its acts; the sacrifice of works receives
by it its consummation and perfect sanction. It is then through
these things that the soul of man fulfils itself most completely
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in this other and dynamic secret, this other great and intimate
aspect of the divine nature and possesses by that fulfilment the
foundation of immortality, the supreme felicity and the eternal
Dharma. And having so stated this double requisite, equality in
the one self, adoration of the one Lord, at first separately as if
they were two different ways of arriving at the Brahmic status,
brahmabhūyāya, — one taking the form of quietistic sannyāsa,
the other a form of divine love and divine action, — the Gita
proceeds now to unite the personal and the impersonal in the
Purushottama and to define their relations. For the object of the
Gita is to get rid of exclusions and separative exaggerations and
fuse these two sides of knowledge and spiritual experience into
a single and perfect way to the supreme perfection.
First there comes a description of cosmic existence in the
Vedantic image of the aswattha tree. This tree of cosmic existence has no beginning and no end, nānto na cādih., in space or in
time; for it is eternal and imperishable, avyaya. The real form of
it cannot be perceived by us in this material world of man’s embodiment, nor has it any apparent lasting foundation here; it is
an infinite movement and its foundation is above in the supreme
of the Infinite. Its principle is the ancient sempiternal urge to
action, pravr.tti, which for ever proceeds without beginning or
end from the original Soul of all existence, ādyaṁ purus.aṁ yatah.
pravr.ttih. prasr.tā purān.ı̄. Therefore its original source is above,
beyond Time in the Eternal, but its branches stretch down below
and it extends and plunges its other roots, well-fixed and clinging
roots of attachment and desire with their consequences of more
and more desire and an endlessly developing action, plunges
them downward here into the world of men. The hymns of the
Veda are compared to its leaves and the man who knows this
tree of the cosmos is the Veda-knower. And here we see the
sense of that rather disparaging view of the Veda or at least of
the Vedavada, which we had to notice at the beginning. For the
knowledge the Veda gives us is a knowledge of the gods, of the
principles and powers of the cosmos, and its fruits are the fruits
of a sacrifice which is offered with desire, fruits of enjoyment
and lordship in the nature of the three worlds, in earth and
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heaven and the world between earth and heaven. The branches
of this cosmic tree extend both below and above, below in the
material, above in the supraphysical planes; they grow by the
gunas of Nature, for the triple guna is all the subject of the
Vedas, traigun.ya-vis.ayā vedāh.. The Vedic rhythms, chandāṁsi,
are the leaves and the sensible objects of desire supremely gained
by a right doing of sacrifice are the constant budding of the
foliage. Man, therefore, so long as he enjoys the play of the
gunas and is attached to desire, is held in the coils of Pravritti,
in the movement of birth and action, turns about constantly
between the earth and the middle planes and the heavens and
is unable to get back to his supreme spiritual infinitudes. This
was perceived by the sages. To achieve liberation they followed
the path of Nivritti or cessation from the original urge to action,
and the consummation of this way is the cessation of birth itself
and a transcendent status in the highest supracosmic reach of
the Eternal. But for this purpose it is necessary to cut these longfixed roots of desire by the strong sword of detachment and
then to seek for that highest goal whence, once having reached
it, there is no compulsion of return to mortal life. To be free from
the bewilderment of this lower Maya, without egoism, the great
fault of attachment conquered, all desires stilled, the duality of
joy and grief cast away, always to be fixed in wide equality,
always to be firm in a pure spiritual consciousness, these are
the steps of the way to that supreme Infinite. There we find the
timeless being which is not illumined by sun or moon or fire, but
is itself the light of the presence of the eternal Purusha. I turn
away, says the Vedantic verse, to seek that original Soul alone
and to reach him in the great passage. That is the highest status
of the Purushottama, his supracosmic existence.
But it would seem that this can be attained very well, best
even, pre-eminently, directly, by the quiescence of Sannyasa. Its
appointed path would seem to be the way of the Akshara, a
complete renunciation of works and life, an ascetic seclusion,
an ascetic inaction. Where is the room here, or at least where
is the call, the necessity, for the command to action, and what
has all this to do with the maintenance of the cosmic existence,
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lokasaṅgraha, the slaughter of Kurukshetra, the ways of the
Spirit in Time, the vision of the million-bodied Lord and his highvoiced bidding, “Arise, slay the foe, enjoy a wealthy kingdom”?
And what then is this soul in Nature? This spirit too, this Kshara,
this enjoyer of our mutable existence, is the Purushottama; it
is he in his eternal multiplicity, that is the Gita’s answer. “It
is an eternal portion of me that becomes the Jiva in a world
of Jivas.” This is an epithet, a statement of immense bearing
and consequence. For it means that each soul, each being in
its spiritual reality is the very Divine, however partial its actual
manifestation of him in Nature. And it means too, if words
have any sense, that each manifesting spirit, each of the many,
is an eternal individual, an eternal unborn and undying power
of the one Existence. We call this manifesting spirit the Jiva,
because it appears here as if a living creature in a world of living
creatures, and we speak of this spirit in man as the human soul
and think of it in the terms of humanity only. But in truth it is
something greater than its present appearance and not bound
to its humanity: it was a lesser manifestation than the human
in its past, it can become something much greater than mental
man in its future. And when this soul rises above all ignorant
limitation, then it puts on its divine nature of which its humanity is only a temporary veil, a thing of partial and incomplete
significance. The individual spirit exists and ever existed beyond
in the Eternal, for it is itself everlasting, sanātana. It is evidently
this idea of the eternal individual which leads the Gita to avoid
any expression at all suggestive of a complete dissolution, laya,
and to speak rather of the highest state of the soul as a dwelling
in the Purushottama, nivasis.yasi mayyeva. If when speaking of
the one Self of all it seems to use the language of Adwaita,
yet this enduring truth of the eternal individual, mamāṁśah.
sanātanah., adds something which brings in a qualification and
appears almost to accept the seeing of the Visishtadwaita, —
though we must not therefore leap at once to the conclusion
that that alone is the Gita’s philosophy or that its doctrine is
identical with the later doctrine of Ramanuja. Still this much
is clear that there is an eternal, a real and not only an illusive
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principle of multiplicity in the spiritual being of the one divine
Existence.
This eternal individual is not other than or in any way really
separate from the Divine Purusha. It is the Lord himself, the
Ishwara who by virtue of the eternal multiplicity of his oneness
— is not all existence a rendering of that truth of the Infinite? —
exists for ever as the immortal soul within us and has taken up
this body and goes forth from the transient framework when it
is cast away to disappear into the elements of Nature. He brings
in with him and cultivates for the enjoyment of the objects of
mind and sense the subjective powers of Prakriti, mind and the
five senses, and in his going forth too he goes taking them as the
wind takes the perfumes from a vase. But the identity of the Lord
and the soul in mutable Nature is hidden from us by outward
appearance and lost in the crowding mobile deceptions of that
Nature. And those who allow themselves to be governed by the
figures of Nature, the figure of humanity or any other form,
will never see it, but will ignore and despise the Divine lodged
in the human body. Their ignorance cannot perceive him in his
coming in and his going forth or in his staying and enjoying
and assumption of quality, but sees only what is there visible to
the mind and senses, not the greater truth which can only be
glimpsed by the eye of knowledge. Never can they have sight
of him, even if they strive to do so, until they learn to put
away the limitations of the outward consciousness and build
in themselves their spiritual being, create for it, as it were, a
form in their nature. Man, to know himself, must be kr.tātmā,
formed and complete in the spiritual mould, enlightened in the
spiritual vision. The Yogins who have this eye of knowledge, see
the Divine Being we are in their own endless reality, their own
eternity of spirit. Illumined, they see the Lord in themselves and
are delivered from the crude material limitation, from the form
of mental personality, from the transient life formulation: they
dwell immortal in the truth of the self and spirit. But they see
him too not only in themselves, but in all the cosmos. In the light
of the sun that illumines all this world they witness the light of
the Godhead which is in us; the light in the moon and in fire is
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447
the light of the Divine. It is the Divine who has entered into this
form of earth and is the spirit of its material force and sustains
by his might these multitudes. The Divine is the godhead of
Soma who by the rasa, the sap in the Earth-mother, nourishes
the plants and trees that clothe her surface. The Divine and no
other is the flame of life that sustains the physical body of living
creatures and turns its food into sustenance of their vital force.
He is lodged in the heart of every breathing thing; from him
are memory and knowledge and the debates of the reason. He
is that which is known by all the Vedas and by all forms of
knowing; he is the knower of Veda and the maker of Vedanta.
In other words, the Divine is at once the Soul of matter and
the Soul of life and the Soul of mind as well as the Soul of the
supramental light that is beyond mind and its limited reasoning
intelligence.
Thus the Divine is manifest in a double soul of his mystery, a twofold power, dvāv imau purus.au; he supports at once
the spirit of mutable things that is all these existences, ks.arah.
sarvān.i bhūtāni, and the immutable spirit that stands above
them in his imperturbable immobility of eternal silence and
calm. And it is by the force of the Divine in them that the
mind and heart and will of man are so powerfully drawn in
different directions by these two spirits as if by opposing and
incompatible attractions one insistent to annul the other. But the
Divine is neither wholly the Kshara, nor wholly the Akshara. He
is greater than the immutable Self and he is much greater than the
Soul of mutable things. If he is capable of being both at once,
it is because he is other than they, anyah., the Purushottama
above all cosmos and yet extended in the world and extended
in the Veda, in self-knowledge and in cosmic experience. And
whoever thus knows and sees him as the Purushottama, is no
longer bewildered whether by the world-appearance or by the
separate attraction of these two apparent contraries. These at
first confront each other here in him as a positive of the cosmic
action and as its negative in the Self who has no part in an
action that belongs or seems to belong entirely to the ignorance of Nature. Or again they challenge his consciousness as
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a positive of pure, indeterminable, stable, eternal self-existence
and as its negative of a world of elusive determinations and
relations, ideas and forms, perpetual unstable becoming and
the creating and uncreating tangle of action and evolution,
birth and death, appearance and disappearance. He embraces
and escapes them, overcomes their opposition and becomes allknowing, sarvavid, a whole-knower. He sees the entire sense
both of the self and of things; he restores the integral reality
of the Divine;6 he unites the Kshara and the Akshara in the
Purushottama. He loves, worships, cleaves to and adores the
supreme Self of his and all existence, the one Lord of his and
all energies, the close and far-off Eternal in and beyond the
world. And he does this too with no single side or portion of
himself, exclusive spiritualised mind, blinding light of the heart
intense but divorced from largeness, or sole aspiration of the
will in works, but in all the perfectly illumined ways of his
being and his becoming, his soul and his nature. Divine in the
equality of his imperturbable self-existence, one in it with all
objects and creatures, he brings that boundless equality, that
deep oneness down into his mind and heart and life and body
and founds on it in an indivisible integrality the trinity of divine
love, divine works and divine knowledge. This is the Gita’s way
of salvation.
And is that not too after all the real Adwaita which makes
no least scission in the one eternal Existence? This utmost undividing Monism sees the one as the one even in the multiplicities
of Nature, in all aspects, as much in the reality of self and of
cosmos as in that greatest reality of the supracosmic which is the
source of self and the truth of the cosmos and is not bound either
by any affirmation of universal becoming or by any universal or
absolute negation. That at least is the Adwaita of the Gita. This
is the most secret Shastra, says the Teacher to Arjuna; this is
the supreme teaching and science which leads us into the heart
of the highest mystery of existence. Absolutely to know it, to
seize it in knowledge and feeling and force and experience is to
6
samagraṁ mām.
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449
be perfected in the transformed understanding, divinely satisfied
in heart and successful in the supreme sense and objective of
all will and action and works. It is the way to be immortal, to
rise towards the highest divine nature and to assume the eternal
Dharma.
XVI
The Fullness of Spiritual Action
T
HE DEVELOPMENT of the idea of the Gita has reached
a point at which one question alone remains for solution,
— the question of our nature bound and defective and
how it is to effect, not only in principle but in all its movements,
its evolution from the lower to the higher being and from the
law of its present action to the immortal Dharma. The difficulty
is one which is implied in certain of the positions laid down
in the Gita, but has to be brought out into greater prominence
than it gets there and to be put into a clearer shape before our
intelligence. The Gita proceeded on a psychological knowledge
which was familiar to the mind of the time, and in the steps of
its thought it was well able to abridge its transitions, to take
much for granted and to leave many things unexpressed which
we need to have put strongly into light and made precise to us.
Its teaching sets out at the beginning to propose a new source
and level for our action in the world; that was the startingpoint and that motives also the conclusion. Its initial object
was not precisely to propose a way of liberation, moks.a, but
rather to show the compatibility of works with the soul’s effort
towards liberation and of spiritual freedom itself when once
attained with continued action in the world, muktasya karma.
Incidentally, a synthetic Yoga or psychological method of arriving at spiritual liberation and perfection has been developed
and certain metaphysical affirmations have been put forward,
certain truths of our being and nature on which the validity
of this Yoga reposes. But the original preoccupation remains
throughout, the original difficulty and problem, how Arjuna,
dislodged by a strong revulsion of thought and feeling from the
established natural and rational foundations and standards of
action, is to find a new and satisfying spiritual norm of works,
or how he is to live in the truth of the Spirit — since he can
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451
no longer act according to the partial truths of the customary
reason and nature of man — and yet to do his appointed work on
the battle-field of Kurukshetra. To live inwardly calm, detached,
silent in the silence of the impersonal and universal Self and
yet do dynamically the works of dynamic Nature, and more
largely, to be one with the Eternal within us and to do all the
will of the Eternal in the world expressed through a sublimated
force, a divine height of the personal nature uplifted, liberated,
universalised, made one with God-nature, — this is the Gita’s
solution.
Let us see what this comes to in the most plain and positive
terms and from the standpoint of the problem which is at the
root of Arjuna’s difficulty and refusal. His duty as a human
being and a social being is the discharge of the high function
of the Kshatriya without which the frame of society cannot be
maintained, the ideals of the race cannot be vindicated, the harmonious order of right and justice cannot be upheld against the
anarchic violence of oppression, wrong and injustice. And yet
the appeal to duty by itself can no longer satisfy the protagonist
of the struggle because in the terrible actuality of Kurukshetra
it presents itself in harsh, perplexed and ambiguous terms. The
discharge of his social duty has suddenly come to signify assent
to an enormous result of sin and sorrow and suffering; the customary means of maintaining social order and justice is found
to lead instead to a great disorder and chaos. The rule of just
claim and interest, that which we call rights, will not serve him
here; for the kingdom he has to win for himself and his brothers
and his side in the war is indeed rightly theirs and its assertion
an overthrow of Asuric tyranny and a vindication of justice, but
a blood-bespattered justice and a kingdom possessed in sorrow
and with the stain on it of a great sin, a monstrous harm done
to society, a veritable crime against the race. Nor will the rule
of Dharma, of ethical right, serve any better; for there is here
a conflict of dharmas. A new and greater yet unguessed rule is
needed to solve the problem, but what is that rule?
For to withdraw from his work, to take refuge in a saintly
inactivity and leave the imperfect world with its unsatisfying
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methods and motives to take care of itself is one possible solution
easy to envisage, easy to execute, but this is the very cutting of the
knot that has been insistently forbidden by the Teacher. Action is
demanded of man by the Master of the world who is the master
of all his works and whose world is a field of action, whether
done through the ego and in the ignorance or partial light of
the limited human reason or initiated from a higher and more
largely seeing plane of vision and motive. Again, to abandon
this particular action as evil would be another kind of solution,
the ready resort of the shortsighted moralising mind, but to this
evasion too the Teacher refuses his assent. Arjuna’s abstention
would work a much greater sin and evil: it would mean, if it
had any effect at all, the triumph of wrong and injustice and
the rejection of his own mission as an instrument of the divine
workings. A violent crisis in the destinies of the race has been
brought about not by any blind motion of forces or solely by the
confused clash of human ideas, interests, passions, egoisms, but
by a Will which is behind these outward appearances. This truth
Arjuna must be brought to see; he must learn to act impersonally,
imperturbably as the instrument not of his little personal desires
and weak human shrinkings, but of a vaster and more luminous
Power, a greater all-wise divine and universal Will. He must act
impersonally and universally in a high union of his soul with the
inner and outer Godhead, yukta, in a calm Yoga with his own
supreme Self and the informing Self of the universe.
But this truth cannot be rightly seen and this kind of action
cannot be rightly undertaken, cannot become real as long as man
is governed by the ego, even by the half-enlightened unillumined
sattwic ego of the reason and the mental intelligence. For this
is a truth of the spirit, this is an action from a spiritual basis.
A spiritual, not an intellectual knowledge is the indispensable
requisite for this way of works, its sole possible light, medium,
incentive. First, therefore, the Teacher points out that all these
ideas and feelings which trouble, perplex and baffle Arjuna, joy
and sorrow, desire and sin, the mind’s turn towards governing
action by the outward results of action, the human shrinking
from what seems terrible and formidable in the dealings of the
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453
universal Spirit with the world, are things born of the subjection
of our consciousness to a natural ignorance, the way of working
of a lower nature in which the soul is involved and sees itself as a
separate ego returning to the action of things upon it dual reactions of pain and pleasure, virtue and vice, right and wrong, good
happening and evil fortune. These reactions create a tangled web
of perplexity in which the soul is lost and bewildered by its own
ignorance; it has to guide itself by partial and imperfect solutions
that serve ordinarily with a stumbling sufficiency in the normal
life, but fail when brought to the test of a wider seeing and a
profounder experience. To understand the real sense of action
and existence one must retreat behind all these appearances into
the truth of the spirit; one must found self-knowledge before
one can have the basis of a right world-knowledge.
The first requisite is to shake the wings of the soul free from
desire and passion and troubling emotion and all this perturbed
and distorting atmosphere of human mind and arrive into an
ether of dispassionate equality, a heaven of impersonal calm, an
egoless feeling and vision of things. For only in that lucid upper
air, reaches free from all storm and cloud, can self-knowledge
come and the law of the world and the truth of Nature be seen
steadily and with an embracing eye and in an undisturbed and
all-comprehending and all-penetrating light. Behind this little
personality which is a helpless instrument, a passive or vainly
resistant puppet of Nature and a form figured in her creations,
there is an impersonal self one in all which sees and knows all
things; there is an equal, impartial, universal presence and support of creation, a witnessing consciousness that suffers Nature
to work out the becoming of things in their own type, svabhāva,
but does not involve and lose itself in the action she initiates. To
draw back from the ego and the troubled personality into this
calm, equal, eternal, universal, impersonal Self is the first step
towards a seeing action in Yoga done in conscious union with
the divine Being and the infallible Will that, however obscure
now to us, manifests itself in the universe.
When we live tranquilly poised in this self of impersonal
wideness, then because that is vast, calm, quiescent, impersonal,
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our other little false self, our ego of action disappears into its
largeness and we see that it is Nature that acts and not we,
that all action is the action of Nature and can be nothing else.
And this thing we call Nature is a universal executive Power
of eternal being in motion which takes different shapes and
forms in this or that class of its creatures and in each individual
of the species according to its type of natural existence and
the resultant function and law of its works. According to its
nature each creature must act and it cannot act by anything else.
Ego and personal will and desire are nothing more than vividly
conscious forms and limited natural workings of a universal
Force that is itself formless and infinite and far exceeds them;
reason and intelligence and mind and sense and life and body,
all that we vaunt or take for our own, are Nature’s instruments
and creations. But the impersonal Self does not act and is not
part of Nature: it observes the action from behind and above
and remains lord of itself and a free and impassive knower and
witness. The soul that lives in this impersonality is not affected
by the actions of which our nature is an instrument; it does not
reply to them or their effects by grief and joy, desire and shrinking, attraction and repulsion or any of the hundred dualities
that draw and shake and afflict us. It regards all men and all
things and all happenings with equal eyes, watches the modes
or qualities of Nature acting on the modes or qualities, sees the
whole secret of the mechanism, but is itself beyond these modes
and qualities, a pure absolute essential being, impassive, free,
at peace. Nature works out her action and the soul impersonal
and universal supports her but is not involved, is not attached,
is not entangled, is not troubled, is not bewildered. If we can
live in this equal self, we too are at peace; our works continue
so long as Nature’s impulsion prolongs itself in our instruments,
but there is a spiritual freedom and quiescence.
This duality of Self and Nature, quiescent Purusha, active
Prakriti, is not, however, the whole of our being; these are not really the two last words in the matter. If it were so, either all works
would be quite indifferent to the soul and this or that action or
refraining from action would take place by some ungoverned
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turn of the mobile variations of the gunas, — Arjuna would be
moved to battle by rajasic impulse in the instruments or withheld
from it by tamasic inertia or sattwic indifference, — or else, if
it so is that he must act and act only in this way, it would be
by some mechanical determinism of Nature. Moreover, since the
soul in its retreat would come to live in the impersonal quiescent
Self and cease to live at all in active Nature, the final result would
be quiescence, cessation, inertia, not the action imposed by the
Gita. And, finally, this duality gives no real explanation why
the soul is at all called to involve itself in Nature and her works;
for it cannot be that the one ever uninvolved self-conscient spirit
gets itself involved and loses its self-knowledge and has to return
to that knowledge. This pure Self, this Atman is on the contrary
always there, always the same, always the one self-conscient impersonal aloof Witness or impartial supporter of the action. It is
this lacuna, this impossible vacuum that compels us to suppose
two Purushas or two poses of the one Purusha, one secret in
the Self that observes all from its self-existence — or perhaps
observes nothing, another self-projected into Nature that lends
itself to her action and identifies itself with her creations. But
even this dualism of Self and Prakriti or Maya corrected by the
dualism of the two Purushas is not the whole philosophic creed
of the Gita. It goes beyond them to the supreme all-embracing
oneness of a highest Purusha, Purushottama.
The Gita affirms that there is a supreme Mystery, a highest Reality that upholds and reconciles the truth of these two
different manifestations. There is an utmost supreme Self, Lord
and Brahman, one who is both the impersonal and the personal,
but other and greater than either of them and other and greater
than both of them together. He is Purusha, Self and soul of our
being, but he is also Prakriti; for Prakriti is the power of the AllSoul, the power of the Eternal and Infinite self-moved to action
and creation. The supreme Ineffable, the universal Person, he
becomes by his Prakriti all these creatures. The supreme Atman
and Brahman, he manifests by his Maya of self-knowledge and
his Maya of ignorance the double truth of the cosmic riddle. The
supreme Lord, master of his Force, his Shakti, he creates, impels
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and governs all this Nature and all the personality, power and
works of these innumerable existences. Each soul is a partial
being of this self-existent One, an eternal soul of this All-Soul,
a partial manifestation of this supreme Lord and his universal
Nature. All here is this Divine, this Godhead, Vasudeva; for
by Nature and the soul in Nature he becomes all that is and
everything proceeds from him and lives in or by him, though
he himself is greater than any widest manifestation, any deepest
spirit, any cosmic figure. This is the complete truth of existence
and this all the secret of the universal action that we have seen
disengaging itself from the later chapters of the Gita.
But how does this greater truth modify or how affect the
principle of spiritual action? It modifies it to begin with in this
fundamental matter that the whole meaning of the relation of
Self and soul and Nature gets changed, opens out to a new
vision, fills in the blanks that were left, acquires a greater amplitude, assumes a true and spiritually positive, a flawlessly integral
significance. The world is no longer a purely mechanical qualitative action and determination of Nature set over against the
quiescence of an impersonal self-existence which has no quality
or power of self-determination, no ability or impulse to create.
The chasm left by this unsatisfactory dualism is bridged and
an uplifting unity revealed between knowledge and works, the
soul and Nature. The quiescent impersonal Self is a truth, —
it is the truth of the calm of the Godhead, the silence of the
Eternal, the freedom of the Lord of all birth and becoming and
action and creation, his calm infinite freedom of self-existence
not bound, troubled or affected by his creation, not touched by
the action and reaction of his Nature. Nature itself is now no
inexplicable illusion, no separated and opposite phenomenon,
but a movement of the Eternal, all her stir and activity and multiplicity founded and supported on the detached and observing
tranquillity of an immutable self and spirit. The Lord of Nature
remains that immutable self even while he is at the same time
the one and multiple soul of the universe and becomes in a
partial manifestation all these forces, powers, consciousnesses,
gods, animals, things, men. Nature of the gunas is a lower self-
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457
limited action of his power; it is nature of imperfectly conscious
manifestation and therefore of a certain ignorance. The truth of
the self, even as the truth of the Divine, is held back from her
surface force absorbed here in its outer action — much as man’s
deeper being is held back from the knowledge of his surface
consciousness — until the soul in her turns to find out this hidden thing, gets inside itself and discovers its own real verities,
its heights and its depths. That is why it has to draw back
from its little personal and egoistic to its large and impersonal,
immutable and universal Self in order to become capable of
self-knowledge. But the Lord is there, not only in that self, but
in Nature. He is in the heart of every creature and guides by
his presence the turnings of this great natural mechanism. He
is present in all, all lives in him, all is himself because all is a
becoming of his being, a portion or a figure of his existence.
But all proceeds here in a lower partial working that has come
out of a secret, a higher and greater and completer nature of
Divinity, the eternal infinite nature or absolute self-power of the
Godhead, devātmaśakti. The perfect, integrally conscious soul
hidden in man, an eternal portion of Deity, a spiritual being
of the eternal Divine Being, can open in us and can too open
us to him if we live constantly in this true truth of his action
and our existence. The seeker of Godhead has to get back to
the reality of his immutable and eternal impersonal self and at
the same time he has to see everywhere the Divine from whom
he proceeds, to see him as all, to see him in the whole of this
mutable Nature and in every part and result of her and in all her
workings, and there too to make himself one with God, there
too to live in him, to enter there too into the divine oneness. He
unites in that integrality the divine calm and freedom of his deep
essential existence with a supreme power of instrumental action
in his divinised self of Nature.
But how is this to be done? It can be done first by a right
spirit in our will of works. The seeker has to regard all his
action as a sacrifice to the Lord of works who is the eternal and
universal Being and his own highest Self and the Self of all others and the supreme all-inhabiting, all-containing, all-governing
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Godhead in the universe. The whole action of Nature is such
a sacrifice, — offered at first indeed to the divine Powers that
move her and move in her, but these powers are only limited
forms and names of the One and Illimitable. Man ordinarily
offers his sacrifice openly or under a disguise to his own ego; his
oblation is the false action of his own self-will and ignorance. Or
he offers his knowledge, action, aspiration, works of energy and
effort to the gods for partial, temporal and personal aims. The
man of knowledge, the liberated soul offers on the contrary all
his activities to the one eternal Godhead without any attachment
to their fruit or to the satisfaction of his lower personal desires.
He works for God, not for himself, for the universal welfare,
for the Soul of the world and not for any particular object
which is of his own personal creation or for any construction
of his mental will or object of his vital longings, as a divine
agent, not as a principal and separate profiteer in the worldcommerce. And this, it must be noted, is a thing that cannot be
really done except in proportion as the mind arrives at equality,
universality, wide impersonality, and a clear freedom from every
disguise of the insistent ego: for without these things the claim
to be thus acting is a pretension or an illusion. The whole action
of the world is the business of the Lord of the universe, the
concern of the self-existent Spirit of whom it is the unceasing
creation, the progressive becoming, the significant manifestation
and living symbol in Nature. The fruits are his, the results are
those determined by him and our personal action is only a minor
contribution ruled or overruled, so far as its motive is an egoistic
claim, by this Self and Spirit in us who is the Self and Spirit in
all and governs things for the universal end and good and not
for the sake of our ego. To work impersonally, desirelessly and
without attachment to the fruits of our work, for the sake of
God and the world and the greater Self and the fulfilment of
the universal will, — this is the first step towards liberation and
perfection.
But beyond this step there lies that other greater motion,
the inner surrender of all our actions to the Divinity within us.
For it is infinite Nature that impels our works and a divine
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459
Will in and above her that demands action of us; the choice
and turn our ego gives to it is a contribution of our tamasic,
rajasic, sattwic quality, a deformation in the lower Nature. The
deformation comes by the ego thinking of itself as the doer; the
character of the act takes the form of the limited personal nature
and the soul is bound up with that and its narrow figures and
does not allow the act to proceed freely and purely from the
infinite power within it. And the ego is chained to the act and its
outcome; it must suffer the personal consequence and reaction
even as it claims the responsible origination and personal will of
the doing. The free perfect working comes first by referring and
finally by surrendering altogether the action and its origination
to the divine Master of our existence; for we feel it progressively
taken up by a supreme Presence within us, the soul drawn into
deep intimacy and close unity with an inner Power and Godhead
and the work originated directly from the greater Self, from the
all-wise, infinite, universal force of an eternal being and not from
the ignorance of the little personal ego. The action is chosen and
shaped according to the nature, but entirely by the divine Will in
the nature, and it is therefore free and perfect within, whatever
its outward appearance; it comes stamped with the inward spiritual seal of the Infinite as the thing to be done, the movement and
the step of the movement decreed in the ways of the omniscient
Master of action, kartavyaṁ karma. The soul of the liberated
man is free in its impersonality, even while he contributes to the
action as its means and its occasion his instrumental personal
self-creation and the special will and power in his nature. That
will and power is now not separately, egoistically his own, but
a force of the suprapersonal Divine who acts in this becoming
of his own self, this one of his myriad personalities by means of
the characteristic form of the natural being, the swabhava. This
is the high secret and mystery, uttamaṁ rahasyam, of the action
of the liberated man. It is the result of a growing of the human
soul into a divine Light and of the union of its nature with a
highest universal nature.
This change cannot come about except by knowledge. There
is necessary a right knowledge of self and God and world and a
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living and growing into the greater consciousness to which that
knowledge admits us. We know now what the knowledge is. It
is sufficient to remember that it reposes on another and wider
vision than the human mental, a changed vision and experience
by which one is first of all liberated from the limitations of the
ego sense and its contacts and feels and sees the one self in all,
all in God, all beings as Vasudeva, all as vessels of the Godhead
and one’s self too as a significant being and soul-power of that
one Godhead; it treats in a spiritual uniting consciousness all
the happenings of the lives of others as if they were happenings
of one’s own life; it allows no wall of separation and lives in a
universal sympathy with all existences, while amidst the worldmovement one still does the work that has to be done for the
good of all, sarva-bhūta-hite, according to the way appointed
by the Divine and in the measures imposed by the command
of the Spirit who is Master of Time. Thus living and acting in
this knowledge the soul of man becomes united with the Eternal
in personality and in impersonality, lives in the Eternal though
acting in Time, even as the Eternal acts, and is free, perfect and
blissful whatever may be the form and determination of the
work done in Nature.
The liberated man has the complete and total knowledge,
kr.tsnavid, and does all works without any of the restrictions
made by the mind, kr.tsna-karma-kr.t, according to the force and
freedom and infinite power of the divine will within him. And
since he is united with the Eternal, he has too the pure spiritual
and illimitable joy of his eternal existence. He turns with adoration to the Self of whom he is a portion, the Master of his works
and divine Lover of his soul and nature. He is not an impassive
calm spectator only; he lifts not only his knowledge and will to
the Eternal, but his heart also of love and adoration and passion.
For without that uplifting of the heart his whole nature is not
fulfilled and united with God; the ecstasy of the spirit’s calm
needs to be transformed by the ecstasy of the soul’s Ananda.
Beyond the personal Jiva and the impersonal Brahman or Atman
he reaches the supracosmic Purushottama who is immutable in
impersonality and fulfils himself in personality and draws us to
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461
him through these two different attractions. The liberated seeker
rises personally to that highest Numen by his soul’s love and joy
in God and the adoration of the will in him for the Master of
its works; the peace and largeness of his impersonal universal
knowledge is perfected by delight in the self-existent integral
close and intimate reality of this surpassing and universal Godhead. This delight glorifies his knowledge and unites it with
the eternal delight of the Spirit in its self and its manifestation;
this perfects too his personality in the superperson of the divine
Purusha and makes his natural being and action one with eternal
beauty, eternal harmony, eternal love and Ananda.
But all this change means a total passing from the lower human to the higher divine nature. It is a lifting of our whole being
or at least of the whole mental being that wills, knows and feels
beyond what we are into some highest spiritual consciousness,
some satisfying fullest power of existence, some deepest widest
delight of the spirit. And this may well be possible by a transcendence of our present natural life, it may well be possible in
some celestial state beyond the earthly existence or still beyond
in a supracosmic superconscience; it may happen by transition
to an absolute and infinite power and status of the Spirit. But
while we are here in the body, here in life, here in action, what in
this change becomes of the lower nature? For at present all our
activities are determined in their trend and shape by the nature,
and this Nature here is the nature of the three gunas, and in all
natural being and in all natural activities there is the triple guna,
tamas with its ignorance and inertia, rajas with its kinesis and
action, its passion and grief and perversion, sattwa with its light
and happiness, and the bondage of these things. And granted
that the soul becomes superior in the self to the three gunas,
how does it escape in its instrumental nature from their working
and result and bondage? For even the man of knowledge, says
the Gita, must act according to his nature. To feel and bear
the reactions of the gunas in the outer manifestation, but to
be free from them and superior in the observing conscious self
behind is not sufficient; for it leaves still a dualism of freedom
and subjection, a contradiction between what we are within and
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what we are without, between our self and our power, what we
know ourselves to be and what we will and do. Where is the
release here, where the full elevation and transformation to the
higher spiritual nature, the immortal Dharma, the law proper
to the infinite purity and power of a divine being? If this change
cannot be effected while in the body, then so it must be said, that
the whole nature cannot be transformed and there must remain
an unreconciled duality until the mortal type of existence drops
off like a discarded shell from the spirit. But in that case the
gospel of works cannot well be the right or at least cannot be
the ultimate gospel: a perfect quiescence or at least as perfect a
quiescence as possible, a progressive Sannyasa and renunciation
of works would seem still to be the true counsel of perfection,
— as indeed the Mayavadin contends, who says that the Gita’s
way is no doubt the right way so long as we remain in action, but
still all works are an illusion and quiescence the highest path. To
act in this spirit is well, but only as a transition to a renunciation
of all works, to cessation, to an absolute quiescence.
This is the difficulty which the Gita has still to meet in
order to justify works to the seeker after the Spirit. Otherwise
it must say to Arjuna, “Act temporarily in this fashion, but
afterwards seek the higher way of renunciation of works.” But
on the contrary it has said that not the cessation of works,
but renunciation of desire is the better way; it has spoken of
the action of the liberated man, muktasya karma. It has even
insisted on doing all actions, sarvān.i karmān.i, kr.tsna-karmakr.t; it has said that in whatever way the perfected Yogin lives
and acts, he lives and acts in God. This can only be, if the nature
also in its dynamics and workings becomes divine, a power
imperturbable, intangible, inviolate, pure and untroubled by the
reactions of the inferior Prakriti. How and by what steps is this
most difficult transformation to be effected? What is this last
secret of the soul’s perfection? what the principle or the process
of this transmutation of our human and earthly nature?
XVII
Deva and Asura
1
T
HE PRACTICAL difficulty of the change from the ignorant and shackled normal nature of man to the dynamic
freedom of a divine and spiritual being will be apparent
if we ask ourselves, more narrowly, how the transition can be
effected from the fettered embarrassed functioning of the three
qualities to the infinite action of the liberated man who is no
longer subject to the gunas. The transition is indispensable; for
it is clearly laid down that he must be above or else without
the three gunas, trigun.ātı̄ta, nistraigun.ya. On the other hand it
is no less clearly, no less emphatically laid down that in every
natural existence here on earth the three gunas are there in their
inextricable working and it is even said that all action of man
or creature or force is merely the action of these three modes
upon each other, a functioning in which one or other predominates and the rest modify its operation and results, gun.ā gun.es.u
vartante. How then can there be another dynamic and kinetic
nature or any other kind of works? To act is to be subject to the
three qualities of Nature; to be beyond these conditions of her
working is to be silent in the Spirit. The Ishwara, the Supreme
who is master of all her works and functions and guides and
determines them by his divine will, is indeed above this mechanism of quality, not touched or limited by her modes, but still
it would seem that he acts always through them, always shapes
by the power of the swabhava and through the psychological
machinery of the gunas. These three are fundamental properties
of Prakriti, necessary operations of the executive Nature-force
which takes shape here in us, and the Jiva himself is only a
portion of the Divine in this Prakriti. If then the liberated man
still does works, still moves in the kinetic movement, it must be
1
Gita, XVI.
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so that he moves and acts, in Nature and by the limitation of her
qualities, subject to their reactions, not, in so far as the natural
part of him persists, in the freedom of the Divine. But the Gita
has said exactly the opposite, that the liberated Yogin is delivered from the guna reactions and whatever he does, however he
lives, moves and acts in God, in the power of his freedom and
immortality, in the law of the supreme eternal Infinite, sarvathā
vartamāno’pi sa yogı̄ mayi vartate. There seems here to be a
contradiction, an impasse.
But this is only when we knot ourselves up in the rigid logical
oppositions of the analytic mind, not when we look freely and
subtly at the nature of spirit and at the spirit in Nature. What
moves the world is not really the modes of Prakriti, — these are
only the lower aspect, the mechanism of our normal nature. The
real motive power is a divine spiritual Will which uses at present
these inferior conditions, but is itself not limited, not dominated,
not mechanised, as is the human will, by the gunas. No doubt,
since these modes are so universal in their action, they must
proceed from something inherent in the power of the Spirit;
there must be powers in the divine Will-force from which these
aspects of Prakriti have their origin. For everything in the lower
normal nature is derived from the higher spiritual power of being
of the Purushottama, mattah. pravartate; it does not come into
being de novo and without a spiritual cause. Something in the
essential power of the spirit there must be from which the sattwic
light and satisfaction, the rajasic kinesis, the tamasic inertia of
our nature are derivations and of which they are the imperfect
or degraded forms. But once we get back to these sources in
their purity above this imperfection and degradation of them in
which we live, we shall find that these motions put on a quite
different aspect as soon as we begin to live in the spirit. Being
and action and the modes of being and action become altogether
different things, far above their present limited appearance.
For what is behind this troubled kinesis of the cosmos with
all its clash and struggle? What is it that when it touches the
mind, when it puts on mental values, creates the reactions of
desire, striving, straining, error of will, sorrow, sin, pain? It is a
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465
will of the spirit in movement, it is a large divine will in action
which is not touched by these things; it is a power2 of the free
and infinite conscious Godhead which has no desire because it
exercises a universal possession and a spontaneous Ananda of
its movements. Wearied by no striving and straining, it enjoys
a free mastery of its means and its objects; misled by no error
of the will, it holds a knowledge of self and things which is the
source of its mastery and its Ananda; overcome by no sorrow,
sin or pain, it has the joy and purity of its being and the joy
and purity of its power. The soul that lives in God acts by this
spiritual will and not by the normal will of the unliberated mind:
its kinesis takes place by this spiritual force and not by the rajasic
mode of Nature, precisely because it no longer lives in the lower
movement to which that deformation belongs, but has got back
in the divine nature to the pure and perfect sense of the kinesis.
And again what is behind the inertia of Nature, behind
this Tamas which, when complete, makes her action like the
blind driving of a machine, a mechanical impetus unobservant
of anything except the groove in which it is set to spin and
not conscious even of the law of that motion, — this Tamas
that turns cessation of the accustomed action into death and
disintegration and becomes in the mind a power for inaction
and ignorance? This tamas is an obscurity which mistranslates,
we may say, into inaction of power and inaction of knowledge
the Spirit’s eternal principle of calm and repose — the repose
which the Divine never loses even while he acts, the eternal
repose which supports his integral action of knowledge and
the force of his creative will both there in its own infinities
and here in an apparent limitation of its working and selfawareness. The peace of the Godhead is not a disintegration
of energy or a vacant inertia; it would keep all that Infinity has
known and done gathered up and concentratedly conscious in
an omnipotent silence even if the Power everywhere ceased for
a time actively to know and create. The Eternal does not need
to sleep or rest; he does not get tired and flag; he has no need
2
tapas, cit-śakti.
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of a pause to refresh and recreate his exhausted energies; for his
energy is inexhaustibly the same, indefatigable and infinite. The
Godhead is calm and at rest in the midst of his action; and on
the other hand his very cessation of action would retain in it the
full power and all the potentialities of his kinesis. The liberated
soul enters into this calm and participates in the eternal repose
of the spirit. This is known to everyone who has had any taste
at all of the joy of liberation, that it contains an eternal power
of calm. And that profound tranquillity can remain in the very
heart of action, can persevere in the most violent motion of
forces. There may be an impetuous flood of thought, doing,
will, movement, an overflowing rush of love, the emotion of the
self-existent spiritual ecstasy at its strongest intensity, and that
may extend itself to a fiery and forceful spiritual enjoyment of
things and beings in the world and in the ways of Nature, and
yet this tranquillity and repose would be behind the surge and in
it, always conscious of its depths, always the same. The calm of
the liberated man is not an indolence, incapacity, insensibility,
inertia; it is full of immortal power, capable of all action, attuned
to deepest delight, open to profoundest love and compassion and
to every manner of intensest Ananda.
And so too beyond the inferior light and happiness of that
purest quality of Nature, Sattwa, the power that makes for assimilation and equivalence, right knowledge and right dealing,
fine harmony, firm balance, right law of action, right possession and brings so full a satisfaction to the mind, beyond this
highest thing in the normal nature, admirable in itself so far as
it goes and while it can be maintained, but precarious, secured
by limitation, dependent on rule and condition, there is at its
high and distant source a greater light and bliss free in the free
spirit. That is not limited nor dependent on limitation or rule
or condition but self-existent and unalterable, not the result
of this or that harmony amid the discords of our nature but
the fount of harmony and able to create whatever harmony
it will. That is a luminous spiritual and in its native action a
direct supramental force of knowledge, jyotih., not our modified
and derivative mental light, prakāśa. That is the light and bliss
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467
of widest self-existence, spontaneous self-knowledge, intimate
universal identity, deepest self-interchange, not of acquisition,
assimilation, adjustment and laboured equivalence. That light is
full of a luminous spiritual will and there is no gulf or disparateness between its knowledge and its action. That delight is not
our paler mental happiness, sukham, but a profound concentrated intense self-existent bliss extended to all that our being
does, envisages, creates, a fixed divine rapture, Ananda. The
liberated soul participates more and more profoundly in this
light and bliss and grows the more perfectly into it, the more
integrally it unites itself with the Divine. And while among the
gunas of the lower Nature there is a necessary disequilibrium,
a shifting inconstancy of measures and a perpetual struggle for
domination, the greater light and bliss, calm, will of kinesis of
the Spirit do not exclude each other, are not at war, are not even
merely in equilibrium, but each an aspect of the two others and
in their fullness all are inseparable and one. Our mind when it
approaches the Divine may seem to enter into one to the exclusion of another, may appear for instance to achieve calm to the
exclusion of kinesis of action, but that is because we approach
him first through the selecting spirit in the mind. Afterwards
when we are able to rise above even the spiritual mind, we can
see that each divine power contains all the rest and can get rid
of this initial error.3
We see then that action is possible without the subjection
of the soul to the normal degraded functioning of the modes
of Nature. That functioning depends on the mental, vital and
physical limitation into which we are cast; it is a deformation,
an incapacity, a wrong or depressed value imposed on us by
the mind and life in matter. When we grow into the spirit, this
3
The account given here of the supreme spiritual and supramental forms of highest
Nature action corresponding to the gunas is not derived from the Gita, but introduced
from spiritual experience. The Gita does not describe in any detail the action of the
highest Nature, rahasyam uttamam; it leaves that for the seeker to discover by his own
spiritual experience. It only points out the nature of the high sattwic temperament and
action through which this supreme mystery has to be reached and insists at the same
time on the overpassing of Sattwa and transcendence of the three gunas.
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dharma or inferior law of Nature is replaced by the immortal
dharma of the spirit; there is the experience of a free immortal
action, a divine illimitable knowledge, a transcendent power, an
unfathomable repose. But still there remains the question of the
transition; for there must be a transition, a proceeding by steps,
since nothing in God’s workings in this world is done by an
abrupt action without procedure or basis. We have the thing we
seek in us, but we have in practice to evolve it out of the inferior
forms of our nature.4 Therefore in the action of the modes itself
there must be some means, some leverage, some point d’appui,
by which we can effect this transformation. The Gita finds it in
the full development of the sattwic guna till that in its potent
expansion reaches a point at which it can go beyond itself and
disappear into its source. The reason is evident, because sattwa
is a power of light and happiness, a force that makes for calm
and knowledge, and at its highest point it can arrive at a certain
reflection, almost a mental identity with the spiritual light and
bliss from which it derives. The other two gunas cannot get
this transformation, rajas into the divine kinetic will or tamas
into the divine repose and calm, without the intervention of
the sattwic power in Nature. The principle of inertia will always
remain an inert inaction of power or an incapacity of knowledge
until its ignorance disappears in illumination and its torpid incapacity is lost in the light and force of the omnipotent divine will
of repose. Then only can we have the supreme calm. Therefore
tamas must be dominated by sattwa. The principle of rajas for
the same reason must remain always a restless, troubled, feverish
or unhappy working because it has not right knowledge; its native movement is a wrong and perverse action, perverse through
ignorance. Our will must purify itself by knowledge; it must get
more and more to a right and luminously informed action before
it can be converted into the divine kinetic will. That again means
4
This is from the point of view of our nature ascending upwards by self-conquest,
effort and discipline. There must also intervene more and more a descent of the divine
Light, Presence and Power into the being to transform it; otherwise the change at the
point of culmination and beyond it cannot take place. That is why there comes in as the
last movement the necessity of an absolute self-surrender.
Deva and Asura
469
the necessity of the intervention of sattwa. The sattwic quality
is a first mediator between the higher and the lower nature. It
must indeed at a certain point transform or escape from itself and
break up and dissolve into its source; its conditioned derivative
seeking light and carefully constructed action must change into
the free direct dynamics and spontaneous light of the spirit. But
meanwhile a high increase of sattwic power delivers us largely
from the tamasic and the rajasic disqualification; and its own
disqualification, once we are not pulled too much downward
by rajas and tamas, can be surmounted with a greater ease. To
develop sattwa till it becomes full of spiritual light and calm and
happiness is the first condition of this preparatory discipline of
the nature.
That, we shall find, is the whole intention of the remaining
chapters of the Gita. But first it prefaces the consideration of this
enlightening movement by a distinction between two kinds of
being, the Deva and the Asura; for the Deva is capable of a high
self-transforming sattwic action, the Asura incapable. We must
see what is the object of this preface and the precise bearing
of this distinction. The general nature of all human beings is
the same, it is a mixture of the three gunas; it would seem then
that in all there must be the capacity to develop and strengthen
the sattwic element and turn it upward towards the heights of
the divine transformation. That our ordinary turn is actually
towards making our reason and will the servants of our rajasic
or tamasic egoism, the ministers of our restless and ill-balanced
kinetic desire or our self-indulgent indolence and static inertia, can only be, one would imagine, a temporary characteristic
of our undeveloped spiritual being, a rawness of its imperfect
evolution and must disappear when our consciousness rises in
the spiritual scale. But we actually see that men, at least men
above a certain level, fall very largely into two classes, those
who have a dominant force of sattwic nature turned towards
knowledge, self-control, beneficence, perfection and those who
have a dominant force of rajasic nature turned towards egoistic
greatness, satisfaction of desire, the indulgence of their own
strong will and personality which they seek to impose on the
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world, not for the service of man or God, but for their own pride,
glory and pleasure. These are the human representatives of the
Devas and Danavas or Asuras, the Gods and the Titans. This
distinction is a very ancient one in Indian religious symbolism.
The fundamental idea of the Rig Veda is a struggle between
the Gods and their dark opponents, between the Masters of
Light, sons of Infinity, and the children of Division and Night,
a battle in which man takes part and which is reflected in all his
inner life and action. This was also a fundamental principle of
the religion of Zoroaster. The same idea is prominent in later
literature. The Ramayana is in its ethical intention the parable of
an enormous conflict between the Deva in human form and the
incarnate Rakshasa, between the representative of a high culture
and Dharma and a huge unbridled force and gigantic civilisation
of the exaggerated Ego. The Mahabharata, of which the Gita is
a section, takes for its subject a lifelong clash between human
Devas and Asuras, the men of power, sons of the Gods, who
are governed by the light of a high ethical Dharma and others
who are embodied Titans, the men of power who are out for the
service of their intellectual, vital and physical ego. The ancient
mind, more open than ours to the truth of things behind the
physical veil, saw behind the life of man great cosmic Powers
or beings representative of certain turns or grades of the universal Shakti, divine, titanic, gigantic, demoniac, and men who
strongly represented in themselves these types of nature were
themselves considered as Devas, Asuras, Rakshasas, Pisachas.
The Gita for its own purposes takes up this distinction and
develops the difference between these two kinds of beings, dvau
bhūtasargau. It has spoken previously of the nature which is
Asuric and Rakshasic and obstructs God-knowledge, salvation
and perfection; it now contrasts it with the Daivic nature which
is turned to these things.
Arjuna, says the Teacher, is of the Deva nature. He need
not grieve with the thought that by acceptance of battle and
slaughter he will be yielding to the impulses of the Asura. The
action on which all turns, the battle which Arjuna has to fight
with the incarnate Godhead as his charioteer at the bidding of
Deva and Asura
471
the Master of the world in the form of the Time-Spirit, is a
struggle to establish the kingdom of the Dharma, the empire of
Truth, Right and Justice. He himself is born in the Deva kind;
he has developed in himself the sattwic being, until he has now
come to a point at which he is capable of a high transformation
and liberation from the traigun.ya and therefore even from the
sattwic nature. The distinction between the Deva and the Asura
is not comprehensive of all humanity, not rigidly applicable to
all its individuals, neither is it sharp and definite in all stages
of the moral or spiritual history of the race or in all phases
of the individual evolution. The tamasic man who makes so
large a part of the whole, falls into neither category as it is here
described, though he may have both elements in him in a low
degree and for the most part serves tepidly the lower qualities.
The normal man is ordinarily a mixture; but one or the other
tendency is more pronounced, tends to make him predominantly
rajaso-tamasic or sattwo-rajasic and can be said to be preparing
him for either culmination, for the divine clarity or the titanic
turbulence. For here what is in question is a certain culmination
in the evolution of the qualitative nature, as will be evident from
the descriptions given in the text. On one side there can be a sublimation of the sattwic quality, the culmination or manifestation
of the unborn Deva, on the other a sublimation of the rajasic
turn of the soul in nature, the entire birth of the Asura. The one
leads towards that movement of liberation on which the Gita
is about to lay stress; it makes possible a high self-exceeding
of the sattwa quality and a transformation into the likeness of
the divine being, vimoks.āya. The other leads away from that
universal potentiality and precipitates towards an exaggeration
of our bondage to the ego. This is the point of the distinction.
The Deva nature is distinguished by an acme of the sattwic
habits and qualities; self-control, sacrifice, the religious habit,
cleanness and purity, candour and straightforwardness, truth,
calm and self-denial, compassion to all beings, modesty, gentleness, forgivingness, patience, steadfastness, a deep sweet and
serious freedom from all restlessness, levity and inconstancy are
its native attributes. The Asuric qualities, wrath, greed, cunning,
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treachery, wilful doing of injury to others, pride and arrogance
and excessive self-esteem have no place in its composition. But
its gentleness and self-denial and self-control are free too from
all weakness: it has energy and soul force, strong resolution,
the fearlessness of the soul that lives in the right and according
to the truth as well as its harmlessness, tejah., abhayam, dhr.tih.,
ahiṁsā, satyam. The whole being, the whole temperament is
integrally pure; there is a seeking for knowledge and a calm and
fixed abiding in knowledge. This is the wealth, the plenitude of
the man born into the Deva nature.
The Asuric nature has too its wealth, its plenitude of force,
but it is of a very different, a powerful and evil kind. Asuric
men have no true knowledge of the way of action or the way of
abstention, the fulfilling or the holding in of the nature. Truth is
not in them, nor clean doing, nor faithful observance. They see
naturally in the world nothing but a huge play of the satisfaction
of self; theirs is a world with Desire for its cause and seed and
governing force and law, a world of Chance, a world devoid of
just relation and linked Karma, a world without God, not true,
not founded in Truth. Whatever better intellectual or higher
religious dogma they may possess, this alone is the true creed
of their mind and will in action; they follow always the cult of
Desire and Ego. On that way of seeing life they lean in reality
and by its falsehood they ruin their souls and their reason. The
Asuric man becomes the centre or instrument of a fierce, Titanic,
violent action, a power of destruction in the world, a fount of
injury and evil. Arrogant, full of self-esteem and the drunkenness
of their pride, these misguided souls delude themselves, persist in
false and obstinate aims and pursue the fixed impure resolution
of their longings. They imagine that desire and enjoyment are all
the aim of life and in their inordinate and insatiable pursuit of it
they are the prey of a devouring, a measurelessly unceasing care
and thought and endeavour and anxiety till the moment of their
death. Bound by a hundred bonds, devoured by wrath and lust,
unweariedly occupied in amassing unjust gains which may serve
their enjoyment and the satisfaction of their craving, always they
think, “Today I have gained this object of desire, tomorrow I
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473
shall have that other; today I have so much wealth, more I will
get tomorrow. I have killed this my enemy, the rest too I will kill.
I am a lord and king of men, I am perfect, accomplished, strong,
happy, fortunate, a privileged enjoyer of the world; I am wealthy,
I am of high birth; who is there like unto me? I will sacrifice, I
will give, I will enjoy.” Thus occupied by many egoistic ideas,
deluded, doing works, but doing them wrongly, acting mightily,
but for themselves, for desire, for enjoyment, not for God in
themselves and God in man, they fall into the unclean hell of
their own evil. They sacrifice and give, but from a self-regarding
ostentation, from vanity and with a stiff and foolish pride. In the
egoism of their strength and power, in the violence of their wrath
and arrogance they hate, despise and belittle the God hidden in
themselves and the God in man. And because they have this
proud hatred and contempt of good and of God, because they
are cruel and evil, the Divine casts them down continually into
more and more Asuric births. Not seeking him, they find him
not, and at last, losing the way to him altogether, sink down into
the lowest status of soul-nature, adhamāṁ gatim.
This graphic description, even giving its entire value to the
distinction it implies, must not be pressed to carry more in it than
it means. When it is said that there are two creations of beings
in this material world, Deva and Asura,5 it is not meant that
human souls are so created by God from the beginning each
with its own inevitable career in Nature, nor is it meant that
there is a rigid spiritual predestination and those rejected from
the beginning by the Divine are blinded by him so that they may
be thrust down to eternal perdition and the impurity of Hell.
All souls are eternal portions of the Divine, the Asura as well
as the Deva, all can come to salvation: even the greatest sinner
can turn to the Divine. But the evolution of the soul in Nature
5
The distinction between the two creations has its full truth in supraphysical planes
where the law of spiritual evolution does not govern the movement. There are worlds of
the Devas, worlds of the Asuras, and there are in these worlds behind us constant types
of beings which support the complex divine play of creation indispensable to the march
of the universe and cast their influence also on the earth and on the life and nature of
man in this physical plane of existence.
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is an adventure of which Swabhava and the Karma governed by
the swabhava are ever the chief powers; and if an excess in the
manifestation of the swabhava, the self-becoming of the soul, a
disorder in its play turns the law of being to the perverse side,
if the rajasic qualities are given the upper hand, cultured to the
diminution of sattwa, then the trend of Karma and its results
necessarily culminate not in the sattwic height which is capable
of the movement of liberation, but in the highest exaggeration
of the perversities of the lower nature. The man, if he does not
stop short and abandon his way of error, has eventually the
Asura full-born in him, and once he has taken that enormous
turn away from the Light and Truth, he can no more reverse the
fatal speed of his course because of the very immensity of the
misused divine power in him until he has plumbed the depths
to which it falls, found bottom and seen where the way has
led him, the power exhausted and misspent, himself down in
the lowest state of the soul nature, which is Hell. Only when
he understands and turns to the Light, does that other truth of
the Gita come in, that even the greatest sinner, the most impure
and violent evil-doer is saved the moment he turns to adore and
follow after the Godhead within him. Then, simply by that turn,
he gets very soon into the sattwic way which leads to perfection
and freedom.
The Asuric Prakriti is the rajasic at its height; it leads to
the slavery of the soul in Nature, to desire, wrath and greed,
the three powers of the rajasic ego, and these are the threefold doors of Hell, the Hell into which the natural being falls
when it indulges the impurity and evil and error of its lower or
perverted instincts. These three are again the doors of a great
darkness, they fold back into tamas, the characteristic power
of the original Ignorance; for the unbridled force of the rajasic
nature, when exhausted, falls back into the weakness, collapse,
darkness, incapacity of the worst tamasic soul-status. To escape
from this downfall one must get rid of these three evil forces
and turn to the light of the sattwic quality, live by the right, in
the true relations, according to the Truth and the Law; then one
follows one’s own higher good and arrives at the highest soul-
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475
status. To follow the law of desire is not the true rule of our
nature; there is a higher and juster standard of its works. But
where is it embodied or how is it to be found? In the first place,
the human race has always been seeking for this just and high
Law and whatever it has discovered is embodied in its Shastra,
its rule of science and knowledge, rule of ethics, rule of religion,
rule of best social living, rule of one’s right relations with man
and God and Nature. Shastra does not mean a mass of customs,
some good, some bad, unintelligently followed by the customary
routine mind of the tamasic man. Shastra is the knowledge and
teaching laid down by intuition, experience and wisdom, the
science and art and ethic of life, the best standards available
to the race. The half-awakened man who leaves the observance
of its rule to follow the guidance of his instincts and desires,
can get pleasure but not happiness; for the inner happiness can
only come by right living. He cannot move to perfection, cannot
acquire the highest spiritual status. The law of instinct and desire
seems to come first in the animal world, but the manhood of man
grows by the pursuit of truth and religion and knowledge and
a right life. The Shastra, the recognised Right that he has set
up to govern his lower members by his reason and intelligent
will, must therefore first be observed and made the authority for
conduct and works and for what should or should not be done,
till the instinctive desire nature is schooled and abated and put
down by the habit of self-control and man is ready first for a
freer intelligent self-guidance and then for the highest supreme
law and supreme liberty of the spiritual nature.
For the Shastra in its ordinary aspect is not that spiritual law,
although at its loftiest point, when it becomes a science and art
of spiritual living, Adhyatma-shastra, — the Gita itself describes
its own teaching as the highest and most secret Shastra, — it formulates a rule of the self-transcendence of the sattwic nature and
develops the discipline which leads to spiritual transmutation.
Yet all Shastra is built on a number of preparatory conditions,
dharmas; it is a means, not an end. The supreme end is the
freedom of the spirit when abandoning all dharmas the soul
turns to God for its sole law of action, acts straight from the
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divine will and lives in the freedom of the divine nature, not in
the Law, but in the Spirit. This is the development of the teaching
which is prepared by the next question of Arjuna.
XVIII
The Gunas, Faith and Works
1
T
HE GITA has made a distinction between action according to the licence of personal desire and action done
according to the Shastra. We must understand by the
latter the recognised science and art of life which is the outcome
of mankind’s collective living, its culture, religion, science, its
progressive discovery of the best rule of life, — but mankind
still walking in the ignorance and proceeding in a half light
towards knowledge. The action of personal desire belongs to the
unregenerated state of our nature and is dictated by ignorance
or false knowledge and an unregulated or ill-regulated kinetic or
rajasic egoism. The action controlled by Shastra is an outcome
of intellectual, ethical, aesthetic, social and religious culture; it
embodies an attempt at a certain right living, harmony and right
order and is evidently an effort, more or less advanced according to circumstances, of the sattwic element in man to overtop,
regulate and control or guide, where it must be admitted, his
rajasic and tamasic egoism. It is the means to a step in advance,
and therefore mankind must first proceed through it and make
this Shastra its law of action rather than obey the impulsion
of its personal desires. This is a general rule which humanity
has always recognised wherever it has arrived at any kind of
established and developed society; it has an idea of an order,
a law, a standard of its perfection, something other than the
guidance of its desires or the crude direction of its raw impulses.
This greater rule the individual finds usually outside himself in
some more or less fixed outcome of the experience and wisdom
of the race, which he accepts, to which his mind and the leading
parts of his being give their assent or sanction and which he
tries to make his own by living it in his mind, will and action.
1
Gita, XVII.
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And this assent of the being, its conscious acceptance and will
to believe and realise, may be called by the name which the Gita
gives to it, his faith, śraddhā. The religion, the philosophy, the
ethical law, the social idea, the cultural idea in which I put my
faith, gives me a law for my nature and its works, an idea of
relative right or an idea of relative or absolute perfection and
in proportion as I have a sincerity and completeness of faith in
it and an intensity of will to live according to that faith, I can
become what it proposes to me, I can shape myself into an image
of that right or an exemplar of that perfection.
But we see also that there is a freer tendency in man other
than the leading of his desires and other than his will to accept
the Law, the fixed idea, the safe governing rule of the Shastra.
The individual frequently enough, the community at any moment of its life is seen to turn away from the Shastra, becomes
impatient of it, loses that form of its will and faith and goes in
search of another law which it is now more disposed to accept as
the right rule of living and regard as a more vital or higher truth
of existence. This may happen when the established Shastra
ceases to be a living thing and degenerates or stiffens into a
mass of customs and conventions. Or it may come because it
is found that the Shastra is imperfect or no longer useful for
the progress demanded; a new truth, a more perfect law of
living has become imperative. If that does not exist, it has to
be discovered by the effort of the race or by some great and
illumined individual mind who embodies the desire and seeking
of the race. The Vedic law becomes a convention and a Buddha
appears with his new rule of the eightfold path and the goal
of Nirvana; and it may be remarked that he propounds it not
as a personal invention, but as the true rule of Aryan living
constantly rediscovered by the Buddha, the enlightened mind,
the awakened spirit. But this practically means that there is an
ideal, an eternal Dharma which religion, philosophy, ethics and
all other powers in man that strive after truth and perfection
are constantly endeavouring to embody in new statements of
the science and art of the inner and outer life, a new Shastra.
The Mosaic law of religious, ethical and social righteousness is
The Gunas, Faith and Works
479
convicted of narrowness and imperfection and is now besides a
convention; the law of Christ comes to replace it and claims at
once to abrogate and to fulfil, to abrogate the imperfect form
and fulfil in a deeper and broader light and power the spirit of the
thing which it aimed at, the divine rule of living. And the human
search does not stop there, but leaves these formulations too,
goes back to some past truth it had rejected or breaks forward
to some new truth and power, but is always in search of the
same thing, the law of its perfection, its rule of right living, its
complete, highest and essential self and nature.
This movement begins with the individual, who is no longer
satisfied with the law because he finds that it no longer corresponds to his idea and largest or intensest experience of himself
and existence and therefore he can no longer bring to it the will
to believe and practise. It does not correspond to his inner way
of being, it is not to him sat, the thing that truly is, the right, the
highest or best or real good; it is not the truth and law of his or of
all being. The Shastra is something impersonal to the individual,
and that gives it its authority over the narrow personal law of his
members; but at the same time it is personal to the collectivity
and is the outcome of its experience, its culture or its nature.
It is not in all its form and spirit the ideal rule of fulfilment of
the Self or the eternal law of the Master of our nature, although
it may contain in itself in small or larger measure indications,
preparations, illuminating glimpses of that far greater thing.
And the individual may have gone beyond the collectivity and
be ready for a greater truth, a wider walk, a deeper intention of
the Life-Spirit. The leading in him that departs from the Shastra
may not indeed be always a higher movement; it may take the
form of a revolt of the egoistic or rajasic nature seeking freedom
from the yoke of something which it feels to be cramping to its
liberty of self-fulfilment and self-finding. But even then it is often
justified by some narrowness or imperfection of the Shastra or
by the degradation of the current rule of living into a merely
restricting or lifeless convention. And so far it is legitimate, it
appeals to a truth, it has a good and just reason for existence: for
though it misses the right path, yet the free action of the rajasic
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ego, because it has more in it of liberty and life, is better than
the dead and hidebound tamasic following of a convention. The
rajasic is always stronger, always more forcefully inspired and
has more possibilities in it than the tamasic nature. But also this
leading may be sattwic at its heart; it may be a turn to a larger
and greater ideal which will carry us nearer to a more complete
and ample truth of our self and universal existence than has yet
been seen and nearer therefore to that highest law which is one
with the divine freedom. And in effect this movement is usually
an attempt to lay hold on some forgotten truth or to move on
to a yet undiscovered or unlived truth of our being. It is not a
mere licentious movement of the unregulated nature; it has its
spiritual justification and is a necessity of our spiritual progress.
And even if the Shastra is still a living thing and the best rule
for the human average, the exceptional man, spiritual, inwardly
developed, is not bound by that standard. He is called upon to
go beyond the fixed line of the Shastra. For this is a rule for the
guidance, control and relative perfection of the normal imperfect
man and he has to go on to a more absolute perfection: this is a
system of fixed dharmas and he has to learn to live in the liberty
of the Spirit.
But what then shall be the secure base of an action which
departs both from the guidance of desire and from the normal
law? For the rule of desire has an authority of its own, no longer
safe or satisfactory to us as it is to the animal or as it might
have been to a primitive humanity, but still, so far as it goes,
founded on a very living part of our nature and fortified by its
strong indications; and the law, the Shastra has behind it all the
authority of long established rule, old successful sanctions and a
secure past experience. But this new movement is of the nature
of a powerful adventure into the unknown or partly known, a
daring development and a new conquest, and what then is the
clue to be followed, the guiding light on which it can depend
or its strong basis in our being? The answer is that the clue and
support is to be found in man’s śraddhā, his faith, his will to
believe, to live what he sees or thinks to be the truth of himself
and of existence. In other words this movement is man’s appeal
The Gunas, Faith and Works
481
to himself or to something potent and compelling in himself
or in universal existence for the discovery of his truth, his law
of living, his way to fullness and perfection. And everything
depends on the nature of his faith, the thing in himself or in the
universal soul — of which he is a portion or manifestation — to
which he directs it and on how near he gets by it to his real
self and the Self or true being of the universe. If he is tamasic,
obscure, clouded, if he has an ignorant faith, an inept will, he will
reach nothing true and will fall away to his lower nature. If he is
lured by false rajasic lights, he can be carried away by self-will
into bypaths that may lead to morass or precipice. In either case
his only chance of salvation lies in a return of sattwa upon him
to impose a new enlightened order and rule upon his members
which will liberate him from the violent error of his self-will or
the dull error of his clouded ignorance. If on the other hand he
has the sattwic nature and a sattwic faith and direction for his
steps, he will arrive in sight of a higher yet unachieved ideal rule
which may lead him even in rare instances beyond the sattwic
light some way at least towards a highest divine illumination
and divine way of being and living. For if the sattwic light is so
strong in him as to bring him to its own culminating point, then
he will be able advancing from that point to make out his gate of
entrance into some first ray of that which is divine, transcendent
and absolute. In all effort at self-finding these possibilities are
there; they are the conditions of this spiritual adventure.
Now we have to see how the Gita deals with this question on
its own line of spiritual teaching and self-discipline. For Arjuna
puts immediately a suggestive query from which the problem or
one aspect of it arises. When men, he says, sacrifice to God or the
gods with faith, śraddhā, but abandon the rule of the Shastra,
what is that concentrated will of devotion in them, nis.t.hā, which
gives them this faith and moves them to this kind of action? Is
it sattwa, rajas or tamas? to which strand of our nature does
it belong? The answer of the Gita first states the principle that
the faith in us is of a triple kind like all things in Nature and
varies according to the dominating quality of our nature. The
faith of each man takes the shape, hue, quality given to it by his
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stuff of being, his constituting temperament, his innate power of
existence, sattvānurūpā sarvasya śraddhā. And then there comes
a remarkable line in which the Gita tells us that this Purusha,
this soul in man, is, as it were, made of śraddhā, a faith, a will
to be, a belief in itself and existence, and whatever is that will,
faith or constituting belief in him, he is that and that is he.
Śraddhāmayo ’yaṁ purus.o yo yac-chraddhah. sa eva sah.. If we
look into this pregnant saying a little closely, we shall find that
this single line contains implied in its