Essays on the Gita - Sri Aurobindo

Essays on the Gita

19

© Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust 1997Published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department

Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, PondicherryPRINTED IN INDIA

VOLUME 19THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SRI AUROBINDO

Essays on the Gita

Publisher’s Note

The first series of Essays on the Gita appeared in themonthly review Arya between August 1916 and July1918. It was revised by Sri Aurobindo and published asa book in 1922.

The second series appeared in the Arya between Au-gust 1918 and July 1920. In 1928 Sri Aurobindo broughtout an extensively revised edition in book form.

For the present edition, the text has been thoroughlychecked against all previous editions and against themanuscripts of the revised Arya.

CONTENTS

FIRST SERIES

IOur Demand and Need from the Gita 3

IIThe Divine Teacher 12

IIIThe Human Disciple 20

IVThe Core of the Teaching 29

VKurukshetra 39

VIMan and the Battle of Life 47

VIIThe Creed of the Aryan Fighter 57

VIIISankhya and Yoga 68

IXSankhya, Yoga and Vedanta 81

XThe Yoga of the Intelligent Will 94

XIWorks and Sacrifice 105

XIIThe Significance of Sacrifice 114

XIIIThe Lord of the Sacrifice 124

CONTENTS

XIVThe Principle of Divine Works 134

XVThe Possibility and Purpose of Avatarhood 145

XVIThe Process of Avatarhood 158

XVIIThe Divine Birth and Divine Works 168

XVIIIThe Divine Worker 177

XIXEquality 188

XXEquality and Knowledge 200

XXIThe Determinism of Nature 212

XXIIBeyond the Modes of Nature 224

XXIIINirvana and Works in the World 234

XXIVThe Gist of the Karmayoga 247

SECOND SERIES

Part I — The Synthesis of Works, Love and Knowledge

IThe Two Natures 263

IIThe Synthesis of Devotion and Knowledge 278

CONTENTS

IIIThe Supreme Divine 289

IVThe Secret of Secrets 301

VThe Divine Truth and Way 311

VIWorks, Devotion and Knowledge 322

VIIThe Supreme Word of the Gita 337

VIIIGod in Power of Becoming 355

IXThe Theory of the Vibhuti 366

XThe Vision of the World-Spirit

— Time the Destroyer 377

XIThe Vision of the World-Spirit

— The Double Aspect 388

XIIThe Way and the Bhakta 396

Part II — The Supreme Secret

XIIIThe Field and its Knower 409

XIVAbove the Gunas 421

XVThe Three Purushas 435

CONTENTS

XVIThe Fullness of Spiritual Action 450

XVIIDeva and Asura 463

XVIIIThe Gunas, Faith and Works 477

XIXThe Gunas, Mind and Works 493

XXSwabhava and Swadharma 507

XXITowards the Supreme Secret 526

XXIIThe Supreme Secret 540

XXIIIThe Core of the Gita’s Meaning 562

XXIVThe Message of the Gita 572

Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry, c. 1915

A page of the as revised by Sri AurobindoArya

Essays on the Gita

First Series

I

Our Demand and Needfrom the Gita

THE WORLD abounds with scriptures sacred and pro-fane, with revelations and half-revelations, with religionsand philosophies, sects and schools and systems. To these

the many minds of a half-ripe knowledge or no knowledge atall attach themselves with exclusiveness and passion and willhave it that this or the other book is alone the eternal Word ofGod and all others are either impostures or at best imperfectlyinspired, that this or that philosophy is the last word of thereasoning intellect and other systems are either errors or savedonly by such partial truth in them as links them to the onetrue philosophical cult. Even the discoveries of physical Sciencehave been elevated into a creed and in its name religion andspirituality banned as ignorance and superstition, philosophy asfrippery and moonshine. And to these bigoted exclusions andvain wranglings even the wise have often lent themselves, misledby some spirit of darkness that has mingled with their light andovershadowed it with some cloud of intellectual egoism or spir-itual pride. Mankind seems now indeed inclined to grow a littlemodester and wiser; we no longer slay our fellows in the nameof God’s truth or because they have minds differently trainedor differently constituted from ours; we are less ready to curseand revile our neighbour because he is wicked or presumptuousenough to differ from us in opinion; we are ready even to admitthat Truth is everywhere and cannot be our sole monopoly; weare beginning to look at other religions and philosophies forthe truth and help they contain and no longer merely in orderto damn them as false or criticise what we conceive to be theirerrors. But we are still apt to declare that our truth gives usthe supreme knowledge which other religions or philosophies

4 Essays on the Gita

have missed or only imperfectly grasped so that they deal eitherwith subsidiary and inferior aspects of the truth of things or canmerely prepare less evolved minds for the heights to which wehave arrived. And we are still prone to force upon ourselves orothers the whole sacred mass of the book or gospel we admire,insisting that all shall be accepted as eternally valid truth andno iota or underline or diaeresis denied its part of the plenaryinspiration.

It may therefore be useful in approaching an ancient Scrip-ture, such as the Veda, Upanishads or Gita, to indicate preciselythe spirit in which we approach it and what exactly we thinkwe may derive from it that is of value to humanity and itsfuture. First of all, there is undoubtedly a Truth one and eternalwhich we are seeking, from which all other truth derives, by thelight of which all other truth finds its right place, explanationand relation to the scheme of knowledge. But precisely for thatreason it cannot be shut up in a single trenchant formula, itis not likely to be found in its entirety or in all its bearingsin any single philosophy or scripture or uttered altogether andfor ever by any one teacher, thinker, prophet or Avatar. Norhas it been wholly found by us if our view of it necessitatesthe intolerant exclusion of the truth underlying other systems;for when we reject passionately, we mean simply that we cannotappreciate and explain. Secondly, this Truth, though it is one andeternal, 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 periodand country in which it was produced, the other eternal and im-perishable and applicable in all ages and countries. Moreover, inthe statement of the Truth the actual form given to it, the systemand arrangement, the metaphysical and intellectual mould, theprecise expression used must be largely subject to the mutationsof Time and cease to have the same force; for the human intellectmodifies itself always; continually dividing and putting togetherit is obliged to shift its divisions continually and to rearrangeits syntheses; it is always leaving old expression and symbol fornew 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 sureof understanding an ancient book of this kind precisely in thesense and spirit it bore to its contemporaries. What is of entirelypermanent value is that which besides being universal has beenexperienced, lived and seen with a higher than the intellectualvision.

I hold it therefore of small importance to extract from theGita its exact metaphysical connotation as it was understoodby the men of the time, — even if that were accurately possible.That it is not possible, is shown by the divergence of the originalcommentaries which have been and are still being written uponit; for they all agree in each disagreeing with all the others,each finds in the Gita its own system of metaphysics and trendof religious thought. Nor will even the most painstaking anddisinterested scholarship and the most luminous theories of thehistorical development of Indian philosophy save us from in-evitable error. But what we can do with profit is to seek in theGita for the actual living truths it contains, apart from theirmetaphysical form, to extract from it what can help us or theworld at large and to put it in the most natural and vital formand expression we can find that will be suitable to the mentalityand helpful to the spiritual needs of our present-day humanity.No doubt in this attempt we may mix a good deal of error bornof our own individuality and of the ideas in which we live, asdid greater men before us, but if we steep ourselves in the spiritof this great Scripture and, above all, if we have tried to live inthat spirit, we may be sure of finding in it as much real truthas we are capable of receiving as well as the spiritual influenceand actual help that, personally, we were intended to derivefrom it. And that is after all what Scriptures were written togive; the rest is academical disputation or theological dogma.Only those Scriptures, religions, philosophies which can be thusconstantly renewed, relived, their stuff of permanent truth con-stantly reshaped and developed in the inner thought and spiritualexperience of a developing humanity, continue to be of livingimportance to mankind. The rest remain as monuments of thepast, but have no actual force or vital impulse for the future.


In the Gita there is very little that is merely local or temporaland its spirit is so large, profound and universal that even thislittle can easily be universalised without the sense of the teachingsuffering any diminution or violation; rather by giving an amplerscope to it than belonged to the country and epoch, the teachinggains in depth, truth and power. Often indeed the Gita itselfsuggests the wider scope that can in this way be given to an ideain itself local or limited. Thus it dwells on the ancient Indiansystem and idea of sacrifice as an interchange between gods andmen, — a system and idea which have long been practically ob-solete in India itself and are no longer real to the general humanmind; but we find here a sense so entirely subtle, figurative andsymbolic given to the word “sacrifice” and the conception ofthe gods is so little local or mythological, so entirely cosmic andphilosophical that we can easily accept both as expressive of apractical fact of psychology and general law of Nature and soapply them to the modern conceptions of interchange betweenlife and life and of ethical sacrifice and self-giving as to widenand deepen these and cast over them a more spiritual aspect andthe light of a profounder and more far-reaching Truth. Equallythe idea of action according to the Shastra, the fourfold orderof society, the allusion to the relative position of the four ordersor the comparative spiritual disabilities of Shudras and womenseem at first sight local and temporal, and, if they are too muchpressed in their literal sense, narrow so much at least of theteaching, deprive it of its universality and spiritual depth andlimit its validity for mankind at large. But if we look behindto the spirit and sense and not at the local name and temporalinstitution, we see that here too the sense is deep and true andthe spirit philosophical, spiritual and universal. By Shastra weperceive that the Gita means the law imposed on itself by hu-manity as a substitute for the purely egoistic action of the naturalunregenerate man and a control on his tendency to seek in thesatisfaction of his desire the standard and aim of his life. Wesee too that the fourfold order of society is merely the concreteform of a spiritual truth which is itself independent of the form;it rests on the conception of right works as a rightly ordered


expression of the nature of the individual being through whomthe work is done, that nature assigning him his line and scopein life according to his inborn quality and his self-expressivefunction. Since this is the spirit in which the Gita advances itsmost local and particular instances, we are justified in pursuingalways the same principle and looking always for the deepergeneral truth which is sure to underlie whatever seems at firstsight merely local and of the time. For we shall find alwaysthat the deeper truth and principle is implied in the grain of thethought even when it is not expressly stated in its language.

Nor shall we deal in any other spirit with the element ofphilosophical dogma or religious creed which either enters intothe Gita or hangs about it owing to its use of the philosophicalterms and religious symbols current at the time. When the Gitaspeaks of Sankhya and Yoga, we shall not discuss beyond thelimits of what is just essential for our statement, the relations ofthe Sankhya of the Gita with its one Purusha and strong Vedanticcolouring to the non-theistic or “atheistic” Sankhya that hascome down to us bringing with it its scheme of many Purushasand 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 conver-gent parts of the same Vedantic truth or rather two concurrentways of approaching its realisation, the one philosophical, in-tellectual, analytic, the other intuitional, devotional, practical,ethical, synthetic, reaching knowledge through experience. TheGita recognises no real difference in their teachings. Still lessneed we discuss the theories which regard the Gita as the fruitof some particular religious system or tradition. Its teaching isuniversal whatever may have been its origins.

The philosophical system of the Gita, its arrangement oftruth, is not that part of its teaching which is the most vital,profound, eternally durable; but most of the material of whichthe system is composed, the principal ideas suggestive and pene-trating which are woven into its complex harmony, are eternallyvaluable and valid; for they are not merely the luminous ideas or


striking speculations of a philosophic intellect, but rather endur-ing truths of spiritual experience, verifiable facts of our highestpsychological possibilities which no attempt to read deeply themystery of existence can afford to neglect. Whatever the systemmay be, it is not, as the commentators strive to make it, framedor intended to support any exclusive school of philosophicalthought or to put forward predominantly the claims of anyone form of Yoga. The language of the Gita, the structure ofthought, the combination and balancing of ideas belong neitherto the temper of a sectarian teacher nor to the spirit of a rigorousanalytical dialectics cutting off one angle of the truth to excludeall the others; but rather there is a wide, undulating, encirclingmovement of ideas which is the manifestation of a vast syntheticmind and a rich synthetic experience. This is one of those greatsyntheses in which Indian spirituality has been as rich as in itscreation of the more intensive, exclusive movements of knowl-edge and religious realisation that follow out with an absoluteconcentration one clue, one path to its extreme issues. It doesnot cleave asunder, but reconciles and unifies.

The thought of the Gita is not pure Monism although itsees in one unchanging, pure, eternal Self the foundation ofall cosmic existence, nor Mayavada although it speaks of theMaya of the three modes of Prakriti omnipresent in the createdworld; nor is it qualified Monism although it places in the Onehis eternal supreme Prakriti manifested in the form of the Jivaand lays most stress on dwelling in God rather than dissolu-tion as the supreme state of spiritual consciousness; nor is itSankhya although it explains the created world by the doubleprinciple of Purusha and Prakriti; nor is it Vaishnava Theismalthough it presents to us Krishna, who is the Avatara of Vishnuaccording to the Puranas, as the supreme Deity and allows noessential difference nor any actual superiority of the status ofthe indefinable relationless Brahman over that of this Lord ofbeings who is the Master of the universe and the Friend of allcreatures. Like the earlier spiritual synthesis of the Upanishadsthis later synthesis at once spiritual and intellectual avoids natu-rally every such rigid determination as would injure its universal


comprehensiveness. Its aim is precisely the opposite to that ofthe polemist commentators who found this Scripture establishedas one of the three highest Vedantic authorities and attemptedto turn it into a weapon of offence and defence against otherschools and systems. The Gita is not a weapon for dialecticalwarfare; it is a gate opening on the whole world of spiritualtruth and experience and the view it gives us embraces all theprovinces of that supreme region. It maps out, but it does notcut up or build walls or hedges to confine our vision.

There have been other syntheses in the long history of Indianthought. We start with the Vedic synthesis of the psychologicalbeing of man in its highest flights and widest rangings of divineknowledge, power, joy, life and glory with the cosmic existenceof the gods, pursued behind the symbols of the material universeinto those superior planes which are hidden from the physicalsense and the material mentality. The crown of this synthesis wasin the experience of the Vedic Rishis something divine, transcen-dent and blissful in whose unity the increasing soul of man andthe eternal divine fullness of the cosmic godheads meet perfectlyand fulfil themselves. The Upanishads take up this crowningexperience of the earlier seers and make it their starting-pointfor a high and profound synthesis of spiritual knowledge; theydraw together into a great harmony all that had been seen andexperienced by the inspired and liberated knowers of the Eternalthroughout a great and fruitful period of spiritual seeking. TheGita starts from this Vedantic synthesis and upon the basis of itsessential ideas builds another harmony of the three great meansand powers, Love, Knowledge and Works, through which thesoul of man can directly approach and cast itself into the Eternal.There is yet another, the Tantric,1 which though less subtle andspiritually profound, is even more bold and forceful than thesynthesis of the Gita, — for it seizes even upon the obstacles tothe spiritual life and compels them to become the means for aricher spiritual conquest and enables us to embrace the whole

1 All the Puranic tradition, it must be remembered, draws the richness of its contentsfrom the Tantra.


of Life in our divine scope as the Lila2 of the Divine; and insome directions it is more immediately rich and fruitful, for itbrings forward into the foreground along with divine knowl-edge, divine works and an enriched devotion of divine Love,the secrets also of the Hatha and Raja Yogas, the use of thebody and of mental askesis for the opening up of the divine lifeon all its planes, to which the Gita gives only a passing andperfunctory attention. Moreover it grasps at that idea of thedivine perfectibility of man, possessed by the Vedic Rishis butthrown into the background by the intermediate ages, which isdestined to fill so large a place in any future synthesis of humanthought, experience and aspiration.

We of the coming day stand at the head of a new age of devel-opment which must lead to such a new and larger synthesis. Weare not called upon to be orthodox Vedantins of any of the threeschools or Tantrics or to adhere to one of the theistic religionsof the past or to entrench ourselves within the four corners ofthe teaching of the Gita. That would be to limit ourselves and toattempt to create our spiritual life out of the being, knowledgeand nature of others, of the men of the past, instead of buildingit out of our own being and potentialities. We do not belongto the past dawns, but to the noons of the future. A mass ofnew material is flowing into us; we have not only to assimilatethe influences of the great theistic religions of India and of theworld and a recovered sense of the meaning of Buddhism, butto take full account of the potent though limited revelations ofmodern knowledge and seeking; and, beyond that, the remoteand dateless past which seemed to be dead is returning uponus with an effulgence of many luminous secrets long lost to theconsciousness of mankind but now breaking out again frombehind the veil. All this points to a new, a very rich, a very vastsynthesis; a fresh and widely embracing harmonisation of ourgains is both an intellectual and a spiritual necessity of the future.But just as the past syntheses have taken those which precededthem for their starting-point, so also must that of the future,

2 The cosmic Play.


to be on firm ground, proceed from what the great bodies ofrealised 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 scholasticor academical scrutiny of its thought, nor to place its philosophyin the history of metaphysical speculation, nor shall we deal withit in the manner of the analytical dialectician. We approach itfor help and light and our aim must be to distinguish its essentialand living message, that in it on which humanity has to seize forits perfection and its highest spiritual welfare.

II

The Divine Teacher

THE PECULIARITY of the Gita among the great religiousbooks of the world is that it does not stand apart as awork by itself, the fruit of the spiritual life of a creative

personality like Christ, Mahomed or Buddha or of an epoch ofpure spiritual searching like the Veda and Upanishads, but isgiven as an episode in an epic history of nations and their warsand men and their deeds and arises out of a critical moment in thesoul of one of its leading personages face to face with the crown-ing action of his life, a work terrible, violent and sanguinary, atthe point when he must either recoil from it altogether or carry itthrough to its inexorable completion. It matters little whether orno, as modern criticism supposes, the Gita is a later compositioninserted into the mass of the Mahabharata by its author in orderto invest its teaching with the authority and popularity of thegreat national epic. There seem to me to be strong groundsagainst this supposition for which, besides, the evidence, extrin-sic or internal, is in the last degree scanty and insufficient. Buteven if it be sound, there remains the fact that the author hasnot only taken pains to interweave his work inextricably intothe vast web of the larger poem, but is careful again and again toremind us of the situation from which the teaching has arisen;he returns to it prominently, not only at the end, but in themiddle of his profoundest philosophical disquisitions. We mustaccept the insistence of the author and give its full importanceto this recurrent preoccupation of the Teacher and the disciple.The teaching of the Gita must therefore be regarded not merelyin the light of a general spiritual philosophy or ethical doctrine,but as bearing upon a practical crisis in the application of ethicsand spirituality to human life. For what that crisis stands, whatis the significance of the battle of Kurukshetra and its effect onArjuna’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 gulfsof deep suggestion and hazardous difficulty behind its superficialand outward aspects and can be governed well enough by theordinary everyday standards of thought and action. There areindeed three things in the Gita which are spiritually significant,almost symbolic, typical of the profoundest relations and prob-lems of the spiritual life and of human existence at its roots;they are the divine personality of the Teacher, his characteristicrelations with his disciple and the occasion of his teaching. Theteacher is God himself descended into humanity; the disciple isthe first, as we might say in modern language, the representativeman of his age, closest friend and chosen instrument of theAvatar, his protagonist in an immense work and struggle thesecret purpose of which is unknown to the actors in it, knownonly to the incarnate Godhead who guides it all from behind theveil of his unfathomable mind of knowledge; the occasion is theviolent crisis of that work and struggle at the moment when theanguish and moral difficulty and blind violence of its apparentmovements forces itself with the shock of a visible revelation onthe mind of its representative man and raises the whole questionof the meaning of God in the world and the goal and drift andsense of human life and conduct.

India has from ancient times held strongly a belief in thereality of the Avatara, the descent into form, the revelation ofthe Godhead in humanity. In the West this belief has never re-ally stamped itself upon the mind because it has been presentedthrough exoteric Christianity as a theological dogma withoutany roots in the reason and general consciousness and attitudetowards life. But in India it has grown up and persisted as alogical outcome of the Vedantic view of life and taken firm rootin the consciousness of the race. All existence is a manifestationof God because He is the only existence and nothing can beexcept as either a real figuring or else a figment of that onereality. Therefore every conscious being is in part or in someway a descent of the Infinite into the apparent finiteness of


name and form. But it is a veiled manifestation and there isa gradation between the supreme being1 of the Divine and theconsciousness shrouded partly or wholly by ignorance of selfin the finite. The conscious embodied soul2 is the spark of thedivine Fire and that soul in man opens out to self-knowledge asit develops out of ignorance of self into self-being. The Divinealso, pouring itself into the forms of the cosmic existence, isrevealed ordinarily in an efflorescence of its powers, in energiesand magnitudes of its knowledge, love, joy, developed force ofbeing,3 in degrees and faces of its divinity. But when the divineConsciousness and Power, taking upon itself the human formand the human mode of action, possesses it not only by powersand magnitudes, by degrees and outward faces of itself but outof its eternal self-knowledge, when the Unborn knows itself andacts in the frame of the mental being and the appearance ofbirth, that is the height of the conditioned manifestation; it isthe full and conscious descent of the Godhead, it is the Avatara.

The Vaishnava form of Vedantism which has laid most stressupon this conception expresses the relation of God in man toman in God by the double figure of Nara-Narayana, associatedhistorically with the origin of a religious school very similar inits doctrines to the teaching of the Gita. Nara is the humansoul which, eternal companion of the Divine, finds itself onlywhen it awakens to that companionship and begins, as the Gitawould say, to live in God. Narayana is the divine Soul alwayspresent in our humanity, the secret guide, friend and helper ofthe human being, the “Lord who abides within the heart ofcreatures” of the Gita; when within us the veil of that secretsanctuary is withdrawn and man speaks face to face with God,hears the divine voice, receives the divine light, acts in the divinepower, then becomes possible the supreme uplifting of the em-bodied human conscious-being into the unborn and eternal. Hebecomes capable of that dwelling in God and giving up of hiswhole consciousness into the Divine which the Gita upholds asthe best or highest secret of things, uttamam rahasyam. When

1 para bhava. 2 dehı. 3 vibhuti.


this eternal divine Consciousness always present in every humanbeing, this God in man, takes possession partly4 or wholly of thehuman consciousness and becomes in visible human shape theguide, teacher, leader of the world, not as those who living intheir humanity yet feel something of the power or light or loveof the divine Gnosis informing and conducting them, but outof that divine Gnosis itself, direct from its central force andplenitude, then we have the manifest Avatar. The inner Divinityis the eternal Avatar in man; the human manifestation is its signand development in the external world.

When we thus understand the conception of Avatarhood, wesee that whether for the fundamental teaching of the Gita, ourpresent subject, or for spiritual life generally the external aspecthas only a secondary importance. Such controversies as the onethat has raged in Europe over the historicity of Christ, wouldseem to a spiritually-minded Indian largely a waste of time; hewould concede to it a considerable historical, but hardly anyreligious importance; for what does it matter in the end whethera Jesus son of the carpenter Joseph was actually born in Nazarethor Bethlehem, lived and taught and was done to death on a realor trumped-up charge of sedition, so long as we can know byspiritual experience the inner Christ, live uplifted in the light ofhis teaching and escape from the yoke of the natural Law bythat atonement of man with God of which the crucifixion is thesymbol? If the Christ, God made man, lives within our spiritualbeing, it would seem to matter little whether or not a son ofMary physically lived and suffered and died in Judea. So toothe Krishna who matters to us is the eternal incarnation of theDivine 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 significanceof the human-divine Krishna of the Mahabharata who is pre-sented to us as the teacher of Arjuna on the battle-field ofKurukshetra. The historical Krishna, no doubt, existed. We meet

4 Chaitanya, the Avatar of Nadiya, is said to have been thus partly or occasionallyoccupied by the divine Consciousness and Power.


the name first in the Chhandogya Upanishad where all we cangather about him is that he was well known in spiritual traditionas a knower of the Brahman, so well known indeed in his per-sonality and the circumstances of his life that it was sufficient torefer to him by the name of his mother as Krishna son of Devakifor all to understand who was meant. In the same Upanishadwe find mention of King Dhritarashtra son of Vichitravirya,and since tradition associated the two together so closely thatthey are both of them leading personages in the action of theMahabharata, we may fairly conclude that they were actuallycontemporaries and that the epic is to a great extent dealingwith historical characters and in the war of Kurukshetra witha historical occurrence imprinted firmly on the memory of therace. We know too that Krishna and Arjuna were the objectof religious worship in the pre-Christian centuries; and there issome reason to suppose that they were so in connection with areligious and philosophical tradition from which the Gita mayhave gathered many of its elements and even the foundation ofits synthesis of knowledge, devotion and works, and perhapsalso that the human Krishna was the founder, restorer or at theleast one of the early teachers of this school. The Gita may wellin spite of its later form represent the outcome in Indian thoughtof the teaching of Krishna and the connection of that teachingwith the historical Krishna, with Arjuna and with the war ofKurukshetra may be something more than a dramatic fiction. Inthe Mahabharata Krishna is represented both as the historicalcharacter and the Avatar; his worship and Avatarhood musttherefore have been well established by the time — apparentlyfrom the fifth to the first centuries B.C. — when the old storyand poem or epic tradition of the Bharatas took its presentform. There is a hint also in the poem of the story or legendof the Avatar’s early life in Vrindavan which, as developed bythe Puranas into an intense and powerful spiritual symbol, hasexercised so profound an influence on the religious mind ofIndia. We have also in the Harivansha an account of the life ofKrishna, very evidently full of legends, which perhaps formedthe basis of the Puranic accounts.


But all this, though of considerable historical importance,has none whatever for our present purpose. We are concernedonly with the figure of the divine Teacher as it is presented tous in the Gita and with the Power for which it there stands inthe spiritual illumination of the human being. The Gita acceptsthe human Avatarhood; for the Lord speaks of the repeated,the constant5 manifestation of the Divine in humanity, when Hethe eternal Unborn assumes by his Maya, by the power of theinfinite Consciousness to clothe itself apparently in finite forms,the conditions of becoming which we call birth. But it is not thisupon which stress is laid, but on the transcendent, the cosmicand the internal Divine; it is on the Source of all things and theMaster of all and on the Godhead secret in man. It is this internaldivinity who is meant when the Gita speaks of the doer of violentAsuric austerities troubling the God within or of the sin of thosewho despise the Divine lodged in the human body or of thesame Godhead destroying our ignorance by the blazing lamp ofknowledge. It is then the eternal Avatar, this God in man, thedivine Consciousness always present in the human being whomanifested in a visible form speaks to the human soul in the Gita,illumines the meaning of life and the secret of divine action andgives it the light of the divine knowledge and guidance and theassuring and fortifying word of the Master of existence in thehour when it comes face to face with the painful mystery of theworld. This is what the Indian religious consciousness seeks tomake near to itself in whatever form, whether in the symbolichuman image it enshrines in its temples or in the worship of itsAvatars or in the devotion to the human Guru through whomthe voice of the one world-Teacher makes itself heard. Throughthese it strives to awaken to that inner voice, unveil that formof the Formless and stand face to face with that manifest divinePower, Love and Knowledge.

Secondly, there is the typical, almost the symbolic signifi-cance of the human Krishna who stands behind the great actionof the Mahabharata, not as its hero, but as its secret centre

5 bahuni me vyatıtani janmani . . . sambhavami yuge yuge.


and hidden guide. That action is the action of a whole worldof men and nations, some of whom have come as helpers ofan effort and result by which they do not personally profit,and to these he is a leader, some as its opponents and to themhe also is an opponent, the baffler of their designs and theirslayer and he seems even to some of them an instigator of allevil and destroyer of their old order and familiar world andsecure conventions of virtue and good; some are representativesof that which has to be fulfilled and to them he is counsellor,helper, friend. Where the action pursues its natural course orthe doers of the work have to suffer at the hands of its enemiesand undergo the ordeals which prepare them for mastery, theAvatar is unseen or appears only for occasional comfort andaid, but at every crisis his hand is felt, yet in such a way that allimagine themselves to be the protagonists and even Arjuna, hisnearest friend and chief instrument, does not perceive that he isan instrument and has to confess at last that all the while he didnot really know his divine Friend. He has received counsel fromhis wisdom, help from his power, has loved and been loved,has even adored without understanding his divine nature; buthe has been guided like all others through his own egoism andthe counsel, help and direction have been given in the languageand received by the thoughts of the Ignorance. Until the momentwhen all has been pushed to the terrible issue of the struggle onthe field of Kurukshetra and the Avatar stands at last, still not asfighter, but as the charioteer in the battle-car which carries thedestiny of the fight, he has not revealed Himself even to thosewhom he has chosen.

Thus the figure of Krishna becomes, as it were, the symbolof the divine dealings with humanity. Through our egoism andignorance we are moved, thinking that we are the doers of thework, vaunting of ourselves as the real causes of the result,and that which moves us we see only occasionally as somevague or even some human and earthly fountain of knowledge,aspiration, force, some Principle or Light or Power which weacknowledge and adore without knowing what it is until theoccasion arises that forces us to stand arrested before the Veil.


And the action in which this divine figure moves is the wholewide action of man in life, not merely the inner life, but all thisobscure course of the world which we can judge only by thetwilight of the human reason as it opens up dimly before ouruncertain advance the little span in front. This is the distinguish-ing feature of the Gita that it is the culmination of such an actionwhich gives rise to its teaching and assigns that prominence andbold relief to the gospel of works which it enunciates with anemphasis and force we do not find in other Indian Scriptures.Not only in the Gita, but in other passages of the Mahabharatawe meet with Krishna declaring emphatically the necessity ofaction, but it is here that he reveals its secret and the divinitybehind our works.

The symbolic companionship of Arjuna and Krishna, thehuman and the divine soul, is expressed elsewhere in Indianthought, in the heavenward journey of Indra and Kutsa seatedin one chariot, in the figure of the two birds upon one tree in theUpanishad, in the twin figures of Nara and Narayana, the seerswho do tapasya together for the knowledge. But in all three itis the idea of the divine knowledge in which, as the Gita says,all action culminates that is in view; here it is instead the actionwhich leads to that knowledge and in which the divine Knowerfigures himself. Arjuna and Krishna, this human and this divine,stand together not as seers in the peaceful hermitage of medita-tion, but as fighter and holder of the reins in the clamorous field,in the midst of the hurtling shafts, in the chariot of battle. TheTeacher of the Gita is therefore not only the God in man whounveils himself in the word of knowledge, but the God in manwho moves our whole world of action, by and for whom allour humanity exists and struggles and labours, towards whomall human life travels and progresses. He is the secret Master ofworks and sacrifice and the Friend of the human peoples.

III

The Human Disciple

SUCH then is the divine Teacher of the Gita, the eternalAvatar, the Divine who has descended into the human con-sciousness, the Lord seated within the heart of all beings,

He who guides from behind the veil all our thought and actionand heart’s seeking even as He directs from behind the veil ofvisible and sensible forms and forces and tendencies the greatuniversal action of the world which He has manifested in Hisown being. All the strife of our upward endeavour and seekingfinds its culmination and ceases in a satisfied fulfilment when wecan rend the veil and get behind our apparent self to this realSelf, 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 activitiesinto His plenary light, offer up our errant and struggling willand energies into His vast, luminous and undivided Will, atonce renounce and satisfy all our dissipated outward-movingdesires and emotions in the plenitude of His self-existent Bliss.This is the world-Teacher of whose eternal knowledge all otherhighest 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 bat-tlefield, is a counterpart of this conception; he is the type of thestruggling human soul who has not yet received the knowledge,but has grown fit to receive it by action in the world in a closecompanionship and an increasing nearness to the higher anddivine Self in humanity. There is a method of explaining theGita in which not only this episode but the whole Mahabha-rata is turned into an allegory of the inner life and has nothingto do with our outward human life and action, but only withthe battles of the soul and the powers that strive within us forpossession. 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, wouldturn the straightforward philosophical language of the Gita intoa constant, laborious and somewhat puerile mystification. Thelanguage of the Veda and part at least of the Puranas is plainlysymbolic, full of figures and concrete representations of thingsthat lie behind the veil, but the Gita is written in plain termsand professes to solve the great ethical and spiritual difficultieswhich the life of man raises, and it will not do to go behindthis plain language and thought and wrest them to the serviceof our fancy. But there is this much of truth in the view, thatthe setting of the doctrine though not symbolical, is certainlytypical, as indeed the setting of such a discourse as the Gitamust necessarily be if it is to have any relation at all with thatwhich it frames. Arjuna, as we have seen, is the representativeman of a great world-struggle and divinely-guided movementof men and nations; in the Gita he typifies the human soul ofaction brought face to face through that action in its highestand most violent crisis with the problem of human life and itsapparent incompatibility with the spiritual state or even with apurely ethical ideal of perfection.

Arjuna is the fighter in the chariot with the divine Krishnaas his charioteer. In the Veda also we have this image of thehuman soul and the divine riding in one chariot through a greatbattle to the goal of a high-aspiring effort. But there it is a purefigure and symbol. The Divine is there Indra, the Master of theWorld of Light and Immortality, the power of divine knowledgewhich descends to the aid of the human seeker battling with thesons of falsehood, darkness, limitation, mortality; the battle iswith spiritual enemies who bar the way to the higher world ofour being; and the goal is that plane of vast being resplendentwith the light of the supreme Truth and uplifted to the consciousimmortality of the perfected soul, of which Indra is the master.The human soul is Kutsa, he who constantly seeks the seer-knowledge, as his name implies, and he is the son of Arjuna orArjuni, the White One, child of Switra the White Mother; he is,that is to say, the sattwic or purified and light-filled soul whichis open to the unbroken glories of the divine knowledge. And


when the chariot reaches the end of its journey, the own home ofIndra, the human Kutsa has grown into such an exact likeness ofhis divine companion that he can only be distinguished by Sachi,the wife of Indra, because she is “truth-conscious”. The parableis evidently of the inner life of man; it is a figure of the humangrowing into the likeness of the eternal divine by the increasingillumination of Knowledge. But the Gita starts from action andArjuna 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 temper-ament of the disciple is clearly indicated and it is maintainedthroughout. It becomes first evident in the manner in which heis awakened to the sense of what he is doing, the great slaughterof which he is to be the chief instrument, in the thoughts whichimmediately rise in him, in the standpoint and the psychologicalmotives which make him recoil from the whole terrible catastro-phe. They are not the thoughts, the standpoint, the motives ofa philosophical or even of a deeply reflective mind or a spiritualtemperament confronted with the same or a similar problem.They are those, as we might say, of the practical or the pragmaticman, the emotional, sensational, moral and intelligent humanbeing not habituated to profound and original reflection or anysounding of the depths, accustomed rather to high but fixed stan-dards of thought and action and a confident treading throughall vicissitudes and difficulties, who now finds all his standardsfailing him and all the basis of his confidence in himself and hislife shorn away from under him at a single stroke. That is thenature of the crisis which he undergoes.

Arjuna is, in the language of the Gita, a man subject tothe action of the three gunas or modes of the Nature-Forceand habituated to move unquestioningly in that field, like thegenerality of men. He justifies his name only in being so far pureand sattwic as to be governed by high and clear principles andimpulses and habitually control his lower nature by the noblestLaw which he knows. He is not of a violent Asuric disposition,not the slave of his passions, but has been trained to a high calmand self-control, to an unswerving performance of his duties


and firm obedience to the best principles of the time and societyin which he has lived and the religion and ethics to which hehas been brought up. He is egoistic like other men, but with thepurer or sattwic egoism which regards the moral law and societyand the claims of others and not only or predominantly his owninterests, desires and passions. He has lived and guided himselfby the Shastra, the moral and social code. The thought whichpreoccupies him, the standard which he obeys is the dharma,that collective Indian conception of the religious, social andmoral rule of conduct, and especially the rule of the stationand function to which he belongs, he the Kshatriya, the high-minded, self-governed, chivalrous prince and warrior and leaderof Aryan men. Following always this rule, conscious of virtueand right dealing he has travelled so far and finds suddenlythat it has led him to become the protagonist of a terrific andunparalleled slaughter, a monstrous civil war involving all thecultured Aryan nations which must lead to the complete destruc-tion of the flower of their manhood and threatens their orderedcivilisation with chaos and collapse.

It is typical again of the pragmatic man that it is throughhis sensations that he awakens to the meaning of his action. Hehas asked his friend and charioteer to place him between thetwo armies, not with any profounder idea, but with the proudintention of viewing and looking in the face these myriads of thechampions of unrighteousness whom he has to meet and conquerand 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 anddomestic war comes home to him, a war in which not only menof the same race, the same nation, the same clan, but those ofthe same family and household stand upon opposite sides. Allwhom the social man holds most dear and sacred, he must meetas 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. Itis not that he did not know these things before, but he has


never realised it all; obsessed by his claims and wrongs and bythe principles of his life, the struggle for the right, the duty ofthe Kshatriya to protect justice and the law and fight and beatdown injustice and lawless violence, he has neither thought itout deeply nor felt it in his heart and at the core of his life. Andnow it is shown to his vision by the divine charioteer, placedsensationally before his eyes, and comes home to him like ablow delivered at the very centre of his sensational, vital andemotional being.

The first result is a violent sensational and physical crisiswhich produces a disgust of the action and its material objectsand of life itself. He rejects the vital aim pursued by egoistichumanity in its action, — happiness and enjoyment; he rejectsthe vital aim of the Kshatriya, victory and rule and power andthe government of men. What after all is this fight for justicewhen reduced to its practical terms, but just this, a fight for theinterests of himself, his brothers and his party, for possessionand enjoyment and rule? But at such a cost these things arenot worth having. For they are of no value in themselves, butonly as a means to the right maintenance of social and nationallife and it is these very aims that in the person of his kin andhis race he is about to destroy. And then comes the cry of theemotions. These are they for whose sake life and happiness aredesired, our “own people”. Who would consent to slay these forthe sake of all the earth, or even for the kingdom of the threeworlds? What pleasure can there be in life, what happiness, whatsatisfaction in oneself after such a deed? The whole thing is adreadful sin, — for now the moral sense awakens to justify therevolt of the sensations and the emotions. It is a sin, there is noright nor justice in mutual slaughter; especially are those whoare to be slain the natural objects of reverence and of love, thosewithout whom one would not care to live, and to violate thesesacred feelings can be no virtue, can be nothing but a heinouscrime. Granted that the offence, the aggression, the first sin, thecrimes of greed and selfish passion which have brought thingsto such a pass came from the other side; yet armed resistanceto wrong under such circumstances would be itself a sin and


crime worse than theirs because they are blinded by passion andunconscious of guilt, while on this side it would be with a clearsense of guilt that the sin would be committed. And for what?For the maintenance of family morality, of the social law andthe law of the nation? These are the very standards that willbe destroyed by this civil war; the family itself will be broughtto the point of annihilation, corruption of morals and loss ofthe purity of race will be engendered, the eternal laws of therace and moral law of the family will be destroyed. Ruin of therace, the collapse of its high traditions, ethical degradation andhell for the authors of such a crime, these are the only practicalresults possible of this monstrous civil strife. “Therefore,” criesArjuna, casting down the divine bow and inexhaustible quivergiven to him by the gods for that tremendous hour, “it is morefor my welfare that the sons of Dhritarashtra armed should slayme unarmed and unresisting. I will not fight.”

The character of this inner crisis is therefore not the ques-tioning of the thinker; it is not a recoil from the appearancesof life and a turning of the eye inward in search of the truth ofthings, the real meaning of existence and a solution or an escapefrom the dark riddle of the world. It is the sensational, emotionaland moral revolt of the man hitherto satisfied with action and itscurrent standards who finds himself cast by them into a hideouschaos where they are in violent conflict with each other and withthemselves and there is no moral standing-ground left, nothingto lay hold of and walk by, no dharma.1 That for the soul ofaction in the mental being is the worst possible crisis, failureand overthrow. The revolt itself is the most elemental and simplepossible; sensationally, the elemental feeling of horror, pity anddisgust; vitally, the loss of attraction and faith in the recognisedand familiar objects of action and aims of life; emotionally, therecoil of the ordinary feelings of social man, affection, reverence,desire of a common happiness and satisfaction, from a stern dutyoutraging 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.


hell and rejection of “blood-stained enjoyments”; practically,the sense that the standards of action have led to a result whichdestroys the practical aims of action. But the whole upshot is thatall-embracing inner bankruptcy which Arjuna expresses whenhe says that his whole conscious being, not the thought alonebut heart and vital desires and all, are utterly bewildered andcan find nowhere the dharma, nowhere any valid law of action.For this alone he takes refuge as a disciple with Krishna; giveme, he practically asks, that which I have lost, a true law, a clearrule of action, a path by which I can again confidently walk. Hedoes not ask for the secret of life or of the world, the meaningand purpose of it all, but for a dharma.

Yet it is precisely this secret for which he does not ask, orat least so much of the knowledge as is necessary to lead himinto a higher life, to which the divine Teacher intends to leadthis disciple; for he means him to give up all dharmas exceptthe one broad and vast rule of living consciously in the Divineand acting from that consciousness. Therefore after testing thecompleteness of his revolt from the ordinary standards of con-duct, he proceeds to tell him much that has to do with the stateof the soul, but nothing of any outward rule of action. He mustbe equal in soul, abandon the desire of the fruits of work, riseabove his intellectual notions of sin and virtue, live and act inYoga with a mind in Samadhi, firmly fixed, that is to say, in theDivine alone. Arjuna is not satisfied: he wishes to know howthe change to this state will affect the outward action of theman, what result it will have on his speech, his movements, hisstate, what difference it will make in this acting, living humanbeing. Krishna persists merely in enlarging upon the ideas he hasalready brought forward, on the soul-state behind the action, noton the action itself. It is the fixed anchoring of the intelligencein a state of desireless equality that is the one thing needed.Arjuna breaks out impatiently, — for here is no rule of conductsuch as he sought, but rather, as it seems to him, the negation ofall action, — “If thou holdest the intelligence to be greater thanaction, why then dost thou appoint me to an action terrible inits nature? Thou bewilderest my understanding with a mingled


word: speak one thing decisively by which I can attain to whatis the best.” It is always the pragmatic man who has no value formetaphysical thought or for the inner life except when they helphim 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 actionwhich he can understand. But to live and act in the world, yetbe above it, this is a “mingled” and confusing word the sense ofwhich he has no patience to grasp.

The rest of Arjuna’s questions and utterances proceed fromthe same temperament and character. When he is told that oncethe soul-state is assured there need be no apparent change in theaction, he must act always by the law of his nature, even if theact itself seem faulty and deficient compared with that of anotherlaw than his own, he is troubled. The nature! but what of thissense of sin in the action with which he is preoccupied? is it notthis very nature which drives men as if by force and even againsttheir better will into sin and guilt? His practical intelligence isbaffled by Krishna’s assertion that it was he who in ancient timesrevealed to Vivasvan this Yoga, since lost, which he is now againrevealing to Arjuna, and by his demand for an explanation heprovokes the famous and oft-quoted statement of Avatarhoodand its mundane purpose. He is again perplexed by the wordsin which Krishna continues to reconcile action and renunciationof action and asks once again for a decisive statement of thatwhich is the best and highest, not this “mingled” word. Whenhe realises fully the nature of the Yoga which he is bidden toembrace, his pragmatic nature accustomed to act from mentalwill and preference and desire is appalled by its difficulty andhe asks what is the end of the soul which attempts and fails,whether it does not lose both this life of human activity andthought and emotion which it has left behind and the Brahmicconsciousness to which it aspires and falling from both perishlike a dissolving cloud?

When his doubts and perplexities are resolved and he knowsthat it is the Divine which must be his law, he aims again andalways at such clear and decisive knowledge as will guide himpractically to this source and this rule of his future action. How


is the Divine to be distinguished among the various states ofbeing which constitute our ordinary experience? What are thegreat manifestations of its self-energy in the world in which hecan recognise and realise it by meditation? May he not see evennow the divine cosmic Form of That which is actually speakingto him through the veil of the human mind and body? And hislast questions demand a clear distinction between renunciationof works and this subtler renunciation he is asked to prefer;the actual difference between Purusha and Prakriti, the Fieldand the Knower of the Field, so important for the practice ofdesireless action under the drive of the divine Will; and finallya clear statement of the practical operations and results of thethree modes of Prakriti which he is bidden to surmount.

To such a disciple the Teacher of the Gita gives his divineteaching. He seizes him at a moment of his psychological devel-opment by egoistic action when all the mental, moral, emotionalvalues of the ordinary egoistic and social life of man have col-lapsed in a sudden bankruptcy, and he has to lift him up outof this lower life into a higher consciousness, out of ignorantattachment to action into that which transcends, yet originatesand orders action, out of ego into Self, out of life in mind,vitality and body into that higher nature beyond mind which isthe status of the Divine. He has at the same time to give him thatfor which he asks and for which he is inspired to seek by theguidance within him, a new Law of life and action high above theinsufficient rule of the ordinary human existence with its endlessconflicts and oppositions, perplexities and illusory certainties, ahigher Law by which the soul shall be free from this bondage ofworks and yet powerful to act and conquer in the vast libertyof its divine being. For the action must be performed, the worldmust fulfil its cycles and the soul of the human being must notturn back in ignorance from the work it is here to do. The wholecourse of the teaching of the Gita is determined and directed,even in its widest wheelings, towards the fulfilment of these threeobjects.

IV

The Core of the Teaching

WE KNOW the divine Teacher, we see the human dis-ciple; it remains to form a clear conception of thedoctrine. A clear conception fastening upon the essen-

tial idea, the central heart of the teaching is especially necessaryhere because the Gita with its rich and many-sided thought, itssynthetical grasp of different aspects of the spiritual life andthe fluent winding motion of its argument lends itself, evenmore than other scriptures, to one-sided misrepresentations bornof a partisan intellectuality. The unconscious or half-consciouswresting of fact and word and idea to suit a preconceived notionor the doctrine or principle of one’s preference is recognised byIndian logicians as one of the most fruitful sources of fallacy;and it is perhaps the one which it is most difficult for eventhe most conscientious thinker to avoid. For the human reasonis incapable of always playing the detective upon itself in thisrespect; it is its very nature to seize upon some partial conclu-sion, idea, principle, become its partisan and make it the key toall truth, and it has an infinite faculty of doubling upon itselfso as to avoid detecting in its operations this necessary andcherished weakness. The Gita lends itself easily to this kind oferror, because it is easy, by throwing particular emphasis on oneof its aspects or even on some salient and emphatic text andputting all the rest of the eighteen chapters into the backgroundor making them a subordinate and auxiliary teaching, to turn itinto a partisan of our own doctrine or dogma.

Thus, there are those who make the Gita teach, not worksat all, but a discipline of preparation for renouncing life andworks: the indifferent performance of prescribed actions or ofwhatever task may lie ready to the hands, becomes the means,the discipline; the final renunciation of life and works is the solereal object. It is quite easy to justify this view by citations from


the book and by a certain arrangement of stress in following outits argument, especially if we shut our eyes to the peculiar wayin which it uses such a word as sannyasa, renunciation; but it isquite impossible to persist in this view on an impartial reading inface of the continual assertion to the very end that action shouldbe preferred to inaction and that superiority lies with the true,the inner renunciation of desire by equality and the giving up ofworks to the supreme Purusha.

Others again speak of the Gita as if the doctrine of devotionwere its whole teaching and put in the background its monisticelements and the high place it gives to quietistic immergence inthe one self of all. And undoubtedly its emphasis on devotion,its insistence on the aspect of the Divine as Lord and Purushaand its doctrine of the Purushottama, the Supreme Being who issuperior both to the mutable Being and to the Immutable andwho is what in His relation to the world we know as God, arethe most striking and among the most vital elements of the Gita.Still, this Lord is the Self in whom all knowledge culminates andthe Master of sacrifice to whom all works lead as well as theLord of Love into whose being the heart of devotion enters, andthe Gita preserves a perfectly equal balance, emphasising nowknowledge, now works, now devotion, but for the purposes ofthe immediate trend of the thought, not with any absolute sepa-rate preference of one over the others. He in whom all three meetand become one, He is the Supreme Being, the Purushottama.

But at the present day, since in fact the modern mind beganto recognise and deal at all with the Gita, the tendency is tosubordinate its elements of knowledge and devotion, to takeadvantage of its continual insistence on action and to find in ita scripture of the Karmayoga, a Light leading us on the path ofaction, a Gospel of Works. Undoubtedly, the Gita is a Gospelof Works, but of works which culminate in knowledge, that is,in spiritual realisation and quietude, and of works motived bydevotion, that is, a conscious surrender of one’s whole self firstinto the hands and then into the being of the Supreme, and notat all of works as they are understood by the modern mind, notat all an action dictated by egoistic and altruistic, by personal,

The Core of the Teaching 31

social, humanitarian motives, principles, ideals. Yet this is whatpresent-day interpretations seek to make of the Gita. We are toldcontinually by many authoritative voices that the Gita, opposingin this the ordinary ascetic and quietistic tendency of Indianthought and spirituality, proclaims with no uncertain sound thegospel of human action, the ideal of disinterested performanceof social duties, nay, even, it would seem, the quite modernideal of social service. To all this I can only reply that verypatently and even on the very surface of it the Gita does nothingof the kind and that this is a modern misreading, a readingof the modern mind into an ancient book, of the present-dayEuropean or Europeanised intellect into a thoroughly antique,a thoroughly Oriental and Indian teaching. That which the Gitateaches is not a human, but a divine action; not the performanceof social duties, but the abandonment of all other standardsof duty or conduct for a selfless performance of the divine willworking through our nature; not social service, but the action ofthe Best, the God-possessed, the Master-men done impersonallyfor the sake of the world and as a sacrifice to Him who standsbehind man and Nature.

In other words, the Gita is not a book of practical ethics, butof the spiritual life. The modern mind is just now the Europeanmind, such as it has become after having abandoned not only thephilosophic idealism of the highest Graeco-Roman culture fromwhich it started, but the Christian devotionalism of the MiddleAges; these it has replaced by or transmuted into a practicalidealism and social, patriotic and philanthropic devotion. It hasgot rid of God or kept Him only for Sunday use and erected inHis place man as its deity and society as its visible idol. At itsbest it is practical, ethical, social, pragmatic, altruistic, human-itarian. Now all these things are good, are especially neededat the present day, are part of the divine Will or they wouldnot have become so dominant in humanity. Nor is there anyreason why the divine man, the man who lives in the Brahmicconsciousness, in the God-being should not be all of these thingsin his action; he will be, if they are the best ideal of the age, theYugadharma, and there is no yet higher ideal to be established,


no great radical change to be effected. For he is, as the Teacherpoints out to his disciple, the best who has to set the standardfor others; and in fact Arjuna is called upon to live according tothe highest ideals of his age and the prevailing culture, but withknowledge, with understanding of that which lay behind, andnot as ordinary men, with a following of the merely outwardlaw and rule.

But the point here is that the modern mind has exiled fromits practical motive-power the two essential things, God or theEternal and spirituality or the God-state, which are the masterconceptions of the Gita. It lives in humanity only, and the Gitawould have us live in God, though for the world in God; in itslife, heart and intellect only, and the Gita would have us live inthe spirit; in the mutable Being who is “all creatures”, and theGita would have us live also in the Immutable and the Supreme;in the changing march of Time, and the Gita would have uslive in the Eternal. Or if these higher things are now beginningto be vaguely envisaged, it is only to make them subservient toman and society; but God and spirituality exist in their ownright and not as adjuncts. And in practice the lower in us mustlearn to exist for the higher, in order that the higher also may inus consciously exist for the lower, to draw it nearer to its ownaltitudes.

Therefore it is a mistake to interpret the Gita from thestandpoint of the mentality of today and force it to teach us thedisinterested performance of duty as the highest and all-sufficientlaw. A little consideration of the situation with which the Gitadeals will show us that this could not be its meaning. For thewhole point of the teaching, that from which it arises, that whichcompels the disciple to seek the Teacher, is an inextricable clashof the various related conceptions of duty ending in the collapseof the whole useful intellectual and moral edifice erected bythe human mind. In human life some sort of a clash arises fairlyoften, as for instance between domestic duties and the call of thecountry or the cause, or between the claim of the country and thegood of humanity or some larger religious or moral principle.An inner situation may even arise, as with the Buddha, in which


all duties have to be abandoned, trampled on, flung aside inorder to follow the call of the Divine within. I cannot thinkthat the Gita would solve such an inner situation by sendingBuddha back to his wife and father and the government of theSakya State, or would direct a Ramakrishna to become a Punditin a vernacular school and disinterestedly teach little boys theirlessons, or bind down a Vivekananda to support his family andfor that to follow dispassionately the law or medicine or jour-nalism. The Gita does not teach the disinterested performanceof duties but the following of the divine life, the abandonmentof all dharmas, sarvadharman, to take refuge in the Supremealone, and the divine activity of a Buddha, a Ramakrishna, aVivekananda is perfectly in consonance with this teaching. Nay,although the Gita prefers action to inaction, it does not rule outthe renunciation of works, but accepts it as one of the ways tothe Divine. If that can only be attained by renouncing worksand life and all duties and the call is strong within us, then intothe bonfire they must go, and there is no help for it. The callof God is imperative and cannot be weighed against any otherconsiderations.

But here there is this farther difficulty that the action whichArjuna must do is one from which his moral sense recoils. Itis his duty to fight, you say? But that duty has now becometo his mind a terrible sin. How does it help him or solve hisdifficulty, to tell him that he must do his duty disinterestedly,dispassionately? He will want to know which is his duty or howit 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 hisside, but that does not and cannot satisfy him, because his verypoint is that the justice of his legal claim does not justify him insupporting it by a pitiless massacre destructive to the future ofhis nation. Is he then to act dispassionately in the sense of notcaring whether it is a sin or what its consequences may be solong as he does his duty as a soldier? That may be the teaching ofa State, of politicians, of lawyers, of ethical casuists; it can neverbe the teaching of a great religious and philosophical Scripturewhich sets out to solve the problem of life and action from the


very roots. And if that is what the Gita has to say on a mostpoignant moral and spiritual problem, we must put it out of thelist of the world’s Scriptures and thrust it, if anywhere, then intoour library of political science and ethical casuistry.

Undoubtedly, the Gita does, like the Upanishads, teach theequality which rises above sin and virtue, beyond good and evil,but only as a part of the Brahmic consciousness and for the manwho is on the path and advanced enough to fulfil the supremerule. It does not preach indifference to good and evil for theordinary life of man, where such a doctrine would have themost pernicious consequences. On the contrary it affirms thatthe doers of evil shall not attain to God. Therefore if Arjunasimply seeks to fulfil in the best way the ordinary law of man’slife, disinterested performance of what he feels to be a sin, athing of Hell, will not help him, even though that sin be his dutyas a soldier. He must refrain from what his conscience abhorsthough a thousand duties were shattered to pieces.

We must remember that duty is an idea which in practicerests upon social conceptions. We may extend the term beyondits proper connotation and talk of our duty to ourselves or wemay, if we like, say in a transcendent sense that it was Buddha’sduty to abandon all, or even that it is the ascetic’s duty to sitmotionless in a cave! But this is obviously to play with words.Duty is a relative term and depends upon our relation to oth-ers. It is a father’s duty, as a father, to nurture and educate hischildren; a lawyer’s to do his best for his client even if he knowshim to be guilty and his defence to be a lie; a soldier’s to fightand 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 remainsclear, a practical matter of course even when it is not a pointof honour or affection, and overrides the absolute religious ormoral law. But what if the inner view is changed, if the lawyeris awakened to the absolute sinfulness of falsehood, the judgebecomes convinced that capital punishment is a crime againsthumanity, the man called upon to the battlefield feels, like theconscientious objector of today or as a Tolstoy would feel, that


in no circumstances is it permissible to take human life any morethan to eat human flesh? It is obvious that here the moral lawwhich is above all relative duties must prevail; and that lawdepends on no social relation or conception of duty but on theawakened inner perception of man, the moral being.

There are in the world, in fact, two different laws of conducteach valid on its own plane, the rule principally dependent onexternal status and the rule independent of status and entirelydependent on the thought and conscience. The Gita does notteach us to subordinate the higher plane to the lower, it doesnot ask the awakened moral consciousness to slay itself on thealtar of duty as a sacrifice and victim to the law of the socialstatus. It calls us higher and not lower; from the conflict ofthe two planes it bids us ascend to a supreme poise above themainly practical, above the purely ethical, to the Brahmic con-sciousness. It replaces the conception of social duty by a divineobligation. The subjection to external law gives place to a certainprinciple of inner self-determination of action proceeding by thesoul’s freedom from the tangled law of works. And this, as weshall see, — the Brahmic consciousness, the soul’s freedom fromworks and the determination of works in the nature by the Lordwithin and above us, — is the kernel of the Gita’s teaching withregard to action.

The Gita can only be understood, like any other great workof the kind, by studying it in its entirety and as a developingargument. But the modern interpreters, starting from the greatwriter Bankim Chandra Chatterji who first gave to the Gita thisnew sense of a Gospel of Duty, have laid an almost exclusivestress on the first three or four chapters and in those on the ideaof equality, on the expression kartavyam karma, the work that isto be done, which they render by duty, and on the phrase “Thouhast a right to action, but none to the fruits of action” whichis now popularly quoted as the great word, mahavakya, of theGita. The rest of the eighteen chapters with their high philosophyare given a secondary importance, except indeed the great visionin the eleventh. This is natural enough for the modern mindwhich is, or has been till yesterday, inclined to be impatient of


metaphysical subtleties and far-off spiritual seekings, eager toget to work and, like Arjuna himself, mainly concerned for aworkable law of works, a dharma. But it is the wrong way tohandle this Scripture.

The equality which the Gita preaches is not disinterested-ness, — the great command to Arjuna given after the foundationand main structure of the teaching have been laid and built,“Arise, slay thy enemies, enjoy a prosperous kingdom,” has notthe ring of an uncompromising altruism or of a white, dispas-sionate abnegation; it is a state of inner poise and wideness whichis the foundation of spiritual freedom. With that poise, in thatfreedom we have to do the “work that is to be done,” a phrasewhich the Gita uses with the greatest wideness including in itall works, sarvakarman. i, and which far exceeds, though it mayinclude, social duties or ethical obligations. What is the work tobe done is not to be determined by the individual choice; nor isthe right to the action and the rejection of claim to the fruit thegreat word of the Gita, but only a preliminary word governingthe first state of the disciple when he begins ascending the hillof Yoga. It is practically superseded at a subsequent stage. Forthe Gita goes on to affirm emphatically that the man is not thedoer of the action; it is Prakriti, it is Nature, it is the great Forcewith its three modes of action that works through him, and hemust learn to see that it is not he who does the work. Thereforethe “right to action” is an idea which is only valid so long as weare still under the illusion of being the doer; it must necessarilydisappear from the mind like the claim to the fruit, as soon aswe cease to be to our own consciousness the doer of our works.All pragmatic egoism, whether of the claim to fruits or of theright to action, is then at an end.

But the determinism of Prakriti is not the last word of theGita. The equality of the will and the rejection of fruits areonly means for entering with the mind and the heart and theunderstanding into the divine consciousness and living in it;and the Gita expressly says that they are to be employed as ameans as long as the disciple is unable so to live or even to seekby practice the gradual development of this higher state. And


what is this Divine, whom Krishna declares himself to be? Itis the Purushottama beyond the Self that acts not, beyond thePrakriti that acts, foundation of the one, master of the other,the Lord of whom all is the manifestation, who even in ourpresent subjection to Maya sits in the heart of His creaturesgoverning the works of Prakriti, He by whom the armies onthe field of Kurukshetra have already been slain while yet theylive and who uses Arjuna only as an instrument or immediateoccasion of this great slaughter. Prakriti is only His executiveforce. The disciple has to rise beyond this Force and its threemodes or gun. as; he has to become trigun. atıta. Not to her hashe to surrender his actions, over which he has no longer anyclaim or “right”, but into the being of the Supreme. Reposinghis mind and understanding, heart and will in Him, with self-knowledge, with God-knowledge, with world-knowledge, witha perfect equality, a perfect devotion, an absolute self-giving,he has to do works as an offering to the Master of all self-energisings and all sacrifice. Identified in will, conscious withthat consciousness, That shall decide and initiate the action. Thisis the solution which the Divine Teacher offers to the disciple.

What the great, the supreme word of the Gita is, itsmahavakya, we have not to seek; for the Gita itself declaresit in its last utterance, the crowning note of the great diapason.“With the Lord in thy heart take refuge with all thy being; byHis grace thou shalt attain to the supreme peace and the eternalstatus. So have I expounded to thee a knowledge more secretthan that which is hidden. Further hear the most secret, thesupreme word that I shall speak to thee. Become my-minded,devoted to Me, to Me do sacrifice and adoration; infallibly, thoushalt come to Me, for dear to me art thou. Abandoning all lawsof conduct seek refuge in Me alone. I will release thee from allsin; do not grieve.”

The argument of the Gita resolves itself into three great stepsby which action rises out of the human into the divine planeleaving the bondage of the lower for the liberty of a higher law.First, by the renunciation of desire and a perfect equality workshave to be done as a sacrifice by man as the doer, a sacrifice to


a deity who is the supreme and only Self though by him not yetrealised in his own being. This is the initial step. Secondly, notonly the desire of the fruit, but the claim to be the doer of workshas to be renounced in the realisation of the Self as the equal, theinactive, the immutable principle and of all works as simply theoperation of universal Force, of the Nature-Soul, Prakriti, theunequal, active, mutable power. Lastly, the supreme Self has tobe seen as the supreme Purusha governing this Prakriti, of whomthe soul in Nature is a partial manifestation, by whom all worksare directed, in a perfect transcendence, through Nature. To himlove and adoration and the sacrifice of works have to be offered;the whole being has to be surrendered to Him and the wholeconsciousness raised up to dwell in this divine consciousness sothat the human soul may share in His divine transcendence ofNature 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 isJnanayoga, the self-realisation and knowledge of the true na-ture of the self and the world; and here the insistence is onknowledge; but the sacrifice of works continues and the path ofWorks becomes one with but does not disappear into the path ofKnowledge. The last step is Bhaktiyoga, adoration and seekingof the supreme Self as the Divine Being, and here the insistence ison 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, worksand devotion. And the fruit of the sacrifice, the one fruit stillplaced before the seeker, is attained, union with the divine Beingand oneness with the supreme divine nature.

V

Kurukshetra

BEFORE we can proceed, following in the large steps of theTeacher of the Gita, to watch his tracing of the triune pathof man, — the path which is that of his will, heart, thought

raising themselves to the Highest and into the being of that whichis the supreme object of all action, love and knowledge, we mustconsider once more the situation from which the Gita arises, butnow in its largest bearings as a type of human life and even of allworld-existence. For although Arjuna is himself concerned onlywith his own situation, his inner struggle and the law of actionhe must follow, yet, as we have seen, the particular question heraises, in the manner in which he raises it, does really bring upthe whole question of human life and action, what the worldis and why it is and how possibly, it being what it is, life herein the world can be reconciled with life in the Spirit. And allthis deep and difficult matter the Teacher insists on resolving asthe very foundation of his command to an action which mustproceed from a new poise of being and by the light of a liberatingknowledge.

But what, then, is it that makes the difficulty for the manwho has to take the world as it is and act in it and yet wouldlive, within, the spiritual life? What is this aspect of existencewhich appals his awakened mind and brings about what the titleof the first chapter of the Gita calls significantly the Yoga of thedejection of Arjuna, the dejection and discouragement felt bythe human being when he is forced to face the spectacle of theuniverse as it really is with the veil of the ethical illusion, theillusion of self-righteousness torn from his eyes, before a higherreconciliation with himself is effected? It is that aspect which isfigured outwardly in the carnage and massacre of Kurukshetraand spiritually by the vision of the Lord of all things as Timearising to devour and destroy the creatures whom it has made.


This is the vision of the Lord of all existence as the universalCreator but also the universal Destroyer, of whom the ancientScripture can say in a ruthless image, “The sages and the heroesare his food and death is the spice of his banquet.” It is oneand the same truth seen first indirectly and obscurely in thefacts of life and then directly and clearly in the soul’s vision ofthat which manifests itself in life. The outward aspect is thatof world-existence and human existence proceeding by struggleand slaughter; the inward aspect is that of the universal Beingfulfilling himself in a vast creation and a vast destruction. Life abattle 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 theking of all; and the saying, like most of the apophthegms ofthe Greek thinker, suggests a profound truth. From a clash ofmaterial or other forces everything in this world, if not the worlditself, seems to be born; by a struggle of forces, tendencies, prin-ciples, beings it seems to proceed, ever creating new things, everdestroying the old, marching one knows not very well whither,— to a final self-destruction, say some; in an unending seriesof vain cycles, say others; in progressive cycles, is the mostoptimistic conclusion, leading through whatever trouble andapparent confusion towards a higher and higher approximationto some divine apocalypse. However that may be, this is certainthat there is not only no construction here without destruction,no harmony except by a poise of contending forces won outof many actual and potential discords, but also no continuedexistence of life except by a constant self-feeding and devouringof other life. Our very bodily life is a constant dying and beingreborn, the body itself a beleaguered city attacked by assailing,protected by defending forces whose business is to devour eachother: and this is only a type of all our existence. The commandseems to have gone out from the beginning, “Thou shalt notconquer except by battle with thy fellows and thy surroundings;thou shalt not even live except by battle and struggle and byabsorbing into thyself other life. The first law of this world thatI have made is creation and preservation by destruction.”

Kurukshetra 41

Ancient thought accepted this starting-point so far as itcould see it by scrutiny of the universe. The old Upanishads sawit very clearly and phrased it with an uncompromising thorough-ness which will have nothing to do with any honeyed glosses oroptimistic scuttlings of the truth. Hunger that is Death, they said,is the creator and master of this world, and they figured vitalexistence in the image of the Horse of the sacrifice. Matter theydescribed by a name which means ordinarily food and they said,we call it food because it is devoured and devours creatures. Theeater eating is eaten, this is the formula of the material world,as the Darwinians rediscovered when they laid it down that thestruggle for life is the law of evolutionary existence. Modernscience has only rephrased the old truths that had already beenexpressed in much more forcible, wide and accurate formulasby the apophthegm of Heraclitus and the figures employed bythe Upanishads.

Nietzsche’s insistence upon war as an aspect of life and theideal man as a warrior, — the camel-man he may be to beginwith and the child-man hereafter, but the lion-man he mustbecome in the middle, if he is to attain his perfection, — thesenow much-decried theories of Nietzsche have, however much wemay differ from many of the moral and practical conclusions hedrew from them, their undeniable justification and recall us toa truth we like to hide out of sight. It is good that we should bereminded of it; first, because to see it has for every strong soula tonic effect which saves us from the flabbiness and relaxationencouraged by a too mellifluous philosophic, religious or ethicalsentimentalism, that which loves to look upon Nature as loveand life and beauty and good, but turns away from her grimmask of death, adoring God as Shiva but refusing to adore himas Rudra; secondly, because unless we have the honesty andcourage to look existence straight in the face, we shall neverarrive at any effective solution of its discords and oppositions.We must see first what life and the world are; afterwards, we canall the better set about finding the right way to transform theminto what they should be. If this repellent aspect of existenceholds in itself some secret of the final harmony, we shall by


ignoring or belittling it miss that secret and all our efforts at asolution will fail by fault of our self-indulgent ignoring of thetrue elements of the problem. If, on the other hand, it is anenemy to be beaten down, trampled on, excised, eliminated, stillwe gain nothing by underrating its power and hold upon life orrefusing to see how firmly it is rooted in the effective past andthe actually operative principles of existence.

War and destruction are not only a universal principle ofour life here in its purely material aspects, but also of our mentaland moral existence. It is self-evident that in the actual life ofman intellectual, social, political, moral we can make no realstep forward without a struggle, a battle between what existsand lives and what seeks to exist and live and between all thatstands behind either. It is impossible, at least as men and thingsare, to advance, to grow, to fulfil and still to observe reallyand utterly that principle of harmlessness which is yet placedbefore us as the highest and best law of conduct. We will useonly soul-force and never destroy by war or any even defensiveemployment of physical violence? Good, though until soul-forceis effective, the Asuric force in men and nations tramples down,breaks, slaughters, burns, pollutes, as we see it doing today, butthen at its ease and unhindered, and you have perhaps caused asmuch destruction of life by your abstinence as others by resortto violence; still you have set up an ideal which may some dayand at any rate ought to lead up to better things. But even soul-force, when it is effective, destroys. Only those who have used itwith eyes open, know how much more terrible and destructiveit is than the sword and the cannon; and only those who donot limit their view to the act and its immediate results, can seehow tremendous are its after-effects, how much is eventuallydestroyed and with that much all the life that depended on itand fed upon it. Evil cannot perish without the destruction ofmuch that lives by the evil, and it is no less destruction even ifwe personally are saved the pain of a sensational act of violence.

Moreover, every time we use soul-force we raise a greatforce of Karma against our adversary, the after-movements ofwhich we have no power to control. Vasishtha uses soul-force

Kurukshetra 43

against the military violence of Vishwamitra and armies of Hunsand Shakas and Pallavas hurl themselves on the aggressor. Thevery quiescence and passivity of the spiritual man under violenceand aggression awakens the tremendous forces of the world toa retributive action; and it may even be more merciful to stayin their path, though by force, those who represent evil than toallow them to trample on until they call down on themselvesa worse destruction than we would ever think of inflicting. Itis not enough that our own hands should remain clean andour souls unstained for the law of strife and destruction to dieout of the world; that which is its root must first disappearout of humanity. Much less will mere immobility and inertiaunwilling to use or incapable of using any kind of resistanceto evil, abrogate the law; inertia, tamas, indeed, injures muchmore than can the rajasic principle of strife which at least cre-ates more than it destroys. Therefore, so far as the problemof the individual’s action goes, his abstention from strife andits inevitable concomitant destruction in their more gross andphysical form may help his own moral being, but it leaves theSlayer of creatures unabolished.

For the rest the whole of human history bears witness to theinexorable vitality and persistent prevalence of this principle inthe world. It is natural that we should attempt to palliate, to laystress on other aspects. Strife and destruction are not all; there isthe saving principle of association and mutual help as well as theforce of dissociation and mutual strife; a power of love no lessthan a power of egoistic self-assertion; an impulse to sacrificeourselves for others as well as the impulse to sacrifice others toourselves. But when we see how these have actually worked,we shall not be tempted to gloss over or ignore the powerof their opposites. Association has been worked not only formutual help, but at the same time for defence and aggression, tostrengthen us against all that attacks or resists in the struggle forlife. Association itself has been a servant of war, egoism and theself-assertion of life against life. Love itself has been constantlya power of death. Especially the love of good and the love ofGod, as embraced by the human ego, have been responsible for


much strife, slaughter and destruction. Self-sacrifice is great andnoble, but at its highest it is an acknowledgment of the lawof Life by death and becomes an offering on the altar of somePower that demands a victim in order that the work desired maybe done. The mother bird facing the animal of prey in defenceof its young, the patriot dying for his country’s freedom, thereligious martyr or the martyr of an idea, these in the lowerand the superior scale of animal life are highest examples ofself-sacrifice, and it is evident to what they bear witness.

But if we look at after results, an easy optimism becomeseven less possible. See the patriot dying in order that his countrymay be free, and mark that country a few decades after theLord of Karma has paid the price of the blood and the sufferingthat was given; you shall see it in its turn an oppressor, an ex-ploiter and conqueror of colonies and dependencies devouringothers that it may live and succeed aggressively in life. The Chris-tian martyrs perish in their thousands, setting soul-force againstempire-force that Christ may conquer, Christianity prevail. Soul-force does triumph, Christianity does prevail, — but not Christ;the victorious religion becomes a militant and dominant Churchand a more fanatically persecuting power than the creed and theempire which it replaced. The very religions organise themselvesinto 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 exis-tence, perhaps the initial element, which we do not know howto conquer either because it cannot be conquered or becausewe have not looked at it with a strong and impartial gaze soas to recognise it calmly and fairly and know what it is. Wemust look existence in the face if our aim is to arrive at a rightsolution, whatever that solution may be. And to look existencein the face is to look God in the face; for the two cannot beseparated, nor the responsibility for the laws of world-existencebe shifted away from Him who created them or from That whichconstituted 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, isnot He or is not His, but was made by some diabolical Powerwhich He suffered for some reason to work out its wicked willor by some dark Ahriman counterbalancing our gracious Or-muzd, or was even the fault of selfish and sinful man who hasspoiled what was made originally perfect by God. As if man hadcreated the law of death and devouring in the animal world orthat tremendous process by which Nature creates indeed andpreserves but in the same step and by the same inextricableaction slays and destroys. It is only a few religions which havehad the courage to say without any reserve, like the Indian,that this enigmatic World-Power is one Deity, one Trinity, to liftup the image of the Force that acts in the world in the figurenot only of the beneficent Durga, but of the terrible Kali in herblood-stained dance of destruction and to say, “This too is theMother; this also know to be God; this too, if thou hast thestrength, adore.” And it is significant that the religion whichhas had this unflinching honesty and tremendous courage, hassucceeded in creating a profound and wide-spread spiritualitysuch as no other can parallel. For truth is the foundation of realspirituality and courage is its soul. Tasyai satyam ayatanam.

All this is not to say that strife and destruction are the alphaand omega of existence, that harmony is not greater than war,love more the manifest divine than death or that we must notmove towards the replacement of physical force by soul-force,of war by peace, of strife by union, of devouring by love, ofegoism by universality, of death by immortal life. God is notonly the Destroyer, but the Friend of creatures; not only thecosmic Trinity, but the Transcendent; the terrible Kali is also theloving and beneficent Mother; the lord of Kurukshetra is thedivine comrade and charioteer, the attracter of beings, incarnateKrishna. And whithersoever he is driving through all the strifeand clash and confusion, to whatever goal or godhead he may beattracting us, it is — no doubt of that — to some transcendenceof all these aspects upon which we have been so firmly insisting.But where, how, with what kind of transcendence, under whatconditions, this we have to discover; and to discover it, the first


necessity is to see the world as it is, to observe and value rightlyhis action as it reveals itself at the start and now; afterwardsthe way and the goal will better reveal themselves. We mustacknowledge Kurukshetra; we must submit to the law of Life byDeath before we can find our way to the life immortal; we mustopen our eyes, with a less appalled gaze than Arjuna’s, to thevision of our Lord of Time and Death and cease to deny, hateor recoil from the universal Destroyer.

VI

Man and the Battle of Life

THUS, if we are to appreciate in its catholicity the teachingof the Gita, we must accept intellectually its standpointand courageous envisaging of the manifest nature and

process of the world. The divine charioteer of Kurukshetra re-veals himself on one side as the Lord of all the worlds andthe Friend and omniscient Guide of all creatures, on the other asTime the Destroyer “arisen for the destruction of these peoples.”The Gita, following in this the spirit of the catholic Hindu reli-gion, affirms this also as God; it does not attempt to evade theenigma of the world by escaping from it through a side-door. If,in fact, we do not regard existence merely as the mechanic actionof a brute and indifferent material Force or, on the other hand, asan equally mechanical play of ideas and energies arising out of anoriginal Non-Existence or else reflected in the passive Soul or theevolution of a dream or nightmare in the surface consciousnessof an indifferent, immutable Transcendence which is unaffectedby 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 theomnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, yet always transcendentBeing who manifests the world and Himself in the world, whois not the slave but the lord of His creative Consciousness, Na-ture or Force (Maya, Prakriti or Shakti), who is not baffled orthwarted in His world-conception or design by His creatures,man or devil, who does not need to justify Himself by shiftingthe responsibility for any part of His creation or manifestationon that which is created or manifested, then the human beinghas to start from a great, a difficult act of faith. Finding himselfin a world which is apparently a chaos of battling powers, aclash of vast and obscure forces, a life which subsists only byconstant change and death, menaced from every side by pain,suffering, evil and destruction, he has to see the omnipresent


Deity in it all and conscious that of this enigma there mustbe a solution and beyond this Ignorance in which he dwells aKnowledge that reconciles, he has to take his stand upon thisfaith, “Though Thou slay me, yet will I trust in Thee.” Allhuman thought or faith that is active and affirmative, whetherit be theistic, pantheistic or atheistic, does in fact involve moreor less explicitly and completely such an attitude. It admits andit believes: admits the discords of the world, believes in somehighest principle of God, universal Being or Nature which shallenable us to transcend, overcome or harmonise these discords,perhaps even to do all three at once, to harmonise by overcomingand transcending.

Then, as to human life in its actualities, we have to acceptits aspect of a struggle and a battle mounting into supremecrises such as that of Kurukshetra. The Gita, as we have seen,takes for its frame such a period of transition and crisis as hu-manity periodically experiences in its history, in which greatforces clash together for a huge destruction and reconstruction,intellectual, social, moral, religious, political, and these in theactual psychological and social stage of human evolution cul-minate usually through a violent physical convulsion of strife,war or revolution. The Gita proceeds from the acceptance of thenecessity in Nature for such vehement crises and it accepts notonly the moral aspect, the struggle between righteousness andunrighteousness, between the self-affirming law of Good and theforces that oppose its progression, but also the physical aspect,the actual armed war or other vehement physical strife betweenthe human beings who represent the antagonistic powers. Wemust remember that the Gita was composed at a time whenwar was even more than it is now a necessary part of humanactivity and the idea of its elimination from the scheme of lifewould have been an absolute chimera. The gospel of universalpeace and goodwill among men — for without a universal andentire mutual goodwill there can be no real and abiding peace —has never succeeded for a moment in possessing itself of humanlife 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 immedi-ately prepared for any such transcendence. Even now we havenot actually progressed beyond the feasibility of a system ofaccommodation between conflicting interests which may min-imise the recurrence of the worst forms of strife. And towardsthis consummation the method, the approach which humanityhas been forced by its own nature to adopt, is a monstrousmutual massacre unparalleled in history; a universal war, full ofbitterness and irreconcilable hatred, is the straight way and thetriumphant means modern man has found for the establishmentof universal peace! That consummation, too, founded not uponany fundamental change in human nature, but upon intellectualnotions, economic convenience, vital and sentimental shrinkingsfrom the loss of life, discomfort and horror of war, effected bynothing better than political adjustments, gives no very certainpromise of firm foundation and long duration. A day may come,must surely come, we will say, when humanity will be readyspiritually, morally, socially for the reign of universal peace;meanwhile the aspect of battle and the nature and function ofman as a fighter have to be accepted and accounted for by anypractical philosophy and religion. The Gita, taking life as itis and not only as it may be in some distant future, puts thequestion how this aspect and function of life, which is reallyan aspect and function of human activity in general, can beharmonised 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 partof government for the protection of those who are excused fromthat duty, debarred from protecting themselves and therefore atthe mercy of the strong and the violent, war, secondly and bya moral extension of this idea, for the protection of the weakand the oppressed and for the maintenance of right and justicein the world. For all these ideas, the social and practical, themoral and the chivalrous enter into the Indian conception ofthe Kshatriya, the man who is a warrior and ruler by functionand a knight and king in his nature. Although the more generaland universal ideas of the Gita are those which are the most


important to us, we ought not to leave out of considerationaltogether the colouring and trend they take from the peculiarIndian culture and social system in the midst of which theyarose. That system differed from the modern in its conception.To the modern mind man is a thinker, worker or producer anda fighter all in one, and the tendency of the social system is tolump all these activities and to demand from each individualhis contribution to the intellectual, economical and military lifeand needs of the community without paying any heed to thedemands of his individual nature and temperament. The ancientIndian civilisation laid peculiar stress on the individual nature,tendency, temperament and sought to determine by it the ethicaltype, function and place in the society. Nor did it consider manprimarily as a social being or the fullness of his social existenceas the highest ideal, but rather as a spiritual being in processof formation and development and his social life, ethical law,play of temperament and exercise of function as means andstages of spiritual formation. Thought and knowledge, war andgovernment, production and distribution, labour and servicewere carefully differentiated functions of society, each assignedto those who were naturally called to it and providing the rightmeans by which they could individually proceed towards theirspiritual development and self-perfection.

The modern idea of a common obligation in all the maindepartments of human activity has its advantages; it helps togreater solidarity, unity and fullness in the life of the communityand a more all-round development of the complete human beingas opposed to the endless divisions and over-specialisation andthe narrowing and artificial shackling of the life of the indi-vidual to which the Indian system eventually led. But it hasalso its disadvantages and in certain of its developments thetoo logical application of it has led to grotesque and disastrousabsurdities. This is evident enough in the character of modernwar. From the idea of a common military obligation binding onevery individual to defend and fight for the community by whichhe lives and profits, has arisen the system by which the wholemanhood of the nation is hurled into the bloody trench to slay


and be slain, thinkers, artists, philosophers, priests, merchants,artisans all torn from their natural functions, the whole life ofthe community disorganised, reason and conscience overridden,even the minister of religion who is salaried by the State or calledby his function to preach the gospel of peace and love forcedto deny his creed and become a butcher of his fellow-men!Not only are conscience and nature violated by the arbitraryfiat of the military State, but national defence carried to aninsane extreme makes its best attempt to become a nationalsuicide.

Indian civilisation on the contrary made it its chief aim tominimise the incidence and disaster of war. For this purpose itlimited the military obligation to the small class who by theirbirth, nature and traditions were marked out for this functionand found in it their natural means of self-development throughthe flowering of the soul in the qualities of courage, disciplinedforce, strong helpfulness and chivalrous nobility for which thewarrior’s life pursued under the stress of a high ideal gives a fieldand opportunities. The rest of the community was in every wayguarded from slaughter and outrage; their life and occupationswere as little interfered with as possible and the combative anddestructive tendencies of human nature were given a restrictedfield, confined in a sort of lists so as to do the minimum amountof harm to the general life of the race, while at the same timeby being subjected to high ethical ideals and every possible ruleof humanity and chivalry the function of war was obliged tohelp in ennobling and elevating instead of brutalising those whoperformed it. It must be remembered that it is war of this kindand under these conditions that the Gita had in view, war con-sidered as an inevitable part of human life, but so restrictedand regulated as to serve like other activities the ethical andspiritual development which was then regarded as the wholereal object of life, war destructive within certain carefully fixedlimits of the bodily life of individual men but constructive oftheir inner life and of the ethical elevation of the race. Thatwar in the past has, when subjected to an ideal, helped in thiselevation, as in the development of knighthood and chivalry, the


Indian ideal of the Kshatriya, the Japanese ideal of the Samurai,can only be denied by the fanatics of pacifism. When it hasfulfilled its function, it may well disappear; for if it tries tosurvive its utility, it will appear as an unrelieved brutality ofviolence stripped of its ideal and constructive aspects and willbe rejected by the progressive mind of humanity; but its pastservice to the race must be admitted in any reasonable view ofour evolution.

The physical fact of war, however, is only a special and out-ward manifestation of a general principle in life and the Kshat-riya is only the outward manifestation and type of a generalcharacteristic necessary to the completeness of human perfec-tion. War typifies and embodies physically the aspect of battleand struggle which belongs to all life, both to our inner and ourouter living, in a world whose method is a meeting and wrestlingof forces which progress by mutual destruction towards a con-tinually changing adjustment expressive of a progressive har-monising and hopeful of a perfect harmony based upon someyet ungrasped potentiality of oneness. The Kshatriya is the typeand embodiment of the fighter in man who accepts this principlein life and faces it as a warrior striving towards mastery, notshrinking from the destruction of bodies and forms, but throughit all aiming at the realisation of some principle of right, justice,law which shall be the basis of the harmony towards whichthe struggle tends. The Gita accepts this aspect of the world-energy and the physical fact of war which embodies it, and itaddresses itself to the man of action, the striver and fighter,the Kshatriya, — war which is the extreme contradiction of thesoul’s high aspiration to peace within and harmlessness1 without,the striver and fighter whose necessary turmoil of struggle andaction seems to be the very contradiction of the soul’s high idealof calm mastery and self-possession, — and it seeks for an issuefrom the contradiction, a point at which its terms meet and apoise which shall be the first essential basis of harmony andtranscendence.

1 ahimsa.


Man meets the battle of life in the manner most consonantwith the essential quality most dominant in his nature. There are,according to the Sankhya philosophy accepted in this respectby the Gita, three essential qualities or modes of the world-energy and therefore also of human nature, sattva, the mode ofpoise, knowledge and satisfaction, rajas, the mode of passion,action and struggling emotion, tamas, the mode of ignoranceand inertia. Dominated by tamas, man does not so much meetthe rush and shock of the world-energies whirling about himand converging upon him as he succumbs to them, is overborneby them, afflicted, subjected; or at the most, helped by the otherqualities, the tamasic man seeks only somehow to survive, tosubsist so long as he may, to shelter himself in the fortress ofan established routine of thought and action in which he feelshimself to a certain extent protected from the battle, able toreject the demand which his higher nature makes upon him,excused from accepting the necessity of farther struggle and theideal of an increasing effort and mastery. Dominated by rajas,man flings himself into the battle and attempts to use the struggleof forces for his own egoistic benefit, to slay, conquer, dominate,enjoy; or, helped by a certain measure of the sattwic quality, therajasic man makes the struggle itself a means of increasing innermastery, joy, power, possession. The battle of life becomes hisdelight and passion partly for its own sake, for the pleasure ofactivity and the sense of power, partly as a means of his increaseand natural self-development. Dominated by sattva, man seeksin the midst of the strife for a principle of law, right, poise,harmony, peace, satisfaction. The purely sattwic man tends toseek this within, whether for himself alone or with an impulse tocommunicate it, when won, to other human minds, but usuallyby a sort of inner detachment from or else an outer rejectionof the strife and turmoil of the active world-energy; but if thesattwic mind accepts partly the rajasic impulse, it seeks ratherto impose this poise and harmony upon the struggle and appar-ent chaos, to vindicate a victory for peace, love and harmonyover the principle of war, discord and struggle. All the attitudesadopted by the human mind towards the problem of life either


derive from the domination of one or other of these qualities orelse from an attempt at balance and harmony between them.

But there comes also a stage in which the mind recoils fromthe whole problem and, dissatisfied with the solutions given bythe threefold mode of Nature, traigun. ya, seeks for some highersolution outside of it or else above it. It looks for an escapeeither into something which is outside and void of all qualitiesand therefore of all activity or in something which is superiorto the three qualities and master of them and therefore at oncecapable of action and unaffected, undominated by its own ac-tion, in the nirgun. a or the trigun. atıta. It aspires to an absolutepeace and unconditioned existence or to a dominant calm andsuperior existence. The natural movement of the former attitudeis towards the renunciation of the world, sannyasa; of the lattertowards superiority to the claims of the lower nature and itswhirl of actions and reactions, and its principle is equality andthe inner renunciation of passion and desire. The former is thefirst impulse of Arjuna recoiling from the calamitous culmina-tion of all his heroic activity in the great cataclysm of battleand massacre, Kurukshetra; losing his whole past principle ofaction, inaction and the rejection of life and its claims seem tohim the only issue. But it is to an inner superiority and not tothe physical renunciation of life and action that he is called bythe voice of the divine Teacher.

Arjuna is the Kshatriya, the rajasic man who governs hisrajasic action by a high sattwic ideal. He advances to this giganticstruggle, to this Kurukshetra with the full acceptance of the joyof battle, as to “a holiday of fight”, but with a proud confidencein the righteousness of his cause; he advances in his rapid chariottearing the hearts of his enemies with the victorious clamour ofhis war-conch; for he wishes to look upon all these Kings of menwho have come here to champion against him the cause of un-righteousness and establish as a rule of life the disregard of law,justice and truth which they would replace by the rule of a selfishand arrogant egoism. When this confidence is shattered withinhim, when he is smitten down from his customary attitude andmental basis of life, it is by the uprush of the tamasic quality into


the rajasic man, inducing a recoil of astonishment, grief, horror,dismay, dejection, bewilderment of the mind and the war of rea-son against itself, a collapse towards the principle of ignoranceand inertia. As a result he turns towards renunciation. Better thelife of the mendicant living upon alms than this dharma of theKshatriya, this battle and action culminating in undiscriminatingmassacre, this principle of mastery and glory and power whichcan only be won by destruction and bloodshed, this conquest ofblood-stained enjoyments, this vindication of justice and right bya means which contradicts all righteousness and this affirmationof the social law by a war which destroys in its process andresult all that constitutes society.

Sannyasa is the renunciation of life and action and of thethreefold modes of Nature, but it has to be approached throughone or other of the three qualities. The impulse may be tamasic, afeeling of impotence, fear, aversion, disgust, horror of the worldand 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 itspains and its eternal discontent. Or the impulse may be that ofrajas tending towards sattwa, the impulse to arrive at somethingsuperior to anything life can give, to conquer a higher state, totrample down life itself under the feet of an inner strength whichseeks to break all bonds and transcend all limits. Or it may besattwic, an intellectual perception of the vanity of life and theabsence of any real goal or justification for this ever-cyclingworld-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 thesattwa-rajasic man. The Teacher may confirm it in its direction,using it as a dark entry to the purity and peace of the asceticlife; or he may purify it at once and raise it towards the rarealtitudes of the sattwic tendency of renunciation. In fact, hedoes neither. He discourages the tamasic recoil and the tendencyto renunciation and enjoins the continuance of action and evenof the same fierce and terrible action, but he points the discipletowards another and inner renunciation which is the real issue


from his crisis and the way towards the soul’s superiority tothe world-Nature and yet its calm and self-possessed action inthe world. Not a physical asceticism, but an inner askesis is theteaching of the Gita.

VII

The Creed of the Aryan Fighter1

THE ANSWER of the divine Teacher to the first flood ofArjuna’s passionate self-questioning, his shrinking fromslaughter, 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 confusionof mind and delusion, a weakness of the heart, an unmanliness,a fall from the virility of the fighter and the hero. Not thiswas fitting in the son of Pritha, not thus should the championand chief hope of a righteous cause abandon it in the hour ofcrisis and peril or suffer the sudden amazement of his heart andsenses, the clouding of his reason and the downfall of his will tobetray him into the casting away of his divine weapons and therefusal of his God-given work. This is not the way cherished andfollowed by the Aryan man; this mood came not from heavennor can it lead to heaven, and on earth it is the forfeiting of theglory that waits upon strength and heroism and noble works.Let him put from him this weak and self-indulgent pity, let himrise and smite his enemies!

The answer of a hero to a hero, shall we say, but not thatwhich we should expect from a divine Teacher from whom wedemand rather that he shall encourage always gentleness andsaintliness and self-abnegation and the recoil from worldly aimsand cessation from the ways of the world? The Gita expresslysays that Arjuna has thus lapsed into unheroic weakness, “hiseyes full and distressed with tears, his heart overcome by de-pression and discouragement,” because he is invaded by pity,kr.payavis.t.am. Is this not then a divine weakness? Is not pity adivine emotion which should not thus be discouraged with harshrebuke? Or are we in face of a mere gospel of war and heroic

1 Gita, II. 1-38.


action, a Nietzschean creed of power and high-browed strength,of Hebraic or old Teutonic hardness which holds pity to bea weakness and thinks like the Norwegian hero who thankedGod because He had given him a hard heart? But the teachingof the Gita springs from an Indian creed and to the Indian mindcompassion has always figured as one of the largest elements ofthe divine nature. The Teacher himself enumerating in a laterchapter the qualities of the godlike nature in man places amongthem compassion to creatures, gentleness, freedom from wrathand from the desire to slay and do hurt, no less than fearlessnessand high spirit and energy. Harshness and hardness and fierce-ness and a satisfaction in slaying enemies and amassing wealthand unjust enjoyments are Asuric qualities; they come from theviolent Titanic nature which denies the Divine in the world andthe Divine in man and worships Desire only as its deity. It isnot then from any such standpoint that the weakness of Arjunamerits rebuke.

“Whence has come to thee this dejection, this stain anddarkness of the soul in the hour of difficulty and peril?” asksKrishna of Arjuna. The question points to the real nature ofArjuna’s deviation from his heroic qualities. There is a divinecompassion which descends to us from on high and for the manwhose nature does not possess it, is not cast in its mould, topretend to be the superior man, the master-man or the supermanis a folly and an insolence, for he alone is the superman who mostmanifests the highest nature of the Godhead in humanity. Thiscompassion observes with an eye of love and wisdom and calmstrength the battle and the struggle, the strength and weaknessof man, his virtues and sins, his joy and suffering, his knowledgeand his ignorance, his wisdom and his folly, his aspiration andhis failure and it enters into it all to help and to heal. In thesaint and philanthropist it may cast itself into the mould of aplenitude of love or charity; in the thinker and hero it assumesthe largeness and the force of a helpful wisdom and strength. Itis this compassion in the Aryan fighter, the soul of his chivalry,which will not break the bruised reed, but helps and protects theweak 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 tyrantand the confident oppressor, not in wrath and with hatred, —for these are not the high divine qualities, the wrath of Godagainst the sinner, God’s hatred of the wicked are the fables ofhalf-enlightened creeds, as much a fable as the eternal tortureof the Hells they have invented, — but, as the old Indian spiri-tuality clearly saw, with as much love and compassion for thestrong Titan erring by his strength and slain for his sins as forthe sufferer and the oppressed who have to be saved from hisviolence and injustice.

But such is not the compassion which actuates Arjuna inthe rejection of his work and mission. That is not compassionbut an impotence full of a weak self-pity, a recoil from themental suffering which his act must entail on himself, — “I seenot what shall thrust from me the sorrow that dries up thesenses,” — and of all things self-pity is among the most ignobleand un-Aryan of moods. Its pity for others is also a form of self-indulgence; it is the physical shrinking of the nerves from theact of slaughter, the egoistic emotional shrinking of the heartfrom the destruction of the Dhritarashtrians because they are“one’s own people” and without them life will be empty. Thispity is a weakness of the mind and senses, — a weakness whichmay well be beneficial to men of a lower grade of development,who have to be weak because otherwise they will be hard andcruel; for they have to cure the harsher by the gentler formsof sensational egoism, they have to call in tamas, the debileprinciple, to help sattwa, the principle of light, in quelling thestrength and excess of their rajasic passions. But this way is notfor the developed Aryan man who has to grow not by weak-ness, but by an ascension from strength to strength. Arjuna isthe divine man, the master-man in the making and as such hehas been chosen by the gods. He has a work given to him, hehas God beside him in his chariot, he has the heavenly bowGandiva 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 doaccording to his emotions and his passions, or to shrink from


a necessary destruction by the claim of his egoistic heart andreason, or to decline his work because it will bring sorrow andemptiness to his life or because its earthly result has no value tohim in the absence of the thousands who must perish. All thatis a weak falling from his higher nature. He has to see only thework that must be done, kartavyam karma, to hear only thedivine command breathed through his warrior nature, to feelonly for the world and the destiny of mankind calling to himas its god-sent man to assist its march and clear its path of thedark armies that beset it.

Arjuna in his reply to Krishna admits the rebuke even whilehe strives against and refuses the command. He is aware of hisweakness 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 andwrong and he accepts the divine Friend as his teacher; but theemotional and intellectual props on which he had supportedhis sense of righteousness have been entirely cast down and hecannot accept a command which seems to appeal only to his oldstandpoint and gives him no new basis for action. He attemptsstill to justify his refusal of the work and puts forward in itssupport the claim of his nervous and sensational being whichshrinks from the slaughter with its sequel of blood-stained en-joyments, the claim of his heart which recoils from the sorrowand emptiness of life that will follow his act, the claim of hiscustomary moral notions which are appalled by the necessity ofslaying his gurus, Bhishma and Drona, the claim of his reasonwhich sees no good but only evil results of the terrible and violentwork assigned to him. He is resolved that on the old basis ofthought and motive he will not fight and he awaits in silence theanswer to objections that seem to him unanswerable. It is theseclaims of Arjuna’s egoistic being that Krishna sets out first todestroy in order to make place for the higher law which shalltranscend all egoistic motives of action.

The answer of the Teacher proceeds upon two differentlines, first, a brief reply founded upon the highest ideas ofthe general Aryan culture in which Arjuna has been educated,


secondly, another and larger founded on a more intimate knowl-edge, opening into deeper truths of our being, which is the realstarting-point of the teaching of the Gita. This first answer relieson the philosophic and moral conceptions of the Vedantic phi-losophy and the social idea of duty and honour which formed theethical basis of Aryan society. Arjuna has sought to justify his re-fusal on ethical and rational grounds, but he has merely cloakedby words of apparent rationality the revolt of his ignorant andunchastened emotions. He has spoken of the physical life andthe death of the body as if these were the primary realities; butthey have no such essential value to the sage and the thinker. Thesorrow for the bodily death of his friends and kindred is a grief towhich wisdom and the true knowledge of life lend no sanction.The enlightened man does not mourn either for the living or thedead, for he knows that suffering and death are merely incidentsin 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 asthe soul passes physically through childhood and youth and age,so it passes on to the changing of the body. The calm and wisemind, the dhıra, the thinker who looks upon life steadily anddoes not allow himself to be disturbed and blinded by his sen-sations and emotions, is not deceived by material appearances;he does not allow the clamour of his blood and his nerves andhis heart to cloud his judgment or to contradict his knowledge.He looks beyond the apparent facts of the life of the body andsenses to the real fact of his being and rises beyond the emotionaland physical desires of the ignorant nature to the true and onlyaim of the human existence.

What is that real fact? that highest aim? This, that humanlife and death repeated through the aeons in the great cycles ofthe world are only a long progress by which the human beingprepares and makes himself fit for immortality. And how shallhe prepare himself? who is the man that is fit? The man who risesabove the conception of himself as a life and a body, who doesnot accept the material and sensational touches of the world attheir own value or at the value which the physical man attaches


to them, who knows himself and all as souls, learns himself tolive in his soul and not in his body and deals with others tooas souls and not as mere physical beings. For by immortality ismeant not the survival of death, — that is already given to everycreature born with a mind, — but the transcendence of life anddeath. It means that ascension by which man ceases to live as amind-informed body and lives at last as a spirit and in the Spirit.Whoever is subject to grief and sorrow, a slave to the sensationsand emotions, occupied by the touches of things transient cannotbecome fit for immortality. These things must be borne until theyare conquered, till they can give no pain to the liberated man,till he is able to receive all the material happenings of the worldwhether joyful or sorrowful with a wise and calm equality, evenas the tranquil eternal Spirit secret within us receives them. To bedisturbed 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 recoilfrom the unavoidable and trivial circumstance of the death ofthe body, this is un-Aryan ignorance. It is not the way of theAryan climbing in calm strength towards the immortal life.

There is no such thing as death, for it is the body that diesand the body is not the man. That which really is, cannot go outof existence, though it may change the forms through which itappears, just as that which is non-existent cannot come into be-ing. The soul is and cannot cease to be. This opposition of is andis not, this balance of being and becoming which is the mind’sview of existence, finds its end in the realisation of the soul asthe one imperishable self by whom all this universe has beenextended. Finite bodies have an end, but that which possessesand uses the body, is infinite, illimitable, eternal, indestructible.It casts away old and takes up new bodies as a man changesworn-out raiment for new; and what is there in this to grieve atand recoil and shrink? This is not born, nor does it die, nor is ita thing that comes into being once and passing away will nevercome into being again. It is unborn, ancient, sempiternal; it isnot slain with the slaying of the body. Who can slay the immortalspirit? Weapons cannot cleave it, nor the fire burn, nor do the


waters drench it, nor the wind dry. Eternally stable, immobile,all-pervading, it is for ever and for ever. Not manifested like thebody, but greater than all manifestation, not to be analysed bythe thought, but greater than all mind, not capable of changeand modification like the life and its organs and their objects,but beyond the changes of mind and life and body, it is yet theReality 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 tobirth and death, still the death of beings ought not to be a causeof sorrow. For that is an inevitable circumstance of the soul’sself-manifestation. Its birth is an appearing out of some state inwhich it is not non-existent but unmanifest to our mortal senses,its death is a return to that unmanifest world or condition andout of it it will again appear in the physical manifestation. Theto-do made by the physical mind and senses about death andthe horror of death whether on the sick-bed or the battlefield,is the most ignorant of nervous clamours. Our sorrow for thedeath of men is an ignorant grieving for those for whom there isno cause to grieve, since they have neither gone out of existencenor suffered any painful or terrible change of condition, butare beyond death no less in being and no more unhappy incircumstance than in life. But in reality the higher truth is thereal truth. All are that Self, that One, that Divine whom we lookon and speak and hear of as the wonderful beyond our com-prehension, for after all our seeking and declaring of knowledgeand learning from those who have knowledge no human mindhas ever known this Absolute. It is this which is here veiled bythe world, the master of the body; all life is only its shadow; thecoming of the soul into physical manifestation and our passingout of it by death is only one of its minor movements. Whenwe have known ourselves as this, then to speak of ourselvesas slayer or slain is an absurdity. One thing only is the truthin which we have to live, the Eternal manifesting itself as thesoul of man in the great cycle of its pilgrimage with birth anddeath for milestones, with worlds beyond as resting-places, withall the circumstances of life happy or unhappy as the means of


our progress and battle and victory and with immortality as thehome to which the soul travels.

Therefore, says the Teacher, put away this vain sorrowand shrinking, fight, O son of Bharata. But wherefore such aconclusion? This high and great knowledge, this strenuous self-discipline of the mind and soul by which it is to rise beyondthe clamour of the emotions and the cheat of the senses to trueself-knowledge, may well free us from grief and delusion; it maywell 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 arenot dead at all nor to be sorrowed for, since they have only gonebeyond; it may well teach us to look undisturbed upon the mostterrible 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 amanifestation of the One and as a means for our souls to raisethemselves above appearances by an upward evolution until weknow ourselves as the immortal Spirit. But how does it justify theaction demanded of Arjuna and the slaughter of Kurukshetra?The answer is that this is the action required of Arjuna in thepath he has to travel; it has come inevitably in the performanceof the function demanded of him by his svadharma, his socialduty, the law of his life and the law of his being. This world,this manifestation of the Self in the material universe is not onlya cycle of inner development, but a field in which the externalcircumstances of life have to be accepted as an environment andan occasion for that development. It is a world of mutual helpand struggle; not a serene and peaceful gliding through easy joysis the progress it allows us, but every step has to be gained byheroic effort and through a clash of opposing forces. Those whotake up the inner and the outer struggle even to the most physicalclash of all, that of war, are the Kshatriyas, the mighty men; war,force, nobility, courage are their nature; protection of the rightand an unflinching acceptance of the gage of battle is their virtueand their duty. For there is continually a struggle between rightand wrong, justice and injustice, the force that protects andthe force that violates and oppresses, and when this has oncebeen brought to the issue of physical strife, the champion and


standard-bearer of the Right must not shake and tremble at theviolent and terrible nature of the work he has to do; he must notabandon his followers or fellow-fighters, betray his cause andleave the standard of Right and Justice to trail in the dust andbe trampled into mire by the blood-stained feet of the oppressor,because of a weak pity for the violent and cruel and a physicalhorror of the vastness of the destruction decreed. His virtue andhis duty lie in battle and not in abstention from battle; it is notslaughter, but non-slaying which would here be the sin.

The Teacher then turns aside for a moment to give anotheranswer to the cry of Arjuna over the sorrow of the death ofkindred which will empty his life of the causes and objects ofliving. What is the true object of the Kshatriya’s life and his truehappiness? Not self-pleasing and domestic happiness and a lifeof comfort and peaceful joy with friends and relatives, but tobattle for the right is his true object of life and to find a cause forwhich he can lay down his life or by victory win the crown andglory of the hero’s existence is his greatest happiness. “Thereis no greater good for the Kshatriya than righteous battle, andwhen such a battle comes to them of itself like the open gateof heaven, happy are the Kshatriyas then. If thou doest not thisbattle for the right, then hast thou abandoned thy duty and virtueand thy glory, and sin shall be thy portion.” He will by such arefusal incur disgrace and the reproach of fear and weakness andthe loss of his Kshatriya honour. For what is worst grief for aKshatriya? It is the loss of his honour, his fame, his noble stationamong the mighty men, the men of courage and power; that tohim is much worse than death. Battle, courage, power, rule, thehonour of the brave, the heaven of those who fall nobly, thisis the warrior’s ideal. To lower that ideal, to allow a smirch tofall on that honour, to give the example of a hero among heroeswhose action lays itself open to the reproach of cowardice andweakness and thus to lower the moral standard of mankind, is tobe false to himself and to the demand of the world on its leadersand kings. “Slain thou shalt win Heaven, victorious thou shaltenjoy the earth; therefore arise, O son of Kunti, resolved uponbattle.”


This heroic appeal may seem to be on a lower level thanthe stoical spirituality which precedes and the deeper spiritualitywhich follows; for in the next verse the Teacher bids him to makegrief and happiness, loss and gain, victory and defeat equal tohis soul and then turn to the battle, — the real teaching of theGita. But Indian ethics has always seen the practical necessity ofgraded ideals for the developing moral and spiritual life of man.The Kshatriya ideal, the ideal of the four orders is here placedin its social aspect, not as afterwards in its spiritual meaning.This, says Krishna in effect, is my answer to you if you insist onjoy and sorrow and the result of your actions as your motive ofaction. I have shown you in what direction the higher knowledgeof self and the world points you; I have now shown you in whatdirection your social duty and the ethical standard of your orderpoint you, svadharmam api caveks.ya. Whichever you consider,the result is the same. But if you are not satisfied with your socialduty and the virtue of your order, if you think that leads youto sorrow and sin, then I bid you rise to a higher and not sinkto a lower ideal. Put away all egoism from you, disregard joyand sorrow, disregard gain and loss and all worldly results; lookonly at the cause you must serve and the work that you mustachieve by divine command; “so thou shalt not incur sin.” ThusArjuna’s plea of sorrow, his plea of the recoil from slaughter, hisplea of the sense of sin, his plea of the unhappy results of hisaction, are answered according to the highest knowledge andethical 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 orweakness or faltering thy work of battle in the world. Thouart the eternal and imperishable Spirit, thy soul is here on itsupward path to immortality; life and death are nothing, sorrowand wounds and suffering are nothing, for these things have tobe conquered and overcome. Look not at thy own pleasure andgain and profit, but above and around, above at the shiningsummits to which thou climbest, around at this world of battleand trial in which good and evil, progress and retrogression arelocked in stern conflict. Men call to thee, their strong man, their


hero for help; help then, fight. Destroy when by destruction theworld must advance, but hate not that which thou destroyest,neither grieve for all those who perish. Know everywhere theone self, know all to be immortal souls and the body to be butdust. Do thy work with a calm, strong and equal spirit; fight andfall nobly or conquer mightily. For this is the work that God andthy nature have given to thee to accomplish.”

VIII

Sankhya and Yoga

IN THE moment of his turning from this first and summaryanswer to Arjuna’s difficulties and in the very first wordswhich strike the keynote of a spiritual solution, the Teacher

makes at once a distinction which is of the utmost importancefor the understanding of the Gita, — the distinction of Sankhyaand Yoga. “Such is the intelligence (the intelligent knowledge ofthings and will) declared to thee in the Sankhya, hear now thisin the Yoga, for if thou art in Yoga by this intelligence, O son ofPritha, thou shalt cast away the bondage of works.” That is theliteral translation of the words in which the Gita announces thedistinction it intends to make.

The Gita is in its foundation a Vedantic work; it is one ofthe three recognised authorities for the Vedantic teaching and,although not described as a revealed Scripture, although, thatis to say, it is largely intellectual, ratiocinative, philosophical inits method, founded indeed on the Truth, but not the directlyinspired Word which is the revelation of the Truth through thehigher faculties of the seer, it is yet so highly esteemed as to beranked almost as a thirteenth Upanishad. But still its Vedanticideas are throughout and thoroughly coloured by the ideas ofthe Sankhya and the Yoga way of thinking and it derives fromthis colouring the peculiar synthetic character of its philosophy.It is in fact primarily a practical system of Yoga that it teachesand it brings in metaphysical ideas only as explanatory of itspractical system; nor does it merely declare Vedantic knowl-edge, but it founds knowledge and devotion upon works, evenas it uplifts works to knowledge, their culmination, and informsthem with devotion as their very heart and kernel of their spirit.Again its Yoga is founded upon the analytical philosophy of theSankhyas, takes that as a starting-point and always keeps it as alarge element of its method and doctrine; but still it proceeds far

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beyond it, negatives even some of its characteristic tendenciesand finds a means of reconciling the lower analytical knowledgeof Sankhya with the higher synthetic and Vedantic truth.

What, then, are the Sankhya and Yoga of which the Gitaspeaks? They are certainly not the systems which have comedown to us under these names as enunciated respectively in theSankhya Karika of Ishwara Krishna and the Yoga aphorismsof Patanjali. This Sankhya is not the system of the Karikas, —at least as that is generally understood; for the Gita nowherefor a moment admits the multiplicity of Purushas as a primaltruth of being and it affirms emphatically what the traditionalSankhya strenuously denies, the One as Self and Purusha, thatOne again as the Lord, Ishwara or Purushottama, and Ishwara asthe cause of the universe. The traditional Sankhya is, to use ourmodern distinctions, atheistic; the Sankhya of the Gita admitsand subtly reconciles the theistic, pantheistic and monistic viewsof the universe.

Nor is this Yoga the Yoga system of Patanjali; for thatis a purely subjective method of Rajayoga, an internal disci-pline, limited, rigidly cut out, severely and scientifically graded,by which the mind is progressively stilled and taken up intoSamadhi so that we may gain the temporal and eternal resultsof this self-exceeding, the temporal in a great expansion of thesoul’s knowledge and powers, the eternal in the divine union. Butthe Yoga of the Gita is a large, flexible and many-sided systemwith various elements, which are all successfully harmonised bya sort of natural and living assimilation, and of these elementsRajayoga is only one and not the most important and vital. ThisYoga does not adopt any strict and scientific gradation but is aprocess of natural soul-development; it seeks by the adoption ofa few principles of subjective poise and action to bring about arenovation of the soul and a sort of change, ascension or newbirth out of the lower nature into the divine. Accordingly, itsidea of Samadhi is quite different from the ordinary notion ofthe Yogic trance; and while Patanjali gives to works only aninitial importance for moral purification and religious concen-tration, the Gita goes so far as to make works the distinctive


characteristic of Yoga. Action to Patanjali is only a preliminary,in the Gita it is a permanent foundation; in the Rajayoga it haspractically to be put aside when its result has been attained orat any rate ceases very soon to be a means for the Yoga, for theGita it is a means of the highest ascent and continues even afterthe complete liberation of the soul.

This much has to be said in order to avoid any confusion ofthought that might be created by the use of familiar words in aconnotation wider than the technical sense now familiar to us.Still, all that is essential in the Sankhya and Yoga systems, allin them that is large, catholic and universally true, is admittedby the Gita, even though it does not limit itself by them likethe opposing schools. Its Sankhya is the catholic and VedanticSankhya such as we find it in its first principles and elements inthe great Vedantic synthesis of the Upanishads and in the laterdevelopments of the Puranas. Its idea of Yoga is that large ideaof a principally subjective practice and inner change, necessaryfor the finding of the Self or the union with God, of whichthe Rajayoga is only one special application. The Gita insiststhat Sankhya and Yoga are not two different, incompatible anddiscordant systems, but one in their principle and aim; theydiffer only in their method and starting-point. The Sankhya alsois a Yoga, but it proceeds by knowledge; it starts, that is to say,by intellectual discrimination and analysis of the principles ofour being and attains its aim through the vision and possessionof the Truth. Yoga, on the other hand, proceeds by works; itis in its first principle Karmayoga; but it is evident from thewhole teaching of the Gita and its later definitions that the wordkarma is used in a very wide sense and that by Yoga is meantthe selfless devotion of all the inner as well as the outer activitiesas a sacrifice to the Lord of all works, offered to the Eternalas Master of all the soul’s energies and austerities. Yoga is thepractice of the Truth of which knowledge gives the vision, and itspractice has for its motor-power a spirit of illumined devotion,of calm or fervent consecration to that which knowledge sees tobe the Highest.

But what are the truths of Sankhya? The philosophy drew

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its name from its analytical process. Sankhya is the analysis, theenumeration, the separative and discriminative setting forth ofthe principles of our being of which the ordinary mind sees onlythe combinations and results of combination. It did not seek atall to synthetise. Its original standpoint is in fact dualistic, notwith the very relative dualism of the Vedantic schools which callthemselves by that name, Dwaita, but in a very absolute andtrenchant fashion. For it explains existence not by one, but bytwo original principles whose inter-relation is the cause of theuniverse, — Purusha, the inactive, Prakriti, the active. Purusha isthe Soul, not in the ordinary or popular sense of the word, but ofpure conscious Being immobile, immutable and self-luminous.Prakriti is Energy and its process. Purusha does nothing, butit reflects the action of Energy and its processes; Prakriti ismechanical, but by being reflected in Purusha it assumes theappearance of consciousness in its activities, and thus there arecreated those phenomena of creation, conservation, dissolution,birth and life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness,sense-knowledge and intellectual knowledge and ignorance, ac-tion and inaction, happiness and suffering which the Purushaunder the influence of Prakriti attributes to itself although theybelong not at all to itself but to the action or movement ofPrakriti alone.

For Prakriti is constituted of three gun. as or essential modesof energy; sattwa, the seed of intelligence, conserves the work-ings of energy; rajas, the seed of force and action, createsthe workings of energy; tamas, the seed of inertia and non-intelligence, the denial of sattwa and rajas, dissolves what theycreate and conserve. When these three powers of the energy ofPrakriti are in a state of equilibrium, all is in rest, there is nomovement, action or creation and there is therefore nothing tobe reflected in the immutable luminous being of the consciousSoul. But when the equilibrium is disturbed, then the threegunas fall into a state of inequality in which they strive withand act upon each other and the whole inextricable businessof ceaseless creation, conservation and dissolution begins, un-rolling the phenomena of the cosmos. This continues so long as


the Purusha consents to reflect the disturbance which obscureshis eternal nature and attributes to it the nature of Prakriti; butwhen he withdraws his consent, the gunas fall into equilibriumand the soul returns to its eternal, unchanging immobility; it isdelivered from phenomena. This reflection and this giving orwithdrawal of consent seem to be the only powers of Purusha;he is the witness of Nature by virtue of reflection and thegiver of the sanction, saks.ı and anumanta of the Gita, but notactively the Ishwara. Even his giving of consent is passive andhis withdrawing of consent is only another passivity. All actionsubjective or objective is foreign to the Soul; it has neither anactive will nor an active intelligence. It cannot therefore be thesole cause of the cosmos and the affirmation of a second causebecomes necessary. Not Soul alone by its nature of consciousknowledge, will and delight is the cause of the universe, butSoul and Nature are the dual cause, a passive Consciousnessand an active Energy. So the Sankhya explains the existence ofthe cosmos.

But whence then come this conscious intelligence and con-scious will which we perceive to be so large a part of ourbeing and which we commonly and instinctively refer not to thePrakriti, but to the Purusha? According to the Sankhya this in-telligence and will are entirely a part of the mechanical energy ofNature and are not properties of the soul; they are the principleof Buddhi, one of the twenty-four tattvas, the twenty-four cos-mic principles. Prakriti in the evolution of the world bases herselfwith her three gunas in her as the original substance of things,unmanifest, inconscient, out of which are evolved successivelyfive elemental conditions of energy or matter, — for Matter andForce are the same in the Sankhya philosophy. These are calledby the names of the five concrete elements of ancient thought,ether, air, fire, water and earth; but it must be remembered thatthey are not elements in the modern scientific sense but subtleconditions of material energy and nowhere to be found in theirpurity in the gross material world. All objects are created by thecombination 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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energy or matter, sound, touch, form, taste and smell, whichconstitute the way in which the mind-sense perceives objects.Thus by these five elements of Matter put forth from primaryenergy and these five sense relations through which Matter isknown is evolved what we would call in modern language theobjective aspect of cosmic existence.

Thirteen other principles constitute the subjective aspect ofthe cosmic Energy, — Buddhi or Mahat, Ahankara, Manas andits ten sense-functions, five of knowledge, five of action. Manas,mind, is the original sense which perceives all objects and reactsupon them; for it has at once an inferent and an efferent activity,receives by perception what the Gita calls the outward touchesof things, bahya sparsa, and so forms its idea of the world andexercises its reactions of active vitality. But it specialises its mostordinary functions of reception by aid of the five perceptivesenses of hearing, touch, sight, taste and smell, which make thefive properties of things their respective objects, and specialisescertain necessary vital functions of reaction by aid of the fiveactive senses which operate for speech, locomotion, the seizingof things, ejection and generation. Buddhi, the discriminatingprinciple, is at once intelligence and will; it is that power inNature which discriminates and coordinates. Ahankara, the ego-sense, is the subjective principle in Buddhi by which the Purushais induced to identify himself with Prakriti and her activities.But these subjective principles are themselves as mechanical, asmuch a part of the inconscient energy as those which consti-tute her objective operations. If we find it difficult to realisehow intelligence and will can be properties of the mechanicalInconscient and themselves mechanical (jad. a), we have only toremember that modern Science itself has been driven to the sameconclusion. Even in the mechanical action of the atom there isa power which can only be called an inconscient will and inall the works of Nature that pervading will does inconscientlythe works of intelligence. What we call mental intelligence isprecisely the same thing in its essence as that which discrimi-nates and coordinates subconsciously in all the activities of thematerial universe, and conscious Mind itself, Science has tried


to demonstrate, is only a result and transcript of the mechanicalaction of the inconscient. But Sankhya explains what modernScience leaves in obscurity, the process by which the mechanicaland inconscient takes on the appearance of consciousness. Itis because of the reflection of Prakriti in Purusha; the light ofconsciousness of the Soul is attributed to the workings of themechanical energy and it is thus that the Purusha, observingNature as the witness and forgetting himself, is deluded withthe 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 byhimself at all. To get rid of this delusion is the first step towardsthe liberation of the soul from Nature and her works.

There are certainly plenty of things in our existence whichthe Sankhya does not explain at all or does not explain satisfac-torily, but if all we need is a rational explanation of the cosmicprocesses in their principles as a basis for the great object com-mon to the ancient philosophies, the liberation of the soul fromthe obsession of cosmic Nature, then the Sankhya explanationof the world and the Sankhya way of liberation seem as goodand as effective as any other. What we do not seize at first is whyit should bring in an element of pluralism into its dualism by af-firming one Prakriti, but many Purushas. It would seem that theexistence of one Purusha and one Prakriti should be sufficient toaccount for the creation and procession of the universe. But theSankhya was bound to evolve pluralism by its rigidly analyticalobservation of the principles of things. First, actually, we findthat there are many conscious beings in the world and eachregards the same world in his own way and has his independentexperience of its subjective and objective things, his separatedealings with the same perceptive and reactive processes. Ifthere were only one Purusha, there would not be this centralindependence and separativeness, but all would see the worldin an identical fashion and with a common subjectivity andobjectivity. Because Prakriti is one, all witness the same world;because her principles are everywhere the same, the general prin-ciples which constitute internal and external experience are the

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same for all; but the infinite difference of view and outlook andattitude, action and experience and escape from experience, —a difference not of the natural operations which are the samebut of the witnessing consciousness, — are utterly inexplicableexcept on the supposition that there is a multiplicity of witnesses,many Purushas. The separative ego-sense, we may say, is a suf-ficient explanation? But the ego-sense is a common principle ofNature and need not vary; for by itself it simply induces thePurusha to identify himself with Prakriti, and if there is onlyone Purusha, all beings would be one, joined and alike in theiregoistic consciousness; however different in detail might be themere forms and combinations of their natural parts, there wouldbe no difference of soul-outlook and soul-experience. The varia-tions of Nature ought not to make all this central difference, thismultiplicity of outlook and from beginning to end this separate-ness of experience in one Witness, one Purusha. Therefore thepluralism of souls is a logical necessity to a pure Sankhya systemdivorced from the Vedantic elements of the ancient knowledgewhich first gave it birth. The cosmos and its process can beexplained 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 isthe object set before itself by this philosophy as by others. Thisliberation is effected, we have said, by the Purusha’s withdrawalof his consent from the activities of Prakriti which she conductsonly for his pleasure; but, in sum, this is only a way of speaking.The Purusha is passive and the act of giving or withdrawingconsent cannot really belong to it, but must be a movement inPrakriti itself. If we consider, we shall see that it is, so far as it isan operation, a movement of reversal or recoil in the principle ofBuddhi, the discriminative will. Buddhi has been lending itselfto the perceptions of the mind-sense; it has been busy discrim-inating and coordinating the operations of the cosmic energyand by the aid of the ego-sense identifying the Witness with herworks of thought, sense and action. It arrives by the process ofdiscriminating things at the acid and dissolvent realisation thatthis identity is a delusion; it discriminates finally the Purusha


from Prakriti and perceives that all is mere disturbance of theequilibrium of the gunas; the Buddhi, at once intelligence andwill, recoils from the falsehood which it has been supporting andthe Purusha, ceasing to be bound, no longer associates himselfwith the interest of the mind in the cosmic play. The ultimateresult will be that Prakriti will lose her power to reflect herselfin the Purusha; for the effect of the ego-sense is destroyed andthe intelligent will becoming indifferent ceases to be the meansof her sanction: necessarily then her gunas must fall into a stateof equilibrium, the cosmic play must cease, the Purusha returnto his immobile repose. But if there were only the one Purushaand this recoil of the discriminating principle from its delusionstook place, all cosmos would cease. As it is, we see that nothingof the kind happens. A few beings among innumerable millionsattain to liberation or move towards it; the rest are in no wayaffected, nor is cosmic Nature in her play with them one whitinconvenienced by this summary rejection which should be theend of all her processes. Only by the theory of many independentPurushas can this fact be explained. The only at all logical ex-planation from the point of view of Vedantic monism is that ofthe Mayavada; but there the whole thing becomes a dream, bothbondage and liberation are circumstances of the unreality, theempirical blunderings of Maya; in reality there is none freed,none bound. The more realistic Sankhya view of things doesnot admit this phantasmagoric idea of existence and thereforecannot adopt this solution. Here too we see that the multiplicityof souls is an inevitable conclusion from the data of the Sankhyaanalysis of existence.

The Gita starts from this analysis and seems at first, even inits setting forth of Yoga, to accept it almost wholly. It acceptsPrakriti and her three gunas and twenty-four principles; acceptsthe attribution of all action to the Prakriti and the passivity ofthe Purusha; accepts the multiplicity of conscious beings in thecosmos; accepts the dissolution of the identifying ego-sense, thediscriminating action of the intelligent will and the transcen-dence of the action of the three modes of energy as the meansof liberation. The Yoga which Arjuna is asked to practise from

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the outset is Yoga by the Buddhi, the intelligent will. But there isone deviation of capital importance, — the Purusha is regardedas one, not many; for the free, immaterial, immobile, eternal,immutable Self of the Gita, but for one detail, is a Vedantic de-scription of the eternal, passive, immobile, immutable Purushaof the Sankhyas. But the capital difference is that there is Oneand not many. This brings in the whole difficulty which theSankhya multiplicity avoids and necessitates a quite differentsolution. This the Gita provides by bringing into its VedanticSankhya the ideas and principles of Vedantic Yoga.

The first important new element we find is in the conceptionof Purusha itself. Prakriti conducts her activities for the pleasureof Purusha; but how is that pleasure determined? In the strictSankhya analysis it can only be by a passive consent of thesilent Witness. Passively the Witness consents to the action ofthe intelligent will and the ego-sense, passively he consents to therecoil of that will from the ego-sense. He is Witness, source ofthe consent, by reflection upholder of the work of Nature, saks.ıanumanta bharta, but nothing more. But the Purusha of the Gitais also the Lord of Nature; he is Ishwara. If the operation of theintelligent will belongs to Nature, the origination and powerof the will proceed from the conscious Soul; he is the Lord ofNature. If the act of intelligence of the Will is the act of Prakriti,the source and light of the intelligence are actively contributedby the Purusha; he is not only the Witness, but the Lord andKnower, master of knowledge and will, jnata ısvarah. . He is thesupreme cause of the action of Prakriti, the supreme cause of itswithdrawal from action. In the Sankhya analysis Purusha andPrakriti in their dualism are the cause of the cosmos; in thissynthetic Sankhya Purusha by his Prakriti is the cause of thecosmos. We see at once how far we have travelled from the rigidpurism of the traditional analysis.

But what of the one self immutable, immobile, eternallyfree, with which the Gita began? That is free from all changeor involution in change, avikarya, unborn, unmanifested, theBrahman, yet it is that “by which all this is extended.” Thereforeit would seem that the principle of the Ishwara is in its being;


if it is immobile, it is yet the cause and lord of all action andmobility. But how? And what of the multiplicity of consciousbeings in the cosmos? They do not seem to be the Lord, butrather very much not the Lord, anısa, for they are subject to theaction of the three gunas and the delusion of the ego-sense, andif, as the Gita seems to say, they are all the one self, how didthis involution, subjection and delusion come about or how isit explicable except by the pure passivity of the Purusha? Andwhence the multiplicity? or how is it that the one self in one bodyand mind attains to liberation while in others it remains underthe delusion of bondage? These are difficulties which cannot bepassed by without a solution.

The Gita answers them in its later chapters by an analysis ofPurusha and Prakriti which brings in new elements very properto a Vedantic Yoga, but alien to the traditional Sankhya. Itspeaks of three Purushas or rather a triple status of the Purusha.The Upanishads in dealing with the truths of Sankhya seemsometimes to speak only of two Purushas. There is one unbornof three colours, says a text, the eternal feminine principle ofPrakriti with its three gunas, ever creating; there are two un-born, two Purushas, of whom one cleaves to and enjoys her,the other abandons her because he has enjoyed all her enjoy-ments. In another verse they are described as two birds on onetree, eternally yoked companions, one of whom eats the fruitsof 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 secondand knows that all is his greatness, then he is delivered fromsorrow. The point of view in the two verses is different, but theyhave a common implication. One of the birds is the eternallysilent, unbound Self or Purusha by whom all this is extendedand he regards the cosmos he has extended, but is aloof fromit; the other is the Purusha involved in Prakriti. The first verseindicates that the two are the same, represent different states,bound and liberated, of the same conscious being, — for thesecond Unborn has descended into the enjoyment of Nature andwithdrawn from her; the other verse brings out what we would

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not gather from the former, that in its higher status of unity theself is for ever free, inactive, unattached, though it descends inits lower being into the multiplicity of the creatures of Prakritiand withdraws from it by reversion in any individual creatureto the higher status. This theory of the double status of the oneconscious soul opens a door; but the process of the multiplicityof the One is still obscure.

To these two the Gita, developing the thought of otherpassages in the Upanishads,1 adds yet another, the supreme,the Purushottama, the highest Purusha, whose greatness all thiscreation is. Thus there are three, the Kshara, the Akshara, theUttama. Kshara, the mobile, the mutable is Nature, svabhava, itis the various becoming of the soul; the Purusha here is the mul-tiplicity of the divine Being; it is the Purusha multiple not apartfrom, but in Prakriti. Akshara, the immobile, the immutable, isthe silent and inactive self, it is the unity of the divine Being,Witness of Nature, but not involved in its movement; it is theinactive Purusha free from Prakriti and her works. The Uttama isthe Lord, the supreme Brahman, the supreme Self, who possessesboth the immutable unity and the mobile multiplicity. It is by alarge mobility and action of His nature, His energy, His will andpower, that He manifests Himself in the world and by a greaterstillness and immobility of His being that He is aloof from it; yetis He as Purushottama above both the aloofness from Natureand the attachment to Nature. This idea of the Purushottama,though continually implied in the Upanishads, is disengaged anddefinitely brought out by the Gita and has exercised a powerfulinfluence on the later developments of the Indian religious con-sciousness. It is the foundation of the highest Bhaktiyoga whichclaims to exceed the rigid definitions of monistic philosophy; itis at the back of the philosophy of the devotional Puranas.

The Gita is not content, either, to abide within the Sankhyaanalysis of Prakriti; for that makes room only for the ego-senseand not for the multiple Purusha, which is there not a part of

1 Purus.ah. . . . aks.arat paratah. parah. , — although the Akshara is supreme, there is asupreme Purusha higher than it, says the Upanishad.


Prakriti, but separate from her. The Gita affirms on the contrarythat the Lord by His nature becomes the Jiva. How is that possi-ble, since there are only the twenty-four principles of the cosmicEnergy and no others? Yes, says the divine Teacher in effect, thatis a perfectly valid account for the apparent operations of thecosmic Prakriti with its three gunas, and the relation attributedto Purusha and Prakriti there is also quite valid and of greatuse for the practical purposes of the involution and the with-drawal. But this is only the lower Prakriti of the three modes,the inconscient, the apparent; there is a higher, a supreme, aconscient and divine Nature, and it is that which has becomethe individual soul, the Jiva. In the lower nature each beingappears as the ego, in the higher he is the individual Purusha.In other words multiplicity is part of the spiritual nature of theOne. This individual soul is myself, in the creation it is a partialmanifestation of me, mamaiva amsah. , and it possesses all mypowers; it is witness, giver of the sanction, upholder, knower,lord. It descends into the lower nature and thinks itself boundby action, so to enjoy the lower being: it can draw back andknow itself as the passive Purusha free from all action. It canrise above the three gunas and, liberated from the bondage ofaction, yet possess action, even as I do myself, and by adorationof the Purushottama and union with him it can enjoy wholly itsdivine Nature.

Such is the analysis, not confining itself to the apparentcosmic process but penetrating into the occult secrets of super-conscious Nature, uttamam rahasyam, by which the Gita foundsits synthesis of Vedanta, Sankhya and Yoga, its synthesis ofknowledge, works and devotion. By the pure Sankhya alonethe combining of works and liberation is contradictory and im-possible. By pure Monism alone the permanent continuationof works as a part of Yoga and the indulgence of devotionafter perfect knowledge and liberation and union are attained,become impossible or at least irrational and otiose. The Sankhyaknowledge of the Gita dissipates and the Yoga system of the Gitatriumphs over all these obstacles.

IX

Sankhya, Yoga and Vedanta

THE WHOLE object of the first six chapters of the Gitais to synthetise in a large frame of Vedantic truth thetwo methods, ordinarily supposed to be diverse and even

opposite, of the Sankhyas and the Yogins. The Sankhya is takenas the starting-point and the basis; but it is from the beginningand with a progressively increasing emphasis permeated withthe ideas and methods of Yoga and remoulded in its spirit.The practical difference, as it seems to have presented itself tothe religious minds of that day, lay first in this that Sankhyaproceeded by knowledge and through the Yoga of the intelli-gence, while Yoga proceeded by works and the transformationof the active consciousness and, secondly, — a corollary of thisfirst distinction, — that Sankhya led to entire passivity and therenunciation of works, sannyasa, while Yoga held to be quitesufficient the inner renunciation of desire, the purification ofthe subjective principle which leads to action and the turningof works Godwards, towards the divine existence and towardsliberation. Yet both had the same aim, the transcendence of birthand of this terrestrial existence and the union of the human soulwith the Highest. This at least is the difference as it is presentedto us by the Gita.

The difficulty which Arjuna feels in understanding any pos-sible synthesis of these oppositions is an indication of the hardline that was driven in between these two systems in the normalideas of the time. The Teacher sets out by reconciling works andthe Yoga of the intelligence: the latter, he says, is far superiorto mere works; it is by the Yoga of the Buddhi, by knowledgeraising man out of the ordinary human mind and its desiresinto the purity and equality of the Brahmic condition free fromall desire that works can be made acceptable. Yet are worksa means of salvation, but works thus purified by knowledge.


Filled with the notions of the then prevailing culture, misledby the emphasis which the Teacher lays upon the ideas properto Vedantic Sankhya, conquest of the senses, withdrawal frommind into the Self, ascent into the Brahmic condition, extinctionof our lower personality in the Nirvana of impersonality, — forthe ideas proper to Yoga are as yet subordinated and largelyheld back, — Arjuna is perplexed and asks, “If thou holdestthe intelligence to be greater than works, why then dost thouappoint me to a terrible work? Thou seemest to bewilder myintelligence with a confused and mingled speech; tell me thendecisively that one thing by which I may attain to my soul’sweal.”

In answer Krishna affirms that the Sankhya goes by knowl-edge and renunciation, the Yoga by works; but the real renun-ciation is impossible without Yoga, without works done as asacrifice, done with equality and without desire of the fruit, withthe perception that it is Nature which does the actions and notthe soul; but immediately afterwards he declares that the sacrificeof knowledge is the highest, all work finds its consummationin knowledge, by the fire of knowledge all works are burntup; therefore by Yoga works are renounced and their bondageovercome for the man who is in possession of his Self. AgainArjuna is perplexed; here are desireless works, the principle ofYoga, and renunciation of works, the principle of Sankhya, puttogether side by side as if part of one method, yet there is no evi-dent reconciliation between them. For the kind of reconciliationwhich the Teacher has already given, — in outward inaction tosee action still persisting and in apparent action to see a realinaction since the soul has renounced its illusion of the workerand given up works into the hands of the Master of sacrifice,— is for the practical mind of Arjuna too slight, too subtle andexpressed almost in riddling words; he has not caught their senseor at least not penetrated into their spirit and reality. Thereforehe asks again, “Thou declarest to me the renunciation of works,O Krishna, and again thou declarest to me Yoga; which one ofthese is the better way, that tell me with a clear decisiveness.”

The answer is important, for it puts the whole distinction

Sankhya, Yoga and Vedanta 83

very clearly and indicates though it does not develop entirelythe line of reconciliation. “Renunciation and Yoga of worksboth bring about the soul’s salvation, but of the two the Yogaof works is distinguished above the renunciation of works. Heshould be known as always a Sannyasin (even when he is do-ing action) who neither dislikes nor desires; for free from thedualities 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 getsthe fruit of both,” because in their integrality each contains theother. “The status which is attained by the Sankhya, to thatthe men of the Yoga also arrive; who sees Sankhya and Yogaas one, he sees. But renunciation is difficult to attain withoutYoga; the sage who has Yoga attains soon to the Brahman; hisself becomes the self of all existences (of all things that havebecome), and even though he does works, he is not involved inthem.” He knows that the actions are not his, but Nature’s andby that very knowledge he is free; he has renounced works, doesno actions, though actions are done through him; he becomesthe Self, the Brahman, brahmabhuta, he sees all existences asbecomings (bhutani) of that self-existent Being, his own onlyone of them, all their actions as only the development of cosmicNature working through their individual nature and his ownactions also as a part of the same cosmic activity. This is notthe whole teaching of the Gita; for as yet there is only the ideaof the immutable self or Purusha, the Akshara Brahman, and ofNature, Prakriti, as that which is responsible for the cosmos andnot yet the idea, clearly expressed, of the Ishwara, the Purushot-tama; as yet only the synthesis of works and knowledge and notyet, in spite of certain hints, the introduction of the supremeelement of devotion which becomes so important afterwards; asyet only the one inactive Purusha and the lower Prakriti and notyet the distinction of the triple Purusha and the double Prakriti.It is true the Ishwara is spoken of, but his relation to the selfand nature is not yet made definite. The first six chapters onlycarry the synthesis so far as it can be carried without the clearexpression and decisive entrance of these all-important truths


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 bywhich it enters into the Brahmic condition: “that of the Sankhyasby the Yoga of knowledge, that of the Yogins by the Yoga ofworks.” This identification of Sankhya with Jnanayoga and ofYoga with the way of works is interesting; for it shows that quitea different order of ideas prevailed at that time from those wenow possess as the result of the great Vedantic development ofIndian thought, subsequent evidently to the composition of theGita, by which the other Vedic philosophies fell into desuetudeas practical methods of liberation. To justify the language ofthe Gita we must suppose that at that time it was the Sankhyamethod which was very commonly1 adopted by those who fol-lowed the path of knowledge. Subsequently, with the spreadof Buddhism, the Sankhya method of knowledge must havebeen much overshadowed by the Buddhistic. Buddhism, likethe Sankhya non-Theistic and anti-Monistic, laid stress on theimpermanence of the results of the cosmic energy, which itpresented not as Prakriti but as Karma because the Buddhistsadmitted neither the Vedantic Brahman nor the inactive Soul ofthe Sankhyas, and it made the recognition of this impermanenceby the discriminating mind its means of liberation. When the re-action against Buddhism arrived, it took up not the old Sankhyanotion, but the Vedantic form popularised by Shankara whoreplaced the Buddhistic impermanence by the cognate Vedanticidea of illusion, Maya, and the Buddhistic idea of Non-Being,indefinable Nirvana, a negative Absolute, by the opposite andyet cognate Vedantic idea of the indefinable Being, Brahman, anineffably positive Absolute in which all feature and action andenergy cease because in That they never really existed and aremere illusions of the mind. It is the method of Shankara basedupon these concepts of his philosophy, it is the renunciation oflife 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, thoughsubordinated to the Vedantic idea and mingled with many others.


now of the Yoga of knowledge. But in the time of the Gita Mayawas evidently not yet quite the master word of the Vedanticphilosophy, nor had it, at least with any decisive clearness, theconnotation which Shankara brought out of it with such a lumi-nous force and distinctness; for in the Gita there is little talk ofMaya and much of Prakriti and, even, the former word is used aslittle more than an equivalent of the latter but only in its inferiorstatus; it is the lower Prakriti of the three gunas, traigun. yamayımaya. Prakriti, not illusive Maya, is in the teaching of the Gitathe effective cause of cosmic existence.

Still, whatever the precise distinctions of their metaphysicalideas, the practical difference between the Sankhya and Yogaas developed by the Gita is the same as that which now ex-ists 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 knowledgeby the Buddhi, by the discriminating intelligence; it arrived byreflective thought, vicara, at right discrimination, viveka, of thetrue nature of the soul and of the imposition on it of the worksof Prakriti through attachment and identification, just as theVedantic method arrives by the same means at the right discrim-ination of the true nature of the Self and of the imposition on itof cosmic appearances by mental illusion which leads to egoisticidentification and attachment. In the Vedantic method Mayaceases for the soul by its return to its true and eternal status asthe one Self, the Brahman, and the cosmic action disappears;in the Sankhya method the working of the gun. as falls to restby the return of the soul to its true and eternal status as theinactive Purusha and the cosmic action ends. The Brahman ofthe Mayavadins is silent, immutable and inactive; so too is thePurusha of the Sankhya; therefore for both ascetic renunciationof life and works is a necessary means of liberation. But for theYoga of the Gita, as for the Vedantic Yoga of works, action isnot only a preparation but itself the means of liberation; and itis the justice of this view which the Gita seeks to bring out withsuch an unceasing force and insistence, — an insistence, unfortu-nately, which could not prevail in India against the tremendous


tide of Buddhism,2 was lost afterwards in the intensity of asceticillusionism and the fervour of world-shunning saints and devo-tees and is only now beginning to exercise its real and salutaryinfluence on the Indian mind. Renunciation is indispensable, butthe true renunciation is the inner rejection of desire and egoism;without that the outer physical abandoning of works is a thingunreal and ineffective, with it it ceases even to be necessary,although it is not forbidden. Knowledge is essential, there isno higher force for liberation, but works with knowledge arealso needed; by the union of knowledge and works the souldwells entirely in the Brahmic status not only in repose andinactive calm, but in the very midst and stress and violence ofaction. Devotion is all-important, but works with devotion arealso important; by the union of knowledge, devotion and worksthe soul is taken up into the highest status of the Ishwara todwell there in the Purushottama who is master at once of theeternal spiritual calm and the eternal cosmic activity. This is thesynthesis of the Gita.

But, apart from the distinction between the Sankhya way ofknowledge and the Yoga way of works, there was another andsimilar opposition in the Vedanta itself, and this also the Gitahas to deal with, to correct and to fuse into its large restatementof the Aryan spiritual culture. This was the distinction betweenKarmakanda and Jnanakanda, between the original thought thatled 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 ofthe Vedic hymns and the Vedic sacrifice and those who putthese aside as a lower knowledge and laid stress on the loftymetaphysical knowledge which emerges from the Upanishads.

2 At the same time the Gita seems to have largely influenced Mahayanist Buddhism andtexts are taken bodily from it into the Buddhist Scriptures. It may therefore have helpedlargely to turn Buddhism, originally a school of quietistic and illuminated ascetics, intothat religion of meditative devotion and compassionate action which has so powerfullyinfluenced 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 theBrahmaloka is not liberation; the soul must pass beyond to the supracosmic status.


For the pragmatic mind of the Vedavadins the Aryan religion ofthe Rishis meant the strict performance of the Vedic sacrificesand the use of the sacred Vedic mantras in order to possess allhuman desires in this world, wealth, progeny, victory, every kindof good fortune, and the joys of immortality in Paradise beyond.For the idealism of the Brahmavadins this was only a preliminarypreparation and the real object of man, true purus.artha, beganwith his turning to the knowledge of the Brahman which wouldgive him the true immortality of an ineffable spiritual bliss farbeyond 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 andwith which therefore the Gita has to deal.

Almost the first word of the synthesis of works and knowl-edge is a strong, almost a violent censure and repudiation of theVedavada, “this flowery word which they declare who have notclear discernment, devoted to the creed of the Veda, whose creedis that there is nothing else, souls of desire, seekers of Paradise,— it gives the fruits of the works of birth, it is multifarious withspecialities of rites, it is directed to enjoyment and lordship asits goal.” The Gita even seems to go on to attack the Veda itselfwhich, though it has been practically cast aside, is still to Indiansentiment intangible, inviolable, the sacred origin and authorityfor all its philosophy and religion. “The action of the three gunasis the subject matter of the Veda; but do thou become free fromthe triple guna, O Arjuna.” The Vedas in the widest terms, “allthe Vedas”, — which might well include the Upanishads also andseems to include them, for the general term Sruti is used lateron, — are declared to be unnecessary for the man who knows.“As much use as there is in a well with water in flood on everyside, so much is there in all the Vedas for the Brahmin who hasthe knowledge.” Nay, the Scriptures are even a stumbling-block;for the letter of the Word — perhaps because of its conflict oftexts and its various and mutually dissentient interpretations —bewilders the understanding, which can only find certainty andconcentration by the light within. “When thy intelligence shallcross beyond the whorl of delusion, then shalt thou become


indifferent to Scripture heard or that which thou hast yet tohear, gantasi nirvedam srotavyasya srutasya ca. When thy intel-ligence which is bewildered by the Sruti, srutivipratipanna, shallstand unmoving and stable in Samadhi, then shalt thou attainto Yoga.” So offensive is all this to conventional religious sen-timent that attempts are naturally made by the convenient andindispensable human faculty of text-twisting to put a differentsense on some of these verses, but the meaning is plain and hangstogether from beginning to end. It is confirmed and emphasisedby a subsequent passage in which the knowledge of the knoweris described as passing beyond the range of Veda and Upanishad,sabdabrahmativartate.

Let us see, however, what all this means; for we may besure that a synthetic and catholic system like the Gita’s will nottreat such important parts of the Aryan culture in a spirit ofmere negation and repudiation. The Gita has to synthetise theYoga doctrine of liberation by works and the Sankhya doctrineof liberation by knowledge; it has to fuse karma with jnana. Ithas at the same time to synthetise the Purusha and Prakriti ideacommon to Sankhya and Yoga with the Brahmavada of the cur-rent Vedanta in which the Purusha, Deva, Ishwara, — supremeSoul, God, Lord, — of the Upanishads all became merged in theone all-swallowing concept of the immutable Brahman; and ithas to bring out again from its overshadowing by that conceptbut not with any denial of it the Yoga idea of the Lord orIshwara. It has too its own luminous thought to add, the crownof its synthetic system, the doctrine of the Purushottama and ofthe triple Purusha for which, though the idea is there, no preciseand indisputable authority can be easily found in the Upanishadsand which seems indeed at first sight to be in contradiction withthat text of the Sruti where only two Purushas are recognised.Moreover, in synthetising works and knowledge it has to takeaccount not only of the opposition of Yoga and Sankhya, but ofthe opposition of works to knowledge in Vedanta itself, wherethe connotation of the two words and therefore their point ofconflict is not quite the same as the point of the Sankhya-Yogaopposition. It is not surprising at all, one may observe in passing,


that with the conflict of so many philosophical schools all found-ing themselves on the texts of the Veda and Upanishads, the Gitashould describe the understanding as being perplexed and con-fused, led in different directions by the Sruti, srutivipratipanna.What battles are even now delivered by Indian pundits andmetaphysicians over the meaning of the ancient texts and towhat different conclusions they lead! The understanding maywell get disgusted and indifferent, gantasi nirvedam, refuse tohear any more texts new or old, srotavyasya srutasya ca, and gointo itself to discover the truth in the light of a deeper and innerand direct experience.

In the first six chapters the Gita lays a large foundation forits synthesis of works and knowledge, its synthesis of Sankhya,Yoga and Vedanta. But first it finds that karma, works, has aparticular sense in the language of the Vedantins; it means theVedic sacrifices and ceremonies or at most that and the orderingof life according to the Grihyasutras in which these rites are themost important part, the religious kernel of the life. By worksthe Vedantins understood these religious works, the sacrificialsystem, the yajna, full of a careful order, vidhi, of exact andcomplicated rites, kriya-vises.a-bahulam. But in Yoga works hada much wider significance. The Gita insists on this wider sig-nificance; in our conception of spiritual activity all works haveto be included, sarva-karman. i. At the same time it does not,like Buddhism, reject the idea of the sacrifice, it prefers to upliftand enlarge it. Yes, it says in effect, not only is sacrifice, yajna,the most important part of life, but all life, all works shouldbe regarded as sacrifice, are yajna, though by the ignorant theyare performed without the higher knowledge and by the mostignorant not in the true order, avidhi-purvakam. Sacrifice is thevery condition of life; with sacrifice as their eternal companionthe Father of creatures created the peoples. But the sacrifices ofthe Vedavadins are offerings of desire directed towards materialrewards, desire eager for the result of works, desire lookingto a larger enjoyment in Paradise as immortality and highestsalvation. This the system of the Gita cannot admit; for that inits very inception starts with the renunciation of desire, with its


rejection and destruction as the enemy of the soul. The Gita doesnot deny the validity even of the Vedic sacrificial works; it admitsthem, it admits that by these means one may get enjoyment hereand Paradise beyond; it is I myself, says the divine Teacher,who accept these sacrifices and to whom they are offered, Iwho give these fruits in the form of the gods since so menchoose to approach me. But this is not the true road, nor isthe enjoyment of Paradise the liberation and fulfilment whichman has to seek. It is the ignorant who worship the gods, notknowing whom they are worshipping ignorantly in these divineforms; 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 allthe life’s energies and activities, with devotion, without desire,for His sake and for the welfare of the peoples. It is becausethe Vedavada obscures this truth and with its tangle of ritualties man down to the action of the three gunas that it has to beso severely censured and put roughly aside; but its central ideais not destroyed; transfigured and uplifted, it is turned into amost important part of the true spiritual experience and of themethod of liberation.

The Vedantic idea of knowledge does not present the samedifficulties. The Gita takes it over at once and completelyand throughout the six chapters quietly substitutes the stillimmutable Brahman of the Vedantins, the One without asecond immanent in all cosmos, for the still immutable butmultiple Purusha of the Sankhyas. It accepts throughout thesechapters knowledge and realisation of the Brahman as the mostimportant, the indispensable means of liberation, even while itinsists on desireless works as an essential part of knowledge.It accepts equally Nirvana of the ego in the infinite equality ofthe immutable, impersonal Brahman as essential to liberation;it practically identifies this extinction with the Sankhya returnof the inactive immutable Purusha upon itself when it emergesout of identification with the actions of Prakriti; it combinesand fuses the language of the Vedanta with the language of theSankhya, as had already indeed been done by certain of the


Upanishads.4 But still there is a defect in the Vedantic positionwhich has to be overcome. We may, perhaps, conjecture that atthis time the Vedanta had not yet redeveloped the later theistictendencies which in the Upanishads are already present as anelement, but not so prominent as in the Vaishnava philosophiesof the later Vedantins where they become indeed not onlyprominent but paramount. We may take it that the orthodoxVedanta was, at any rate in its main tendencies, pantheistic atthe basis, monistic at the summit.5 It knew of the Brahman, onewithout a second; it knew of the Gods, Vishnu, Shiva, Brahmaand the rest, who all resolve themselves into the Brahman; butthe one supreme Brahman as the one Ishwara, Purusha, Deva —words often applied to it in the Upanishads and justifying to thatextent, yet passing beyond the Sankhya and the theistic concep-tions — was an idea that had fallen from its pride of place;6 thenames could only be applied in a strictly logical Brahmavada tosubordinate or inferior phases of the Brahman-idea. The Gitaproposes not only to restore the original equality of these namesand therefore of the conceptions they indicate, but to go a stepfarther. The Brahman in its supreme and not in any lower aspecthas to be presented as the Purusha with the lower Prakriti forits Maya, so to synthetise thoroughly Vedanta and Sankhya,and as Ishwara, so to synthetise thoroughly both with Yoga; butthe Gita is going to represent the Ishwara, the Purushottama,as higher even than the still and immutable Brahman, and theloss of ego in the impersonal comes in at the beginning asonly a great initial and necessary step towards union with thePurushottama. For the Purushottama is the supreme Brahman.It therefore passes boldly beyond the Veda and the Upanishadsas they were taught by their best authorised exponents andaffirms 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 butpartial 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.


but which may not be capable of being fitted in within thefour corners of their meaning as ordinarily interpreted by theVedantins.7 In fact without this free and synthetic dealing withthe letter of the Scripture a work of large synthesis in the thenstate of conflict between numerous schools and with the currentmethods of Vedic exegesis would have been impossible.

The Gita in later chapters speaks highly of the Veda and theUpanishads. They are divine Scriptures, they are the Word. TheLord himself is the knower of Veda and the author of Vedanta,vedavid vedantakr.t; the Lord is the one object of knowledgein all the Vedas, sarvair vedair aham eva vedyah. , a languagewhich implies that the word Veda means the book of knowl-edge and that these Scriptures deserve their appellation. ThePurushottama from his high supremacy above the Immutableand the mutable has extended himself in the world and in theVeda. Still the letter of the Scripture binds and confuses, as theapostle of Christianity warned his disciples when he said thatthe letter killeth and it is the spirit that saves; and there is apoint beyond which the utility of the Scripture itself ceases. Thereal source of knowledge is the Lord in the heart; “I am seatedin the heart of every man and from me is knowledge,” says theGita; the Scripture is only a verbal form of that inner Veda, ofthat self-luminous Reality, it is sabdabrahma: the mantra, saysthe Veda, has risen from the heart, from the secret place whereis the seat of the truth, sadanad r.tasya, guhayam. That origin isits sanction; but still the infinite Truth is greater than its word.Nor shall you say of any Scripture that it alone is all-sufficientand no other truth can be admitted, as the Vedavadins said ofthe Veda, nanyad astıti vadinah. . This is a saving and liberatingword 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 SupremeBrahman or Supreme Purusha is constantly described as containing in himself the op-position of the Brahman with qualities and without qualities, nirgun.o gun. ı. He is notone of these things to the exclusion of the other which seems to our intellect to be itscontrary.


and the books of the Chinese, Veda and Upanishads and Puranaand Tantra and Shastra and the Gita itself and the sayings ofthinkers and sages, prophets and Avatars, still you shall not saythat there is nothing else or that the truth your intellect cannotfind there is not true because you cannot find it there. That isthe limited thought of the sectarian or the composite thoughtof the eclectic religionist, not the untrammelled truth-seeking ofthe free and illumined mind and God-experienced soul. Heardor unheard before, that always is the truth which is seen by theheart of man in its illumined depths or heard within from theMaster of all knowledge, the knower of the eternal Veda.

X

The Yoga of the Intelligent Will

IHAVE had to deviate in the last two essays and to drag thereader 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 followsthe peculiar line of development it has taken, working out first apartial truth with only subdued hints of its deeper meaning, thenreturning upon its hints and bringing out their significance untilit rises to its last great suggestion, its supreme mystery which itdoes not work out at all, but leaves to be lived out, as the laterages of Indian spirituality tried to live it out in great waves oflove, of surrender, of ecstasy. Its eye is always on its synthesisand all its strains are the gradual preparation of the mind for itshigh closing note.

I have declared to you the poise of a self-liberating intelli-gence in Sankhya, says the divine Teacher to Arjuna. I will nowdeclare to you another poise in Yoga. You are shrinking fromthe results of your works, you desire other results and turn fromyour right path in life because it does not lead you to them. Butthis idea of works and their result, desire of result as the motive,the work as a means for the satisfaction of desire, is the bondageof the ignorant who know not what works are, nor their truesource, nor their real operation, nor their high utility. My Yogawill free you from all bondage of the soul to its works, karma-bandham prahasyasi. You are afraid of many things, afraid ofsin, afraid of suffering, afraid of hell and punishment, afraidof God, afraid of this world, afraid of the hereafter, afraid ofyourself. What is it that you are not afraid of at this moment,you the Aryan fighter, the world’s chief hero? But this is thegreat fear which besieges humanity, its fear of sin and sufferingnow and hereafter, its fear in a world of whose true nature itis ignorant, of a God whose true being also it has not seen and

The Yoga of the Intelligent Will 95

whose cosmic purpose it does not understand. My Yoga willdeliver you from the great fear and even a little of it will bringdeliverance. When you have once set out on this path, you willfind that no step is lost; every least movement will be a gain; youwill find there no obstacle that can baulk you of your advance.A bold and absolute promise and one to which the fearful andhesitating mind beset and stumbling in all its paths cannot easilylend an assured trust; nor is the large and full truth of it apparentunless with these first words of the message of the Gita we readalso the last, “Abandon all laws of conduct and take refuge inMe 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 toman, but rather with the first necessary rays of light on thepath, directed not like that to the soul, but to the intellect, thatthe exposition begins. Not the Friend and Lover of man speaksfirst, but the guide and teacher who has to remove from himhis ignorance of his true self and of the nature of the worldand of the springs of his own action. For it is because he actsignorantly, with a wrong intelligence and therefore a wrong willin 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 ofthis wrong intelligence that he has hope and fear, wrath and griefand transient joy; otherwise works are possible with a perfectserenity and freedom. Therefore it is the Yoga of the buddhi, theintelligence, that is first enjoined on Arjuna. To act with rightintelligence and, therefore, a right will, fixed in the One, aware ofthe one self in all and acting out of its equal serenity, not runningabout in different directions under the thousand impulses of oursuperficial mental self, is the Yoga of the intelligent will.

There are, says the Gita, two types of intelligence in the hu-man being. The first is concentrated, poised, one, homogeneous,directed singly towards the Truth; unity is its characteristic, con-centrated fixity is its very being. In the other there is no singlewill, no unified intelligence, but only an endless number of ideasmany-branching, coursing about, that is to say, in this or thatdirection in pursuit of the desires which are offered to it by lifeand by the environment. Buddhi, the word used, means, properly


speaking, the mental power of understanding but it is evidentlyused by the Gita in a large philosophic sense for the whole actionof the discriminating and deciding mind which determines boththe direction and use of our thoughts and the direction and use ofour acts; thought, intelligence, judgment, perceptive choice andaim are all included in its functioning: for the characteristic of theunified intelligence is not only concentration of the mind thatknows, but especially concentration of the mind that decidesand persists in the decision, vyavasaya, while the sign of thedissipated intelligence is not so much even discursiveness of theideas and perceptions as discursiveness of the aims and desires,therefore of the will. Will, then, and knowledge are the twofunctions of the Buddhi. The unified intelligent will is fixed inthe 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 therestless and discursive action of the mind, dispersed in outwardlife and works and their fruits. “Works are far inferior,” saysthe Teacher, “to Yoga of the intelligence; desire rather refuge inthe intelligence; poor and wretched souls are they who make thefruit of their works the object of their thoughts and activities.”

We must remember the psychological order of the Sankhyawhich the Gita accepts. On one side there is the Purusha, thesoul calm, inactive, immutable, one, not evolutive; on the otherside there is Prakriti or Nature-force inert without the consciousSoul, active but only by juxtaposition to that consciousness,by contact with it, as we would say, not so much one at firstas indeterminate, triple in its qualities, capable of evolutionand involution. The contact of soul and nature generates theplay of subjectivity and objectivity which is our experience ofbeing; what is to us the subjective first evolves, because the soul-consciousness is the first cause, inconscient Nature-force onlythe second and dependent cause; but still it is Nature and notSoul which supplies the instruments of our subjectivity. Firstin order come Buddhi, discriminative or determinative powerevolving out of Nature-force, and its subordinate power of self-discriminating ego. Then as a secondary evolution there arises


out of these the power which seizes the discriminations of ob-jects, sense-mind or Manas, — we must record the Indian namesbecause the corresponding English words are not real equiv-alents. As a tertiary evolution out of sense-mind we have thespecialising 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 forthe mind and make things what they are to our subjectivity, —and, as the substantial basis of these, the primary conditionsof the objects of sense, the five elements of ancient philosophyor rather elementary conditions of Nature, panca bhuta, whichconstitute objects by their various combination.

Reflected in the pure consciousness of Purusha these degreesand powers of Nature-force become the material of our impuresubjectivity, impure because its action is dependent on the per-ceptions of the objective world and on their subjective reactions.Buddhi, which is simply the determinative power that determinesall inertly out of indeterminate inconscient Force, takes for us theform of intelligence and will. Manas, the inconscient force whichseizes Nature’s discriminations by objective action and reactionand grasps at them by attraction, becomes sense-perception anddesire, the two crude terms or degradations of intelligence andwill, — becomes the sense-mind sensational, emotive, volitionalin the lower sense of wish, hope, longing, passion, vital impul-sion, all the deformations (vikara) of will. The senses becomethe instruments of sense-mind, the perceptive five of our sense-knowledge, the active five of our impulsions and vital habits,mediators between the subjective and objective; the rest are theobjects of our consciousness, vis.ayas of the senses.

This order of evolution seems contrary to that which weperceive as the order of the material evolution; but if we remem-ber that even Buddhi is in itself an inert action of inconscientNature and that there is certainly in this sense an inconscientwill and intelligence, a discriminative and determinative forceeven in the atom, if we observe the crude inconscient stuff ofsensation, emotion, memory, impulsion in the plant and in thesubconscient forms of existence, if we look at these powers


of Nature-force assuming the forms of our subjectivity in theevolving consciousness of animal and man, we shall see thatthe Sankhya system squares well enough with all that modernenquiry has elicited by its observation of material Nature. In theevolution of the soul back from Prakriti towards Purusha, thereverse order has to be taken to the original Nature-evolution,and that is how the Upanishads and the Gita following andalmost quoting the Upanishads state the ascending order of oursubjective powers. “Supreme, they say,” beyond their objects“are the senses, supreme over the senses the mind, supremeover the mind the intelligent will: that which is supreme overthe intelligent will, is he,” — is the conscious self, the Purusha.Therefore, says the Gita, it is this Purusha, this supreme causeof our subjective life which we have to understand and becomeaware of by the intelligence; in that we have to fix our will. Soholding our lower subjective self in Nature firmly poised andstilled by means of the greater really conscient self, we can de-stroy 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 theintelligent will. It may take its downward and outward orien-tation towards a discursive action of the perceptions and thewill in the triple play of Prakriti, or it may take its upwardand inward orientation towards a settled peace and equalityin the calm and immutable purity of the conscious silent soulno longer subject to the distractions of Nature. In the formeralternative the subjective being is at the mercy of the objectsof sense, it lives in the outward contact of things. That life isthe life of desire. For the senses excited by their objects create arestless or often violent disturbance, a strong or even headlongoutward movement towards the seizure of these objects andtheir enjoyment, and they carry away the sense-mind, “as thewinds carry away a ship upon the sea”; the mind subjectedto the emotions, passions, longings, impulsions awakened bythis outward movement of the senses carries away similarly theintelligent will, which loses therefore its power of calm discrim-ination and mastery. Subjection of the soul to the confused play


of the three gunas of Prakriti in their eternal entangled twiningand wrestling, ignorance, a false, sensuous, objective life of thesoul, enslavement to grief and wrath and attachment and pas-sion, are the results of the downward trend of the buddhi, —the troubled life of the ordinary, unenlightened, undisciplinedman. Those who like the Vedavadins make sense-enjoyment theobject of action and its fulfilment the highest aim of the soul, aremisleading guides. The inner subjective self-delight independentof objects is our true aim and the high and wide poise of ourpeace and liberation.

Therefore, it is the upward and inward orientation of theintelligent will that we must resolutely choose with a settledconcentration and perseverance, vyavasaya; we must fix it firmlyin the calm self-knowledge of the Purusha. The first movementmust be obviously to get rid of desire which is the whole root ofthe evil and suffering; and in order to get rid of desire, we mustput an end to the cause of desire, the rushing out of the sensesto seize and enjoy their objects. We must draw them back whenthey are inclined thus to rush out, draw them away from theirobjects, — as the tortoise draws in his limbs into the shell, sothese into their source, quiescent in the mind, the mind quiescentin intelligence, the intelligence quiescent in the soul and its self-knowledge, observing the action of Nature, but not subject toit, not desiring anything that the objective life can give.

It is not an external asceticism, the physical renunciationof the objects of sense that I am teaching, suggests Krishnaimmediately to avoid a misunderstanding which is likely at onceto arise. Not the renunciation of the Sankhyas or the austeritiesof the rigid ascetic with his fasts, his maceration of the body,his attempt to abstain even from food; that is not the self-discipline or the abstinence which I mean, for I speak of aninner withdrawal, a renunciation of desire. The embodied soul,having a body, has to support it normally by food for its normalphysical action; by abstention from food it simply removes fromitself the physical contact with the object of sense, but does notget rid of the inner relation which makes that contact hurtful.It retains the pleasure of the sense in the object, the rasa, the


liking and disliking, — for rasa has two sides; the soul must,on the contrary, be capable of enduring the physical contactwithout suffering inwardly this sensuous reaction. Otherwisethere is nivr.tti, cessation of the object, vis.aya vinivartante, butno subjective cessation, no nivr.tti of the mind; but the senses areof the mind, subjective, and subjective cessation of the rasa is theonly real sign of mastery. But how is this desireless contact withobjects, this unsensuous use of the senses possible? It is possible,param dr.s.t.va, by the vision of the supreme, — param, the Soul,the Purusha, — and by living in the Yoga, in union or onenessof the whole subjective being with that, through the Yoga ofthe intelligence; for the one Soul is calm, satisfied in its owndelight, and that delight free from duality can take, once we seethis supreme thing in us and fix the mind and will on that, theplace of the sensuous object-ridden pleasures and repulsions ofthe mind. This is the true way of liberation.

Certainly self-discipline, self-control is never easy. All intel-ligent human beings know that they must exercise some controlover themselves and nothing is more common than this advice tocontrol the senses; but ordinarily it is only advised imperfectlyand practised imperfectly in the most limited and insufficientfashion. Even, however, the sage, the man of clear, wise and dis-cerning soul who really labours to acquire complete self-masteryfinds himself hurried and carried away by the senses. That isbecause the mind naturally lends itself to the senses; it observesthe objects of sense with an inner interest, settles upon them andmakes them the object of absorbing thought for the intelligenceand of strong interest for the will. By that attachment comes, byattachment desire, by desire distress, passion and anger whenthe desire is not satisfied or is thwarted or opposed, and bypassion the soul is obscured, the intelligence and will forget tosee and be seated in the calm observing soul; there is a fall fromthe memory of one’s true self, and by that lapse the intelligentwill is also obscured, destroyed even. For, for the time being, itno longer exists to our memory of ourselves, it disappears in acloud of passion; we become passion, wrath, grief and cease tobe self and intelligence and will. This then must be prevented


and all the senses brought utterly under control; for only by anabsolute control of the senses can the wise and calm intelligencebe firmly established in its proper seat.

This cannot be done perfectly by the act of the intelligenceitself, by a merely mental self-discipline; it can only be done byYoga with something which is higher than itself and in whichcalm and self-mastery are inherent. And this Yoga can only ar-rive at its success by devoting, by consecrating, by giving up thewhole self to the Divine, “to Me”, says Krishna; for the Liberatoris within us, but it is not our mind, nor our intelligence, norour personal will, — they are only instruments. It is the Lord inwhom, 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 wholebeing and keep in soul-contact with him. This is the sense ofthe 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 theGita, three words only which contain in seed the whole gist ofthe highest secret yet to be developed. Yukta asıta matparah. .

If this is done, then it becomes possible to move amongthe objects of sense, in contact with them, acting on them, butwith the senses entirely under the control of the subjective self,— not at the mercy of the objects and their contacts and re-actions, — and that self again obedient to the highest self, thePurusha. Then, free from reactions, the senses will be deliveredfrom the affections of liking and disliking, escape the duality ofpositive and negative desire, and calm, peace, clearness, happytranquillity, atmaprasada, will settle upon the man. That cleartranquillity is the source of the soul’s felicity; all grief begins tolose its power of touching the tranquil soul; the intelligence israpidly established in the peace of the self; suffering is destroyed.It is this calm, desireless, griefless fixity of the buddhi in self-poise and self-knowledge to which the Gita gives the name ofSamadhi.

The sign of the man in Samadhi is not that he loses con-sciousness of objects and surroundings and of his mental andphysical self and cannot be recalled to it even by burning ortorture of the body, — the ordinary idea of the matter; trance


is a particular intensity, not the essential sign. The test is theexpulsion of all desires, their inability to get at the mind, and it isthe inner state from which this freedom arises, the delight of thesoul gathered within itself with the mind equal and still and high-poised above the attractions and repulsions, the alternations ofsunshine and storm and stress of the external life. It is drawn in-ward even when acting outwardly; it is concentrated in self evenwhen gazing out upon things; it is directed wholly to the Divineeven when to the outward vision of others busy and preoccupiedwith the affairs of the world. Arjuna, voicing the average humanmind, asks for some outward, physical, practically discerniblesign of this great Samadhi; how does such a man speak, howsit, how walk? No such signs can be given, nor does the Teacherattempt to supply them; for the only possible test of its posses-sion is inward and that there are plenty of hostile psychologicalforces to apply. Equality is the great stamp of the liberated souland of that equality even the most discernible signs are stillsubjective. “A man with mind untroubled by sorrows, who hasdone with desire for pleasures, from whom liking and wrath andfear have passed away, such is the sage whose understanding hasbecome founded in stability.” He is “without the triple actionof the qualities of Prakriti, without the dualities, ever based inhis true being, without getting or having, possessed of his self.”For what gettings and havings has the free soul? Once we arepossessed of the Self, we are in possession of all things.

And yet he does not cease from work and action. Thereis the originality and power of the Gita, that having affirmedthis static condition, this superiority to nature, this emptinesseven of all that constitutes ordinarily the action of Nature forthe liberated soul, it is still able to vindicate for it, to enjoinon it even the continuance of works and thus avoid the greatdefect of the merely quietistic and ascetic philosophies, — thedefect from which we find them today attempting to escape.“Thou hast a right to action, but only to action, never to itsfruits; let not the fruits of thy works be thy motive, neither letthere be in thee any attachment to inactivity.” Therefore it is notthe works practised with desire by the Vedavadins, it is not the


claim for the satisfaction of the restless and energetic mind by aconstant activity, the claim made by the practical or the kineticman, which is here enjoined. “Fixed in Yoga do thy actions,having abandoned attachment, having become equal in failureand success; for it is equality that is meant by Yoga.” Action isdistressed by the choice between a relative good and evil, thefear of sin and the difficult endeavour towards virtue? But theliberated who has united his reason and will with the Divine,casts away from him even here in this world of dualities bothgood doing and evil doing; for he rises to a higher law beyondgood and evil, founded in the liberty of self-knowledge. Suchdesireless action can have no decisiveness, no effectiveness, noefficient motive, no large or vigorous creative power? Not so;action done in Yoga is not only the highest but the wisest, themost potent and efficient even for the affairs of the world; for itis informed by the knowledge and will of the Master of works:“Yoga is skill in works.” But all action directed towards life leadsaway from the universal aim of the Yogin which is by commonconsent to escape from bondage to this distressed and sorrowfulhuman birth? Not so, either; the sages who do works withoutdesire for fruits and in Yoga with the Divine are liberated fromthe bondage of birth and reach that other perfect status in whichthere are none of the maladies which afflict the mind and life ofa suffering humanity.

The status he reaches is the Brahmic condition; he gets tofirm standing in the Brahman, brahmı sthiti. It is a reversal ofthe whole view, experience, knowledge, values, seeings of earth-bound creatures. This life of the dualities which is to them theirday, their waking, their consciousness, their bright conditionof activity and knowledge, is to him a night, a troubled sleepand darkness of the soul; that higher being which is to thema night, a sleep in which all knowledge and will cease, is tothe self-mastering sage his waking, his luminous day of truebeing, knowledge and power. They are troubled and muddywaters disturbed by every little inrush of desire; he is an oceanof wide being and consciousness which is ever being filled, yetever motionless in its large poise of his soul; all the desires of the


world enter into him as waters into the sea, yet he has no desirenor is troubled. For while they are filled with the troubling senseof ego and mine and thine, he is one with the one Self in all andhas no “I” or “mine”. He acts as others, but he has abandonedall desires and their longings. He attains to the great peace andis not bewildered by the shows of things; he has extinguishedhis individual ego in the One, lives in that unity and, fixed inthat 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 thevast reality of the one infinite impersonal Existence.

Such, subtly unifying Sankhya, Yoga and Vedanta, is thefirst foundation of the teaching of the Gita. It is far from beingall, but it is the first indispensable practical unity of knowledgeand works with a hint already of the third crowning intensestelement in the soul’s completeness, divine love and devotion.

XI

Works and Sacrifice

THE YOGA of the intelligent will and its culmination inthe Brahmic status, which occupies all the close of thesecond chapter, contains the seed of much of the teaching

of the Gita, — its doctrine of desireless works, of equality, of therejection of outward renunciation, of devotion to the Divine;but as yet all this is slight and obscure. What is most stronglyemphasised as yet is the withdrawal of the will from the ordinarymotive of human activities, desire, from man’s normal temper-ament of the sense-seeking thought and will with its passionsand ignorance, and from its customary habit of troubled many-branching ideas and wishes to the desireless calm unity andpassionless serenity of the Brahmic poise. So much Arjuna hasunderstood. He is not unfamiliar with all this; it is the substanceof the current teaching which points man to the path of knowl-edge and to the renunciation of life and works as his way ofperfection. The intelligence withdrawing from sense and desireand human action and turning to the Highest, to the One, to theactionless Purusha, to the immobile, to the featureless Brahman,that surely is the eternal seed of knowledge. There is no roomhere for works, since works belong to the Ignorance; action isthe very opposite of knowledge; its seed is desire and its fruitis bondage. That is the orthodox philosophical doctrine, andKrishna seems quite to admit it when he says that works arefar inferior to the Yoga of the intelligence. And yet works areinsisted upon as part of the Yoga; so that there seems to be inthis teaching a radical inconsistency. Not only so; for some kindof work no doubt may persist for a while, the minimum, themost inoffensive; but here is a work wholly inconsistent withknowledge, with serenity and with the motionless peace of theself-delighted soul, — a work terrible, even monstrous, a bloodystrife, a ruthless battle, a giant massacre. Yet it is this that is


enjoined, this that it is sought to justify by the teaching of innerpeace and desireless equality and status in the Brahman! Herethen is an unreconciled contradiction. Arjuna complains that hehas been given a contradictory and confusing doctrine, not theclear, strenuously single road by which the human intelligencecan move straight and trenchantly to the supreme good. It is inanswer to this objection that the Gita begins at once to developmore clearly its positive and imperative doctrine of Works.

The Teacher first makes a distinction between the two meansof salvation on which in this world men can concentrate sep-arately, the Yoga of knowledge, the Yoga of works, the oneimplying, it is usually supposed, renunciation of works as anobstacle to salvation, the other accepting works as a meansof salvation. He does not yet insist strongly on any fusion ofthem, 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, norat 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 riseabove involution in the activities of the being and attain to afree serenity and poise watching over the operations of Prakriti,but not affected by them. That, and not cessation of the worksof Prakriti, is what is really meant by the soul’s nais.karmya.Therefore it is an error to think that by not engaging in anykind of action this actionless state of the soul can be attainedand enjoyed. Mere renunciation of works is not a sufficient,not even quite a proper means for salvation. “Not by absten-tion from works does a man enjoy actionlessness, nor by mererenunciation (of works) does he attain to his perfection,” — tosiddhi, the accomplishment of the aims of his self-discipline byYoga.

But at least it must be one necessary means, indispensable,imperative? For how, if the works of Prakriti continue, can thesoul help being involved in them? How can I fight and yet in mysoul not think or feel that I the individual am fighting, not desirevictory nor be inwardly touched by defeat? This is the teaching of

Works and Sacrifice 107

the Sankhyas that the intelligence of the man who engages in theactivities of Nature, is entangled in egoism, ignorance and desireand therefore drawn to action; on the contrary, if the intelligencedraws back, then the action must cease with the cessation of thedesire and the ignorance. Therefore the giving up of life andworks is a necessary part, an inevitable circumstance and anindispensable last means of the movement to liberation. Thisobjection of a current logic, — it is not expressed by Arjuna,but it is in his mind as the turn of his subsequent utterancesshows, — the Teacher immediately anticipates. No, he says, suchrenunciation, far from being indispensable, is not even possible.“For none stands even for a moment not doing work; everyoneis made to do action helplessly by the modes born of Prakriti.”The strong perception of the great cosmic action and the eternalactivity and power of the cosmic energy which was so muchemphasised afterwards by the teaching of the Tantric Shaktaswho even made Prakriti or Shakti superior to Purusha, is a veryremarkable feature of the Gita. Although here an undertone, it isstill strong enough, coupled with what we might call the theisticand devotional elements of its thought, to bring in that activismwhich so strongly modifies in its scheme of Yoga the quietistictendencies of the old metaphysical Vedanta. Man embodied inthe natural world cannot cease from action, not for a moment,not for a second; his very existence here is an action; the wholeuniverse is an act of God, mere living even is His movement.

Our physical life, its maintenance, its continuance is a jour-ney, a pilgrimage of the body, sarıra-yatra, and that cannot beeffected without action. But even if a man could leave his bodyunmaintained, otiose, if he could stand still always like a tree orsit inert like a stone, tis.t.hati, that vegetable or material immo-bility would not save him from the hands of Nature; he wouldnot be liberated from her workings. For it is not our physicalmovements and activities alone which are meant by works, bykarma; our mental existence also is a great complex action, itis even the greater and more important part of the works ofthe unresting energy, — subjective cause and determinant of thephysical. We have gained nothing if we repress the effect but


retain the activity of the subjective cause. The objects of senseare only an occasion for our bondage, the mind’s insistence onthem is the means, the instrumental cause. A man may controlhis organs of action and refuse to give them their natural play,but he has gained nothing if his mind continues to remember anddwell upon the objects of sense. Such a man has bewildered him-self with false notions of self-discipline; he has not understoodits object or its truth, nor the first principles of his subjectiveexistence; therefore all his methods of self-discipline are false andnull.1 The body’s actions, even the mind’s actions are nothing inthemselves, neither a bondage, nor the first cause of bondage.What is vital is the mighty energy of Nature which will haveher way and her play in her great field of mind and life andbody; what is dangerous in her, is the power of her three gun. as,modes or qualities to confuse and bewilder the intelligence andso obscure the soul. That, as we shall see later, is the whole cruxof action and liberation for the Gita. Be free from obscurationand bewilderment by the three gun. as and action can continue, asit must continue, and even the largest, richest or most enormousand violent action; it does not matter, for nothing then touchesthe 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 impos-sible, what is rational, necessary, the right way is a controlledaction of the subjective and objective organism. The mind mustbring the senses under its control as an instrument of the intel-ligent will and then the organs of action must be used for theirproper office, for action, but for action done as Yoga. But whatis the essence of this self-control, what is meant by action doneas Yoga, Karmayoga? It is non-attachment, it is to do workswithout clinging with the mind to the objects of sense and thefruit of the works. Not complete inaction, which is an error, aconfusion, a self-delusion, an impossibility, but action full and

1 I cannot think that mithyacara means a hypocrite. How is a man a hypocrite whoinflicts on himself so severe and complete a privation? He is mistaken and deluded,vimud.hatma, and his acara, his formally regulated method of self-discipline, is a falseand vain method, — this surely is all that the Gita means.


free done without subjection to sense and passion, desirelessand unattached works, are the first secret of perfection. Doaction thus self-controlled, says Krishna, niyatam kuru karmatvam: I have said that knowledge, the intelligence, is greaterthan works, jyayası karman. o buddhih. , but I did not mean thatinaction is greater than action; the contrary is the truth, karmajyayo akarman. ah. . For knowledge does not mean renunciation ofworks, it means equality and non-attachment to desire and theobjects of sense; and it means the poise of the intelligent will inthe Soul free and high-uplifted above the lower instrumentationof Prakriti and controlling the works of the mind and the sensesand body in the power of self-knowledge and the pure objectlessself-delight of spiritual realisation, niyatam karma.2 Buddhiyogais fulfilled by karmayoga; the Yoga of the self-liberating intelli-gent will finds its full meaning by the Yoga of desireless works.Thus the Gita founds its teaching of the necessity of desirelessworks, nis.kama karma, and unites the subjective practice ofthe Sankhyas — rejecting their merely physical rule — with thepractice of Yoga.

But still there is an essential difficulty unsolved. Desire isthe ordinary motive of all human actions, and if the soul isfree from desire, then there is no farther rationale for action.We may be compelled to do certain works for the maintenanceof the body, but even that is a subjection to the desire of thebody 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 fixa rule for action outside ourselves, not dictated by anything inour subjectivity, the nityakarma of the Vedic rule, the routine

2 Again, I cannot accept the current interpretation of niyatam karma as if it meantfixed and formal works and were equivalent to the Vedic nityakarma, the regular worksof sacrifice, ceremonial and the daily rule of Vedic living. Surely, niyata simply takesup the niyamya of the last verse. Krishna makes a statement, “he who controlling thesenses by the mind engages with the organs of action in Yoga of action, he excels,”manasa niyamya arabhate karmayogam, and he immediately goes on to draw from thestatement an injunction, to sum it up and convert it into a rule. “Do thou do controlledaction,” niyatam kuru karma tvam: niyatam takes up the niyamya, kuru karma takesup the arabhate karmayogam. Not formal works fixed by an external rule, but desirelessworks controlled by the liberated buddhi, is the Gita’s teaching.


of ceremonial sacrifice, daily conduct and social duty, which theman who seeks liberation may do simply because it is enjoinedupon him, without any personal purpose or subjective interestin them, with an absolute indifference to the doing, not becausehe is compelled by his nature but because it is enjoined by theShastra. But if the principle of the action is not to be externalto the nature but subjective, if the actions even of the liberatedand the sage are to be controlled and determined by his nature,svabhava-niyatam, then the only subjective principle of action isdesire of whatever kind, lust of the flesh or emotion of the heartor base or noble aim of the mind, but all subject to the gun. as ofPrakriti. Let us then interpret the niyata karma of the Gita as thenityakarma of the Vedic rule, its kartavya karma or work thathas to be done as the Aryan rule of social duty and let us take tooits work done as a sacrifice to mean simply these Vedic sacrificesand this fixed social duty performed disinterestedly and withoutany personal object. This is how the Gita’s doctrine of desirelesswork is often interpreted. But it seems to me that the Gita’steaching is not so crude and simple, not so local and temporaland narrow as all that. It is large, free, subtle and profound; it isfor 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 factsof our nature and our being. It is a work of large philosophictruth and spiritual practicality, not of constrained religious andphilosophical formulas and stereotyped dogmas.

The difficulty is this, how, our nature being what it is and de-sire the common principle of its action, is it possible to institutea really desireless action? For what we call ordinarily disinter-ested action is not really desireless; it is simply a replacement ofcertain smaller personal interests by other larger desires whichhave only the appearance of being impersonal, virtue, country,mankind. All action, moreover, as Krishna insists, is done bythe gun. as of Prakriti, by our nature; in acting according to theShastra we are still acting according to our nature, — even if thisShastric action is not, as it usually is, a mere cover for our desires,prejudices, passions, egoisms, our personal, national, sectarian


vanities, sentiments and preferences; but even otherwise, even atthe purest, still we obey a choice of our nature, and if our naturewere different and the gun. as acted on our intelligence and will insome other combination, we would not accept the Shastra, butlive according to our pleasure or our intellectual notions or elsebreak free from the social law to live the life of the solitary orthe ascetic. We cannot become impersonal by obeying somethingoutside ourselves, for we cannot so get outside ourselves; we canonly do it by rising to the highest in ourselves, into our free Souland Self which is the same and one in all and has thereforeno personal interests, to the Divine in our being who possessesHimself transcendent of cosmos and is therefore not bound byHis cosmic works or His individual action. That is what theGita teaches and desirelessness is only a means to this end, notan aim in itself. Yes, but how is it to be brought about? By doingall works with sacrifice as the only object, is the reply of thedivine Teacher. “By doing works otherwise than for sacrifice,this world of men is in bondage to works; for sacrifice practiseworks, O son of Kunti, becoming free from all attachment.” It isevident that all works and not merely sacrifice and social dutiescan be done in this spirit; any action may be done either fromthe ego-sense narrow or enlarged or for the sake of the Divine.All being and all action of Prakriti exist only for the sake ofthe Divine; from that it proceeds, by that it endures, to that itis directed. But so long as we are dominated by the ego-sensewe cannot perceive or act in the spirit of this truth, but act forthe satisfaction of the ego and in the spirit of the ego, otherwisethan for sacrifice. Egoism is the knot of the bondage. By actingGodwards, without any thought of ego, we loosen this knot andfinally arrive at freedom.

At first, however, the Gita takes up the Vedic statement ofthe idea of sacrifice and phrases the law of sacrifice in its currentterms. This it does with a definite object. We have seen thatthe quarrel between renunciation and works has two forms, theopposition of Sankhya and Yoga which is already in principlereconciled and the opposition of Vedism and Vedantism whichthe Teacher has yet to reconcile. The first is a larger statement of


the opposition in which the idea of works is general and wide.The Sankhya starts from the notion of the divine status as that ofthe immutable and inactive Purusha which each soul is in realityand makes an opposition between inactivity of Purusha andactivity of Prakriti; so its logical culmination is cessation of allworks. Yoga starts from the notion of the Divine as Ishwara, lordof the operations of Prakriti and therefore superior to them, andits logical culmination is not cessation of works but the soul’ssuperiority to them and freedom even though doing all works.In the opposition of Vedism and Vedantism works, karma, arerestricted to Vedic works and sometimes even to Vedic sacrificeand ritualised works, all else being excluded as not useful tosalvation. Vedism of the Mimansakas insisted on them as themeans, Vedantism taking its stand on the Upanishads looked onthem as only a preliminary belonging to the state of ignoranceand in the end to be overpassed and rejected, an obstacle to theseeker of liberation. Vedism worshipped the Devas, the gods,with sacrifice and held them to be the powers who assist oursalvation. Vedantism was inclined to regard them as powers ofthe mental and material world opposed to our salvation (men,says the Upanishad, are the cattle of the gods, who do not desireman to know and be free); it saw the Divine as the immutableBrahman who has to be attained not by works of sacrifice andworship but by knowledge. Works only lead to material resultsand to an inferior Paradise; therefore they have to be renounced.

The Gita resolves this opposition by insisting that the Devasare only forms of the one Deva, the Ishwara, the Lord of allYoga and worship and sacrifice and austerity, and if it is truethat sacrifice offered to the Devas leads only to material resultsand to Paradise, it is also true that sacrifice offered to the Ishwaraleads beyond them to the great liberation. For the Lord and theimmutable Brahman are not two different beings, but one andthe same Being, and whoever strives towards either, is strivingtowards that one divine Existence. All works in their totalityfind their culmination and completeness in the knowledge of theDivine, sarvam karmakhilam partha jnane parisamapyate. Theyare not an obstacle, but the way to the supreme knowledge.


Thus this opposition too is reconciled with the help of a largeelucidation of the meaning of sacrifice. In fact its conflict is onlya restricted form of the larger opposition between Yoga andSankhya. Vedism is a specialised and narrow form of Yoga; theprinciple of the Vedantists is identical with that of the Sankhyas,for to both the movement of salvation is the recoil of the intel-ligence, 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 iswith this object of reconciliation in his mind that the Teacherfirst approaches his statement of the doctrine of sacrifice; butthroughout, even from the very beginning, he keeps his eye noton the restricted Vedic sense of sacrifice and works, but on theirlarger and universal application, — that widening of narrow andformal notions to admit the great general truths they undulyrestrict which is always the method of the Gita.

XII

The Significance of Sacrifice

THE GITA’S theory of sacrifice is stated in two separatepassages; one we find in the third chapter, another in thefourth; the first gives it in language which might, taken by

itself, seem to be speaking only of the ceremonial sacrifice; thesecond interpreting that into the sense of a large philosophicalsymbolism, transforms at once its whole significance and raisesit to a plane of high psychological and spiritual truth. “Withsacrifice the Lord of creatures of old created creatures and said,By this shall you bring forth (fruits or offspring), let this be yourmilker of desires. Foster by this the gods and let the gods fosteryou; 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 whocook (the food) for their own sake. From food creatures comeinto being, from rain is the birth of food, from sacrifice comesinto being the rain, sacrifice is born of work; work know to beborn of Brahman, Brahman is born of the Immutable; thereforeis the all-pervading Brahman established in the sacrifice. He whofollows not here the wheel thus set in movement, evil is his being,sensual is his delight, in vain, O Partha, that man lives.” Havingthus stated the necessity of sacrifice, — we shall see hereafterin what sense we may understand a passage which seems atfirst sight to convey only a traditional theory of ritualism andthe necessity of the ceremonial offering, — Krishna proceeds tostate the superiority of the spiritual man to works. “But theman whose delight is in the Self and who is satisfied with theenjoyment of the Self and in the Self he is content, for him thereexists no work that needs to be done. He has no object here to begained by action done and none to be gained by action undone;

The Significance of Sacrifice 115

he has no dependence on all these existences for any object tobe gained.”

Here then are the two ideals, Vedist and Vedantist, standingas if in all their sharp original separation and opposition, onone side the active ideal of acquiring enjoyments here and thehighest good beyond by sacrifice and the mutual dependence ofthe human being and the divine powers and on the other, facingit, the austerer ideal of the liberated man who, independent inthe Spirit, has nothing to do with enjoyment or works or thehuman or the divine worlds, but exists only in the peace of thesupreme Self, joys only in the calm joy of the Brahman. The nextverses create a ground for the reconciliation between the twoextremes; the secret is not inaction as soon as one turns towardsthe higher truth, but desireless action both before and after itis reached. The liberated man has nothing to gain by action,but nothing also to gain by inaction, and it is not at all forany personal object that he has to make his choice. “Thereforewithout attachment perform ever the work that is to be done(done for the sake of the world, lokasangraha, as is made clearimmediately afterward); for by doing work without attachmentman attains to the highest. For it was even by works that Janakaand the rest attained to perfection.” It is true that works andsacrifice are a means of arriving at the highest good, sreyah.param avapsyatha; but there are three kinds of works, that donewithout sacrifice for personal enjoyment which is entirely selfishand egoistic and misses the true law and aim and utility of life,mogham partha sa jıvati, that done with desire, but with sacrificeand the enjoyment only as a result of sacrifice and therefore tothat extent consecrated and sanctified, and that done withoutdesire or attachment of any kind. It is the last which brings thesoul of man to the highest, param apnoti purus.ah. .

The whole sense and drift of this teaching turns upon theinterpretation we are to give to the important words, yajna,karma, brahma, sacrifice, work, Brahman. If the sacrifice issimply the Vedic sacrifice, if the work from which it is bornis the Vedic rule of works and if the brahman from which thework itself is born is the sabdabrahman in the sense only of the


letter of the Veda, then all the positions of the Vedist dogmaare conceded and there is nothing more. Ceremonial sacrificeis the right means of gaining children, wealth, enjoyment; byceremonial sacrifice rain is brought down from heaven and theprosperity and continuity of the race assured; life is a continualtransaction between the gods and men in which man offers cer-emonial gifts to the gods from the gifts they have bestowed onhim and in return is enriched, protected, fostered. Therefore allhuman works have to be accompanied and turned into a sacra-ment by ceremonial sacrifice and ritualistic worship; work not sodedicated is accursed, enjoyment without previous ceremonialsacrifice and ritual consecration is a sin. Even salvation, eventhe highest good is to be gained by ceremonial sacrifice. It mustnever be abandoned. Even the seeker of liberation has to con-tinue to do ceremonial sacrifice, although without attachment;it is by ceremonial sacrifice and ritualistic works done withoutattachment that men of the type of Janaka attained to spiritualperfection and liberation.

Obviously, this cannot be the meaning of the Gita, for itwould be in contradiction with all the rest of the book. Evenin the passage itself, without the illumining interpretation af-terwards given to it in the fourth chapter, we have already anindication of a wider sense where it is said that sacrifice is bornfrom work, work from brahman, brahman from the Akshara,and therefore the all-pervading Brahman, sarvagatam brahma,is established in the sacrifice. The connecting logic of the “there-fore” and the repetition of the word brahma are significant; for itshows clearly that the brahman from which all work is born hasto be understood with an eye not so much to the current Vedicteaching in which it means the Veda as to a symbolical sense inwhich the creative Word is identical with the all-pervading Brah-man, the Eternal, the one Self present in all existences, sarva-bhutes.u, and present in all the workings of existence. The Veda isthe knowledge of the Divine, the Eternal, — “I am He who is tobe known in all the books of the Knowledge,” vedais ca vedyah. ,Krishna will say in a subsequent chapter; but it is the knowledgeof him in the workings of Prakriti, in the workings of the three


gun. as, first qualities or modes of Nature, traigun. yavis.aya vedah. .This Brahman or Divine in the workings of Nature is born, aswe may say, out of the Akshara, the immutable Purusha, theSelf who stands above all the modes or qualities or workings ofNature, nistraigun. ya. The Brahman is one but self-displayed intwo aspects, the immutable Being and the creator and originatorof works in the mutable becoming, atman, sarvabhutani; it isthe immobile omnipresent Soul of things and it is the spiritualprinciple of the mobile working of things, Purusha poised inhimself and Purusha active in Prakriti; it is aks.ara and ks.ara. Inboth of these aspects the Divine Being, Purushottama, manifestshimself in the universe; the immutable above all qualities is Hispoise of peace, self-possession, equality, samam brahma; fromthat proceeds His manifestation in the qualities of Prakriti andtheir universal workings; from the Purusha in Prakriti, from thisBrahman with qualities, proceed all the works1 of the universalenergy, Karma, in man and in all existences; from that workproceeds the principle of sacrifice. Even the material interchangebetween gods and men proceeds upon this principle, as typifiedin the dependence of rain and its product food on this workingand on them the physical birth of creatures. For all the workingof Prakriti is in its true nature a sacrifice, yajna, with the DivineBeing as the enjoyer of all energisms and works and sacrificeand the great Lord of all existences, bhoktaram yajnatapasamsarvaloka-mahesvaram, and to know this Divine all-pervadingand established in sacrifice, sarvagatam yajne pratis.t.hitam, isthe true, the Vedic knowledge.

1 That this is the right interpretation results also from the opening of the eighth chapterwhere the universal principles are enumerated, aks.ara (brahma), svabhava, karma, ks.arabhava, purus.a, adhiyajna. Akshara is the immutable Brahman, spirit or self, Atman;swabhava is the principle of the self, adhyatma, operative as the original nature of thebeing, “own way of becoming”, and this proceeds out of the self, the Akshara; Karmaproceeds from that and is the creative movement, visarga, which brings all natural beingsand all changing subjective and objective shapes of being into existence; the result ofKarma therefore is all this mutable becoming, the changes of nature developed outof the original self-nature, ks.ara bhava out of svabhava; Purusha is the soul, the divineelement in the becoming, adhidaivata, by whose presence the workings of Karma becomea sacrifice, yajna, to the Divine within; adhiyajna is this secret Divine who receives thesacrifice.


But he may be known in an inferior action through thedevas, the gods, the powers of the divine Soul in Nature and inthe eternal interaction of these powers and the soul of man, mu-tually giving and receiving, mutually helping, increasing, raisingeach other’s workings and satisfaction, a commerce in whichman rises towards a growing fitness for the supreme good. Herecognises that his life is a part of this divine action in Natureand not a thing separate and to be held and pursued for itsown sake. He regards his enjoyments and the satisfaction of hisdesires as the fruit of sacrifice and the gift of the gods in theirdivine universal workings and he ceases to pursue them in thefalse and evil spirit of sinful egoistic selfishness as if they were agood to be seized from life by his own unaided strength withoutreturn and without thankfulness. As this spirit increases in him,he subordinates his desires, becomes satisfied with sacrifice as thelaw of life and works and is content with whatever remains overfrom the sacrifice, giving up all the rest freely as an offering in thegreat and beneficent interchange between his life and the world-life. Whoever goes contrary to this law of action and pursuesworks and enjoyment for his own isolated personal self-interest,lives in vain; he misses the true meaning and aim and utility ofliving and the upward growth of the soul; he is not on the pathwhich leads to the highest good. But the highest only comeswhen the sacrifice is no longer to the gods, but to the one all-pervading Divine established in the sacrifice, of whom the godsare inferior forms and powers, and when he puts away the lowerself that desires and enjoys and gives up his personal sense ofbeing the worker to the true executrix of all works, Prakriti, andhis personal sense of being the enjoyer to the Divine Purusha,the higher and universal Self who is the real enjoyer of the worksof Prakriti. In that Self and not in any personal enjoyment hefinds now his sole satisfaction, complete content, pure delight;he has nothing to gain by action or inaction, depends neitheron gods nor men for anything, seeks no profit from any, forthe self-delight is all-sufficient to him, but does works for thesake of the Divine only, as a pure sacrifice, without attachmentor desire. Thus he gains equality and becomes free from the


modes of Nature, nistraigun. ya; his soul takes its poise not inthe insecurity of Prakriti, but in the peace of the immutableBrahman, even while his actions continue in the movement ofPrakriti. Thus is sacrifice his way of attaining to the Highest.

That this is the sense of the passage is made clear in whatfollows, by the affirmation of lokasangraha as the object ofworks, of Prakriti as the sole doer of works and the divinePurusha as their equal upholder, to whom works have to begiven up even in their doing, — this inner giving up of worksand yet physical doing of them is the culmination of sacrifice,— and by the affirmation that the result of such active sacrificewith an equal and desireless mind is liberation from the bondageof works. “He who is satisfied with whatever gain comes tohim and equal in failure and success, is not bound even whenhe acts. When a man liberated, free from attachment, acts forsacrifice, all his action is dissolved,” leaves, that is to say, noresult of bondage or after-impression on his free, pure, perfectand equal soul. To these passages we shall have to return. Theyare followed by a perfectly explicit and detailed interpretation ofthe meaning of yajna in the language of the Gita which leaves nodoubt at all about the symbolic use of the words and the psycho-logical character of the sacrifice enjoined by this teaching. In theancient Vedic system there was always a double sense physicaland psychological, outward and symbolic, the exterior form ofthe sacrifice and the inner meaning of all its circumstances. Butthe secret symbolism of the ancient Vedic mystics, exact, curious,poetic, psychological, had been long forgotten by this time andit is now replaced by another, large, general and philosophical inthe spirit of Vedanta and a later Yoga. The fire of sacrifice, agni,is no material flame, but brahmagni, the fire of the Brahman, orit 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 apurified sense-action or it is the vital energy in that discipline ofthe control of the vital being through the control of the breathwhich is common to Rajayoga and Hathayoga, or it is the fireof self-knowledge, the flame of the supreme sacrifice. The foodeaten as the leavings of the sacrifice is, it is explained, the nectar


of immortality, amr.ta, left over from the offering; and here wehave still something of the old Vedic symbolism in which theSoma-wine was the physical symbol of the amr.ta, the immortal-ising delight of the divine ecstasy won by the sacrifice, offeredto the gods and drunk by men. The offering itself is whateverworking of his energy, physical or psychological, is consecratedby 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 Selfor to the Self in mankind and in all existences.

This elaborate explanation of the Yajna sets out with a vastand comprehensive definition in which it is declared that theact and energy and materials of the sacrifice, the giver and re-ceiver of the sacrifice, the goal and object of the sacrifice areall the one Brahman. “Brahman is the giving, Brahman is thefood-offering, by Brahman it is offered into the Brahman-fire,Brahman is that which is to be attained by samadhi in Brahman-action.” This then is the knowledge in which the liberated manhas to do works of sacrifice. It is the knowledge declared of oldin the great Vedantic utterances, “I am He”, “All this verily isthe Brahman, Brahman is this Self.” It is the knowledge of theentire unity; it is the One manifest as the doer and the deed andthe object of works, knower and knowledge and the object ofknowledge. The universal energy into which the action is pouredis the Divine; the consecrated energy of the giving is the Divine;whatever is offered is only some form of the Divine; the giver ofthe offering is the Divine himself in man; the action, the work,the sacrifice is itself the Divine in movement, in activity; the goalto be reached by sacrifice is the Divine. For the man who hasthis knowledge and lives and acts in it, there can be no bindingworks, no personal and egoistically appropriated action; thereis only the divine Purusha acting by the divine Prakriti in Hisown being, offering everything into the fire of His self-consciouscosmic energy, while the knowledge and the possession of Hisdivine existence and consciousness by the soul unified with Himis the goal of all this God-directed movement and activity. Toknow that and to live and act in this unifying consciousness isto be free.


But all even of the Yogins have not attained to this knowl-edge. “Some Yogins follow after the sacrifice which is of thegods; others offer the sacrifice by the sacrifice itself into theBrahman-fire.” The former conceive of the Divine in variousforms and powers and seek him by various means, ordinances,dharmas, laws or, as we might say, settled rites of action, self-discipline, consecrated works; for the latter, those who alreadyknow, the simple fact of sacrifice, of offering whatever work tothe Divine itself, of casting all their activities into the unifieddivine consciousness and energy, is their one means, their onedharma. The means of sacrifice are various; the offerings are ofmany kinds. There is the psychological sacrifice of self-controland self-discipline which leads to the higher self-possession andself-knowledge. “Some offer their senses into the fires of con-trol, others offer the objects of sense into the fires of sense, andothers offer all the actions of the sense and all the actions ofthe vital force into the fire of the Yoga of self-control kindled byknowledge.” There is, that is to say, the discipline which receivesthe objects of sense-perception without allowing the mind to bedisturbed or affected by its sense-activities, the senses themselvesbecoming pure fires of sacrifice; there is the discipline which stillsthe senses so that the soul in its purity may appear from behindthe veil of mind-action, calm and still; there is the disciplineby which, when the self is known, all the actions of the sense-perceptions and all the action of the vital being are received intothat one still and tranquil soul. The offering of the striver afterperfection may be material and physical, dravya-yajna, like thatconsecrated in worship by the devotee to his deity, or it may bethe austerity of his self-discipline and energy of his soul directedto some high aim, tapo-yajna, or it may be some form of Yogalike the Pranayama of the Rajayogins and Hathayogins, or anyother yoga-yajna. 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 allthese variations, is to subordinate the lower activities, to dimin-ish the control of desire and replace it by a superior energy, toabandon the purely egoistic enjoyment for that diviner delight


which comes by sacrifice, by self-dedication, by self-mastery, bythe giving up of one’s lower impulses to a greater and higher aim.“They who enjoy the nectar of immortality left over from thesacrifice attain to the eternal Brahman.” Sacrifice is the law ofthe world and nothing can be gained without it, neither masteryhere, nor the possession of heavens beyond, nor the supremepossession of all; “this world is not for him who doeth notsacrifice, how then any other world?” Therefore all these andmany other forms of sacrifice have been “extended in the mouthof the Brahman,” the mouth of that Fire which receives all offer-ings; they are all means and forms of the one great Existence inactivity, means by which the action of the human being can beoffered up to That of which his outward existence is a part andwith which his inmost self is one. They are “all born of work”;all proceed from and are ordained by the one vast energy ofthe Divine which manifests itself in the universal karma andmakes all the cosmic activity a progressive offering to the oneSelf and Lord and of which the last stage for the human beingis self-knowledge and the possession of the divine or Brahmicconsciousness. “So knowing thou shalt become free.”

But there are gradations in the range of these various formsof sacrifice, the physical offering the lowest, the sacrifice ofknowledge the highest. Knowledge is that in which all this actionculminates, not any lower knowledge, but the highest, self-knowledge and God-knowledge, that which we can learn fromthose who know the true principles of existence, that by possess-ing which we shall not fall again into the bewilderment of themind’s ignorance and into its bondage to mere sense-knowledgeand to the inferior activity of the desires and passions. Theknowledge in which all culminates is that by which “thou shaltsee all existences (becomings, bhutani) without exception inthe Self, then in Me.” For the Self is that one, immutable,all-pervading, all-containing, self-existent reality or Brahmanhidden behind our mental being into which our consciousnesswidens out when it is liberated from the ego; we come to see allbeings as becomings, bhutani, within that one self-existence.

But this Self or immutable Brahman we see too to be the


self-presentation to our essential psychological consciousness ofa supreme Being who is the source of our existence and of whomall that is mutable or immutable is the manifestation. He is God,the Divine, the Purushottama. To Him we offer everything as asacrifice; into His hands we give up our actions; in His existencewe live and move; unified with Him in our nature and with allexistence in Him, we become one soul and one power of beingwith Him and with all beings; with His supreme reality weidentify and unite our self-being. By works done for sacrifice,eliminating desire, we arrive at knowledge and at the soul’spossession of itself; by works done in self-knowledge and God-knowledge we are liberated into the unity, peace and joy of thedivine existence.

XIII

The Lord of the Sacrifice

WE HAVE, before we can proceed further, to gatherup all that has been said in its main principles. Thewhole of the Gita’s gospel of works rests upon its

idea of sacrifice and contains in fact the eternal connectingtruth of God and the world and works. The human mind seizesordinarily only fragmentary notions and standpoints of a many-sided eternal truth of existence and builds upon them its varioustheories of life and ethics and religion, stressing this or that signor appearance, but to some entirety of it it must always tend toreawaken whenever it returns in an age of large enlightenmentto any entire and synthetic relation of its world-knowledge withits God-knowledge and self-knowledge. The gospel of the Gitareposes upon this fundamental Vedantic truth that all being isthe one Brahman and all existence the wheel of Brahman, adivine movement opening out from God and returning to God.All is the expressive activity of Nature and Nature a power ofthe Divine which works out the consciousness and will of thedivine Soul master of her works and inhabitant of her forms. Itis for his satisfaction that she descends into the absorption of theforms of things and the works of life and mind and returns againthrough mind and self-knowledge to the conscious possessionof the Soul that dwells within her. There is first an involving ofself and all it is or means in an evolution of phenomena; thereis afterwards an evolution of self, a revelation of all it is andmeans, all that is hidden and yet suggested by the phenomenalcreation. This cycle of Nature could not be what it is but for thePurusha assuming and maintaining simultaneously three eternalpoises each of which is necessary to the totality of this action.It must manifest itself in the mutable, and there we see it asthe finite, the many, all existences, sarvabhutani. It appears tous as the finite personality of these million creatures with their

The Lord of the Sacrifice 125

infinite diversities and various relations and it appears to usbehind these as the soul and force of the action of the gods,— that is to say, the cosmic powers and qualities of the Divinewhich preside over the workings of the life of the universe andconstitute to our perception different universal forms of the oneExistence, or, it may be, various self-statements of personalityof the one supreme Person. Then, secret behind and within allforms 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 findthemselves to be really one. And therefore by returning to thatthe active, finite personality of the individual being discoversthat it can release itself into a silent largeness of universalityand the peace and poise of an immutable and unattached unitywith all that proceeds from and is supported by this indivisibleInfinite. Or even he may escape into it from individual exis-tence. But the highest secret of all, uttamam rahasyam, is thePurushottama. This is the supreme Divine, God, who possessesboth the infinite and the finite and in whom the personal andthe impersonal, the one Self and the many existences, being andbecoming, the world-action and the supracosmic peace, pravr.ttiand nivr.tti, meet, are united, are possessed together and in eachother. In God all things find their secret truth and their absolutereconciliation.

All truth of works must depend upon the truth of being. Allactive existence must be in its inmost reality a sacrifice of worksoffered by Prakriti to Purusha, Nature offering to the supremeand infinite Soul the desire of the multiple finite Soul withinher. Life is an altar to which she brings her workings and thefruits of her workings and lays them before whatever aspect ofthe Divinity the consciousness in her has reached for whateverresult of the sacrifice the desire of the living soul can seize onas its immediate or its highest good. According to the grade ofconsciousness and being which the soul has reached in Nature,will be the Divinity it worships, the delight which it seeks andthe hope for which it sacrifices. And in the movement of themutable Purusha in Nature all is and must be interchange; for


existence is one and its divisions must found themselves on somelaw of mutual dependence, each growing by each and living byall. Where sacrifice is not willingly given, Nature exacts it byforce, she satisfies the law of her living. A mutual giving andreceiving is the law of Life without which it cannot for onemoment endure, and this fact is the stamp of the divine creativeWill on the world it has manifested in its being, the proof thatwith sacrifice as their eternal companion the Lord of creatureshas created all these existences. The universal law of sacrifice isthe sign that the world is of God and belongs to God and thatlife is his dominion and house of worship and not a field for theself-satisfaction of the independent ego; not the fulfilment of theego, — that is only our crude and obscure beginning, — but thediscovery of God, the worship and seeking of the Divine and theInfinite through a constantly enlarging sacrifice culminating ina perfect self-giving founded on a perfect self-knowledge, is thatto which the experience of life is at last intended to lead.

But the individual being begins with ignorance and persistslong in ignorance. Acutely conscious of himself he sees the egoas the cause and whole meaning of life and not the Divine. Hesees himself as the doer of works and does not see that all theworkings of existence including his own internal and externalactivities are the workings of one universal Nature and nothingelse. He sees himself as the enjoyer of works and imagines thatfor him all exists and him Nature ought to satisfy and obeyhis personal will; he does not see that she is not at all concernedwith satisfying him or at all careful of his will, but obeys a higheruniversal will and seeks to satisfy a Godhead who transcends herand her works and creations; his finite being, his will and hissatisfactions are hers and not his, and she offers them at everymoment as a sacrifice to the Divine of whose purpose in hershe makes all this the covert instrumentation. Because of thisignorance whose seal is egoism, the creature ignores the law ofsacrifice and seeks to take all he can for himself and gives onlywhat Nature by her internal and external compulsion forces himto give. He can really take nothing except what she allows himto receive as his portion, what the divine Powers within her yield


to his desire. The egoistic soul in a world of sacrifice is as if athief or robber who takes what these Powers bring to him andhas no mind to give in return. He misses the true meaning of lifeand, since he does not use life and works for the enlargementand elevation of his being through sacrifice, he lives in vain.

Only when the individual being begins to perceive and ac-knowledge in his acts the value of the self in others as well as thepower and needs of his own ego, begins to perceive universalNature behind his own workings and through the cosmic god-heads gets some glimpse of the One and the Infinite, is he onhis way to the transcendence of his limitation by the ego andthe discovery of his soul. He begins to discover a law other thanthat of his desires, to which his desires must be more and moresubordinated and subjected; he develops the purely egoistic intothe understanding and ethical being. He begins to give morevalue to the claims of the self in others and less to the claimsof his ego; he admits the strife between egoism and altruismand by the increase of his altruistic tendencies he prepares theenlargement of his own consciousness and being. He begins toperceive Nature and divine Powers in Nature to whom he owessacrifice, adoration, obedience, because it is by them and bytheir law that the workings both of the mental and the materialworld are controlled, and he learns that only by increasing theirpresence and their greatness in his thought and will and life canhe himself increase his powers, knowledge, right action and thesatisfactions which these things bring to him. Thus he adds thereligious and supraphysical to the material and egoistic sense oflife and prepares himself to rise through the finite to the Infinite.

But this is only a long intermediate stage. It is still subjectto the law of desire, to the centrality of all things in the con-ceptions and needs of his ego and to the control of his beingas well as his works by Nature, though it is a regulated andgoverned desire, a clarified ego and a Nature more and moresubtilised and enlightened by the sattwic, the highest naturalprinciple. All this is still within the domain, though the verymuch enlarged domain, of the mutable, finite and personal. Thereal self-knowledge and consequently the right way of works


lies beyond; for the sacrifice done with knowledge is the highestsacrifice and that alone brings a perfect working. That can onlycome when he perceives that the self in him and the self inothers are one being and this self is something higher than theego, an infinite, an impersonal, a universal existence in whomall move and have their being, — when he perceives that all thecosmic gods to whom he offers his sacrifice are forms of oneinfinite Godhead and when again, leaving all his limited andlimiting conceptions of that one Godhead, he perceives him tobe the supreme and ineffable Deity who is at once the finite andthe infinite, the one self and the many, beyond Nature thoughmanifesting himself through Nature, beyond limitation by qual-ities though formulating the power of his being through infinitequality. This is the Purushottama to whom the sacrifice has tobe offered, not for any transient personal fruit of works, but forthe soul’s possession of God and in order to live in harmony andunion with the Divine.

In other words, man’s way to liberation and perfectionlies through an increasing impersonality. It is his ancient andconstant experience that the more he opens himself to the im-personal and infinite, to that which is pure and high and one andcommon in all things and beings, the impersonal and infinite inNature, the impersonal and infinite in life, the impersonal andinfinite in his own subjectivity, the less he is bound by his ego andby the circle of the finite, the more he feels a sense of largeness,peace, pure happiness. The pleasure, joy, satisfaction which thefinite by itself can give or the ego in its own right attain, istransitory, petty and insecure. To dwell entirely in the ego-senseand its finite conceptions, powers, satisfactions is to find thisworld for ever full of transience and suffering, anityam asukham;the finite life is always troubled by a certain sense of vanity forthis fundamental reason that the finite is not the whole or thehighest truth of life; life is not entirely real until it opens into thesense of the infinite. It is for this reason that the Gita opens itsgospel of works by insisting on the Brahmic consciousness, theimpersonal life, that great object of the discipline of the ancientsages. For the impersonal, the infinite, the One in which all


the impermanent, mutable, multiple activity of the world findsabove itself its base of permanence, security and peace, is theimmobile Self, the Akshara, the Brahman. If we see this, weshall see that to raise one’s consciousness and the poise of one’sbeing out of limited personality into this infinite and impersonalBrahman is the first spiritual necessity. To see all beings in thisone Self is the knowledge which raises the soul out of egoisticignorance and its works and results; to live in it is to acquirepeace and firm spiritual foundation.

The way to bring about this great transformation followsa double path; for there is the way of knowledge and thereis the way of works, and the Gita combines them in a firmsynthesis. The way of knowledge is to turn the understanding,the intelligent will away from its downward absorption in theworkings of the mind and the senses and upward to the self, thePurusha or Brahman; it is to make it dwell always on the oneidea of the one Self and not in the many-branching conceptionsof the mind and many-streaming impulses of desire. Taken byitself this path would seem to lead to the complete renunciationof works, to an immobile passivity and to the severance of thesoul from Nature. But in reality such an absolute renunciation,passivity and severance are impossible. Purusha and Prakritiare twin principles of being which cannot be severed, and solong as we remain in Nature, our workings in Nature mustcontinue, even though they may take a different form or rathera different sense from those of the unenlightened soul. The realrenunciation — for renunciation, sannyasa, there must be — isnot the fleeing from works, but the slaying of ego and desire.The way is to abandon attachment to the fruit of works evenwhile doing them, and the way is to recognise Nature as theagent and leave her to do her works and to live in the soulas the witness and sustainer, watching and sustaining her, butnot attached either to her actions or their fruits. The ego, thelimited and troubled personality is then quieted and merged inthe consciousness of the one impersonal Self, while the worksof Nature continue to our vision to operate through all these“becomings” or existences who are now seen by us as living


and acting and moving, under her impulsion entirely, in this oneinfinite Being; our own finite existence is seen and felt to beonly one of these and its workings are seen and felt to be thoseof Nature, not of our real self which is the silent, impersonalunity. The ego claimed them as its own doings and thereforewe thought them ours; but the ego is now dead and henceforththey are no longer ours, but Nature’s. We have achieved by theslaying of ego impersonality in our being and consciousness;we have achieved by the renunciation of desire impersonalityin the works of our nature. We are free not only in inaction,but in action; our liberty does not depend on a physical andtemperamental immobility and vacancy, nor do we fall fromfreedom directly we act. Even in a full current of natural actionthe impersonal soul in us remains calm, still and free.

The liberation given by this perfect impersonality is real, iscomplete, is indispensable; but is it the last word, the end of thewhole matter? All life, all world-existence, we have said, is thesacrifice offered by Nature to the Purusha, the one and secretsoul in Nature, in whom all her workings take place; but its realsense is obscured in us by ego, by desire, by our limited, active,multiple personality. We have risen out of ego and desire andlimited personality and by impersonality, its great corrective,we have found the impersonal Godhead; we have identified ourbeing with the one self and soul in whom all exist. The sacrificeof works continues, conducted not by ourselves any longer, butby Nature, — Nature operating through the finite part of ourbeing, mind, senses, body, — but in our infinite being. But towhom then is this sacrifice offered and with what object? For theimpersonal has no activity and no desires, no object to be gained,no dependence for anything on all this world of creatures; itexists for itself, in its own self-delight, in its own immutableeternal being. We may have to do works without desire as ameans in order to reach this impersonal self-existence and self-delight, but, that movement once executed, the object of works isfinished; the sacrifice is no longer needed. Works may even thencontinue because Nature continues and her activities; but thereis no longer any further object in these works. The sole reason


for our continuing to act after liberation is purely negative; it isthe compulsion of Nature on our finite parts of mind and body.But if that be all, then, first, works may well be whittled downand reduced to a minimum, may be confined to what Nature’scompulsion absolutely will have from our bodies; and secondly,even if there is no reduction to a minimum, — since action doesnot matter and inaction also is no object, — then the nature ofthe works also does not matter. Arjuna, once having attainedknowledge, may continue to fight out the battle of Kurukshetra,following his old Kshatriya nature, or he may leave it and live thelife of the Sannyasin, following his new quietistic impulse. Whichof these things he does, becomes quite indifferent; or rather thesecond is the better way, since it will discourage more quickly theimpulses of Nature which still have a hold on his mind owing topast created tendency and, when his body has fallen from him,he will securely depart into the Infinite and Impersonal with nonecessity of returning again to the trouble and madness of lifein this transient and sorrowful world, anityam asukham imamlokam.

If this were so, the Gita would lose all its meaning; for itsfirst and central object would be defeated. But the Gita insiststhat the nature of the action does matter and that there is a pos-itive sanction for continuance in works, not only that one quitenegative and mechanical reason, the objectless compulsion ofNature. There is still, after the ego has been conquered, a divineLord and enjoyer of the sacrifice, bhoktaram yajnatapasam, andthere is still an object in the sacrifice. The impersonal Brahmanis not the very last word, not the utterly highest secret of ourbeing; for impersonal and personal, finite and infinite turn outto be only two opposite, yet concomitant aspects of a divineBeing unlimited by these distinctions who is both these thingsat once. God is an ever unmanifest Infinite ever self-impelled tomanifest himself in the finite; he is the great impersonal Person ofwhom all personalities are partial appearances; he is the Divinewho reveals himself in the human being, the Lord seated in theheart of man. Knowledge teaches us to see all beings in theone impersonal self, for so we are liberated from the separative


ego-sense, and then through this delivering impersonality to seethem in this God, atmani atho mayi, “in the Self and then inMe.” Our ego, our limiting personalities stand in the way of ourrecognising the Divine who is in all and in whom all have theirbeing; for, subject to personality, we see only such fragmen-tary aspects of Him as the finite appearances of things sufferus to seize. We have to arrive at him not through our lowerpersonality, but through the high, infinite and impersonal partof our being, and that we find by becoming this self one in allin whose existence the whole world is comprised. This infinitecontaining, not excluding all finite appearances, this impersonaladmitting, not rejecting all individualities and personalities, thisimmobile sustaining, pervading, containing, not standing apartfrom all the movement of Nature, is the clear mirror in whichthe Divine will reveal His being. Therefore it is to the Impersonalthat we have first to attain; through the cosmic deities, throughthe aspects of the finite alone the perfect knowledge of Godcannot be totally obtained. But neither is the silent immobilityof the impersonal Self, conceived as shut into itself and divorcedfrom all that it sustains, contains and pervades, the whole all-revealing all-satisfying truth of the Divine. To see that we haveto look through its silence to the Purushottama, and he in hisdivine greatness possesses both the Akshara and the Kshara;he is seated in the immobility, but he manifests himself in themovement and in all the action of cosmic Nature; to him evenafter liberation the sacrifice of works in Nature continues to beoffered.

The real goal of the Yoga is then a living and self-completingunion with the divine Purushottama and is not merely a self-extinguishing immergence in the impersonal Being. To raise ourwhole existence to the Divine Being, to dwell in him (mayyevanivasis.yasi), to be at one with him, unify our consciousnesswith his, to make our fragmentary nature a reflection of hisperfect nature, to be inspired in our thought and sense whollyby the divine knowledge, to be moved in will and action utterlyand faultlessly by the divine will, to lose desire in his love anddelight, is man’s perfection; it is that which the Gita describes as


the highest secret. It is the true goal and the last sense of humanliving and the highest step in our progressive sacrifice of works.For he remains to the end the master of works and the soul ofsacrifice.

XIV

The Principle of Divine Works

THIS THEN is the sense of the Gita’s doctrine of sac-rifice. Its full significance depends on the idea of thePurushottama 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 ofinfidelity 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 Purushottamaand his relation to the immobile Self in whom it is our firstbusiness, our pressing spiritual need to find our poise of perfectpeace and equality by attainment to the Brahmic condition. Hespeaks as yet not at all in set terms of the Purushottama, butof himself, — “I”, Krishna, Narayana, the Avatar, the God inman who is also the Lord in the universe incarnated in the figureof the divine charioteer of Kurukshetra. “In the Self, then inMe,” is the formula he gives, implying that the transcendenceof the individual personality by seeing it as a “becoming” inthe impersonal self-existent Being is simply a means of arrivingat that great secret impersonal Personality, which is thus silent,calm and uplifted above Nature in the impersonal Being, butalso present and active in Nature in all these million becomings.Losing our lower individual personality in the Impersonal, wearrive finally at union with that supreme Personality which isnot separate and individual, but yet assumes all individualities.Transcending the lower nature of the three gunas and seatingthe soul in the immobile Purusha beyond the three gunas, wecan ascend finally into the higher nature of the infinite Godheadwhich is not bound by the three gunas even when it acts throughNature. Reaching the inner actionlessness of the silent Purusha,nais.karmya, and leaving Prakriti to do her works, we can attainsupremely 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 thePurushottama, seen here as the incarnate Narayana, Krishna,is therefore the key. Without it the withdrawal from the lowernature to the Brahmic condition leads necessarily to inaction ofthe liberated man, his indifference to the works of the world;with it the same withdrawal becomes a step by which the worksof the world are taken up in the spirit, with the nature and inthe freedom of the Divine. See the silent Brahman as the goaland the world with all its activities has to be forsaken; see God,the Divine, the Purushottama as the goal, superior to actionyet its inner spiritual cause and object and original will, andthe world with all its activities is conquered and possessed in adivine transcendence of the world. It can become instead of aprison-house an opulent kingdom, rajyam samr.ddham, whichwe have conquered for the spiritual life by slaying the limitationof the tyrant ego and overcoming the bondage of our gaolerdesires and breaking the prison of our individualistic possessionand enjoyment. The liberated universalised soul becomes svarat.samrat., self-ruler and emperor.

The works of sacrifice are thus vindicated as a meansof liberation and absolute spiritual perfection, samsiddhi. SoJanaka and other great Karmayogins of the mighty ancientYoga attained to perfection, by equal and desireless works doneas a sacrifice, without the least egoistic aim or attachment —karman.aiva hi samsiddhim asthita janakadayah. . So too and withthe same desirelessness, after liberation and perfection, workscan and have to be continued by us in a large divine spirit,with the calm high nature of a spiritual royalty. “Thou shouldstdo works regarding also the holding together of the peoples,lokasangraham evapi sampasyan kartum arhasi. Whatsoever theBest doeth, that the lower kind of man puts into practice; thestandard he creates, the people follows. O son of Pritha, I haveno work that I need to do in all the three worlds, I have nothingthat I have not gained and have yet to gain, and I abide verilyin the paths of action,” varta eva ca karman. i, — eva implying,I abide in it and do not leave it as the Sannyasin thinks himselfbound to abandon works. “For if I did not abide sleeplessly in


the paths of action, men follow in every way my path, thesepeoples would sink to destruction if I did not works and Ishould be the creator of confusion and slay these creatures. Asthose who know not act with attachment to the action, he whoknows should act without attachment, having for his motive tohold together the peoples. He should not create a division oftheir understanding in the ignorant who are attached to theirworks; he should set them to all actions, doing them himselfwith knowledge and in Yoga.” There are few more importantpassages in the Gita than these seven striking couplets.

But let us clearly understand that they must not be inter-preted, as the modern pragmatic tendency concerned much morewith the present affairs of the world than with any high andfar-off spiritual possibility seeks to interpret them, as no morethan a philosophical and religious justification of social service,patriotic, cosmopolitan and humanitarian effort and attachmentto the hundred eager social schemes and dreams which attractthe modern intellect. It is not the rule of a large moral and intel-lectual altruism which is here announced, but that of a spiritualunity with God and with this world of beings who dwell in himand in whom he dwells. It is not an injunction to subordinatethe individual to society and humanity or immolate egoism onthe altar of the human collectivity, but to fulfil the individualin God and to sacrifice the ego on the one true altar of the all-embracing Divinity. The Gita moves on a plane of ideas andexperiences higher than those of the modern mind which is atthe stage indeed of a struggle to shake off the coils of egoism, butis still mundane in its outlook and intellectual and moral ratherthan spiritual in its temperament. Patriotism, cosmopolitanism,service of society, collectivism, humanitarianism, the ideal orreligion of humanity are admirable aids towards our escape fromour primary condition of individual, family, social, national ego-ism into a secondary stage in which the individual realises, asfar as it can be done on the intellectual, moral and emotionallevel, — on that level he cannot do it entirely in the right andperfect way, the way of the integral truth of his being, — theoneness of his existence with the existence of other beings. But


the thought of the Gita reaches beyond to a tertiary condition ofour developing self-consciousness towards which the secondaryis only a partial stage of advance.

The Indian social tendency has been to subordinate the in-dividual to the claims of society, but Indian religious thoughtand spiritual seeking have been always loftily individualistic intheir aims. An Indian system of thought like the Gita’s cannotpossibly fail to put first the development of the individual, thehighest need of the individual, his claim to discover and exercisehis largest spiritual freedom, greatness, splendour, royalty, — hisaim to develop into the illumined seer and king in the spiritualsense of seerdom and kingship, which was the first great charterof the ideal humanity promulgated by the ancient Vedic sages.To exceed himself was their goal for the individual, not by losingall his personal aims in the aims of an organised human soci-ety, but by enlarging, heightening, aggrandising himself into theconsciousness of the Godhead. The rule given here by the Gita isthe rule for the master man, the superman, the divinised humanbeing, the Best, not in the sense of any Nietzschean, any one-sided and lopsided, any Olympian, Apollonian or Dionysian,any angelic or demoniac supermanhood, but in that of the manwhose whole personality has been offered up into the being,nature and consciousness of the one transcendent and universalDivinity and by loss of the smaller self has found its greater self,has been divinised.

To exalt oneself out of the lower imperfect Prakriti, trai-gun. yamayı maya, into unity with the divine being, consciousnessand nature,1 madbhavam agatah. , is the object of the Yoga. Butwhen this object is fulfilled, when the man is in the Brahmicstatus and sees no longer with the false egoistic vision himselfand the world, but sees all beings in the Self, in God, and theSelf 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 Sayujya, salokya and sadr.sya or sadharmya. Sadharmya is becoming of one law ofbeing and action with the Divine.


works? It is the question of Arjuna,2 but answered from a stand-point other than that from which Arjuna had put it. The motivecannot be personal desire on the intellectual, moral, emotionallevel, for that has been abandoned, — even the moral motivehas been abandoned, since the liberated man has passed beyondthe lower distinction of sin and virtue, lives in a glorified puritybeyond good and evil. It cannot be the spiritual call to his perfectself-development by means of disinterested works, for the callhas been answered, the development is perfect and fulfilled. Hismotive of action can only be the holding together of the peo-ples, cikırs.ur lokasangraham. This great march of the peoplestowards a far-off divine ideal has to be held together, preventedfrom falling into the bewilderment, confusion and utter discordof the understanding which would lead to dissolution and de-struction and to which the world moving forward in the nightor dark twilight of ignorance would be too easily prone if itwere not held together, conducted, kept to the great lines of itsdiscipline by the illumination, by the strength, by the rule andexample, by the visible standard and the invisible influence ofits Best. The best, the individuals who are in advance of thegeneral line and above the general level of the collectivity, arethe natural leaders of mankind, for it is they who can point tothe race both the way they must follow and the standard orideal they have to keep to or to attain. But the divinised man isthe Best in no ordinary sense of the word and his influence, hisexample must have a power which that of no ordinarily superiorman can exercise. What example then shall he give? What ruleor standard shall he uphold?

In order to indicate more perfectly his meaning, the divineTeacher, the Avatar gives his own example, his own standard toArjuna. “I abide in the path of action,” he seems to say, “the paththat all men follow; thou too must abide in action. In the way Iact, in that way thou too must act. I am above the necessity ofworks, for I have nothing to gain by them; I am the Divine whopossess all things and all beings in the world and I am myself

2 kim prabhas.eta kim asıta vrajeta kim.


beyond the world as well as in it and I do not depend uponanything or anyone in all the three worlds for any object; yet Iact. This too must be thy manner and spirit of working. I, theDivine, am the rule and the standard; it is I who make the pathin which men tread; I am the way and the goal. But I do all thislargely, universally, visibly in part, but far more invisibly; andmen do not really know the way of my workings. Thou, whenthou knowest and seest, when thou hast become the divinisedman, must be the individual power of God, the human yet divineexample, even as I am in my avatars. Most men dwell in theignorance, the God-seer dwells in the knowledge; but let himnot confuse the minds of men by a dangerous example, rejectingin his superiority the works of the world; let him not cut shortthe thread of action before it is spun out, let him not perplex andfalsify the stages and gradations of the ways I have hewn. Thewhole range of human action has been decreed by me with aview to the progress of man from the lower to the higher nature,from the apparent undivine to the conscious Divine. The wholerange of human works must be that in which the God-knowershall move. All individual, all social action, all the works of theintellect, the heart and the body are still his, not any longer forhis own separate sake, but for the sake of God in the world, ofGod in all beings and that all those beings may move forward,as he has moved, by the path of works towards the discovery ofthe Divine in themselves. Outwardly his actions may not seem todiffer essentially from theirs; battle and rule as well as teachingand thought, all the various commerce of man with man mayfall in his range; but the spirit in which he does them must bevery different, and it is that spirit which by its influence shall bethe great attraction drawing men upwards to his own level, thegreat lever lifting the mass of men higher in their ascent.”

The giving of the example of God himself to the liberatedman is profoundly significant; for it reveals the whole basis of theGita’s philosophy of divine works. The liberated man is he whohas exalted himself into the divine nature and according to thatdivine nature must be his actions. But what is the divine nature?It is not entirely and solely that of the Akshara, the immobile,


inactive, impersonal self; for that by itself would lead the lib-erated man to actionless immobility. It is not characteristicallythat of the Kshara, the multitudinous, the personal, the Purushaself-subjected to Prakriti; for that by itself would lead him backinto subjection to his personality and to the lower nature and itsqualities. It is the nature of the Purushottama who holds boththese together and by his supreme divinity reconciles them ina divine reconciliation which is the highest secret of his being,rahasyam hyetad uttamam. He is not the doer of works in thepersonal sense of our action involved in Prakriti; for God worksthrough his power, conscious nature, effective force, — Shakti,Maya, Prakriti, — but yet above it, not involved in it, not subjectto it, not unable to lift himself beyond the laws, workings, habitsof action it creates, not affected or bound by them, not unable todistinguish himself, as we are unable, from the workings of life,mind and body. He is the doer of works who acts not, kartaramakartaram. “Know me,” says Krishna, “for the doer of this (thefourfold law of human workings) who am yet the imperishablenon-doer. Works fix not themselves on me (na limpanti), norhave I desire for the fruits of action.” But neither is he theinactive, impassive, unpuissant Witness and nothing else; for itis he who works in the steps and measures of his power; everymovement of it, every particle of the world of beings it forms isinstinct with his presence, full of his consciousness, impelled byhis will, shaped by his knowledge.

He is, besides, the Supreme without qualities who is pos-sessed of all qualities, nirgun.o gun. ı.

3 He is not bound by anymode of nature or action, nor consists, as our personality con-sists, of a sum of qualities, modes of nature, characteristic oper-ations of the mental, moral, emotional, vital, physical being, butis the source of all modes and qualities, capable of developingany he wills in whatever way and to whatever degree he wills;he is the infinite being of which they are ways of becoming, theimmeasurable quantity and unbound ineffable of which they aremeasures, numbers and figures, which they seem to rhythmise

3 Swetaswatara Upanishad.


and arithmise in the standards of the universe. Yet neither ishe merely an impersonal indeterminate, nor a mere stuff ofconscious existence for all determinations and personalisingsto draw upon for their material, but a supreme Being, the oneoriginal conscious Existent, the perfect Personality capable ofall relations even to the most human, concrete and intimate; forhe is friend, comrade, lover, playmate, guide, teacher, master,ministrant of knowledge or ministrant of joy, yet in all relationsunbound, free and absolute. This too the divinised man becomesin the measure of his attainment, impersonal in his personal-ity, unbound by quality or action even when maintaining themost personal and intimate relations with men, unbound byany dharma even when following in appearance this or thatdharma. Neither the dynamism of the kinetic man nor the ac-tionless light of the ascetic or quietist, neither the vehementpersonality of the man of action nor the indifferent impersonalityof the philosophic sage is the complete divine ideal. These arethe two conflicting standards of the man of this world and theascetic or the quietist philosopher, one immersed in the actionof the Kshara, the other striving to dwell entirely in the peaceof the Akshara; but the complete divine ideal proceeds from thenature of the Purushottama which transcends this conflict andreconciles all divine possibilities.

The kinetic man is not satisfied with any ideal which doesnot depend upon the fulfilment of this cosmic nature, this play ofthe three qualities of that nature, this human activity of mind andheart and body. The highest fulfilment of that activity, he mightsay, is my idea of human perfection, of the divine possibility inman; some ideal that satisfies the intellect, the heart, the moralbeing, some ideal of our human nature in its action can alonesatisfy the human being; he must have something that he canseek in the workings of his mind and life and body. For that ishis nature, his dharma, and how can he be fulfilled in somethingoutside his nature? For to his nature each being is bound andwithin it he must seek for his perfection. According to our humannature must be our human perfection; and each man must strivefor it according to the line of his personality, his svadharma, but


in life, in action, not outside life and action. Yes, there is a truthin that, replies the Gita; the fulfilment of God in man, the playof the Divine in life is part of the ideal perfection. But if youseek it only in the external, in life, in the principle of action, youwill never find it; for you will then not only act according toyour nature, which is in itself a rule of perfection, but you willbe — and this is a rule of the imperfection — eternally subject toits modes, its dualities of liking and dislike, pain and pleasureand especially to the rajasic mode with its principle of desireand its snare of wrath and grief and longing, — the restless, all-devouring principle of desire, the insatiable fire which besiegesyour worldly action, the eternal enemy of knowledge by whichit is covered over here in your nature as is a fire by smoke or amirror by dust and which you must slay in order to live in thecalm, clear, luminous truth of the spirit. The senses, mind andintellect are the seat of this eternal cause of imperfection andyet it is within this sense, mind and intellect, this play of thelower nature that you would limit your search for perfection!The effort is vain. The kinetic side of your nature must first seekto add to itself the quietistic; you must uplift yourself beyondthis lower nature to that which is above the three gunas, thatwhich is founded in the highest principle, in the soul. Only whenyou have attained to peace of soul, can you become capable ofa free and divine action.

The quietist, the ascetic, on the other hand cannot see anypossibility of perfection into which life and action enter. Are theynot the very seat of bondage and imperfection? Is not all actionimperfect in its nature, like a fire that must produce smoke, isnot the principle of action itself rajasic, the father of desire, acause that must have its effect of obscuration of knowledge, itsround of longing and success and failure, its oscillations of joyand 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 notthe Master or cause of our works; the master of our works isdesire and the cause of works is ignorance. If the world, theKshara is in a sense a manifestation or a lıla of the Divine, it isan imperfect play with the ignorance of Nature, an obscuration


rather than a manifestation. That is surely evident from our veryfirst glance at the nature of the world and does not the fullestexperience of the world teach us always the same truth? is it nota wheel of the ignorance binding the soul to continual birth bythe impulse of desire and action until at last that is exhaustedor cast away? Not only desire, but action also must be flungaway; seated in the silent self the soul will then pass away intothe motionless, actionless, imperturbable, absolute Brahman. Tothis objection of the impersonalising quietist the Gita is at morepains to answer than to that of the man of the world, the kineticindividual. For this quietism having hold of a higher and morepowerful truth which is yet not the whole or the highest truth, itspromulgation as the universal, complete, highest ideal of humanlife is likely to be more confusing and disastrous to the advanceof the human race towards its goal than the error of an exclusivekinetism. A strong one-sided truth, when set forth as the wholetruth, creates a strong light but also a strong confusion; for thevery strength of its element of truth increases the strength of itselement of error. The error of the kinetic ideal can only prolongthe ignorance and retard the human advance by setting it insearch of perfection where perfection cannot be found; but theerror of the quietistic ideal contains in itself the very principle ofworld-destruction. Were I to act upon it, says Krishna, I shoulddestroy the peoples and be the author of confusion; and thoughthe error of an individual human being, even though a nearlydivine man, cannot destroy the whole race, it may produce awidespread confusion which may be in its nature destructive ofthe principle of human life and disturbing to the settled line ofits advance.

Therefore the quietistic tendency in man must be got torecognise its own incompleteness and admit on an equality withitself the truth which lies behind the kinetic tendency, — thefulfilment of God in man and the presence of the Divine in allthe action of the human race. God is there not only in the silence,but in the action; the quietism of the impassive soul unaffectedby Nature and the kinetism of the soul giving itself to Natureso that the great world-sacrifice, the Purusha-Yajna, may be


effected, are not a reality and a falsehood in perpetual strugglenor yet two hostile realities, one superior, the other inferior,each fatal to the other; they are the double term of the divinemanifestation. The Akshara alone is not the whole key of theirfulfilment, not the very highest secret. The double fulfilment, thereconciliation is to be sought in the Purushottama representedhere by Krishna, at once supreme Being, Lord of the worlds andAvatar. The divinised man entering into his divine nature willact even as he acts; he will not give himself up to inaction. TheDivine is at work in man in the ignorance and at work in man inthe knowledge. To know Him is our soul’s highest welfare andthe condition of its perfection, but to know and realise Him asa transcendent peace and silence is not all; the secret that has tobe learned is at once the secret of the eternal and unborn Divineand the secret of the divine birth and works, janma karma came divyam. The action which proceeds from that knowledge,will be free from all bondage; “he who so knoweth me,” saysthe Teacher, “is not bound by works.” If the escape from theobligation of works and desire and from the wheel of rebirth isto be the aim and the ideal, then this knowledge is to be takenas the true, the broad way of escape; for, says the Gita, “hewho knows in their right principles my divine birth and works,comes when he leaves his body, not to rebirth, but to Me, OArjuna.” Through the knowledge and possession of the divinebirth he comes to the unborn and imperishable Divine who isthe self of all beings, ajo avyaya atma; through the knowledgeand execution of divine works to the Master of works, the lordof all beings, bhutanam ısvara. He lives in that unborn being;his works are those of that universal Mastery.

XV

The Possibility and Purposeof Avatarhood

IN SPEAKING of this Yoga in which action and knowledgebecome one, the Yoga of the sacrifice of works with knowl-edge, in which works are fulfilled in knowledge, knowledge

supports, changes and enlightens works, and both are offered tothe Purushottama, the supreme Divinity who becomes manifestwithin us as Narayana, Lord of all our being and action seatedsecret in our hearts for ever, who becomes manifest even in thehuman form as the Avatar, the divine birth taking possessionof our humanity, Krishna has declared in passing that this wasthe ancient and original Yoga which he gave to Vivasvan, theSun-God, Vivasvan gave it to Manu, the father of men, Manugave it to Ikshvaku, head of the Solar line, and so it came downfrom royal sage to royal sage till it was lost in the great lapseof Time and is now renewed for Arjuna, because he is the loverand devotee, friend and comrade of the Avatar. For this, hesays, is the highest secret, — thus claiming for it a superiorityto all other forms of Yoga, because those others lead to theimpersonal Brahman or to a personal Deity, to a liberation inactionless knowledge or a liberation in absorbed beatitude, butthis gives the highest secret and the whole secret; it brings usto divine peace and divine works, to divine knowledge, actionand ecstasy unified in a perfect freedom; it unites into itself allthe Yogic paths as the highest being of the Divine reconciles andmakes one in itself all the different and even contrary powersand principles of its manifested being. Therefore this Yoga ofthe Gita is not, as some contend, only the Karmayoga, one andthe lowest, according to them, of the three paths, but a highestYoga synthetic and integral directing Godward all the powers ofour being.


Arjuna takes the declaration about the transmission of theYoga in its most physical sense, — there is another significancein which it can be taken, — and asks how the Sun-God, oneof the first-born of beings, ancestor of the Solar dynasty, canhave received the Yoga from the man Krishna who is only nowborn into the world. Krishna does not reply, as we might haveexpected him to have done, that it was as the Divine who is thesource of all knowledge that he gave the Word to the Deva whois his form of knowledge, giver of all inner and outer light, —bhargah. savitur devasya yo no dhiyah. pracodayat; he acceptsinstead the opportunity which Arjuna gives him of declaring hisconcealed Godhead, a declaration for which he had preparedwhen he gave himself as the divine example for the worker whois not bound by his works, but which he has not yet quite explic-itly made. He now openly announces himself as the incarnateGodhead, the Avatar.

We have had occasion already, when speaking of the divineTeacher, to state briefly the doctrine of Avatarhood as it appearsto us in the light of Vedanta, the light in which the Gita presents itto us. We must now look a little more closely at this Avatarhoodand at the significance of the divine Birth of which it is the out-ward expression; for that is a link of considerable importance inthe integral teaching of the Gita. And we may first translate thewords of the Teacher himself in which the nature and purpose ofAvatarhood are given summarily and remind ourselves also ofother passages or references which bear upon it. “Many are mylives 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 theunborn, though I am imperishable in my self-existence, thoughI am the Lord of all existences, yet I stand upon my own Natureand I come into birth by my self-Maya. For whensoever there isthe fading of the Dharma and the uprising of unrighteousness,then I loose myself forth into birth. For the deliverance of thegood, for the destruction of the evil-doers, for the enthroning ofthe Right I am born from age to age. He who knoweth thus inits right principles my divine birth and my divine work, whenhe 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 knowledgehave arrived at my nature of being (madbhavam, the divinenature of the Purushottama). As men approach me, so I acceptthem to my love (bhajami); men follow in every way my path,O son of Pritha.”

But most men, the Gita goes on to say, desiring the ful-filment of their works, sacrifice to the gods, to various formsand 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 tothat world alone. The other, the divine self-fulfilment in man bythe sacrifice with knowledge to the supreme Godhead, is muchmore difficult; its results belong to a higher plane of existenceand they are less easily grasped. Men therefore have to followthe fourfold law of their nature and works and on this planeof mundane action they seek the Godhead through his variousqualities. But, says Krishna, though I am the doer of the fourfoldworks and creator of its fourfold law, yet I must be known alsoas the non-doer, the imperishable, the immutable Self. “Worksaffect me not, nor have I desire for the fruit of works;” forGod is the impersonal beyond this egoistic personality and thisstrife of the modes of Nature, and as the Purushottama also,the impersonal Personality, he possesses this supreme freedomeven in works. Therefore the doer of divine works even whilefollowing the fourfold law has to know and live in that which isbeyond, in the impersonal Self and so in the supreme Godhead.“He who thus knows me is not bound by his works. So knowingwas work done by the men of old who sought liberation; dotherefore, thou also, work of that more ancient kind done byancient men.”

The second portion of these passages which has here beengiven in substance, explains the nature of divine works, divyamkarma, with the principle of which we have had to deal in thelast essay; the first, which has been fully translated, explainsthe way of the divine birth, divyam janma, the Avatarhood. Butwe have to remark carefully that the upholding of Dharma in


the world is not the only object of the descent of the Avatar,that great mystery of the Divine manifest in humanity; for theupholding of the Dharma is not an all-sufficient object in itself,not the supreme possible aim for the manifestation of a Christ, aKrishna, a Buddha, but is only the general condition of a higheraim and a more supreme and divine utility. For there are twoaspects of the divine birth; one is a descent, the birth of Godin humanity, the Godhead manifesting itself in the human formand nature, the eternal Avatar; the other is an ascent, the birthof man into the Godhead, man rising into the divine nature andconsciousness, madbhavam agatah. ; it is the being born anew ina second birth of the soul. It is that new birth which Avatarhoodand the upholding of the Dharma are intended to serve. Thisdouble aspect in the Gita’s doctrine of Avatarhood is apt to bemissed by the cursory reader satisfied, as most are, with catchinga superficial view of its profound teachings, and it is missedtoo by the formal commentator petrified in the rigidity of theschools. Yet it is necessary, surely, to the whole meaning of thedoctrine. Otherwise the Avatar idea would be only a dogma,a popular superstition, or an imaginative or mystic deificationof historical or legendary supermen, not what the Gita makesall its teaching, a deep philosophical and religious truth and anessential part of or step to the supreme mystery of all, rahasyamuttamam.

If there were not this rising of man into the Godhead tobe helped by the descent of God into humanity, Avatarhood forthe sake of the Dharma would be an otiose phenomenon, sincemere Right, mere justice or standards of virtue can always beupheld by the divine omnipotence through its ordinary means,by great men or great movements, by the life and work of sagesand kings and religious teachers, without any actual incarnation.The Avatar comes as the manifestation of the divine nature in thehuman nature, the apocalypse of its Christhood, Krishnahood,Buddhahood, in order that the human nature may by mouldingits principle, thought, feeling, action, being on the lines of thatChristhood, Krishnahood, Buddhahood transfigure itself intothe divine. The law, the Dharma which the Avatar establishes


is given for that purpose chiefly; the Christ, Krishna, Buddhastands in its centre as the gate, he makes through himself theway men shall follow. That is why each Incarnation holds beforemen his own example and declares of himself that he is the wayand the gate; he declares too the oneness of his humanity withthe divine being, declares that the Son of Man and the Fatherabove from whom he has descended are one, that Krishna in thehuman body, manus.ım tanum asritam, and the supreme Lordand Friend of all creatures are but two revelations of the samedivine Purushottama, revealed there in his own being, revealedhere in the type of humanity.

That the Gita contains as its kernel this second and realobject of the Avatarhood, is evident even from this passage byitself rightly considered; but it becomes much clearer if we takeit, not by itself, — always the wrong way to deal with the texts ofthe Gita, — but in its right close connection with other passagesand with the whole teaching. We have to remember and taketogether its doctrine of the one Self in all, of the Godhead seatedin the heart of every creature, its teaching about the relationsbetween the Creator and his creation, its strongly emphasisedidea of the vibhuti, — noting too the language in which theTeacher gives his own divine example of selfless works whichapplies equally to the human Krishna and the divine Lord ofthe worlds, and giving their due weight to such passages as thatin the ninth chapter, “Deluded minds despise me lodged in thehuman body because they know not my supreme nature of being,Lord of all existences”; and we have to read in the light of theseideas this passage we find before us and its declaration that bythe knowledge of his divine birth and divine works men cometo the Divine and by becoming full of him and even as he andtaking refuge in him they arrive at his nature and status of being,madbhavam. For then we shall understand the divine birth andits object, not as an isolated and miraculous phenomenon, but inits proper place in the whole scheme of the world-manifestation;without that we cannot arrive at its divine mystery, but shalleither scout it altogether or accept it ignorantly and, it may be,superstitiously or fall into the petty and superficial ideas of the


modern mind about it by which it loses all its inner and helpfulsignificance.

For to the modern mind Avatarhood is one of the most diffi-cult to accept or to understand of all the ideas that are streamingin from the East upon the rationalised human consciousness. Itis apt to take it at the best for a mere figure for some high man-ifestation of human power, character, genius, great work donefor the world or in the world, and at the worst to regard it as asuperstition, — to the heathen a foolishness and to the Greeks astumbling-block. The materialist, necessarily, cannot even lookat it, since he does not believe in God; to the rationalist or theDeist it is a folly and a thing of derision; to the thoroughgoingdualist who sees an unbridgeable gulf between the human andthe divine nature, it sounds like a blasphemy. The rationalistobjects that if God exists, he is extracosmic or supracosmic anddoes not intervene in the affairs of the world, but allows themto 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 ofNature, like some generalised or abstract witness Purusha of theSankhyas; he is pure Spirit and cannot put on a body, infiniteand cannot be finite as the human being is finite, the ever unborncreator and cannot be the creature born into the world, — thesethings are impossible even to his absolute omnipotence. To theseobjections the thoroughgoing dualist would add that God is inhis person, his role and his nature different and separate fromman; the perfect cannot put on human imperfection; the unbornpersonal God cannot be born as a human personality; the Rulerof the worlds cannot be limited in a nature-bound human actionand in a perishable human body. These objections, so formidableat first sight to the reason, seem to have been present to the mindof the Teacher in the Gita when he says that although the Divineis unborn, imperishable in his self-existence, the Lord of allbeings, yet he assumes birth by a supreme resort to the actionof his Nature and by force of his self-Maya; that he whom thedeluded despise because lodged in a human body, is verily inhis supreme being the Lord of all; that he is in the action of


the divine consciousness the creator of the fourfold Law andthe doer of the works of the world and at the same time in thesilence of the divine consciousness the impartial witness of theworks of his own Nature, — for he is always, beyond both thesilence and the action, the supreme Purushottama. And the Gitais able to meet all these oppositions and to reconcile all thesecontraries because it starts from the Vedantic view of existence,of God and the universe.

For in the Vedantic view of things all these apparentlyformidable 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 logicalconception. For all here is God, is the Spirit or Self-existence,is Brahman, ekamevadvitıyam, — there is nothing else, nothingother and different from it and there can be nothing else, canbe nothing other and different from it; Nature is and can benothing else than a power of the divine consciousness; all beingsare and can be nothing else than inner and outer, subjectiveand objective soul-forms and bodily forms of the divine beingwhich exist in or result from the power of its consciousness. Farfrom the Infinite being unable to take on finiteness, the wholeuniverse is nothing else but that; we can see, look as we may,nothing else at all in the whole wide world we inhabit. Far fromthe Spirit being incapable of form or disdaining to connect itselfwith form of matter or mind and to assume a limited nature ora body, all here is nothing but that, the world exists only by thatconnection, that assumption. Far from the world being a mech-anism of law with no soul or spirit intervening in the movementof its forces or the action of its minds and bodies, — only someoriginal indifferent Spirit passively existing somewhere outsideor above it, — the whole world and every particle of it is on thecontrary nothing but the divine force in action and that divineforce determines and governs its every movement, inhabits itsevery form, possesses here every soul and mind; all is in Godand in him moves and has its being, in all he is, acts and displayshis being; every creature is the disguised Narayana.

Far from the unborn being unable to assume birth, all beings


are even in their individuality unborn spirits, eternal withoutbeginning or end, and in their essential existence and their uni-versality all are the one unborn Spirit of whom birth and deathare only a phenomenon of the assumption and change of forms.The assumption of imperfection by the perfect is the whole mys-tic phenomenon of the universe; but the imperfection appears inthe form and action of the mind or body assumed, subsists inthe phenomenon, — in that which assumes it there is no imper-fection, even as in the Sun which illumines all there is no defectof light or of vision, but only in the capacities of the individualorgan of vision. Nor does God rule the world from some remoteheaven, but by his intimate omnipresence; each finite working offorce is an act of infinite Force and not of a limited separate self-existent energy labouring in its own underived strength; in everyfinite working of will and knowledge we can discover, support-ing it, an act of the infinite all-will and all-knowledge. God’s ruleis not an absentee, foreign and external government; he governsall because he exceeds all, but also because he dwells within allmovements and is their absolute soul and spirit. Therefore noneof the objections opposed by our reason to the possibility ofAvatarhood can stand in their principle; for the principle is avain division made by the intellectual reason which the wholephenomenon and the whole reality of the world are busy everymoment contradicting and disproving.

But still, apart from the possibility, there is the question ofthe actual divine working, — whether actually the divine con-sciousness does appear coming forward from beyond the veil toact at all directly in the phenomenal, the finite, the mental andmaterial, the limited, the imperfect. The finite is indeed nothingbut a definition, a face-value of the Infinite’s self-representationsto its own variations of consciousness; the real value of eachfinite phenomenon is an infinite value, is indeed the very Infi-nite. Each being is infinite in its self-existence, whatever it maybe in the action of its phenomenal nature, its temporal self-representation. The man is not, when we look closely, himselfalone, a rigidly separate self-existent individual, but humanityin a mind and body of itself; and humanity too is no rigidly


separate self-existent species or genus, it is the All-existence, theuniversal Godhead figuring itself in the type of humanity; there itworks out certain possibilities, develops, evolves, as we now say,certain powers of its manifestations. What it evolves, is itself, isthe Spirit.

For what we mean by Spirit is self-existent being with aninfinite power of consciousness and unconditioned delight inits being; it is either that or nothing, or at least nothing whichhas anything to do with man and the world or with which,therefore, man or the world has anything to do. Matter, bodyis only a massed motion of force of conscious being employedas a starting-point for the variable relations of consciousnessworking through its power of sense; nor is Matter anywherereally void of consciousness, for even in the atom, the cell thereis, as is now made abundantly clear in spite of itself by modernScience, a power of will, an intelligence at work; but that poweris the power of will and intelligence of the Self, Spirit or Godheadwithin it, it is not the separate, self-derived will or idea of themechanical cell or atom. This universal will and intelligence,involved, develops its powers from form to form, and on earthat least it is in man that it draws nearest to the full divine andthere first becomes, even in the outward intelligence in the form,obscurely conscious of its divinity. But still there too there is alimitation, there is that imperfection of the manifestation whichprevents the lower forms from having the self-knowledge of theiridentity with the Divine. For in each limited being the limitationof the phenomenal action is accompanied by a limitation alsoof the phenomenal consciousness which defines the nature ofthe being and makes the inner difference between creature andcreature. The Divine works behind indeed and governs its specialmanifestation through this outer and imperfect consciousnessand will, but is itself secret in the cavern, guhayam, as the Vedaputs it, or as the Gita expresses it, “In the heart of all existencesthe Lord abides turning all existences as if mounted on a machineby Maya.” This secret working of the Lord hidden in the heartfrom the egoistic nature-consciousness through which he works,is God’s universal method with creatures. Why then should we


suppose that in any form he comes forward into the frontal, thephenomenal consciousness for a more direct and consciouslydivine action? Obviously, if at all, then to break the veil betweenhimself and humanity which man limited in his own nature couldnever lift.

The Gita explains the ordinary imperfect action of the crea-ture by its subjection to the mechanism of Prakriti and itslimitation by the self-representations of Maya. These two termsare only complementary aspects of one and the same effectiveforce of divine consciousness. Maya is not essentially illusion, —the element or appearance of illusion only enters in by the igno-rance of the lower Prakriti, Maya of the three modes of Nature,— it is the divine consciousness in its power of various self-representation of its being, while Prakriti is the effective forceof that consciousness which operates to work out each suchself-representation according to its own law and fundamentalidea, svabhava and svadharma, in its own proper quality andparticular force of working, gun. a-karma. “Leaning — pressingdown upon my own Nature (Prakriti) I create (loose forth intovarious being) all this multitude of existences, all helplessly sub-ject to the control of Nature.” Those who know not the Divinelodged in the human body, are ignorant of it because they aregrossly subject to this mechanism of Prakriti, helplessly subjectto its mental limitations and acquiescent in them, and dwell inan Asuric nature that deludes with desire and bewilders withegoism the will and the intelligence, mohinım prakr.tim sritah. .For the Purushottama within is not readily manifest to any andevery being; he conceals himself in a thick cloud of darkness ora bright cloud of light, utterly he envelops and wraps himself inhis Yogamaya.1 “All this world,” says the Gita, “because it isbewildered by the three states of being determined by the modesof Nature, fails to recognise me, for this my divine Maya of themodes of Nature is hard to get beyond; those cross beyond itwho approach Me; but those who dwell in the Asuric natureof being, have their knowledge reft from them by Maya.” In

1 naham prakasah. sarvasya yogamaya-samavr.tah. .


other words, there is the inherent consciousness of the divine inall, for in all the Divine dwells; but he dwells there covered byhis Maya and the essential self-knowledge of beings is reft fromthem, turned into the error of egoism by the action of Maya, theaction of the mechanism of Prakriti. Still by drawing back fromthe mechanism of Nature to her inner and secret Master mancan become conscious of the indwelling Divinity.

Now it is notable that with a slight but important variationof language the Gita describes in the same way both the actionof the Divine in bringing about the ordinary birth of creaturesand his action in his birth as the Avatar. “Leaning upon my ownNature, prakr.tim svam avas.t.abhya,” it will say later, “I looseforth variously, visr.jami, this multitude of creatures helplesslysubject owing to the control of Prakriti, avasam prakr.ter vasat.”“Standing upon my own Nature,” it says here, “I am bornby my self-Maya, prakr.tim svam adhis.t.haya . . . atmamayaya, Iloose forth myself, atmanam sr.jami.” The action implied in theword avas.t.abhya is a forceful downward pressure by which theobject controlled is overcome, oppressed, blocked or limited inits movement or working and becomes helplessly subject to thecontrolling power, avasam vasat; Nature in this action becomesmechanical and its multitude of creatures are held helpless inthe mechanism, not lords of their own action. On the contrarythe action implied in the word adhis.t.haya is a dwelling in, butalso a standing upon and over the Nature, a conscious controland government by the indwelling Godhead, adhis.t.hatrı devata,in which the Purusha is not helplessly driven by the Prakritithrough ignorance, but rather the Prakriti is full of the light andthe will of the Purusha. Therefore in the normal birth that whichis loosed forth, — created, as we say, — is the multitude of crea-tures or becomings, bhutagramam; in the divine birth that whichis loosed forth, self-created, is the self-conscious self-existentbeing, atmanam; for the Vedantic distinction between atma andbhutani is that which is made in European philosophy betweenthe Being and its becomings. In both cases Maya is the meansof the creation or manifestation, but in the divine birth it is byself-Maya, atmamayaya, not the involution in the lower Maya


of the ignorance, but the conscious action of the self-existentGodhead in its phenomenal self-representation, well aware of itsoperation and its purpose, — that which the Gita calls elsewhereYogamaya. In the ordinary birth Yogamaya is used by the Divineto envelop and conceal itself from the lower consciousness, soit becomes for us the means of the ignorance, avidya-maya; butit is by this same Yogamaya that self-knowledge also is mademanifest in the return of our consciousness to the Divine, it isthe means of the knowledge, vidya-maya; and in the divine birthit so operates — as the knowledge controlling and enlighteningthe works which are ordinarily done in the Ignorance.

The language of the Gita shows therefore that the divinebirth is that of the conscious Godhead in our humanity and es-sentially the opposite of the ordinary birth even though the samemeans are used, because it is not the birth into the Ignorance,but the birth of the knowledge, not a physical phenomenon, buta soul-birth. It is the Soul’s coming into birth as the self-existentBeing controlling consciously its becoming and not lost to self-knowledge in the cloud of the ignorance. It is the Soul born intothe body as Lord of Nature, standing above and operating inher freely by its will, not entangled and helplessly driven roundand round in the mechanism; for it works in the knowledgeand not, as most do, in the ignorance. It is the secret Soul inall coming forward from its governing secrecy behind the veilto possess wholly in a human type, but as the Divine, the birthwhich ordinarily it possesses only from behind the veil as theIshwara while the outward consciousness in front of the veil israther possessed than in possession because there it is a partiallyconscious being, the Jiva lost to self-knowledge and bound in itsworks through a phenomenal subjection to Nature. The Avatar2

therefore is a direct manifestation in humanity by Krishna thedivine 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 linewhich divides the divine from the human world or status.


only arise by climbing out of the ignorance and limitation of hisordinary humanity. It is the manifestation from above of thatwhich we have to develop from below; it is the descent of Godinto that divine birth of the human being into which we mortalcreatures must climb; it is the attracting divine example givenby God to man in the very type and form and perfected modelof our human existence.

XVI

The Process of Avatarhood

WE SEE that the mystery of the divine Incarnation inman, the assumption by the Godhead of the humantype and the human nature, is in the view of the Gita

only the other side of the eternal mystery of human birth itselfwhich is always in its essence, though not in its phenomenalappearance, even such a miraculous assumption. The eternal anduniversal self of every human being is God; even his personalself is a part of the Godhead, mamaivamsah. , — not a fractionor fragment, surely, since we cannot think of God as brokenup into little pieces, but a partial consciousness of the one Con-sciousness, a partial power of the one Power, a partial enjoymentof world-being by the one and universal Delight of being, andtherefore in manifestation or, as we say, in Nature a limited andfinite being of the one infinite and illimitable Being. The stampof that limitation is an ignorance by which he forgets, not onlythe Godhead from which he came forth, but the Godhead whichis always within him, there living in the secret heart of his ownnature, there burning like a veiled Fire on the inner altar in hisown temple-house of human consciousness.

He is ignorant because there is upon the eyes of his soul andall its organs the seal of that Nature, Prakriti, Maya, by whichhe has been put forth into manifestation out of God’s eternalbeing; she has minted him like a coin out of the precious metalof the divine substance, but overlaid with a strong coating ofthe alloy of her phenomenal qualities, stamped with her ownstamp and mark of animal humanity, and although the secretsign of the Godhead is there, it is at first indistinguishable andalways with difficulty decipherable, not to be really discoveredexcept by that initiation into the mystery of our own beingwhich distinguishes a Godward from an earthward humanity.In the Avatar, the divinely-born Man, the real substance shines

The Process of Avatarhood 159

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 isthat of the secret Godhead, and it breaks through the seals ofthe assumed human nature; the sign of the Godhead, an innersoul-sign, not outward, not physical, stands out legible for allto read who care to see or who can see; for the Asuric nature isalways blind to these things, it sees the body and not the soul,the external being and not the internal, the mask and not thePerson. In the ordinary human birth the Nature-aspect of theuniversal Divine assuming humanity prevails; in the incarnationthe God-aspect of the same phenomenon takes its place. In theone he allows the human nature to take possession of his partialbeing and to dominate it; in the other he takes possession of hispartial type of being and its nature and divinely dominates it.Not by evolution or ascent like the ordinary man, the Gita seemsto tell us, not by a growing into the divine birth, but by a directdescent into the stuff of humanity and a taking up of its moulds.

But it is to assist that ascent or evolution the descent ismade or accepted; that the Gita makes very clear. It is, wemight say, to exemplify the possibility of the Divine manifestin the human being, so that man may see what that is and takecourage to grow into it. It is also to leave the influence of thatmanifestation vibrating in the earth-nature and the soul of thatmanifestation presiding over its upward endeavour. It is to givea spiritual mould of divine manhood into which the seekingsoul 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 outerliving, — a way, a rule and law of self-moulding by which he cangrow towards divinity. It is too, since this growth, this ascent isno mere isolated and individual phenomenon, but like all in thedivine world-activities a collective business, a work and the workfor the race, to assist the human march, to hold it together inits great crises, to break the forces of the downward gravitationwhen they grow too insistent, to uphold or restore the greatdharma of the Godward law in man’s nature, to prepare even,however far off, the kingdom of God, the victory of the seekersof light and perfection, sadhunam, and the overthrow of those


who fight for the continuance of the evil and the darkness. Allthese are recognised objects of the descent of the Avatar, and it isusually by his work that the mass of men seek to distinguish himand for that that they are ready to worship him. It is only thespiritual who see that this external Avatarhood is a sign, in thesymbol of a human life, of the eternal inner Godhead makinghimself manifest in the field of their own human mentality andcorporeality so that they can grow into unity with that and bepossessed by it. The divine manifestation of a Christ, Krishna,Buddha in external humanity has for its inner truth the samemanifestation of the eternal Avatar within in our own innerhumanity. That which has been done in the outer human life ofearth, 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 Avatarhoodwhich sees in it only an extraordinary manifestation of the di-viner qualities moral, intellectual and dynamic by which averagehumanity is exceeded. In this idea there is a certain truth. TheAvatar is at the same time the Vibhuti. This Krishna who in hisdivine inner being is the Godhead in a human form, is in hisouter human being the leader of his age, the great man of theVrishnis. This is from the point of view of the Nature, not of thesoul. The Divine manifests himself through infinite qualities ofhis nature and the intensity of the manifestation is measured bytheir power and their achievement. The vibhuti of the Divine istherefore, impersonally, the manifest power of his quality, it ishis outflowing, in whatever form, of Knowledge, Energy, Love,Strength and the rest; personally, it is the mental form and theanimate being in whom this power is achieved and does its greatworks. A pre-eminence in this inner and outer achievement, agreater power of divine quality, an effective energy is alwaysthe sign. The human vibhuti is the hero of the race’s struggletowards divine achievement, the hero in the Carlylean sense ofheroism, 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 seer-poet Ushanas among the seer-poets,” the first in each category,


the greatest of each group, the most powerfully representativeof the qualities and works in which its characteristic soul-powermanifests itself. This heightening of the powers of the being is avery necessary step in the progress of the divine manifestation.Every great man who rises above our average level, raises bythat very fact our common humanity; he is a living assurance ofour divine possibilities, a promise of the Godhead, a glow of thedivine Light and a breath of the divine Power.

It is this truth which lies behind the natural human tendencyto the deification of great minds and heroic characters; it comesout clearly enough in the Indian habit of mind which easily seesa partial (amsa) Avatar in great saints, teachers, founders, ormost significantly in the belief of southern Vaishnavas that someof their saints were incarnations of the symbolic living weaponsof Vishnu, — for that is what all great spirits are, living powersand weapons of the Divine in the upward march and battle. Thisidea is innate and inevitable in any mystic or spiritual view oflife which does not draw an inexorable line between the beingand nature of the Divine and our human being and nature; it isthe sense of the divine in humanity. But still the Vibhuti is notthe Avatar; otherwise Arjuna, Vyasa, Ushanas would be Avatarsas well as Krishna, even if in a less degree of the power ofAvatarhood. The divine quality is not enough; there must be theinner consciousness of the Lord and Self governing the humannature by his divine presence. The heightening of the power ofthe qualities is part of the becoming, bhutagrama, an ascent inthe ordinary manifestation; in the Avatar there is the specialmanifestation, the divine birth from above, the eternal and uni-versal Godhead descended into a form of individual humanity,atmanam sr.jami, and conscious not only behind the veil but inthe outward nature.

There is an intermediary idea, a more mystical view ofAvatarhood which supposes that a human soul calls down thisdescent into himself and is either possessed by the divine con-sciousness or becomes an effective reflection or channel of it.This view rests upon certain truths of spiritual experience. Thedivine birth in man, his ascent, is itself a growing of the human


into the divine consciousness, and in its intensest culminationis a losing of the separate self in that. The soul merges its in-dividuality in an infinite and universal being or loses it in theheights of a transcendent being; it becomes one with the Self,the Brahman, the Divine or, as it is sometimes more absolutelyput, becomes the one Self, the Brahman, the Divine. The Gitaitself speaks of the soul becoming the Brahman, brahmabhuta,and of its thereby dwelling in the Lord, in Krishna, but it doesnot, it must be marked, speak of it as becoming the Lord orthe Purushottama, though it does declare that the Jiva himselfis always Ishwara, the partial being of the Lord, mamaivamsah. .For this greatest union, this highest becoming is still part of theascent; while it is the divine birth to which every Jiva arrives, itis not the descent of the Godhead, not Avatarhood, but at mostBuddhahood according to the doctrine of the Buddhists, it is thesoul awakened from its present mundane individuality into aninfinite superconsciousness. That need not carry with it eitherthe inner consciousness or the characteristic action of the Avatar.

On the other hand, this entering into the divine conscious-ness may be attended by a reflex action of the Divine enteringor coming forward into the human parts of our being, pouringhimself into the nature, the activity, the mentality, the corpore-ality even of the man; and that may well be at least a partialAvatarhood. The Lord stands in the heart, says the Gita, — bywhich it means of course the heart of the subtle being, the nodusof the emotions, sensations, mental consciousness, where theindividual Purusha also is seated, — but he stands there veiled,enveloped by his Maya. But above, on a plane within us but nowsuperconscient to us, called heaven by the ancient mystics, theLord and the Jiva stand together revealed as of one essence ofbeing, the Father and the Son of certain symbolisms, the DivineBeing and the divine Man who comes forth from Him born ofthe higher divine Nature,1 the virgin Mother, para prakr.ti, para

1 In the Buddhist legend the name of the mother of Buddha makes the symbolismclear; in the Christian the symbol seems to have been attached by a familiar mythopoeicprocess to the actual human mother of Jesus of Nazareth.


maya, into the lower or human nature. This seems to be the innerdoctrine of the Christian incarnation; in its Trinity the Father isabove in this inner Heaven; the Son or supreme Prakriti becomeJiva of the Gita descends as the divine Man upon earth, in themortal body; the Holy Spirit, pure Self, Brahmic consciousnessis that which makes them one and that also in which they com-municate; for we hear of the Holy Spirit descending upon Jesusand it is the same descent which brings down the powers of thehigher consciousness into the simple humanity of the Apostles.

But also the higher divine consciousness of the Purushot-tama may itself descend into the humanity and that of the Jivadisappear into it. This is said by his contemporaries to havehappened in the occasional transfigurations of Chaitanya whenhe who in his normal consciousness was only the lover anddevotee of the Lord and rejected all deification, became in theseabnormal moments the Lord himself and so spoke and acted,with all the outflooding light and love and power of the divinePresence. Supposing this to be the normal condition, the humanreceptacle to be constantly no more than a vessel of this divinePresence and divine Consciousness, we should have the Avataraccording to this intermediary idea of the incarnation. That eas-ily recommends itself as possible to our human notions; for if thehuman being can elevate his nature so as to feel a unity with thebeing of the Divine and himself a mere channel of its conscious-ness, light, power, love, his own will and personality lost in thatwill and that being, — and this is a recognised spiritual status,— then there is no inherent impossibility of the reflex action ofthat Will, Being, Power, Love, Light, Consciousness occupyingthe whole personality of the human Jiva. And this would not bemerely an ascent of our humanity into the divine birth and thedivine nature, but a descent of the divine Purusha into humanity,an Avatar.

The Gita, however, goes much farther. It speaks clearly ofthe Lord himself being born; Krishna speaks of his many birthsthat are past and makes it clear by his language that it is notmerely the receptive human being but the Divine of whom hemakes this affirmation, because he uses the very language of


the Creator, the same language which he will employ when hehas to describe his creation of the world. “Although I am theunborn Lord of creatures, I create (loose forth) my self by myMaya,” presiding over the actions of my Prakriti. Here there isno question of the Lord and the human Jiva or of the Father andthe Son, the divine Man, but only of the Lord and his Prakriti.The Divine descends by his own Prakriti into birth in its humanform and type and brings into it the divine Consciousness andthe divine Power, though consenting, though willing to act in theform, type, mould of humanity, and he governs its actions in thebody as the indwelling and over-dwelling Soul, adhis.t.haya. Fromabove 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, “thewill of the Father which is in heaven,” but by his quite direct andapparent will that he moves the nature. And here there seems tobe no room for the human intermediary; for it is by resort to hisown nature, prakr.tim svam, and not the special nature of theJiva that the Lord of all existence thus takes upon himself thehuman birth.

This doctrine is a hard saying, a difficult thing for the humanreason to accept; and for an obvious reason, because of theevident humanity of the Avatar. The Avatar is always a dualphenomenon of divinity and humanity; the Divine takes uponhimself the human nature with all its outward limitations andmakes them the circumstances, means, instruments of the divineconsciousness and the divine power, a vessel of the divine birthand the divine works. But so surely it must be, since otherwisethe object of the Avatar’s descent is not fulfilled; for that objectis precisely to show that the human birth with all its limita-tions can be made such a means and instrument of the divinebirth and divine works, precisely to show that the human typeof consciousness can be compatible with the divine essence ofconsciousness made manifest, can be converted into its vessel,drawn into nearer conformity with it by a change of its mould


and a heightening of its powers of light and love and strength andpurity; and to show also how it can be done. If the Avatar wereto act in an entirely supernormal fashion, this object would notbe fulfilled. A merely supernormal or miraculous Avatar wouldbe a meaningless absurdity; not that there need be an entireabsence of the use of supernormal powers such as Christ’s so-called miracles of healing, for the use of supernormal powers isquite a possibility of human nature; but there need not be thatat all, nor in any case is it the root of the matter, nor would it atall do if the life were nothing else but a display of supernormalfireworks. The Avatar does not come as a thaumaturgic magi-cian, but as the divine leader of humanity and the exemplar ofa divine humanity. Even human sorrow and physical sufferinghe must assume and use so as to show, first, how that sufferingmay be a means of redemption, — as did Christ, — secondly,to show how, having been assumed by the divine soul in thehuman nature, it can also be overcome in the same nature, — asdid Buddha. The rationalist who would have cried to Christ, “Ifthou art the Son of God, come down from the cross,” or pointsout sagely that the Avatar was not divine because he died anddied too by disease, — as a dog dieth, — knows not what he issaying: for he has missed the root of the whole matter. Even, theAvatar of sorrow and suffering must come before there can bethe Avatar of divine joy; the human limitation must be assumedin order to show how it can be overcome; and the way and theextent of the overcoming, whether internal only or external also,depends upon the stage of the human advance; it must not bedone 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 werenot created suddenly and all of a piece, but by some kind ofevolution, physical or spiritual or both. No doubt, the descent ofthe Avatar, like the divine birth from the other side, is essentiallya spiritual phenomenon, as is shown by the Gita’s atmanamsr.jami, it is a soul-birth; but still there is here an attendantphysical birth. How then were this human mind and body of


the Avatar created? If we suppose that the body is always cre-ated by the hereditary evolution, by inconscient Nature and itsimmanent Life-spirit without the intervention of the individualsoul, the matter becomes simple. A physical and mental body isprepared fit for the divine incarnation by a pure or great hered-ity and the descending Godhead takes possession of it. But theGita in this very passage applies the doctrine of reincarnation,boldly enough, to the Avatar himself, and in the usual theoryof reincarnation the reincarnating soul by its past spiritual andpsychological evolution itself determines and in a way preparesits own mental and physical body. The soul prepares its ownbody, the body is not prepared for it without any reference tothe soul. Are we then to suppose an eternal or continual Avatarhimself evolving, we might say, his own fit mental and physicalbody according to the needs and pace of the human evolutionand so appearing from age to age, yuge yuge? In some suchspirit some would interpret the ten incarnations of Vishnu, firstin animal forms, then in the animal man, then in the dwarf man-soul, Vamana, the violent Asuric man, Rama of the axe, thedivinely-natured man, a greater Rama, the awakened spiritualman, 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 fulfilsin power the great struggle which the previous Avatars preparedin all its potentialities. It is a difficult assumption to our modernmentality, but the language of the Gita seems to demand it. Or,since the Gita does not expressly solve the problem, we may solveit in some other way of our own, as that the body is preparedby the Jiva but assumed from birth by the Godhead or that itis prepared by one of the four Manus, catvaro manavah. , of theGita, the spiritual Fathers of every human mind and body. Thisis going far into the mystic field from which the modern reasonis still averse; but once we admit Avatarhood, we have alreadyentered into it and, once entered, may as well tread in it withfirm footsteps.

There the Gita’s doctrine of Avatarhood stands. We havehad to advert to it at length in this aspect of its method, as we


did to the question of its possibility, because it is necessary tolook at it and face the difficulties which the reasoning mind ofman is likely to offer to it. It is true that the physical Avatarhooddoes not fill a large space in the Gita, but still it does occupy adefinite place in the chain of its teachings and is implied in thewhole scheme, the very framework being the Avatar leading thevibhuti, the man who has risen to the greatest heights of meremanhood, to the divine birth and divine works. No doubt, too,the inner descent of the Godhead to raise the human soul intohimself is the main thing, — it is the inner Christ, Krishna orBuddha that matters. But just as the outer life is of immense im-portance for the inner development, so the external Avatarhoodis of no mean importance for this great spiritual manifestation.The consummation in the mental and physical symbol assists thegrowth of the inner reality; afterwards the inner reality expressesitself with greater power in a more perfect symbolisation of itselfthrough the outer life. Between these two, spiritual reality andmental and physical expression, acting and returning upon eachother constantly the manifestation of the Divine in humanityhas elected to move always in the cycles of its concealment andits revelation.

XVII

The Divine Birth and Divine Works

THE WORK for which the Avatar descends has like hisbirth a double sense and a double form. It has an outwardside of the divine force acting upon the external world in

order to maintain there and to reshape the divine law by whichthe Godward effort of humanity is kept from decisive retro-gression and instead decisively carried forward in spite of therule of action and reaction, the rhythm of advance and relapseby which Nature proceeds. It has an inward side of the divineforce of the Godward consciousness acting upon the soul of theindividual and the soul of the race, so that it may receive newforms of revelation of the Divine in man and may be sustained,renewed and enriched in its power of upward self-unfolding. TheAvatar does not descend merely for a great outward action, asthe pragmatic sense in humanity is too often tempted to suppose.Action and event have no value in themselves, but only take theirvalue from the force which they represent and the idea whichthey symbolise and which the force is there to serve.

The crisis in which the Avatar appears, though apparent tothe outward eye only as a crisis of events and great materialchanges, is always in its source and real meaning a crisis in theconsciousness of humanity when it has to undergo some grandmodification and effect some new development. For this actionof change a divine force is needed; but the force varies alwaysaccording to the power of consciousness which it embodies;hence the necessity of a divine consciousness manifesting in themind and soul of humanity. Where, indeed, the change is mainlyintellectual and practical, the intervention of the Avatar is notneeded; there is a great uplifting of consciousness, a great man-ifestation of power in which men are for the time being exaltedabove their normal selves, and this surge of consciousness andpower finds its wave-crests in certain exceptional individuals,

The Divine Birth and Divine Works 169

vibhutis, whose action leading the general action is sufficientfor the change intended. The Reformation in Europe and theFrench Revolution were crises of this character; they were notgreat spiritual events, but intellectual and practical changes, onein religious, the other in social and political ideas, forms and mo-tives, and the modification of the general consciousness broughtabout was a mental and dynamic, but not a spiritual modifica-tion. But when the crisis has a spiritual seed or intention, then acomplete or a partial manifestation of the God-consciousness ina human mind and soul comes as its originator or leader. Thatis the Avatar.

The outward action of the Avatar is described in the Gitaas the restoration of the Dharma; when from age to age theDharma fades, languishes, loses force and its opposite arises,strong and oppressive, then the Avatar comes and raises it againto power; and as these things in idea are always represented bythings in action and by human beings who obey their impulsion,his mission is, in its most human and outward terms, to relievethe seekers of the Dharma who are oppressed by the reign of thereactionary darkness and to destroy the wrong-doers who seekto maintain the denial of the Dharma. But the language usedcan easily be given a poor and insufficient connotation whichwould deprive Avatarhood of all its spiritual depth of meaning.Dharma is a word which has an ethical and practical, a naturaland philosophical and a religious and spiritual significance, andit may be used in any of these senses exclusive of the others,in a purely ethical, a purely philosophical or a purely religioussense. Ethically it means the law of righteousness, the moral ruleof conduct, or in a still more outward and practical significancesocial and political justice, or even simply the observation ofthe social law. If used in this sense we shall have to understandthat when unrighteousness, injustice and oppression prevail, theAvatar descends to deliver the good and destroy the wicked,to break down injustice and oppression and restore the ethicalbalance of mankind.

Thus the popular and mythical account of the Krishnaavatar is that the unrighteousness of the Kurus as incarnated


in Duryodhana and his brothers became so great a burden tothe earth that she had to call upon God to descend and lightenher load; accordingly Vishnu incarnated as Krishna, deliveredthe oppressed Pandavas and destroyed the unjust Kauravas. Asimilar account is given of the descent of the previous Vishnuavatars, of Rama to destroy the unrighteous oppression of Ra-vana, of Parashurama to destroy the unrighteous license of themilitary and princely caste, the Kshatriyas, of the dwarf Vamanato destroy the rule of the Titan Bali. But obviously the purelypractical, ethical or social and political mission of the Avatarwhich is thus thrown into popular and mythical form, does notgive a right account of the phenomenon of Avatarhood. It doesnot cover its spiritual sense, and if this outward utility were all,we should have to exclude Buddha and Christ whose missionwas not at all to destroy evil-doers and deliver the good, but tobring to all men a new spiritual message and a new law of divinegrowth and spiritual realisation. On the other hand, if we giveto the word dharma only its religious sense, in which it meansa law of religious and spiritual life, we shall indeed get to thekernel of the matter, but we shall be in danger of excluding amost important part of the work done by the Avatar. Always wesee in the history of the divine incarnations the double work, andinevitably, because the Avatar takes up the workings of God inhuman life, the way of the divine Will and Wisdom in the world,and that always fulfils itself externally as well as internally, byinner progress in the soul and by an outer change in the life.

The Avatar may descend as a great spiritual teacher andsaviour, the Christ, the Buddha, but always his work leads,after he has finished his earthly manifestation, to a profoundand powerful change not only in the ethical, but in the socialand outward life and ideals of the race. He may, on the otherhand, descend as an incarnation of the divine life, the divinepersonality and power in its characteristic action, for a missionostensibly social, ethical and political, as is represented in thestory of Rama or Krishna; but always then this descent becomesin the soul of the race a permanent power for the inner livingand the spiritual rebirth. It is indeed curious to note that the


permanent, vital, universal effect of Buddhism and Christianityhas been the force of their ethical, social and practical ideals andtheir influence even on the men and the ages which have rejectedtheir religious and spiritual beliefs, forms and disciplines; laterHinduism which rejected Buddha, his sangha and his dharma,bears the ineffaceable imprint of the social and ethical influenceof Buddhism and its effect on the ideas and the life of the race,while in modern Europe, Christian only in name, humanitari-anism is the translation into the ethical and social sphere andthe aspiration to liberty, equality and fraternity the translationinto the social and political sphere of the spiritual truths ofChristianity, the latter especially being effected by men who ag-gressively rejected the Christian religion and spiritual disciplineand by an age which in its intellectual effort of emancipationtried to get rid of Christianity as a creed. On the other hand thelife of Rama and Krishna belongs to the prehistoric past whichhas come down only in poetry and legend and may even beregarded as myths; but it is quite immaterial whether we regardthem as myths or historical facts, because their permanent truthand value lie in their persistence as a spiritual form, presence,influence in the inner consciousness of the race and the life of thehuman soul. Avatarhood is a fact of divine life and consciousnesswhich may realise itself in an outward action, but must persist,when that action is over and has done its work, in a spiritualinfluence; or may realise itself in a spiritual influence and teach-ing, but must then have its permanent effect, even when the newreligion or discipline is exhausted, in the thought, temperamentand outward life of mankind.

We must then, in order to understand the Gita’s descriptionof the work of the Avatar, take the idea of the Dharma in itsfullest, deepest and largest conception, as the inner and the outerlaw by which the divine Will and Wisdom work out the spiritualevolution of mankind and its circumstances and results in thelife of the race. Dharma in the Indian conception is not merelythe good, the right, morality and justice, ethics; it is the wholegovernment of all the relations of man with other beings, withNature, with God, considered from the point of view of a divine


principle working itself out in forms and laws of action, formsof the inner and the outer life, orderings of relations of everykind in the world. Dharma1 is both that which we hold to andthat which holds together our inner and outer activities. In itsprimary sense it means a fundamental law of our nature whichsecretly 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 inus, and in this sense dharma is the law of the inner workings bywhich that grows in our being. Thirdly, there is the law by whichwe govern our outgoing thought and action and our relationswith each other so as to help best both our own growth and thatof the human race towards the divine ideal.

Dharma is generally spoken of as something eternal andunchanging, and so it is in the fundamental principle, in theideal, 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 to-wards its knowledge and practice. And in this growth dharmais 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 itsgrowth and has not undergone its law, all that has not yieldedup and does not will to yield up its secret of divine values, butpresents a front of perversion and contradiction, of impurity,narrowness, bondage, darkness, weakness, vileness, discord andsuffering and division, and the hideous and the crude, all thatman has to leave behind in his progress. This is the adharma, not-dharma, which strives with and seeks to overcome the dharma,to draw backward and downward, the reactionary force whichmakes for evil, ignorance and darkness. Between the two thereis perpetual battle and struggle, oscillation of victory and defeatin which sometimes the upward and sometimes the downwardforces prevail. This has been typified in the Vedic image of thestruggle between the divine and the Titanic powers, the sons

1 The word means “holding” from the root dhr., to hold.


of the Light and the undivided Infinity and the children of theDarkness and Division, in Zoroastrianism by Ahuramazda andAhriman, and in later religions in the contest between God andhis angels and Satan or Iblis and his demons for the possessionof human life and the human soul.

It is these things that condition and determine the workof the Avatar. In the Buddhistic formula the disciple takesrefuge from all that opposes his liberation in three powers,the dharma, the sangha, the Buddha. So in Christianity wehave the law of Christian living, the Church and the Christ.These three are always the necessary elements of the workof the Avatar. He gives a dharma, a law of self-disciplineby which to grow out of the lower into the higher life andwhich necessarily includes a rule of action and of relations withour fellowmen and other beings, endeavour in the eightfoldpath or the law of faith, love and purity or any other suchrevelation of the nature of the divine in life. Then becauseevery tendency in man has its collective as well as its individ-ual aspect, because those who follow one way are naturallydrawn together into spiritual companionship and unity, heestablishes the sangha, the fellowship and union of those whomhis personality and his teaching unite. In Vaishnavism there isthe same trio, bhagavata, bhakta, bhagavan, — the bhagavata,which is the law of the Vaishnava dispensation of adorationand love, the bhakta representing the fellowship of those inwhom that law is manifest, bhagavan, the divine Lover andBeloved in whose being and nature the divine law of loveis founded and fulfils itself. The Avatar represents this thirdelement, the divine personality, nature and being who is thesoul of the dharma and the sangha, informs them with himself,keeps them living and draws men towards the felicity and theliberation.

In the teaching of the Gita, which is more catholic andcomplex than other specialised teachings and disciplines, thesethings assume a larger meaning. For the unity here is the all-embracing Vedantic unity by which the soul sees all in itself anditself in all and makes itself one with all beings. The dharma


is therefore the taking up of all human relations into a higherdivine meaning; starting from the established ethical, social andreligious rule which binds together the whole community inwhich the God-seeker lives, it lifts it up by informing it withthe Brahmic consciousness; the law it gives is the law of one-ness, of equality, of liberated, desireless, God-governed action, ofGod-knowledge and self-knowledge enlightening and drawingto itself all the nature and all the action, drawing it towardsdivine being and divine consciousness, and of God-love as thesupreme power and crown of the knowledge and the action.The idea of companionship and mutual aid in God-love andGod-seeking which is at the basis of the idea of the sangha ordivine fellowship, is brought in when the Gita speaks of theseeking of God through love and adoration, but the real sanghaof this teaching is all humanity. The whole world is movingtowards this dharma, each man according to his capacity, — “itis my path that men follow in every way,” — and the God-seeker,making himself one with all, making their joy and sorrow andall their life his own, the liberated made already one self withall beings, lives in the life of humanity, lives for the one Selfin humanity, for God in all beings, acts for lokasangraha, forthe maintaining of all in their dharma and the Dharma, forthe maintenance of their growth in all its stages and in all itspaths towards the Divine. For the Avatar here, though he ismanifest in the name and form of Krishna, lays no exclusivestress on this one form of his human birth, but on that which itrepresents, the Divine, the Purushottama, of whom all Avatarsare the human births, of whom all forms and names of theGodhead worshipped by men are the figures. The way declaredby Krishna here is indeed announced as the way by which mancan reach the real knowledge and the real liberation, but it is onethat is inclusive of all paths and not exclusive. For the Divinetakes up into his universality all Avatars and all teachings andall dharmas.

The Gita lays stress upon the struggle of which the worldis the theatre, in its two aspects, the inner struggle and theouter battle. In the inner struggle the enemies are within, in


the individual, and the slaying of desire, ignorance, egoism isthe victory. But there is an outer struggle between the powersof the Dharma and the Adharma in the human collectivity. Theformer is supported by the divine, the godlike nature in man,and by those who represent it or strive to realise it in humanlife, the latter by the Titanic or demoniac, the Asuric and Rak-shasic nature whose head is a violent egoism, and by those whorepresent and strive to satisfy it. This is the war of the Godsand Titans, the symbol of which the old Indian literature isfull, the struggle of the Mahabharata of which Krishna is thecentral figure being often represented in that image; the Pan-davas who fight for the establishment of the kingdom of theDharma, are the sons of the Gods, their powers in human form,their adversaries are incarnations of the Titanic powers, they areAsuras. This outer struggle too the Avatar comes to aid, directlyor indirectly, to destroy the reign of the Asuras, the evil-doers,and in them depress the power they represent and to restorethe oppressed ideals of the Dharma. He comes to bring nearerthe kingdom of heaven on earth in the collectivity as well asto build the kingdom of heaven within in the individual humansoul.

The inner fruit of the Avatar’s coming is gained by thosewho learn from it the true nature of the divine birth and thedivine works and who, growing full of him in their conscious-ness and taking refuge in him with their whole being, manmayamam upasritah. , purified by the realising force of their knowledgeand delivered from the lower nature, attain to the divine beingand divine nature, madbhavam. The Avatar comes to reveal thedivine nature in man above this lower nature and to show whatare the divine works, free, unegoistic, disinterested, impersonal,universal, full of the divine light, the divine power and the di-vine love. He comes as the divine personality which shall fillthe consciousness of the human being and replace the limitedegoistic personality, so that it shall be liberated out of ego intoinfinity and universality, out of birth into immortality. He comesas the divine power and love which calls men to itself, so thatthey may take refuge in that and no longer in the insufficiency


of their human wills and the strife of their human fear, wrathand passion, and liberated from all this unquiet and sufferingmay live in the calm and bliss of the Divine.2 Nor does it matteressentially in what form and name or putting forward whataspect of the Divine he comes; for in all ways, varying with theirnature, men are following the path set to them by the Divinewhich will in the end lead them to him and the aspect of himwhich suits their nature is that which they can best follow whenhe comes to lead them; in whatever way men accept, love andtake joy in God, in that way God accepts, loves and takes joy inman. Ye yatha mam prapadyante tams tathaiva bhajamyaham.

2 janma karma ca me divyam evam yo vetti tattvatah. ,tyaktva deham punarjanma naiti mam eti so’rjuna.vıtaragabhayakrodha manmaya mam upasritah. ,bahavo jnanatapasa puta madbhavam agatah. .

XVIII

The Divine Worker

TO ATTAIN to the divine birth, — a divinising new birth ofthe soul into a higher consciousness, — and to do divineworks both as a means towards that before it is attained

and as an expression of it after it is attained, is then all theKarmayoga of the Gita. The Gita does not try to define worksby any outward signs through which it can be recognisable toan external gaze, measurable by the criticism of the world; itdeliberately renounces even the ordinary ethical distinctions bywhich men seek to guide themselves in the light of the humanreason. The signs by which it distinguishes divine works are allprofoundly intimate and subjective; the stamp by which they areknown is invisible, spiritual, supra-ethical.

They are recognisable only by the light of the soul fromwhich they come. For, it says, “what is action and what is in-action, as to this even the sages are perplexed and deluded,”because, judging by practical, social, ethical, intellectual stan-dards, they discriminate by accidentals and do not go to the rootof the matter; “I will declare to thee that action by the knowledgeof which thou shalt be released from all ills. One has to under-stand about action as well as to understand about wrong actionand about inaction one has to understand; thick and tangled isthe way of works.” Action in the world is like a deep forest,gahana, through which man goes stumbling as best he can, bythe 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 inex-tricably confused together, temporal and conventional amidstall their claim to absoluteness and immutable truth, empiricaland irrational in spite of their aping of right reason. And finallythe sage seeking in the midst of it all a highest foundation offixed law and an original truth finds himself obliged to raise the


last supreme question, whether all action and life itself are not adelusion 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 perplexedand deluded. For by action, by works, not by inaction comes theknowledge and the release.

What then is the solution? what is that type of works bywhich we shall be released from the ills of life, from this doubt,this error, this grief, from this mixed, impure and baffling resulteven of our purest and best-intentioned acts, from these millionforms of evil and suffering? No outward distinctions need bemade, is the reply; no work the world needs, be shunned; nolimit or hedge set round our human activities; on the contrary, allactions should be done, but from a soul in Yoga with the Divine,yuktah. kr.tsna-karma-kr.t. Akarma, cessation from action is notthe way; the man who has attained to the insight of the highestreason, perceives that such inaction is itself a constant action, astate subject to the workings of Nature and her qualities. Themind that takes refuge in physical inactivity, is still under thedelusion that it and not Nature is the doer of works; it hasmistaken inertia for liberation; it does not see that even in whatseems absolute inertia greater than that of the stone or clod,Nature is at work, keeps unimpaired her hold. On the contraryin the full flood of action the soul is free from its works, is notthe doer, not bound by what is done, and he who lives in thefreedom of the soul, not in the bondage of the modes of Nature,alone has release from works. This is what the Gita clearly meanswhen it says that he who in action can see inaction and can seeaction still continuing in cessation from works, is the man of truereason and discernment among men. This saying hinges uponthe Sankhya distinction between Purusha and Prakriti, betweenthe free inactive soul, eternally calm, pure and unmoved in themidst of works, and ever active Nature operative as much ininertia and cessation as in the overt turmoil of her visible hurryof labour. This is the knowledge which the highest effort of thediscriminating reason, the buddhi, gives to us, and thereforewhoever possesses it is the truly rational and discerning man, sa

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buddhiman manus.yes.u, — not the perplexed thinker who judgeslife and works by the external, uncertain and impermanent dis-tinctions of the lower reason. Therefore the liberated man is notafraid 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 withthe Divine. The Divine is the lord of his works, he is only theirchannel through the instrumentality of his nature conscious ofand subject to her Lord. By the flaming intensity and purity ofthis knowledge all his works are burned up as in a fire and hismind remains without any stain or disfiguring mark from them,calm, silent, unperturbed, white and clean and pure. To do allin this liberating knowledge, without the personal egoism of thedoer, is the first sign of the divine worker.

The second sign is freedom from desire; for where there isnot 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 allkinds like other men, on a larger scale perhaps with a morepowerful will and driving-force, for the might of the divine willworks in his active nature; but from all his inceptions and under-takings the inferior concept and nether will of desire is entirelybanished, sarve samarambhah. kamasankalpavarjitah. . He hasabandoned all attachment to the fruits of his works, and whereone does not work for the fruit, but solely as an impersonalinstrument of the Master of works, desire can find no place, —not even the desire to serve successfully, for the fruit is the Lord’sand determined by him and not by the personal will and effort,or to serve with credit and to the Master’s satisfaction, for thereal doer is the Lord himself and all glory belongs to a form ofhis Shakti missioned in the nature and not to the limited humanpersonality. The human mind and soul of the liberated mandoes nothing, na kincit karoti; even though through his naturehe engages in action, it is the Nature, the executive Shakti, it isthe conscious Goddess governed by the divine Inhabitant whodoes the work.

It does not follow that the work is not to be done perfectly,


with success, with a right adaptation of means to ends: on thecontrary a perfect working is easier to action done tranquilly inYoga than to action done in the blindness of hopes and fears,lamed by the judgments of the stumbling reason, running aboutamidst the eager trepidations of the hasty human will: Yoga,says the Gita elsewhere, is the true skill in works, yogah. karmasukausalam. But all this is done impersonally by the action of agreat universal light and power operating through the individualnature. The Karmayogin knows that the power given to him willbe adapted to the fruit decreed, the divine thought behind thework equated with the work he has to do, the will in him, —which will not be wish or desire, but an impersonal drive ofconscious power directed towards an aim not his own, — subtlyregulated in its energy and direction by the divine wisdom. Theresult may be success, as the ordinary mind understands it, orit may seem to that mind to be defeat and failure; but to him itis always the success intended, not by him, but by the all-wisemanipulator of action and result, because he does not seek forvictory, but only for the fulfilment of the divine will and wisdomwhich works out its ends through apparent failure as well as andoften with greater force than through apparent triumph. Arjuna,bidden to fight, is assured of victory; but even if certain defeatwere before him, he must still fight because that is the presentwork assigned to him as his immediate share in the great sum ofenergies by which the divine will is surely accomplished.

The liberated man has no personal hopes; he does not seizeon things as his personal possessions; he receives what the divineWill brings him, covets nothing, is jealous of none: what comesto him he takes without repulsion and without attachment; whatgoes from him he allows to depart into the whirl of things with-out repining or grief or sense of loss. His heart and self are underperfect control; they are free from reaction and passion, theymake no turbulent response to the touches of outward things.His action is indeed a purely physical action, sarıram kevalamkarma; for all else comes from above, is not generated on thehuman plane, is only a reflection of the will, knowledge, joy ofthe divine Purushottama. Therefore he does not by a stress on


doing and its objects bring about in his mind and heart any ofthose reactions which we call passion and sin. For sin consistsnot at all in the outward deed, but in an impure reaction of thepersonal will, mind and heart which accompanies it or causesit; the impersonal, the spiritual is always pure, apapaviddham,and gives to all that it does its own inalienable purity. Thisspiritual impersonality is a third sign of the divine worker. Allhuman souls, indeed, who have attained to a certain greatnessand largeness are conscious of an impersonal Force or Loveor Will and Knowledge working through them, but they arenot free from egoistic reactions, sometimes violent enough, oftheir human personality. But this freedom the liberated soulhas attained; for he has cast his personality into the impersonal,where it is no longer his, but is taken up by the divine Person, thePurushottama, who uses all finite qualities infinitely and freelyand is bound by none. He has become a soul and ceased to bea sum of natural qualities; and such appearance of personalityas remains for the operations of Nature, is something unbound,large, flexible, universal; it is a free mould for the Infinite, it is aliving mask of the Purushottama.

The result of this knowledge, this desirelessness and thisimpersonality is a perfect equality in the soul and the nature.Equality is the fourth sign of the divine worker. He has, saysthe Gita, passed beyond the dualities; he is dvandvatıta. Wehave seen that he regards with equal eyes, without any distur-bance of feeling, failure and success, victory and defeat; but notonly these, all dualities are in him surpassed and reconciled.The outward distinctions by which men determine their psy-chological attitude towards the happenings of the world, havefor him only a subordinate and instrumental meaning. He doesnot ignore them, but he is above them. Good happening andevil happening, so all-important to the human soul subject todesire, are to the desireless divine soul equally welcome sinceby their mingled strand are worked out the developing formsof the eternal good. He cannot be defeated, since all for him ismoving towards the divine victory in the Kurukshetra of Nature,dharmaks.etre kuruks.etre, the field of doings which is the field


of the evolving Dharma, and every turn of the conflict has beendesigned and mapped by the foreseeing eye of the Master of thebattle, the Lord of works and Guide of the dharma. Honourand dishonour from men cannot move him, nor their praise northeir blame; for he has a greater clear-seeing judge and anotherstandard for his action, and his motive admits no dependenceupon worldly rewards. Arjuna the Kshatriya prizes naturallyhonour and reputation and is right in shunning disgrace and thename of coward as worse than death; for to maintain the pointof honour and the standard of courage in the world is part ofhis dharma: but Arjuna the liberated soul need care for noneof these things, he has only to know the kartavyam karma, thework which the supreme Self demands from him, and to do thatand leave the result to the Lord of his actions. He has passedeven beyond that distinction of sin and virtue which is so all-important to the human soul while it is struggling to minimisethe hold of its egoism and lighten the heavy and violent yoke ofits passions, — the liberated has risen above these struggles andis seated firmly in the purity of the witnessing and enlightenedsoul. Sin has fallen away from him, and not a virtue acquiredand increased by good action and impaired or lost by evil action,but the inalienable and unalterable purity of a divine and selflessnature is the peak to which he has climbed and the seat uponwhich he is founded. There the sense of sin and the sense ofvirtue have no starting-point or applicability.

Arjuna, still in the ignorance, may feel in his heart the call ofright and justice and may argue in his mind that abstention frombattle would be a sin entailing responsibility for all the sufferingthat injustice and oppression and the evil karma of the triumphof wrong bring upon men and nations, or he may feel in his heartthe recoil from violence and slaughter and argue in his mind thatall shedding of blood is a sin which nothing can justify. Bothof these attitudes would appeal with equal right to virtue andreason and it would depend upon the man, the circumstancesand the time which of these might prevail in his mind or beforethe eyes of the world. Or he might simply feel constrained by hisheart and his honour to support his friends against his enemies,


the cause of the good and just against the cause of the evil andoppressive. The liberated soul looks beyond these conflictingstandards; he sees simply what the supreme Self demands fromhim as needful for the maintenance or for the bringing forwardof the evolving Dharma. He has no personal ends to serve, nopersonal loves and hatreds to satisfy, no rigidly fixed standardof action which opposes its rock-line to the flexible advancingmarch of the progress of the human race or stands up defiantagainst the call of the Infinite. He has no personal enemies to beconquered or slain, but sees only men who have been broughtup against him by circumstances and the will in things to helpby their opposition the march of destiny. Against them he canhave no wrath or hatred; for wrath and hatred are foreign to thedivine nature. The Asura’s desire to break and slay what opposeshim, the Rakshasa’s grim lust of slaughter are impossible to hiscalm and peace and his all-embracing sympathy and understand-ing. He has no wish to injure, but on the contrary a universalfriendliness and compassion, maitrah. karun. a eva ca: but thiscompassion is that of a divine soul overlooking men, embracingall other souls in himself, not the shrinking of the heart andthe nerves and the flesh which is the ordinary human form ofpity: nor does he attach a supreme importance to the life of thebody, but looks beyond to the life of the soul and attaches to theother only an instrumental value. He will not hasten to slaughterand strife, but if war comes in the wave of the Dharma, he willaccept it with a large equality and a perfect understanding andsympathy for those whose power and pleasure of domination hehas to break and whose joy of triumphant life he has to destroy.

For in all he sees two things, the Divine inhabiting everybeing equally, the varying manifestation unequal only in itstemporary 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 friendlyand the hostile, in those who love him and benefit and thosewho hate him and afflict, he sees himself, he sees God and has atheart for all the same equal kindliness, the same divine affection.Circumstances may determine the outward clasp or the outward


conflict, but can never affect his equal eye, his open heart, hisinner embrace of all. And in all his actions there will be the sameprinciple of soul, a perfect equality, and the same principle ofwork, the will of the Divine in him active for the need of therace in its gradually developing advance towards the Godhead.

Again, the sign of the divine worker is that which is centralto the divine consciousness itself, a perfect inner joy and peacewhich depends upon nothing in the world for its source or itscontinuance; it is innate, it is the very stuff of the soul’s con-sciousness, it is the very nature of divine being. The ordinaryman depends upon outward things for his happiness; thereforehe has desire; therefore he has anger and passion, pleasure andpain, joy and grief; therefore he measures all things in the bal-ance of good fortune and evil fortune. None of these thingscan affect the divine soul; it is ever satisfied without any kindof dependence, nitya-tr.pto nirasrayah. ; for its delight, its divineease, its happiness, its glad light are eternal within, ingrained initself, atma-ratih. , antah. -sukho ’ntar-aramas tathantar-jyotir evayah. . What joy it takes in outward things is not for their sake, notfor things which it seeks in them and can miss, but for the self inthem, for their expression of the Divine, for that which is eternalin them and which it cannot miss. It is without attachment totheir outward touches, but finds everywhere the same joy that itfinds in itself, because its self is theirs, has become one self withthe self of all beings, because it is united with the one and equalBrahman in them through all their differences, brahmayoga-yuktatma, sarvabhutatma-bhutatma. It does not rejoice in thetouches of the pleasant or feel anguish in the touches of theunpleasant; neither the wounds of things, nor the wounds offriends, nor the wounds of enemies can disturb the firmness ofits outgazing mind or bewilder its receiving heart; this soul is inits nature, as the Upanishad puts it, avran. am, without wound orscar. In all things it has the same imperishable Ananda, sukhamaks.ayam asnute.

That equality, impersonality, peace, joy, freedom do not de-pend on so outward a thing as doing or not doing works. TheGita insists repeatedly on the difference between the inward and


the outward renunciation, tyaga and sannyasa. The latter, it says,is valueless without the former, hardly possible even to attainwithout it, and unnecessary when there is the inward freedom.In fact tyaga itself is the real and sufficient Sannyasa. “He shouldbe known as the eternal Sannyasin who neither hates nor desires;free from the dualities he is happily and easily released from allbondage.” The painful process of outward Sannyasa, duh. khamaptum, is an unnecessary process. It is perfectly true that allactions, as well as the fruit of action, have to be given up, to berenounced, but inwardly, not outwardly, not into the inertia ofNature, but to the Lord in sacrifice, into the calm and joy of theImpersonal from whom all action proceeds without disturbinghis peace. The true Sannyasa of action is the reposing of allworks on the Brahman. “He who, having abandoned attach-ment, acts reposing (or founding) his works on the Brahman,brahman. yadhaya karman. i, is not stained by sin even as waterclings not to the lotus-leaf.” Therefore the Yogins first “do workswith the body, mind, understanding, or even merely with theorgans of action, abandoning attachment, for self-purification,sangam tyaktvatmasuddhaye. By abandoning attachment to thefruits of works the soul in union with Brahman attains to peaceof rapt foundation in Brahman, but the soul not in union isattached to the fruit and bound by the action of desire.” Thefoundation, the purity, the peace once attained, the embodiedsoul perfectly controlling its nature, having renounced all itsactions by the mind, inwardly, not outwardly, “sits in its nine-gated city neither doing nor causing to be done.” For this soul isthe one impersonal Soul in all, the all-pervading Lord, prabhu,vibhu, who, as the impersonal, neither creates the works of theworld, nor the mind’s idea of being the doer, na kartr.tvam nakarman. i, nor the coupling of works to their fruits, the chain ofcause and effect. All that is worked out by the Nature in the man,svabhava, his principle of self-becoming, as the word literallymeans. The all-pervading Impersonal accepts neither the sin northe virtue of any: these are things created by the ignorance inthe creature, by his egoism of the doer, by his ignorance of hishighest self, by his involution in the operations of Nature, and


when the self-knowledge within him is released from this darkenvelope, that knowledge lights up like a sun the real self withinhim; he knows himself then to be the soul supreme above theinstruments of Nature. Pure, infinite, inviolable, immutable, heis no longer affected; no longer does he imagine himself to bemodified by her workings. By complete identification with theImpersonal he can, too, release himself from the necessity ofreturning by birth into her movement.

And yet this liberation does not at all prevent him fromacting. Only, he knows that it is not he who is active, but themodes, the qualities of Nature, her triple gun. as. “The man whoknows the principles of things thinks, his mind in Yoga (withthe 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 itis only the senses acting upon the objects of the senses.” Hehimself, safe in the immutable, unmodified soul, is beyond thegrip of the three gunas, trigun. atıta; he is neither sattwic, rajasicnor tamasic; he sees with a clear untroubled spirit the alter-nations of the natural modes and qualities in his action, theirrhythmic play of light and happiness, activity and force, rest andinertia. This superiority of the calm soul observing its action butnot involved in it, this traigun. atıtya, is also a high sign of thedivine worker. By itself the idea might lead to a doctrine of themechanical determinism of Nature and the perfect aloofness andirresponsibility of the soul; but the Gita effectively avoids thisfault of an insufficient thought by its illumining supertheisticidea of the Purushottama. It makes it clear that it is not in theend Nature which mechanically determines its own action; it isthe will of the Supreme which inspires her; he who has alreadyslain the Dhritarashtrians, he of whom Arjuna is only the hu-man instrument, a universal Soul, a transcendent Godhead is themaster of her labour. The reposing of works in the Impersonalis a means of getting rid of the personal egoism of the doer, butthe end is to give up all our actions to that great Lord of all,sarva-loka-mahesvara. “With a consciousness identified with theSelf, renouncing all thy actions into Me, mayi sarvan. i karman. i


sannyasyadhyatmacetasa, freed from personal hopes and de-sires, from the thought of ‘I’ and ‘mine’, delivered from the feverof the soul, fight,” work, do my will in the world. The Divinemotives, inspires, determines the entire action; the human soulimpersonal in the Brahman is the pure and silent channel of hispower; 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 theactions of the accomplished Karmayogin. They rise from a freespirit and disappear without modifying it, like waves that riseand disappear on the surface of conscious, immutable depths.Gata-sangasya muktasya jnanavasthita-cetasah. , yajnayacaratah.karma samagram pravilıyate.

XIX

Equality

SINCE knowledge, desirelessness, impersonality, equality,the inner self-existent peace and bliss, freedom from or atleast superiority to the tangled interlocking of the three

modes of Nature are the signs of the liberated soul, they mustaccompany it in all its activities. They are the condition of thatunalterable calm which this soul preserves in all the movement,all the shock, all the clash of forces which surround it in theworld. That calm reflects the equable immutability of the Brah-man in the midst of all mutations, and it belongs to the indivisibleand impartial Oneness which is for ever immanent in all themultiplicities of the universe. For an equal and all-equalisingspirit is that Oneness in the midst of the million differences andinequalities of the world; and equality of the spirit is the sole realequality. For in all else in existence there can only be similarity,adjustment and balance; but even in the greatest similaritiesof the world we find difference of inequality and difference ofunlikeness and the adjusted balancings of the world can onlycome about by a poising of combined unequal weights.

Hence the immense importance attached by the Gita in itselements of Karmayoga to equality; it is the nodus of the freespirit’s free relations with the world. Self-knowledge, desireless-ness, impersonality, bliss, freedom from the modes of Nature,when withdrawn into themselves, self-absorbed, inactive, haveno need of equality; for they take no cognisance of the thingsin which the opposition of equality and inequality arises. Butthe moment the spirit takes cognisance of and deals with themultiplicities, personalities, differences, inequalities of the ac-tion of Nature, it has to effectuate these other signs of its freestatus by this one manifesting sign of equality. Knowledge isthe consciousness of unity with the One; and in relation withthe 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 oneimmutable spirit’s superiority to the variations of its multiplepersonality in the world; in its dealings with the personalities ofthe universe it must show itself in the equal and impartial spiritof its action with regard to all, however various that action maybe made by the variety of relations into which it is moulded orof the conditions under which it has to take place. So Krishnain the Gita says that none is dear to him, none hated, to all heis equal in spirit; yet is the God-lover the special receiver of hisgrace, because the relation he has created is different and the oneimpartial Lord of all yet meets each soul according to its way ofapproach to him. Desirelessness is the illimitable Spirit’s superi-ority to the limiting attraction of the separate objects of desire inthe world; when it has to enter into relations with those objects,it must show it either by an equal and impartial indifference intheir possession or by an equal and impartial unattached delightin all and love for all which, because it is self-existent, does notdepend upon possession or non-possession, but is in its essenceunperturbed and immutable. For the spirit’s bliss is in itself, andif 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. atıtya, transcendence of the gunas, is the unperturbedspirit’s superiority to that flux of action of the modes of Naturewhich is in its constant character perturbed and unequal; if it hasto enter into relations with the conflicting and unequal activitiesof Nature, if the free soul is to allow its nature any action at all,it must show its superiority by an impartial equality towards allactivities, results or happenings.

Equality is the sign and also for the aspirant the test. Wherethere is inequality in the soul, there there is in evidence someunequal play of the modes of Nature, motion of desire, playof personal will, feeling and action, activity of joy and grief orthat disturbed and disturbing delight which is not true spiritualbliss but a mental satisfaction bringing in its train inevitablya counterpart or recoil of mental dissatisfaction. Where thereis inequality of soul, there there is deviation from knowledge,loss of steadfast abiding in the all-embracing and all-reconciling


oneness of the Brahman and unity of things. By his equality theKarmayogin knows in the midst of his action that he is free.

It is the spiritual nature of the equality enjoined, high anduniversal in its character and comprehension, which gives itsdistinctive note to the teaching of the Gita in this matter. Forotherwise the mere teaching of equality in itself as the mostdesirable status of the mind, feelings and temperament in whichwe rise superior to human weakness, is by no means peculiarto the Gita. Equality has always been held up to admirationas the philosophic ideal and the characteristic temperament ofthe sages. The Gita takes up indeed this philosophic ideal, butcarries it far beyond into a higher region where we find ourselvesbreathing a larger and purer air. The Stoic poise, the philosophicpoise of the soul are only its first and second steps of ascensionout of the whirl of the passions and the tossings of desire to aserenity and bliss, not of the Gods, but of the Divine himself inhis supreme self-mastery. The Stoic equality, making character itspivot, founds itself upon self-mastery by austere endurance; thehappier and serener philosophic equality prefers self-mastery byknowledge, by detachment, by a high intellectual indifferenceseated above the disturbances to which our nature is prone,udasınavad asınah. , as the Gita expresses it; there is also thereligious or Christian equality which is a perpetual kneeling ora prostrate resignation and submission to the will of God. Theseare the three steps and means towards divine peace, heroic en-durance, sage indifference, pious resignation, titiks.a, udasınata,namas or nati. The Gita takes them all in its large syntheticmanner and weaves them into its upward soul-movement, butit gives to each a profounder root, a larger outlook, a moreuniversal and transcendent significance. For to each it gives thevalues of the spirit, its power of spiritual being beyond the strainof character, beyond the difficult poise of the understanding,beyond the stress of the emotions.

The ordinary human soul takes a pleasure in the customarydisturbances of its nature-life; it is because it has this pleasureand because, having it, it gives a sanction to the troubled playof the lower nature that the play continues perpetually; for the

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Prakriti does nothing except for the pleasure and with the sanc-tion of its lover and enjoyer, the Purusha. We do not recognisethis truth because under the actual stroke of the adverse dis-turbance, 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 plea-surable disturbances, joy, pleasure, satisfactions of all kinds,prosperity, success, victory, glory, praise; but this does not alterthe truth of the soul’s pleasure in life which remains constantbehind the dualities of the mind. The warrior does not feelphysical pleasure in his wounds or find mental satisfaction inhis defeats; but he has a complete delight in the godhead ofbattle which brings to him defeat and wounds as well as thejoy of victory, and he accepts the chances of the former andthe hope of the latter as part of the mingled weft of war, thething which the delight in him pursues. Even, wounds bring hima joy and pride in memory, complete when the pain of themhas passed, but often enough present even while it is there andactually fed by the pain. Defeat keeps for him the joy and prideof indomitable resistance to a superior adversary, or, if he is of abaser kind, the passions of hatred and revenge which also havetheir darker and crueller pleasures. So it is with the pleasure ofthe soul in the normal play of our life.

The mind recoils by pain and dislike from the adversestrokes of life; that is Nature’s device for enforcing a principleof self-protection, jugupsa, so that the vulnerable nervous andbodily parts of us may not unduly rush upon self-destructionto embrace it: it takes joy in the favourable touches of life;that is Nature’s lure of rajasic pleasure, so that the force in thecreature may overcome the tamasic tendencies of inertia andinactivity and be impelled fully towards action, desire, struggle,success, and by its attachment to these things her ends may beworked out. Our secret soul takes a pleasure in this strife andeffort, and even a pleasure in adversity and suffering, which canbe complete enough in memory and retrospect, but is presenttoo behind at the time and often even rises to the surface ofthe afflicted mind to support it in its passion; but what really


attracts the soul is the whole mingled weft of the thing we calllife with all its disturbance of struggle and seeking, its attractionsand repulsions, its offer and its menace, its varieties of everykind. To the rajasic desire-soul in us a monotonous pleasure,success without struggle, joy without a shadow must after atime become fatiguing, insipid, cloying; it needs a backgroundof darkness to give full value to its enjoyment of light: for thehappiness it seeks and enjoys is of that very nature, it is inits very essence relative and dependent on the perception andexperience of its opposite. The joy of the soul in the dualities isthe secret of the mind’s pleasure in living.

Ask it to rise out of all this disturbance to the unmingledjoy of the pure bliss-soul which all the time secretly supports itsstrength in the struggle and makes its own continued existencepossible, — it will draw back at once from the call. It does notbelieve in such an existence; or it believes that it would not belife, that it would not be at all the varied existence in the worldaround it in which it is accustomed to take pleasure; it wouldbe something tasteless and without savour. Or it feels that theeffort would be too difficult for it; it recoils from the struggle ofthe ascent, although in reality the spiritual change is not at allmore difficult than the realisation of the dreams the desire-soulpursues, nor entails more struggle and labour in the attainmentthan the tremendous effort which the desire-soul expends in itspassionate chase after its own transient objects of pleasure anddesire. The true cause of its unwillingness is that it is asked torise above its own atmosphere and breathe a rarer and purerair of life, whose bliss and power it cannot realise and hardlyeven conceives as real, while the joy of this lower turbid natureis to it the one thing familiar and palpable. Nor is this lowersatisfaction in itself a thing evil and unprofitable; it is rather thecondition for the upward evolution of our human nature out ofthe tamasic ignorance and inertia to which its material being ismost subject; it is the rajasic stage of the graded ascent of mantowards the supreme self-knowledge, power and bliss. But if werest eternally on this plane, the madhyama gatih. of the Gita, ourascent remains unfinished, the evolution of the soul incomplete.

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Through the sattwic being and nature to that which is beyondthe three gunas lies the way of the soul to its perfection.

The movement which will lead us out of the disturbancesof the lower nature must be necessarily a movement towardsequality in the mind, in the emotional temperament, in the soul.But it is to be noted that, although in the end we must arriveat a superiority to all the three gunas of the lower nature, itis yet in its incipience by a resort to one or other of the threethat the movement must begin. The beginning of equality maybe sattwic, rajasic or tamasic; for there is a possibility in thehuman nature of a tamasic equality. It may be purely tamasic,the heavy equability of a vital temperament rendered inertly irre-sponsive to the shocks of existence by a sort of dull insensibilityundesirous of the joy of life. Or it may result from a wearinessof the emotions and desires accumulated by a surfeit and satietyof the pleasure or else, on the contrary, a disappointment and adisgust and shrinking from the pain of life, a lassitude, a fear andhorror and dislike of the world: it is then in its nature a mixedmovement, rajaso-tamasic, but the lower quality predominates.Or, approaching the sattwic principle, it may aid itself by theintellectual perception that the desires of life cannot be satisfied,that the soul is too weak to master life, that the whole thing isnothing but sorrow and transient effort and nowhere in it is thereany real truth or sanity or light or happiness; this is the sattwo-tamasic principle of equality and is not so much equality, thoughit may lead to that, as indifference or equal refusal. Essentially,the movement of tamasic equality is a generalisation of Nature’sprinciple of jugupsa or self-protecting recoil extended from theshunning of particular painful effects to a shunning of the wholelife of Nature itself as in sum leading to pain and self-tormentingand not to the delight which the soul demands.

In tamasic equality by itself there is no real liberation; but itcan be made a powerful starting-point, if, as in Indian asceticism,it is turned into the sattwic by the perception of the greater exis-tence, the truer power, the higher delight of the immutable Selfabove Nature. The natural turn of such a movement, however,is towards Sannyasa, the renunciation of life and works, rather


than to that union of inner renunciation of desire with continuedactivity in the world of Nature which the Gita advocates. TheGita, however, admits and makes room for this movement; itallows as a recoiling starting-point the perception of the defectsof the world-existence, birth and disease and death and old ageand sorrow, the historic starting-point of the Buddha, janma-mr.tyu-jara-vyadhi-duh. kha-dos.anudarsanam, and it accepts theeffort of those whose self-discipline is motived by a desire forrelease, even in this spirit, from the curse of age and death,jara-maran. a-moks.aya mam asritya yatanti ye. But that, to be ofany profit, must be accompanied by the sattwic perception of ahigher state and the taking delight and refuge in the existence ofthe Divine, mam asritya. Then the soul by its recoil comes to agreater condition of being, lifted beyond the three gunas and freefrom birth and death and age and grief, and enjoys the immor-tality of its self-existence, janma-mr.tyu-jara-duh. khair vimukto’mr.tam asnute. The tamasic unwillingness to accept the painand effort of life is indeed by itself a weakening and degradingthing, and in this lies the danger of preaching to all alike thegospel of asceticism and world-disgust, that it puts the stamp ofa tamasic weakness and shrinking on unfit souls, confuses theirunderstanding, buddhibhedam janayet, diminishes the sustainedaspiration, the confidence in living, the power of effort which thesoul of man needs for its salutary, its necessary rajasic struggleto master its environment, without really opening to it — for itis yet incapable of that — a higher goal, a greater endeavour,a mightier victory. But in souls that are fit this tamasic recoilmay serve a useful spiritual purpose by slaying their rajasicattraction, their eager preoccupation with the lower life whichprevents the sattwic awakening to a higher possibility. Seekingthen for a refuge in the void they have created, they are able tohear the divine call, “O soul that findest thyself in this transientand unhappy world, turn and put thy delight in Me,” anityamasukham lokam imam prapya bhajasva mam.

Still, in this movement, the equality consists only in an equalrecoil from all that constitutes the world; and it arrives at in-difference and aloofness, but does not include that power to

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accept equally all the touches of the world pleasurable or painfulwithout attachment or disturbance which is a necessary elementin the discipline of the Gita. Therefore, even if we begin with thetamasic recoil, — which is not at all necessary, — it can only beas a first incitement to a greater endeavour, not as a permanentpessimism. The real discipline begins with the movement to mas-tery over these things from which we were first inclined merelyto flee. It is here that the possibility of a kind of rajasic equalitycomes in, which is at its lowest the strong nature’s pride in self-mastery, self-control, superiority to passion and weakness; butthe Stoic ideal seizes upon this point of departure and makes itthe key to an entire liberation of the soul from subjection to allweakness of its lower nature. As the tamasic inward recoil is ageneralisation of Nature’s principle of jugupsa or self-protectionfrom suffering, so the rajasic upward movement is a generalisa-tion of Nature’s other principle of the acceptance of struggle andeffort and the innate impulse of life towards mastery and vic-tory; but it transfers the battle to the field where alone completevictory is possible. Instead of a struggle for scattered outwardaims and transient successes, it proposes nothing less than theconquest of Nature and the world itself by a spiritual struggleand an inner victory. The tamasic recoil turns from both thepains and pleasures of the world to flee from them; the rajasicmovement turns upon them to bear, master and rise superior tothem. The Stoic self-discipline calls desire and passion into itsembrace of the wrestler and crushes them between its arms, asdid old Dhritarashtra in the epic the iron image of Bhima. Itendures the shock of things painful and pleasurable, the causesof the physical and mental affections of the nature, and breakstheir effects to pieces; it is complete when the soul can bear alltouches 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 thegreat enemy desire and slay it. Its first description of equality isthat of the Stoic philosopher. “He whose mind is undisturbed inthe midst of sorrows and amid pleasures is free from desire, from


whom liking and fear and wrath have passed away, is the sageof settled understanding. Who in all things is without affectionthough visited by this good or that evil and neither hates norrejoices, his intelligence sits firmly founded in wisdom.” If oneabstains from food, it says, giving a physical example, the objectof sense ceases to affect, but the affection itself of the sense, therasa, 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 oftaste, that the highest level of the soul is reached. It is by usingthe mental organs on the objects, “ranging over them with thesenses,” vis.ayan indriyais caran, but with senses subject to theself, freed from liking and disliking, that one gets into a largeand sweet clearness of soul and temperament in which passionand grief find no place. All desires have to enter into the soul, aswaters into the sea, and yet it has to remain immovable, filledbut not disturbed: so in the end all desires can be abandoned.To be freed from wrath and passion and fear and attractionis repeatedly stressed as a necessary condition of the liberatedstatus, and for this we must learn to bear their shocks, whichcannot be done without exposing ourselves to their causes. “Hewho can bear here in the body the velocity of wrath and desire,is the Yogin, the happy man.” Titiks.a, the will and power toendure, is the means. “The material touches which cause heatand cold, happiness and pain, things transient which come andgo, these learn to endure. For the man whom these do nottrouble nor pain, the firm and wise who is equal in pleasureand suffering, makes himself apt for immortality.” The equal-souled has to bear suffering and not hate, to receive pleasure andnot rejoice. Even the physical affections are to be mastered byendurance and this too is part of the Stoic discipline. Age, death,suffering, pain are not fled from, but accepted and vanquishedby a high indifference.1 Not to flee appalled from Nature in her

1 Dhıras tatra na muhyati, says the Gita; the strong and wise soul is not per-plexed, troubled or moved by them. But still they are accepted only to be conquered,jara-maran.a-moks.aya yatanti.

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lower masks, but to meet and conquer her is the true instinct ofthe strong nature, purus.ars.abha, the leonine soul among men.Thus compelled, she throws aside her mask and reveals to himhis true nature as the free soul, not her subject but her king andlord, svarat., samrat..

But the Gita accepts this Stoic discipline, this heroic philos-ophy, on the same condition that it accepts the tamasic recoil,— it must have above it the sattwic vision of knowledge, at itsroot the aim at self-realisation and in its steps the ascent to thedivine Nature. A Stoic discipline which merely crushed downthe common affections of our human nature, — although lessdangerous than a tamasic weariness of life, unfruitful pessimismand sterile inertia, because it would at least increase the powerand self-mastery of the soul, — would still be no unmixed good,since it might lead to insensibility and an inhuman isolationwithout giving the true spiritual release. The Stoic equality isjustified as an element in the discipline of the Gita because itcan be associated with and can help to the realisation of thefree immutable Self in the mobile human being, param dr.s.t.va,and to status in that new self-consciousness, es.a brahmı sthitih. .“Awakening by the understanding to the Highest which is be-yond even the discerning mind, put force on the self by theself to make it firm and still, and slay this enemy who is sohard to assail, Desire.” Both the tamasic recoil of escape andthe rajasic movement of struggle and victory are only justifiedwhen they look beyond themselves through the sattwic principleto the self-knowledge which legitimises both the recoil and thestruggle.

The pure philosopher, the thinker, the born sage not only re-lies 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 tran-sitoriness of the material and external world and its failure tosatisfy the desires or to give the true delight, but this causes inhim no grief, fear or disappointment. He observes all with an eyeof tranquil discernment and makes his choice without repulsionor perplexity. “The enjoyments born of the touches of things are


causes of sorrow, they have a beginning and an end; thereforethe sage, the man of awakened understanding, budhah. , does notplace his delight in these.” “The self in him is unattached to thetouches of external things; he finds his happiness in himself.”He sees, as the Gita puts it, that he is himself his own enemyand his own friend, and therefore he takes care not to dethronehimself by casting his being into the hands of desire and passion,natmanam avasadayet, but delivers himself out of that impris-onment by his own inner power, uddhared atmanatmanam; forwhoever has conquered his lower self, finds in his higher selfhis best friend and ally. He becomes satisfied with knowledge,master of his senses, a Yogin by sattwic equality, — for equality isYoga, samatvam yoga ucyate, — regarding alike clod and stoneand gold, tranquil and self-poised in heat and cold, suffering andhappiness, honour and disgrace. He is equal in soul to friend andenemy and to neutral and indifferent, because he sees that theseare transitory relations born of the changing conditions of life.Even by the pretensions of learning and purity and virtue andthe claims to superiority which men base upon these things, heis not led away. He is equal-souled to all men, to the sinner andthe saint, to the virtuous, learned and cultured Brahmin and thefallen outcaste. All these are the Gita’s descriptions of the sattwicequality, and they sum up well enough what is familiar to theworld as the calm philosophic equality of the sage.

Where then is the difference between this and the largerequality taught by the Gita? It lies in the difference betweenthe intellectual and philosophic discernment and the spiritual,the Vedantic knowledge of unity on which the Gita founds itsteaching. The philosopher maintains his equality by the powerof the buddhi, the discerning mind; but even that by itself is adoubtful foundation. For, though master of himself on the wholeby a constant attention or an acquired habit of mind, in reality heis not free from his lower nature, and it does actually assert itselfin many ways and may at any moment take a violent revenge forits rejection and suppression. For, always, the play of the lowernature is a triple play, and the rajasic and tamasic qualities areever 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 thevehement insistence of the senses.” Perfect security can only behad by resorting to something higher than the sattwic quality,something higher than the discerning mind, to the Self, — notthe philosopher’s intelligent self, but the divine sage’s spiritualself which is beyond the three gunas. All must be consummatedby a divine birth into the higher spiritual nature.

And the philosopher’s equality is like the Stoic’s, like theworld-fleeing ascetic’s, inwardly a lonely freedom, remote andaloof from men; but the man born to the divine birth has foundthe Divine not only in himself, but in all beings. He has realisedhis unity with all and his equality is therefore full of sympathyand oneness. He sees all as himself and is not intent on hislonely salvation; he even takes upon himself the burden of theirhappiness and sorrow by which he is not himself affected orsubjected. The perfect sage, the Gita more than once repeats,is ever engaged with a large equality in doing good to all crea-tures and makes that his occupation and delight, sarvabhutahiteratah. . The perfect Yogin is no solitary musing on the Self in hisivory tower of spiritual isolation, but yuktah. kr.tsna-karma-kr.t,a many-sided universal worker for the good of the world, forGod in the world. For he is a bhakta, a lover and devotee ofthe Divine, as well as a sage and a Yogin, a lover who lovesGod wherever he finds Him and who finds Him everywhere;and what he loves, he does not disdain to serve, nor does actioncarry him away from the bliss of union, since all his acts proceedfrom the One in him and to the One in all they are directed. Theequality of the Gita is a large synthetic equality in which all islifted up into the integrality of the divine being and the divinenature.

XX

Equality and Knowledge

YOGA and knowledge are, in this early part of the Gita’steaching, the two wings of the soul’s ascent. By Yoga ismeant union through divine works done without desire,

with equality of soul to all things and all men, as a sacrifice to theSupreme, while knowledge is that on which this desirelessness,this equality, this power of sacrifice is founded. The two wingsindeed assist each other’s flight; acting together, yet with a subtlealternation of mutual aid, like the two eyes in a man whichsee together because they see alternately, they increase one an-other mutually by interchange of substance. As the works growmore and more desireless, equal-minded, sacrificial in spirit, theknowledge increases; with the increase of the knowledge the soulbecomes firmer in the desireless, sacrificial equality of its works.The sacrifice of knowledge, says the Gita therefore, is greaterthan any material sacrifice. “Even if thou art the greatest doer ofsin beyond all sinners, thou shalt cross over all the crookednessof evil in the ship of knowledge. . . . There is nothing in theworld equal in purity to knowledge.” By knowledge desire andits first-born child, sin, are destroyed. The liberated man is ableto do works as a sacrifice because he is freed from attachmentthrough his mind, heart and spirit being firmly founded in self-knowledge, gata-sangasya jnanavasthita-cetasah. . All his workdisappears completely as soon as done, suffers laya, as onemight say, in the being of the Brahman, pravilıyate; it has noreactionary consequence on the soul of the apparent doer. Thework is done by the Lord through his Nature, it is no longerpersonal to the human instrument. The work itself becomes butpower of the nature and substance of the being of the Brahman.

It is in this sense that the Gita is speaking when it says thatall the totality of work finds its completion, culmination, endin knowledge, sarvam karmakhilam jnane parisamapyate. “As

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a fire kindled turns to ashes its fuel, so the fire of knowledgeturns all works to ashes.” By this it is not at all meant that whenknowledge is complete, there is cessation from works. Whatis meant is made clear by the Gita when it says that he whohas destroyed all doubt by knowledge and has by Yoga givenup all works and is in possession of the Self is not bound byhis works, yoga-sannyasta-karman. am atmavantam na karman. inibadhnanti, and that he whose self has become the self of allexistences, acts and yet is not affected by his works, is not caughtin them, receives from them no soul-ensnaring reaction, kurvannapi na lipyate. Therefore, it says, the Yoga of works is better thanthe physical renunciation of works, because, while Sannyasa isdifficult for embodied beings who must do works so long asthey are in the body, Yoga of works is entirely sufficient andit rapidly and easily brings the soul to Brahman. That Yoga ofworks is, we have seen, the offering of all action to the Lord,which induces as its culmination an inner and not an outer, aspiritual, not a physical giving up of works into the Brahman,into the being of the Lord, brahman. i adhaya karman. i, mayisannyasya. 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 hisworks, but the works themselves and the doing of them to theLord. The Divine then takes the burden of works from him; theSupreme becomes the doer and the act and the result.

This knowledge of which the Gita speaks, is not an intel-lectual activity of the mind; it is a luminous growth into thehighest state of being by the outshining of the light of the divinesun of Truth, “that Truth, the Sun lying concealed in the dark-ness” of our ignorance of which the Rigveda speaks, tat satyamsuryam tamasi ks.iyantam. The immutable Brahman is there inthe spirit’s skies above this troubled lower nature of the dualities,untouched either by its virtue or by its sin, accepting neither oursense of sin nor our self-righteousness, untouched by its joyand its sorrow, indifferent to our joy in success and our griefin failure, master of all, supreme, all-pervading, prabhu vibhu,calm, strong, pure, equal in all things, the source of Nature,


not the direct doer of our works, but the witness of Nature andher works, not imposing on us either the illusion of being thedoer, for that illusion is the result of the ignorance of this lowerNature. But this freedom, mastery, purity we cannot see; we arebewildered by the natural ignorance which hides from us theeternal self-knowledge of the Brahman secret within our being.But knowledge comes to its persistent seeker and removes thenatural self-ignorance; it shines out like a long-hidden sun andlights up to our vision that self-being supreme beyond the duali-ties of this lower existence, adityavat prakasayati tat param. By along whole-hearted endeavour, by directing our whole consciousbeing to that, by making that our whole aim, by turning it intothe whole object of our discerning mind and so seeing it not onlyin ourselves but everywhere, we become one thought and selfwith that, tad-buddhayas tad-atmanah. , we are washed clean ofall the darkness and suffering of the lower man by the waters ofknowledge,1 jnana-nirdhuta-kalmas.ah. .

The result is, says the Gita, a perfect equality to all thingsand all persons; and then only can we repose our works com-pletely in the Brahman. For the Brahman is equal, samambrahma, and it is only when we have this perfect equality, samyesthitam manah. , “seeing with an equal eye the learned andcultured Brahmin, the cow, the elephant, the dog, the outcaste”and knowing all as one Brahman, that we can, living in thatoneness, see like the Brahman our works proceeding from thenature freely without any fear of attachment, sin or bondage. Sinand stain then cannot be; for we have overcome that creationfull of desire and its works and reactions which belongs tothe ignorance, tair jitah. sargah. , and living in the supreme anddivine Nature there is no longer fault or defect in our works;for these are created by the inequalities of the ignorance. Theequal Brahman is faultless, nirdos.am hi samam brahma, beyondthe 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 perfectknowledge, the waters that are full of the divine sunlight, r.tasya dharah. , apo vicetasah. ,svarvatır apah. . What are here metaphors, are there concrete symbols.


too rise beyond good and evil; we act in that purity, stainlessly,with an equal and single purpose of fulfilling the welfare ofall existences, ks.ın. a-kalmas.ah. sarvabhuta-hite ratah. . The Lordin our hearts is in the ignorance also the cause of our actions,but through his Maya, through the egoism of our lower naturewhich creates the tangled web of our actions and brings backupon our egoism the recoil of their tangled reactions affectingus inwardly as sin and virtue, affecting us outwardly as sufferingand pleasure, evil fortune and good fortune, the great chain ofKarma. When we are freed by knowledge, the Lord, no longerhidden in our hearts, but manifest as our supreme self, takes upour works and uses us as faultless instruments, nimitta-matram,for the helping of the world. Such is the intimate union betweenknowledge and equality; knowledge here in the buddhi reflectedas equality in the temperament; above, on a higher plane ofconsciousness, knowledge as the light of the Being, equality asthe stuff of the Nature.

Always in this sense of a supreme self-knowledge is thisword jnana used in Indian philosophy and Yoga; it is the lightby which we grow into our true being, not the knowledge bywhich we increase our information and our intellectual riches; itis not scientific or psychological or philosophic or ethical oraesthetic or worldly and practical knowledge. These too nodoubt help us to grow, but only in the becoming, not in thebeing; they enter into the definition of Yogic knowledge onlywhen we use them as aids to know the Supreme, the Self, theDivine, — scientific knowledge, when we can get through theveil of processes and phenomena and see the one Reality behindwhich explains them all; psychological knowledge, when weuse it to know ourselves and to distinguish the lower from thehigher, so that this we may renounce and into that we maygrow; philosophical knowledge, when we turn it as a light uponthe essential principles of existence so as to discover and livein that which is eternal; ethical knowledge, when by it havingdistinguished sin from virtue we put away the one and rise abovethe other into the pure innocence of the divine Nature; aestheticknowledge, when we discover by it the beauty of the Divine;


knowledge of the world, when we see through it the way of theLord with his creatures and use it for the service of the Divinein man. Even then they are only aids; the real knowledge isthat which is a secret to the mind, of which the mind only getsreflections, but which lives in the spirit.

The Gita in describing how we come by this knowledge, saysthat we get first initiation into it from the men of knowledgewho have seen, not those who know merely by the intellect,its essential truths; but the actuality of it comes from withinourselves: “the man who is perfected by Yoga, finds it of him-self 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 increasingin desirelessness, in equality, in devotion to the Divine. It isonly of the supreme knowledge that this can altogether be said;the knowledge which the intellect of man amasses, is gatheredlaboriously by the senses and the reason from outside. To getthis other knowledge, self-existent, intuitive, self-experiencing,self-revealing, we must have conquered and controlled our mindand senses, samyatendriyah. , so that we are no longer subject totheir delusions, but rather the mind and senses become its puremirror; we must have fixed our whole conscious being on thetruth of that supreme reality in which all exists, tat-parah. , sothat it may display in us its luminous self-existence.

Finally, we must have a faith which no intellectual doubtcan be allowed to disturb, sraddhavan labhate jnanam. “Theignorant who has not faith, the soul of doubt goeth to perdition;neither this world, nor the supreme world, nor any happinessis for the soul full of doubts.” In fact, it is true that withoutfaith nothing decisive can be achieved either in this world or forpossession of the world above, and that it is only by laying holdof some sure basis and positive support that man can attain anymeasure of terrestrial or celestial success and satisfaction andhappiness; the merely sceptical mind loses itself in the void. Butstill in the lower knowledge doubt and scepticism have theirtemporary uses; in the higher they are stumbling-blocks: forthere the whole secret is not the balancing of truth and error,but a constantly progressing realisation of revealed truth. In


intellectual knowledge there is always a mixture of falsehoodor incompleteness which has to be got rid of by subjecting thetruth itself to sceptical inquiry; but in the higher knowledgefalsehood cannot enter and that which intellect contributes byattaching itself to this or that opinion, cannot be got rid of bymere questioning, but will fall away of itself by persistence inrealisation. Whatever incompleteness there is in the knowledgeattained, it must be got rid of, not by questioning in its rootswhat has already been realised, but by proceeding to further andmore complete realisation through a deeper, higher and widerliving in the Spirit. And what is not yet realised must be preparedfor by faith, not by sceptical questioning, because this truth isone which the intellect cannot give and which is indeed oftenquite opposed to the ideas in which the reasoning and logicalmind gets entangled: it is not a truth which has to be proved,but a truth which has to be lived inwardly, a greater realityinto which we have to grow. Finally, it is in itself a self-existenttruth and would be self-evident if it were not for the sorceriesof the ignorance in which we live; the doubts, the perplexitieswhich prevent us from accepting and following it, arise from thatignorance, from the sense-bewildered, opinion-perplexed heartand mind, living as they do in a lower and phenomenal truth andtherefore questioning the higher realities, ajnana-sambhutamhr.tstham samsayam. They have to be cut away by the swordof knowledge, says the Gita, by the knowledge that realises,by resorting constantly to Yoga, that is, by living out the unionwith the Supreme whose truth being known all is known, yasminvijnate sarvam vijnatam.

The higher knowledge we then get is that which is to theknower of Brahman his constant vision of things when he livesuninterruptedly in the Brahman, brahmavid brahman. i sthitah. .That is not a vision or knowledge or consciousness of Brahmanto the exclusion of all else, but a seeing of all in Brahman and asthe Self. For, it is said, the knowledge by which we rise beyondall relapse back into the bewilderment of our mental nature, is“that by which thou shalt see all existences without exceptionin the Self, then in Me.” Elsewhere the Gita puts it more largely,


“Equal-visioned everywhere, he sees the Self in all existences andall existences in the Self. He who sees Me everywhere and all andeach in Me, is never lost to Me nor I to him. He who has reachedoneness and loves Me in all beings, that Yogin, howsoever helives and acts, is living and acting in Me. O Arjuna, he whosees all equally everywhere as himself, whether it be happinessor suffering, I hold him to be the supreme Yogin.” That is theold Vedantic knowledge of the Upanishads which the Gita holdsup constantly before us; but it is its superiority to other laterformulations of it that it turns persistently this knowledge intoa great practical philosophy of divine living. Always it insists onthe relation between this knowledge of oneness and Karmayoga,and therefore on the knowledge of oneness as the basis of aliberated action in the world. Whenever it speaks of knowledge,it turns at once to speak of equality which is its result; wheneverit speaks of equality, it turns to speak too of the knowledgewhich is its basis. The equality it enjoins does not begin and endin a static condition of the soul useful only for self-liberation;it is always a basis of works. The peace of the Brahman in theliberated soul is the foundation; the large, free, equal, world-wide action of the Lord in the liberated nature radiates thepower which proceeds from that peace; these two made onesynthesise divine works and God-knowledge.

We see at once what a profound extension we get herefor the ideas which otherwise the Gita has in common withother systems of philosophic, ethical or religious living. En-durance, philosophic indifference, resignation are, we have said,the foundation of three kinds of equality; but the Gita’s truthof knowledge not only gathers them all up together, but givesthem an infinitely profound, a magnificently ample significance.The Stoic knowledge is that of the soul’s power of self-masteryby fortitude, an equality attained by a struggle with one’s na-ture, maintained by a constant vigilance and control against itsnatural rebellions: it gives a noble peace, an austere happiness,but not the supreme joy of the liberated self living not by arule, but in the pure, easy, spontaneous perfection of its divinebeing, so that “however it may act and live, it acts and lives


in the Divine,” because here perfection is not only attained butpossessed in its own right and has no longer to be maintained byeffort, for it has become the very nature of the soul’s being. TheGita accepts the endurance and fortitude of our struggle with thelower nature as a preliminary movement; but if a certain masterycomes by our individual strength, the freedom of mastery onlycomes by our union with God, by a merging or dwelling of thepersonality in the one divine Person and the loss of the personalwill in the divine Will. There is a divine Master of Nature and herworks, above her though inhabiting her, who is our highest beingand our universal self; to be one with him is to make ourselvesdivine. By union with God we enter into a supreme freedomand a supreme mastery. The ideal of the Stoic, the sage who isking because by self-rule he becomes master also of outwardconditions, resembles superficially the Vedantic idea of the self-ruler and all-ruler, svarat. samrat.; but it is on a lower plane.The Stoic kingship is maintained by a force put upon self andenvironment; the entirely liberated kingship of the Yogin existsnaturally by the eternal royalty of the divine nature, a unionwith its unfettered universality, a finally unforced dwelling inits superiority to the instrumental nature through which it acts.His mastery over things is because he has become one soul withall things. To take an image from Roman institutions, the Stoicfreedom is that of the libertus, the freedman, who is still reallya dependent on the power that once held him enslaved; his isa freedom allowed by Nature because he has merited it. Thefreedom of the Gita is that of the freeman, the true freedomof the birth into the higher nature, self-existent in its divinity.Whatever he does and however he lives, the free soul lives inthe Divine; he is the privileged child of the mansion, balavat,who cannot err or fall because all he is and does is full of thePerfect, the All-blissful, the All-loving, the All-beautiful. Thekingdom which he enjoys, rajyam samr.ddham, is a sweet andhappy dominion of which it may be said, in the pregnant phraseof the Greek thinker, “The kingdom is of the child.”

The knowledge of the philosopher is that of the true natureof mundane existence, the transience of outward things, the


vanity of the world’s differences and distinctions, the superiorityof the inner calm, peace, light, self-dependence. It is an equalityof philosophic indifference; it brings a high calm, but not thegreater spiritual joy; it is an isolated freedom, a wisdom like thatof the Lucretian sage high in his superiority upon the cliff-topwhence he looks down on men tossed still upon the tempestuouswaters from which he has escaped, — in the end something afterall aloof and ineffective. The Gita admits the philosophic motiveof indifference as a preliminary movement; but the indifferenceto which it finally arrives, if indeed that inadequate word can beat all applied, has nothing in it of the philosophic aloofness. Itis indeed a position as of one seated above, udasınavat, but asthe 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 foundedupon oneness with all beings. It brings in what is wanting to thephilosophic equality; for its soul is the soul of peace, but also it isthe 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 insupreme sympathy with all of them. Without exception, ases.en. a,not only with all that is good and fair and pleases; nothing andno one, however vile, fallen, criminal, repellent in appearance,can be excluded from this universal, this whole-souled sympathyand spiritual oneness. Here there is no room, not merely forhatred or anger or uncharitableness, but for aloofness, disdainor any petty pride of superiority. A divine compassion for theignorance of the struggling mind, a divine will to pour forth onit all light and power and happiness there will be, indeed, for theapparent man; but for the divine Soul within him there will bemore, there will be adoration and love. For from all, from thethief and the harlot and the outcaste as from the saint and thesage, the Beloved looks forth and cries to us, “This is I.” “Hewho loves Me in all beings,” — what greater word of power forthe utmost intensities and profundities of divine and universallove, 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


submissive forbearance. In the Gita this element takes the moreample form of an entire surrender of the whole being to God. Itis not merely a passive submission, but an active self-giving; notonly a seeing and an accepting of the divine Will in all things, buta giving up of one’s own will to be the instrument of the Masterof works, and this not with the lesser idea of being a servant ofGod, but, eventually at least, of such a complete renunciationboth of the consciousness and the works to him that our beingbecomes one with his being and the impersonalised nature onlyan instrument and nothing else. All result good or bad, pleasingor unpleasing, fortunate or unfortunate, is accepted as belongingto the Master of our actions, so that finally not only are grief andsuffering borne, but they are banished: a perfect equality of theemotional mind is established. There is no assumption of per-sonal will in the instrument; it is seen that all is already workedout in the omniscient prescience and omnipotent effective powerof the universal Divine and that the egoism of men cannot alterthe workings of that Will. Therefore, the final attitude is thatenjoined on Arjuna in a later chapter, “All has been alreadydone by Me in my divine will and foresight; become only theoccasion, O Arjuna,” nimitta-matram bhava savyasacin. Thisattitude must lead finally to an absolute union of the personalwith the Divine Will and, with the growth of knowledge, bringabout a faultless response of the instrument to the divine Powerand 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 workin the world, will be the poise of this supreme union of theTranscendent, the universal and the individual.

Equality too there will be with regard to the action of othersupon us. Nothing that they can do will alter the inner oneness,love, sympathy which arises from the perception of the one Selfin all, the Divine in all beings. But a resigned forbearance andsubmission to them and their deeds, a passive non-resistance,will be no necessary part of the action; it cannot be, since aconstant instrumental obedience to the divine and universal Willmust mean in the shock of opposite forces that fill the world a


conflict with personal wills which seek rather their own egoisticsatisfaction. Therefore Arjuna is bidden to resist, to fight, to con-quer; but, to fight without hatred or personal desire or personalenmity or antagonism, since to the liberated soul these feelingsare impossible. To act for the lokasangraha, impersonally, forthe keeping and leading of the peoples on the path to the divinegoal, is a rule which rises necessarily from the oneness of thesoul with the Divine, the universal Being, since that is the wholesense and drift of the universal action. Nor does it conflict withour oneness with all beings, even those who present themselveshere as opponents and enemies. For the divine goal is their goalalso, since it is the secret aim of all, even of those whose outwardminds, misled by ignorance and egoism, would wander from thepath and resist the impulsion. Resistance and defeat are the bestoutward service that can be done to them. By this perceptionthe Gita avoids the limiting conclusion which might have beendrawn from a doctrine of equality impracticably overriding allrelations and of a weakening love without knowledge, while itkeeps the one thing essential unimpaired. For the soul onenesswith all, for the heart calm universal love, sympathy, compas-sion, but for the hands freedom to work out impersonally thegood, not of this or that person only without regard to or to thedetriment of the divine plan, but the purpose of the creation, theprogressing welfare and salvation of men, the total good of allexistences.

Oneness with God, oneness with all beings, the realisationof the eternal divine unity everywhere and the drawing onwardsof men towards that oneness are the law of life which arisesfrom the teachings of the Gita. There can be none greater, wider,more profound. Liberated oneself, to live in this oneness, tohelp mankind on the path that leads towards it and meanwhileto do all works for God and help man also to do with joy andacceptance all the works to which he is called, kr.tsna-karma-kr.t,sarvakarman. i jos.ayan, no greater or more liberal rule of divineworks can be given. This freedom and this oneness are the secretgoal of our human nature and the ultimate will in the existenceof the race. It is that to which it must turn for the happiness all


mankind is now vainly seeking, when once men lift their eyesand their hearts to see the Divine in them and around, in all andeverywhere, sarves.u, sarvatra, and learn that it is in him theylive, while this lower nature of division is only a prison-wallwhich they must break down or at best an infant-school whichthey must outgrow, so that they may become adult in natureand free in spirit. To be made one self with God above and Godin man and God in the world is the sense of liberation and thesecret of perfection.

XXI

The Determinism of Nature

WHEN we can live in the higher Self by the unity ofworks and self-knowledge, we become superior tothe method of the lower workings of Prakriti. We

are no longer enslaved to Nature and her gunas, but, one withthe Ishwara, the master of our nature, we are able to use herwithout subjection to the chain of Karma, for the purposes ofthe Divine Will in us; for that is what the greater Self in us is, heis the Lord of her works and unaffected by the troubled stressof her reactions. The soul ignorant in Nature, on the contrary, isenslaved by that ignorance to her modes, because it is identifiedthere, not felicitously with its true self, not with the Divine whois seated above her, but stupidly and unhappily with the ego-mind which is a subordinate factor in her operations in spiteof the exaggerated figure it makes, a mere mental knot andpoint of reference for the play of the natural workings. To breakthis knot, no longer to make the ego the centre and beneficiaryof our works, but to derive all from and refer all to the divineSupersoul is the way to become superior to all the restless troubleof 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 equaland unified Will and Force and not in the unequal play of thegunas which is a broken seeking and striving, a disturbance, aninferior Maya.

The passages in which the Gita lays stress on the subjectionof the ego-soul to Nature, have by some been understood asthe enunciation of an absolute and a mechanical determinismwhich leaves no room for any freedom within the cosmic exis-tence. Certainly, the language it uses is emphatic and seems veryabsolute. But we must take, here as elsewhere, the thought of theGita as a whole and not force its affirmations in their solitarysense quite detached from each other, — as indeed every truth,

The Determinism of Nature 213

however true in itself, yet, taken apart from others which atonce limit and complete it, becomes a snare to bind the intellectand a misleading dogma; for in reality each is one thread ofa complex weft and no thread must be taken apart from theweft. Everything in the Gita is even so interwoven and must beunderstood in its relation to the whole. The Gita itself makesa distinction between those who have not the knowledge ofthe whole, akr.tsnavidah. , and are misled by the partial truths ofexistence, and the Yogin who has the synthetic knowledge of thetotality, kr.tsna-vit. To see all existence steadily and see it wholeand not be misled by its conflicting truths, is the first necessityfor the calm and complete wisdom to which the Yogin is calledupon to rise. A certain absolute freedom is one aspect of thesoul’s relations with Nature at one pole of our complex being;a certain absolute determinism by Nature is the opposite aspectat its opposite pole; and there is also a partial and apparent,therefore an unreal eidolon of liberty which the soul receivesby a contorted reflection of these two opposite truths in thedeveloping mentality. It is the latter to which we ordinarily give,more or less inaccurately, the name of free will; but the Gitaregards nothing as freedom which is not a complete liberationand mastery.

We have always to keep in mind the two great doctrineswhich stand behind all the Gita’s teachings with regard tothe soul and Nature, — the Sankhya truth of the Purusha andPrakriti corrected and completed by the Vedantic truth of thethreefold Purusha and the double Prakriti of which the lowerform is the Maya of the three gunas and the higher is thedivine nature and the true soul-nature. This is the key whichreconciles and explains what we might have otherwise to leave ascontradictions and inconsistencies. There are, in fact, differentplanes of our conscious existence, and what is practical truth onone plane ceases to be true, because it assumes a quite differentappearance, as soon as we rise to a higher level from which wecan see things more in the whole. Recent scientific discoveryhas shown that man, animal, plant and even the metal haveessentially the same vital reactions and they would, therefore,


if each has a certain kind of what for want of a better wordwe must call nervous consciousness, possess the same basis ofmechanical psychology. Yet if each of these could give its ownmental account of what it experiences, we should have fourquite different and largely contradictory statements of the samereactions and the same natural principles, because they get, aswe rise in the scale of being, a different meaning and valueand have to be judged by a different outlook. So it is with thelevels of the human soul. What we now call in our ordinarymentality our free will and have a certain limited justification forso calling it, yet appears to the Yogin who has climbed beyondand to whom our night is day and our day night, not free willat all, but a subjection to the modes of Nature. He regards thesame facts, but from the higher outlook of the whole-knower,kr.tsna-vit, while we view it altogether from the more limitedmentality of our partial knowledge, akr.tsnavidah. , which is anignorance. What we vaunt of as our freedom is to him bondage.

The perception of the ignorance of our assumption of free-dom while one is all the time in the meshes of this lower nature, isthe view-point at which the Gita arrives and it is in contradictionto this ignorant claim that it affirms the complete subjection ofthe ego-soul on this plane to the gunas. “While the actions arebeing entirely done by the modes of Nature,” it says, “he whoseself is bewildered by egoism thinks that it is his ‘I’ which is doingthem. But one who knows the true principles of the divisions ofthe modes and of works, realises that it is the modes which areacting and reacting on each other and is not caught in themby attachment. Those who are bewildered by the modes, getattached to the modes and their works; dull minds, not knowersof the whole, let not the knower of the whole disturb themin their mental standpoint. Giving up thy works to Me, freefrom desire and egoism, fight delivered from the fever of thysoul.” Here there is the clear distinction between two levels ofconsciousness, two standpoints of action, that of the soul caughtin 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


ego, observing, sanctioning and governing the works of Naturefrom above her.

We speak of the soul being subject to Nature; but on theother hand the Gita in distinguishing the properties of the souland Nature affirms that while Nature is the executrix, the soul isalways the lord, ısvara. It speaks here of the self being bewilderedby egoism, but the real Self to the Vedantin is the divine, eternallyfree and self-aware. What then is this self that is bewildered byNature, this soul that is subject to her? The answer is that we arespeaking here in the common parlance of our lower or mentalview of things; we are speaking of the apparent self, of the appar-ent soul, not of the real self, not of the true Purusha. It is reallythe ego which is subject to Nature, inevitably, because it is itselfpart of Nature, one functioning of her machinery; but when theself-awareness in the mind-consciousness identifies itself withthe 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 thenatural personality, not the true Person, the Purusha, but thedesire-soul in us which is a reflection of the consciousness ofthe Purusha in the workings of Prakriti: it is, in fact, itself onlyan action of the three modes and therefore a part of Nature.Thus there are, we may say, two souls in us, the apparent ordesire-soul, which changes with the mutations of the gunas andis entirely constituted and determined by them, and the free andeternal Purusha not limited by Nature and her gunas. We havetwo selves, the apparent self, which is only the ego, that mentalcentre in us which takes up this mutable action of Prakriti, thismutable personality, and which says “I am this personality, Iam this natural being who am doing these works,” — but thenatural being is simply Nature, a composite of the gunas, — andthe true self which is, indeed, the upholder, the possessor and thelord of Nature and figured in her, but is not itself the mutablenatural personality. The way to be free must then be to get ridof the desires of this desire-soul and the false self-view of thisego. “Having become free from desire and egoism,” cries theTeacher, “fight with all the fever of thy soul passed away fromthee,” — nirasır nirmamo bhutva.


This view of our being starts from the Sankhya analysis ofthe dual principle in our nature, Purusha and Prakriti. Purusha isinactive, akarta; Prakriti is active, kartrı: Purusha is the being fullof 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, inperpetual collision and intermixture and mutation with eachother; and by her function of ego-mind she gets the Purusha toidentify himself with all this working and so creates the senseof active, mutable, temporal personality in the silent eternity ofthe Self. The impure natural consciousness overclouds the puresoul-consciousness; the mind forgets the Person in the ego andthe personality; we suffer the discriminating intelligence to becarried away by the sense-mind and its outgoing functions andby the desire of the life and the body. So long as the Purushasanctions this action, ego and desire and ignorance must governthe natural being.

But if this were all, then the only remedy would be to with-draw altogether the sanction, suffer or compel all our natureby this withdrawal to fall into a motionless equilibrium of thethree gunas and so cease from all action. But this is preciselythe remedy, — though it is undoubtedly a remedy, one whichabolishes, we might say, the patient along with the disease, —which the Gita constantly discourages. Especially, to resort to atamasic inaction is just what the ignorant will do if this truth isthrust upon them; the discriminating mind in them will fall intoa false division, a false opposition, buddhibheda; their activenature and their intelligence will be divided against each otherand produce a disturbance and confusion without true issue, afalse and self-deceiving line of action, mithyacara, or else a meretamasic inertia, cessation of works, diminution of the will to lifeand action, not therefore a liberation, but rather a subjection tothe lowest of the three gunas, to tamas, the principle of ignoranceand of inertia. Or else they will not be able to understand at all,they will find fault with this higher teaching, assert against ittheir present mental experience, their ignorant idea of free willand, yet more confirmed by the plausibility of their logic in their


bewilderment and the deception of ego and desire, lose theirchance of liberation in a deeper, more obstinate confirmation ofthe ignorance.

In fact, these higher truths can only be helpful, because thereonly they are true to experience and can be lived, on a higherand vaster plane of consciousness and being. To view thesetruths from below is to mis-see, misunderstand and probablyto misuse them. It is a higher truth that the distinction of goodand evil is indeed a practical fact and law valid for the egoistichuman life which is the stage of transition from the animal tothe divine, but on a higher plane we rise beyond good and evil,are above their duality even as the Godhead is above it. Butthe unripe mind, seizing on this truth without rising from thelower consciousness where it is not practically valid, will simplymake it a convenient excuse for indulging its Asuric propensities,denying the distinction between good and evil altogether andfalling by self-indulgence deeper into the morass of perdition,sarva-jnana-vimud. han nas.t.an acetasah. . So too with this truthof the determinism of Nature; it will be mis-seen and misused,as those misuse it who declare that a man is what his nature hasmade him and cannot do otherwise than as his nature compelshim. It is true in a sense, but not in the sense which is attachedto it, not in the sense that the ego-self can claim irresponsibilityand impunity for itself in its works; for it has will and it hasdesire and so long as it acts according to its will and desire,even though that be its nature, it must bear the reactions of itsKarma. It is in a net, if you will, a snare which may well seemperplexing, illogical, unjust, terrible to its present experience, toits limited self-knowledge, but a snare of its own choice, a netof its own weaving.

The Gita says, indeed, “All existences follow their natureand what shall coercing it avail?” which seems, if we take it byitself, a hopelessly absolute assertion of the omnipotence of Na-ture over the soul; “even the man of knowledge acts according tohis own nature.” And on this it founds the injunction to followfaithfully in our action the law of our nature. “Better is one’s ownlaw of works, svadharma, though in itself faulty than an alien


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 bythis svadharma we have to wait to see until we get to the moreelaborate disquisition in the closing chapters about Purusha andPrakriti and the gunas; but certainly it does not mean that weare to follow any impulse, even though evil, which what we callour nature dictates to us. For between these two verses the Gitathrows in this further injunction, “In the object of this or thatsense liking and disliking are set in ambush; fall not into theirpower, for they are the besetters of the soul in its path.” Andimmediately after this, in answer to Arjuna’s objection who askshim, if there is no fault in following our Nature, what are wethen 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 thisis desire and its companion wrath, children of rajas, the secondguna, the principle of passion, and this desire is the soul’s greatenemy and has to be slain. Abstention from evil-doing it declaresto be the first condition for liberation, and always it enjoins self-mastery, self-control, samyama, control of the mind, senses, allthe lower being.

There is therefore a distinction to be made between what isessential in the nature, its native and inevitable action, which itavails not at all to repress, suppress, coerce, and what is acci-dental to it, its wanderings, confusions, perversions, over whichwe must certainly get control. There is a distinction implied toobetween coercion and suppression, nigraha, and control withright use and right guidance, samyama. The former is a violencedone to the nature by the will, which in the end depresses thenatural powers of the being, atmanam avasadayet; the latter isthe control of the lower by the higher self, which successfullygives to those powers their right action and their maximumefficiency, — yogah. karmasu kausalam. This nature of samyamais made very clear by the Gita in the opening of its sixth chapter,“By the self thou shouldst deliver the self, thou shouldst notdepress and cast down the self (whether by self-indulgence orsuppression); for the self is the friend of the self and the self isthe enemy. To the man is his self a friend in whom the (lower)


self has been conquered by the (higher) self, but to him whois not in possession of his (higher) self, the (lower) self is as ifan enemy and it acts as an enemy.” When one has conqueredone’s self and attained to the calm of a perfect self-mastery andself-possession, then is the supreme self in a man founded andpoised even in his outwardly conscious human being, samahita.In other words, to master the lower self by the higher, the naturalself by the spiritual is the way of man’s perfection and liberation.

Here then is a very great qualification of the determinism ofNature, a precise limitation of its meaning and scope. How thepassage from subjection to mastery works out is best seen if weobserve the working of the gunas in the scale of Nature fromthe bottom to the top. At the bottom are the existences in whichthe principle of tamas is supreme, the beings who have not yetattained to the light of self-consciousness and are utterly drivenby the current of Nature. There is a will even in the atom, but wesee clearly enough that it is not free will, because it is mechanicaland 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 lightof the conscious Soul has not at all struggled to the surface: theatom is not conscious of an intelligent will; tamas, the inert andignorant principle, has its grip on it, contains rajas, concealssattva within itself and holds a high holiday of mastery, Naturecompelling this form of existence to act with a stupendous forceindeed, but as a mechanical instrument, yantrarud. ham mayaya.Next, in the plant the principle of rajas has struggled to thesurface, with its power of life, with its capacity of the nervousreactions which in us are recognisable as pleasure and suffering,but sattva is quite involved, has not yet emerged to awakenthe light of a conscious intelligent will; all is still mechanical,subconscient or half-conscient, tamas stronger than rajas, bothgaolers of the imprisoned sattwa.

In the animal, though tamas is still strong, though we maystill describe him as belonging to the tamasic creation, tamasasarga, yet rajas prevails much more against tamas, brings with


it its developed power of life, desire, emotion, passion, pleasure,suffering, while sattwa, emerging, but still dependent on thelower action, contributes to these the first light of the consciousmind, the mechanical sense of ego, conscious memory, a certainkind of thought, especially the wonders of instinct and animalintuition. But as yet the buddhi, the intelligent will, has notdeveloped the full light of consciousness; therefore, no respon-sibility can be attributed to the animal for its actions. The tigercan be no more blamed for killing and devouring than the atomfor its blind movements, the fire for burning and consuming orthe storm for its destructions. If it could answer the question, thetiger would indeed say, like man, that it had free will, it wouldhave 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 thatdevours; and if it refrains from killing or devouring, it is fromsatiety, from fear or from indolence, from another principle ofNature in it, from the action of the guna called tamas. As it wasNature in the animal that killed, so it is Nature in the animalthat refrained from killing. Whatever soul is in it, sanctionspassively the action of Nature, is as much passive in its passionand activity as in its indolence or inaction. The animal like theatom acts according to the mechanism of its Nature, and nototherwise, sadr.sam ces.t.ate svasyah. prakr.teh. , as if mounted ona machine, yantrarud.ho mayaya.

Well, but in man at least there is another action, a free soul, afree will, a sense of responsibility, a real doer other than Nature,other than the mechanism of Maya? So it seems, because in manthere is a conscious intelligent will; buddhi is full of the lightof the observing Purusha, who through it, it seems, observes,understands, approves or disapproves, gives or withholds thesanction, seems indeed at last to begin to be the lord of hisnature. Man is not like the tiger or the fire or the storm; hecannot kill and say as a sufficient justification, “I am actingaccording to my nature”, and he cannot do it, because he hasnot the nature and not, therefore, the law of action, svadharma,of the tiger, storm or fire. He has a conscious intelligent will,


a buddhi, and to that he must refer his actions. If he does notdo 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 measureof his humanity, but even as might the animal. It is true thatthe principle of rajas or the principle of tamas gets hold of hisbuddhi and induces it to justify any and every action he commitsor any avoidance of action; but still the justification or at leastthe reference to the buddhi must be there either before or afterthe action is committed. And, besides, in man sattva is awakeand acts not only as intelligence and intelligent will, but as aseeking for light, for right knowledge and right action accordingto that knowledge, as a sympathetic perception of the existenceand claims of others, as an attempt to know the higher law of hisown nature, which the sattwic principle in him creates, and toobey it, and as a conception of the greater peace and happinesswhich virtue, knowledge and sympathy bring in their train. Heknows more or less imperfectly that he has to govern his rajasicand tamasic by his sattwic nature and that thither tends theperfection of his normal humanity.

But is the condition of the predominantly sattwic naturefreedom and is this will in man a free will? That the Gita fromthe standpoint of a higher consciousness in which alone is truefreedom, denies. The buddhi or conscious intelligent will is stillan instrument of Nature and when it acts, even in the mostsattwic sense, it is still Nature which acts and the soul whichis carried on the wheel by Maya. At any rate, at least nine-tenths of our freedom of will is a palpable fiction; that will iscreated and determined not by its own self-existent action ata given moment, but by our past, our heredity, our training,our environment, the whole tremendous complex thing we callKarma, which is, behind us, the whole past action of Natureon us and the world converging in the individual, determiningwhat he is, determining what his will shall be at a given momentand determining, as far as analysis can see, even its action atthat moment. The ego associates itself always with its Karmaand it says “I did” and “I will” and “I suffer”, but if it looks at


itself and sees how it was made, it is obliged to say of man asof the animal, “Nature did this in me, Nature wills in me”, andif it qualifies by saying “my Nature”, that only means “Natureas self-determined in this individual creature”. It was the strongperception of this aspect of existence which compelled the Bud-dhists to declare that all is Karma and that there is no self inexistence, that the idea of self is only a delusion of the ego-mind.When the ego thinks “I choose and will this virtuous and notthat evil action”, it is simply associating itself, somewhat likethe fly on the wheel, or rather as might a cog or other part of amechanism if it were conscious, with a predominant wave or aformed current of the sattwic principle by which Nature choosesthrough 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, andwe shall see hereafter in what sense, still the freedom of ourindividual will, if we choose to give it that name, is very relativeand almost infinitesimal, so much is it mixed up with otherdetermining elements. Its strongest power does not amount tomastery. It cannot be relied upon to resist the strong wave of cir-cumstance or of other nature which either overbears or modifiesor mixes up with it or at the best subtly deceives and circumventsit. Even the most sattwic will is so overborne or mixed up withor circumvented by the rajasic and tamasic gunas as to be only inpart sattwic, and thence arises that sufficiently strong element ofself-deception, of a quite involuntary and even innocent make-believe and hiding from oneself which the merciless eye of thepsychologist detects even in the best human action. When wethink that we are acting quite freely, powers are concealed be-hind 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. Whenour eyes are really opened on our action and its springs, we areobliged to say with the Gita “gun. a gun. es.u vartante”, “it wasthe modes of Nature that were acting upon the modes.”

For this reason even a high predominance of the sattwic


principle does not constitute freedom. For, as the Gita pointsout, the sattwa binds, as much as the other gunas, and bindsjust in the same way, by desire, by ego; a nobler desire, a purerego, — but so long as in any form these two hold the being, thereis no freedom. The man of virtue, of knowledge, has his ego ofthe virtuous man, his ego of knowledge, and it is that sattwic egowhich he seeks to satisfy; for his own sake he seeks virtue andknowledge. Only when we cease to satisfy the ego, to think andto will from the ego, the limited “I” in us, then is there a realfreedom. In other words, freedom, highest self-mastery beginwhen above the natural self we see and hold the supreme Selfof which the ego is an obstructing veil and a blinding shadow.And that can only be when we see the one Self in us seatedabove Nature and make our individual being one with it inbeing and consciousness and in its individual nature of actiononly an instrument of a supreme Will, the one Will that is reallyfree. For that we must rise high above the three gunas, becometrigun. atıta; for that Self is beyond even the sattwic principle. Wehave to climb to it through the sattwa, but we attain to it onlywhen 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 bythe highest, most passionate, most stupendous and ecstatic of alldesires; but we can securely live in it only when all desire dropsaway from us. We have at a certain stage to liberate ourselveseven from the desire of our liberation.

XXII

Beyond the Modes of Nature

SO FAR then extends the determinism of Nature, and whatit amounts to is this that the ego from which we act isitself an instrument of the action of Prakriti and cannot

therefore be free from the control of Prakriti; the will of theego is a will determined by Prakriti, it is a part of the natureas it has been formed in us by the sum of its own past actionand self-modification, and by the nature in us so formed andthe will in it so formed our present action also is determined. Itis said by some that the first initiating action is always free toour choice however much all that follows may be determined bythat, and in this power of initiation and its effect on our futurelies our responsibility. But where is that first action in Naturewhich has no determining past behind it, where that presentcondition of our nature which is not in sum and detail the resultof the action of our past nature? We have that impression ofa free initial act because we are living at every moment fromour present on towards our future and we do not live back con-stantly from our present into our past, so that what is stronglyvivid to our minds is the present and its consequences whilewe have a much less vivid hold of our present as entirely theconsequence of our past; this latter we are apt to look on as ifit were dead and done with. We speak and act as if we wereperfectly free in the pure and virgin moment to do what wewill with ourselves using an absolute inward independence ofchoice. But there is no such absolute liberty, our choice has nosuch independence.

Certainly, the will in us has always to choose between acertain number of possibilities, for that is the way in whichNature always acts; even our passivity, our refusal to will, isitself a choice, itself an act of the will of Nature in us; even inthe 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 theaction 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 thatit is we who are acting. And error or not, illusion or not, thisidea of our will, of our action is not a thing of no consequence,of no utility; everything in Nature has a consequence and autility. It is rather that process of our conscious being by whichNature in us becomes more and more aware of and responsiveto the presence of the secret Purusha within her and opens bythat increase of knowledge to a greater possibility of action;it is by the aid of the ego-idea and the personal will that sheraises herself to her own higher possibilities, rises out of thesheer or else the predominant passivity of the tamasic natureinto the passion and the struggle of the rajasic nature and fromthe passion and the struggle of the rajasic nature to the greaterlight, happiness and purity of the sattwic nature. The relativeself-mastery gained by the natural man over himself is the do-minion achieved by the higher possibilities of his nature over itslower possibilities, and this is done in him when he associateshis idea of self with the struggle of the higher guna to get themastery, the predominance over the lower guna. The sense offree will, illusion or not, is a necessary machinery of the actionof Nature, necessary for man during his progress, and it wouldbe disastrous for him to lose it before he is ready for a highertruth. If it be said, as it has been said, that Nature deludes manto fulfil her behests and that the idea of a free individual will isthe most powerful of these delusions, then it must also be saidthat the delusion is for his good and without it he could not riseto his full possibilities.

But it is not a sheer delusion, it is only an error of stand-point and an error of placement. The ego thinks that it is thereal self and acts as if it were the true centre of action andas if all existed for its sake, and there it commits an error ofstandpoint and placement. It is not wrong in thinking that thereis something or someone within ourselves, within this action ofour nature, who is the true centre of its action and for whomall exists; but this is not the ego, it is the Lord secret within


our hearts, the divine Purusha, and the Jiva, other than ego,who is a portion of his being. The self-assertion of ego-sense isthe broken and distorted shadow in our minds of the truth thatthere is a real Self within us which is the master of all and forwhom and at whose behest Nature goes about her works. Sotoo the ego’s idea of free will is a distorted and misplaced senseof the truth that there is a free Self within us and that the willin Nature is only a modified and partial reflection of its will,modified and partial because it lives in the successive momentsof Time and acts by a constant series of modifications whichforget much of their own precedents and are only imperfectlyconscious of their own consequences and aims. But the Willwithin, exceeding the moments of Time, knows all these, and theaction of Nature in us is an attempt, we might say, to work outunder the difficult conditions of a natural and egoistic ignorancewhat is foreseen in full supramental light by the inner Will andKnowledge.

But a time must come in our progress when we are ready toopen our eyes to the real truth of our being, and then the errorof our egoistic free will must fall away from us. The rejectionof the idea of egoistic free will does not imply a cessation ofaction, because Nature is the doer and carries out her actionafter this machinery is dispensed with even as she did before itcame into usage in the process of her evolution. In the man whohas rejected it, it may even be possible for her to develop a greateraction; for his mind may be more aware of all that his natureis by the self-creation of the past, more aware of the powersthat environ and are working upon it to help or to hinder itsgrowth, more aware too of the latent greater possibilities whichit contains by virtue of all in it that is unexpressed, yet capable ofexpression; and this mind may be a freer channel for the sanctionof the Purusha to the greater possibilities that it sees and a freerinstrument for the response of Nature, for her resultant attemptat their development and realisation. But the rejection of freewill must not be a mere fatalism or idea of natural determinismin 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


is always the instrument of Prakriti, we still act by the ego andwith our will as her instrument, and the idea in us brings no realchange, but only a modification of our intellectual attitude. Weshall have accepted the phenomenal truth of the determinationof our egoistic being and action by Nature, we shall have seenour subjection: but we shall not have seen the unborn Self withinwhich is above the action of the gunas; we shall not have seenwherein lies our gate of freedom. Nature and ego are not all weare; there is the free soul, the Purusha.

But in what consists this freedom of the Purusha? The Pu-rusha of the current Sankhya philosophy is free in the essence ofhis being, but because he is the non-doer, akarta; and in so far ashe permits Nature to throw on the inactive Soul her shadow ofaction, he becomes bound phenomenally by the actions of thegunas and cannot recover his freedom except by dissociationfrom her and by cessation of her activities. If then a man castsfrom 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 theinactive non-doer, atmanam akartaram, and all action as not hisown but Nature’s, as the play of her gunas, will not a like resultfollow? The Sankhya Purusha is the giver of the sanction, buta passive sanction only, anumati, the work is entirely Nature’s;essentially he is the witness and sustainer, not the governing andactive consciousness of the universal Godhead. He is the Soulthat sees and accepts, as a spectator accepts the representation ofa play he is watching, not the Soul that both governs and watchesthe play planned by himself and staged in his own being. If thenhe withdraws the sanction, if he refuses to acknowledge theillusion of doing by which the play continues, he ceases also tobe the sustainer and the action comes to a stop, since it is onlyfor the pleasure of the witnessing conscious Soul that Natureperforms it and only by his support that she can maintain it.Therefore it is evident that the Gita’s conception of the relationsof the Purusha and Prakriti are not the Sankhya’s, since the samemovement leads to a quite different result, in one case to cessa-tion of works, in the other to a great, a selfless and desireless, adivine action. In the Sankhya Soul and Nature are two different


entities, in the Gita they are two aspects, two powers of one self-existent being; the Soul is not only giver of the sanction, but lordof Nature, Ishwara, through her enjoying the play of the world,through her executing divine will and knowledge in a scheme ofthings supported by his sanction and existing by his immanentpresence, existing in his being, governed by the law of his beingand by the conscious will within it. To know, to respond to, tolive in the divine being and nature of this Soul is the object ofwithdrawing from the ego and its action. One rises then abovethe lower nature of the gunas to the higher divine nature.

The movement by which this ascension is determined resultsfrom the complex poise of the Soul in its relations with Nature;it depends on the Gita’s idea of the triple Purusha. The Soul thatimmediately informs the action, the mutations, the successivebecomings of Nature, is the Kshara, that which seems to changewith her changes, to move in her motion, the Person who followsin his idea of his being the changes of his personality broughtabout by the continuous action of her Karma. Nature here isKshara, a constant movement and mutation in Time, a constantbecoming. But this Nature is simply the executive power ofthe Soul itself; for only by what he is, can she become, onlyaccording to the possibilities of his becoming, can she act; sheworks out the becoming of his being. Her Karma is determinedby Swabhava, the own-nature, the law of self-becoming of thesoul, even though, because it is the agent and executive of thebecoming, the action rather seems often to determine the na-ture. According to what we are, we act, and by our action wedevelop, we work out what we are. Nature is the action, themutation, the becoming, and it is the Power that executes allthese; but the Soul is the conscious Being from which that Powerproceeds, from whose luminous stuff of consciousness she hasdrawn the variable will that changes and expresses its changesin her actions. And this Soul is One and Many; it is the oneLife-being out of which all life is constituted and it is all theseliving beings; it is the cosmic Existent and it is all this multitudeof cosmic existences, sarvabhutani, for all these are One; allthe many Purushas are in their original being the one and only


Purusha. But the mechanism of the ego-sense in Nature, whichis part of her action, induces the mind to identify the soul’sconsciousness with the limited becoming of the moment, withthe sum of her active consciousness in a given field of space andtime, with the result from moment to moment of the sum ofher past actions. It is possible to realise in a way the unity ofall these beings even in Nature herself and to become aware ofa cosmic Soul which is manifest in the whole action of cosmicNature, Nature manifesting the Soul, the Soul constituting theNature. But this is to become aware only of the great cosmicBecoming, which is not false or unreal, but the knowledge ofwhich alone does not give us the true knowledge of our Self; forour true Self is always something more than this and somethingbeyond it.

For, beyond the soul manifest in Nature and bound up withits action, is another status of the Purusha, which is entirely a sta-tus and not at all an action; that is the silent, the immutable, theall-pervading, self-existent, motionless Self, sarvagatam acalam,immutable Being and not Becoming, the Akshara. In the Ksharathe Soul is involved in the action of Nature, therefore it is con-centrated, loses itself, as it were, in the moments of Time, in thewaves of the Becoming, not really, but only in appearance andby following the current; in the Akshara Nature falls to silenceand rest in the Soul, therefore it becomes aware of its immutableBeing. The Kshara is the Sankhya’s Purusha when it reflects thevaried workings of the gunas of Nature, and it knows itself asthe Saguna, the Personal; the Akshara is the Sankhya’s Purushawhen these gunas have fallen into a state of equilibrium, andit knows itself as the Nirguna, the Impersonal. Therefore whilethe Kshara, associating itself with the work of Prakriti, seemsto be the doer of works, karta, the Akshara dissociated from allthe workings of the gunas is the inactive non-doer, akarta, andwitness. The soul of man, when it takes the poise of the Kshara,identifies itself with the play of personality and readily clouds itsself-knowledge with the ego-sense in Nature, so that he thinksof himself as the ego-doer of works; when it takes its poise inthe Akshara, it identifies itself with the Impersonal and is aware


of Nature as the doer and itself as the inactive witnessing Self,akartaram. The mind of man has to tend to one of these poises,it takes them as alternatives; it is bound by Nature to action inthe mutations of quality and personality or it is free from herworkings in immutable impersonality.

But these two, the status and immutability of the Soul andthe action of the Soul and its mutability in Nature, actuallycoexist. And this would be an anomaly irreconcilable except bysome such theory as that of Maya or else of a double and dividedbeing, if there were not a supreme reality of the Soul’s existenceof which these are the two contrary aspects, but which is limitedby neither of them. We have seen that the Gita finds this in the Pu-rushottama. The supreme Soul is the Ishwara, God, the Masterof all being, sarvaloka-mahesvara. He puts forth his own activenature, his Prakriti, — svam prakr.tim, says the Gita, — manifestin the Jiva, worked out by the svabhava, “own-becoming”, ofeach Jiva according to the law of the divine being in it, the greatlines of which each Jiva must follow, but worked out too in theegoistic nature by the bewildering play of the three gunas uponeach other, gun. a gun. es.u vartante. That is the traigun. yamayımaya, the Maya hard for man to get beyond, duratyaya, — yetcan one get beyond it by transcending the three gunas. For whileall this is done by the Ishwara through his Nature-Power in theKshara, in the Akshara he is untouched, indifferent, regardingall equally, extended within all, yet above all. In all three he isthe Lord, the supreme Ishwara in the highest, the presiding andall-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 playof his personality; he is not either merely impersonal or personal,but one and the same being in two aspects; he is the impersonal-personal, nirgun.o gun. ı, of the Upanishad. By him all has beenwilled even before it is worked out, — as he says of the still livingDhartarashtrians, “already have they been slain by Me,” mayanihatah. purvam eva, — and the working out by Nature is onlythe result of his Will; yet by virtue of his impersonality behindhe is not bound by his works, kartaram akartaram.


But man as the individual self, owing to his ignorant self-identification with the work and the becoming, as if that were allhis 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 otherswho are doing all; he does not see that Nature is doing all andthat he is misrepresenting and disfiguring her works to himselfby ignorance and attachment. He is enslaved by the gunas, nowhampered in the dull case of tamas, now blown by the strongwinds of rajas, now limited by the partial lights of sattwa, notdistinguishing himself at all from the nature-mind which alone isthus modified by the gunas. He is therefore mastered by pain andpleasure, happiness and grief, desire and passion, attachmentand disgust: he has no freedom.

He must, to be free, get back from the Nature action to thestatus of the Akshara; he will then be trigun. atıta, beyond thegunas. Knowing himself as the Akshara Brahman, the unchang-ing Purusha, he will know himself as an immutable impersonalself, the Atman, tranquilly observing and impartially supportingthe action, but himself calm, indifferent, untouched, motionless,pure, one with all beings in their self, not one with Natureand her workings. This self, though by its presence authorisingthe works of Nature, though by its all-pervading existence sup-porting and consenting to them, prabhu vibhu, does not itselfcreate works or the state of the doer or the joining of the worksto their fruit, na kartr.tvam na karman. i sr.jati na karma-phala-samyogam, but only watches nature in the Kshara working outthese things, svabhavas tu pravartate; it accepts neither the sinnor the virtue of the living creatures born into this birth as itsown, nadatte kasyacit papam na caiva sukr.tam; it preserves itsspiritual purity. It is the ego bewildered by ignorance whichattributes these things to itself, because it assumes the respon-sibility of the doer and chooses to figure as that and not asthe instrument of a greater power, which is all that it really is;ajnanenavr.tam jnanam tena muhyanti jantavah. . By going backinto the impersonal self the soul gets back into a greater self-knowledge and is liberated from the bondage of the works ofNature, untouched by her gunas, free from her shows of good


and evil, suffering and happiness. The natural being, the mind,body, life, still remain, Nature still works; but the inner beingdoes not identify himself with these, nor while the gunas play inthe natural being, does he rejoice or grieve. He is the calm andfree 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 har-monised status, a double, not a unified being, a freedom in thesoul, an imperfection in the Nature. It can only be a stage. Whatthen is there beyond it? One solution is that of the Sannyasin whorejects the nature, the action altogether, so far at least as actioncan be rejected, so that there may be an unmixed undividedfreedom; but this solution, though admitted, is not preferred bythe Gita. The Gita also insists on the giving up of actions, sarva-karman. i sannyasya, but inwardly to the Brahman. Brahman inthe Kshara supports wholly the action of Prakriti, Brahman inthe Akshara, even while supporting, dissociates itself from theaction, preserves its freedom; the individual soul, unified withthe Brahman in the Akshara, is free and dissociated, yet, unifiedwith the Brahman in the Kshara, supports but is not affected.This it can do best when it sees that both are aspects of theone Purushottama. The Purushottama, inhabiting all existencesas the secret Ishwara, controls the Nature and by his will, nowno longer distorted and disfigured by the ego-sense, the Na-ture works out the actions by the swabhava; the individual soulmakes the divinised natural being an instrument of the divineWill, nimitta-matram. He remains even in action trigun. atıta,beyond the gunas, free from the gunas, nistraigun. ya, he fulfilsentirely at last the early injunction of the Gita, nistraigun. yobhavarjuna. He is indeed still the enjoyer of the gunas, as is theBrahman, though not limited by them, nirgun. am gun. abhoktr.ca, unattached, yet all-supporting, even as is that Brahman,asaktam sarvabhr.t: but the action of the gunas within him isquite changed; it is lifted above their egoistic character and re-actions. For he has unified his whole being in the Purushottama,has assumed the divine being and the higher divine nature ofbecoming, madbhava, has unified even his mind and natural


consciousness with the Divine, manmana maccittah. . This changeis the final evolution of the nature and the consummation of thedivine birth, rahasyam uttamam. When it is accomplished, thesoul is aware of itself as the master of its nature and, grown alight of the divine Light and will of the divine Will, is able tochange its natural workings into a divine action.

XXIII

Nirvana and Works in the World

THE UNION of the soul with the Purushottama by a Yogaof the whole being is the complete teaching of the Gitaand not only the union with the immutable Self as in the

narrower doctrine which follows the exclusive way of knowl-edge. That is why the Gita subsequently, after it has effectedthe reconciliation of knowledge and works, is able to developthe idea of love and devotion, unified with both works andknowledge, as the highest height of the way to the supremesecret. For if the union with the immutable Self were the solesecret or the highest secret, that would not at all be possible; forthen at a given point our inner basis for love and devotion, noless than our inner foundation of works, would crumble awayand collapse. Union utter and exclusive with the immutableSelf alone means the abolition of the whole point of view ofthe mutable being, not only in its ordinary and inferior actionbut in its very roots, in all that makes its existence possible,not only in the works of its ignorance, but in the works of itsknowledge. It would mean the abolition of all that differencein conscious poise and activity between the human soul and theDivine which makes possible the play of the Kshara; for theaction of the Kshara would become then entirely a play of theignorance without any root or basis of divine reality in it. Onthe contrary, union by Yoga with the Purushottama means theknowledge and enjoyment of our oneness with him in our self-existent being and of a certain differentiation in our active being.It is the persistence of the latter in a play of divine works whichare urged by the motive power of divine love and constituted by aperfected divine Nature, it is the vision of the Divine in the worldharmonised with a realisation of the Divine in the self whichmakes action and devotion possible to the liberated man, andnot only possible but inevitable in the perfect mode of his being.

Nirvana and Works in the World 235

But the direct way to union lies through the firm realisationof the immutable Self, and it is the Gita’s insistence on this as afirst necessity, after which alone works and devotion can acquiretheir whole divine meaning, that makes it possible for us to mis-take its drift. For if we take the passages in which it insists mostrigorously upon this necessity and neglect to observe the wholesequence of thought in which they stand, we may easily come tothe conclusion that it does really teach actionless absorption asthe final state of the soul and action only as a preliminary meanstowards stillness in the motionless Immutable. It is in the close ofthe fifth and throughout the sixth chapter that this insistence isstrongest and most comprehensive. There we get the descriptionof a Yoga which would seem at first sight to be incompatiblewith works and we get the repeated use of the word Nirvana todescribe the status to which the Yogin arrives.

The mark of this status is the supreme peace of a calm self-extinction, santim nirvan. a-paramam, and, as if to make it quiteclear that it is not the Buddhist’s Nirvana in a blissful negationof being, but the Vedantic loss of a partial in a perfect beingthat it intends, the Gita uses always the phrase brahma-nirvan. a,extinction in the Brahman; and the Brahman here certainly seemsto mean the Immutable, to denote primarily at least the innertimeless Self withdrawn from active participation even thoughimmanent in the externality of Nature. We have to see thenwhat is the drift of the Gita here, and especially whether thispeace is the peace of an absolute inactive cessation, whether theself-extinction in the Akshara means the absolute excision of allknowledge and consciousness of the Kshara and of all action inthe Kshara. We are accustomed indeed to regard Nirvana andany kind of existence and action in the world as incompatibleand we might be inclined to argue that the use of the word is byitself sufficient and decides the question. But if we look closely atBuddhism, we shall doubt whether the absolute incompatibilityreally existed even for the Buddhists; and if we look closely atthe Gita, we shall see that it does not form part of this supremeVedantic teaching.

The Gita after speaking of the perfect equality of the


Brahman-knower who has risen into the Brahman-conscious-ness, brahmavid brahman. i sthitah. , develops in nine verses thatfollow its idea of Brahmayoga and of Nirvana in the Brahman.“When the soul is no longer attached to the touches of outwardthings,” it begins, “then one finds the happiness that exists inthe Self; such a one enjoys an imperishable happiness, becausehis self is in Yoga, yukta, by Yoga with the Brahman.” Thenon-attachment is essential, it says, in order to be free fromthe attacks of desire and wrath and passion, a freedom withoutwhich true happiness is not possible. That happiness and thatequality are to be gained entirely by man in the body: he is notto suffer any least remnant of the subjection to the troubledlower nature to remain in the idea that the perfect release willcome by a putting off of the body; a perfect spiritual freedomis to be won here upon earth and possessed and enjoyed inthe human life, prak sarıra-vimoks.an. at. It then continues, “Hewho has the inner happiness and the inner ease and reposeand the inner light, that Yogin becomes the Brahman andreaches self-extinction in the Brahman, brahma-nirvan. am.”Here, very clearly, Nirvana means the extinction of the ego inthe higher spiritual, inner Self, that which is for ever timeless,spaceless, not bound by the chain of cause and effect and thechanges of the world-mutation, self-blissful, self-illumined andfor ever at peace. The Yogin ceases to be the ego, the littleperson limited by the mind and the body; he becomes theBrahman; he is unified in consciousness with the immutabledivinity of the eternal Self which is immanent in his naturalbeing.

But is this a going in into some deep sleep of samadhi awayfrom all world-consciousness, or is it the preparatory movementfor a dissolution of the natural being and the individual soul intosome absolute Self who is utterly and for ever beyond Natureand her works, laya, moks.a? Is that withdrawal necessary beforewe can enter into Nirvana, or is Nirvana, as the context seemsto suggest, a state which can exist simultaneously with world-consciousness and even in its own way include it? Apparentlythe latter, for in the succeeding verse the Gita goes on to say,


“Sages win Nirvana in the Brahman, they in whom the stainsof sin are effaced and the knot of doubt is cut asunder, mastersof their selves, who are occupied in doing good to all creatures,sarvabhuta-hite ratah. .” That would almost seem to mean that tobe thus is to be in Nirvana. But the next verse is quite clear anddecisive, “Yatis (those who practise self-mastery by Yoga andausterity) who are delivered from desire and wrath and havegained self-mastery, for them Nirvana in the Brahman exists allabout them, encompasses them, they already live in it becausethey have knowledge of the Self.” That is to say, to have knowl-edge and possession of the self is to exist in Nirvana. This isclearly a large extension of the idea of Nirvana. Freedom from allstain of the passions, the self-mastery of the equal mind on whichthat freedom is founded, equality to all beings, sarvabhutes.u,and beneficial love for all, final destruction of that doubt andobscurity of the ignorance which keeps us divided from the all-unifying Divine and the knowledge of the One Self within usand in all are evidently the conditions of Nirvana which are laiddown in these verses of the Gita, go to constitute it and are itsspiritual substance.

Thus Nirvana is clearly compatible with world-conscious-ness and with action in the world. For the sages who possessit are conscious of and in intimate relation by works with theDivine in the mutable universe; they are occupied with the goodof all creatures, sarvabhuta-hite. They have not renounced theexperiences of the Kshara Purusha, they have divinised them; forthe Kshara, the Gita tells us, is all existences, sarvabhutani, andthe doing universal good to all is a divine action in the mutabilityof Nature. This action in the world is not inconsistent with livingin Brahman, it is rather its inevitable condition and outward re-sult because the Brahman in whom we find Nirvana, the spiritualconsciousness in which we lose the separative ego-consciousness,is not only within us but within all these existences, exists notonly above and apart from all these universal happenings, butpervades them, contains them and is extended in them. There-fore by Nirvana in the Brahman must be meant a destructionor extinction of the limited separative consciousness, falsifying


and dividing, which is brought into being on the surface ofexistence by the lower Maya of the three gunas, and entry intoNirvana is a passage into this other true unifying consciousnesswhich is the heart of existence and its continent and its wholecontaining and supporting, its whole original and eternal andfinal truth. Nirvana when we gain it, enter into it, is not onlywithin us, but all around, abhito vartate, because this is notonly the Brahman-consciousness which lives secret within us,but the Brahman-consciousness in which we live. It is the Selfwhich we are within, the supreme Self of our individual beingbut also the Self which we are without, the supreme Self of theuniverse, the self of all existences. By living in that self we live inall, and no longer in our egoistic being alone; by oneness withthat self a steadfast oneness with all in the universe becomesthe very nature of our being and the root status of our activeconsciousness and root motive of all our action.

But again we get immediately afterwards two verses whichmight seem to lead away from this conclusion. “Having putoutside of himself all outward touches and concentrated thevision between the eyebrows and made equal the pran. a and theapana 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 isever free.” Here we have a process of Yoga that brings in anelement which seems quite other than the Yoga of works andother even than the pure Yoga of knowledge by discriminationand contemplation; it belongs in all its characteristic features tothe system, introduces the psycho-physical askesis of Rajayoga.There is the conquest of all the movements of the mind, cittavr.tti-nirodha; there is the control of the breathing, Pranayama; thereis the drawing in of the sense and the vision. All of them areprocesses which lead to the inner trance of Samadhi, the objectof all of them moks.a, and moks.a signifies in ordinary parlancethe renunciation not only of the separative ego-consciousness,but of the whole active consciousness, a dissolution of our beinginto the highest Brahman. Are we to suppose that the Gita givesthis process in that sense as the last movement of a release by


dissolution or only as a special means and a strong aid to over-come the outward-going mind? Is this the finale, the climax, thelast word? We shall find reason to regard it as both a specialmeans, an aid, and at least one gate of a final departure, notby dissolution, but by an uplifting to the supracosmic existence.For even here in this passage this is not the last word; the lastword, the finale, the climax comes in a verse that follows andis the last couplet of the chapter. “When a man has knownMe as the Enjoyer of sacrifice and tapasya (of all askesis andenergisms), the mighty lord of all the worlds, the friend of allcreatures, he comes by the peace.” The power of the Karmayogacomes in again; the knowledge of the active Brahman, the cosmicsupersoul, is insisted on among the conditions of the peace ofNirvana.

We get back to the great idea of the Gita, the idea of the Pu-rushottama, — though that name is not given till close upon theend, it is always that which Krishna means by his “I” and “Me”,the Divine who is there as the one self in our timeless immutablebeing, who is present too in the world, in all existences, in allactivities, the master of the silence and the peace, the master ofthe power and the action, who is here incarnate as the divinecharioteer of the stupendous conflict, the Transcendent, the Self,the All, the master of every individual being. He is the enjoyerof all sacrifice and of all tapasya, therefore shall the seeker ofliberation do works as a sacrifice and as a tapasya; he is thelord of all the worlds, manifested in Nature and in these beings,therefore shall the liberated man still do works for the rightgovernment and leading on of the peoples in these worlds, loka-sangraha; he is the friend of all existences, therefore is the sagewho has found Nirvana within him and all around, still andalways occupied with the good of all creatures, — even as theNirvana of Mahayana Buddhism took for its highest sign theworks of a universal compassion. Therefore too, even when hehas found oneness with the Divine in his timeless and immutableself, is he still capable, since he embraces the relations also ofthe play of Nature, of divine love for man and of love for theDivine, of bhakti.


That this is the drift of the meaning, becomes clearer whenwe have fathomed the sense of the sixth chapter which is a largecomment on and a full development of the idea of these closingverses of the fifth, — that shows the importance which the Gitaattaches to them. We shall therefore run as briefly as possiblethrough the substance of this sixth chapter. First the Teacheremphasises — and this is very significant — his often repeatedasseveration about the real essence of Sannyasa, that it is aninward, not an outward renunciation. “Whoever does the workto be done without resort to its fruits, he is the Sannyasin andthe Yogin, not the man who lights not the sacrificial fire and doesnot the works. What they have called renunciation (Sannyasa),know to be in truth Yoga; for none becomes a Yogin who has notrenounced the desire-will in the mind.” Works are to be done,but with what purpose and in what order? They are first to bedone while ascending the hill of Yoga, for then works are thecause, karan. am. The cause of what? The cause of self-perfection,of liberation, of nirvana in the Brahman; for by doing works witha steady practice of the inner renunciation this perfection, thisliberation, this conquest of the desire-mind and the ego-self andthe lower nature are easily accomplished.

But when one has got to the top? Then works are no longerthe cause; the calm of self-mastery and self-possession gained byworks becomes the cause. Again, the cause of what? Of fixityin the Self, in the Brahman-consciousness and of the perfectequality in which the divine works of the liberated man aredone. “For when one does not get attached to the objects ofsense or to works and has renounced all will of desire in themind, 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 doesworks; he does them without desire and attachment, without theegoistic personal will and the mental seeking which is the parentof desire. He has conquered his lower self, reached the perfectcalm in which his highest self is manifest to him, that highestself always concentrated in its own being, samahita, in Samadhi,not only in the trance of the inward-drawn consciousness, butalways, in the waking state of the mind as well, in exposure to


the causes of desire and of the disturbance of calm, to grief andpleasure, heat and cold, honour and disgrace, all the dualities,sıtos.n. a-sukhaduh. khes.u tatha manapamanayoh. . This higher selfis the Akshara, kut.astha, which stands above the changes andthe perturbations of the natural being; and the Yogin is said tobe in Yoga with it when he also is like it, kut.astha, when he issuperior to all appearances and mutations, when he is satisfiedwith self-knowledge, when he is equal-minded to all things andhappenings and persons.

But this Yoga is after all no easy thing to acquire, as Arjunaindeed shortly afterwards suggests, for the restless mind is al-ways liable to be pulled down from these heights by the attacksof outward things and to fall back into the strong control ofgrief and passion and inequality. Therefore, it would seem, theGita proceeds to give us in addition to its general method ofknowledge and works a special process of Rajayogic meditationalso, a powerful method of practice, abhyasa, a strong way tothe complete control of the mind and all its workings. In thisprocess the Yogin is directed to practise continually union withthe Self so that that may become his normal consciousness. Heis to sit apart and alone, with all desire and idea of possessionbanished from his mind, self-controlled in his whole being andconsciousness. “He should set in a pure spot his firm seat, neithertoo high, nor yet too low, covered with a cloth, with a deer-skin,with sacred grass, and there seated with a concentrated mind andwith the workings of the mental consciousness and the senses un-der control he should practise Yoga for self-purification, atma-visuddhaye.” The posture he takes must be the motionless erectposture proper to the practice of Rajayoga; the vision shouldbe drawn in and fixed between the eye-brows, “not regardingthe regions.” The mind is to be kept calm and free from fearand the vow of Brahmacharya observed; the whole controlledmentality must be devoted and turned to the Divine so that thelower action of the consciousness shall be merged in the higherpeace. For the object to be attained is the still peace of Nirvana.“Thus always putting himself in Yoga by control of his mindthe Yogin attains to the supreme peace of Nirvana which has its


foundation in Me, santim nirvan. a-paramam matsamstham.”This peace of Nirvana is reached when all the mental con-

sciousness is perfectly controlled and liberated from desire andremains still in the Self, when, motionless like the light of a lampin a windless place, it ceases from its restless action, shut in fromits outward motion, and by the silence and stillness of the mindthe Self is seen within, not disfigured as in the mind, but in theSelf, seen, not as it is mistranslated falsely or partially by themind and represented to us through the ego, but self-perceivedby the Self, svaprakasa. Then the soul is satisfied and knowsits own true and exceeding bliss, not that untranquil happinesswhich is the portion of the mind and the senses, but an inner andserene felicity in which it is safe from the mind’s perturbationsand can no longer fall away from the spiritual truth of its being.Not even the fieriest assault of mental grief can disturb it; formental grief comes to us from outside, is a reaction to externaltouches, and this is the inner, the self-existent happiness of thosewho no longer accept the slavery of the unstable mental reactionsto external touches. It is the putting away of the contact withpain, the divorce of the mind’s marriage with grief, duh. kha-samyoga-viyogam. The firm winning of this inalienable spiritualbliss is Yoga, it is the divine union; it is the greatest of all gainsand the treasure beside which all others lose their value. There-fore is this Yoga to be resolutely practised without yielding toany discouragement by difficulty or failure until the release, untilthe bliss of Nirvana is secured as an eternal possession.

The main stress here has fallen on the stilling of the emotivemind, the mind of desire and the senses which are the recipientsof outward touches and reply to them with our customary emo-tional reactions; but even the mental thought has to be stilled inthe silence of the self-existent being. First, all the desires bornof the desire-will have to be wholly abandoned without anyexception or residue and the senses have to be held in by themind so that they shall not run out to all sides after their usualdisorderly and restless habit; but next the mind itself has tobe seized by the buddhi and drawn inward. One should slowlycease from mental action by a buddhi held in the grasp of fixity


and having fixed the mind in the higher self one should notthink of anything at all. Whenever the restless and unquiet mindgoes forth, it should be controlled and brought into subjectionin the Self. When the mind is thoroughly quieted, then therecomes upon the Yogin the highest, stainless, passionless bliss ofthe soul that has become the Brahman. “Thus freed from stainof passion and putting himself constantly into Yoga, the Yogineasily and happily enjoys the touch of the Brahman which is anexceeding bliss.”

And yet the result is not, while one yet lives, a Nirvanawhich puts away every possibility of action in the world, ev-ery relation with beings in the world. It would seem at firstthat it ought to be so. When all the desires and passions haveceased, when the mind is no longer permitted to throw itselfout in thought, when the practice of this silent and solitaryYoga has become the rule, what farther action or relation withthe world of outward touches and mutable appearances is anylonger possible? No doubt, the Yogin for a time still remains inthe body, but the cave, the forest, the mountain-top seem nowthe fittest, the only possible scene of his continued living andconstant trance of Samadhi his sole joy and occupation. But,first, while this solitary Yoga is being pursued, the renunciationof 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 playand action, even as it is not for those who indulge too much inthese things of the life and the body; but the sleep and waking,the food, the play, the putting forth of effort in works shouldall be yukta. This is generally interpreted as meaning that allshould be moderate, regulated, done in fit measure, and thatmay indeed be the significance. But at any rate when the Yoga isattained, all this has to be yukta in another sense, the ordinarysense of the word everywhere else in the Gita. In all states, inwaking and in sleeping, in food and play and action, the Yoginwill then be in Yoga with the Divine, and all will be done byhim in the consciousness of the Divine as the self and as the Alland as that which supports and contains his own life and hisaction. Desire and ego and personal will and the thought of the


mind are the motives of action only in the lower nature; whenthe ego is lost and the Yogin becomes Brahman, when he lives inand is, even, a transcendent and universal consciousness, actioncomes spontaneously out of that, luminous knowledge higherthan the mental thought comes out of that, a power other andmightier than the personal will comes out of that to do for himhis works and bring its fruits:1 personal action has ceased, allhas been taken up into the Brahman and assumed by the Divine,mayi sannyasya karman. i.

For when the Gita describes the nature of this self-realisationand the result of the Yoga which comes by Nirvana of the sep-arative ego-mind and its motives of thought and feeling andaction into the Brahman-consciousness, it includes the cosmicsense, though lifted into a new kind of vision. “The man whoseself 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 theSelf, all is his self, all is the Divine. But is there no danger, if hedwells at all in the mutability of the Kshara, of his losing all theresults of this difficult Yoga, losing the Self and falling back intothe mind, of the Divine losing him and the world getting him, ofhis losing the Divine and getting back in its place the ego and thelower nature? No, says the Gita; “he who sees Me everywhereand sees all in Me, to him I do not get lost, nor does he get lostto Me.” For this peace of Nirvana, though it is gained throughthe Akshara, is founded upon the being of the Purushottama,mat-samstham, and that is extended, the Divine, the Brahmanis extended too in the world of beings and, though transcendentof it, not imprisoned in its own transcendence. One has to seeall things as He and live and act wholly in that vision; that is theperfect fruit of the Yoga.

But why act? Is it not safer to sit in one’s solitude looking outupon 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, notacting in it, living rather ordinarily in the inner Samadhi? Shouldnot that be the law, the rule, the dharma of this highest spiritual

1 yoga-ks.emam vahamyaham.


condition? No, again; for the liberated Yogin there is no otherlaw, rule, dharma than simply this, to live in the Divine and lovethe Divine and be one with all beings; his freedom is an absoluteand not a contingent freedom, self-existent and not dependentany longer on any rule of conduct, law of life or limitation of anykind. He has no longer any need of a process of Yoga, becausehe is now perpetually in Yoga. “The Yogin who has taken hisstand upon oneness and loves Me in all beings, however andin all ways he lives and acts, lives and acts in Me.” The loveof the world spiritualised, changed from a sense-experience toa soul-experience, is founded on the love of God and in thatlove there is no peril and no shortcoming. Fear and disgust ofthe world may often be necessary for the recoil from the lowernature, for it is really the fear and disgust of our own ego whichreflects itself in the world. But to see God in the world is to fearnothing, it is to embrace all in the being of God; to see all as theDivine is to hate and loathe nothing, but love God in the worldand the world in God.

But at least the things of the lower nature will be shunnedand feared, the things which the Yogin has taken so much troubleto surmount? Not this either; all is embraced in the equality ofthe self-vision. “He, O Arjuna, who sees with equality everythingin the image of the Self, whether it be grief or it be happiness, himI hold to be the supreme Yogin.” And by this it is not meant atall that he himself shall fall from the griefless spiritual bliss andfeel again worldly unhappiness, even in the sorrow of others, butseeing in others the play of the dualities which he himself has leftand surmounted, he shall still see all as himself, his self in all,God in all and, not disturbed or bewildered by the appearancesof these things, moved only by them to help and heal, to occupyhimself with the good of all beings, to lead men to the spiritualbliss, to work for the progress of the world Godwards, he shalllive the divine life, so long as days upon earth are his portion.The God-lover who can do this, can thus embrace all things inGod, can look calmly on the lower nature and the works of theMaya of the three gunas and act in them and upon them withoutperturbation or fall or disturbance from the height and power


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 hasconquered the creation, jitah. sargah. .

The Gita brings in here as always bhakti as the climax ofthe Yoga, sarvabhutasthitam yo mam bhajati ekatvam asthitah. ;that may almost be said to sum up the whole final result ofthe Gita’s teaching — whoever loves God in all and his soul isfounded upon the divine oneness, however he lives and acts,lives and acts in God. And to emphasise it still more, after anintervention of Arjuna and a reply to his doubt as to how sodifficult a Yoga can be at all possible for the restless mind ofman, the divine Teacher returns to this idea and makes it hisculminating utterance. “The Yogin is greater than the doers ofaskesis, greater than the men of knowledge, greater than the menof works; become then the Yogin, O Arjuna,” the Yogin, onewho seeks for and attains, by works and knowledge and askesisor by whatever other means, not even spiritual knowledge orpower or anything else for their own sake, but the union withGod alone; for in that all else is contained and in that liftedbeyond itself to a divinest significance. But even among Yoginsthe greatest is the Bhakta. “Of all Yogins he who with all hisinner self given up to Me, for Me has love and faith, sraddhavanbhajate, 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 andcontains in itself the seed of the rest, of that which still remainsunspoken and is nowhere entirely spoken; for it is always andremains something of a mystery and a secret, rahasyam, thehighest spiritual mystery and the divine secret.

XXIV

The Gist of the Karmayoga

THE FIRST six chapters of the Gita form a sort of pre-liminary block of the teaching; all the rest, all the othertwelve chapters are the working out of certain unfinished

figures in this block which here are seen only as hints behind thelarge-size execution of the main motives, yet are in themselvesof capital importance and are therefore reserved for a yet largertreatment on the other two faces of the work. If the Gita werenot a great written Scripture which must be carried to its end,if it were actually a discourse by a living teacher to a disciplewhich could be resumed in good time, when the disciple wasready for farther truth, one could conceive of his stopping hereat 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 largestpossible basis; as difficulties arise, they will solve themselvesor I will solve them for you. But at present live out what Ihave told you; work in this spirit.” True, there are many thingshere which cannot be properly understood except in the lightthrown on them by what is to come after. In order to clear upimmediate difficulties and obviate possible misunderstandings, Ihave had myself to anticipate a good deal, to bring in repeatedly,for example, the idea of the Purushottama, for without thatit would have been impossible to clear up certain obscuritiesabout the Self and action and the Lord of action, which the Gitadeliberately accepts so that it may not disturb the firmness ofthe first steps by reaching out prematurely to things too great asyet for the mind of the human disciple.

Arjuna, himself, if the Teacher were to break off his dis-course here, might well object: “You have spoken much of thedestruction of desire and attachment, of equality, of the con-quest of the senses and the stilling of the mind, of passionlessand impersonal action, of the sacrifice of works, of the inner as


preferable to the outer renunciation, and these things I under-stand intellectually, however difficult they may appear to me inpractice. But you have also spoken of rising above the gunas,while yet one remains in action, and you have not told me howthe gunas work, and unless I know that, it will be difficult forme to detect and rise above them. Besides, you have spoken ofbhakti as the greatest element in Yoga, yet you have talked muchof works and knowledge, but very little or nothing of bhakti.And to whom is bhakti, this greatest thing, to be offered? Notto the still impersonal Self, certainly, but to you, the Lord. Tellme, then, what you are, who, as bhakti is greater even than thisself-knowledge, are greater than the immutable Self, which isyet itself greater than mutable Nature and the world of action,even as knowledge is greater than works. What is the relationbetween these three things? between works and knowledge anddivine love? between the soul in Nature and the immutable Selfand that which is at once the changeless Self of all and the Masterof knowledge and love and works, the supreme Divinity who ishere with me in this great battle and massacre, my charioteer inthe chariot of this fierce and terrible action?” It is to answer thesequestions that the rest of the Gita is written, and in a completeintellectual solution they have indeed to be taken up withoutdelay and resolved. But in actual sadhana one has to advancefrom stage to stage, leaving many things, indeed the greatestthings to arise subsequently and solve themselves fully by thelight of the advance we have made in spiritual experience. TheGita follows to a certain extent this curve of experience and putsfirst a sort of large preliminary basis of works and knowledgewhich contains an element leading up to bhakti and to a greaterknowledge, but not yet fully arriving. The six chapters presentus with that basis.

We may then pause to consider how far they have carriedthe solution of the original problem with which the Gita started.The problem in itself, it may be useful again to remark, need notnecessarily have led up to the whole question of the nature ofexistence and of the replacement of the normal by the spirituallife. 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 con-sideration of all of these together; that in fact would have beenour modern method of solving the difficulty. By itself it raisesin the first instance just this question, whether Arjuna shouldbe governed by the ethical sense of personal sin in slaughteror by the consideration equally ethical of his public and socialduty, the defence of the Right, the opposition demanded byconscience from all noble natures to the armed forces of injus-tice and oppression? That question has been raised in our owntime and the present hour, and it can be solved, as we solve itnow, by one or other of very various solutions, but all from thestandpoint of our normal life and our normal human mind. Itmay be answered as a question between the personal conscienceand our duty to the society and the State, between an ideal and apractical morality, between “soul-force” and the recognition ofthe troublesome fact that life is not yet at least all soul and thatto take up arms for the right in a physical struggle is sometimesinevitable. All these solutions are, however, intellectual, temper-amental, emotional; they depend upon the individual standpointand are at the best our own proper way of meeting the difficultyoffered to us, proper because suitable to our nature and thestage 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 whichis always a tangle of various tendencies of our being and canonly arrive at a choice or an accommodation between them,between our reason, our ethical being, our dynamic needs, ourlife-instincts, our emotional being and those rarer movementswhich we may perhaps call soul-instincts or psychical prefer-ences. The Gita recognises that from this standpoint there canbe no absolute, only an immediate practical solution and, afteroffering to Arjuna from the highest ideals of his age just such apractical solution, which he is in no mood to accept and indeed isevidently not intended to accept, it proceeds to quite a differentstandpoint and to quite another answer.

The Gita’s solution is to rise above our natural being andnormal mind, above our intellectual and ethical perplexities into


another consciousness with another law of being and thereforeanother standpoint for our action; where personal desire andpersonal emotions no longer govern it; where the dualities fallaway; where the action is no longer our own and where thereforethe sense of personal virtue and personal sin is exceeded; wherethe universal, the impersonal, the divine spirit works out throughus its purpose in the world; where we are ourselves by a new anddivine birth changed into being of that Being, consciousness ofthat Consciousness, power of that Power, bliss of that Bliss, and,living no longer in our lower nature, have no works to do of ourown, no personal aim to pursue of our own, but if we do worksat all, — and that is the one real problem and difficulty left, —do only the divine works, those of which our outward natureis only a passive instrument and no longer the cause, no longerprovides the motive; for the motive-power is above us in the willof the Master of our works. And this is presented to us as thetrue solution, because it goes back to the real truth of our beingand to live according to the real truth of our being is evidentlythe highest solution and the sole entirely true solution of theproblems of our existence. Our mental and vital personality is atruth of our natural existence, but a truth of the ignorance, andall that attaches itself to it is also truth of that order, practicallyvalid for the works of the ignorance, but no longer valid whenwe get back to the real truth of our being. But how can weactually be sure that this is the truth? We cannot so long as weremain satisfied with our ordinary mental experience; for ournormal mental experience is wholly that of this lower naturefull of the ignorance. We can only know this greater truth byliving it, that is to say, by passing beyond the mental into thespiritual experience, by Yoga. For the living out of spiritualexperience until we cease to be mind and become spirit, until,liberated from the imperfections of our present nature, we areable to live entirely in our true and divine being is what in theend we mean by Yoga.

This upward transference of our centre of being and the con-sequent transformation of our whole existence and conscious-ness, with a resultant change in the whole spirit and motive of


our action, the action often remaining precisely the same in all itsoutward appearances, makes the gist of the Gita’s Karmayoga.Change your being, be reborn into the spirit and by that newbirth proceed with the action to which the Spirit within hasappointed you, may be said to be the heart of its message. Oragain, put otherwise, with a deeper and more spiritual import,— make the work you have to do here your means of innerspiritual rebirth, the divine birth, and, having become divine, dostill divine works as an instrument of the Divine for the leadingof the peoples. Therefore there are here two things which haveto be clearly laid down and clearly grasped, the way to thechange, to this upward transference, this new divine birth, andthe nature of the work or rather the spirit in which it has tobe done, since the outward form of it need not at all change,although really its scope and aim become quite different. Butthese two things are practically the same, for the elucidation ofone elucidates the other. The spirit of our action arises from thenature of our being and the inner foundation it has taken, butalso this nature is itself affected by the trend and spiritual effectof our action; a very great change in the spirit of our workschanges the nature of our being and alters the foundation it hastaken; it shifts the centre of conscious force from which we act.If life and action were entirely illusory, as some would have it, ifthe Spirit had nothing to do with works or life, this would notbe 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’sinner force of working determines its relations to the Spirit. Thisis, indeed, the justification of Karmayoga as a practical meansof the higher self-realisation.

We start from this foundation that the present inner lifeof man, almost entirely dependent as it is upon his vital andphysical nature, only lifted beyond it by a limited play of mentalenergy, is not the whole of his possible existence, not even thewhole of his present real existence. There is within him a hiddenSelf, of which his present nature is either only an outer appear-ance or is a partial dynamic result. The Gita seems throughoutto admit its dynamic reality and not to adopt the severer view


of the extreme Vedantists that it is only an appearance, a viewwhich strikes at the very roots of all works and action. Its way offormulating this element of its philosophical thought, — it mightbe done in a different way, — is to admit the Sankhya distinctionbetween the Soul and Nature, the power that knows, supportsand informs and the power that works, acts, provides all thevariations of instrument, medium and process. Only it takes thefree and immutable Soul of the Sankhyas, calls it in Vedanticlanguage the one immutable omnipresent Self or Brahman, anddistinguishes it from this other soul involved in Nature, whichis our mutable and dynamic being, the multiple soul of things,the basis of variation and personality. But in what then consiststhis action of Nature?

It consists in a power of process, Prakriti, which is the inter-play of three fundamental modes of its working, three qualities,gunas. And what is the medium? It is the complex system ofexistence created by a graded evolution of the instruments ofPrakriti, which, as they are reflected here in the soul’s experienceof her workings, we may call successively the reason and the ego,the mind, the senses and the elements of material energy whichare the basis of its forms. These are all mechanical, a complexengine of Nature, yantra; and from our modern point of viewwe may say that they are all involved in material energy andmanifest themselves in it as the soul in Nature becomes awareof itself by an upward evolution of each instrument, but in theinverse order to that which we have stated, matter first, thensensation, then mind, next reason, last spiritual consciousness.Reason, which is at first only preoccupied with the workings ofNature, may then detect their ultimate character, may see themonly as a play of the three gunas in which the soul is entangled,may distinguish between the soul and these workings; then thesoul gets a chance of disentangling itself and of going back toits original freedom and immutable existence. In Vedantic lan-guage, it sees the spirit, the being; it ceases to identify itself withthe instruments and workings of Nature, with its becoming;it identifies itself with its true Self and being and recovers itsimmutable spiritual self-existence. It is then from this spiritual


self-existence, according to the Gita, that it can freely and asthe master of its being, the Ishwara, support the action of itsbecoming.

Looking only at the psychological facts on which thesephilosophical distinctions are founded, — philosophy is only away of formulating to ourselves intellectually in their essentialsignificance the psychological and physical facts of existenceand their relation to any ultimate reality that may exist, — wemay say that there are two lives we can lead, the life of thesoul engrossed in the workings of its active nature, identifiedwith its psychological and physical instruments, limited by them,bound by its personality, subject to Nature, and the life of theSpirit, superior to these things, large, impersonal, universal, free,unlimited, transcendent, supporting with an infinite equality itsnatural being and action, but exceeding them by its freedomand infinity. We may live in what is now our natural being or wemay live in our greater and spiritual being. This is the first greatdistinction on which the Karmayoga of the Gita is founded.

The whole question and the whole method lie then in theliberation of the soul from the limitations of our present naturalbeing. In our natural life the first dominating fact is our sub-jection to the forms of material Nature, the outward touches ofthings. These present themselves to our life through the senses,and the life through the senses immediately returns upon theseobjects to seize upon them and deal with them, desires, attachesitself, seeks for results. The mind in all its inner sensations,reactions, emotions, habitual ways of perceiving, thinking andfeeling obeys this action of the senses; the reason too carriedaway by the mind gives itself up to this life of the senses, thislife in which the inner being is subject to the externality ofthings and cannot for a moment really get above it or outsidethe circle of its action upon us and its psychological results andreactions within us. It cannot get beyond them because there isthe principle of ego by which the reason differentiates the sumof the action of Nature upon our mind, will, sense, body fromher action in other minds, wills, nervous organisms, bodies; andlife to us means only the way she affects our ego and the way our


ego replies to her touches. We know nothing else, we seem to benothing else; the soul itself seems then only a separate mass ofmind, will, emotional and nervous reception and reaction. Wemay enlarge our ego, identify ourselves with the family, clan,class, country, nation, humanity even, but still the ego remainsin all these disguises the root of our actions, only it finds a largersatisfaction of its separate being by these wider dealings withexternal things.

What acts in us is still the will of the natural being seizingupon the touches of the external world to satisfy the differentphases of its personality, and the will in this seizing is alwaysa will of desire and passion and attachment to our works andtheir results, the will of Nature in us; our personal will, we say,but our ego personality is a creation of Nature, it is not andcannot be our free self, our independent being. The whole is theaction of the modes of Nature. It may be a tamasic action, andthen we have an inert personality subject to and satisfied withthe mechanical round of things, incapable of any strong effortat a freer action and mastery. Or it may be the rajasic action,and then we have the restless active personality which throwsitself upon Nature and tries to make her serve its needs anddesires, but does not see that its apparent mastery is a servitude,since its needs and desires are those of Nature, and while we aresubject to them, there can be for us no freedom. Or it may bea sattwic action, and then we have the enlightened personalitywhich tries to live by reason or to realise some preferred idealof good, truth or beauty; but this reason is still subject to theappearances of Nature and these ideals are only changing phasesof our personality in which we find in the end no sure ruleor permanent satisfaction. We are still carried on a wheel ofmutation, obeying in our circlings through the ego some Powerwithin us and within all this, but not ourselves that Power or inunion and communion with it. Still there is no freedom, no realmastery.

Yet freedom is possible. For that we have to get first awayinto ourselves from the action of the external world upon oursenses; that is to say, we have to live inwardly and be able to


hold back the natural running of the senses after their externalobjects. A mastery of the senses, an ability to do without allthat they hanker after, is the first condition of the true soul-life; only so can we begin to feel that there is a soul withinus which is other than the mutations of mind in its receptionof the touches of outward things, a soul which in its depthsgoes back to something self-existent, immutable, tranquil, self-possessed, grandiose, serene and august, master of itself andunaffected by the eager runnings of our external nature. Butthis cannot be done so long as we are subject to desire. For itis desire, the principle of all our superficial life, which satisfiesitself with the life of the senses and finds its whole account inthe play of the passions. We must get rid then of desire and, thatpropensity of our natural being destroyed, the passions whichare its emotional results will fall into quietude; for the joy andgrief of possession and of loss, success and failure, pleasant andunpleasant touches, which entertain them, will pass out of oursouls. A calm equality will then be gained. And since we havestill to live and act in the world and our nature in works is to seekfor the fruits of our works, we must change that nature and doworks without attachment to their fruits, otherwise desire and allits results remain. But how can we change this nature of the doerof works in us? By dissociating works from ego and personality,by seeing through the reason that all this is only the play of thegunas of Nature, and by dissociating our soul from the play, bymaking it first of all the observer of the workings of Nature andleaving those works to the Power that is really behind them, thesomething in Nature which is greater than ourselves, not ourpersonality, but the Master of the universe. But the mind willnot permit all this; its nature is to run out after the senses andcarry the reason and will with it. Then we must learn to still themind. We must attain that absolute peace and stillness in whichwe become aware of the calm, motionless, blissful Self withinus which is eternally untroubled and unaffected by the touchesof things, is sufficient to itself and finds there alone its eternalsatisfaction.

This Self is our self-existent being. It is not limited by our


personal existence. It is the same in all existences, pervasive,equal to all things, supporting the whole universal action withits infinity, but unlimited by all that is finite, unmodified by thechangings of Nature and personality. When this Self is revealedwithin us, when we feel its peace and stillness, we can growinto that; we can transfer the poise of our soul from its lowerimmergence in Nature and draw it back into the Self. We cando this by the force of the things we have attained, calm, equal-ity, passionless impersonality. For as we grow in these things,carry them to their fullness, subject all our nature to them, weare growing into this calm, equal, passionless, impersonal, all-pervading Self. Our senses fall into that stillness and receivethe touches of the world on us with a supreme tranquillity; ourmind falls into stillness and becomes the calm, universal witness;our ego dissolves itself into this impersonal existence. All thingswe see in this self which we have become in ourself; and wesee this self in all; we become one being with all beings in thespiritual basis of their existence. By doing works in this selflesstranquillity and impersonality, our works cease to be ours, ceaseto bind or trouble us with their reactions. Nature and her gunasweave the web of her works, but without affecting our grieflessself-existent tranquillity. All is given up into that one equal anduniversal Brahman.

But here there are two difficulties. First, there seems to bean antinomy between this tranquil and immutable Self and theaction of Nature. How then does the action at all exist or howcan it continue once we have entered into the immutable Self-existence? Where in that is the will to works which would makethe action of our nature possible? If we say with the Sankhyathat the will is in Nature and not in the Self, still there must bea motive in Nature and the power in her to draw the soul intoits workings by interest, ego and attachment, and when thesethings cease to reflect themselves in the soul-consciousness, herpower ceases and the motive of works ceases with it. But theGita does not accept this view, which seems indeed to necessitatethe existence of many Purushas and not one universal Purusha,otherwise the separate experience of the soul and its separate


liberation while millions of others are still involved, would notbe intelligible. Nature is not a separate principle, but the powerof the Supreme going forth in cosmic creation. But if the Supremeis only this immutable Self and the individual is only somethingthat has gone forth from him in the Power, then the momentit returns and takes its poise in the self, everything must ceaseexcept the supreme unity and the supreme calm. Secondly, evenif in some mysterious way action still continues, yet since the Selfis equal to all things, it cannot matter whether works are done or,if they are done, it cannot matter what work is done. Why thenthis 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 somethinggreater even than the immutable Self, more comprehensive, onewho is at once this Self and the Master of works in Nature. But hedirects the works of Nature with the eternal calm, the equality,the superiority to works and personality which belong to theimmutable. This, we may say, is the poise of being from whichhe directs works, and by growing into this we are growing intohis being and into the poise of divine works. From this he goesforth as the Will and Power of his being in Nature, manifestshimself in all existences, is born as Man in the world, is there inthe heart of all men, reveals himself as the Avatar, the divine birthin man; and as man grows into his being, it is into the divinebirth that he grows. Works must be done as a sacrifice to thisLord of our works, and we must by growing into the Self realiseour oneness with him in our being and see our personality as apartial 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 maintenanceand 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 disap-pear. The problem is no longer one of our personal action, forthat which makes our personality becomes a thing temporal andsubordinate, the question is then only one of the workings of thedivine Will through us in the universe. To understand that we


must know what this supreme Being is in himself and in Nature,what the workings of Nature are and what they lead to, and theintimate relation between the soul in Nature and this supremeSoul, of which bhakti with knowledge is the foundation. Theelucidation of these questions is the subject of the rest of theGita.

END OF THE FIRST SERIES

ESSAYS ON THE GITA

SECOND SERIES

PART I

THE SYNTHESIS OF WORKS,

LOVE AND KNOWLEDGE

I

The Two Natures1

THE FIRST six chapters of the Gita have been treated as asingle block of teachings, its primary basis of practice andknowledge; the remaining twelve may be similarly treated

as two closely connected blocks which develop the rest of thedoctrine from this primary basis. The seventh to the twelfthchapters lay down a large metaphysical statement of the natureof the Divine Being and on that foundation closely relate andsynthetise knowledge and devotion, just as the first part of theGita related and synthetised works and knowledge. The visionof the World-Purusha intervenes in the eleventh chapter, gives adynamic turn to this stage of the synthesis and relates it vividly toworks and life. Thus again all is brought powerfully back to theoriginal question of Arjuna round which the whole expositionrevolves and completes its cycle. Afterwards the Gita proceedsby the differentiation of the Purusha and Prakriti to work outits ideas of the action of the gunas, of the ascension beyond thegunas and of the culmination of desireless works with knowl-edge where that coalesces with Bhakti, — knowledge, worksand love made one, — and it rises thence to its great finale, thesupreme secret of self-surrender to the Master of Existence.

In this second part of the Gita we come to a more conciseand easy manner of statement than we have yet had. In thefirst six chapters the definitions have not yet been made whichgive the key to the underlying truth; difficulties are being metand solved; the progress is a little laboured and moves throughseveral involutions and returns; much is implied the bearing ofwhich is not yet clear. Here we seem to get on to clearer groundand to lay hold of a more compact and pointed expression. Butbecause of this very conciseness we have to be careful always

1 Gita, VII. 1-14.


of our steps in order to avoid error and a missing of the realsense. For we are here no longer steadily on the safe ground ofpsychological and spiritual experience, but have to deal with in-tellectual statements of spiritual and often of supracosmic truth.Metaphysical statement has always this peril and uncertaintyabout it that it is an attempt to define to our minds what isreally infinite, an attempt which has to be made, but can neverbe quite satisfactory, quite final or ultimate. The highest spiritualtruth can be lived, can be seen, but can only be partially stated.The deeper method and language of the Upanishads with its freeresort to image and symbol, its intuitive form of speech in whichthe hard limiting definiteness of intellectual utterance is brokendown and the implications of words are allowed to roll out intoan illimitable wave of suggestion, is in these realms the onlyright method and language. But the Gita cannot resort to thisform, because it is designed to satisfy an intellectual difficulty,answers a state of mind in which the reason, the arbiter to whichwe refer the conflicts of our impulses and sentiments, is at warwith itself and impotent to arrive at a conclusion. The reasonhas to be led to a truth beyond itself, but by its own means andin its own manner. Offered a spiritually psychological solution,of the data of which it has no experience, it can only be assuredof its validity if it is satisfied by an intellectual statement of thetruths of being upon which the solution rests.

So far the justifying truths that have been offered to it arethose with which it is already familiar, and they are only suffi-cient as a starting-point. There is first the distinction betweenthe Self and the individual being in Nature. The distinction hasbeen used to point out that this individual being in Nature isnecessarily subject, so long as he lives shut up within the actionof the ego, to the workings of the three gunas which make upby their unstable movements the whole scope and method ofthe reason, the mind and the life and senses in the body. Andwithin this circle there is no solution. Therefore the solution hasto be found by an ascent out of the circle, above this nature ofthe gunas, to the one immutable Self and silent Spirit, becausethen one gets beyond that action of the ego and desire which

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is the whole root of the difficulty. But since this by itself seemsto lead straight towards inaction, as beyond Nature there isno instrumentality of action and no cause or determinant ofaction, — for the immutable self is inactive, impartial and equalto all things, all workings and all happenings, — the Yoga ideais brought in of the Ishwara, the Divine as master of works andsacrifice, and it is hinted but not yet expressly stated that thisDivine exceeds even the immutable self and that in him lies thekey to cosmic existence. Therefore by rising to him through theSelf it is possible to have spiritual freedom from our works andyet to continue in the works of Nature. But it has not yet beenstated who is this Supreme, incarnate here in the divine teacherand charioteer of works, or what are his relations to the Self andto the individual being in Nature. Nor is it clear how the Will toworks coming from him can be other than the will in the natureof the three gunas. And if it is only that, then the soul obeyingit can hardly fail to be in subjection to the gunas in its action, ifnot in its spirit, and if so, at once the freedom promised becomeseither illusory or incomplete. Will seems to be an aspect of theexecutive part of being, to be power and active force of nature,Shakti, Prakriti. Is there then a higher Nature than that of thethree gunas? Is there a power of pragmatic creation, will, actionother than that of ego, desire, mind, sense, reason and the vitalimpulse?

Therefore, in this uncertainty, what has now to be done is togive more completely the knowledge on which divine works areto be founded. And this can only be the complete, the integralknowledge of the Divine who is the source of works and in whosebeing the worker becomes by knowledge free; for he knows thefree Spirit from whom all works proceed and participates inhis freedom. Moreover this knowledge must bring a light thatjustifies the assertion with which the first part of the Gita closes.It must ground the supremacy of bhakti over all other motivesand powers of spiritual consciousness and action; it must be aknowledge of the supreme Lord of all creatures to whom alonethe soul can offer itself in the perfect self-surrender which isthe highest height of all love and devotion. This is what the


Teacher proposes to give in the opening verses of the seventhchapter which initiate the development that occupies all the restof the book. “Hear,” he says, “how by practising Yoga with amind attached to me and with me as asraya (the whole basis,lodgment, point of resort of the conscious being and action)thou shalt know me without any remainder of doubt, integrally,samagram mam. I will speak to thee without omission or remain-der, ases.atah. ,” (for otherwise a ground of doubt may remain),“the essential knowledge, attended with all the comprehensiveknowledge, by knowing which there shall be no other thinghere left to be known.” The implication of the phrase is thatthe Divine Being is all, vasudevah. sarvam, and therefore if heis known integrally in all his powers and principles, then allis known, not only the pure Self, but the world and action andNature. There is then nothing else here left to be known, becauseall is that Divine Existence. It is only because our view here is notthus integral, because it rests on the dividing mind and reasonand the separative idea of the ego, that our mental perception ofthings is an ignorance. We have to get away from this mental andegoistic view to the true unifying knowledge, and that has twoaspects, the essential, jnana, and the comprehensive, vijnana,the direct spiritual awareness of the supreme Being and the rightintimate knowledge of the principles of his existence, Prakriti,Purusha and the rest, by which all that is can be known in itsdivine origin and in the supreme truth of its nature. That integralknowledge, says the Gita, is a rare and difficult thing; “amongthousands of men one here and there strives after perfection,and of those who strive and attain to perfection one here andthere knows me in all the principles of my existence, tattvatah. .”

Then, to start with and in order to found this integralknowledge, the Gita makes that deep and momentous distinctionwhich is the practical basis of all its Yoga, the distinction betweenthe two Natures, the phenomenal and the spiritual Nature. “Thefive elements (conditions of material being), mind, reason, ego,this is my eightfold divided Nature. But know my other Naturedifferent from this, the supreme which becomes the Jiva and bywhich 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 theSankhya philosophy and yet exceed them and give to their terms,which it keeps and extends, a Vedantic significance. An eightfoldNature constituted of the five bhutas, — elements, as it is ren-dered, but rather elemental or essential conditions of materialbeing to which are given the concrete names of earth, water, fire,air and ether, — the mind with its various senses and organs, thereason-will and the ego, is the Sankhya description of Prakriti.The Sankhya stops there, and because it stops there, it has to setup an unbridgeable division between the soul and Nature; it hasto posit them as two quite distinct primary entities. The Gitaalso, if it stopped there, would have to make the same incurableantinomy between the Self and cosmic Nature which would thenbe only the Maya of the three gunas and all this cosmic existencewould be simply the result of this Maya; it could be nothing else.But there is something else, there is a higher principle, a nature ofspirit, para prakr.tir me. There is a supreme nature of the Divinewhich is the real source of cosmic existence and its fundamentalcreative force and effective energy and of which the other lowerand ignorant Nature is only a derivation and a dark shadow.In this highest dynamis Purusha and Prakriti are one. Prakritithere is only the will and the executive power of the Purusha, hisactivity of being, — not a separate entity, but himself in Power.

This supreme Prakriti is not merely a presence of the powerof spiritual being immanent in cosmic activities. For then itmight be only the inactive presence of the all-pervading Self,immanent in all things or containing them, compelling in a waythe world action but not itself active. Nor is this highest Prakritithe avyakta of the Sankhyas, the primary unmanifest seed-stateof the manifest active eightfold nature of things, the one produc-tive original force of Prakriti out of which her many instrumentaland executive powers evolve. Nor is it sufficient to interpret thatidea of avyakta in the Vedantic sense and say that this supremeNature is the power involved and inherent in unmanifest Spiritor Self out of which cosmos comes and into which it returns. Itis that, but it is much more; for that is only one of its spiritualstates. It is the integral conscious-power of the supreme Being,


cit-sakti, which is behind the self and cosmos. In the immutableSelf it is involved in the Spirit; it is there, but in nivr.tti or aholding back from action: in the mutable self and the cosmos itcomes out into action, pravr.tti. There by its dynamic presence itevolves in the Spirit all existences and appears in them as theiressential spiritual nature, the persistent truth behind their playof subjective and objective phenomena. It is the essential qualityand force, svabhava, the self-principle of all their becoming, theinherent principle and divine power behind their phenomenalexistence. The balance of the gunas is only a quantitative andquite derivative play evolved out of this supreme Principle. Allthis activity of forms, all this mental, sensuous, intelligentialstriving of the lower nature is only a phenomenon, which couldnot be at all except for this spiritual force and this power ofbeing; 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 bythe notions it impresses on us, we shall not get at the real truthof our active existence. The real truth is this spiritual power, thisdivine force of being, this essential quality of the spirit in thingsor rather of the spirit in which things are and from which theydraw all their potencies and the seeds of their movements. Getat that truth, power, quality and we shall get at the real law ofour becoming and the divine principle of our living, its sourceand sanction in the Knowledge and not only its process in theIgnorance.

This is to throw the sense of the Gita into language suitedto our modern way of thinking; but if we look at its descriptionof the Para Prakriti, we shall find that this is practically thesubstance of what it says. For first, this other higher Prakriti is,says Krishna, my supreme nature, prakr.tim me param. And this“I” here is the Purushottama, the supreme Being, the supremeSoul, the transcendent and universal Spirit. The original andeternal nature of the Spirit and its transcendent and originatingShakti is what is meant by the Para Prakriti. For speaking first ofthe origin of the world from the point of view of the active powerof his Nature, Krishna assevers, “This is the womb of all beings,”etad-yonıni bhutani. And in the next line of the couplet, again

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stating the same fact from the point of view of the originatingSoul, he continues, “I am the birth of the whole world and sotoo its dissolution; there is nothing else supreme beyond Me.”Here then the supreme Soul, Purushottama, and the supremeNature, Para Prakriti, are identified: they are put as two ways oflooking at one and the same reality. For when Krishna declares,I am the birth of the world and its dissolution, it is evident thatit is this Para Prakriti, supreme Nature, of his being which isboth these things. The Spirit is the supreme Being in his infiniteconsciousness and the supreme Nature is the infinity of poweror will of being of the Spirit, — it is his infinite consciousnessin its inherent divine energy and its supernal divine action. Thebirth is the movement of evolution of this conscious Energy outof the Spirit, para prakr.tir jıvabhuta, its activity in the mutableuniverse; the dissolution is the withdrawing of that activity byinvolution of the Energy into the immutable existence and self-gathered power of the Spirit. That then is what is initially meantby the supreme Nature.

The supreme Nature, para prakr.tih. , is then the infinite time-less conscious power of the self-existent Being out of whichall existences in the cosmos are manifested and come out oftimelessness into Time. But in order to provide a spiritual basisfor this manifold universal becoming in the cosmos the supremeNature formulates itself as the Jiva. To put it otherwise, theeternal multiple soul of the Purushottama appears as individualspiritual existence in all the forms of the cosmos. All existencesare instinct with the life of the one indivisible Spirit; all aresupported in their personality, actions and forms by the eternalmultiplicity of the one Purusha. We must be careful not to makethe mistake of thinking that this supreme Nature is identical withthe Jiva manifested in Time in the sense that there is nothing elseor that it is only nature of becoming and not at all nature ofbeing: that could not be the supreme nature of the Spirit. Evenin Time it is something more; for otherwise the only truth of itin the cosmos would be nature of multiplicity and there wouldbe no nature of unity in the world. That is not what the Gitasays: it does not say that the supreme Prakriti is in its essence the


Jiva, jıvatmikam, but that it has become the Jiva, jıvabhutam;and it is implied in that expression that behind its manifestationas the Jiva here it is originally something else and higher, itis nature of the one supreme spirit. The Jiva, as we are toldlater on, is the Lord, ısvara, but in his partial manifestation,mamaivamsah. ; even all the multiplicity of beings in the universeor in numberless universes could not be in their becoming theintegral Divine, but only a partial manifestation of the infiniteOne. In them Brahman the one indivisible existence resides asif divided, avibhaktam ca bhutes.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 issustained, yayedam dharyate jagat, even as it is that from whichit is born with all its becomings, etad-yonıni bhutani sarvan. i, andthat also which withdraws the whole world and its existencesinto itself in the hour of dissolution, aham kr.tsnasya jagatah.prabhavah. pralayas tatha. But in the manifestation which isthus put forth in the Spirit, upheld in its action, withdrawn in itsperiodical rest from action, the Jiva is the basis of the multipleexistence; it is the multiple soul, if we may so call it, or, if weprefer, the soul of the multiplicity we experience here. It is onealways with the Divine in its being, different from it only in thepower of its being, — different not in the sense that it is not atall the same power, but in this sense that it only supports theone power in a partial multiply individualised action. Thereforeall things are initially, ultimately and in the principle of theircontinuance too the Spirit. The fundamental nature of all is na-ture of the Spirit, and only in their lower differential phenomenado they seem to be something else, to be nature of body, life,mind, reason, ego and the senses. But these are phenomenalderivatives, they are not the essential truth of our nature andour existence.

The supreme nature of spiritual being gives us then both anoriginal truth and power of existence beyond cosmos and a firstbasis of spiritual truth for the manifestation in the cosmos. Butwhere is the link between this supreme nature and the lower

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phenomenal nature? On me, says Krishna, all this, all that ishere — sarvam idam, the common phrase in the Upanishads forthe totality of phenomena in the mobility of the universe — isstrung like pearls upon a thread. But this is only an image whichwe cannot press very far; for the pearls are only kept in relationto each other by the thread and have no other oneness or rela-tion with the pearl-string except their dependence on it for thismutual connection. Let us go then from the image to that whichit images. It is the supreme nature of Spirit, the infinite consciouspower of its being, self-conscient, all-conscient, all-wise, whichmaintains these phenomenal existences in relation to each other,penetrates them, abides in and supports them and weaves theminto the system of its manifestation. This one supreme powermanifests not only in all as the One, but in each as the Jiva, theindividual spiritual presence; it manifests also as the essence ofall quality of Nature. These are therefore the concealed spiritualpowers behind all phenomena. This highest quality is not theworking of the three gunas, which is phenomenon of qualityand not its spiritual essence. It is rather the inherent, one, yetvariable inner power of all these superficial variations. It is afundamental truth of the Becoming, a truth that supports andgives a spiritual and divine significance to all its appearances.The workings of the gunas are only the superficial unstablebecomings of reason, mind, sense, ego, life and matter, sattvikabhava rajasas tamasas ca; but this is rather the essential stableoriginal intimate power of the becoming, svabhava. It is thatwhich determines the primary law of all becoming and of eachJiva; it constitutes the essence and develops the movement ofthe nature. It is a principle in each creature that derives fromand is immediately related to a transcendent divine Becoming,that of the Ishwara, madbhavah. . In this relation of the divinebhava to the svabhava and of the svabhava to the superficialbhavah. , of the divine Nature to the individual self-nature and ofthe self-nature in its pure and original quality to the phenomenalnature in all its mixed and confused play of qualities, we findthe link between that supreme and this lower existence. Thedegraded powers and values of the inferior Prakriti derive from


the absolute powers and values of the supreme Shakti and mustgo back to them to find their own source and truth and theessential law of their operation and movement. So too the soulor Jiva involved here in the shackled, poor and inferior playof the phenomenal qualities, if he would escape from it andbe divine and perfect, must by resort to the pure action of hisessential quality of Swabhava go back to that higher law of hisown being in which he can discover the will, the power, thedynamic principle, the highest working of his divine nature.

This is clear from the immediately subsequent passage inwhich the Gita gives a number of instances to show how theDivine in the power of his supreme nature manifests and actswithin the animate and so-called inanimate existences of theuniverse. We may disentangle them from the loose and free orderwhich the exigence of the poetical form imposes and put themin their proper philosophical series. First, the divine Power andPresence works within the five elemental conditions of matter.“I am taste in the waters, sound in ether, scent in earth, energyof light in fire,” and, it may be added for more completeness,touch or contact in air. That is to say, the Divine himself in hisPara Prakriti is the energy at the basis of the various sensoryrelations of which, according to the ancient Sankhya system,the ethereal, the radiant, electric and gaseous, the liquid and theother elemental conditions of matter are the physical medium.The five elemental conditions of matter are the quantitative ormaterial element in the lower nature and are the basis of ma-terial forms. The five Tanmatras — taste, touch, scent, and theothers — are the qualitative element. These Tanmatras are thesubtle energies whose action puts the sensory consciousness inrelation to the gross forms of matter, — they are the basis ofall phenomenal knowledge. From the material point of viewmatter is the reality and the sensory relations are derivative; butfrom the spiritual point of view the truth is the opposite. Matterand the material media are themselves derivative powers andat bottom are only concrete ways or conditions in which theworkings of the quality of Nature in things manifest themselvesto 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 ofbeing which so manifests itself to the soul through the senses.And what is essential in the senses, most spiritual, most subtleis itself stuff of that eternal quality and power. But energy orpower of being in Nature is the Divine himself in his Prakriti;each sense in its purity is therefore that Prakriti, each sense isthe Divine in his dynamic conscious force.

This we gather better from the other terms of the series. “Iam the light of sun and moon, the manhood in man, the intelli-gence of the intelligent, the energy of the energetic, the strengthof the strong, the ascetic force of those who do askesis, tapasya.”“I am life in all existences.” In each case it is the energy of theessential quality on which each of these becomings depends forwhat it has become, that is given as the characteristic sign indi-cating the presence of the divine Power in their nature. Again,“I am pranava in all the Vedas,” that is to say, the basic syllableOM, which is the foundation of all the potent creative soundsof the revealed word; OM is the one universal formulation ofthe energy of sound and speech, that which contains and sumsup, synthetises and releases all the spiritual power and all thepotentiality of Vak and Shabda and of which the other sounds,out of whose stuff words of speech are woven, are supposedto be the developed evolutions. That makes it quite clear. It isnot the phenomenal developments of the senses or of life or oflight, intelligence, energy, strength, manhood, ascetic force thatare proper to the supreme Prakriti. It is the essential quality inits spiritual power that constitutes the Swabhava. It is the forceof spirit so manifesting, it is the light of its consciousness andthe power of its energy in things revealed in a pure original signthat is the self-nature. That force, light, power is the eternal seedfrom which all other things are the developments and derivationsand variabilities and plastic circumstances. Therefore the Gitathrows in as the most general statement in the series, “Knowme to be the eternal seed of all existences, O son of Pritha.”This eternal seed is the power of spiritual being, the consciouswill in the being, the seed which, as is said elsewhere, the Divinecasts into the great Brahman, into the supramental vastness,


and from that all are born into phenomenal existence. It is thatseed of spirit which manifests itself as the essential quality in allbecomings and constitutes their swabhava.

The practical distinction between this original power ofessential quality and the phenomenal derivations of the lowernature, between the thing itself in its purity and the thing inits lower appearances, is indicated very clearly at the close ofthe series. “I am the strength of the strong devoid of desire andliking,” stripped of all attachment to the phenomenal pleasure ofthings. “I am in beings the desire which is not contrary to theirdharma.” And as for the secondary subjective becomings ofNature, bhavah. (states of mind, affections of desire, movementsof passion, the reactions of the senses, the limited and dual playof reason, the turns of the feeling and moral sense), which aresattwic, rajasic and tamasic, as for the working of the threegunas, they are, says the Gita, not themselves the pure action ofthe supreme spiritual nature, but are derivations from it; “theyare verily from me,” matta eva, they have no other origin, “but Iam not in them, it is they that are in me.” Here is indeed a strongand yet subtle distinction. “I am” says the Divine “the essentiallight, strength, desire, power, intelligence, but these derivationsfrom them I am not in my essence, nor am I in them, yet arethey all of them from me and they are all in my being.” It isthen upon the basis of these statements that we have to view thetransition of things from the higher to the lower and again fromthe lower back to the higher nature.

The first statement offers no difficulty. The strong man inspite of the divine nature of the principle of strength in him fallsinto subjection to desire and to attachment, stumbles into sin,struggles towards virtue. But that is because he descends in allhis derivative action into the grasp of the three gunas and doesnot govern that action from above, from his essential divinenature. The divine nature of his strength is not affected by thesederivations, it remains the same in its essence in spite of everyobscuration and every lapse. The Divine is there in that natureand supports him by its strength through the confusions of hislower 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 itsacts by the pure power of the divine will in his higher nature.But how can the Divine be desire, kama? for this desire, thiskama has been declared to be our one great enemy who has tobe slain. But that desire was the desire of the lower nature of thegunas which has its native point of origin in the rajasic being,rajogun. a-samudbhavah. ; for this is what we usually mean whenwe speak of desire. This other, the spiritual, is a will not contraryto the dharma.

Is it meant that the spiritual kama is a virtuous desire, ethicalin its nature, a sattwic desire, — for virtue is always sattwic in itsorigin and motive force? But then there would be here an obviouscontradiction, — since in the very next line all sattwic affectionsare declared to be not the Divine, but only lower derivations.Undoubtedly sin has to be abandoned if one is to get anywherenear the Godhead; but so too has virtue to be overpassed if weare to enter into the Divine Being. The sattwic nature has to beattained, but it has then to be exceeded. Ethical action is only ameans of purification by which we can rise towards the divinenature, but that nature itself is lifted beyond the dualities, —and indeed there could otherwise be no pure divine presence ordivine strength in the strong man who is subjected to the rajasicpassions. Dharma in the spiritual sense is not morality or ethics.Dharma, says the Gita elsewhere, is action governed by theswabhava, the essential law of one’s nature. And this swabhavais at its core the pure quality of the spirit in its inherent powerof conscious will and in its characteristic force of action. Thedesire meant here is therefore the purposeful will of the Divinein us searching for and discovering not the pleasure of the lowerPrakriti, but the Ananda of its own play and self-fulfilling; it isthe desire of the divine Delight of existence unrolling its ownconscious force of action in accordance with the law of theswabhava.

But what again is meant by saying that the Divine is notin the becomings, the forms and affections of the lower nature,even the sattwic, though they all are in his being? In a sense hemust evidently be in them, otherwise they could not exist. But


what is meant is that the true and supreme spiritual nature ofthe Divine is not imprisoned there; they are only phenomenain his being created out of it by the action of the ego and theignorance. The ignorance presents everything to us in an invertedvision and at least a partially falsified experience. We imaginethat the soul is in the body, almost a result and derivation fromthe body; even we so feel it: but it is the body that is in the souland a result and derivation from the soul. We think of the spiritas a small part of us — the Purusha who is no bigger than thethumb — in this great mass of material and mental phenomena:in reality, the latter for all its imposing appearance is a verysmall 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 ratherthan the Divine in these things. This lower nature of the threegunas which creates so false a view of things and imparts tothem an inferior character is a Maya, a power of illusion, bywhich it is not meant that it is all non-existent or deals withunrealities, but that it bewilders our knowledge, creates falsevalues, envelops us in ego, mentality, sense, physicality, limitedintelligence and there conceals from us the supreme truth of ourexistence. This illusive Maya hides from us the Divine that weare, the infinite and imperishable spirit. “By these three kindsof becoming which are of the nature of the gunas, this wholeworld is bewildered and does not recognise Me supreme beyondthem and imperishable.” If we could see that that Divine is thereal truth of our existence, all else also would change to ourvision, assume its true character and our life and action acquirethe divine values and move in the law of the divine nature.

But why then, since the Divine is there after all and thedivine nature at the root even of these bewildering derivations,since we are the Jiva and the Jiva is that, is this Maya so hard toovercome, maya duratyaya? Because it is still the Maya of theDivine, daivı hyes.a gun. amayı mama maya; “this is my divineMaya of the gunas.” It is itself divine and a development fromthe nature of the Divine, but the Divine in the nature of the gods;it is daivı, of the godheads or, if you will, of the Godhead, but ofthe Godhead in its divided subjective and lower cosmic aspects,

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sattwic, rajasic and tamasic. It is a cosmic veil which the God-head has spun around our understanding; Brahma, Vishnu andRudra have woven its complex threads; the Shakti, the SupremeNature is there at its base and is hidden in its every tissue. Wehave to work out this web in ourselves and turn through it andfrom it leaving it behind us when its use is finished, turn from thegods to the original and supreme Godhead in whom we shalldiscover at the same time the last sense of the gods and theirworks and the inmost spiritual verities of our own imperishableexistence. “To Me who turn and come, they alone cross overbeyond this Maya.”

II

The Synthesis ofDevotion and Knowledge1

THE GITA is not a treatise of metaphysical philosophy, inspite of the great mass of metaphysical ideas which ariseincidentally in its pages; for here no metaphysical truth

is brought into expression solely for its own sake. It seeks thehighest truth for the highest practical utility, not for intellectualor even for spiritual satisfaction, but as the truth that saves andopens to us the passage from our present mortal imperfectionto an immortal perfection. Therefore after giving us in the firstfourteen verses of this chapter a leading philosophical truth ofwhich we stand in need, it hastens in the next sixteen versesto make an immediate application of it. It turns it into a firststarting-point for the unification of works, knowledge and de-votion, — for the preliminary synthesis of works and knowledgeby themselves has already been accomplished.

We have before us three powers, the Purushottama as thesupreme truth of that into which we have to grow, the Self andthe Jiva. Or, as we may put it, there is the Supreme, there isthe impersonal spirit, and there is the multiple soul, timelessfoundation of our spiritual personality, the true and eternal in-dividual, mamaivamsah. sanatanah. . 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 conditioningIgnorance, is the nature of the Purushottama. In the impersonalSelf there is the same divine nature, but here it is in its state ofeternal rest, equilibrium, inactivity, nivritti. Finally, for activity,for pravritti, the Para Prakriti becomes the multiple spiritualpersonality, the Jiva. But the intrinsic activity of this supreme

1 Gita, VII. 15-28.

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Nature is always a spiritual, a divine working. It is force ofthe supreme divine Nature, it is the conscious will of the beingof the Supreme that throws itself out in various essential andspiritual power of quality in the Jiva: that essential power isthe swabhava of the Jiva. All act and becoming which proceeddirectly from this spiritual force are a divine becoming and apure and spiritual action. Therefore it follows that in action theeffort of the human individual must be to get back to his truespiritual personality and to make all his works flow from thepower of its supernal Shakti, to develop action through the souland the inmost intrinsic being, not through the mental idea andvital desire, and to turn all his acts into a pure outflowing ofthe will of the Supreme, all his life into a dynamic symbol of theDivine Nature.

But there is also this lower nature of the three gunas whosecharacter is the character of the ignorance and whose action isthe action of the ignorance, mixed, confused, perverted; it is theaction of the lower personality, of the ego, of the natural andnot of the spiritual individual. It is in order to recede from thatfalse personality that we have to resort to the impersonal Selfand make ourselves one with it. Then, freed so from the egopersonality, we can find the relation of the true individual to thePurushottama. It is one with him in being, even though necessar-ily partial and determinative, because individual, in action andtemporal manifestation of nature. Freed too from the lower na-ture we can realise the higher, the divine, the spiritual. Thereforeto act from the soul does not mean to act from the desire soul; forthat is not the high intrinsic being, but only the lower natural andsuperficial appearance. To act in accordance with the intrinsicnature, the swabhava, does not mean to act out of the passionsof the ego, to enact with indifference or with desire sin andvirtue according to the natural impulses and the unstable playof the gunas. Yielding to passion, an active or an inert indulgenceof sin is no way either to the spiritual quietism of the highestimpersonality or to the spiritual activity of the divine individualwho is to be a channel for the will of the supreme Person, adirect power and visible becoming of the Purushottama.


The Gita has laid it down from the beginning that the veryfirst precondition of the divine birth, the higher existence is theslaying of rajasic desire and its children, and that means theexclusion of sin. Sin is the working of the lower nature for thecrude satisfaction of its own ignorant, dull or violent rajasic andtamasic propensities in revolt against any high self-control andself-mastery of the nature by the spirit. And in order to get ridof this crude compulsion of the being by the lower Prakriti in itsinferior modes we must have recourse to the highest mode of thatPrakriti, the sattwic, which is seeking always for a harmoniouslight of knowledge and for a right rule of action. The Purusha,the soul within us which assents in Nature to the varying impulseof the gunas, has to give its sanction to that sattwic impulse andthat sattwic will and temperament in our being which seeks aftersuch a rule. The sattwic will in our nature has to govern us andnot the rajasic and tamasic will. This is the meaning of all highreason in action as of all true ethical culture; it is the law ofNature in us striving to evolve from her lower and disorderly toher higher and orderly action, to act not in passion and igno-rance with the result of grief and unquiet, but in knowledge andenlightened will with the result of inner happiness, poise andpeace. We cannot get beyond the three gunas, if we do not firstdevelop 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 knowledgeis reft away from them by Maya and they resort to the natureof being of the Asura.” This bewilderment is a befooling of thesoul in Nature by the deceptive ego. The evil-doer cannot attainto the Supreme because he is for ever trying to satisfy the idolego on the lowest scale of human nature; his real God is thisego. His mind and will, hurried away in the activities of theMaya of the three gunas, are not instruments of the spirit, butwilling slaves or self-deceived tools of his desires. He sees thislower nature only and not his supreme self and highest beingor the Godhead within himself and in the world: he explains allexistence to his will in the terms of ego and desire and servesonly ego and desire. To serve ego and desire without aspiration


to a higher nature and a higher law is to have the mind and thetemperament of the Asura. A first necessary step upward is toaspire to a higher nature and a higher law, to obey a better rulethan the rule of desire, to perceive and worship a nobler godheadthan the ego or than any magnified image of the ego, to become aright thinker and a right doer. This too is not in itself enough; foreven the sattwic man is subject to the bewilderment of the gunas,because he is still governed by wish and disliking, iccha-dves.a.He moves within the circle of the forms of Nature and has notthe highest, not the transcendental and integral knowledge. Stillby the constant upward aspiration in his ethical aim he in theend gets rid of the obscuration of sin which is the obscuration ofrajasic desire and passion and acquires a purified nature capableof deliverance from the rule of the triple Maya. By virtue aloneman cannot attain to the highest, but by virtue2 he can developa first capacity for attaining to it, adhikara. For the crude rajasicor the dull tamasic ego is difficult to shake off and put belowus; the sattwic ego is less difficult and at last, when it sufficientlysubtilises and enlightens itself, becomes even easy to transcend,transmute or annihilate.

Man, therefore, has first of all to become ethical, sukr.tı, andthen to rise to heights beyond any mere ethical rule of living, tothe light, largeness and power of the spiritual nature, where hegets beyond the grasp of the dualities and its delusion, dvandva-moha. There he no longer seeks his personal good or pleasureor shuns his personal suffering or pain, for by these things heis no longer affected, nor says any longer, “I am virtuous,” “Iam sinful,” but acts in his own high spiritual nature by the willof the Divine for the universal good. We have already seen thatfor this end self-knowledge, equality, impersonality are the firstnecessities, and that that is the way of reconciliation betweenknowledge and works, between spirituality and activity in theworld, between the ever immobile quietism of the timeless selfand 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.


the Gita now lays down another and greater necessity for theKarmayogin who has unified his Yoga of works with the Yogaof knowledge. Not knowledge and works alone are demandedof him now, but bhakti also, devotion to the Divine, love andadoration and the soul’s desire of the Highest. This demand,not expressly made until now, had yet been prepared when theTeacher laid down as the necessary turn of his Yoga the conver-sion of all works into a sacrifice to the Lord of our being andfixed as its culmination the giving up of all works, not only intoour impersonal Self, but through impersonality into the Beingfrom whom all our will and power originate. What was thereimplied is now brought out and we begin to see more fully theGita’s purpose.

We have now set before us three interdependent movementsof our release out of the normal nature and our growth into thedivine and spiritual being. “By the delusion of the dualities whicharises from wish and disliking, all existences in the creation areled into bewilderment,” says the Gita. That is the ignorance, theegoism which fails to see and lay hold on the Divine everywhere,because it sees only the dualities of Nature and is constantlyoccupied with its own separate personality and its seekings andshrinkings. For escape from this circle the first necessity in ourworks 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 doneby the steadying sattwic impulse of the ethical being. When thatis done, yes.am tvantagatam papam jananam pun. yakarman. am,— or rather as it is being done, for after a certain point allgrowth in the sattwic nature brings an increasing capacity for ahigh quietude, equality and transcendence, — it is necessary torise above the dualities and to become impersonal, equal, one selfwith the Immutable, one self with all existences. This process ofgrowing into the spirit completes our purification. But while thisis being done, while the soul is enlarging into self-knowledge, ithas also to increase in devotion. For it has not only to act in alarge spirit of equality, but to do also sacrifice to the Lord, tothat Godhead in all beings which it does not yet know perfectly,but which it will be able so to know, integrally, samagram mam,


when it has firmly the vision of the one self everywhere and in allexistences. Equality and vision of unity once perfectly gained, tedvandva-moha-nirmuktah. , a supreme bhakti, an all-embracingdevotion to the Divine, becomes the whole and the sole lawof the being. All other law of conduct merges into that surren-der, sarva-dharman parityajya. The soul then becomes firm inthis bhakti and in the vow of self-consecration of all its being,knowledge, works; for it has now for its sure base, its absolutefoundation of existence and action the perfect, the integral, theunifying knowledge of the all-originating Godhead, te bhajantemam dr.d.ha-vratah. .

From the ordinary point of view any return towards bhaktior continuation of the heart’s activities after knowledge andimpersonality have been gained, might seem to be a relapse. Forin bhakti there is always the element, the foundation even ofpersonality, since its motive-power is the love and adoration ofthe individual soul, the Jiva, turned towards the supreme anduniversal Being. But from the standpoint of the Gita, where theaim is not inaction and immergence in the eternal Impersonal,but a union with the Purushottama through the integrality ofour being, this objection cannot at all intervene. In this Yogathe soul escapes indeed its lower personality by the sense of itsimpersonal and immutable self-being; but it still acts and allaction belongs to the multiple soul in the mutability of Nature.If we do not bring in as a corrective to an excessive quietism theidea of sacrifice to the Highest, we have to regard this elementof action as something not at all ourselves, some remnant of theplay of the gunas without any divine reality behind it, a last dis-solving form of ego, of I-ness, a continued impetus of the lowerNature for which we are not responsible since our knowledgerejects it and aims at escape from it into pure inaction. But bycombining the tranquil impersonality of the one self with thestress of the works of Nature done as a sacrifice to the Lord,we by this double key escape from the lower egoistic personalityand grow into the purity of our true spiritual person. Then arewe no longer the bound and ignorant ego in the lower, but thefree Jiva in the supreme Nature. Then we no longer live in the


knowledge of the one immutable and impersonal self and thismutable multiple Nature as two opposite entities, but rise to thevery embrace of the Purushottama discovered simultaneouslythrough both of these powers of our being. All three are thespirit, and the two which are apparent opposites prove to beonly confronting faces of the third which is the highest. “Thereis the immutable and impersonal spiritual being (Purusha),” saysKrishna later on, “and there is the mutable and personal spiritualbeing. But there is too another Highest (uttama purus.a) calledthe supreme self, Paramatman, he who has entered into thiswhole world and upbears it, the Lord, the imperishable. I amthis Purushottama who am beyond the mutable and am greaterand higher even than the immutable. He who has knowledge ofme as the Purushottama, adores me (has bhakti for me, bhajati),with all-knowledge and in every way of his natural being.” Andit is this bhakti of an integral knowledge and integral self-givingwhich the Gita now begins to develop.

For note that it is bhakti with knowledge which the Gitademands from the disciple and it regards all other forms ofdevotion as good in themselves but still inferior; they may dowell by the way, but they are not the thing at which it aims inthe soul’s culmination. Among those who have put away thesin of the rajasic egoism and are moving towards the Divine,the Gita distinguishes between four kinds of bhaktas. There arethose who turn to him as a refuge from sorrow and suffering inthe world, arta. There are those who seek him as the giver ofgood in the world, artharthı. There are those who come to himin the desire for knowledge, jijnasu. And lastly there are thosewho adore him with knowledge, jnanı. All are approved by theGita, but only on the last does it lay the seal of its completesanction. All these movements without exception are high andgood, udarah. sarva evaite, but the bhakti with knowledge excelsthem all, visis.yate. We may say that these forms are successivelythe 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-emotionalonly in its inferior forms or in some of its more outward manifestations.


practical and dynamic nature, that of the reasoning intellectualnature, and that of the highest intuitive being which takes upall 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 manyexistences that one can, after possession of the integral knowl-edge and after working that out in oneself through many lives,attain at the long last to the Transcendent. For the knowledgeof the Divine as all things that are is difficult to attain and rareon earth is the great soul, mahatma, who is capable of fully soseeing him and of entering into him with his whole being, inevery way of his nature, by the wide power of this all-embracingknowledge, sarvavit sarvabhavena.

It may be asked how is that devotion high and noble, udara,which seeks God only for the worldly boons he can give or asa refuge in sorrow and suffering, and not the Divine for itsown sake? Do not egoism, weakness, desire reign in such anadoration and does it not belong to the lower nature? Moreover,where there is not knowledge, the devotee does not approachthe Divine in his integral all-embracing truth, vasudevah. sarvamiti, but constructs imperfect names and images of the Godheadwhich are only reflections of his own need, temperament andnature, and he worships them to help or appease his naturallongings. He constructs for the Godhead the name and formof Indra or Agni, of Vishnu or Shiva, of a divinised Christ orBuddha, or else some composite of natural qualities, an indul-gent God of love and mercy, or a severe God of righteousnessand justice, or an awe-inspiring God of wrath and terror andflaming punishments, or some amalgam of any of these, andto that he raises his altars without and in his heart and mindand falls down before it to demand from it worldly good andjoy or healing of his wounds or a sectarian sanction for anerring, dogmatic, intellectual, intolerent knowledge. All this upto a certain point is true enough. Very rare is the great soulwho knows that Vasudeva the omnipresent Being is all thatis, vasudevah. sarvam iti sa mahatma sudurlabhah. . Men are ledaway by various outer desires which take from them the working


of the inner knowledge, kamais tais tair hr.tajnanah. . Ignorant,they resort to other godheads, imperfect forms of the deity whichcorrespond to their desire, prapadyante ’nyadevatah. . Limited,they set up this or that rule and cult, tam tam niyamam asthaya,which satisfies the need of their nature. And in all this it is acompelling personal determination, it is this narrow need oftheir own nature that they follow and take for the highest truth,— incapable yet of the infinite and its largeness. The Godheadin these forms gives them their desires if their faith is whole;but these fruits and gratifications are temporary and it is a pettyintelligence and unformed reason which makes the pursuit ofthem its principle of religion and life. And so far as there is aspiritual attainment by this way, it is only to the gods; it is onlythe Divine in formations of mutable nature and as the giver ofher results that they realise. But those who adore the transcen-dent and integral Godhead embrace all this and transform itall, exalt the gods to their highest, Nature to her summits, andgo beyond them to the very Godhead, realise and attain to theTranscendent. Devan deva-yajo yanti mad-bhakta yanti mamapi.

Still the supreme Godhead does not at all reject these devo-tees because of their imperfect vision. For the Divine in hissupreme transcendent being, unborn, imminuable and superiorto all these partial manifestations, cannot be easily known toany living creature. He is self-enveloped in this immense cloakof Maya, that Maya of his Yoga, by which he is one with theworld and yet beyond it, immanent but hidden, seated in allhearts but not revealed to any and every being. Man in Naturethinks that these manifestations in Nature are all the Divine,when they are only his works and his powers and his veils. Heknows all past and all present and future existences, but himnone yet knoweth. If then after thus bewildering them with hisworkings 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, heaccepts their bhakti and answers to it with the reply of divinelove and compassion. These forms are after all a certain kind of


manifestation through which the imperfect human intelligencecan touch him, these desires are first means by which our soulsturn 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 ofthat faith in his cult and worship he gets his desire and thespiritual realisation for which he is at the moment fitted. Byseeking all his good from the Divine, he shall come in the end toseek in the Divine all his good. By depending for his joys on theDivine, he shall learn to fix in the Divine all his joy. By knowingthe Divine in his forms and qualities, he shall come to know himas the All and the Transcendent who is the source of all things.4

Thus by spiritual development devotion becomes one withknowledge. The Jiva comes to delight in the one Godhead, —in the Divine known as all being and consciousness and delightand 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 lifeand being are an eternal Yoga with the Transcendent than whomthere is nothing higher, with the Universal besides whom there isnone else and nothing else. On him is concentred all his bhakti,ekabhaktih. , not on any partial godhead, rule or cult. This singledevotion is his whole law of living and he has gone beyond allcreeds of religious belief, rules of conduct, personal aims of life.He has no griefs to be healed, for he is in possession of the All-blissful. He has no desires to hunger after, for he possesses thehighest and the All and is close to the All-Power that bringsall fulfilment. He has no doubts or baffled seekings left, for allknowledge streams upon him from the Light in which he lives.He loves perfectly the Divine and is his beloved; for as he takesjoy 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 re-moval of sorrow and evil and ignorance and for the increasing evolution and integralmanifestation of the supreme good, power, joy and knowledge in this phenomenalNature.


the God-lover who has the knowledge, jnanı bhakta. And thisknower, says the Godhead in the Gita, is my self; the others seizeonly motives and aspects in Nature, but he the very self-beingand 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. Inhim the Jiva’s cosmic existence is justified because it has exceededitself and so found its own whole and highest truth of being.

III

The Supreme Divine1

ALREADY what has been said in the seventh chapter pro-vides us with the starting-point of our new and fullerposition and fixes it with sufficient precision. Substan-

tially it comes to this that we are to move inwardly towards agreater consciousness and a supreme existence, not by a totalexclusion of our cosmic nature, but by a higher, a spiritualfulfilment of all that we now essentially are. Only there is tobe a change from our mortal imperfection to a divine perfectionof being. The first idea on which this possibility is founded, is theconception of the individual soul in man as in its eternal essenceand its original power a ray of the supreme Soul and Godhead,here a veiled manifestation of him, a being of his being, a con-sciousness of his consciousness, a nature of his nature, but in theobscurity of this mental and physical existence self-forgetful ofits source, its reality, its true character. The second idea is thatof the double nature of the Soul in manifestation, — the originalnature in which it is one with its own true spiritual being, andthe derived in which it is subject to the confusions of egoism andignorance. The latter has to be cast away and the spiritual hasto 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 Spiritand re-become a portion of the Godhead from whom we havedescended into this mortal figure of being.

There is here at once a departure from the general contem-porary mind of Indian thought, a less negating attitude, a greateraffirmation. In place of its obsessing idea of a self-annulment ofNature we get the glimpse of an ampler solution, the principleof a self-fulfilment in divine Nature. There is, even, at least

1 Gita, VII. 29-30, VIII.


a foreshadowing of the later developments of the religions ofBhakti. Our first experience of what is beyond our normal status,concealed behind the egoistic being in which we live, is still forthe Gita the calm of a vast impersonal immutable self in whoseequality and oneness we lose our petty egoistic personality andcast off in its tranquil purity all our narrow motives of desire andpassion. But our second completer vision reveals to us a livingInfinite, a divine immeasurable Being from whom all that we areproceeds 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 inhim poised in the supremacy of this Infinite. And this is doneat one and the same time by three simultaneous movements, —an integral self-finding through works founded in his and ourspiritual nature, an integral self-becoming through knowledgeof the Divine Being in whom all exists and who is all, and —most sovereign and decisive movement of all — an integral self-giving through love and devotion of our whole being to this Alland this Supreme, attracted to the Master of our works, to theInhabitant of our hearts, to the continent of all our consciousexistence. To him who is the source of all that we are, we give allthat we are. Our persistent consecration turns into knowledgeof 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 andopens the mystery of his deepest heart of being. Love completesthe triple cord of the sacrifice, perfects the triune key of thehighest secret, uttamam rahasyam.

An integral knowledge in our self-giving is the first conditionof its effective force. And therefore we have first of all to knowthis Purusha in all the powers and principles of his divine exis-tence, tattvatah. , in the whole harmony of it, in its eternal essenceand living process. But to the ancient thought all the value ofthis knowledge, tattvajnana, lay in its power for release out ofour mortal birth into the immortality of a supreme existence.The Gita therefore proceeds next to show how this liberationtoo in the highest degree is a final outcome of its own movementof spiritual self-fulfilment. The knowledge of the Purushottama,

The Supreme Divine 291

it says in effect, is the perfect knowledge of the Brahman. Thosewho have resort to Me as their refuge, mam asritya, their divinelight, their deliverer, receiver and harbourer of their souls, thosewho turn to Me in their spiritual effort towards release fromage and death, from the mortal being and its limitations, saysKrishna, come to know that Brahman and all the integralityof the spiritual nature and the entirety of Karma. And becausethey know Me and know at the same time the material and thedivine nature of being and the truth of the Master of sacrifice,they keep knowledge of Me also in the critical moment of theirdeparture from physical existence and have at that momenttheir whole consciousness in union with Me. Therefore theyattain to Me. No longer bound to the mortal existence, theyreach the very highest status of the Divine quite as effectively asthose who lose their separate personality in the impersonal andimmutable Brahman. Thus the Gita closes this important anddecisive seventh chapter.

Here we have certain expressions which give us in theirbrief sum the chief essential truths of the manifestation of thesupreme Divine in the cosmos. All the originative and effectiveaspects of it are there, all that concerns the soul in its return tointegral self-knowledge. First there is that Brahman, tad brahma;adhyatma, second, the principle of the self in Nature; adhibhutaand adhidaiva next, the objective phenomenon and subjectivephenomenon of being; adhiyajna last, the secret of the cosmicprinciple of works and sacrifice. I, the Purushottama (mamviduh. ), says in effect Krishna, I who am above all these things,must yet be sought and known through all together and bymeans of their relations, — that is the only complete way for thehuman consciousness which is seeking its path back towardsMe. But these terms in themselves are not at first quite clear orat least they are open to different interpretations, they have tobe made precise in their connotation, and Arjuna the disciple atonce asks for their elucidation. Krishna answers very briefly, —nowhere does the Gita linger very long upon any purely meta-physical explanation; it gives only so much and in such a way aswill make their truth just seizable for the soul to proceed on to


experience. By that Brahman, a phrase which in the Upanishadsis more than once used for the self-existent as opposed to thephenomenal being, the Gita intends, it appears, the immutableself-existence which is the highest self-expression of the Divineand on whose unalterable eternity all the rest, all that moves andevolves, is founded, aks.aram paramam. By adhyatma it meanssvabhava, the spiritual way and law of being of the soul in thesupreme Nature. Karma, it says, is the name given to the creativeimpulse and energy, visargah. , which looses out things from thisfirst essential self-becoming, this Swabhava, and effects, creates,works out under its influence the cosmic becoming of existencesin Prakriti. By adhibhuta is to be understood all the result ofmutable becoming, ks.aro bhavah. . By adhidaiva is intended thePurusha, the soul in Nature, the subjective being who observesand enjoys as the object of his consciousness all that is thismutable becoming of his essential existence worked out here byKarma in Nature. By adhiyajna, the Lord of works and sac-rifice, I mean, says Krishna, myself, the Divine, the Godhead,the Purushottama here secret in the body of all these embodiedexistences. All that is, therefore, falls within this formula.

The Gita immediately proceeds from this brief statementto work out the idea of the final release by knowledge whichit has suggested in the last verse of the preceding chapter. Itwill return indeed upon its thought hereafter to give such ul-terior light as is needed for action and inner realisation, andwe may wait till then for a fuller knowledge of all that theseterms indicate. But before we proceed farther, it is necessary tobring out as much of the connection between these things as weare justified in understanding from this passage itself and fromwhat has gone before. For here is indicated the Gita’s idea of theprocess of the cosmos. First there is the Brahman, the highestimmutable self-existent being which all existences are behindthe play of cosmic Nature in time and space and causality, desa-kala-nimitta. For by that self-existence alone time and space andcausality are able to exist, and without that unchanging supportomnipresent, yet indivisible they could not proceed to their di-visions and results and measures. But of itself the immutable


Brahman does nothing, causes nothing, determines nothing; it isimpartial, equal, all-supporting, but does not select or originate.What then originates, what determines, what gives the divineimpulsion of the Supreme? what is it that governs Karma andactively unrolls the cosmic becoming in Time out of the eternalbeing? It is Nature as Swabhava. The Supreme, the Godhead, thePurushottama is there and supports on his eternal immutabilitythe action of his higher spiritual Shakti. He displays the divineBeing, Consciousness, Will or Power, yayedam dharyate jagat:that is the Para Prakriti. The self-awareness of the Spirit in thissupreme Nature perceives in the light of self-knowledge thedynamic idea, the authentic truth of whatever he separates inhis own being and expresses it in the Swabhava, the spiritualnature of the Jiva. The inherent truth and principle of the selfof each Jiva, that which works itself out in manifestation, theessential divine nature in all which remains constant behind allconversions, perversions, reversions, that is the Swabhava. Allthat is in the Swabhava is loosed out into cosmic Nature forher to do what she can with it under the inner eye of the Pu-rushottama. Out of the constant svabhava, out of the essentialnature and self-principle of being of each becoming, she createsthe varied mutations by which she strives to express it, unrollsall her changes in name and form, in time and space and thosesuccessions of condition developed one out of the other in timeand space which we call causality, nimitta.

All this bringing out and continual change from state tostate is Karma, is action of Nature, is the energy of Prakriti,the worker, the goddess of processes. It is first a loosing forthof the svabhava into its creative action, visargah. . The creationis of existences in the becoming, bhuta-karah. , and of all thatthey subjectively or otherwise become, bhava-karah. . All takentogether, it is a constant birth of things in Time, udbhava, ofwhich the creative energy of Karma is the principle. All thismutable becoming emerges by a combination of the powers andenergies of Nature, adhibhuta, which constitutes the world andis the object of the soul’s consciousness. In it all the soul is theenjoying and observing Deity in Nature; the divine powers of


mind and will and sense, all the powers of its conscious beingby which it reflects this working of Prakriti are its godheads,adhidaiva. This soul in Nature is therefore the ks.ara purus.a, itis the mutable soul, the eternal activity of the Godhead: the samesoul in the Brahman drawn back from her is the aks.ara purus.a,the immutable self, the eternal silence of the Godhead. But inthe form and body of the mutable being inhabits the supremeGodhead. Possessing at once the calm of the immutable existenceand the enjoyment of the mutable action there dwells in man thePurushottama. He is not only remote from us in some supremestatus beyond, but he is here too in the body of every being, inthe heart of man and in Nature. There he receives the works ofNature as a sacrifice and awaits the conscious self-giving of thehuman soul: but always even in the human creature’s ignoranceand egoism he is the Lord of his swabhava and the Master ofall his works, who presides over the law of Prakriti and Karma.From him the soul came forth into the play of Nature’s muta-tions; to him the soul returns through immutable self-existenceto the highest status of the Divine, param dhama.

Man, born into the world, revolves between world andworld in the action of Prakriti and Karma. Purusha in Prakritiis his formula: what the soul in him thinks, contemplates andacts, that always he becomes. All that he had been, determinedhis present birth; and all that he is, thinks, does in this life up tothe moment of his death, determines what he will become in theworlds beyond and in lives yet to be. If birth is a becoming, deathalso is a becoming, not by any means a cessation. The body isabandoned, but the soul goes on its way, tyaktva kalevaram.Much then depends on what he is at the critical moment of hisdeparture. For whatever form of becoming his consciousness isfixed on at the time of death and has been full of that always inhis mind and thought before death, to that form he must attain,since the Prakriti by Karma works out the soul’s thoughts andenergies and that is in real fact her whole business. Therefore, ifthe soul in the human being desires to attain to the status of thePurushottama, there are two necessities, two conditions whichmust be satisfied before that can be possible. He must have


moulded towards that ideal his whole inner life in his earthlyliving; and he must be faithful to his aspiration and will in hisdeparting. “Whoever leaves his body and departs” says Krishna“remembering me at his time of end, comes to my bhava,” thatof the Purushottama, my status of being. He is united with theoriginal being of the Divine and that is the ultimate becomingof the soul, paro bhavah. , the last result of Karma in its returnupon itself and towards its source. The soul which has followedthe play of cosmic evolution that veils here its essential spiritualnature, its original form of becoming, svabhava, and has passedthrough all these other ways of becoming of its consciousnesswhich are only its phenomena, tam tam bhavam, returns to thatessential nature and, finding through this return its true self andspirit, comes to the original status of being which is from thepoint of view of the return a highest becoming, mad-bhavam. Ina certain sense we may say that it becomes God, since it unitesitself with nature of the Divine in a last transformation of itsown phenomenal nature and existence.

The Gita here lays a great stress on the thought and state ofmind at the time of death, a stress which will with difficulty beunderstood if we do not recognise what may be called the self-creative power of the consciousness. What the thought, the innerregard, the faith, sraddha, settles itself upon with a complete anddefinite insistence, into that our inner being tends to change. Thistendency becomes a decisive force when we go to those higherspiritual and self-evolved experiences which are less dependenton external things than is our ordinary psychology, enslaved asthat is to outward Nature. There we can see ourselves steadilybecoming that on which we keep our minds fixed and to whichwe constantly aspire. Therefore there any lapse of the thought,any infidelity of the memory means always a retardation of thechange or some fall in its process and a going back towards whatwe were before, — at least so long as we have not substantiallyand irrevocably fixed our new becoming. When we have donethat, when we have made it normal to our experience, the mem-ory of it remains self-existently because that now is the naturalform of our consciousness. In the critical moment of passing


from the mortal plane of living, the importance of our thenstate of consciousness becomes evident. But it is not a death-bed remembrance at variance with or insufficiently prepared bythe whole tenor of our life and our past subjectivity that canhave this saving power. The thought of the Gita here is not on apar with the indulgences and facilities of popular religion; it hasnothing in common with the crude fancies that make the absolu-tion and last unction of the priest, an edifying “Christian” deathafter an unedifying profane life or the precaution or accident ofa death in sacred Benares or holy Ganges a sufficient machineryof salvation. The divine subjective becoming on which the mindhas to be fixed firmly in the moment of the physical death, yamsmaran bhavam tyajati ante kalevaram, must have been one intowhich the soul was at each moment growing inwardly duringthe physical life, sada tad-bhava-bhavitah. . “Therefore,” says thedivine Teacher, “at all times remember me and fight; for if thymind and thy understanding are always fixed on and given up toMe, mayi arpita-mano-buddhih. , to Me thou shalt surely come.For it is by thinking always of him with a consciousness unitedwith him in an undeviating Yoga of constant practice that onecomes to the divine and supreme Purusha.”

We arrive here at the first description of this supreme Pu-rusha, — the Godhead who is even more and greater than theImmutable and to whom the Gita gives subsequently the nameof Purushottama. He too in his timeless eternity is immutableand far beyond all this manifestation and here in Time theredawn on us only faint glimpses of his being conveyed throughmany varied symbols and disguises, avyakto aks.arah. . Still he isnot merely a featureless or indiscernible existence, anirdesyam;or he is indiscernible only because he is subtler than the lastsubtlety of which the mind is aware and because the form of theDivine is beyond our thought, an. or an. ıyamsam acintya-rupam.This supreme Soul and Self is the Seer, the Ancient of Days andin his eternal self-vision and wisdom the Master and Ruler of allexistence who sets in their place in his being all things that are,kavim puran. am anusasitaram sarvasya dhataram. This supremeSoul is the immutable self-existent Brahman of whom the Veda-


knowers speak, and this is that into which the doers of askesisenter when they have passed beyond the affections of the mindof mortality and for the desire of which they practise the controlof the bodily passions.2 That eternal reality is the highest step,place, foothold of being (padam); therefore is it the supreme goalof the soul’s movement in Time, itself no movement but a statusoriginal, sempiternal and supreme, param sthanam adyam.

The Gita describes the last state of the mind of the Yogin inwhich he passes from life through death to this supreme divineexistence. A motionless mind, a soul armed with the strength ofYoga, a union with God in bhakti, — the union by love is nothere superseded by the featureless unification through knowl-edge, it remains to the end a part of the supreme force of theYoga, — and the life-force entirely drawn up and set betweenthe brows in the seat of mystic vision. All the doors of thesense are closed, the mind is shut in into the heart, the life-forcetaken up out of its diffused movement into the head, the intel-ligence concentrated in the utterance of the sacred syllable OMand its conceptive thought in the remembrance of the supremeGodhead, mam anusmaran. That is the established Yogic wayof going, a last offering up of the whole being to the Eternal,the Transcendent. But still that is only a process; the essentialcondition is the constant undeviating memory of the Divine inlife, even in action and battle — mam anusmara yudhya ca —and the turning of the whole act of living into an uninterruptedYoga, nitya-yoga. Whoever does that, finds Me easy to attain,says the Godhead; he is the great soul who reaches the supremeperfection.

The condition to which the soul arrives when it thus departsfrom life is supracosmic. The highest heavens of the cosmic planare subject to a return to rebirth; but there is no rebirth im-posed on the soul that departs to the Purushottama. Thereforewhatever fruit can be had from the aspiration of knowledge tothe indefinable Brahman, is acquired also by this other and com-prehensive aspiration through knowledge, works and love to the

2 The language here is taken bodily from the Upanishads.


self-existent Godhead who is the Master of works and the Friendof mankind and of all beings. To know him so and so to seekhim does not bind to rebirth or to the chain of Karma; the soulcan satisfy its desire to escape permanently from the transientand painful condition of our mortal being. And the Gita here,in order to make more precise to the mind this circling round ofbirths and the escape from it, adopts the ancient theory of thecosmic cycles which became a fixed part of Indian cosmologicalnotions. There is an eternal cycle of alternating periods of cosmicmanifestation and non-manifestation, each period called respec-tively a day and a night of the creator Brahma, each of equallength in Time, the long aeon of his working which endures fora thousand ages, the long aeon of his sleep of another thousandsilent ages. At the coming of the Day all manifestations are borninto being out of the unmanifest, at the coming of the Night allvanish or are dissolved into it. Thus all these existences alternatehelplessly in the cycle of becoming and non-becoming; they comeinto the becoming again and again, bhutva bhutva, and they goback constantly into the unmanifest. But this unmanifest is notthe original divinity of the Being; there is another status of hisexistence, bhavo ’nyo, a supracosmic unmanifest beyond thiscosmic non-manifestation, which is eternally self-seated, is notan opposite of this cosmic status of manifestation but far aboveand unlike it, changeless, eternal, not forced to perish with theperishing of all these existences. “He is called the unmanifest im-mutable, him they speak of as the supreme soul and status, andthose who attain to him return not; that is my supreme place ofbeing, paramam dhama.” For the soul attaining to it has escapedout of the cycle of cosmic manifestation and non-manifestation.

Whether we entertain or we dismiss this cosmological no-tion, — which depends on the value we are inclined to assignto the knowledge of “the knowers of day and night,” — theimportant thing is the turn the Gita gives to it. One mighteasily imagine that this eternally unmanifested Being whose sta-tus seems to have nothing to do with the manifestation or thenon-manifestation, must be the ever undefined and indefinableAbsolute, and the proper way to reach him is to get rid of all


that we have become in the manifestation, not to carry up to itour whole inner consciousness in a combined concentration ofthe mind’s knowledge, the heart’s love, the Yogic will, the vitallife-force. Especially, bhakti seems inapplicable to the Absolutewho is void of every relation, avyavaharya. “But” insists theGita, — although this condition is supracosmic and although itis eternally unmanifest, — still “that supreme Purusha has to bewon by a bhakti which turns to him alone in whom all beingsexist and by whom all this world has been extended in space.” Inother words, the supreme Purusha is not an entirely relationlessAbsolute aloof from our illusions, but he is the Seer, Creatorand Ruler of the worlds, kavim anusasitaram, dhataram, andit is by knowing and by loving Him as the One and the All,vasudevah. sarvam iti, that we ought by a union with him ofour whole conscious being in all things, all energies, all actionsto seek the supreme consummation, the perfect perfection, theabsolute release.

Then there comes a more curious thought which the Gita hasadopted from the mystics of the early Vedanta. It gives the dif-ferent times at which the Yogin has to leave his body accordingas he wills to seek rebirth or to avoid it. Fire and light and smokeor mist, the day and the night, the bright fortnight of the lunarmonth and the dark, the northern solstice and the southern,these are the opposites. By the first in each pair the knowers ofthe Brahman go to the Brahman; but by the second the Yoginreaches the “lunar light” and returns subsequently to humanbirth. These are the bright and the dark paths, called the path ofthe gods and the path of the fathers in the Upanishads, and theYogin who knows them is not misled into any error. Whateverpsycho-physical fact or else symbolism there may be behind thisnotion,3 — it comes down from the age of the mystics who sawin every physical thing an effective symbol of the psychological

3 Yogic experience shows in fact that there is a real psycho-physical truth, not indeedabsolute in its application, behind this idea, viz., that in the inner struggle between thepowers of the Light and the powers of the Darkness, the former tend to have a naturalprevalence in the bright periods of the day or the year, the latter in the dark periods, andthis balance may last until the fundamental victory is won.


and who traced everywhere an interaction and a sort of identityof the outward with the inward, light and knowledge, the fieryprinciple and the spiritual energy, — we need observe only theturn by which the Gita closes the passage: “Therefore at all timesbe in Yoga.”

For that is after all the essential, to make the whole beingone with the Divine, so entirely and in all ways one as to benaturally and constantly fixed in union, and thus to make allliving, not only thought and meditation, but action, labour, bat-tle, a remembering of God. “Remember me and fight,” meansnot to lose the ever-present thought of the Eternal for one singlemoment in the clash of the temporal which normally absorbs ourminds, and that seems sufficiently difficult, almost impossible.It is entirely possible indeed only if the other conditions aresatisfied. If we have become in our consciousness one self withall, one self which is always to our thought the Divine, and evenour eyes and our other senses see and sense the Divine Beingeverywhere so that it is impossible for us at any time at all tofeel or think of anything as that merely which the unenlightenedsense perceives, but only as the Godhead at once concealed andmanifested in that form, and if our will is one in consciousnesswith a supreme will and every act of will, of mind, of body is feltto come from it, to be its movement, instinct with it or identical,then what the Gita demands can be integrally done. The remem-brance of the Divine Being becomes no longer an intermittentact of the mind, but the natural condition of our activities andin a way the very substance of the consciousness. The Jiva hasbecome possessed of its right and natural, its spiritual relationto the Purushottama and all our life is a Yoga, an accomplishedand yet an eternally self-accomplishing oneness.

IV

The Secret of Secrets

ALL THE truth that has developed itself at this lengthstep by step, each bringing forward a fresh aspect of theintegral knowledge and founding on it some result of

spiritual state and action, has now to take a turn of immenseimportance. The Teacher therefore takes care first to draw at-tention to the decisive character of what he is about to say, sothat the mind of Arjuna may be awakened and attentive. Forhe is going to open his mind to the knowledge and sight of theintegral Divinity and lead up to the vision of the eleventh book,by which the warrior of Kurukshetra becomes conscious of theauthor and upholder of his being and action and mission, theGodhead in man and the world, whom nothing in man andthe world limits or binds, because all proceeds from him, is amovement in his infinite being, continues and is supported byhis will, is justified in his divine self-knowledge, has him alwaysfor its origin, substance and end. Arjuna is to become awareof himself as existing only in God and as acting only by thepower within him, his workings only an instrumentality of thedivine action, his egoistic consciousness only a veil and to hisignorance a misrepresentation of the real being within him whichis an immortal spark and portion of the supreme Godhead.

This vision is to remove whatever doubt may still remainwithin his mind; it is to make him strong for the action fromwhich he has shrunk, but to which he is irrevocably commandedand can no more recoil from it, — for to recoil would be thenegation and denial of the divine will and sanction within himalready expressed in his individual consciousness but soon toassume the appearance of the greater cosmic sanction. For nowthe world Being appears to him as the body of God ensouled bythe eternal Time-spirit and with its majestic and dreadful voicemissions him to the crash of the battle. He is called by it to


the liberation of his spirit, to the fulfilment of his action in thecosmic mystery, and the two — liberation and action — are tobe one movement. His intellectual doubts are clearing away asa greater light of self-knowledge and the knowledge of God andNature is being unfolded before him. But intellectual clarity isnot enough; he must see with the inner sight illumining his blindoutward human vision, so that he may act with the consent ofhis whole being, with a perfect faith in all his members, sraddha,with a perfect devotion to the Self of his self and the Master ofhis being and to the same Self of the world and Master of allbeing in the universe.

All that has gone before laid the foundations of the knowl-edge or prepared its first necessary materials or scaffolding, butnow the full frame of the structure is to be placed before hisunsealed vision. All that is to come after will have its greatimportance because it will analyse parts of this frame, show inwhat this or that in it consists; but in substance the integralknowledge of the Being who is speaking to him is to be now un-veiled to his eyes so that he cannot choose but see. What has gonebefore showed him that he is not bound fatally to the knot of theignorance and egoistic action in which he had hitherto remainedcontented till its partial solutions sufficed no longer to satisfy hismind bewildered by the conflict of opposite appearances thatmake up the action of the world and his heart troubled by theentanglement of his works from which he feels himself unableto escape except by renunciation of life and works. He has beenshown that there are two opposed ways of working and living,one in the ignorance of the ego, one in the clear self-knowledgeof a divine being. He may act with desire, with passion, anego driven by the qualities of the lower Nature, subject to thebalance of virtue and sin, joy and sorrow, preoccupied with thefruits and consequences of his works, success and defeat, goodresult and evil result, bound on the world machine, caught up ina great tangle of action and inaction and perverse action whichperplex the heart and mind and soul of man with their changingand contrary masks and appearances. But he is not utterly tieddown to the works of the ignorance; he may do if he will the

The Secret of Secrets 303

works of knowledge. He may act here as the higher thinker, theknower, the Yogin, the seeker of freedom first and afterwardsthe liberated spirit. To perceive that great possibility and to keephis will and intelligence fixed on the knowledge and self-visionwhich will realise and make it effectual, is the path of escapefrom his sorrow and bewilderment, the way out of the humanriddle.

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, con-taining all, one self in all, it surveys impartially the whole actionof nature and it sees that it is only the action of Nature, not itsown action. It sees that the ego and its will and its intelligenceare all a machinery of Nature and that all their activities aredetermined by the complexity of her triple modes and qualities.The eternal spirit itself is free from these things. It is free fromthem because it knows; it knows that Nature and ego and thepersonal being of all these creatures do not make up the wholeof existence. For existence is not merely a glorious or a vain,a wonderful or a dismal panorama of a constant mutation ofbecoming. There is something eternal, immutable, imperishable,a timeless self-existence; that is not affected by the mutationsof Nature. It is their impartial witness, neither affecting noraffected, neither acting nor acted upon, neither virtuous norsinful, but always pure, complete, great and unwounded. Nei-ther grieving nor rejoicing at all that afflicts and attracts theegoistic being, it is the friend of none, the enemy of none, butone equal self of all. Man is not now conscious of this self,because he is wrapped up in his outward-going mind, becausehe will not learn or has not learned to live within; he does notdetach himself, draw back from his action and observe it as thework of Nature. Ego is the obstacle, the linch-pin of the wheel ofdelusion, the loss of the ego in the soul’s self the first conditionof 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 alldesire of the fruits of his works and become simply the desireless


impartial doer of whatever has to be done, — leaving the fruit towhatever power may be the master of the cosmic workings. Forhe very evidently is not the master; it is not for the satisfactionof his personal ego that Nature was set upon her ways, not forthe fulfilment of his desires and preferences that the universalLife 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 cosmicaims or its terrestrial method and purposes. These claims canonly be made by the ignorant souls who live in their personalityand see everything from that poor and narrow standpoint. Hemust stand back first from his egoistic demand on the world andwork only as one among the millions who contributes his shareof effort and labour to a result determined not by himself, but bythe universal action and purpose. But he has to do yet more, hehas to give up the idea of being the doer and to see, freed fromall personality, that it is the universal intelligence, will, mind, lifethat is at work in him and in all others. Nature is the universalworker; his works are hers, even as the fruits of her works in himare part of the grand sum of result guided by a greater Powerthan his own. If he can do these two things spiritually, then thetangle and bondage of his works will fall far away from him;for the whole knot of that bondage lay in his egoistic demandand participation. Passion and sin and personal joy and grief willfade away from his soul, which will now live within, pure, large,calm, equal to all persons and all things. Action will produce nosubjective reaction and will leave no stain nor any mark on hisspirit’s purity and peace. He will have the inner joy, rest, ease andinalienable bliss of a free unaffected being. Neither within norwithout will he have any more the old little personality, for hewill feel consciously one self and spirit with all, even as his outernature will have become to his consciousness an inseparablepart of the universal mind, life and will. His separative egoisticpersonality will have been taken up and extinguished in theimpersonality of spiritual being; his separative egoistic naturewill be unified with the action of cosmic Nature.

But this liberation is dependent on two simultaneous, but


not yet reconciled perceptions, the clear vision of spirit and theclear vision of Nature. This is not the scientific and intelligentdetachment which is quite possible even to the materialisticphilosopher who has some clear vision of Nature alone, butnot the perception of his own soul and self-being. Nor is it theintellectual detachment of the idealistic sage who escapes fromthe more limiting and disturbing forms of his ego by a luminoususe of the reason. This is a larger, more living, more perfectspiritual detachment which comes by a vision of the Supremewho is more than Nature and greater than mind and reason. Buteven this detachment is only the initial secret of freedom andof the clear vision of knowledge, it is not the whole clue to thedivine mystery, — for by itself it would leave Nature unexplainedand the natural active part of being isolated from the spiritualand quietistic self-existence. The divine detachment must be thefoundation for a divine participation in Nature which will re-place the old egoistic participation, the divine quietism mustsupport a divine activism and kinetism. This truth which theTeacher has had in view all along and therefore insisted on thesacrifice of works, the recognition of the Supreme as the masterof our works and the doctrine of the Avatar and the divine birth,has yet been at first kept subordinate to the primary necessity of aquietistic liberation. Only the truths which lead to spiritual calm,detachment, equality and oneness, in a word, to the perceptionand becoming of the immutable self, have been fully developedand given their largest amplitude of power and significance. Theother great and necessary truth, its complement, has been left ina certain obscurity of a lesser or relative light; it has been hintedat constantly, but not as yet developed. Now in these successivechapters it is being rapidly released into expression.

Throughout Krishna, the Avatar, the Teacher, the charioteerof the human soul in the world-action, has been preparing therevelation of the secret of himself, Nature’s deepest secret. Hehas kept one note always sounding across his preparatory strainand insistently coming in as a warning and prelude of the largerultimate harmony of his integral Truth. That note was the ideaof a supreme Godhead which dwells within man and Nature,


but is greater than man and Nature, is found by impersonal-ity of the self, but of which impersonal self is not the wholesignificance. We now see the meaning of that strong recurringinsistence. It was this one Godhead, the same in universal selfand man and Nature who through the voice of the Teacher inthe chariot was preparing for his absolute claim to the wholebeing of the awakened seer of things and doer of works. “Iwho am within thee,” he was saying, “I who am here in thishuman body, I for whom all exists, acts, strives, am at once thesecret of the self-existent spirit and of the cosmic action. This ‘I’is the greater I of whom the largest human personality is onlya partial and fragmentary manifestation, Nature itself only aninferior working. Master of the soul, master of all the works ofthe cosmos, I am the one Light, the sole Power, the only Being.This Godhead within thee is the Teacher, the Sun, the lifter of theclear blaze of knowledge in which thou becomest aware of thedifference between thy immutable self and thy mutable nature.But look beyond the light itself to its source; then shalt thouknow the supreme Soul in which is recovered the spiritual truthof personality and Nature. See then the one self in all beings thatthou mayst see me in all beings; see all beings in one spiritualself 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 thesupreme Brahman. Know thyself, be thyself that thou mayst beunited with me of whom this timeless self is the clear light or thetransparent curtain. I the Godhead am the highest truth of selfand spirit.”

Arjuna has to see that the same Godhead is the higher truthtoo not only of self and spirit but of Nature and his own per-sonality, the secret at once of the individual and the universe.That was the Will universal in Nature, greater than the acts ofNature which proceed from him, to whom belong her actionsand man’s and the fruits of them. Therefore has he to do worksas a sacrifice, because that is the truth of his works and of allworks. Nature is the worker and not ego, but Nature is only apower of the Being who is the sole master of all her works andenergisms and of all the aeons of the cosmic sacrifice. Therefore


since his works are that Being’s, he has to give up all his actionsto the Godhead in him and the world by whom they are done inthe divine mystery of Nature. This is the double condition of thedivine birth of the soul, of its release from the mortality of theego and the body into the spiritual and eternal, — knowledgefirst of one’s timeless immutable self and union through it withthe timeless Godhead, but knowledge too of that which livesbehind the riddle of cosmos, the Godhead in all existences andtheir workings. Thus only can we aspire through the offeringof all our nature and being to a living union with the One whohas become in Time and Space all that is. Here is the place ofbhakti in the scheme of the Yoga of an integral self-liberation.It is an adoration and aspiration towards that which is greaterthan imperishable self or changing Nature. All knowledge thenbecomes an adoration and aspiration, but all works too becomean adoration and aspiration. Works of nature and freedom ofsoul are unified in this adoration and become one self-upliftingto the one Godhead. The final release, a passing away from thelower nature to the source of the higher spiritual becoming, is notan extinction of the soul, — only its form of ego becomes extinct,— but a departure of our whole self of knowledge, will and loveto 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 ofArjuna, the divine Teacher sets out by removing the source oftwo remaining difficulties, the antinomy between the impersonalself and the human personality and the antinomy between theself and Nature. While these two antinomies last, the Godheadin Nature and man remains obscure, irrational and unbelievable.Nature has been represented as the mechanical bondage of thegunas, 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; fordivine 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 Divineand itself a divine being; for such a divine being must be itself of


the very nature of the Divine, free, spiritual, self-developing, self-existent, superior to mind, life and body. Both these difficultiesand the obscurities they bring in are removed by one illuminingray of truth. Mechanical Nature is only a lower truth; it is theformula of an inferior phenomenal action. There is a higherwhich is the spiritual and that is the nature of our spiritualpersonality, our true person. God is at once impersonal andpersonal. His impersonality is to our psychological realisationan infinite of timeless being, consciousness, bliss of existence;his personality represents itself here as a conscious power ofbeing, a conscious centre of knowledge and will and the joy ofmultiple self-manifestation. We are that one impersonality in thestatic essence of our being; we are each of us the multitude of thatessential power in our spiritual person. But the distinction is onlyfor the purposes of self-manifestation; the divine impersonalityis, when one goes behind it, at the same time infinite He, asupreme soul and spirit. It is the great “I” — so aham, I amHe, from which all personality and nature proceed and disportthemselves here diversely in the appearance of an impersonalworld. Brahman is all this that is, says the Upanishad, for Brah-man is one self which sees itself in four successive positions ofconsciousness. Vasudeva, the eternal Being, is all, says the Gita.He is the Brahman, consciously supports and originates all fromhis higher spiritual nature, consciously here becomes all thingsin a nature of intelligence, mind, life and sense and objectivephenomenon of material existence. The Jiva is he in that spiritualnature of the Eternal, his eternal multiplicity, his self-vision frommany centres of conscious self-power. God, Nature and Jiva arethe three terms of existence, and these three are one being.

How does this Being manifest himself in cosmos? First as theimmutable timeless self omnipresent and all-supporting whichis in its eternity being and not becoming. Then, held in thatbeing there is an essential power or spiritual principle of self-becoming, svabhava, through which by spiritual self-vision itdetermines and expresses, creates by liberation all that is latentor contained in its own existence. The power or the energy ofthat self-becoming looses forth into universal action, Karma, all


that is thus determined in the spirit. All creation is this action, isthis working of the essential nature, is Karma. But it is developedhere in a mutable Nature of intelligence, mind, life, sense andform-objectivity of material phenomenon actually cut off fromthe absolute light and limited by the Ignorance. All its workingsbecome there a sacrifice of the soul in Nature to the supreme Soulsecret within her, and the supreme Godhead dwells therefore inall as the Master of their sacrifice, whose presence and powergovern it and whose self-knowledge and delight of being receiveit. To know this is to have the right knowledge of the universeand the vision of God in the cosmos and to find out the door ofescape from the Ignorance. For this knowledge, made effectivefor man by the offering up of his works and all his consciousnessto the Godhead in all, enables him to return to his spiritualexistence and through it to the supracosmic Reality eternal andluminous above this mutable Nature.

This truth is the secret of being which the Gita is now goingto apply in its amplitude of result for our inner life and our outerworks. What it is going to say is the most secret thing of all.1 Itis the knowledge of the whole Godhead, samagram mam, whichthe Master of his being has promised to Arjuna, that essentialknowledge attended with the complete knowledge of it in all itsprinciples which will leave nothing yet to be known. The wholeknot of the ignorance which has bewildered his human mindand has made his will recoil from his divinely appointed work,will have been cut entirely asunder. This is the wisdom of allwisdoms, the secret of all secrets, the king-knowledge, the king-secret. It is a pure and supreme light which one can verify bydirect spiritual experience and see in oneself as the truth: it isthe right and just knowledge, the very law of being. It is easy topractise when one gets hold of it, sees it, tries faithfully to livein it.

But faith is necessary; if faith is absent, if one trusts to thecritical intelligence which goes by outward facts and jealouslyquestions the revelatory knowledge because that does not square

1 Gita, IX. 1-3.


with the divisions and imperfections of the apparent nature andseems to exceed it and state something which carries us beyondthe first practical facts of our present existence, its grief, itspain, evil, defect, undivine error and stumbling, asubham, thenthere is no possibility of living out that greater knowledge. Thesoul that fails to get faith in the higher truth and law, mustreturn into the path of ordinary mortal living subject to deathand error and evil: it cannot grow into the Godhead which itdenies. For this is a truth which has to be lived, — and lived inthe 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 theonly way to verify it. It is only by an exceeding of the lower selfthat one can become the real divine self and live the truth ofour spiritual existence. All the apparent truths one can opposeto it are appearances of the lower Nature. The release fromthe evil and the defect of the lower Nature, asubham, can onlycome by accepting a higher knowledge in which all this apparentevil becomes convinced of ultimate unreality, is shown to be acreation of our darkness. But to grow thus into the freedom ofthe divine Nature one must accept and believe in the Godheadsecret within our present limited nature. For the reason whythe practice of this Yoga becomes possible and easy is that indoing it we give up the whole working of all that we naturallyare into the hands of that inner divine Purusha. The Godheadworks out the divine birth in us progressively, simply, infallibly,by taking up our being into his and by filling it with his ownknowledge and power, jnanadıpena bhasvata; he lays hands onour obscure ignorant nature and transforms it into his own lightand wideness. What with entire faith and without egoism webelieve in and impelled by him will to be, the God within willsurely accomplish. But the egoistic mind and life we now andapparently are, must first surrender itself for transmutation intothe hands of that inmost secret Divinity within us.

V

The Divine Truth and Way

THE GITA then proceeds to unveil the supreme and in-tegral secret, the one thought and truth in which theseeker of perfection and liberation must learn to live

and the one law of perfection of his spiritual members andof all their movements. This supreme secret is the mysteryof the transcendent Godhead who is all and everywhere,yet so much greater and other than the universe and allits forms that nothing here contains him, nothing expresseshim really, and no language which is borrowed from theappearances of things in space and time and their relationscan suggest the truth of his unimaginable being. The conse-quent law of our perfection is an adoration by our wholenature and its self-surrender to its divine source and pos-sessor. Our one ultimate way is the turning of our entireexistence in the world, and not merely of this or that in it,into a single movement towards the Eternal. By the powerand mystery of a divine Yoga we have come out of his in-expressible secrecies into this bounded nature of phenomenalthings. By a reverse movement of the same Yoga we musttranscend the limits of phenomenal nature and recover thegreater consciousness by which we can live in the Divine andthe 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, acintya-rupa, avyaktamurti. What we see is only a self-created form,rupa, not the eternal form of the Divinity, svarupa. There issomeone or there is something that is other than the universe,inexpressible, unimaginable, an ineffably infinite Godhead be-yond anything that our largest or subtlest conceptions of infin-ity can shadow. All this weft of things to which we give the


name of universe, all this immense sum of motion to which wecan fix no limits and vainly seek in its forms and movementsfor any stable reality, any status, level and point of cosmicleverage, has been spun out, shaped, extended by this highestInfinite, founded upon this ineffable supracosmic Mystery. Itis founded upon a self-formulation which is itself unmanifestand unthinkable. All this mass of becomings always changingand in motion, all these creatures, existences, things, breathingand living forms cannot contain him either in their sum or intheir separate existence. He is not in them; it is not in themor by them that he lives, moves or has his being, — God isnot the Becoming. It is they that are in him, it is they thatlive and move in him and draw their truth from him; they arehis becomings, he is their being.1 In the unthinkable timelessand spaceless infinity of his existence he has extended this mi-nor phenomenon of a boundless universe in an endless spaceand time.

And even to say of him that all exists in him is not the wholetruth of the matter, not the entirely real relation: for it is tospeak of him with the idea of space, and the Divine is spacelessand timeless. Space and time, immanence and pervasion andexceeding are all of them terms and images of his consciousness.There is a Yoga of divine Power, me yoga aisvarah. , by whichthe Supreme creates phenomena of himself in a spiritual, not amaterial, self-formulation of his own extended infinity, an ex-tension of which the material is only an image. He sees himselfas one with that, is identified with that and all it harbours. Inthat infinite self-seeing, which is not his whole seeing, — thepantheist’s identity of God and universe is a still more limitedview, — he is at once one with all that is and yet exceeds it; buthe is other also than this self or extended infinity of spiritualbeing which contains and exceeds the universe. All exists herein his world-conscious infinite, but that again is upheld as a self-conception by the supracosmic reality of the Godhead whichexceeds all our terms of world and being and consciousness.

1 matsthani sarvabhutani na caham tes.vavasthitah. .

The Divine Truth and Way 313

This is the mystery of his being that he is supracosmic, yet not inany exclusive sense extracosmic. For he pervades it all as its self;there is a luminous uninvolved presence of the self-being of God,mama atma, which is in constant relation with the becomingand brings all its existences into manifestation by his simplepresence.2 Therefore it is that we have these terms of Being andbecoming, existence in itself, atman, and existences dependentupon it, bhutani, mutable beings and immutable being. Butthe highest truth of these two relations and the resolution oftheir antinomy must be found in that which exceeds it; it is thesupreme Godhead who manifests both containing self and itscontained phenomena by the power of his spiritual conscious-ness, yogamaya. And it is only through union with him in ourspiritual consciousness that we can arrive at our real relationswith his being.

Metaphysically stated, this is the intention of these versesof the Gita: but they rest founded not upon any intellectualspeculation, but on spiritual experience; they synthetise becausethey arise globally from certain truths of spiritual consciousness.When we attempt to put ourselves into conscious relations withwhatever supreme or universal Being there exists concealed ormanifest in the world, we arrive at a very various experienceand one or other variant term of this experience is turned bydifferent intellectual conceptions into their fundamental ideaof existence. We have, to start with, the crude experience firstof a Divine who is something quite different from and greaterthan ourselves, quite different from and greater than the uni-verse in which we live; and so it is and no more so long aswe live only in our phenomenal selves and see around us onlythe phenomenal face of the world. For the highest truth of theSupreme is supracosmic and all that is phenomenal seems athing other than the infinity of the self-conscious spirit, seemsan image of a lesser truth if not an illusion. When we dwellin this difference only, we regard the Divine as if extracosmic.That he is only in this sense that he is not, being supracosmic,

2 bhutabhr.n na ca bhutastho mamatma bhutabhavanah. .


contained in the cosmos and its creations, but not in the sensethat they are outside his being: for there is nothing outside theone Eternal and Real. We realise this first truth of the God-head spiritually when we get the experience that we live andmove and have our being in him alone, that however differentfrom him we may be, we depend on him for our existence andthe universe itself is only a phenomenon and movement in theSpirit.

But again we have the farther and more transcendent ex-perience that our self-existence is one with his self-existence.We perceive a one self of all and of that we have the con-sciousness and the vision: we can no longer say or think thatwe are entirely different from him, but that there is self andthere is phenomenon of the self-existent; all is one in self, butall is variation in the phenomenon. By an exclusive intensityof union with the self we may even come to experience thephenomenon as a thing dreamlike and unreal. But again by adouble intensity we may have too the double experience of asupreme self-existent oneness with him and yet of ourselves asliving with him and in many relations to him in a persistentform, an actual derivation of his being. The universe, and ourexistence in the universe, becomes to us a constant and realform of the self-aware existence of the Divine. In that lessertruth we have our relations of difference between us and himand all these other living or inanimate powers of the Eternal andour dealings with his cosmic self in the nature of the universe.These relations are other than the supracosmic truth, they arederivative creations of a certain power of consciousness of thespirit, and because they are other and because they are creationsthe exclusive seekers of the supracosmic Absolute tax them withan unreality relative or complete. Yet are they from him, theyare existent forms derived from his being, not figments createdout of nothing. For it is ever itself and figures of itself and notthings quite other than itself that the Spirit sees everywhere.Nor can we say that there is nothing at all in the supracosmicthat corresponds to these relations. We cannot say that theyare derivations of consciousness sprung from that source but


yet with nothing in the source which at all supports or justifiesthem, nothing that is the eternal reality and supernal principleof these forms of his being.

Again if we press in yet another way the difference betweenthe self and the forms of self, we may come to regard theSelf as containing and immanent, we may admit the truth ofomnipresent spirit, and yet the forms of spirit, the moulds ofits presence may affect us not only as something other thanit, not only as transient, but as unreal images. We have theexperience of the Spirit, the Divine Being immutable and evercontaining in his vision the mutabilities of the universe; we havetoo the separate, the simultaneous or the coincident experienceof the Divine immanent in ourselves and in all creatures. Andyet the universe may be to us only an empirical form of his andour consciousness, or only an image or a symbol of existenceby which we have to construct our significant relations withhim and to grow gradually aware of him. But on the otherhand, we get another revealing spiritual experience in whichwe are forced to see as the very Divine all things, not onlythat Spirit which dwells immutable in the universe and in itscountless creatures, but all this inward and outward becom-ing. All is then to us a divine Reality manifesting himself inus and in the cosmos. If this experience is exclusive, we getthe pantheistic identity, the One that is all: but the pantheisticvision is only a partial seeing. This extended universe is not allthat the Spirit is, there is an Eternal greater than it by whichalone its existence is possible. Cosmos is not the Divine in allhis utter reality, but a single self-expression, a true but minormotion of his being. All these spiritual experiences, howeverdifferent or opposed at first sight, are yet reconcilable if wecease to press on one or other exclusively and if we see thissimple truth that the divine Reality is something greater thanthe universal existence, but yet that all universal and particu-lar things are that Divine and nothing else, — significative ofhim, we might say, and not entirely That in any part or sumof their appearance, but still they could not be significative ofhim if they were something else and not term and stuff of the


divine existence. That is the Real; but they are its expressiverealities.3

This is what is intended by the phrase, vasudevah. sarvam iti;the Godhead is all that is universe and all that is in the universeand all that is more than the universe. The Gita lays stress firston his supracosmic existence. For otherwise the mind wouldmiss its highest goal and remain turned towards the cosmic onlyor else attached to some partial experience of the Divine in thecosmos. It lays stress next on his universal existence in whichall moves and acts. For that is the justification of the cosmiceffort and that is the vast spiritual self-awareness in which theGodhead self-seen as the Time-Spirit does his universal works.Next it insists with a certain austere emphasis on the acceptanceof the Godhead as the divine inhabitant in the human body.For he is the Immanent in all existences, and if the indwellingdivinity is not recognised, not only will the divine meaning ofindividual existence be missed, the urge to our supreme spiritualpossibilities deprived of its greatest force, but the relations ofsoul with soul in humanity will be left petty, limited and egoistic.Finally, it insists at great length on the divine manifestation inall things in the universe and affirms the derivation of all that isfrom the nature, power and light of the one Godhead. For thatseeing too is essential to the God-knowledge; on it is foundedthe integral turn of the whole being and the whole nature God-wards, the acceptance by man of the works of the divine Powerin the world and the possibility of remoulding his mentality andwill 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 cos-mic 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 absolutelyReal. Shankara’s Mayavada apart from its logical scaffolding comes when reduced toterms of spiritual experience to no more than an exaggerated expression of this relativeunreality. Beyond mind the difficulty disappears, for there it never existed. The separateexperiences that lie behind the differences of religious sects and schools of philosophyor Yoga, transmuted, shed their divergent mental sequences, are harmonised and, whenexalted to their highest common intensity, unified in the supramental infinite.


and the Divine secretly conscious or partially manifested in cos-mic Nature and all her works and creatures, are then one reality,one Godhead. But the truths that we can put forward the mostconfidently of one, are reversed or they alter their sense whenwe try to apply them to the other poises of the one Being. Thusthe Divine is always the Lord, Ishwara; but we cannot thereforecrudely apply the idea of his essential lordship and mastery inexactly the same way without change in all four fields. As theDivine manifest in cosmic Nature he acts in close identity withNature. He is himself then Nature, so to speak, but with a spiritwithin her workings which foresees and forewills, understandsand enforces, compels the action, overrules in the result. As theone silent self of all he is the non-doer, and Nature alone is thedoer. He leaves all these works to be done by her accordingto the law of our being, svabhavas tu pravartate, and yet he isstill the lord, prabhu vibhu, because he views and upholds ouraction and enables Nature to work by his silent sanction. Heby his immobility transmits the power of the supreme Godheadthrough the compulsion of his pervading motionless Presenceand supports its workings by the equal regard of his witness Selfin all things. As the supreme supracosmic Godhead he originatesall, but is above all; he compels all to manifest, but does not losehimself in what he creates or attach himself to the works of hisNature. His is the free presiding Will of being that is antecedentto all the necessities of the natural action. In the individual he isduring the ignorance the secret Godhead in us who compels allto revolve on the machine of Nature on which the ego is carriedround as part of the machinery, at once a clog and a convenience.But since all the Divine is within each being, we can rise abovethis relation by transcending the ignorance. For we can identifyourselves with the one Self supporter of all things and become thewitness and non-doer. Or else we can put our individual beinginto the human soul’s right relation with the supreme Godheadwithin us and make it in its parts of nature the immediate causeand instrument, nimitta, and in its spiritual self and person ahigh participant in the supreme, free and unattached masteryof that inner Numen. This is a thing we have to see clearly in


the Gita; we have to allow for this variation of the sense ofthe same truth according to the nodus of relation from whichits application comes into force. Otherwise we shall see merecontradiction and inconsistency where none exists or be baffledlike Arjuna by what seems to us a riddling utterance.

Thus the Gita begins by affirming that the Supreme containsall things in himself, but is not in any, matsthani sarva-bhutani,“all are situated in Me, not I in them,” and yet it proceedsimmediately to say, “and yet all existences are not situated inMe, my self is the bearer of all existences and it is not situatedin existences.” And yet again it insists with an apparent self-contradiction that the Divine has lodged himself, has taken uphis abode in the human body, manus.ım tanum asritam, and thatthe recognition of this truth is necessary for the soul’s releaseby the integral way of works and love and knowledge. Thesestatements are only in appearance inconsistent with each other.It is as the supracosmic Godhead that he is not in existences, noreven they in him; for the distinction we make between Being andbecoming applies only to the manifestation in the phenomenaluniverse. In the supracosmic existence all is eternal Being and all,if there too there is any multiplicity, are eternal beings; nor canthe spatial idea of indwelling come in, since a supracosmic abso-lute being is not affected by the concepts of time and space whichare created here by the Lord’s Yogamaya. There a spiritual, nota spatial or temporal coexistence, a spiritual identity and coin-cidence must be the foundation. But on the other hand in thecosmic manifestation there is an extension of universe in spaceand time by the supreme unmanifest supracosmic Being, and inthat extension he appears first as a self who supports all theseexistences; bhuta-bhr.t, he bears them in his all-pervading self-existence. And, even, through this omnipresent self the supremeSelf too, the Paramatman, can be said to bear the universe;he is its invisible spiritual foundation and the hidden spiritualcause of the becoming of all existences. He bears the universeas the secret spirit in us bears our thoughts, works, movements.He seems to pervade and to contain mind, life and body, tosupport them by his presence: but this pervasion is itself an act


of consciousness, not material; the body itself is only a constantact of consciousness of the spirit.

This divine Self contains all existences; all are situated inhim, not materially in essence, but in that extended spiritualconception of self-being of which our too rigid notion of amaterial and etheric space is only a rendering in the terms ofthe physical mind and senses. In reality all even here is spiritualcoexistence, identity and coincidence; but that is a fundamentaltruth which we cannot apply until we get back to the supremeconsciousness. Till then such an idea would only be an intel-lectual concept to which nothing corresponds in our practicalexperience. We have to say, then, using these terms of relationin space and time, that the universe and all its beings exist inthe divine Self-existent as everything else exists in the spatialprimacy of ether. “It is as the great, the all-pervading aerialprinciple dwells in the etheric that all existences dwell in Me,that is how you have to conceive of it,” says the Teacher hereto Arjuna. The universal existence is all-pervading and infiniteand the Self-existent too is all-pervading and infinite; but theself-existent infinity is stable, static, immutable, the universal isan all-pervading movement, sarvatragah. . The Self is one, notmany; but the universal expresses itself as all existence and is,as it seems, the sum of all existences. One is Being; the other isPower of Being which moves and creates and acts in the existenceof the fundamental, supporting, immutable Spirit. The Self doesnot dwell in all these existences or in any of them; that is tosay, he is not contained by any, — just as the ether here is notcontained in any form, though all forms are derived ultimatelyfrom the ether. Nor is he contained in or constituted by allexistences together — any more than the ether is contained inthe mobile extension of the aerial principle or is constituted bythe sum of its forms or its forces. But still in the movement alsois 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 existenceto its own forms. The one is a truth of being in its all-containing


immutability, self-existent: the other is a truth of Power of thesame being manifest in the government and information of itsown self-veiling and self-revealing movements.

The Supreme from above cosmic existence leans, it is heresaid, or presses down upon his Nature to loose from it in aneternal cyclic recurrence all that it contains in it, all that was oncemanifest and has become latent. All existences act in the universein subjection to this impelling movement and to the laws ofmanifested being by which is expressed in cosmic harmoniesthe phenomenon of the divine All-existence. The Jiva followsthe cycle of its becoming in the action of this divine Nature,prakr.tim mamikam, svam prakr.tim, the “own nature” of theDivine. It becomes in the turns of her progression this or thatpersonality; it follows always the curve of its own law of being asa manifestation of the divine Nature, whether in her higher anddirect or her lower and derived movement, whether in ignoranceor in knowledge; it returns out of her action into her immobilityand silence in the lapse of the cycle. Ignorant, it is subject to hercyclic whirl, not master of itself, but dominated by her, avasah.prakr.ter vasat; only by return to the divine consciousness canit attain to mastery and freedom. The Divine too follows thecycle, not as subject to it, but as its informing Spirit and guide,not with his whole being involved in it, but with his power ofbeing accompanying and shaping it. He is the presiding controlof his own action of Nature, adhyaks.a, — not a spirit born inher, but the creative spirit who causes her to produce all thatappears in the manifestation. If in his power he accompaniesher and causes all her workings, he is outside it too, as if Oneseated above her universal action in the supracosmic mastery,not attached to her by any involving and mastering desire andnot therefore bound by her works, because he infinitely exceedsthem and precedes them, is the same before, during and afterall their procession in the cycles of Time. All their mutationsmake no difference to his immutable being. The silent self thatpervades and supports the cosmos is not affected by its changesbecause, though supporting, it does not participate in them. Thisgreatest supreme supracosmic Self also is not affected because it


exceeds and eternally transcends them.But also since this action is the action of the divine Nature,

sva prakr.tih. , and the divine Nature can never be separate fromthe Divine, in everything she creates the Godhead must be imma-nent. 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 islodged in the human body. Those who ignore his presence, whodespise because of its masks the divinity in the human form, arebewildered and befooled by the appearances of Nature and theycannot realise that there is the secret Godhead within, whetherconscious in humanity as in the Avatar or veiled by his Maya.Those who are great-souled, who are not shut up in their ideaof ego, who open themselves to the indwelling Divinity, knowthat the secret spirit in man which appears here bounded by thelimited human nature, is the same ineffable splendour which weworship beyond as the supreme Godhead. They become awareof the highest status of him in which he is master and lord ofall existences and yet see that in each existence he is still thesupreme Deity and the indwelling Godhead. All the rest is a self-limitation for the manifesting of the variations of Nature in thecosmos. They see too that as it is his Nature which has becomeall that is in the universe, everything here is in its inner factnothing but one Divine, all is Vasudeva, and they worship himnot only as the supreme Godhead beyond, but here in the world,in his oneness and in every separate being. They see this truthand in this truth they live and act; him they adore, live, serveboth as the Transcendent of things and as God in the world andas the Godhead in all that is, serve him with works of sacrifice,seek him out by knowledge, see nothing else but him everywhereand lift their whole being to him both in its self and in all itsinward and outward nature. This they know to be the largeand perfect way; for it is the way of the whole truth of the onesupreme and universal and individual Godhead.4

4 Gita, IX. 4-11, 13-15, 34.

VI

Works, Devotion and Knowledge

THIS THEN is the integral truth, the highest and widestknowledge. The Divine is supracosmic, the eternal Para-brahman who supports with his timeless and spaceless

existence all this cosmic manifestation of his own being andnature in Space and Time. He is the supreme spirit who ensoulsthe forms and movements of the universe, Paramatman. He isthe supernal Person of whom all self and nature, all being andbecoming in this or any universe are the self-conception andthe self-energising, Purushottama. He is the ineffable Lord ofall existence who by his spiritual control of his own manifestedPower in Nature unrolls the cycles of the world and the naturalevolution of creatures in the cycles, Parameshwara. From himthe Jiva, individual spirit, soul in Nature, existent by his be-ing, conscious by the light of his consciousness, empowered toknowledge, to will and to action by his will and power, enjoyingexistence by his divine enjoyment of the cosmos, has come hereinto the cosmic rounds.

The inner soul in man is here a partial self-manifestation ofthe Divine, self-limited for the works of his Nature in the uni-verse, prakr.tir jıva-bhuta. In his spiritual essence the individual isone with the Divine. In the works of the divine Prakriti he is onewith him, yet there is an operative difference and many deep re-lations with God in Nature and with God above cosmic Nature.In the works of the lower appearance of Prakriti he seems byan ignorance and egoistic separation to be quite other than theOne and to think, will, act, enjoy in this separative consciousnessfor the egoistic pleasure and purpose of his personal existencein the universe and its surface relations with other embodiedminds and lives. But in fact all his being, all his thinking, allhis willing and action and enjoyment are only a reflection —egoistic and perverted so long as he is in the ignorance — of the

Works, Devotion and Knowledge 323

Divine’s being, the Divine’s thought, will, action and enjoymentof Nature. To get back to this truth of himself is his direct meansof salvation, his largest and nearest door of escape from subjec-tion to the Ignorance. Since he is a spirit, a soul with a natureof mind and reason, of will and dynamic action, of emotionand sensation and life’s seeking for the delight of existence, itis by turning all these powers Godwards that the return to thehighest truth of himself can be made entirely possible. He mustknow with the knowledge of the supreme Self and Brahman;he must turn his love and adoration to the supreme Person; hemust subject his will and works to the supreme Lord of cosmos.Then he passes from the lower to the divine Nature: he castsfrom him the thought and will and works of the Ignorance andthinks, wills and works in his divine identity as soul of that Soul,power and light of that Spirit; he enjoys all the inner infinite ofthe Divine and no longer only these outward touches, masks andappearances. Thus divinely living, thus directing his whole selfand soul and nature Godwards, he is taken up into the truesttruth of the supreme Brahman.

To know Vasudeva as all and live in that knowledge is thesecret. He knows him as the Self, immutable, continent of all aswell as immanent in all things. He draws back from the confusedand perturbed whirl of the lower nature to dwell in the stilland inalienable calm and light of the self-existent spirit. Therehe realises a constant unity with this self of the Divine that ispresent in all existences and supports all cosmic movement andaction and phenomenon. He looks upward from this eternalunchanging spiritual hypostasis of the mutable universe to thegreater Eternal, the supracosmic, the Real. He knows him as thedivine Inhabitant in all things that are, the Lord in the heartof man, the secret Ishwara, and removes the veil between hisnatural being and this inner spiritual Master of his being. Hemakes his will, thought and works one in knowledge with theIshwara’s, attuned by an ever-present realisation to the sense ofthe indwelling Divinity, sees and adores him in all and changesthe whole human action to the highest meaning of the divinenature. He knows him as the source and the substance of all that


is around him in the universe. All things that are he sees as at oncein their appearance the veils and in their secret trend the meansand signs of self-manifestation of that one unthinkable Realityand everywhere discovers that oneness, Brahman, Purusha, At-man, Vasudeva, the Being that has become all these creatures.Therefore too his whole inner existence comes into tune andharmony with the Infinite now self-revealed in all that lives oris within and around him and his whole outer existence turnsinto an exact instrumentation of the cosmic purpose. He looksup through the Self to the Parabrahman who there and hereis the one and only existence. He looks up through the divineInhabitant in all to that supernal Person who in his supremestatus is beyond all habitation. He looks up through the Lordmanifested in the universe to the Supreme who exceeds andrules all his manifestation. Thus he arises through a limitlessunfolding of knowledge and upward vision and aspiration tothat to which he has turned with an all-compelling integrality,sarvabhavena.

This integral turning of the soul Godwards bases royallythe Gita’s synthesis of knowledge and works and devotion. Toknow God thus integrally is to know him as One in the selfand in all manifestation and beyond all manifestation, — andall this unitedly and at once. And yet even so to know him is notenough unless it is accompanied by an intense uplifting of theheart and soul Godwards, unless it kindles a one-pointed and atthe same time all-embracing love, adoration, aspiration. Indeedthe knowledge which is not companioned by an aspiration andvivified by an uplifting is no true knowledge, for it can be only anintellectual seeing and a barren cognitive endeavour. The visionof God brings infallibly the adoration and passionate seeking ofthe Divine, — a passion for the Divine in his self-existent being,but also for the Divine in ourselves and for the Divine in allthat is. To know with the intellect is simply to understand andmay be an effective starting-point, — or, too, it may not be, andit will not be if there is no sincerity in the knowledge, no urgetowards inner realisation in the will, no power upon the soul,no call in the spirit: for that would mean that the brain has


externally understood, but inwardly the soul has seen nothing.True knowledge is to know with the inner being, and when theinner being is touched by the light, then it arises to embrace thatwhich is seen, it yearns to possess, it struggles to shape that initself and itself to it, it labours to become one with the glory of itsvision. 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 hasseen, knowledge awakened must bring an overmastering impulsetowards this true and only perfect realisation. Here that whichis known is not an externalised object, but the divine Purusha,self and lord of all that we are. An all-seizing delight in himand a deep and moved love and adoration of him must be theinevitable result and is the very soul of this knowledge. And thisadoration is no isolated seeking of the heart, but an offering ofthe whole existence. Therefore it must take also the form of asacrifice; there is a giving of all our works to the Ishwara, thereis a surrender of all our active inward and outward nature tothe Godhead of our adoration in its every subjective and in itsevery objective movement. All our subjective workings move inhim and they seek him, the Lord and Self, as the source and goalof their power and endeavour. All our objective workings moveout towards him in the world and make him their object, initiatea service of God in the world of which the controlling power isthe Divinity within us in whom we are one self with the universeand its creatures. For both world and self, Nature and the soulin her are enlightened by the consciousness of the One, are innerand outer bodies of the transcendent Purushottama. So comesa synthesis of mind and heart and will in the one self and spiritand with it the synthesis of knowledge, love and works in thisintegral union, this embracing God-realisation, this divine Yoga.

But to arrive at this movement at all is difficult for the ego-bound nature. And to arrive at its victorious and harmoniousintegrality is not easy even when we have set our feet on the wayfinally and for ever. Mortal mind is bewildered by its ignorantreliance upon veils and appearances; it sees only the outwardhuman body, human mind, human way of living and catches no


liberating glimpse of the Divinity who is lodged in the creature.It ignores the divinity within itself and cannot see it in othermen, and even though the Divine manifest himself in humanityas Avatar and Vibhuti, it is still blind and ignores or despisesthe veiled Godhead, avajananti mam mud. ha manus.ım tanumasritam. And if it ignores him in the living creature, still lesscan it see him in the objective world on which it looks outfrom its prison of separative ego through the barred windowsof the finite mind. It does not see God in the universe; it knowsnothing of the supreme Divinity who is master of these planesfull of various existences and dwells within them; it is blindto the vision by which all in the world grows divine and thesoul itself awakens to its own inherent divinity and becomes ofthe Godhead, godlike. What it does see readily, and to that itattaches itself with passion, is only the life of the ego huntingafter finite things for their own sake and for the satisfactionof the earthly hunger of the intellect, body, senses. Those whohave given themselves up too entirely to this outward drive ofthe mentality, fall into the hands of the lower nature, cling to itand make it their foundation. They become a prey to the natureof the Rakshasa in man who sacrifices everything to a violentand inordinate satisfaction of his separate vital ego and makesthat the dark godhead of his will and thought and action andenjoyment. Or they are hurried onward in a fruitless cycle bythe arrogant self-will, self-sufficient thought, self-regarding act,self-satisfied and yet ever unsatisfied intellectualised appetite ofenjoyment of the Asuric nature. But to live persistently in thisseparative ego-consciousness and make that the centre of allour activities is to miss altogether the true self-awareness. Thecharm it throws upon the misled instruments of the spirit is anenchantment that chains life to a profitless circling. All its hope,action, knowledge are vain things when judged by the divineand eternal standard, for it shuts out the great hope, excludesthe liberating action, banishes the illuminating knowledge. Itis a false knowledge that sees the phenomenon but misses thetruth of the phenomenon, a blind hope that chases after thetransient but misses the eternal, a sterile action whose every


profit is annulled by loss and amounts to a perennial labour ofSisyphus.1

The great-souled who open themselves to the light and large-ness of the diviner nature of which man is capable, are alone onthe path narrow in the beginning, inexpressibly wide in the endthat leads to liberation and perfection. The growth of the godin man is man’s proper business; the steadfast turning of thislower Asuric and Rakshasic into the divine nature is the carefullyhidden meaning of human life. As this growth increases, the veilfalls and the soul comes to see the greater significance of actionand the real truth of existence. The eye opens to the Godhead inman, to the Godhead in the world; it sees inwardly and comes toknow outwardly the infinite Spirit, the Imperishable from whomall existences originate and who exists in all and by him and inhim all exist always. Therefore when this vision, this knowledgeseizes on the soul, its whole life-aspiration becomes a surpassinglove and fathomless adoration of the Divine and Infinite. Themind attaches itself singly to the eternal, the spiritual, the living,the universal, the Real; it values nothing but for its sake, itdelights only in the all-blissful Purusha. All the word and allthe thought become one hymning of the universal greatness,Light, Beauty, Power and Truth that has revealed itself in itsglory to the human spirit and a worship of the one supremeSoul and infinite Person. All the long stress of the inner self tobreak outward becomes a form now of spiritual endeavour andaspiration to possess the Divine in the soul and realise the Divinein the nature. All life becomes a constant Yoga and unificationof that Divine and this human spirit. This is the manner of theintegral devotion; it creates a single uplifting of our whole beingand nature through sacrifice by the dedicated heart to the eternalPurushottama.2

Those who lay a predominant stress on knowledge, arriveto the same point by an always increasing, engrossing, enforcingpower 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.


of knowledge they come to the adoration of the Purushottama,jnana-yajnena yajanto mam upasate. This is a comprehensionfilled with Bhakti, because it is integral in its instruments, inte-gral in its objective. It is not a pursuit of the Supreme merely asan abstract unity or an indeterminable Absolute. It is a heart-felt seeking and seizing of the Supreme and the Universal, apursuit of the Infinite in his infinity and of the Infinite in all thatis finite, a vision and embracing of the One in his oneness andof 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, inbeings without number, all his million universal faces frontingus in the world and its creatures, ekatvena pr.thaktvena bahudhavisvatomukham. This knowledge becomes easily an adoration,a large devotion, a vast self-giving, an integral self-offering be-cause it is the knowledge of a Spirit, the contact of a Being, theembrace of a supreme and universal Soul which claims all thatwe are even as it lavishes on us when we approach it all thetreasures of its endless delight of existence.3

The way of works too turns into an adoration and a devo-tion of self-giving because it is an entire sacrifice of all our willand its activities to the one Purushottama. The outward Vedicrite is a powerful symbol, effective for a slighter though still aheavenward purpose; but the real sacrifice is that inner oblationin which the Divine All becomes himself the ritual action, thesacrifice and every single circumstance of the sacrifice. All theworking and forms of that inner rite are the self-ordinance andself-expression of his power in us mounting by our aspirationtowards the source of its energies. The Divine Inhabitant be-comes himself the flame and the offering, because the flame isthe Godward will and that will is God himself within us. Andthe offering too is form and force of the constituent Godheadin our nature and being; all that has been received from himis given up to the service and the worship of its own Reality,

3 IX. 15.


its own supreme Truth and Origin. The Divine Thinker be-comes himself the sacred mantra; it is the Light of his beingthat expresses itself in the thought directed Godward and iseffective in the revealing word of splendour that enshrines thethought’s secret and in the rhythm that repeats for man therhythms of the Eternal. The illumining Godhead is himself theVeda and that which is made known by the Veda. He is boththe knowledge and the object of the knowledge. The Rik, theYajur, the Sama, the word of illumination which lights up themind with the rays of knowledge, the word of power for theright ordaining of action, the word of calm and harmoniousattainment for the bringing of the divine desire of the spirit,are themselves the Brahman, the Godhead. The mantra of thedivine Consciousness brings its light of revelation, the mantraof the divine Power its will of effectuation, the mantra of thedivine Ananda its equal fulfilment of the spiritual delight of ex-istence. All word and thought are an outflowering of the greatOM, — OM, the Word, the Eternal. Manifest in the forms ofsensible objects, manifest in that conscious play of creative self-conception of which forms and objects are the figures, manifestbehind 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 allmanifestation in supernal being.4 This sacrifice is therefore atonce works and adoration and knowledge.5

To the soul that thus knows, adores, offers up all its work-ings in a great self-surrender of its being to the Eternal, God is alland all is the Godhead. It knows God as the Father of this worldwho nourishes and cherishes and watches over his children. Itknows God as the divine Mother who holds us in her bosom,lavishes upon us the sweetness of her love and fills the universewith 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 andinternal, Taijasa, M the spirit of the secret superconscient omnipotence, Prajna, OM theAbsolute, Turiya. — Mandukya Upanishad.5 IX. 16-17.


whom has originated all that originates and creates in space andtime and relation. It knows him as the Master and ordainer ofall universal and of every individual dispensation. The worldand fate and uncertain eventuality cannot terrify, the aspect ofsuffering and evil cannot bewilder the man who has surrenderedhimself to the Eternal. God to the soul that sees is the path andGod is the goal of his journey, a path in which there is no self-losing and a goal to which his wisely guided steps are surelyarriving at every moment. He knows the Godhead as the masterof his and all being, the upholder of his nature, the husbandof the nature-soul, its lover and cherisher, the inner witness ofall his thoughts and actions. God is his house and country, therefuge of his seekings and desires, the wise and close and benig-nant friend of all beings. All birth and status and destructionof apparent existences is to his vision and experience the Onewho brings forward, maintains and withdraws his temporal self-manifestation in its system of perpetual recurrences. He alone isthe imperishable seed and origin of all that seem to be born andperish and their eternal resting-place in their non-manifestation.It is he that burns in the heat of the sun and the flame; it ishe who is the plenty of the rain and its withholding; he is allthis physical Nature and her workings. Death is his mask andimmortality is his self-revelation. All that we call existent is heand all that we look upon as non-existent still is there secret inthe Infinite and is part of the mysterious being of the Ineffable.6

Nothing but the highest knowledge and adoration, no otherway than an entire self-giving and surrender to this Highest whois all, will bring us to the Highest. Other religion, other worship,other knowledge, other seeking has always its fruits, but theseare transient and limited to the enjoyment of divine symbolsand appearances. There are always open for our following ac-cording to the balance of our mentality an outer and an inmostknowledge, an outer and an inmost seeking. Outward religion isthe worship of an outward deity and the pursuit of an externalbeatitude: its devotees purify their conduct from sin and attain

6 IX. 17-19.


to an active ethical righteousness in order to satisfy the fixedlaw, the Shastra, the external dispensation; they perform theceremonial symbol of the outer communion. But their objectis to secure after the mortal pleasure and pain of earthly lifethe bliss of heavenly worlds, a greater happiness than earth cangive but still a personal and mundane enjoyment though in alarger world than the field of this limited and suffering terrestrialnature. And to that to which they aspire, they attain by faith andright endeavour; for material existence and earthly activities arenot the whole scope of our personal becoming or the wholeformula of the cosmos. Other worlds there are of a larger felicity,svargalokam visalam. Thus the Vedic ritualist of old learned theexoteric sense of the triple Veda, purified himself from sin, drankthe wine of communion with the gods and sought by sacrificeand good deeds the rewards of heaven. This firm belief in aBeyond and this seeking of a diviner world secures to the soul inits passing the strength to attain to the joys of heaven on which itsfaith and seeking were centred: but the return to mortal existenceimposes itself because the true aim of that existence has not beenfound and realised. Here and not elsewhere the highest Godheadhas to be found, the soul’s divine nature developed out of theimperfect physical human nature and through unity with Godand man and universe the whole large truth of being discoveredand lived and made visibly wonderful. That completes the longcycle of our becoming and admits us to a supreme result; thatis the opportunity given to the soul by the human birth and,until that is accomplished, it cannot cease. The God-lover ad-vances constantly towards this ultimate necessity of our birth incosmos through a concentrated love and adoration by which hemakes the supreme and universal Divine the whole object of hisliving — not either egoistic terrestrial satisfaction or the celestialworlds — and the whole object of his thought and his seeing. Tosee nothing but the Divine, to be at every moment in union withhim, to love him in all creatures and have the delight of him in allthings is the whole condition of his spiritual existence. His God-vision does not divorce him from life, nor does he miss anythingof the fullness of life; for God himself becomes the spontaneous


bringer to him of every good and of all his inner and outer gettingand having, yoga-ks.emam vahamyaham. The joy of heaven andthe joy of earth are only a small shadow of his possessions; foras he grows into the Divine, the Divine too flows out upon himwith all the light, power and joy of an infinite existence.7

Ordinary religion is a sacrifice to partial godheads otherthan the integral Divinity. The Gita takes its direct examplesfrom the old Vedic religion on its exoteric side as it had then de-veloped; it describes this outward worship as a sacrifice to othergodheads, anya-devatah. , to the gods, or to the divinised Ances-tors, or to elemental powers and spirits, devan, pitr.n, bhutani.Men consecrate their life and works ordinarily to partial powersor aspects of the divine Existence as they see or conceive them —mostly powers and aspects that ensoul to them things prominentin Nature and man or else reflect to them their own humanity ina divine exceeding symbol. If they do this with faith, then theirfaith is justified; for the Divine accepts whatever symbol, formor conception of himself is present to the mind of the worship-per, yam yam tanum sraddhaya arcati, as it is said elsewhere,and meets him according to the faith that is in him. All sincerereligious belief and practice is really a seeking after the onesupreme and universal Godhead; for he always is the sole masterof man’s sacrifice and askesis and infinite enjoyer of his effortand aspiration. However small or low the form of the worship,however limited the idea of the godhead, however restricted thegiving, the faith, the effort to get behind the veil of one’s own ego-worship and limitation by material Nature, it yet forms a threadof connection between the soul of man and the All-soul and thereis a response. Still the response, the fruit of the adoration and of-fering is according to the knowledge, the faith and the work andcannot exceed their limitations, and therefore from the point ofview of the greater God-knowledge, which alone gives the entiretruth of being and becoming, this inferior offering is not givenaccording to the true and highest law of the sacrifice. It is notfounded on a knowledge of the supreme Godhead in his integral

7 IX. 20-22.


existence and the true principles of his self-manifestation, butattaches itself to external and partial appearances, — na mamabhijananti tattvena. Therefore its sacrifice too is limited in itsobject, largely egoistic in its motive, partial and mistaken inits action and its giving, yajanti avidhi-purvakam. An entireseeing of the Divine is the condition of an entire conscious self-surrender; the rest attains to things that are incomplete andpartial, and has to fall back from them and return to enlarge it-self in a greater seeking and wider God-experience. But to followafter the supreme and universal Godhead alone and utterly is toattain to all knowledge and result which other ways acquire,while yet one is not limited by any aspect, though one finds thetruth of him in all aspects. This movement embraces all formsof divine being on its way to the supreme Purushottama.8

This absolute self-giving, this one-minded surrender is thedevotion which the Gita makes the crown of its synthesis. Allaction and effort are by this devotion turned into an offeringto the supreme and universal Godhead. “Whatever thou doest,whatever thou enjoyest, whatever thou sacrificest, whateverthou givest, whatever energy of tapasya, of the soul’s will oreffort thou puttest forth, make it an offering unto Me.” Herethe least, the slightest circumstance of life, the most insignificantgift out of oneself or what one has, the smallest action assumes adivine significance and it becomes an acceptable offering to theGodhead who makes it a means for his possession of the souland life of the God-lover. The distinctions made by desire andego then disappear. As there is no straining after the good resultof one’s action, no shunning of unhappy result, but all actionand result are given up to the Supreme to whom all work andfruit in the world belong for ever, there is no farther bondage.For by an absolute self-giving all egoistic desire disappears fromthe heart and there is a perfect union between the Divine andthe individual soul through an inner renunciation of its separateliving. 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.


longer belong to the limited personal ego. The finite nature thussurrendered becomes a free channel of the Infinite; the soul in itsspiritual being, uplifted out of the ignorance and the limitation,returns to its oneness with the Eternal. The Divine Eternal isthe inhabitant in all existences; he is equal in all and the equalfriend, father, mother, creator, lover, supporter of all creatures.He is the enemy of none and he is the partial lover of none; nonehas he cast out, none has he eternally condemned, none has hefavoured by any despotism of arbitrary caprice: all at last equallycome to him through their circlings in the ignorance. But it isonly this perfect adoration that can make this indwelling of Godin man and man in God a conscious thing and an engrossingand perfect union. Love of the Highest and a total self-surrenderare the straight and swift way to this divine oneness.9

The equal Divine Presence in all of us makes no other pre-liminary condition, if once this integral self-giving has been madein faith and in sincerity and with a fundamental completeness.All have access to this gate, all can enter into this temple: ourmundane distinctions disappear in the mansion of the All-lover.There the virtuous man is not preferred, nor the sinner shut outfrom the Presence; together by this road the Brahmin pure of lifeand exact in observance of the law and the outcaste born froma womb of sin and sorrow and rejected of men can travel andfind an equal and open access to the supreme liberation and thehighest dwelling in the Eternal. Man and woman find their equalright before God; for the divine Spirit is no respecter of personsor of social distinctions and restrictions: all can go straight tohim without intermediary or shackling condition. “If” says thedivine Teacher “even a man of very evil conduct turns to mewith a sole and entire love, he must be regarded as a saint, forthe settled will of endeavour in him is a right and complete will.Swiftly he becomes a soul of righteousness and obtains eternalpeace.” In other words a will of entire self-giving opens wide allthe gates of the spirit and brings in response an entire descentand self-giving of the Godhead to the human being, and that at

9 IX. 26-29.


once reshapes and assimilates everything in us to the law of thedivine existence by a rapid transformation of the lower into thespiritual nature. The will of self-giving forces away by its powerthe veil between God and man; it annuls every error and annihi-lates every obstacle. Those who aspire in their human strengthby effort of knowledge or effort of virtue or effort of laboriousself-discipline, grow with much anxious difficulty towards theEternal; but when the soul gives up its ego and its works to theDivine, God himself comes to us and takes up our burden. Tothe ignorant he brings the light of the divine knowledge, to thefeeble the power of the divine will, to the sinner the liberationof the divine purity, to the suffering the infinite spiritual joyand Ananda. Their weakness and the stumblings of their humanstrength make no difference. “This is my word of promise,”cries the voice of the Godhead to Arjuna, “that he who lovesme shall not perish.” Previous effort and preparation, the purityand the holiness of the Brahmin, the enlightened strength ofthe king-sage great in works and knowledge have their value,because they make it easier for the imperfect human creature toarrive at this wide vision and self-surrender; but even withoutthis preparation all who take refuge in the divine Lover of man,the Vaishya once preoccupied with the narrowness of wealth-getting and the labour of production, the Shudra hampered bya thousand hard restrictions, woman shut in and stunted inher growth by the narrow circle society has drawn around herself-expansion, those too, papa-yonayah. , on whom their pastKarma has imposed even the very worst of births, the outcaste,the Pariah, the Chandala, find at once the gates of God openingbefore them. In the spiritual life all the external distinctions ofwhich men make so much because they appeal with an oppres-sive force to the outward mind, cease before the equality of thedivine Light and the wide omnipotence of an impartial Power.10

The earthly world preoccupied with the dualities and boundto the immediate transient relations of the hour and the momentis for man, so long as he dwells here attached to these things

10 IX. 30-32.


and while he accepts the law they impose on him for the law ofhis life, a world of struggle, suffering and sorrow. The way toliberation is to turn from the outward to the inward, from theappearance created by the material life which lays its burden onthe mind and imprisons it in the grooves of the life and the bodyto the divine Reality which waits to manifest itself through thefreedom of the spirit. Love of the world, the mask, must changeinto the love of God, the Truth. Once this secret and innerGodhead is known and is embraced, the whole being and thewhole life will undergo a sovereign uplifting and a marvelloustransmutation. In place of the ignorance of the lower Natureabsorbed in its outward works and appearances the eye will opento the vision of God everywhere, to the unity and universalityof the spirit. The world’s sorrow and pain will disappear in thebliss of the All-blissful; our weakness and error and sin will bechanged into the all-embracing and all-transforming strength,truth and purity of the Eternal. To make the mind one withthe divine consciousness, to make the whole of our emotionalnature one love of God everywhere, to make all our works onesacrifice to the Lord of the worlds and all our worship andaspiration one adoration of him and self-surrender, to direct thewhole self Godwards in an entire union is the way to rise out ofa mundane into a divine existence. This is the Gita’s teaching ofdivine love and devotion, in which knowledge, works and theheart’s longing become one in a supreme unification, a mergingof all their divergences, an intertwining of all their threads, ahigh fusion, a wide identifying movement.11

11 IX. 33-34.

VII

The Supreme Word of the Gita

WE HAVE now got to the inmost kernel of the Gita’sYoga, the whole living and breathing centre of itsteaching. We can see now quite clearly that the ascent

of the limited human soul when it withdraws from the ego andthe lower nature into the immutable Self calm, silent and stable,was only a first step, an initial change. And now too we cansee why the Gita from the first insisted on the Ishwara, theGodhead in the human form, who speaks always of himself,“aham, mam,” as of some great secret and omnipresent Being,lord of all the worlds and master of the human soul, one whois greater even than that immutable self-existence which is stilland unmoved for ever and abides for ever untouched by thesubjective and objective appearances of the natural universe.

All Yoga is a seeking after the Divine, a turn towards unionwith the Eternal. According to the adequacy of our perceptionof the Divine and the Eternal will be the way of the seeking, thedepth and fullness of the union and the integrality of the realisa-tion. Man, the mental being, approaches the Infinite through hisfinite mind and has to open some near gate of this finite upon thatInfinite. He seeks for some conception on which his mind is ableto seize, selects some power of his nature which by force of anabsolute self-heightening can reach out and lay its touch on theinfinite Truth that in itself is beyond his mental comprehension.Some face of that infinite Truth — for, because it is infinite, ithas numberless faces, words of its meaning, self-suggestions —he attempts to see, so that by attaching himself to it he can arrivethrough direct experience to the immeasurable reality it figures.However narrow the gate may be, he is satisfied if it offers someprospect into the wideness which attracts him, if it sets him onthe way to the fathomless profundity and unreachable heightsof that which calls to his spirit. And as he approaches it, so it


receives him, ye yatha mam prapadyante.Philosophic mind attempts to attain to the Eternal by an

abstractive knowledge. The business of knowledge is to com-prehend and for the finite intellect that means to define anddetermine. But the only way to determine the indeterminableis by some kind of universal negation, neti neti. Therefore themind proceeds to exclude from the conception of the Eternalall that offers itself as limitable by the senses and the heart andthe understanding. An entire opposition is made between theSelf and the not-self, between an eternal, immutable, indefinableself-existence and all forms of existence, — between Brahmanand Maya, between the ineffable Reality and all that undertakesto express, but cannot express the Ineffable, — between Karmaand Nirvana, between the ever continuous but ever impermanentaction and conception of the universal Energy and some absoluteineffable supreme Negation of its action and conception whichis empty of all life and mentality and dynamic significance. Thatstrong drive of knowledge towards the Eternal leads away fromeverything that is transient. It negates life in order to return to itssource, cuts away from us all that we seem to be in order to getfrom it to the nameless and impersonal reality of our being. Thedesires of the heart, the works of the will and the conceptions ofthe mind are rejected; even in the end knowledge itself is negatedand abolished in the Identical and Unknowable. By the way ofan increasing quietude ending in an absolute passivity the Maya-created soul or the bundle of associations we call ourselves entersinto annihilation of its idea of personality, makes an end of thelie of living, disappears into Nirvana.

But this difficult abstractive method of self-negation, how-ever it may draw to it some exceptional natures, cannot satisfyuniversally the embodied soul in man, because it does not givean outlet to all the straining of his complex nature towards theperfect Eternal. Not only his abstracting contemplative intellectbut his yearning heart, his active will, his positive mind in searchof some Truth to which his existence and the existence of theworld is a manifold key, have their straining towards the Eternaland Infinite and seek to find in it their divine Source and the jus-

The Supreme Word of the Gita 339

tification of their being and their nature. From this need arise thereligions of love and works, whose strength is that they satisfyand lead Godwards the most active and developed powers of ourhumanity, — for only by starting from these can knowledge beeffective. Even Buddhism with its austere and uncompromisingnegation both of subjective self and objective things had still tofound itself initially on a divine discipline of works and to admitas a substitute for bhakti the spiritualised emotionalism of auniversal love and compassion, since so only could it becomean effective way for mankind, a truly liberating religion. Evenillusionist Mayavada with its ultralogical intolerance of actionand the creations of mentality had to allow a provisional andpractical reality to man and the universe and to God in the worldin order to have a first foothold and a feasible starting-point; ithad to affirm what it denied in order to give some reality toman’s bondage and to his effort for liberation.

But the weakness of the kinetic and the emotional religionsis that they are too much absorbed in some divine Personalityand in the divine values of the finite. And, even when they havea conception of the infinite Godhead, they do not give us thefull satisfaction of knowledge because they do not follow it outinto its most ultimate and supernal tendencies. These religionsfall short of a complete absorption in the Eternal and the perfectunion by identity, — and yet to that identity in some other way,if not in the abstractive, since there all oneness has its basis, thespirit that is in man must one day arrive. On the other hand,the weakness of a contemplative quietistic spirituality is that itarrives at this result by a too absolute abstraction and in theend it turns into a nothing or a fiction the human soul whoseaspiration was yet all the time the whole sense of this attemptat union; for without the soul and its aspiration liberation andunion could have no meaning. The little that this way of think-ing recognises of his other powers of existence, it relegates toan inferior preliminary action which never arrives at any fullor satisfying realisation in the Eternal and Infinite. Yet thesethings too which it restricts unduly, the potent will, the strongyearning of love, the positive light and all-embracing intuition


of the conscious mental being are from the Divine, representessential powers of him and must have some justification intheir Source and some dynamic way of self-fulfilment in him. NoGod-knowledge can be integral, perfect or universally satisfyingwhich leaves unfulfilled their absolute claim, no wisdom utterlywise which in its intolerant asceticism of search negates or inthe pride of pure knowledge belittles the spiritual reality behindthese ways of the Godhead.

The greatness of the central thought of the Gita in which allits threads are gathered up and united, consists in the syntheticvalue of a conception which recognises the whole nature ofthe soul of man in the universe and validates by a large andwise unification its many-sided need of the supreme and infiniteTruth, Power, Love, Being to which our humanity turns in itssearch for perfection and immortality and some highest joy andpower and peace. There is a strong and wide endeavour towardsa comprehensive spiritual view of God and man and universalexistence. Not indeed that everything without any exception isseized in these eighteen chapters, no spiritual problem left forsolution; but still so large a scheme is laid out that we have onlyto fill in, to develop, to modify, to stress, to follow out points, towork out hint and illuminate adumbration in order to find a clueto any further claim of our intelligence and need of our spirit.The Gita itself does not evolve any quite novel solution out of itsown questionings. To arrive at the comprehensiveness at whichit aims, it goes back behind the great philosophical systems tothe original Vedanta of the Upanishads; for there we have thewidest and profoundest extant synthetic vision of spirit and manand cosmos. But what is in the Upanishads undeveloped to theintelligence because wrapped up in a luminous kernel of intuitivevision and symbolic utterance, the Gita brings out in the light ofa later intellectual thinking and distinctive experience.

In the frame of its synthesis it admits the seeking of theabstractive thinkers for the Indefinable, anirdesyam, the everunmanifest Immutable, avyaktam aks.aram. Those who devotethemselves to this search, find, they also, the Purushottama,the supreme Divine Person, mam, the Spirit and highest Soul


and Lord of things. For his utmost self-existent way of being isindeed an unthinkable, acintyarupam, an unimaginable positive,an absolute quintessence of all absolutes far beyond the deter-mination of the intelligence. The method of negative passivity,quietude, renunciation of life and works by which men feel afterthis intangible Absolute is admitted and ratified in the Gita’sphilosophy, but only with a minor permissive sanction. Thisnegating knowledge approaches the Eternal by one side only ofthe truth and that side the most difficult to reach and follow forthe embodied soul in Nature, duh. kham dehavadbhir avapyate;it proceeds by a highly specialised, even an unnecessarily ar-duous way, “narrow and difficult to tread as a razor’s edge.”Not by denying all relations, but through all relations is theDivine Infinite naturally approachable to man and most easily,widely, intimately seizable. This seeing is not after all the largestor the truest truth that the Supreme is without any relationswith the mental, vital, physical existence of man in the universe,avyavaharyam, nor that what is described as the empirical truthof things, the truth of relations, vyavahara, is altogether the op-posite of the highest spiritual truth, paramartha. On the contrarythere are a thousand relations by which the supreme Eternal issecretly in contact and union with our human existence and byall essential ways of our nature and of the world’s nature, sarva-bhavena, can that contact be made sensible and that union madereal to our soul, heart, will, intelligence, spirit. Therefore is thisother way natural and easy for man, sukham aptum. God doesnot make himself difficult of approach to us: only one thing isneeded, one demand made on us, the single indomitable willto break through the veil of our ignorance and the whole, thepersistent seeking of the mind and heart and life for that which isall the time near to it, within it, its own soul of being and spiritualessence and the secret of its personality and its impersonality, itsself and its nature. This is our one difficulty; the rest the Masterof our existence will himself see to and accomplish, aham tvammoks.ayis.yami ma sucah. .

In the very part of its teaching in which the Gita’s synthe-sis leans most towards the side of pure knowledge, we have


seen that it constantly prepares for this fuller truth and morepregnant experience. Indeed, it is implied in the very form theGita gives to the realisation of the self-existent Immutable. Thatimmutable Self of all existences seems indeed to stand back fromany active intervention in the workings of Nature; but it is notvoid of all relation whatever and remote from all connection.It is our witness and supporter; it gives a silent and impersonalsanction; it has even an impassive enjoyment. The many-sidedaction of Nature is still possible even when the soul is poised inthat calm self-existence: for the witness soul is the immutablePurusha, and Purusha has always some relation with Prakriti.But now the reason of this double aspect of silence and of ac-tivity is revealed in its entire significance, — because the silentall-pervading Self is only one side of the truth of the divineBeing. He who pervades the world as the one unchanging selfthat supports all its mutations, is equally the Godhead in man,the Lord in the heart of every creature, the conscient Causeand Master of all our subjective becoming and all our inward-taking and outward-going objectivised action. The Ishwara ofthe Yogins is one with the Brahman of the seeker of knowledge,one supreme and universal Spirit, one supreme and universalGodhead.

This Godhead is not the limited personal God of so manyexoteric religions; for those are all only partial and outwardformations of this other, this creative and directive, this per-sonal side of his complete truth of existence. This is the onesupreme Person, Soul, Being, Purusha of whom all godheadsare aspects, all individual personality a limited development incosmic Nature. This Godhead is not a particularised name andform of Divinity, is.t.a-devata, constructed by the intelligence orembodying the special aspiration of the worshipper. All suchnames and forms are only powers and faces of the one Devawho is the universal Lord of all worshippers and all religions:but this is itself that universal Deity, deva-deva. This Ishwara isnot a reflection of the impersonal and indeterminable Brahmanin illusive Maya: for from beyond all cosmos as well as within ithe rules and is the Lord of the worlds and their creatures. He is


Parabrahman who is Parameshwara, supreme Lord because heis the supreme Self and Spirit, and from his highest original ex-istence he originates and governs the universe, not self-deceived,but with an all-knowing omnipotence. Nor is the working of hisdivine Nature in the cosmos an illusion whether of his or ourconsciousness. The only illusive Maya is the ignorance of thelower Prakriti which is not a creator of non-existent things on theimpalpable background of the One and Absolute, but because ofits blind encumbered and limited working misrepresents to thehuman mind by the figure of ego and other inadequate figuresof mind, life and matter the greater sense, the deeper realitiesof existence. There is a supreme, a divine Nature which is thetrue creatrix of the universe. All creatures and all objects arebecomings of the one divine Being; all life is a working of thepower of the one Lord; all nature is a manifestation of the oneInfinite. 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 Timeis his phenomenal self-extension.

In the unrolling of this comprehensive vision of existenceand super-existence the Yoga of the Gita finds its unified signifi-cance and unexampled amplitude. This supreme Godhead is theone unchanging imperishable Self in all that is; therefore to thespiritual sense of this unchanging imperishable self man has toawake and to unify with it his inner impersonal being. He is theGodhead in man who originates and directs all his workings;therefore man has to awake to the Godhead within himself, toknow the divinity he houses, to rise out of all that veils andobscures it and to become united with this inmost Self of hisself, this greater consciousness of his consciousness, this hiddenMaster of all his will and works, this Being within him who is thefount and object of all his various becoming. He is the Godheadwhose divine nature, origin of all that we are, is thickly veiledby these lower natural derivations; therefore man has to getback from his lower apparent existence, imperfect and mortal,to his essential divine nature of immortality and perfection. ThisGodhead is one in all things that are, the self who lives in alland the self in whom all live and move; therefore man has to


discover his spiritual unity with all creatures, to see all in theself and the self in all beings, even to see all things and creaturesas himself, atmaupamyena sarvatra, and accordingly think, feeland act in all his mind, will and living. This Godhead is theorigin of all that is here or elsewhere and by his Nature he hasbecome all these innumerable existences, abhut sarvan. i bhutani;therefore man has to see and adore the One in all things animateand inanimate, to worship the manifestation in sun and star andflower, in man and every living creature, in the forms and forces,qualities and powers of Nature, vasudevah. sarvam iti. He has tomake himself by divine vision and divine sympathy and finally bya strong inner identity one universality with the universe. A pas-sive relationless identity excludes love and action, but this largerand richer oneness fulfils itself by works and by a pure emotion:it becomes the source and continent and substance and motiveand divine purpose of all our acts and feelings. Kasmai devayahavis.a vidhema, to what Godhead shall we give all our life andactivities as an offering? This is that Godhead, this the Lord whoclaims our sacrifice. A passive relationless identity excludes thejoy of adoration and devotion; but bhakti is the very soul andheart 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 theone supreme and universal Deva, Atman, Purusha, Brahman,Ishwara of the secret wisdom. He has manifested the world inhimself in all these ways by his divine Yoga: its multitudinousexistences 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 isman’s side of the same divine Yoga.

To make it perfectly and indisputably clear that this is thesupreme and entire truth of his teaching, this the integral knowl-edge 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, paramam vacah. .“Again hearken to my supreme word,” bhuya eva sr.n.u meparamam vacah. . This supreme word of the Gita is, we find,first the explicit and unmistakable declaration that the highest


worship and highest knowledge of the Eternal are the knowledgeand the adoration of him as the supreme and divine Origin ofall that is in existence and the mighty Lord of the world andits peoples of whose being all things are the becomings. It is,secondly, the declaration of a unified knowledge and bhakti asthe supreme Yoga; that is the destined and the natural waygiven to man to arrive at union with the eternal Godhead. Andto make more significant this definition of the way, to give anilluminating point to this highest importance of bhakti foundedupon and opening to knowledge and made the basis and motive-power for divinely appointed works, the acceptance of it by theheart and mind of the disciple is put as a condition for the fartherdevelopment by which the final command to action comes at lastto be given to the human instrument, Arjuna. “I will speak thissupreme word to thee” says the Godhead “from my will forthy soul’s good, now that thy heart is taking delight in me,” teprıyaman. aya vaks.yami. For this delight of the heart in God isthe whole constituent and essence of true bhakti, bhajanti prıti-purvakam. As soon as the supreme word is given, Arjuna ismade to utter his acceptance of it and to ask for a practical wayof seeing God in all things in Nature, and from that questionimmediately and naturally there develops the vision of the Divineas the Spirit of the universe and there arises the tremendouscommand to the world-action.1

The idea of the Divine on which the Gita insists as the secretof the whole mystery of existence, the knowledge that leadsto liberation, is one that bridges the opposition between thecosmic procession in Time and a supracosmic eternity withoutdenying either of them or taking anything from the reality ofeither. It harmonises the pantheistic, the theistic and the highesttranscendental terms of our spiritual conception and spiritualexperience. 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 godsnor the great Rishis know any birth of me. . . . He who knows

1 Gita, X. 1-18.


me as the unborn without origin . . . ” are the opening utterancesof this supreme word. And it gives the high promise that thisknowledge, not limiting, not intellectual, but pure and spiritual,— for the form and nature, if we can use such language, of thistranscendental Being, his svarupa, are necessarily unthinkableby the mind, acintyarupa, — liberates mortal man from all con-fusion of ignorance and from all bondage of sin, suffering andevil, yo vetti asammud. hah. sa martyes.u sarva-papaih. pramuc-yate. The human soul that can dwell in the light of this supremespiritual knowledge is lifted by it beyond the ideative or sensibleformulations of the universe. It rises into the ineffable powerof an all-exceeding, yet all-fulfilling identity, the same beyondand here. This spiritual experience of the transcendental Infinitebreaks down the limitations of the pantheistic conception ofexistence. The infinite of a cosmic monism which makes Godand the universe one, tries to imprison the Divine in his worldmanifestation and leaves us that as our sole possible means ofknowing him; but this experience liberates us into the timelessand spaceless Eternal. “Neither the Gods nor the Titans knowthy manifestation” cries Arjuna in his reply: the whole universeor even numberless universes cannot manifest him, cannot con-tain his ineffable light and infinite greatness. All other lesserGod-knowledge has its truth only by dependence on the everunmanifested and ineffable reality of the transcendent Godhead.

But at the same time the divine Transcendence is not a nega-tion, nor is it an Absolute empty of all relation to the universe. Itis a supreme positive, it is an absolute of all absolutes. All cosmicrelations derive from this Supreme; all cosmic existences returnto it and find in it alone their true and immeasurable existence.“For I am altogether and in every way the origin of the godsand the great Rishis.” The gods are the great undying Powersand 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 Deitywho descend from him into the many processes of the world.Multitudinous, universal, the gods weave out of the primaryprinciples of being and its thousand complexities the whole web


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 self-sufficiently by these divine agents; everything finds its origin,cause, first spiritual reason for being and will to be in the abso-lute and supreme Godhead, — aham adih. sarvasah. . Nothing inthe universe has its real cause in the universe; all proceeds fromthis supernal Existence.

The great Rishis, called here as in the Veda the seven originalSeers, mahars.ayah. sapta purve, the seven Ancients of the world,are intelligence-powers of that divine Wisdom which has evolvedall things out of its own self-conscious infinitude, prajna puran. ı,— developed them down the range of the seven principles ofits own essence. These Rishis embody the all-upholding, all-illumining, all-manifesting seven Thoughts of the Veda, saptadhiyah. , — the Upanishad speaks of all things as being arrangedin septettes, sapta sapta. Along with these are coupled the foureternal Manus, fathers of man, — for the active nature of theGodhead is fourfold and humanity expresses this nature in itsfourfold character. These also, as their name implies, are mentalbeings. Creators of all this life that depends on manifest or latentmind for its action, from them are all these living creatures inthe world; all are their children and offspring, yes.am loka imah.prajah. . And these great Rishis and these Manus are themselvesperpetual mental becomings of the supreme Soul2 and born outof his spiritual transcendence into cosmic Nature, — originators,but he the origin of all that originates in the universe. Spirit ofall spirits, Soul of all souls, Mind of all mind, Life of all life,Substance of all form, this transcendent Absolute is no completeopposite of all we are, but on the contrary the originating andilluminating Absolute of all the principles and powers of ourand the world’s being and nature.

This transcendent Origin of our existence is not separated

2 mad-bhava manasa jatah. .


from us by any unbridgeable gulf and does not disown the crea-tures that derive from him or condemn them to be only thefigments 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 un-substantial matrix of dream. Out of himself he creates, in himselfhe becomes; all are in his being and all is of his being. This truthadmits and exceeds the pantheistic seeing of things. Vasudevais all, vasudevah. sarvam; but Vasudeva is all that appears inthe cosmos because he is too all that does not appear in it, allthat is never manifested. His being is in no way limited by hisbecoming; he is in no degree bound by this world of relations.Even in becoming all he is still a Transcendence; even in assumingfinite forms he is always the Infinite. Nature, Prakriti, is in heressence his spiritual power, self-power, atmasakti; this spiritualself-power develops infinite primal qualities of becoming in theinwardness of things and turns them into an external surface ofform and action. For in her essential, secret and divine orderthe spiritual truth of each and all comes first, a thing of herdeep identities; their psychological truth of quality and nature isdependent on the spiritual for all in it that is authentic, it derivesfrom the spirit; least in necessity, last in order the objective truthof form and action derives from inner quality of nature anddepends on it for all these variable presentations of existencehere in the external order. Or in other words, the objective factis only an expression of a sum of soul factors and these go backalways to a spiritual cause of their appearance.

This finite outward becoming is an expressive phenomenonof the divine Infinite. Nature is, secondarily, the lower Nature,a subordinate variable development of a few selective combina-tions out of the many possibilities of the Infinite. Evolved outof essential and psychological quality of being and becoming,svabhava, these combinations of form and energy, action andmovement exist for a quite limited relation and mutual expe-rience in the cosmic oneness. And in this lower, outward andapparent order of things Nature as an expressive power of theGodhead is disfigured by the perversions of an obscure cosmicIgnorance and her divine significances lost in the materialised,


separative and egoistic mechanism of our mental and vital ex-perience. But still here also all is from the supreme Godhead,a birth, a becoming, an evolution,3 a process of developmentthrough action of Nature out of the Transcendent. Aham sar-vasya prabhavo mattah. sarvam pravartate; “I am the birth ofeverything and from me all proceeds into development of actionand movement.” Not only is this true of all that we call goodor praise and recognise as divine, all that is luminous, sattwic,ethical, peace-giving, spiritually joy-giving, “understanding andknowledge and freedom from the bewilderment of the Igno-rance, forgiveness and truth and self-government and calm ofinner control, non-injuring and equality, contentment and aus-terity and giving.” It is true also of the oppositions that perplexthe mortal mind and bring in ignorance and its bewilderment,“grief and pleasure, coming into being and destruction, fear andfearlessness, glory and ingloriousness” with all the rest of theinterplay of light and darkness, all the myriad mixed threadsthat quiver so painfully and yet with a constant stimulationthrough the entanglement of our nervous mind and its ignorantsubjectivities. All here in their separate diversities are subjec-tive becomings of existences in the one great Becoming andthey get their birth and being from Him who transcends them.The Transcendent knows and originates these things, but is notcaught as in a web in that diversified knowledge and is notovercome by his creation. We must observe here the emphaticcollocation of the three words from the verb bhu, to become,bhavanti, bhavah. , bhutanam. All existences are becomings ofthe Divine, bhutani; all subjective states and movements arehis and their psychological becomings, bhavah. . These even, ourlesser subjective conditions and their apparent results no lessthan the highest spiritual states, are all becomings from thesupreme Being,4 bhavanti matta eva. The Gita recognises andstresses the distinction between Being and becoming, but does

3 prabhava, bhava, pravr.tti.4 Cf. the Upanishad, atma eva abhut sarvan. i bhutani, the Self has become all existences,

with this contained significance in the choice of the words, the Self-existent has becomeall these becomings.


not turn it into an opposition. For that would be to abrogatethe universal oneness. The Godhead is one in his transcendence,one all-supporting Self of things, one in the unity of his cosmicnature. These three are one Godhead; all derives from him, allbecomes from his being, all is eternal portion or temporal ex-pression of the Eternal. In the Transcendence, in the Absolute,if we are to follow the Gita, we must look, not for a supremenegation 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 mustalso be recognised as an indispensable element of the liberatingknowledge. This reality is that of the transcendent downlook aswell as the close immanent presence of the divine governmentof the universe. The Supreme who becomes all creation, yetinfinitely transcends it, is not a will-less cause aloof from hiscreation. He is not an involuntary originator who disowns allresponsibility for these results of his universal Power or caststhem upon an illusive consciousness entirely different from hisown or leaves them to a mechanical Law or to a Demiurgeor to a Manichean conflict of Principles. He is not an aloof andindifferent Witness who waits impassively for all to abolish itselfor return to its unmoved original principle. He is the mightylord of the worlds and peoples, loka-mahesvara, and governsall not only from within but from above, from his supremetranscendence. Cosmos cannot be governed by a Power thatdoes not transcend cosmos. A divine government implies thefree mastery of an omnipotent Ruler and not an automatic forceor mechanical law of determinative becoming limited by theapparent nature of the cosmos. This is the theistic seeing of theuniverse, but it is no shrinking and gingerly theism afraid of theworld’s contradictions, but one which sees God as the omniscientand omnipotent, the sole original Being who manifests in him-self all, whatever it may be, good and evil, pain and pleasure,light and darkness as stuff of his own existence and governshimself what in himself he has manifested. Unaffected by itsoppositions, unbound by his creation, exceeding, yet intimatelyrelated to this Nature and closely one with her creatures, their


Spirit, Self, highest Soul, Lord, Lover, Friend, Refuge, he is everleading them from within them and from above through themortal appearances of ignorance and suffering and sin and evil,ever leading each through his nature and all through universalNature towards a supreme light and bliss and immortality andtranscendence. This is the fullness of the liberating knowledge.It is a knowledge of the Divine within us and in the world asat the same time a transcendent Infinite. An Absolute who hasbecome all that is by his divine Nature, his effective power ofSpirit, he governs all from his transcendence. He is intimatelypresent within every creature and the cause, ruler, director ofall cosmic happenings and yet is he far too great, mighty andinfinite to be limited by his creation.

This character of the knowledge is emphasised in threeseparate verses of promise. “Whosoever knows me,” says theGodhead, “as the unborn who is without origin, mighty lordof the worlds and peoples, lives unbewildered among mortalsand is delivered from all sin and evil. . . . Whosoever knows inits right principles this my pervading lordship and this my Yoga(the divine Yoga, aisvara yoga, by which the Transcendent is onewith all existences, even while more than them all, and dwells inthem and contains them as becomings of his own Nature), uniteshimself to me by an untrembling Yoga. . . . The wise hold me forthe birth of each and all, hold each and all as developing fromme its action and movement, and so holding they love and adoreme . . . and I give them the Yoga of the understanding by whichthey come to me and I destroy for them the darkness which isborn of the ignorance.” These results must arise inevitably fromthe very nature of the knowledge and from the very nature ofthe Yoga which converts that knowledge into spiritual growthand spiritual experience. For all the perplexity of man’s mind andaction, all the stumbling, insecurity and affliction of his mind, hiswill, his ethical turn, his emotional, sensational and vital urgingscan be traced back to the groping and bewildered cognition andvolition natural to his sense-obscured mortal mind in the body,sammoha. But when he sees the divine Origin of all things, whenhe looks steadily from the cosmic appearance to its transcendent


Reality and back from that Reality to the appearance, he is thendelivered from this bewilderment of the mind, will, heart andsenses, he walks enlightened and free, asammud.hah. martyes.u.Assigning to everything its supernal and real and not any longeronly its present and apparent value, he finds the hidden linksand connections; he consciously directs all life and act to theirhigh and true object and governs them by the light and powerwhich comes to him from the Godhead within him. Thus heescapes from the wrong cognition, the wrong mental and vo-litional reaction, the wrong sensational reception and impulsewhich here originate sin and error and suffering, sarva-papaih.pramucyate. For living thus in the transcendent and universalhe sees his own and every other individuality in their greatervalues and is released from the falsehood and ignorance of hisseparative and egoistic will and knowledge. That is always theessence of the spiritual liberation.

The wisdom of the liberated man is not then, in the viewof the Gita, a consciousness of abstracted and unrelated imper-sonality, a do-nothing quietude. For the mind and soul of theliberated man are firmly settled in a constant sense, an integralfeeling of the pervasion of the world by the actuating and direct-ing presence of the divine Master of the universe, etam vibhutimmama yo vetti. He is aware of his spirit’s transcendence of thecosmic order, but he is aware also of his oneness with it bythe divine Yoga, yogam ca mama. And he sees each aspect ofthe transcendent, the cosmic and the individual existence in itsright relation to the supreme Truth and puts all in their rightplace in the unity of the divine Yoga. He no longer sees eachthing in its separateness, — the separate seeing that leaves alleither unexplained or one-sided to the experiencing conscious-ness. Nor does he see all confusedly together, — the confusedseeing that gives a wrong light and a chaotic action. Secure inthe transcendence, he is not affected by the cosmic stress and theturmoil of Time and circumstance. Untroubled in the midst ofall this creation and destruction of things, his spirit adheres to anunshaken and untrembling, an unvacillating Yoga of union withthe eternal and spiritual in the universe. He watches through it all


the divine persistence of the Master of the Yoga and acts out ofa tranquil universality and oneness with all things and creatures.And this close contact with all things implies no involution ofsoul and mind in the separative lower nature, because his basisof spiritual experience is not the inferior phenomenal form andmovement but the inner All and the supreme Transcendence.He becomes of like nature and law of being with the Divine,sadharmyam agatah. , transcendent even in universality of spirit,universal even in the individuality of mind, life and body. By thisYoga once perfected, undeviating and fixed, avikampena yogenayujyate, he is able to take up whatever poise of nature, assumewhatever human condition, do whatever world-action withoutany fall from his oneness with the divine Self, without any lossof his constant communion with the Master of existence.5

This knowledge translated into the affective, emotional,temperamental plane becomes a calm love and intense adorationof the original and transcendental Godhead above us, the ever-present Master of all things here, God in man, God in Nature.It is at first a wisdom of the intelligence, the buddhi; but thatis accompanied by a moved spiritualised state of the affectivenature,6 bhava. This change of the heart and mind is the be-ginning of a total change of all the nature. A new inner birthand becoming prepares us for oneness with the supreme objectof our love and adoration, madbhavaya. There is an intensedelight of love in the greatness and beauty and perfection of thisdivine Being now seen everywhere in the world and above it,prıti. That deeper ecstasy assumes the place of the scattered andexternal pleasure of the mind in existence or rather it draws allother delight into it and transforms by a marvellous alchemythe mind’s and the heart’s feelings and all sense movements. Thewhole consciousness becomes full of the Godhead and repletewith his answering consciousness; the whole life flows into onesea of bliss-experience. All the speech and thought of such God-lovers becomes a mutual utterance and understanding of the

5 sarvatha vartamano’pi sa yogı mayi vartate.6 budha bhava-samanvitah. .


Divine. In that one joy is concentrated all the contentment ofthe being, all the play and pleasure of the nature. There is acontinual union from moment to moment in the thought andmemory, there is an unbroken continuity of the experience ofoneness in the spirit. And from the moment that this inner statebegins, even in the stage of imperfection, the Divine confirms itby the perfect Yoga of the will and intelligence. He uplifts theblazing lamp of knowledge within us, he destroys the ignoranceof the separative mind and will, he stands revealed in the humanspirit. By the Yoga of the will and intelligence founded on anillumined union of works and knowledge the transition waseffected from our lower troubled mind-ranges to the immutablecalm of the witnessing Soul above the active nature. But now bythis greater yoga of the Buddhi founded on an illumined unionof love and adoration with an all-comprehending knowledge thesoul rises in a vast ecstasy to the whole transcendental truth ofthe absolute and all-originating Godhead. The Eternal is fulfilledin the individual spirit and individual nature; the individual spiritis exalted from birth in time to the infinitudes of the Eternal.

VIII

God in Power of Becoming

AVERY important step has been reached, a decisive state-ment of its metaphysical and psychological synthesis hasbeen added to the development of the Gita’s gospel of

spiritual liberation and divine works. The Godhead has beenrevealed in thought to Arjuna; he has been made visible to themind’s search and the heart’s seeing as the supreme and universalBeing, the supernal and universal Person, the inward-dwellingMaster of our existence for whom man’s knowledge, will andadoration were seeking through the mists of the Ignorance.There remains only the vision of the multiple Virat Purushato complete the revelation on one more of its many sides.

The metaphysical synthesis is complete. Sankhya has beenadmitted for the separation of the soul from the lower nature, —a separation that must be effected by self-knowledge through thediscriminating reason and by transcendence of our subjection tothe three gunas constituent of that nature. It has been completedand its limitations exceeded by a large revelation of the unityof the supreme Soul and supreme Nature, para purus.a, paraprakr.ti. Vedanta of the philosophers has been admitted for theself-effacement of the natural separative personality built roundthe ego. Its method has been used to replace the little personalby the large impersonal being, to annul the separative illusion inthe unity of the Brahman and to substitute for the blind seeingof the ego the truer vision of all things in one Self and one Self inall things. Its truth has been completed by the impartial revela-tion of the Parabrahman from whom originate both the mobileand the immobile, the mutable and the immutable, the actionand the silence. Its possible limitations have been transcendedby the intimate revelation of the supreme Soul and Lord whobecomes here in all Nature, manifests himself in all personalityand puts forth the power of his Nature in all action. Yoga has


been admitted for the self-surrender of the will, mind, heart, allthe psychological being to the Ishwara, the divine Lord of thenature. It has been completed by the revelation of the supernalMaster of existence as the original Godhead of whom the Jivais the partial being in Nature. Its possible limitations have beenexceeded by the soul’s seeing of all things as the Lord in the lightof a perfect spiritual oneness.

There results an integral vision of the Divine Existent at onceas the transcendent Reality, supracosmic origin of cosmos, as theimpersonal Self of all things, calm continent of the cosmos, andas 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 allexistences. The Yoga of knowledge has been fulfilled sovereignlyin this integral seeing and knowing of the One. The Yoga ofworks has been crowned by the surrender of all works to theirMaster, — for the natural man is now only an instrument of hiswill. The Yoga of love and adoration has been declared in itsamplest forms. The intense consummation of knowledge andworks, love conducts to a crowning union of soul and Oversoulin a highest amplitude. In that union the revelations of knowl-edge are made real to the heart as well as to the intelligence. Inthat union the difficult sacrifice of self in an instrumental actionbecomes the easy, free and blissful expression of a living oneness.The whole means of the spiritual liberation has been given; thewhole foundation of the divine action has been constructed.

Arjuna accepts the entire knowledge that has thus been givento him by the divine Teacher. His mind is already delivered fromits doubts and seekings; his heart, turned now from the outwardaspect of the world, from its baffling appearance to its supremesense and origin and its inner realities, is already released fromsorrow and affliction and touched with the ineffable gladnessof a divine revelation. The language which he is made to usein voicing his acceptance is such as to emphasise and insistonce again on the profound integrality of this knowledge and itsall-embracing finality and fullness. He accepts first the Avatar,the Godhead in man who is speaking to him as the supreme

God in Power of Becoming 357

Brahman, as the supracosmic All and Absolute of existence inwhich the soul can dwell when it rises out of this manifestationand this partial becoming to its source, param brahma, paramdhama. He accepts him as the supreme purity of the ever freeExistence to which one arrives through the effacement of egoin the self’s immutable impersonality calm and still for ever,pavitram paramam. He accepts him next as the one Permanent,the eternal Soul, the divine Purusha, purus.am sasvatam divyam.He acclaims in him the original Godhead, adores the Unbornwho is the pervading, indwelling, self-extending master of allexistence, adi-devam ajam vibhum. He accepts him therefore notonly as that Wonderful who is beyond expression of any kind,for nothing is sufficient to manifest him, — “neither the Godsnor the Titans, O blessed Lord, know thy manifestation,” na hite bhagavan vyaktim vidur deva na danavah. , — but as the lordof all existences and the one divine efficient cause of all their be-coming, God of the gods from whom all godheads have sprung,master of the universe who manifests and governs it from aboveby the power of his supreme and his universal Nature, bhuta-bhavana bhutesa deva-deva jagat-pate. And lastly he accepts himas that Vasudeva in and around us who is all things here by virtueof the world-pervading, all-inhabiting, all-constituting masterpowers of his becoming, vibhutayah. , “the sovereign powers ofthy becoming by which thou standest pervading these worlds,”yabhir vibhutibhir lokan imams tvam vyapya tis.t.hasi.1

He has accepted the truth with the adoration of his heart, thesubmission of his will and the understanding of his intelligence.He is already prepared to act as the divine instrument in thisknowledge and with this self-surrender. But a desire for a deeperconstant spiritual realisation has been awakened in his heart andwill. This is a truth which is evident only to the supreme Soulin its own self-knowledge, — for, cries Arjuna, “thou alone, OPurushottama, knowest thyself by thyself,” atmana atmanamvettha. This is a knowledge that comes by spiritual identity andthe unaided heart, will, intelligence of the natural man cannot

1 Gita, X. 12-15.


arrive at it by their own motion and can only get at imperfectmental reflections that reveal less than they conceal and disfigure.This is a secret wisdom which one must hear from the seers whohave seen the face of this Truth, have heard its word and havebecome one with it in self and spirit. “All the Rishis say this ofthee and the divine seer Narada, Asita, Devala, Vyasa.” Or elseone must receive it from within by revelation and inspirationfrom the inner Godhead who lifts in us the blazing lamp ofknowledge. Svayancaiva bravıs.i me, “and thou thyself sayest itto me.” Once revealed, it has to be accepted by the assent ofthe mind, the consent of the will and the heart’s delight andsubmission, the three elements of the complete mental faith,sraddha. It is so that Arjuna has accepted it; “all this that thousayest, my mind holds for the truth.” But still there will remainthe need of that deeper possession in the very self of our beingout from its most intimate psychic centre, the soul’s demand forthat inexpressible permanent spiritual realisation of which themental is only a preliminary or a shadow and without whichthere cannot be a complete union with the Eternal.

Now the way to arrive at that realisation has been givento Arjuna. And so far as regards the great self-evident divineprinciples, these do not baffle the mind; it can open to the ideaof the supreme Godhead, to the experience of the immutableSelf, to the direct perception of the immanent Divinity, to thecontact of the conscient universal Being. One can, once the mindis illumined with the idea, follow readily the way and, withwhatever preliminary difficult effort to exceed the normal men-tal perceptions, come in the end to the self-experience of theseessential truths that stand behind our and all existence, atmanaatmanam. One can do it with this readiness because these, onceconceived, are evidently divine realities; there is nothing in ourmental associations to prevent us from admitting God in thesehigh aspects. But the difficulty is to see him in the apparenttruths of existence, to detect him in this fact of Nature and inthese disguising phenomena of the world’s becoming; for hereall is opposed to the sublimity of this unifying conception. Howcan we consent to see the Divine as man and animal being and


inanimate object, in the noble and the low, the sweet and theterrible, the good and the evil? If, assenting to some idea of Godextended in the things of the cosmos, we see him in ideal lightof knowledge and greatness of power and charm of beauty andbeneficence of love and ample largeness of spirit, how shall weavoid the breaking of the unity by their opposites which in actualfact cling to these high things and envelop them and obscure?And if in spite of the limitations of human mind and naturewe can see God in the man of God, how shall we see him inthose who oppose him and represent in act and nature all thatwe conceive of as undivine? If Narayana is without difficultyvisible in the sage and the saint, how shall he be easily visibleto us in the sinner, the criminal, the harlot and the outcaste? Toall the differentiations of the world-existence the sage, lookingeverywhere for the supreme purity and oneness, returns the aus-tere cry, “not this, not this,” neti neti. Even if to many thingsin the world we give a willing or reluctant assent and admit theDivine in the universe, still before most must not the mind persistin that cry “not this, not this”? Here constantly the assent ofthe understanding, the consent of the will and the heart’s faithbecome difficult to a human mentality anchored always on phe-nomenon and appearance. At least some compelling indicationsare needed, some links and bridges, some supports to the difficulteffort at oneness.

Arjuna, though he accepts the revelation of Vasudeva as alland though his heart is full of the delight of it, — for alreadyhe finds that it is delivering him from the perplexity and stum-bling differentiations of his mind which was crying for a clue, aguiding truth amid the bewildering problems of a world of oppo-sitions, and it is to his hearing the nectar of immortality, amr.tam,— yet feels the need of such supports and indices. He feels thatthey are indispensable to overcome the difficulty of a completeand firm realisation; for how else can this knowledge be made athing of the heart and life? He requires guiding indications, asksKrishna even for a complete and detailed enumeration of thesovereign powers of his becoming and desires that nothing shallbe left out of the vision, nothing remain to baffle him. “Thou


shouldst tell me” he says “of thy divine self-manifestations inthy sovereign power of becoming, divya atma-vibhutayah. , allwithout exception, — ases.en. a, nothing omitted, — thy Vibhutisby which thou pervadest these worlds and peoples. How shallI know thee, O Yogin, by thinking of thee everywhere at allmoments and in what pre-eminent becomings should I thinkof thee?” This Yoga by which thou art one with all and onein all and all are becomings of thy being, all are pervading orpre-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 Ihear, I am not satiated. Here we get an indication in the Gita ofsomething which the Gita itself does not bring out expressly, butwhich occurs frequently in the Upanishads and was developedlater on by Vaishnavism and Shaktism in a greater intensity ofvision, man’s possible joy of the Divine in the world-existence,the universal Ananda, the play of the Mother, the sweetness andbeauty 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. ForGod is infinite and his manifestation is infinite. The forms ofhis manifestation too are innumerable. Each form is a symbolof some divine power, vibhuti, concealed in it and to the seeingeye each finite carries in it its own revelation of the infinite.Yes, he says, I will tell thee of my divine Vibhutis, but only insome of my principal pre-eminences and as an indication and bythe example of things in which thou canst most readily see thepower of the Godhead, pradhanyatah. , uddesatah. . For there is noend to the innumerable detail of the Godhead’s self-extension inthe universe, nasti anto vistarasya me. This reminder begins thepassage and is repeated at the end in order to give it a greaterand unmistakable emphasis. And then throughout the rest ofthe chapter3 we get a summary description of these principalindications, these pre-eminent signs of the divine force presentin the things and persons of the universe. It seems at first as

2 X. 16-18. 3 X. 19-42.


if they were given pell-mell, without any order, but still thereis a certain principle in the enumeration, which, if it is oncedisengaged, can lead by a helpful guidance to the inner sense ofthe idea and its consequences. The chapter has been called theVibhuti-Yoga, — an indispensable yoga. For while we must iden-tify ourselves impartially with the universal divine Becoming inall its extension, its good and evil, perfection and imperfection,light and darkness, we must at the same time realise that there isan ascending evolutionary power in it, an increasing intensity ofits revelation in things, a hierarchic secret something that carriesus upward from the first concealing appearances through higherand higher forms towards the large ideal nature of the universalGodhead.

This summary enumeration begins with a statement of theprimal principle that underlies all the power of this manifesta-tion in the universe. It is this that in every being and object Goddwells concealed and discoverable; he is housed as in a crypt inthe mind and heart of every thing and creature, an inner self inthe core of its subjective and its objective becoming, one whois the beginning and middle and end of all that is, has been orwill be. For it is this inner divine Self hidden from the mindand heart which he inhabits, this luminous Inhabitant concealedfrom the view of the soul in Nature which he has put forthinto Nature as his representative, who is all the time evolvingthe mutations of our personality in Time and our sensationalexistence in Space, — Time and Space that are the conceptualmovement and extension of the Godhead in us. All is this self-seeing Soul, this self-representing Spirit. For ever from withinall beings, from within all conscient and inconscient existences,this All-conscient develops his manifested self in quality andpower, develops it in the forms of objects, in the instrumentsof our subjectivity, in knowledge and word and thinking, in thecreations of the mind and in the passion and actions of the doer,in the measures of Time, in cosmic powers and godheads and inthe forces of Nature, in plant life, in animal life, in human andsuperhuman beings.

If we look at things with this eye of vision unblinded by


differentiations of quality and quantity or by difference of val-ues and oppositions of nature, we shall see that all things arein fact and can be nothing but powers of his manifestation,vibhutis of this universal Soul and Spirit, Yoga of this greatYogin, self-creations of this marvellous self-Creator. He is theunborn and the all-pervading Master of his own innumerablebecomings in the universe, ajo vibhuh. ; all things are his powersand effectuations in his self-Nature, vibhutis. He is the originof all they are, their beginning; he is their support in their ever-changing status, their middle; he is their end too, the culminationor the disintegration of each created thing in its cessation or itsdisappearance. He brings them out from his consciousness andis hidden in them, he withdraws them into his consciousnessand they are hidden in him for a time or for ever. What isapparent to us is only a power of becoming of the One: whatdisappears from our sense and vision is effect of that power ofbecoming of the One. All classes, genera, species, individualsare such vibhutis. But since it is through power in his becomingthat he is apparent to us, he is especially apparent in whateveris of a pre-eminent value or seems to act with a powerful andpre-eminent force. And therefore in each kind of being we cansee him most in those in whom the power of nature of thatkind reaches its highest, its leading, its most effectively self-revealing manifestation. These are in a special sense Vibhutis.Yet the highest power and manifestation is only a very partialrevelation of the Infinite; even the whole universe is informedby only one degree of his greatness, illumined by one ray of hissplendour, glorious with a faint hint of his delight and beauty.This is in sum the gist of the enumeration, the result we carryaway from it, the heart of its meaning.

God is imperishable, beginningless, unending Time; this ishis most evident Power of becoming and the essence of thewhole universal movement. Aham eva aks.ayah. kalah. . In thatmovement of Time and Becoming God appears to our con-ception or experience of him by the evidence of his works asthe divine Power who ordains and sets all things in their placein the movement. In his form of Space it is he who fronts us


in every direction, million-bodied, myriad-minded, manifest ineach existence; we see his faces on all sides of us. Dhata ’hamvisvato-mukhah. . For simultaneously in all these many millionpersons and things, sarva-bhutes.u, there works the mystery ofhis self and thought and force and his divine genius of creationand his marvellous art of formation and his impeccable order-ing of relations and possibilities and inevitable consequences.He appears to us too in the universe as the universal spirit ofDestruction, who seems to create only to undo his creationsin the end, — “I am all-snatching Death,” aham mr.tyuh. sarva-harah. . And yet his Power of becoming does not cease from itsworkings, for the force of rebirth and new creation ever keepspace with the force of death and destruction, — “and I am toothe birth of all that shall come into being.” The divine Self inthings is the sustaining Spirit of the present, the withdrawingSpirit of the past, the creative Spirit of the future.

Then among all these living beings, cosmic godheads, super-human and human and subhuman creatures, and amid all thesequalities, powers and objects, the chief, the head, the greatest inquality of each class is a special power of the becoming of theGodhead. I am, says the Godhead, Vishnu among the Adityas,Shiva among the Rudras, Indra among the gods, Prahlada amongthe Titans, Brihaspati the chief of the high priests of the world,Skanda the war-god, leader of the leaders of battle, Marichiamong the Maruts, the lord of wealth among the Yakshas andRakshasas, the serpent Ananta among the Nagas, Agni amongthe Vasus, Chitraratha among the Gandharvas, Kandarpa thelove-God among the progenitors, Varuna among the peoples ofthe sea, Aryaman among the Fathers, Narada among the divinesages, Yama lord of the Law among those who maintain rule andlaw, among the powers of storm the Wind-God. At the other endof the scale I am the radiant sun among lights and splendours,the moon among the stars of night, the ocean among the flowingwaters, Meru among the peaks of the world, Himalaya amongthe mountain-ranges, Ganges among the rivers, the divine thun-derbolt among weapons. Among all plants and trees I am theAswattha, among horses Indra’s horse Uchchaihsravas, Airavata


among the elephants, among the birds Garuda, Vasuki the snake-god among the serpents, Kamadhuk the cow of plenty amongcattle, the alligator among fishes, the lion among the beasts ofthe 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 conscious-ness by which they are aware of themselves and their surround-ings. I am mind among the senses, mind by which they receivethe impressions of objects and react upon them. I am man’squalities of mind and character and body and action; I am gloryand speech and memory and intelligence and steadfastness andforgiveness, the energy of the energetic and the strength of themighty. I am resolution and perseverance and victory, I am thesattwic quality of the good, I am the gambling of the cunning; Iam the mastery and power of all who rule and tame and vanquishand the policy of all who succeed and conquer; I am the silenceof things secret, the knowledge of the knower, the logic of thosewho debate. I am the letter A among letters, the dual amongcompounds, the sacred syllable OM among words, the Gayatriamong metres, the Sama-veda among the Vedas and the greatSama among the mantras. I am Time the head of all reckoningto those who reckon and measure. I am spiritual knowledgeamong the many philosophies, arts and sciences. I am all thepowers of the human being and all the energies of the universeand its creatures.

Those in whom my powers rise to the utmost heights ofhuman attainment are myself always, my special Vibhutis. I amamong men the king of men, the leader, the mighty man, thehero. 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 inspiredpoet who sees and reveals the truth by the light of the ideaand sound of the word, is myself luminous in the mortal; I amUshanas among the seer-poets. The great sage, thinker, philoso-pher is my power among men, my own vast intelligence; I amVyasa among the sages. But, with whatever variety of degreein manifestation, all beings are in their own way and nature


powers of the Godhead; nothing moving or unmoving, animateor inanimate in the world can be without me. I am the divineseed of all existences and of that seed they are the branches andflowers; what is in the seed of self, that only they can develop inNature. There is no numbering or limit to my divine Vibhutis;what I have spoken is nothing more than a summary develop-ment and I have given only the light of a few leading indicationsand a strong opening to endless verities. Whatever beautifuland glorious creature thou seest in the world, whatever being ismighty and forceful among men and above man and below him,know to be a very splendour, light and energy of Me and bornof a potent portion and intense power of my existence. But whatneed is there of a multitude of details for this knowledge? Takeit thus, that I am here in this world and everywhere, I am in alland I constitute all: there is nothing else than I, nothing withoutMe. I support this entire universe with a single degree of myillimitable power and an infinitesimal portion of my fathomlessspirit; all these worlds are only sparks, hints, glintings of the IAm eternal and immeasurable.

IX

The Theory of the Vibhuti

THE IMPORTANCE of this chapter of the Gita is verymuch greater than appears at first view or to an eye ofprepossession which is looking into the text only for the

creed of the last transcendence and the detached turning of thehuman soul away from the world to a distant Absolute. Themessage of the Gita is the gospel of the Divinity in man who byforce of an increasing union unfolds himself out of the veil ofthe lower Nature, reveals to the human soul his cosmic spirit,reveals his absolute transcendences, reveals himself in man andin all beings. The potential outcome here of this union, thisdivine Yoga, man growing towards the Godhead, the Godheadmanifest in the human soul and to the inner human vision, isour liberation from limited ego and our elevation to the highernature of a divine humanity. For dwelling in this greater spiritualnature and not in the mortal weft, the tangled complexity of thethree gunas, man, one with God by knowledge, love and will andthe giving up of his whole being into the Godhead, is able indeedto rise to the absolute Transcendence, but also to act upon theworld, no longer in ignorance, but in the right relation of theindividual to the Supreme, in the truth of the Spirit, fulfilled inimmortality, for God in the world and no longer for the ego. Tocall Arjuna to this action, to make him aware of the being andpower that he is and of the Being and Power whose will actsthrough him, is the purpose of the embodied Godhead. To thisend the divine Krishna is his charioteer; to this end there cameupon him that great discouragement and deep dissatisfactionwith the lesser human motives of his work; to substitute for themthe larger spiritual motive this revelation is given to him in thesupreme moment of the work to which he has been appointed.The vision of the World-Purusha and the divine command toaction is the culminating point to which he was being led. That

The Theory of the Vibhuti 367

is already imminent; but without the knowledge now given tohim through the Vibhuti-Yoga it would not bring with it its fullmeaning.

The mystery of the world-existence is in part revealed by theGita. In part, for who shall exhaust its infinite depths or whatcreed or philosophy say that it has enlightened in a narrow spaceor shut up in a brief system all the significance of the cosmicmiracle? But so far as is essential for the Gita’s purpose, it isrevealed to us. We have the way of the origination of the worldfrom God, the immanence of the Divine in it and its immanencein the Divine, the essential unity of all existence, the relation ofthe human soul obscured in Nature to the Godhead, its awak-ening to self-knowledge, its birth into a greater consciousness,its ascension into its own spiritual heights. But when this newself-vision and consciousness have been acquired in place of theoriginal ignorance, what will be the liberated man’s view of theworld around him, his attitude towards the cosmic manifestationof which he has now the central secret? He will have first theknowledge of the unity of existence and the regarding eye of thatknowledge. He will see all around him as souls and forms andpowers of the one divine Being. Henceforward that vision will bethe starting-point of all the inward and outward operations ofhis consciousness; it will be the fundamental seeing, the spiritualbasis of all his actions. He will see all things and every creatureliving, moving and acting in the One, contained in the divine andeternal Existence. But he will also see that One as the Inhabitantin all, their Self, the essential Spirit within them without whosesecret presence in their conscious nature they could not at alllive, move or act and without whose will, power, sanction orsufferance not one of their movements at any moment would bein the least degree possible. Themselves too, their soul, mind, lifeand physical mould he will see only as a result of the power, willand force of this one Self and Spirit. All will be to him a becomingof this one universal Being. Their consciousness he will see tobe derived entirely from its consciousness, their power and willto be drawn from and dependent on its power and will, theirpartial phenomenon of nature to be a resultant from its greater


divine Nature, whether in the immediate actuality of things itstrikes the mind as a manifestation or a disguise, a figure ora disfigurement of the Godhead. No untoward or bewilderingappearance of things will in any smallest degree diminish orconflict with the completeness of this vision. It is the essentialfoundation of the greater consciousness into which he has arisen,it is the indispensable light that has opened around him and theone perfect way of seeing, the one Truth that makes all otherspossible.

But the world is only a partial manifestation of the Godhead,it is not itself that Divinity. The Godhead is infinitely greaterthan any natural manifestation can be. By his very infinity, byits absolute freedom he exists beyond all possibility of integralformulation in any scheme of worlds or extension of cosmicNature, however wide, complex, endlessly varied this and everyworld may seem to us, — nasti anto vistarasya me, — howeverto our finite view infinite. Therefore beyond cosmos the eye ofthe liberated spirit will see the utter Divine. Cosmos he will seeas a figure drawn from the Divinity who is beyond all figure, aconstant minor term in the absolute existence. Every relative andfinite he will see as a figure of the divine Absolute and Infinite,and both beyond all finites and through each finite he will arriveat that alone, see always that beyond each phenomenon andnatural creature and relative action and every quality and everyhappening; looking at each of these things and beyond it, he willfind in the Divinity its spiritual significance.

These things will not be to his mind intellectual conceptsor this attitude to the world simply a way of thinking or apragmatic dogma. For if his knowledge is conceptual only, itis a philosophy, an intellectual construction, not a spiritualknowledge and vision, not a spiritual state of consciousness.The spiritual seeing of God and world is not ideative only, noteven mainly or primarily ideative. It is direct experience andas real, vivid, near, constant, effective, intimate as to the mindits sensuous seeing and feeling of images, objects and persons.It is only the physical mind that thinks of God and spirit asan abstract conception which it cannot visualise or represent


to itself except by words and names and symbolic images andfictions. Spirit sees spirit, the divinised consciousness sees Godas directly and more directly, as intimately and more intimatelythan bodily consciousness sees matter. It sees, feels, thinks, sensesthe Divine. For to the spiritual consciousness all manifest exis-tence 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 thingsare to its view only God-thought, God-force, God-form. Thatis what the Gita means by living and acting in Vasudeva, mayivartate. The spiritual consciousness is aware of the Godheadwith that close knowledge by identity which is so much moretremendously real than any mental perception of the thinkableor any sensuous experience of the sensible. It is so aware evenof the Absolute who is behind and beyond all world-existenceand who originates and surpasses it and is for ever outside itsvicissitudes. And of the immutable self of this Godhead thatpervades and supports the world’s mutations with his unchang-ing eternity, this consciousness is similarly aware, by identity,by the oneness of this self with our own timeless unchangingimmortal spirit. It is aware again in the same manner of thedivine Person who knows himself in all these things and personsand becomes all things and persons in his consciousness andshapes their thoughts and forms and governs their actions by hisimmanent will. It is intimately conscious of God absolute, Godas self, God as spirit, soul and nature. Even this external Natureit knows by identity and self-experience, but an identity freelyadmitting variation, admitting relations, admitting greater andlesser degrees of the action of the one power of existence. ForNature is God’s power of various self-becoming, atma-vibhuti.

But this spiritual consciousness of world-existence will notsee Nature in the world as the normal mind of man sees it inthe ignorance or only as it is in the effects of the ignorance.All in this Nature that is of the ignorance, all that is imperfector painful or perverse and repellent, does not exist as an abso-lute opposite of the nature of the Godhead, but goes back tosomething behind itself, goes back to a saving power of spirit inwhich it can find its own true being and redemption. There is an


original and originating Supreme Prakriti, in which the divinepower and will to be enjoys its own absolute quality and purerevelation. There is found the highest, there the perfect energyof all the energies we see in the universe. That is what presentsitself to us as the ideal nature of the Godhead, a nature ofabsolute knowledge, absolute power and will, absolute love anddelight. And all the infinite variations of its quality and energy,ananta-gun. a, agan. ana-sakti, are there wonderfully various, ad-mirably and spontaneously harmonised free self-formulations ofthis absolute wisdom and will and power and delight and love.All is there a many-sided untrammelled unity of infinites. Eachenergy, each quality is in the ideal divine nature pure, perfect,self-possessed, harmonious in its action; nothing there strives forits own separate limited self-fulfilment, all act in an inexpressibleoneness. There all dharmas, all laws of being — dharma, law ofbeing, is only characteristic action of divine energy and quality,gun. a-karma, — are one free and plastic dharma. The one divinePower of being1 works with an immeasurable liberty and, tiedto no single excluding law, not limited by any binding system,rejoices in her own play of infinity and never falters in her truthof self-expression perfect for ever.

But in the universe in which we live, there is a separatingprinciple of selection and differentiation. There we see each en-ergy, each quality which comes out for expression labouring asif for its own hand, trying to get as much self-expression as it canin whatever way it can, and accommodating somehow as best oras worst it may that effort with the concomitant or rival effortof other energies and qualities for their separate self-expression.The Spirit, the Divine dwells in this struggling world-natureand imposes on it a certain harmony by the inalienable lawof the inner secret oneness on which the action of all thesepowers is based. But it is a relative harmony which seems toresult from an original division, to emerge from and subsist bythe shock of divisions and not from an original oneness. Orat least the oneness seems to be suppressed and latent, not to

1 tapas, cit-sakti.


find itself, never to put off its baffling disguises. And in fact itdoes not find itself till the individual being in this world-naturediscovers in himself the higher divine Prakriti from whom thislesser movement is a derivation. Nevertheless, the qualities andenergies at work in the world, operating variously in man, ani-mal, plant, inanimate thing, are, whatever forms they may take,always divine qualities and energies. All energies and qualitiesare powers of the Godhead. Each comes from the divine Prakritithere, works for its self-expression in the lower Prakriti here,increases its potency of affirmation and actualised values underthese hampering conditions, and as it reaches its heights of self-power, comes near to the visible expression of the Divinity anddirects itself upward to its own absolute in the supreme, theideal, the divine Nature. For each energy is being and power ofthe Godhead and the expansion and self-expression of energy isalways the expansion and expression of the Godhead.

One might even say that at a certain point of intensity eachforce in us, force of knowledge, force of will, force of love,force of delight, can result in an explosion which breaks theshell of the lower formulation and liberates the energy fromits separative action into union with the infinite freedom andpower of the divine Being. A highest Godward tension liberatesthe mind through an absolute seeing of knowledge, liberates theheart through an absolute love and delight, liberates the wholeexistence through an absolute concentration of will towards agreater existence. But the percussion and the delivering shockcome by the touch of the Divine on our actual nature which di-rects the energy away from its normal limited separative actionand objects towards the Eternal, Universal and Transcendent,orientates it towards the infinite and absolute Godhead. Thistruth of the dynamic omnipresence of the divine Power of beingis the foundation of the theory of the Vibhuti.

The infinite divine Shakti is present everywhere and secretlysupports the lower formulation, para prakr.tir me yaya dharyatejagat, but it holds itself back, hidden in the heart of each naturalexistence, sarvabhutanam hr.ddese, until the veil of Yogamaya isrent by the light of knowledge. The spiritual being of man, the


Jiva, possesses the divine Nature. He is a manifestation of God inthat Nature, para prakr.tir jıva-bhuta, and he has latent in him allthe divine energies and qualities, the light, the force, the powerof being of the Godhead. But in this inferior Prakriti in whichwe live, the Jiva follows the principle of selection and finitedetermination, and there whatever nexus of energy, whateverquality or spiritual principle he brings into birth with him orbrings forward as the seed of his self-expression, becomes anoperative portion of his swabhava, his law of self-becoming,and determines his swadharma, his law of action. And if thatwere all, there would be no perplexity or difficulty; the life ofman would be a luminous unfolding of godhead. But this lowerenergy of our world is a nature of ignorance, of egoism, ofthe three gunas. Because this is a nature of egoism, the Jivaconceives of himself as the separative ego: he works out his self-expression egoistically as a separative will to be in conflict aswell as in association with the same will to be in others. Heattempts to possess the world by strife and not by unity andharmony; he stresses an ego-centric discord. Because this is anature of ignorance, a blind seeing and an imperfect or partialself-expression, he does not know himself, does not know hislaw of being, but follows it instinctively under the ill-understoodcompulsion of the world-energy, with a struggle, with muchinner conflict, with a very large possibility of deviation. Becausethis is a nature of the three gunas, this confused and strivingself-expression takes various forms of incapacity, perversion orpartial self-finding. Dominated by the guna of tamas, the modeof darkness and inertia, the power of being works in a weakconfusion, a prevailing incapacity, an unaspiring subjection tothe blind mechanism of the forces of the Ignorance. Dominatedby the guna of rajas, the mode of action, desire and possession,there is a struggle, there is an effort, there is a growth of powerand capacity, but it is stumbling, painful, vehement, misled bywrong notions, methods and ideals, impelled to a misuse, cor-ruption and perversion of right notions, methods or ideals andprone, especially, to a great, often an enormous exaggeration ofthe ego. Dominated by the guna of sattwa, the mode of light


and poise and peace, there is a more harmonious action, a rightdealing with the nature, but right only within the limits of anindividual light and a capacity unable to exceed the better formsof this lower mental will and knowledge. To escape from thistangle, to rise beyond the ignorance, the ego and the gunas is thefirst real step towards divine perfection. By that transcendencethe Jiva finds his own divine nature and his true existence.

The liberated eye of knowledge in the spiritual conscious-ness does not in its outlook on the world see this strugglinglower Nature alone. If we perceive only the apparent outwardfact of our nature and others’ nature, we are looking with theeye of the ignorance and cannot know God equally in all, in thesattwic, the rajasic, the tamasic creature, in God and Titan, insaint and sinner, in the wise man and the ignorant, in the greatand in the little, in man, animal, plant and inanimate existence.The liberated vision sees three things at once as the whole occulttruth of the natural being. First and foremost it sees the divinePrakriti in all, secret, present, waiting for evolution; it sees heras the real power in all things, that which gives its value to allthis apparent action of diverse quality and force, and it reads thesignificance of these latter phenomena not in their own languageof ego and ignorance, but in the light of the divine Nature. There-fore it sees too, secondly, the differences of the apparent actionin Deva and Rakshasa, man and beast and bird and reptile,good and wicked, ignorant and learned, but as action of divinequality and energy under these conditions, under these masks.It is not deluded by the mask, but detects behind every maskthe Godhead. It observes the perversion or the imperfection, butit pierces to the truth of the spirit behind, it discovers it evenin the perversion and imperfection self-blinded, struggling tofind itself, groping through various forms of self-expression andexperience towards complete self-knowledge, towards its owninfinite and absolute. The liberated eye does not lay undue stresson the perversion and imperfection, but is able to see all with acomplete love and charity in the heart, a complete understandingin the intelligence, a complete equality in the spirit. Finally, itsees the upward urge of the striving powers of the Will to be


towards Godhead; it respects, welcomes, encourages all highmanifestations of energy and quality, the flaming tongues ofthe Divinity, the mounting greatnesses of soul and mind andlife in their intensities uplifted from the levels of the lowernature towards heights of luminous wisdom and knowledge,mighty power, strength, capacity, courage, heroism, benignantsweetness and ardour and grandeur of love and self-giving, pre-eminent virtue, noble action, captivating beauty and harmony,fine and godlike creation. The eye of the spirit sees and marksout the rising godhead of man in the great Vibhuti.

This is a recognition of the Godhead as Power, but powerin 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 outand finds itself again by energy of being, energy of consciousnessand energy of delight; this is a world of the works of the divineShakti. That Shakti shapes herself here in innumerable kinds ofbeings and each of them has its own characteristic powers ofher force. Each power is the Divine himself in that form, in thelion as in the hind, in the Titan as in the God, in the inconscientsun that flames through ether as in man who thinks upon earth.The deformation given by the gunas is the minor, not reallythe major aspect; the essential thing is the divine power that isfinding self-expression. It is the Godhead who manifests himselfin the great thinker, the hero, the leader of men, the great teacher,sage, prophet, religious founder, saint, lover of man, the greatpoet, the great artist, the great scientist, the ascetic self-tamer,the tamer of things and events and forces. The work itself, thehigh poem, the perfect form of beauty, the deep love, the nobleact, the divine achievement is a movement of godhead; it is theDivine in manifestation.

This is a truth which all ancient cultures recognised andrespected, but one side of the modern mind has singular repug-nances to the idea, sees in it a worship of mere strength andpower, an ignorant or self-degrading hero-worship or a doctrineof the Asuric superman. Certainly, there is an ignorant wayof taking this truth, as there is an ignorant way of taking all


truths; but it has its proper place, its indispensable function inthe divine economy of Nature. The Gita puts it in that rightplace and perspective. It must be based on the recognition ofthe divine self in all men and all creatures; it must be consistentwith an equal heart to the great and the small, the eminentand the obscure manifestation. God must be seen and loved inthe ignorant, the humble, the weak, the vile, the outcaste. Inthe Vibhuti himself it is not, except as a symbol, the outwardindividual that is to be thus recognised and set high, but theone Godhead who displays himself in the power. But this doesnot abrogate the fact that there is an ascending scale in man-ifestation and that Nature mounts upward in her degrees ofself-expression from her groping, dark or suppressed symbols tothe first visible expressions of the Godhead. Each great being,each great achievement is a sign of her power of self-exceedingand a promise of the final, the supreme exceeding. Man himselfis a superior degree of natural manifestation to the beast andreptile, though in both there is the one equal Brahman. But manhas not reached his own highest heights of self-exceeding andmeanwhile every hint of a greater power of the Will to be in himmust be recognised as a promise and an indication. Respect forthe divinity in man, in all men, is not diminished, but heightenedand given a richer significance by lifting our eyes to the trail ofthe great Pioneers who lead or point him by whatever step ofattainment towards supermanhood.

Arjuna himself is a Vibhuti; he is a man high in the spiritualevolution, a figure marked out in the crowd of his contempo-raries, a chosen instrument of the divine Narayana, the Godheadin humanity. In one place the Teacher speaking as the supremeand equal Self of all declares that there is none dear to him, nonehated, but in others he says that Arjuna is dear to him and hisbhakta and therefore guided and safe in his hands, chosen forthe vision and the knowledge. There is here only an apparentinconsistency. The Power as the self of the cosmos is equal to all,therefore to each being he gives according to the workings of hisnature; but there is also a personal relation of the Purushottamato the human being in which he is especially near to the man


who has come near to him. All these heroes and men of mightwho have joined in battle on the plain of Kurukshetra are vesselsof the divine Will and through each he works according to hisnature but behind the veil of his ego. Arjuna has reached thatpoint when the veil can be rent and the embodied Godheadcan reveal the mystery of his workings to his Vibhuti. It is evenessential that there should be the revelation. He is the instrumentof a great work, a work terrible in appearance but necessaryfor a long step forward in the march of the race, a decisivemovement in its struggle towards the kingdom of the Right andthe Truth, dharmarajya. The history of the cycles of man is aprogress towards the unveiling of the Godhead in the soul andlife of humanity; each high event and stage of it is a divinemanifestation. Arjuna, the chief instrument of the hidden Will,the great protagonist, must become the divine man capable ofdoing the work consciously as the action of the Divine. So onlycan that action become psychically alive and receive its spiritualimport and its light and power of secret significance. He is calledto self-knowledge; he must see God as the Master of the universeand the origin of the world’s creatures and happenings, all as theGodhead’s self-expression in Nature, God in all, God in himselfas man and as Vibhuti, God in the lownesses of being and onits heights, God on the topmost summits, man too upon heightsas the Vibhuti and climbing to the last summits in the supremeliberation and union. Time in its creation and destruction mustbe seen by him as the figure of the Godhead in its steps, — stepsthat accomplish the cycles of the cosmos on whose spires ofmovement the divine spirit in the human body rises doing God’swork in the world as his Vibhuti to the supreme transcendences.This knowledge has been given; the Time-figure of the Godheadis now to be revealed and from the million mouths of that figurewill issue the command for the appointed action to the liberatedVibhuti.

X

The Vision of the World-SpiritTime the Destroyer

THE VISION of the universal Purusha is one of the bestknown and most powerfully poetic passages in the Gita,but its place in the thought is not altogether on the sur-

face. It is evidently intended for a poetic and revelatory symboland we must see how it is brought in and for what purpose anddiscover to what it points in its significant aspects before we cancapture its meaning. It is invited by Arjuna in his desire to see theliving image, the visible greatness of the unseen Divine, the veryembodiment of the Spirit and Power that governs the universe.He has heard the highest spiritual secret of existence, that all isfrom God and all is the Divine and in all things God dwells andis concealed and can be revealed in every finite appearance. Theillusion which so persistently holds man’s sense and mind, theidea that things at all exist in themselves or for themselves apartfrom God or that anything subject to Nature can be self-movedand self-guided, has passed from him, — that was the cause of hisdoubt and bewilderment and refusal of action. Now he knowswhat is the sense of the birth and passing away of existences. Heknows that the imperishable greatness of the divine consciousSoul is the secret of all these appearances. All is a Yoga of thisgreat eternal Spirit in things and all happenings are the result andexpression of that Yoga; all Nature is full of the secret Godheadand in labour to reveal him in her. But he would see too thevery form and body of this Godhead, if that be possible. He hasheard of his attributes and understood the steps and ways ofhis self-revelation; but now he asks of this Master of the Yogato discover his very imperishable Self to the eye of Yoga. Not,evidently, the formless silence of his actionless immutability, butthe Supreme from whom is all energy and action, of whom forms


are the masks, who reveals his force in the Vibhuti, — the Masterof works, the Master of knowledge and adoration, the Lord ofNature and all her creatures. For this greatest all-comprehendingvision he is made to ask because it is so, from the Spirit revealedin the universe, that he must receive the command to his part inthe world-action.

What thou hast to see, replies the Avatar, the human eyecannot grasp, — for the human eye can see only the outwardappearances of things or make out of them separate symbolforms, each of them significant of only a few aspects of theeternal Mystery. But there is a divine eye, an inmost seeing, bywhich the supreme Godhead in his Yoga can be beheld and thateye I now give to thee. Thou shalt see, he says, my hundredsand thousands of divine forms, various in kind, various in shapeand hue; thou shalt see the Adityas and the Rudras and theMaruts and the Aswins; thou shalt see many wonders that nonehas beheld; thou shalt see today the whole world related andunified in my body and whatever else thou willest to behold.This then is the keynote, the central significance. It is the visionof the One in the many, the Many in the One, — and all are theOne. 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 andheld, it lays the shining axe of God at the root of all doubts andperplexities and annihilates all denials and oppositions. It is thevision that reconciles and unifies. If the soul can arrive at unitywith the Godhead in this vision, — Arjuna has not yet done that,therefore we find that he has fear when he sees, — all even thatis terrible in the world loses its terror. We see that it too is anaspect of the Godhead and once we have found his meaningin it, not looking at it by itself alone, we can accept the wholeof existence with an all-embracing joy and a mighty courage,go forward with sure steps to the appointed work and envisagebeyond it the supreme consummation. The soul admitted to thedivine knowledge which beholds all things in one view, not witha divided, partial and therefore bewildered seeing, can make anew discovery of the world and all else that it wills to see, yaccanyad dras.t.um icchasi; it can move on the basis of this all-

Time the Destroyer 379

relating and all-unifying vision from revelation to completingrevelation.

The supreme Form is then made visible. It is that of theinfinite Godhead whose faces are everywhere and in whomare all the wonders of existence, who multiplies unendinglyall the many marvellous revelations of his being, a world-wideDivinity seeing with innumerable eyes, speaking from innumer-able mouths, armed for battle with numberless divine upliftedweapons, glorious with divine ornaments of beauty, robed inheavenly raiment of deity, lovely with garlands of divine flowers,fragrant with divine perfumes. Such is the light of this body ofGod as if a thousand suns had risen at once in heaven. Thewhole world multitudinously divided and yet unified is visiblein the body of the God of Gods. Arjuna sees him, God mag-nificent and beautiful and terrible, the Lord of souls who hasmanifested in the glory and greatness of his spirit this wild andmonstrous and orderly and wonderful and sweet and terribleworld, and overcome with marvel and joy and fear he bowsdown and adores with words of awe and with clasped handsthe tremendous vision. “I see” he cries “all the gods in thy body,O God, and different companies of beings, Brahma the creatinglord seated in the Lotus, and the Rishis and the race of the divineSerpents. I see numberless arms and bellies and eyes and faces,I see thy infinite forms on every side, but I see not thy end northy middle nor thy beginning, O Lord of the universe, O Formuniversal. I see thee crowned and with thy mace and thy discus,hard to discern because thou art a luminous mass of energy onall sides of me, an encompassing blaze, a sun-bright fire-brightImmeasurable. Thou art the supreme Immutable whom we haveto know, thou art the high foundation and abode of the universe,thou art the imperishable guardian of the eternal laws, thou artthe sempiternal soul of existence.”

But in the greatness of this vision there is too the terrific im-age of the Destroyer. This Immeasurable without end or middleor beginning is he in whom all things begin and exist and end.This Godhead who embraces the worlds with his numberlessarms and destroys with his million hands, whose eyes are suns


and moons, has a face of blazing fire and is ever burning upthe whole universe with the flame of his energy. The form ofhim is fierce and marvellous and alone it fills all the regionsand occupies the whole space between earth and heaven. Thecompanies of the gods enter it, afraid, adoring; the Rishis andthe Siddhas crying “May there be peace and weal” praise it withmany praises; the eyes of Gods and Titans and Giants are fixedon it in amazement. It has enormous burning eyes; it has mouthsthat gape to devour, terrible with many tusks of destruction;it has faces like the fires of Death and Time. The kings andthe captains and the heroes on both sides of the world-battleare hastening into its tusked and terrible jaws and some areseen with crushed and bleeding heads caught between its teethof power; the nations are rushing to destruction with helplessspeed into its mouths of flame like many rivers hurrying in theircourse towards the ocean or like moths that cast themselves ona kindled fire. With those burning mouths the Form of Dreadis licking all the regions around; the whole world is full of hisburning energies and baked in the fierceness of his lustres. Theworld and its nations are shaken and in anguish with the terrorof destruction and Arjuna shares in the trouble and panic aroundhim; troubled and in pain is the soul within him and he finds nopeace or gladness. He cries to the dreadful Godhead, “Declare tome who thou art that wearest this form of fierceness. Salutationto thee, O thou great Godhead, turn thy heart to grace. I wouldknow who thou art who wast from the beginning, for I knownot the will of thy workings.”

This last cry of Arjuna indicates the double intention in thevision. This is the figure of the supreme and universal Being, theAncient of Days who is for ever, sanatanam purus.am puran. am,this is he who for ever creates, for Brahma the Creator is one ofthe Godheads seen in his body, he who keeps the world alwaysin existence, for he is the guardian of the eternal laws, but whois always too destroying in order that he may new-create, whois Time, who is Death, who is Rudra the Dancer of the calm andawful dance, who is Kali with her garland of skulls tramplingnaked in battle and flecked with the blood of the slaughtered


Titans, who is the cyclone and the fire and the earthquake andpain and famine and revolution and ruin and the swallowingocean. And it is this last aspect of him which he puts forward atthe moment. It is an aspect from which the mind in men willinglyturns away and ostrich-like hides its head so that perchance,not seeing, it may not be seen by the Terrible. The weaknessof the human heart wants only fair and comforting truths orin their absence pleasant fables; it will not have the truth inits entirety because there there is much that is not clear andpleasant and comfortable, but hard to understand and harder tobear. The raw religionist, the superficial optimistic thinker, thesentimental idealist, the man at the mercy of his sensations andemotions agree in twisting away from the sterner conclusions,the harsher and fiercer aspects of universal existence. Indianreligion has been ignorantly reproached for not sharing in thisgeneral game of hiding, because on the contrary it has built andplaced before it the terrible as well as the sweet and beautifulsymbols of the Godhead. But it is the depth and largeness ofits long thought and spiritual experience that prevent it fromfeeling or from giving countenance to these feeble shrinkings.

Indian spirituality knows that God is Love and Peace andcalm Eternity, — the Gita which presents us with these terribleimages, speaks of the Godhead who embodies himself in them asthe lover and friend of all creatures. But there is too the sterneraspect of his divine government of the world which meets usfrom the beginning, the aspect of destruction, and to ignore it isto miss the full reality of the divine Love and Peace and Calmand Eternity and even to throw on it an aspect of partiality andillusion, because the comforting exclusive form in which it is putis not borne out by the nature of the world in which we live. Thisworld of our battle and labour is a fierce dangerous destructivedevouring world in which life exists precariously and the souland body of man move among enormous perils, a world in whichby every step forward, whether we will it or no, something iscrushed and broken, in which every breath of life is a breath tooof death. To put away the responsibility for all that seems tous evil or terrible on the shoulders of a semi-omnipotent Devil,


or to put it aside as part of Nature, making an unbridgeableopposition between world-nature and God-Nature, as if Naturewere independent of God, or to throw the responsibility on manand his sins, as if he had a preponderant voice in the making ofthis world or could create anything against the will of God, areclumsily comfortable devices in which the religious thought ofIndia has never taken refuge. We have to look courageously inthe face of the reality and see that it is God and none else whohas made this world in his being and that so he has made it.We have to see that Nature devouring her children, Time eatingup the lives of creatures, Death universal and ineluctable andthe violence of the Rudra forces in man and Nature are also thesupreme Godhead in one of his cosmic figures. We have to seethat God the bountiful and prodigal creator, God the helpful,strong and benignant preserver is also God the devourer anddestroyer. The torment of the couch of pain and evil on whichwe are racked is his touch as much as happiness and sweetnessand pleasure. It is only when we see with the eye of the completeunion and feel this truth in the depths of our being that we canentirely discover behind that mask too the calm and beautifulface of the all-blissful Godhead and in this touch that tests ourimperfection the touch of the friend and builder of the spirit inman. The discords of the worlds are God’s discords and it is onlyby accepting and proceeding through them that we can arrive atthe greater concords of his supreme harmony, the summits andthrilled vastnesses of his transcendent and his cosmic Ananda.

The problem raised by the Gita and the solution it givesdemand this character of the vision of the World-Spirit. It is theproblem of a great struggle, ruin and massacre which has beenbrought about by the all-guiding Will and in which the eternalAvatar himself has descended as the charioteer of the protagonistin the battle. The seer of the vision is himself the protagonist,the representative of the battling soul of man who has to strikedown tyrant and oppressive powers that stand in the path of hisevolution and to establish and enjoy the kingdom of a higherright and nobler law of being. Perplexed by the terrible aspect ofthe catastrophe in which kindred smite at kindred, whole nations


are to perish and society itself seems doomed to sink down in apit of confusion and anarchy, he has shrunk back, refused thetask of destiny and demanded of his divine Friend and Guidewhy he is appointed to so dreadful a work, kim karman. i ghoremam niyojayasi. He has been shown then how individually torise 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 Natureand of works to whom he must offer them without desire oregoistic choice as a sacrifice. He has been shown too that theDivine who is above all these things and untouched by them, yetmanifests himself in man and Nature and their action and thatall is a movement in the cycles of this divine manifestation. Butnow when he is put face to face with the embodiment of thistruth, he sees in it magnified by the image of the divine greatnessthis aspect of terror and destruction and is appalled and canhardly bear it. For why should it be thus that the All-spiritmanifests himself in Nature? What is the significance of thiscreating and devouring flame that is mortal existence, this world-wide struggle, these constant disastrous revolutions, this labourand anguish and travail and perishing of creatures? He puts theancient question and breathes the eternal prayer, “Declare to mewho art thou that comest to us in this form of fierceness. I wouldknow who art thou who wast from the beginning, for I knownot the will of thy workings. Turn thy heart to grace.”

Destruction, replies the Godhead, is the will of my workingswith which I stand here on this field of Kurukshetra, the field ofthe working out of the Dharma, the field of human action, — aswe might symbolically translate the descriptive phrase, dharma-ks.etre kuru-ks.etre, — a world-wide destruction which has comein the process of the Time-Spirit. I have a foreseeing purposewhich fulfils itself infallibly and no participation or abstentionof any human being can prevent, alter or modify it; all is done byme already in my eternal eye of will before it can at all be doneby man upon earth. I as Time have to destroy the old structuresand to build up a new, mighty and splendid kingdom. Thou as ahuman instrument of the divine Power and Wisdom hast in this


struggle which thou canst not prevent to battle for the right andslay and conquer its opponents. Thou too, the human soul inNature, hast to enjoy in Nature the fruit given by me, the empireof right and justice. Let this be sufficient for thee, — to be onewith God in thy soul, to receive his command, to do his will,to see calmly a supreme purpose fulfilled in the world. “I amTime the waster of the peoples arisen and increased whose willin my workings is here to destroy the nations. Even without theeall these warriors shall be not, who are ranked in the opposingarmies. Therefore arise, get thee glory, conquer thy enemies andenjoy an opulent kingdom. By me and none other already evenare they slain, do thou become the occasion only, O Savyasachin.Slay, by me who are slain, Drona, Bhishma, Jayadratha, Karnaand other heroic fighters; be not pained and troubled. Fight,thou shalt conquer the adversary in the battle.” The fruit of thegreat and terrible work is promised and prophesied, not as afruit hungered for by the individual, — for to that there is to beno attachment, — but as the result of the divine will, the gloryand success of the thing to be done accomplished, the glorygiven by the Divine to himself in his Vibhuti. Thus is the finaland compelling command to action given to the protagonist ofthe world-battle.

It is the Timeless manifest as Time and World-Spirit fromwhom the command to action proceeds. For certainly the God-head when he says, “I am Time the Destroyer of beings,” doesnot mean either that he is the Time-Spirit alone or that the wholeessence of the Time-Spirit is destruction. But it is this which isthe present will of his workings, pravr.tti. Destruction is alwaysa simultaneous or alternate element which keeps pace with cre-ation and it is by destroying and renewing that the Master ofLife does his long work of preservation. More, destruction isthe first condition of progress. Inwardly, the man who does notdestroy his lower self-formations, cannot rise to a greater exis-tence. Outwardly also, the nation or community or race whichshrinks too long from destroying and replacing its past formsof life, is itself destroyed, rots and perishes and out of its debrisother nations, communities and races are formed. By destruction


of the old giant occupants man made himself a place upon earth.By destruction of the Titans the gods maintain the continuity ofthe divine Law in the cosmos. Whoever prematurely attemptsto get rid of this law of battle and destruction, strives vainlyagainst the greater will of the World-Spirit. Whoever turns fromit in the weakness of his lower members, as did Arjuna in thebeginning, — therefore was his shrinking condemned as a smalland false pity, an inglorious, an un-Aryan and unheavenly fee-bleness of heart and impotence of spirit, klaibyam, ks.udramhr.daya-daurbalyam, — is showing not true virtue, but a wantof spiritual courage to face the sterner truths of Nature and ofaction and existence. Man can only exceed the law of battleby discovering the greater law of his immortality. There arethose who seek this where it always exists and must primarilybe found, in the higher reaches of the pure spirit, and to find itturn away from a world governed by the law of Death. That isan individual solution which makes no difference to mankindand the world, or rather makes only this difference that they aredeprived of so much spiritual power which might have helpedthem forward in the painful march of their evolution.

What then is the master man, the divine worker, the openedchannel of the universal Will to do when he finds the World-Spirit turned towards some immense catastrophe, figured beforehis eyes as Time the destroyer arisen and increased for the de-struction of the nations, and himself put there in the forefrontwhether as a fighter with physical weapons or a leader andguide or an inspirer of men, as he cannot fail to be by the veryforce of his nature and the power within him, svabhavajenasvena karman. a? To abstain, to sit silent, to protest by non-intervention? But abstention will not help, will not prevent thefulfilment of the destroying Will, but rather by the lacuna it cre-ates increase confusion. Even without thee, cries the Godhead,my will of destruction would still be accomplished, r.te’pi tvam. IfArjuna were to abstain or even if the battle of Kurukshetra werenot to be fought, that evasion would only prolong and makeworse the inevitable confusion, disorder, ruin that are coming.For these things are no accident, but an inevitable seed that


has been sown and a harvest that must be reaped. They whohave sown the wind, must reap the whirlwind. Nor indeed willhis own nature allow him any real abstention, prakr.tis tvamniyoks.yati. This the Teacher tells Arjuna at the close, “Thatwhich in thy egoism thou thinkest saying, I will not fight, vainis this thy resolve: Nature shall yoke thee to thy work. Boundby thy own action which is born of the law of thy being, whatfrom delusion thou desirest not to do, that thou shalt do evenperforce.” Then to give another turn, to use some kind of soulforce, spiritual method and power, not physical weapons? Butthat is only another form of the same action; the destructionwill still take place, and the turn given too will be not what theindividual ego, but what the World-Spirit wills. Even, the forceof destruction may feed on this new power, may get a moreformidable impetus and Kali arise filling the world with a moreterrible sound of her laughters. No real peace can be till the heartof man deserves peace; the law of Vishnu cannot prevail till thedebt to Rudra is paid. To turn aside then and preach to a stillunevolved mankind the law of love and oneness? Teachers ofthe law of love and oneness there must be, for by that way mustcome the ultimate salvation. But not till the Time-Spirit in manis ready, can the inner and ultimate prevail over the outer andimmediate reality. Christ and Buddha have come and gone, butit is Rudra who still holds the world in the hollow of his hand.And meanwhile the fierce forward labour of mankind tormentedand oppressed by the Powers that are profiteers of egoistic forceand their servants cries for the sword of the Hero of the struggleand the word of its prophet.

The highest way appointed for him is to carry out the will ofGod without egoism, as the human occasion and instrument ofthat which he sees to be decreed, with the constant supportingmemory of the Godhead in himself and man, mam anusmaran,and in whatever ways are appointed for him by the Lord of hisNature. Nimittamatram bhava savyasacin. He will not cherishpersonal enmity, anger, hatred, egoistic desire and passion, willnot hasten towards strife or lust after violence and destructionlike the fierce Asura, but he will do his work, lokasangrahaya.


Beyond the action he will look towards that to which it leads,that for which he is warring. For God the Time-Spirit doesnot destroy for the sake of destruction, but to make the waysclear in the cyclic process for a greater rule and a progressingmanifestation, rajyam samr.ddham. He will accept in its deepersense, which the superficial mind does not see, the greatnessof the struggle, the glory of the victory, — if need be, the gloryof the victory which comes masked as defeat, — and lead mantoo in the enjoyment of his opulent kingdom. Not appalledby the face of the Destroyer, he will see within it the eternalSpirit imperishable in all these perishing bodies and behind itthe face of the Charioteer, the Leader of man, the Friend ofall creatures, suhr.dam sarvabhutanam. This formidable World-Form once seen and acknowledged, it is to that reassuring truththat the rest of the chapter is directed; it discloses in the end amore intimate face and body of the Eternal.

XI

The Vision of the World-Spirit1

The Double Aspect

EVEN WHILE the effects of the terrible aspect of this vi-sion are still upon him, the first words uttered by Arjunaafter the Godhead has spoken are eloquent of a greater

uplifting and reassuring reality behind this face of death and thisdestruction. “Rightly and in good place,” he cries, “O Krishna,does the world rejoice and take pleasure in thy name, the Rak-shasas are fleeing from thee in terror to all the quarters and thecompanies of the Siddhas bow down before thee in adoration.How should they not do thee homage, O great Spirit? For thouart the original Creator and Doer of works and greater even thancreative Brahma. O thou Infinite, O thou Lord of the gods, Othou abode of the universe, thou art the Immutable and thou artwhat is and is not and thou art that which is the Supreme. Thouart the ancient Soul and the first and original Godhead and thesupreme resting-place of this All; thou art the knower and thatwhich is to be known and the highest status; O infinite in form,by thee was extended the universe. Thou art Yama and Vayu andAgni and Soma and Varuna and Prajapati, father of creatures,and the great-grandsire. Salutation to thee a thousand times overand again and yet again salutation, in front and behind and fromevery side, for thou art each and all that is. Infinite in might andimmeasurable in strength of action thou pervadest all and artevery one.”

But this supreme universal Being has lived here before himwith the human face, in the mortal body, the divine Man, theembodied Godhead, the Avatar, and till now he has not knownhim. 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 earthlymask to the Godhead of which the humanity was a vessel anda symbol, and he prays now for that Godhead’s forgivenessof his unseeing carelessness and his negligent ignorance. “Forwhatsoever I have spoken to thee in rash vehemence, thinkingof thee only as my human friend and companion, ‘O Krishna,O Yadava, O comrade,’ not knowing this thy greatness, in neg-ligent error or in love, and for whatsoever disrespect was shownby me to thee in jest, on the couch and the seat and in thebanquet, alone or in thy presence, I pray forgiveness from theethe immeasurable. Thou art the father of all this world of themoving and unmoving; thou art one to be worshipped and themost solemn object of veneration. None is equal to thee, howthen another greater in all the three worlds, O incomparablein might? Therefore I bow down before thee and prostrate mybody and I demand grace of thee the adorable Lord. As a fatherto his son, as a friend to his friend and comrade, as one dearwith him he loves, so shouldst thou, O Godhead, bear with me. Ihave seen what never was seen before and I rejoice, but my mindis troubled with fear. O Godhead, show me that other form ofthine. I would see thee even as before crowned and with thy maceand discus. Assume thy four-armed shape, O thousand-armed,O Form universal.”

From the first words there comes the suggestion that thehidden truth behind these terrifying forms is a reassuring, aheartening and delightful truth. There is something that makesthe heart of the world to rejoice and take pleasure in the nameand nearness of the Divine. It is the profound sense of that whichmakes us see in the dark face of Kali the face of the Mother and toperceive even in the midst of destruction the protecting arms ofthe Friend of creatures, in the midst of evil the presence of a pureunalterable Benignity and in the midst of death the Master ofImmortality. From the terror of the King of the divine action theRakshasas, the fierce giant powers of darkness, flee destroyed,defeated and overpowered. But the Siddhas, but the completeand perfect who know and sing the names of the Immortal andlive in the truth of his being, bow down before every form of


Him and know what every form enshrines and signifies. Nothinghas real need to fear except that which is to be destroyed, theevil, the ignorance, the veilers in Night, the Rakshasa powers.All the movement and action of Rudra the Terrible is towardsperfection and divine light and completeness.

For this Spirit, this Divine is only in outward form the De-stroyer, Time who undoes all these finite forms: but in himself heis the Infinite, the Master of the cosmic Godheads, in whom theworld and all its action are securely seated. He is the original andever originating Creator, one greater than that figure of creativePower called Brahma which he shows to us in the form of thingsas one aspect of his trinity, creation chequered by a balance ofpreservation and destruction. The real divine creation is eternal;it is the Infinite manifested sempiternally in finite things, theSpirit who conceals and reveals himself for ever in his innumer-able infinity of souls and in the wonder of their actions and inthe beauty of their forms. He is the eternal Immutable; he is thedual appearance of the Is and Is-not, of the manifest and thenever manifested, of things that were and seem to be no more,are and appear doomed to perish, shall be and shall pass. Butwhat he is beyond all these is That, the Supreme, who holds allthings mutable in the single eternity of a Time to which all is everpresent. He possesses his immutable self in a timeless eternity ofwhich Time and creation are an ever extending figure.

This is the Truth of him in which all is reconciled; a har-mony of simultaneous and interdependent truths start from andamount to the one that is real. It is the truth of a supremeSoul of whose supreme nature the world is a derivation and aninferior figure of that Infinite; of the Ancient of Days who forever presides over the long evolutions of Time; of the originalGodhead of whom Gods and men and all living creatures are thechildren, the powers, the souls, spiritually justified in their beingby his truth of existence; of the Knower who develops in manthe knowledge of himself and world and God; of the one Objectof all knowing who reveals himself to man’s heart and mindand soul, so that every new opening form of our knowledgeis a partial unfolding of him, up to the highest by which he is


intimately, profoundly and integrally seen and discovered. Thisis the high supreme Stability who originates and supports andreceives to himself all that are in the universe. By him in his ownexistence the world is extended, by his omnipotent power, byhis miraculous self-conception and energy and Ananda of never-ending creation. All is an infinity of his material and spiritualforms. He is all the many gods from the least to the greatest; heis 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 thedivine creators of these different races of living things. On thistruth there is a constant insistence. Again it is repeated that heis the All, he is each and every one, sarvah. . He is the infiniteUniversal and he is each individual and everything that is, theone Force and Being in every one of us, the infinite Energy thatthrows itself out in these multitudes, the immeasurable Will andmighty Power of motion and action that forms out of itself all thecourses of Time and all the happenings of the spirit in Nature.

And from that insistence the thought naturally turns to thepresence of this one great Godhead in man. There the soul of theseer of the vision is impressed by three successive suggestions.First, it is borne in upon him that in the body of this son of Manwho moved beside him as a transient creature upon earth and satby his side and lay with him on the same couch and ate with himin the banquet and was the object of jest and careless word, actorin war and council and common things, in this figure of mortalman was all the time something great, concealed, of tremendoussignificance, a Godhead, an Avatar, a universal Power, a One Re-ality, a supreme Transcendence. To this occult divinity in whichall the significance of man and his long race is wrapped and fromwhich all world-existence receives its inner meaning of ineffablegreatness, he had been blind. Now only he sees the universalSpirit in the individual frame, the Divine embodied in humanity,the transcendent Inhabitant of this symbol of Nature. He hasseen now only this tremendous, infinite, immeasurable Reality ofall these apparent things, this boundless universal Form which soexceeds every individual form and yet of whom each individualthing is a house for his dwelling. For that great Reality is equal


and infinite and the same in the individual and in the universe.And at first his blindness, his treatment of this Divine as themere outward man, his seeing of only the mental and physicalrelation seems to him a sin against the Mightiness that wasthere. For the being whom he called Krishna, Yadava, comrade,was this immeasurable Greatness, this incomparable Might, thisSpirit one in all of whom all are the creations. That and not theveiling outward humanity, avajanan manus.ım tanum asritam,was what he should have seen with awe and with submissionand veneration.

But the second suggestion is that what was figured in thehuman manifestation and the human relation is also a realitywhich accompanies and mitigates for our mind the tremendouscharacter of the universal vision. The transcendence and cosmicaspect have to be seen, for without that seeing the limitations ofhumanity cannot be exceeded. In that unifying oneness all has tobe included. But by itself that would set too great a gulf betweenthe transcendent spirit and this soul bound and circumscribedin an inferior Nature. The infinite presence in its unmitigatedsplendour would be too overwhelming for the separate littlenessof the limited, individual and natural man. A link is needed bywhich he can see this universal Godhead in his own individualand natural being, close to him, not only omnipotently thereto govern all he is by universal and immeasurable Power, buthumanly figured to support and raise him to unity by an intimateindividual relation. The adoration by which the finite creaturebows down before the Infinite, receives all its sweetness anddraws near to a closest truth of companionship and onenesswhen it deepens into the more intimate adoration which lives inthe sense of the fatherhood of God, the friendhood of God, theattracting love between the Divine Spirit and our human souland nature. For the Divine inhabits the human soul and body;he draws around him and wears like a robe the human mind andfigure. He assumes the human relations which the soul affects inthe mortal body and they find in God their own fullest sense andgreatest realisation. This is the Vaishnava bhakti of which theseed is here in the Gita’s words, but which received afterwards


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 thestrength of the liberated spirit a thing mighty, encouraging andfortifying, a source of power, an equalising, sublimating, all-justifying vision; but to the normal man it is overwhelming,appalling, incommunicable. The truth that reassures, even whenknown, is grasped with difficulty behind the formidable andmighty aspect of all-destructive Time and an incalculable Willand a vast immeasurable inextricable working. But there is toothe gracious mediating form of divine Narayana, the God whois so close to man and in man, the Charioteer of the battle andthe journey, with his four arms of helpful power, a humanisedsymbol of Godhead, not this million-armed universality. It isthis mediating aspect which man must have for his supportconstantly before him. For it is this figure of Narayana whichsymbolises the truth that reassures. It makes close, visible, living,seizable the vast spiritual joy in which for the inner spirit andlife of man the universal workings behind all their stupendouscircling, retrogression, progression sovereignly culminate, theirmarvellous and auspicious upshot. To this humanised embodiedsoul their end becomes here a union, a closeness, a constantcompanionship of man and God, man living in the world forGod, God dwelling in man and turning to his own divine endsin him the enigmatic world-process. And beyond the end is a yetmore wonderful oneness and inliving in the last transfigurationsof the Eternal.

The Godhead in answer to Arjuna’s prayer reassumes hisown normal Narayana image, svakam rupam, the desired formof grace and love and sweetness and beauty. But first he declaresthe incalculable significance of the other mighty Image which heis about to veil. “This that thou now seest,” he tells him, “is mysupreme shape, my form of luminous energy, the universal, theoriginal which none but thou amongst men has yet seen. I haveshown it by my self-Yoga. For it is an image of my very Self andSpirit, it is the very Supreme self-figured in cosmic existence andthe soul in perfect Yoga with me sees it without any trembling


of the nervous parts or any bewilderment and confusion of themind, because he descries not only what is terrible and over-whelming in its appearance, but also its high and reassuringsignificance. 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 lookupon it with that high strength and tranquillity, I will reassumeagain for thee my Narayana figure in which the human mindsees isolated and toned to its humanity the calm, helpfulnessand delight of a friendly Godhead. The greater Form” — andthis is repeated again after it has disappeared — “is only for therare highest souls. The gods themselves ever desire to look uponit. It cannot be won by Veda or austerities or gifts or sacrifice;it can be seen, known, entered into only by that bhakti whichregards, adores and loves Me alone in all things.”

But what then is the uniqueness of this Form by which itis lifted so far beyond cognizance that all the ordinary endeav-our of human knowledge and even the inmost austerity of itsspiritual effort are insufficient, unaided, to reach the vision? Itis this that man can know by other means this or that exclusiveaspect of the one existence, its individual, cosmic or world-excluding figures, but not this greatest reconciling Oneness ofall the aspects of the Divinity in which at one and the same timeand in one and the same vision all is manifested, all is exceededand all is consummated. For here transcendent, universal andindividual Godhead, Spirit and Nature, Infinite and finite, spaceand time and timelessness, Being and Becoming, all that wecan strive to think and know of the Godhead, whether of theabsolute or the manifested existence, are wonderfully revealed inan ineffable oneness. This vision can be reached only by the ab-solute adoration, the love, the intimate unity that crowns at theirsummit the fullness of works and knowledge. To know, to see,to enter into it, to be one with this supreme form of the Supremebecomes then possible, and it is that end which the Gita proposesfor its Yoga. There is a supreme consciousness through whichit is possible to enter into the glory of the Transcendent andcontain in him the immutable Self and all mutable Becoming, —


it is possible to be one with all, yet above all, to exceed worldand yet embrace the whole nature at once of the cosmic and thesupracosmic Godhead. This is difficult indeed for limited manimprisoned in his mind and body: but, says the Godhead, “be adoer of my works, accept me as the supreme being and object,become my bhakta, be free from attachment and without enmityto all existences; for such a man comes to me.” In other wordssuperiority to the lower nature, unity with all creatures, onenesswith the cosmic Godhead and the Transcendence, oneness of willwith the Divine in works, absolute love for the One and for Godin all, — this is the way to that absolute spiritual self-exceedingand that unimaginable transformation.

XII

The Way and the Bhakta

IN THE eleventh chapter of the Gita the original object ofthe teaching has been achieved and brought up to a certaincompleteness. The command to divine action done for the

sake of the world and in union with the Spirit who dwells init and in all its creatures and in whom all its working takesplace, has been given and accepted by the Vibhuti. The disciplehas been led away from the old poise of the normal man andthe standards, motives, outlook, egoistic consciousness of hisignorance, away from all that had finally failed him in the hourof his spiritual crisis. The very action which on that standinghe had rejected, the terrible function, the appalling labour, hehas now been brought to admit and accept on a new innerbasis. A reconciling greater knowledge, a diviner consciousness,a high impersonal motive, a spiritual standard of oneness withthe will of the Divine acting on the world from the fountainlight and with the motive power of the spiritual nature, — thisis the new inner principle of works which is to transform theold ignorant action. A knowledge which embraces oneness withthe Divine and arrives through the Divine at conscious onenesswith all things and beings, a will emptied of egoism and actingonly by the command and as an instrumentation of the secretMaster of works, a divine love whose one aspiration is towardsa close intimacy with the supreme Soul of all existence, accom-plished by the unity of these three perfected powers an innerall-comprehending unity with the transcendent and universalSpirit and Nature and all creatures are the foundation offeredfor his activities to the liberated man. For from that foundationthe soul in him can suffer the instrumental nature to act in safety;he is lifted above all cause of stumbling, delivered from egoismand its limitations, rescued from all fear of sin and evil andconsequence, exalted out of that bondage to the outward nature

The Way and the Bhakta 397

and the limited action which is the knot of the Ignorance. He canact in the power of the Light, no longer in twilight or darkness,and a divine sanction upholds every step of his conduct. Thedifficulty which had been raised by the antinomy between thefreedom of the Spirit and the bondage of the soul in Nature, hasbeen solved by a luminous reconciliation of Spirit with Nature.That antinomy exists for the mind in the ignorance; it ceases toexist for the spirit in its knowledge.

But there is something more to be said in order to bringout all the meaning of the great spiritual change. The twelfthchapter leads up to this remaining knowledge and the last sixthat follow develop it to a grand final conclusion. This thingthat remains still to be said turns upon the difference betweenthe current Vedantic view of spiritual liberation and the largercomprehensive freedom which the teaching of the Gita opens tothe spirit. There is now a pointed return to that difference. Thecurrent Vedantic way led through the door of an austere andexclusive knowledge. The Yoga, the oneness which it recognisedas the means and the absorbing essence of the spiritual release,was a Yoga of pure knowledge and a still oneness with a supremeImmutable, an absolute Indefinable, — the unmanifested Brah-man, infinite, silent, intangible, aloof, far above all this universeof relations. In the way proposed by the Gita knowledge isindeed the indispensable foundation, but an integral knowledge.Impersonal integral works are the first indispensable means; buta deep and large love and adoration, to which a relationlessUnmanifest, an aloof and immovable Brahman can return noanswer, since these things ask for a relation and an intimatepersonal closeness, are the strongest and highest power for re-lease and spiritual perfection and the immortal Ananda. TheGodhead with whom the soul of man has to enter into thisclosest oneness, is indeed in his supreme status a transcendentUnthinkable too great for any manifestation, Parabrahman; buthe is at the same time the living supreme Soul of all things. Heis the supreme Lord, the Master of works and universal nature.He at once exceeds and inhabits as its self the soul and mind andbody of the creature. He is Purushottama, Parameshwara and


Paramatman and in all these equal aspects the same single andeternal Godhead. It is an awakening to this integral reconcilingknowledge that is the wide gate to the utter release of the souland an unimaginable perfection of the nature. It is this Godheadin the unity of all his aspects to whom our works and our adora-tion and our knowledge have to be directed as a constant innersacrifice. It is this supreme soul, Purushottama, transcendent ofthe universe, but also its containing spirit, inhabitant and pos-sessor, even as it is mightily figured in the vision of Kurukshetra,into whom the liberated spirit has to enter once it has reachedto the vision and knowledge of him in all the principles andpowers of his existence, once it is able to grasp and enjoy hismultitudinous oneness, jnatum dras.t.um tattvena praves.t.um ca.

The liberation of the Gita is not a self-oblivious abolition ofthe soul’s personal being in the absorption of the One, sayujyamukti; it is all kinds of union at once. There is an entire unifica-tion with the supreme Godhead in essence of being and intimacyof consciousness and identity of bliss, sayujya, — for one objectof this Yoga is to become Brahman, brahmabhuta. There is aneternal ecstatic dwelling in the highest existence of the Supreme,salokya, — for it is said, “Thou shalt dwell in me,” nivasis.yasimayyeva. There is an eternal love and adoration in a unitingnearness, there is an embrace of the liberated spirit by its divineLover and the enveloping Self of its infinitudes, samıpya. Thereis an identity of the soul’s liberated nature with the divine nature,sadr.sya mukti, — for the perfection of the free spirit is to becomeeven as the Divine, madbhavam agatah. , and to be one with himin the law of its being and the law of its works and nature,sadharmyam agatah. . The orthodox Yoga of knowledge aims ata fathomless immergence in the one infinite existence, sayujya;it looks upon that alone as the entire liberation. The Yoga ofadoration envisages an eternal habitation or nearness as thegreater release, salokya, samıpya. The Yoga of works leads tooneness in power of being and nature, sadr.sya. But the Gitaenvelops them all in its catholic integrality and fuses them allinto one greatest and richest divine freedom and perfection.

Arjuna is made to raise the question of this difference. It


must be remembered that the distinction between the imper-sonal immutable Akshara Purusha and the supreme Soul that isat once impersonality and divine Person and much more thaneither — that this capital distinction implied in the later chaptersand in the divine “I” of which Krishna has constantly spoken,aham, mam, has as yet not been quite expressly and definitelydrawn. We have been throughout anticipating it in order tounderstand from the beginning the full significance of the Gita’smessage and not have to go back again, as we would otherwisebe obliged, over the same ground newly seen and prospected inthe light of this greater truth. Arjuna has been enjoined first tosink his separate personality in the calm impersonality of theone eternal and immutable self, a teaching which agreed wellwith his previous notions and offered no difficulties. But nowhe is confronted with the vision of this greatest transcendent,this widest universal Godhead and commanded to seek onenesswith him by knowledge and works and adoration. Therefore heasks the better to have a doubt cleared which might otherwisehave arisen, “Those devotees who thus by a constant unionseek after thee, tvam, and those who seek after the unmani-fest Immutable, which of these have the greater knowledge ofYoga?” This recalls the distinction made in the beginning bysuch phrases as “in the self, then in me,” atmani atho mayi:Arjuna points the distinction, tvam, aks.aram avyaktam. Thou,he says in substance, art the supreme Source and Origin of allbeings, a Presence immanent in all things, a Power pervadingthe universe with thy forms, a Person manifest in thy Vibhutis,manifest in creatures, manifest in Nature, seated as the Lord ofworks in the world and in our hearts by thy mighty world-Yoga.As such I have to know, adore, unite myself with thee in allmy being, consciousness, thoughts, feelings and actions, satata-yukta. 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? Thiseternal Self is the greater Principle according to all current no-tions and the Godhead in the manifestation is an inferior figure:


the unmanifest and not the manifest is the eternal Spirit. Howthen does the union which admits the manifestation, admits thelesser thing, come yet to be the greater Yoga-knowledge?

To this question Krishna replies with an emphatic decisive-ness. “Those who found their mind in Me and by constantunion, possessed of a supreme faith, seek after Me, I hold to bethe most perfectly in union of Yoga.” The supreme faith is thatwhich sees God in all and to its eye the manifestation and thenon-manifestation are one Godhead. The perfect union is thatwhich meets the Divine at every moment, in every action andwith all the integrality of the nature. But those also who seek bya hard ascent after the indefinable unmanifest Immutable alone,arrive, says the Godhead, to Me. For they are not mistaken intheir aim, but they follow a more difficult and a less completeand perfect path. At the easiest, to reach the unmanifest Absolutethey have to climb through the manifest Immutable here. Thismanifest Immutable is my own all-pervading impersonality andsilence; vast, unthinkable, immobile, constant, omnipresent, itsupports the action of personality but does not share in it. Itoffers no hold to the mind; it can only be gained by a motionlessspiritual impersonality and silence and those who follow afterit alone have to restrain altogether and even draw in completelythe action of the mind and senses. But still by the equality oftheir understanding and by their seeing of one self in all thingsand by their tranquil benignancy of silent will for the good of allexistences they too meet me in all objects and creatures. No lessthan those who unite themselves with the Divine in all ways oftheir existence, sarva-bhavena, and enter largely and fully intothe unthinkable living fountainhead of universal things, divyampurus.am acintya-rupam, these seekers too who climb throughthis more difficult exclusive oneness towards a relationless un-manifest Absolute find in the end the same Eternal. But this is aless direct and more arduous way; it is not the full and naturalmovement 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 easierway of the Gita leads more rapidly, naturally and normally to


the same absolute liberation. For its acceptance of the divinePerson does not imply any attachment to the mental and sensu-ous limitations of embodied Nature. On the contrary it bringsa swift and effectual unchaining from the phenomenal bondageof death and birth. The Yogin of exclusive knowledge imposeson himself a painful struggle with the manifold demands of hisnature; he denies them even their highest satisfaction and cutsaway from him even the upward impulses of his spirit wheneverthey imply relations or fall short of a negating absolute. Theliving way of the Gita on the contrary finds out the most intenseupward trend of all our being and by turning it Godwards usesknowledge, will, feeling and the instinct for perfection as somany puissant wings of a mounting liberation. The unmanifestBrahman in its indefinable unity is a thing to which embodiedsouls can only arrive and that hardly by a constant mortifica-tion, a suffering of all the repressed members, a stern difficultyand anguish of the nature, duh. kham avapyate, kleso ’dhikatarastes.am. The indefinable Oneness accepts all that climb to it, butoffers no help of relation and gives no foothold to the climber.All has to be done by a severe austerity and a stern and lonelyindividual effort. How different is it for those who seek afterthe Purushottama in the way of the Gita! When they meditateon him with a Yoga which sees none else, because it sees all tobe Vasudeva, he meets them at every point, in every movement,at all times, with innumerable forms and faces, holds up thelamp of knowledge within and floods with its divine and happylustre the whole of existence. Illumined, they discern the supremeSpirit in every form and face, arrive at once through all Natureto the Lord of Nature, arrive through all beings to the Soul ofall being, arrive through themselves to the Self of all that theyare; incontinently they break through a hundred opening issuesat once into that from which everything has its origin. The othermethod of a difficult relationless stillness tries to get away fromall action even though that is impossible to embodied creatures.Here the actions are all given up to the supreme Master of actionand he as the supreme Will meets the will of sacrifice, takes fromit its burden and assumes to himself the charge of the works of


the divine Nature in us. And when too in the high passion of lovethe devotee of the Lover and Friend of man and of all creaturescasts upon him all his heart of consciousness and yearning ofdelight, then swiftly the Supreme comes to him as the saviourand deliverer and exalts him by a happy embrace of his mindand heart and body out of the waves of the sea of death in thismortal 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 andlodge all thy understanding in me: I will lift them up bathed inthe supernal blaze of the divine love and will and knowledgeto myself from whom these things flow. Doubt not that thoushalt dwell in me above this mortal existence. The chain of thelimiting earthly nature cannot hold the immortal spirit exaltedby the passion, the power and the light of the eternal love, willand knowledge. No doubt, on this way too there are difficulties;for there is the lower nature with its fierce or dull downwardgravitation which resists and battles against the motion of ascentand clogs the wings of the exaltation and the upward rapture.The divine consciousness even when it has been found at first ina wonder of great moments or in calm and splendid durations,cannot at once be altogether held or called back at will; there isfelt often an inability to keep the personal consciousness fixedsteadily in the Divine; there are nights of long exile from theLight, there are hours or moments of revolt, doubt or failure.But still by the practice of union and by constant repetition ofthe experience, that highest spirit grows upon the being andtakes permanent possession of the nature. Is this also found toodifficult because of the power and persistence of the outward-going movement of the mind? Then the way is simple, to doall actions for the sake of the Lord of the action, so that everyoutward-going movement of the mind shall be associated withthe inner spiritual truth of the being and called back even inthe very movement to the eternal reality and connected with itssource. Then the presence of the Purushottama will grow uponthe natural man till he is filled with it and becomes a godheadand a spirit; all life will become a constant remembering of God


and perfection too will grow and the unity of the whole existenceof the human soul with the supreme Existence.

But it may be that even this constant remembering of Godand lifting up of our works to him is felt to be beyond the powerof the limited mind, because in its forgetfulness it turns to the actand its outward object and will not remember to look withinand 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 workswithout desire of the fruit. All fruit has to be renounced, to begiven up to the Power that directs the work, and yet the work hasto be done that is imposed by It on the nature. For by this meansthe obstacle steadily diminishes and easily disappears; the mindis left free to remember the Lord and to fix itself in the liberty ofthe divine consciousness. And here the Gita gives an ascendingscale of potencies and assigns the palm of excellence to this Yogaof desireless action. Abhyasa, practice of a method, repetition ofan effort and experience is a great and powerful thing; but betterthan this is knowledge, the successful and luminous turning ofthe thought to the Truth behind things. This thought-knowledgetoo is excelled by a silent complete concentration on the Truthso that the consciousness shall eventually live in it and be alwaysone with it. But more powerful still is the giving up of the fruitof one’s works, because that immediately destroys all causesof disturbance and brings and preserves automatically an innercalm and peace, and calm and peace are the foundation onwhich all else becomes perfect and secure in possession by thetranquil spirit. Then the consciousness can be at ease, happilyfix itself in the Divine and rise undisturbed to perfection. Thentoo knowledge, will and devotion can lift their pinnacles from afirm soil of solid calm into the ether of Eternity.

What then will be the divine nature, what will be the greaterstate of consciousness and being of the bhakta who has followedthis way and turned to the adoration of the Eternal? The Gita ina number of verses rings the changes on its first insistent demand,on equality, on desirelessness, on freedom of spirit. This is to bethe base always, — and that was why so much stress was laidon it in the beginning. And in that equality bhakti, the love and


adoration of the Purushottama must rear the spirit towards somegreatest highest perfection of which this calm equality will bethe wide foundation. Several formulas of this fundamental equalconsciousness are given here. First, an absence of egoism, of I-ness and my-ness, nirmamo nirahankarah. . The bhakta of thePurushottama is one who has a universal heart and mind whichhas broken down all the narrow walls of the ego. A universallove dwells in his heart, a universal compassion flows from itlike an encompassing sea. He will have friendship and pity forall beings and hate for no living thing: for he is patient, long-suffering, enduring, a well of forgiveness. A desireless contentis his, a tranquil equality to pleasure and pain, suffering andhappiness, the steadfast control of self and the firm unshakablewill and resolution of the Yogin and a love and devotion whichgives up the whole mind and reason to the Lord, to the Masterof his consciousness and knowledge. Or, simply, he will be onewho is freed from the troubled agitated lower nature and fromits 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 withwhom all are at peace.

Or he will be one who has given up all desire and actionto the Master of his being, one pure and still, indifferent towhatever comes, not pained or afflicted by any result or hap-pening, one who has flung away from him all egoistic, personaland mental initiative whether of the inner or the outer act, onewho lets the divine will and divine knowledge flow throughhim undeflected by his own resolves, preferences and desires,and yet for that very reason is swift and skilful in all action ofhis nature, because this flawless unity with the supreme will,this pure instrumentation is the condition of the greatest skill inworks. Again, he will be one who neither desires the pleasant andrejoices at its touch nor abhors the unpleasant and sorrows atits burden. He has abolished the distinction between fortunateand unfortunate happenings, because his devotion receives allthings equally as good from the hands of his eternal Lover andMaster. The God-lover dear to God is a soul of wide equality,


equal to friend and enemy, equal to honour and insult, pleasureand 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 surround-ings, whatever relation men adopt to him, whatever station orfortune. He will keep a mind firm in all things, because it isconstantly seated in the highest self and fixed for ever on the onedivine object of his love and adoration. Equality, desirelessnessand freedom from the lower egoistic nature and its claims arealways the one perfect foundation demanded by the Gita forthe great liberation. There is to the end an emphatic repetitionof its first fundamental teaching and original desideratum, thecalm soul of knowledge that sees the one self in all things, thetranquil egoless equality that results from this knowledge, thedesireless action offered in that equality to the Master of works,the surrender of the whole mental nature of man into the handsof the mightier indwelling spirit. And the crown of this equalityis love founded on knowledge, fulfilled in instrumental action,extended to all things and beings, a vast absorbing and all-containing love for the divine Self who is Creator and Master ofthe universe, suhr.dam sarva-bhutanam sarva-loka-mahesvaram.

This is the foundation, the condition, the means by whichthe supreme spiritual perfection is to be won, and those whohave it in any way are all dear to me, says the Godhead, bhak-timan me priyah. . But exceedingly dear, atıva me priyah. , are thosesouls nearest to the Godhead whose love of me is completed bythe still wider and greatest perfection of which I have just shownto you the way and the process. These are the bhaktas who makethe Purushottama their one supreme aim and follow out with aperfect faith and exactitude the immortalising Dharma describedin this teaching. Dharma in the language of the Gita means theinnate law of the being and its works and an action proceedingfrom and determined by the inner nature, svabhava-niyatamkarma. In the lower ignorant consciousness of mind, life andbody there are many dharmas, many rules, many standards andlaws because there are many varying determinations and types


of the mental, vital and physical nature. The immortal Dharmais one; it is that of the highest spiritual divine consciousnessand its powers, para prakr.tih. . It is beyond the three gunas,and to reach it all these lower dharmas have to be abandoned,sarva-dharman parityajya. Alone in their place the one liberatingunifying consciousness and power of the Eternal has to becomethe infinite source of our action, its mould, determinant andexemplar. To rise out of our lower personal egoism, to enterinto the impersonal and equal calm of the immutable eternalall-pervading Akshara Purusha, to aspire from that calm by aperfect self-surrender of all one’s nature and existence to thatwhich is other and higher than the Akshara, is the first necessityof this Yoga. In the strength of that aspiration one can rise to theimmortal Dharma. There, made one in being, consciousness anddivine bliss with the greatest Uttama Purusha, made one withhis supreme dynamic nature-force, sva prakr.tih. , the liberatedspirit can know infinitely, love illimitably, act unfalteringly in theauthentic power of a highest immortality and a perfect freedom.The rest of the Gita is written to throw a fuller light on thisimmortal Dharma.

PART II

THE SUPREME SECRET

XIII

The Field and its Knower1

THE GITA in its last six chapters, in order to found on aclear and complete knowledge the way of the soul’s risingout of the lower into the divine nature, restates in another

form the enlightenment the Teacher has already imparted toArjuna. Essentially it is the same knowledge, but details andrelations are now made prominent and assigned their entire sig-nificance, thoughts and truths brought out in their full value thatwere alluded to only in passing or generally stated in the lightof another purpose. Thus in the first six chapters the knowledgenecessary for the distinction between the immutable self and thesoul veiled in nature was accorded an entire prominence. Thereferences to the supreme Self and Purusha were summary andnot at all explicit; it was assumed in order to justify works inthe world and it was affirmed to be the Master of being, butthere was otherwise nothing to show what it was and its rela-tions to the rest were not even hinted at, much less developed.The remaining chapters are devoted to the bringing out of thissuppressed knowledge in a conspicuous light and strong pre-eminence. It is to the Lord, the Ishwara, it is to the distinctionof the higher and the lower nature and to the vision of the all-originating and all-constituting Godhead in Nature, it is to theOne in all beings that prominence has been assigned in the nextsix Adhyayas (7-12) in order to found a root-unity of works andlove with knowledge. But now it is necessary to bring out moredefinitely the precise relations between the supreme Purusha,the immutable self, the Jiva and Prakriti in her action and hergunas. Arjuna is therefore made to put a question which shallevoke a clearer elucidation of these still ill-lighted matters. Heasks to learn of the Purusha and the Prakriti; he inquires of the

1 Gita, XIII.


field of being and the knower of the field and of knowledge andthe object of knowledge. Here is contained the sum of all theknowledge of self and the world that is still needed if the soulis to throw off its natural ignorance and staying its steps on aright use of knowledge, of life, of works and of its own relationswith the Divine in these things ascend into unity of being withthe eternal Spirit of existence.

The essence of the Gita’s ideas in these matters has already,anticipating the final evolution of its thought, been elucidatedin a certain measure; but, following its example, we may statethem again from the point of view of its present preoccupation.Action being admitted, a divine action done with self-knowledgeas the instrument of the divine Will in the cosmos being acceptedas perfectly consistent with the Brahmic status and an indispens-able part of the Godward movement, that action being upliftedinwardly as a sacrifice with adoration to the Highest, how doesthis way practically affect the great object of spiritual life, therising from the lower into the higher nature, from mortal intoimmortal being? All life, all works are a transaction between thesoul and Nature. What is the original character of that trans-action? what does it become at its spiritual culminating point?to what perfection does it lead the soul that gets free from itslower and external motives and grows inwardly into the veryhighest poise of the Spirit and deepest motive-force of the worksof its energy in the universe? These are the questions involved,— there are others which the Gita does not raise or answer, forthey were not pressingly present to the human mind of that day,— and they are replied to in the sense of the solution drawnfrom a large-sighted combination of the Vedantic, Sankhya andYoga views of existence which is the starting-point of the wholethought of the Gita.

The Soul which finds itself here embodied in Nature has atriple reality to its own self-experience. First it is a spiritual beingapparently subjected by ignorance to the outward workings ofPrakriti and represented in her mobility as an acting, thinking,mutable personality, a creature of Nature, an ego. Next whenit gets behind all this action and motion, it finds its own higher

The Field and its Knower 411

reality to be an eternal and impersonal self and immutable spiritwhich has no other share in the action and movement than tosupport it by its presence and regard it as an undisturbed equalwitness. And last, when it looks beyond these two oppositeselves, it discovers a greater ineffable Reality from which bothproceed, the Eternal who is Self of the self and the Master of allNature and all action, and not only the Master, but the origin andthe spiritual support and scene of these workings of his own en-ergy in Cosmos, and not only the origin and spiritual container,but the spiritual inhabitant in all forces, in all things and in allbeings, and not only the inhabitant but, by the developments ofthis eternal energy of his being which we call Nature, himselfall energies and forces, all things and all beings. This Natureitself is of two kinds, one derived and inferior, another originaland supreme. There is a lower nature of the cosmic mechanismby association with which the soul in Prakriti lives in a certainignorance born of Maya, traigun. yamayı maya, conceives of itselfas an ego of embodied mind and life, works under the power ofthe modes of Nature, thinks itself bound, suffering, limited bypersonality, chained to the obligation of birth and the wheel ofaction, a thing of desires, transient, mortal, a slave of its ownnature. Above this inferior power of existence there is a higherdivine and spiritual nature of its own true being in which thissoul is for ever a conscious portion of the Eternal and Divine,blissful, free, superior to its mask of becoming, immortal, imper-ishable, a power of the Godhead. To rise by this higher nature tothe Eternal through divine knowledge, love and works foundedon a spiritual universality is the key of the complete spiritualliberation. This much has been made clear; and we have to seenow more in detail what farther considerations this change ofbeing involves and especially what is the difference between thesetwo natures and how our action and our soul-status are affectedby the liberation. For that purpose the Gita enters largely intocertain details of the highest knowledge which it had hithertokept in the background. Especially it dwells on the relation be-tween Being and becoming, Soul and Nature, the action of thethree gunas, the highest liberation, the largest fullest self-giving


of the human soul to the Divine Spirit. There is in all that it saysin these closing six chapters much of the greatest importance,but it is the last thought with which it closes that is of supremeinterest; for in it we shall find the central idea of its teaching, itsgreat word to the soul of man, its highest message.

First, the whole of existence must be regarded as a field ofthe soul’s construction and action in the midst of Nature. TheGita explains the ks.etram, field, by saying that it is this bodywhich is called the field of the spirit, and in this body thereis someone who takes cognizance of the field, ks.etrajna, theknower of Nature. It is evident, however, from the definitionsthat succeed that it is not the physical body alone which is thefield, but all too that the body supports, the working of nature,the mentality, the natural action of the objectivity and subjec-tivity of our being.2 This wider body too is only the individualfield; there is a larger, a universal, a world-body, a world-fieldof the same Knower. For in each embodied creature there is thisone Knower: in each existence he uses mainly and centrally thissingle outward result of the power of his nature which he hasformed for his habitation, ısa vasyam sarvam yat kinca, makeseach separate sustained knot of his mobile Energy the first baseand scope of his developing harmonies. In Nature he knows theworld as it affects and is reflected by the consciousness in thisone limited body; the world exists to us as it is seen in our singlemind, — and in the end, even, this seemingly small embodiedconsciousness can so enlarge itself that it contains in itself thewhole universe, atmani visva-darsanam. But, physically, it is amicrocosm in a macrocosm, and the macrocosm too, the largeworld too, is a body and field inhabited by the spiritual knower.

That becomes evident when the Gita proceeds to state thecharacter, nature, source, deformations, powers of this sensibleembodiment of our being. We see then that it is the whole work-ing of the lower Prakriti that is meant by the ks.etra. That totalityis 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.


field of which it takes cognizance. For a varied and detailedknowledge of all this world of Nature in its essential action asseen from the spiritual view-point we are referred to the versesof the ancient seers, the seers of the Veda and Upanishads, inwhich we get the inspired and intuitive account of these creationsof the Spirit, and to the Brahma Sutras which will give us therational and philosophic analysis. The Gita contents itself with abrief practical statement of the lower nature of our being in theterms of the Sankhya thinkers. First there is the indiscriminateunmanifest Energy; out of that has come the objective evolu-tion of the five elemental states of matter; as also the subjectiveevolution of the senses, intelligence and ego; there are too fiveobjects of the senses, or rather five different ways of sense cog-nizance of the world, powers evolved by the universal energyin order to deal with all the forms of things she has createdfrom the five elemental states assumed by her original objectivesubstance, — organic relations by which the ego endowed withintelligence and sense acts on the formations of the cosmos:this is the constitution of the kshetra. Then there is a generalconsciousness that first informs and then illumines the Energyin its works; there is a faculty of that consciousness by whichthe Energy holds together the relations of objects; there is too acontinuity, a persistence of the subjective and objective relationsof our consciousness with its objects. These are the necessarypowers of the field; all these are common and universal powersat once of the mental, vital and physical Nature. Pleasure andpain, liking and disliking are the principal deformations of thekshetra. From the Vedantic point of view we may say that plea-sure and pain are the vital or sensational deformations givenby the lower energy to the spontaneous Ananda or delight ofthe spirit when brought into contact with her workings. Andwe may say from the same view-point that liking and dislikingare the corresponding mental deformations given by her to thereactive Will of the spirit that determines its response to hercontacts. These dualities are the positive and negative terms inwhich the ego soul of the lower nature enjoys the universe. Thenegative terms, pain, dislike, sorrow, repulsion and the rest, are


perverse or at the best ignorantly reverse responses: the positiveterms, liking, pleasure, joy, attraction, are ill-guided responsesor at the best insufficient and in character inferior to those ofthe true spiritual experience.

All these things taken together constitute the fundamentalcharacter of our first transactions with the world of Nature, butit is evidently not the whole description of our being; it is ouractuality but not the limit of our possibilities. There is somethingbeyond to be known, jneyam, and it is when the knower of thefield turns from the field itself to learn of himself within it andof all that is behind its appearances that real knowledge begins,jnanam, — the true knowledge of the field no less than of theknower. That turning inward alone delivers from ignorance. Forthe farther we go inward, the more we seize on greater and fullerrealities of things and grasp the complete truth both of Godand the soul and of the world and its movements. Therefore,says the divine Teacher, it is the knowledge at once of the fieldand its knower, ks.etra-ks.etrajnayor jnanam, a united and evenunified self-knowledge and world-knowledge, which is the realillumination and the only wisdom. For both soul and nature arethe Brahman, but the true truth of the world of Nature can onlybe discovered by the liberated sage who possesses also the truthof the spirit. One Brahman, one reality in Self and Nature is theobject of all knowledge.

The Gita then tells us what is the spiritual knowledge orrather it tells us what are the conditions of knowledge, themarks, the signs of the man whose soul is turned towards theinner wisdom. These signs are the recognised and traditionalcharacteristics of the sage, — his strong turning away of theheart from attachment to outward and worldly things, his in-ward and brooding spirit, his steady mind and calm equality, thesettled fixity of his thought and will upon the greatest inmosttruths, upon the things that are real and eternal. First, therecomes a certain moral condition, a sattwic government of thenatural being. There is fixed in him a total absence of worldlypride and arrogance, a candid soul, a tolerant, long-sufferingand benignant heart, purity of mind and body, tranquil firmness


and steadfastness, self-control and a masterful government ofthe lower nature and the heart’s worship given to the Teacher,whether to the divine Teacher within or to the human Master inwhom the divine Wisdom is embodied, — for that is the senseof the reverence given to the Guru. Then there is a nobler andfreer attitude towards the outward world, an attitude of perfectdetachment and equality, a firm removal of the natural being’sattraction to the objects of the senses and a radical freedomfrom the claims of that constant clamorous ego-sense, ego-idea,ego-motive which tyrannises over the normal man. There is nolonger any clinging to the attachment and absorption of familyand home. There is instead of these vital and animal movementsan unattached will and sense and intelligence, a keen perceptionof the defective nature of the ordinary life of physical man withits aimless and painful subjection to birth and death and dis-ease and age, a constant equalness to all pleasant or unpleasanthappenings, — for the soul is seated within and impervious tothe shocks of external events, — and a meditative mind turnedtowards solitude and away from the vain noise of crowds and theassemblies of men. Finally, there is a strong turn within towardsthe things that really matter, a philosophic perception of the truesense and large principles of existence, a tranquil continuity ofinner spiritual knowledge and light, the Yoga of an unswervingdevotion, love of God, the heart’s deep and constant adorationof the universal and eternal Presence.

The one object to which the mind of spiritual knowledgemust be turned is the Eternal by fixity in whom the soul cloudedhere and swathed in the mists of Nature recovers and enjoysits native and original consciousness of immortality and tran-scendence. To be fixed on the transient, to be limited in thephenomenon is to accept mortality; the constant truth in thingsthat perish is that in them which is inward and immutable.The soul when it allows itself to be tyrannised over by theappearances of Nature, misses itself and goes whirling aboutin the cycle of the births and deaths of its bodies. There, pas-sionately following without end the mutations of personalityand its interests, it cannot draw back to the possession of its


impersonal and unborn self-existence. To be able to do that is tofind oneself and get back to one’s true being, that which assumesthese births but does not perish with the perishing of its forms.To enjoy the eternity to which birth and life are only outwardcircumstances, is the soul’s true immortality and transcendence.That Eternal or that Eternity is the Brahman. Brahman is Thatwhich is transcendent and That which is universal: it is thefree spirit who supports in front the play of soul with natureand assures behind their imperishable oneness; it is at once themutable and the immutable, the All that is the One. In his highestsupracosmic status Brahman is a transcendent Eternity withoutorigin or change far above the phenomenal oppositions of ex-istence and non-existence, persistence and transience betweenwhich the outward world moves. But once seen in the substanceand light of this eternity, the world also becomes other than itseems to the mind and senses; for then we see the universe nolonger as a whirl of mind and life and matter or a mass of thedeterminations of energy and substance, but as no other than thiseternal Brahman. A spirit who immeasurably fills and surroundsall this movement with himself — for indeed the movement toois himself — and who throws on all that is finite the splendourof his garment of infinity, a bodiless and million-bodied spiritwhose hands of strength and feet of swiftness are on every sideof us, whose heads and eyes and faces are those innumerablevisages which we see wherever we turn, whose ear is everywherelistening 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 theeternity of Brahman; sense and quality, their reflectors and con-stituents, are this supreme Soul’s devices for the presentation ofthe workings that his own energy in things constantly liberatesinto movement. He is himself beyond the limitation of the senses,sees all things but not with the physical eye, hears all things butnot with the physical ear, is aware of all things but not with thelimiting mind — mind which represents but cannot truly know.Not determined by any qualities, he possesses and determines inhis substance all qualities and enjoys this qualitative action of


his own Nature. He is attached to nothing, bound by nothing,fixed to nothing that he does; calm, he supports in a large andimmortal freedom all the action and movement and passionof his universal Shakti. He becomes all that is in the universe;that which is in us is he and all that we experience outsideourselves is he. The inward and the outward, the far and thenear, the moving and the unmoving, all this he is at once. He isthe subtlety of the subtle which is beyond our knowledge, evenas he is the density of force and substance which offers itself tothe grasp of our minds. He is indivisible and the One, but seemsto divide himself in forms and creatures and appears as all theseseparate existences. All things can get back in him, can returnin the Spirit to the indivisible unity of their self-existence. All iseternally born from him, upborne in his eternity, taken eternallyback into his oneness. He is the light of all lights and luminousbeyond all the darkness of our ignorance. He is knowledge andthe object of knowledge. The spiritual supramental knowledgethat floods the illumined mind and transfigures it is this spiritmanifesting himself in light to the force-obscured soul which hehas put forth into the action of Nature. This eternal Light is inthe heart of every being; it is he who is the secret knower of thefield, ks.etrajna, and presides as the Lord in the heart of thingsover this province and over all these kingdoms of his manifestedbecoming and action. When man sees this eternal and universalGodhead within himself, when he becomes aware of the soul inall things and discovers the spirit in Nature, when he feels all theuniverse as a wave mounting in this Eternity and all that is as theone existence, he puts on the light of Godhead and stands freein the midst of the worlds of Nature. A divine knowledge and aperfect turning with adoration to this Divine is the secret of thegreat spiritual liberation. Freedom, love and spiritual knowledgeraise us from mortal nature to immortal being.

The Soul and Nature are only two aspects of the eternalBrahman, an apparent duality which founds the operations ofhis universal existence. The Soul is without origin and eter-nal, Nature too is without origin and eternal; but the modesof Nature and the lower forms she assumes to our conscious


experience have an origin in the transactions of these two en-tities. They come from her, wear by her the outward chain ofcause and effect, doing and the results of doing, force and itsworkings, all that is here transient and mutable. Constantly theychange and the soul and Nature seem to change with them,but in themselves these two powers are eternal and always thesame. Nature creates and acts, the Soul enjoys her creation andaction; but in this inferior form of her action she turns this en-joyment into the obscure and petty figures of pain and pleasure.Forcibly the soul, the individual Purusha, is attracted by herqualitative workings and this attraction of her qualities drawshim constantly to births of all kinds in which he enjoys thevariations and vicissitudes, the good and evil of birth in Nature.But this is only the outward experience of the soul mutable inconception by identification with mutable Nature. Seated in thisbody is her and our Divinity, the supreme Self, Paramatman, thesupreme Soul, the mighty Lord of Nature, who watches her ac-tion, sanctions her operations, upholds all she does, commandsher manifold creation, enjoys with his universal delight this playof her figures of his own being. That is the self-knowledge towhich we have to accustom our mentality before we can trulyknow ourselves as an eternal portion of the Eternal. Once that isfixed, no matter how the soul in us may comport itself outwardlyin its transactions with Nature, whatever it may seem to do orhowever it may seem to assume this or that figure of personalityand active force and embodied ego, it is in itself free, no longerbound to birth because one through impersonality of self withthe inner unborn spirit of existence. That impersonality is ourunion with the supreme egoless I of all that is in cosmos.

This knowledge comes by an inner meditation throughwhich the eternal self becomes apparent to us in our ownself-existence. Or it comes by the Yoga of the Sankhyas, theseparation of the soul from nature. Or it comes by the Yogaof works in which the personal will is dissolved through theopening up of our mind and heart and all our active forcesto the Lord who assumes to himself the whole of our worksin nature. The spiritual knowledge may be awakened by the


urging of the spirit within us, its call to this or that Yoga, thisor that way of oneness. Or it may come to us by hearing of thetruth from others and the moulding of the mind into the senseof that to which it listens with faith and concentration. Buthowever arrived at, it carries us beyond death to immortality.Knowledge shows us high above the mutable transactions ofthe soul with the mortality of nature our highest Self as thesupreme Lord of her actions, one and equal in all objects andcreatures, not born in the taking up of a body, not subject todeath in the perishing of all these bodies. That is the true seeing,the seeing of that in us which is eternal and immortal. As weperceive more and more this equal spirit in all things, we passinto that equality of the spirit; as we dwell more and morein this universal being, we become ourselves universal beings;as we grow more and more aware of this eternal, we put onour own eternity and are for ever. We identify ourselves withthe eternity of the self and no longer with the limitation anddistress of our mental and physical ignorance. Then we see thatall our works are an evolution and operation of Nature andour real self not the executive doer, but the free witness andlord and unattached enjoyer of the action. All this surface ofcosmic movement is a diverse becoming of natural existencesin the one eternal Being, all is extended, manifested, rolled outby the universal Energy from the seeds of her Idea deep in hisexistence; but the spirit even though it takes up and enjoys herworkings in this body of ours, is not affected by its mortalitybecause it is eternal beyond birth and death, is not limited bythe personalities which it multiply assumes in her because it isthe one supreme self of all these personalities, is not changedby the mutations of quality because it is itself undetermined byquality, does not act even in action, kartaram api akartaram,because it supports natural action in a perfect spiritual freedomfrom its effects, is the originator indeed of all activities, but inno way changed or affected by the play of its Nature. As the all-pervading ether is not affected or changed by the multiple formsit assumes, but remains always the same pure subtle originalsubstance, even so this spirit when it has done and become all


possible things, remains through it all the same pure immutablesubtle infinite essence. That is the supreme status of the soul,para gatih. , that is the divine being and nature, madbhava, andwhoever arrives at spiritual knowledge, rises to that supremeimmortality of the Eternal.

This Brahman, this eternal and spiritual knower of the fieldof his own natural becoming, this Nature, his perpetual energy,which converts herself into that field, this immortality of thesoul in mortal nature, — these things together make the wholereality of our existence. The spirit within, when we turn to it,illumines the entire field of Nature with its own truth in all thesplendour of its rays. In the light of that sun of knowledge the eyeof knowledge opens in us and we live in that truth and no longerin this ignorance. Then we perceive that our limitation to ourpresent mental and physical nature was an error of the darkness,then we are liberated from the law of the lower Prakriti, the lawof the mind and body, then we attain to the supreme nature of thespirit. That splendid and lofty change is the last, the divine andinfinite becoming, the putting off of mortal nature, the puttingon of an immortal existence.

XIV

Above the Gunas1

THE DISTINCTIONS between the Soul and Naturerapidly drawn in the verses of the thirteenth chapter by afew decisive epithets, a few brief but packed characterisa-

tions of their separate power and functioning, and especially thedistinction between the embodied soul subjected to the action ofNature by its enjoyment of her gunas, qualities or modes and theSupreme Soul which dwells enjoying the gunas, but not subjectbecause it is itself beyond them, are the basis on which theGita rests its whole idea of the liberated being made one in theconscious law of its existence with the Divine. That liberation,that oneness, that putting on of the divine nature, sadharmya,it declares to be the very essence of spiritual freedom and thewhole significance of immortality. This supreme importanceassigned to sadharmya is a capital point in the teaching of theGita.

To be immortal was never held in the ancient spiritual teach-ing to consist merely in a personal survival of the death of thebody: all beings are immortal in that sense and it is only theforms that perish. The souls that do not arrive at liberation, livethrough the returning aeons; all exist involved or secret in theBrahman during the dissolution of the manifest worlds and areborn again in the appearance of a new cycle. Pralaya, the end ofa cycle of aeons, is the temporary disintegration of a universalform of existence and of all the individual forms which move inits rounds, but that is only a momentary pause, a silent inter-val followed by an outburst of new creation, reintegration andreconstruction in which they reappear and recover the impetusof 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.


pralayam yati deha-bhr.t, “the soul bearing the body comes to apralaya,” to a disintegration of that form of matter with whichits ignorance identified its being and which now dissolves intothe natural elements. But the soul itself persists and after aninterval resumes in a new body formed from those elements itsround of births in the cycle, just as after the interval of pause andcessation the universal Being resumes his endless round of thecyclic aeons. This immortality in the rounds of Time is commonto all embodied spirits.

To be immortal in the deeper sense is something differentfrom this survival of death and this constant recurrence. Immor-tality is that supreme status in which the Spirit knows itself tobe superior to death and birth, not conditioned by the natureof its manifestation, infinite, imperishable, immutably eternal,— immortal, because never being born it never dies. The divinePurushottama, who is the supreme Lord and supreme Brahman,possesses for ever this immortal eternity and is not affectedby his taking up a body or by his continuous assumption ofcosmic forms and powers because he exists always in this self-knowledge. His very nature is to be unchangeably conscious ofhis own eternity; he is self-aware without end or beginning. Heis here the Inhabitant of all bodies, but as the unborn in everybody, not limited in his consciousness by that manifestation, notidentified with the physical nature which he assumes; for thatis only a minor circumstance of his universal activised play ofexistence. Liberation, immortality is to live in this unchangeablyconscious eternal being of the Purushottama.2 But to arrive hereat this greater spiritual immortality the embodied soul mustcease 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 indi-vidual spiritual being into the unmanifest, indefinable or absolute Brahman, avyaktamanirdesyam, 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 hissupreme status, mayi nivasis.yasi, param dhama, and here as sadharmya, param 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 allthe sages still exist, munayah. sarve, not bound to birth in the creation, not troubled bythe dissolution of the cycles.

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put on the law of the Divine’s supreme way of existence whichis in fact the real law of its own eternal essence. In the spiritualevolution 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 divinenature, we can only do by an effort of Godward knowledge,will and adoration. For the soul sent forth by the Supreme as hiseternal portion, his immortal representative into the workingsof universal Nature is yet obliged by the character of thoseworkings, avasam prakr.ter vasat, to identify itself in its externalconsciousness with her limiting conditions, to identify itself witha life, mind and body that are oblivious of their inner spiritualreality and of the innate Godhead. To get back to self-knowledgeand to the knowledge of the real as distinct from the apparentrelations of the soul with Nature, to know God and ourselvesand the world with a spiritual and no longer with a physical orexternalised experience, through the deepest truth of the innersoul-consciousness and not through the misleading phenomenalsignificances of the sense-mind and the outward understanding,is an indispensable means of this perfection. Perfection cannotcome without self-knowledge and God-knowledge and a spiri-tual attitude towards our natural existence, and that is why theancient wisdom laid so much stress on salvation by knowledge,— not an intellectual cognizance of things, but a growing of manthe mental being into a greater spiritual consciousness. The soul’ssalvation cannot come without the soul’s perfection, without itsgrowing into the divine nature; the impartial Godhead will noteffect it for us by an act of caprice or an arbitrary sanad ofhis favour. Divine works are effective for salvation because theylead us towards this perfection and to a knowledge of self andnature and God by a growing unity with the inner Master ofour existence. Divine love is effective because by it we grow intothe likeness of the sole and supreme object of our adoration andcall down the answering love of the Highest to flood us withthe light of his knowledge and the uplifting power and purity ofhis eternal spirit. Therefore, says the Gita, this is the supremeknowledge and the highest of all knowings because it leads to


the highest perfection and spiritual status, param siddhim, andbrings the soul to likeness with the Divine, sadharmya. It is theeternal wisdom, the great spiritual experience by which all thesages attained to that highest perfection, grew into one law ofbeing with the Supreme and live for ever in his eternity, not bornin the creation, not troubled by the anguish of the universaldissolution. This perfection, then, this sadharmya is the way ofimmortality and the indispensable condition without which thesoul cannot consciously live in the Eternal.

The soul of man could not grow into the likeness of theDivine, if it were not in its secret essence imperishably one withthe Divine and part and parcel of his divinity: it could not be orbecome immortal if it were merely a creature of mental, vital andphysical Nature. All existence is a manifestation of the divineExistence and that which is within us is spirit of the eternalSpirit. We have come indeed into the lower material nature andare under its influence, but we have come there from the supremespiritual nature: this inferior imperfect status is our apparent,but that our real being. The Eternal puts all this movementforth as his self-creation. He is at once the Father and Motherof the universe; the substance of the infinite Idea, vijnana, theMahad Brahman, is the womb into which he casts the seed ofhis self-conception. As the Over-Soul he casts the seed; as theMother, the Nature-Soul, the Energy filled with his consciouspower, he receives it into this infinite substance of being madepregnant with his illimitable, yet self-limiting Idea. He receivesinto this Vast of self-conception and develops there the divineembryo into mental and physical form of existence born fromthe original act of conceptive creation. All we see springs fromthat act of creation; but that which is born here is only finite ideaand form of the unborn and infinite. The Spirit is eternal andsuperior to all its manifestation: Nature, eternal without begin-ning in the Spirit, proceeds for ever with the rhythm of the cyclesby unending act of creation and unconcluding act of cessation;the Soul too which takes on this or that form in Nature, is noless eternal than she, anadı ubhav api. Even while in Nature itfollows 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 termsof birth and death, and even in its apparent consciousness hereit can become aware of that innate and constant transcendence.

What is it then that makes the difference, what is it that getsthe soul into the appearance of birth and death and bondage, —for this is patent that it is only an appearance? It is a subordinateact or state of consciousness, it is a self-oblivious identificationwith the modes of Nature in the limited workings of this lowermotivity and with this self-wrapped ego-bounded knot of actionof the mind, life and body. To rise above the modes of Nature,to be traigun. yatıta, is indispensable, if we are to get back intoour fully conscious being away from the obsessing power of thelower action and to put on the free nature of the spirit and itseternal immortality. That condition of the sadharmya is whatthe Gita next proceeds to develop. It has already alluded to itand laid it down with a brief emphasis in a previous chapter; butit has now to indicate more precisely what are these modes, thesegunas, how they bind the soul and keep it back from spiritualfreedom and what is meant by rising above the modes of Nature.

The modes of Nature are all qualitative in their essence andare called for that reason its gunas or qualities. In any spiritualconception of the universe this must be so, because the connect-ing medium between spirit and matter must be psyche or soulpower and the primary action psychological and qualitative, notphysical and quantitative; for quality is the immaterial, the morespiritual element in all the action of the universal Energy, herprior dynamics. The predominance of physical Science has ac-customed us to a different view of Nature, because there the firstthing that strikes us is the importance of the quantitative aspectof her workings and her dependence for the creation of forms onquantitative combinations and dispositions. And yet even therethe discovery that matter is rather substance or act of energythan energy a motive power of self-existent material substanceor an inherent power acting in matter has led to some revival ofan older reading of universal Nature. The analysis of the ancientIndian thinkers allowed for the quantitative action of Nature,matra; but that it regarded as proper to its more objective and


formally executive working, while the innately ideative executivepower which disposes things according to the quality of theirbeing and energy, gun. a, svabhava, is the primary determinantand underlies all the outer quantitative dispositions. In the basisof the physical world this is not apparent only because therethe underlying ideative spirit, the Mahad Brahman, is overlaidand hidden up by the movement of matter and material energy.But even in the physical world the miraculous varying resultsof different combinations and quantities of elements otherwiseidentical with each other admits of no conceivable explanationif there is not a superior power of variative quality of whichthese material dispositions are only the convenient mechanicaldevices. Or let us say at once, there must be a secret ideativecapacity of the universal energy, vijnana, — even if we supposethat energy and its instrumental idea, buddhi, to be themselvesmechanical in their nature, — which fixes the mathematics anddecides the resultants of these outer dispositions: it is the om-nipotent Idea in the spirit which invents and makes use of thesedevices. And in the vital and mental existence quality at onceopenly appears as the primary power and amount of energy isonly a secondary factor. But in fact the mental, the vital, thephysical existence are all subject to the limitations of quality, allare governed by its determinations, even though that truth seemsmore and more obscured as we descend the scale of existence.Only the Spirit, which by the power of its idea-being and its idea-force called mahat and vijnana fixes these conditions, is not sodetermined, not subject to any limitations either of quality orquantity because its immeasurable and indeterminable infinity issuperior to the modes which it develops and uses for its creation.

But, again, the whole qualitative action of Nature, so in-finitely intricate in its detail and variety, is figured as cast into themould of three general modes of quality everywhere present, in-tertwined, almost inextricable, sattva, rajas, tamas. These modesare described in the Gita only by their psychological action inman, or incidentally in things such as food according as theyproduce a psychological or vital effect on human beings. If welook for a more general definition, we shall perhaps catch a

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glimpse of it in the symbolic idea of Indian religion which at-tributes each of these qualities respectively to one member ofthe cosmic Trinity, sattwa to the preserver Vishnu, rajas to thecreator Brahma, tamas to the destroyer Rudra. Looking behindthis idea for the rationale of the triple ascription, we mightdefine the three modes or qualities in terms of the motion ofthe universal Energy as Nature’s three concomitant and insep-arable powers of equilibrium, kinesis and inertia. But that isonly their appearance in terms of the external action of Force.It is otherwise if we regard consciousness and force as twinterms of the one Existence, always coexistent in the reality ofbeing, however in the primal outward phenomenon of materialNature light of consciousness may seem to disappear in a vastaction of nescient unillumined energy, while at an opposite poleof spiritual quiescence action of force may seem to disappearin the stillness of the observing or witness consciousness. Thesetwo conditions are the two extremes of an apparently separatedPurusha and Prakriti, but each at its extreme point does notabolish but at the most only conceals its eternal mate in thedepths of its own characteristic way of being. Therefore, sinceconsciousness is always there even in an apparently inconscientForce, we must find a corresponding psychological power ofthese three modes which informs their more outward executiveaction. On their psychological side the three qualities may bedefined, tamas as Nature’s power of nescience, rajas as her powerof 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 inter-twined in all cosmic existence. Tamas, the principle of inertia,is a passive and inert nescience which suffers all shocks andcontacts without any effort of mastering response and by itselfwould lead to a disintegration of the whole action of the energyand a radical dispersion of substance. But it is driven by thekinetic power of rajas and even in the nescience of Matter ismet and embraced by an innate though unpossessed preserv-ing principle of harmony and balance and knowledge. Materialenergy appears to be tamasic in its basic action, jad. a, nescient,


mechanic and in movement disintegrative. But it is dominated bya huge force and impulsion of mute rajasic kinesis which drivesit, even in and even by its dispersion and disintegration, to buildand create and again by a sattwic ideative element in its ap-parently inconscient force which is always imposing a harmonyand preservative order on the two opposite tendencies. Rajas,the principle of creative endeavour and motion and impulsionin Prakriti, kinesis, pravr.tti, so seen in Matter, appears moreevidently as a conscious or half-conscious passion of seekingand desire and action in the dominant character of Life, — forthat passion is the nature of all vital existence. And it would leadby itself in its own nature to a persistent but always mutable andunstable life and activity and creation without any settled result.But met on one side by the disintegrating power of tamas withdeath and decay and inertia, its ignorant action is on the otherside of its functioning settled and harmonised and sustained bythe power of sattwa, subconscient in the lower forms of life,more and more conscient in the emergence of mentality, mostconscious in the effort of the evolved intelligence figuring aswill and reason in the fully developed mental being. Sattwa, theprinciple of understanding knowledge and of according assimi-lation, measure and equilibrium, which by itself would lead onlyto some lasting concord of fixed and luminous harmonies, is inthe motions of this world impelled to follow the mutable strifeand action of the eternal kinesis and constantly overpoweredor hedged in by the forces of inertia and nescience. This is theappearance of a world governed by the interlocked and mutuallylimited play of the three qualitative modes of Nature.

The Gita applies this generalised analysis of the universalEnergy to the psychological nature of man in relation to hisbondage to Prakriti and the realisation of spiritual freedom.Sattwa, it tells us, is by the purity of its quality a cause oflight and illumination and by virtue of that purity it producesno disease or morbidity or suffering in the nature. When intoall the doors in the body there comes a flooding of light, asif the doors and windows of a closed house were opened tosunshine, a light of understanding, perception and knowledge,

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— when the intelligence is alert and illumined, the senses quick-ened, the whole mentality satisfied and full of brightness andthe nervous being calmed and filled with an illumined ease andclarity, prasada, one should understand that there has been agreat increase and uprising of the sattwic guna in the nature.For knowledge and a harmonious ease and pleasure and happi-ness are the characteristic results of sattwa. The pleasure that issattwic is not only that contentment which an inner clarity ofsatisfied will and intelligence brings with it, but all delight andcontent produced by the soul’s possession of itself in light orby an accord or an adequate and truthful adjustment betweenthe regarding soul and the surrounding Nature and her offeredobjects of desire and perception.

Rajas, again, the Gita tells us, has for its essence attraction ofliking and longing. Rajas is a child of the attachment of the soulto the desire of objects; it is born from the nature’s thirst for anunpossessed satisfaction. It is therefore full of unrest and feverand lust and greed and excitement, a thing of seeking impulsions,and all this mounts in us when the middle guna increases. It is theforce of desire which motives all ordinary personal initiative ofaction and all that movement of stir and seeking and propulsionin our nature which is the impetus towards action and works,pravr.tti. Rajas, then, is evidently the kinetic force in the modesof Nature. Its fruit is the lust of action, but also grief, pain, allkinds of suffering; for it has no right possession of its object —desire in fact implies non-possession — and even its pleasure ofacquired possession is troubled and unstable because it has notclear knowledge and does not know how to possess nor can itfind the secret of accord and right enjoyment. All the ignorantand passionate seeking of life belongs to the rajasic mode ofNature.

Tamas, finally, is born of inertia and ignorance and its fruittoo is inertia and ignorance. It is the darkness of tamas which ob-scures knowledge and causes all confusion and delusion. There-fore it is the opposite of sattwa, for the essence of sattwa isenlightenment, prakasa, and the essence of tamas is absenceof light, nescience, aprakasa. But tamas brings incapacity and


negligence of action as well as the incapacity and negligence oferror, inattention and misunderstanding or non-understanding;indolence, languor and sleep belong to this guna. Therefore it isthe opposite too of rajas; for the essence of rajas is movementand impulsion and kinesis, pravr.tti, but the essence of tamasis inertia, apravr.tti. Tamas is inertia of nescience and inertia ofinaction, a double negative.

These three qualities of Nature are evidently present andactive in all human beings and none can be said to be quitedevoid 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 theothers. All men have in them in whatever degree the rajasicimpulse of desire and activity and the sattwic boon of light andhappiness, some balance, some adjustment of mind to itself andits surroundings and objects, and all have their share of tamasicincapacity and ignorance or nescience. But these qualities are notconstant in any man in the quantitative action of their force or inthe combination of their elements; for they are variable and in acontinual state of mutual impact, displacement and interaction.Now one leads, now another increases and predominates, andeach subjects us to its characteristic action and consequences.Only by a general and ordinary predominance of one or otherof the qualities can a man be said to be either sattwic or rajasicor tamasic in his nature; but this can only be a general and notan exclusive or absolute description. The three qualities are atriple power which by their interaction determine the characterand disposition and through that and its various motions theactions of the natural man. But this triple power is at the sametime a triple cord of bondage. “The three gunas born of Prakriti”says the Gita “bind in the body the imperishable dweller in thebody.” In a certain sense we can see at once that there mustbe this bondage in following the action of the gunas; for theyare all limited by their finite of quality and operation and causelimitation. Tamas is on both its sides an incapacity and thereforevery obviously binds to limitation. Rajasic desire as an initiatorof action is a more positive power, but still we can see wellenough that desire with its limiting and engrossing hold on man

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must always be a bondage. But how does sattwa, the powerof knowledge and happiness, become a chain? It so becomesbecause it is a principle of mental nature, a principle of limitedand limiting knowledge and of a happiness which depends uponright following or attainment of this or that object or else onparticular states of the mentality, on a light of mind which canbe only a more or less clear twilight. Its pleasure can only be apassing intensity or a qualified ease. Other is the infinite spiri-tual knowledge and the free self-existent delight of our spiritualbeing.

But then there is the question, how does our infinite and im-perishable spirit, even involved in Nature, come thus to confineitself to the lower action of Prakriti and undergo this bondageand 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 itsactive evolution? The reason, says the Gita, is our attachmentto the gunas and to the result of their workings. Sattwa, it says,attaches to happiness, rajas attaches to action, tamas covers upthe knowledge and attaches to negligence of error and inaction.Or again, “sattwa binds by attachment to knowledge and attach-ment to happiness, rajas binds the embodied spirit by attachmentto works, tamas binds by negligence and indolence and sleep.”In other words, the soul by attachment to the enjoyment ofthe gunas and their results concentrates its consciousness onthe lower and outward action of life, mind and body in Nature,imprisons itself in the form of these things and becomes obliviousof its own greater consciousness behind in the spirit, unaware ofthe free power and scope of the liberating Purusha. Evidently, inorder to be liberated and perfect, we must get back from thesethings, away from the gunas and above them and return to thepower of that free spiritual consciousness above Nature.

But this would seem to imply a cessation of all doing, sinceall natural action is done by the gunas, by Nature through hermodes. The soul cannot act by itself, it can only act throughNature and her modes. And yet the Gita, while it demands free-dom from the modes, insists upon the necessity of action. Herecomes in the importance of its insistence on the abandonment


of the fruits; for it is the desire of the fruits which is the mostpotent cause of the soul’s bondage and by abandoning it thesoul can be free in action. Ignorance is the result of tamasicaction, pain the consequence of rajasic works, pain of reaction,disappointment, dissatisfaction or transience, and therefore inattachment to the fruits of this kind of activity attended as theyare with these undesirable accompaniments there is no profit.But of works rightly done the fruit is pure and sattwic, the innerresult is knowledge and happiness. Yet attachment even to thesepleasurable things must be entirely abandoned, first, becausein the mind they are limited and limiting forms and, secondly,because, since sattwa is constantly entangled with and besiegedby rajas and tamas which may at any moment overcome it, thereis a perpetual insecurity in their tenure. But, even if one is freefrom any clinging to the fruit, there may be an attachment to thework itself, either for its own sake, the essential rajasic bond, orowing to a lax subjection to the drive of Nature, the tamasic, orfor the sake of the attracting rightness of the thing done, whichis the sattwic attaching cause powerful on the virtuous man orthe man of knowledge. And here evidently the resource is inthat other injunction of the Gita, to give up the action itself tothe Lord of works and be only a desireless and equal-mindedinstrument of his will. To see that the modes of Nature are thewhole agency and cause of our works and to know and turn tothat which is supreme above the gunas, is the way to rise abovethe lower nature. Only so can we attain to the movement andstatus of the Divine, mad-bhava, by which free from subjectionto birth and death and their concomitants, decay, old age andsuffering, the liberated soul shall enjoy in the end immortalityand all that is eternal.

But what, asks Arjuna, are the signs of such a man, whathis action and how is he said even in action to be above thethree gunas? The sign, says Krishna, is that equality of which Ihave so constantly spoken; the sign is that inwardly he regardshappiness and suffering alike, gold and mud and stone as ofequal 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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and the faction of his enemies are equal things. He is steadfast ina wise imperturbable and immutable inner calm and quietude.He initiates no action, but leaves all works to be done by thegunas of Nature. Sattwa, rajas or tamas may rise or cease in hisouter mentality and his physical movements with their resultsof enlightenment, of impulsion to works or of inaction and theclouding over of the mental and nervous being, but he does notrejoice when this comes or that ceases, nor on the other handdoes he abhor or shrink from the operation or the cessationof these things. He has seated himself in the conscious light ofanother principle than the nature of the gunas and that greaterconsciousness remains steadfast in him, above these powers andunshaken by their motions like the sun above clouds to one whohas risen into a higher atmosphere. He from that height sees thatit is the gunas that are in process of action and that their stormand calm are not himself but only a movement of Prakriti; hisself is immovable above and his spirit does not participate in thatshifting mutability of things unstable. This is the impersonalityof the Brahmic status; for that higher principle, that greater widehigh-seated consciousness, kut.astha, is the immutable Brahman.

But still there is evidently here a double status, there is ascission of the being between two opposites; a liberated spiritin the immutable Self or Brahman watches the action of anunliberated mutable Nature, — Akshara and Kshara. Is thereno greater status, no principle of more absolute perfection, oris this division the highest consciousness possible in the body,and is the end of Yoga to drop the mutable nature and thegunas born of the embodiment in Nature and disappear intothe impersonality and everlasting peace of the Brahman? Is thatlaya or dissolution of the individual Purusha the greatest libera-tion? There is, it would seem, something else; for the Gita saysat the close, always returning to this one final note, “He alsowho loves and strives after Me with an undeviating love andadoration, passes beyond the three gunas and he too is preparedfor becoming the Brahman.” This “I” is the Purushottama whois the foundation of the silent Brahman and of immortality andimperishable spiritual existence and of the eternal dharma and


of an utter bliss of happiness. There is a status then which isgreater than the peace of the Akshara as it watches unmovedthe strife of the gunas. There is a highest spiritual experienceand foundation above the immutability of the Brahman, there isan eternal dharma greater than the rajasic impulsion to works,pravr.tti, there is an absolute delight which is untouched byrajasic suffering and beyond the sattwic happiness, and thesethings are found and possessed by dwelling in the being andpower of the Purushottama. But since it is acquired by bhakti,its status must be that divine delight, Ananda, in which is experi-enced the union of utter love3 and possessing oneness, the crownof bhakti. And to rise into that Ananda, into that imperishableoneness must be the completion of spiritual perfection and thefulfilment of the eternal immortalising dharma.

3 niratisayapremaspadatvam anandatattvam.

XV

The Three Purushas1

THE DOCTRINE of the Gita from the beginning to theend converges on all its lines and through all the flexibilityof its turns towards one central thought, and to that it is

arriving in all its balancing and reconciliation of the disagree-ments of various philosophic systems and its careful synthetisingof the truths of spiritual experience, lights often conflicting or atleast divergent when taken separately and exclusively pursuedalong their outer arc and curve of radiation, but here broughttogether into one focus of grouping vision. This central thoughtis the idea of a triple consciousness, three and yet one, presentin the whole scale of existence.

There is a spirit here at work in the world that is one ininnumerable appearances. It is the developer of birth and ac-tion, the moving power of life, the inhabiting and associatingconsciousness in the myriad mutabilities of Nature; it is theconstituting reality of all this stir in Time and Space; it is itselfTime and Space and Circumstance. It is this multitude of souls inthe worlds; it is the gods and men and creatures and things andforces and qualities and quantities and powers and presences.It is Nature, which is power of the Spirit, and objects, whichare its phenomena of name and idea and form, and existences,who are portions and births and becomings of this single self-existent spiritual entity, the One, the Eternal. But what we seeobviously at work before us is not this Eternal and his consciousShakti, but a Nature which in the blind stress of her operations isignorant of the spirit within her action. Her work is a confused,ignorant and limiting play of certain fundamental modes, quali-ties, principles of force in mechanical operation and the fixity orthe flux of their consequences. And whatever soul comes to the

1 Gita, XV.


surface in her action, is itself in appearance ignorant, suffering,bound to the incomplete and unsatisfying play of this inferiorNature. The inherent Power in her is yet other than what it thusseems to be; for, hidden in its truth, manifest in its appearances,it is the Kshara, the universal Soul, the spirit in the mutabilityof cosmic phenomenon and becoming, one with the Immutableand the Supreme. We have to arrive at the hidden truth behind itsmanifest appearances; we have to discover the Spirit behind theseveils and to see all as the One, vasudevah. sarvam iti, individual,universal, transcendent. But this is a thing impossible to achievewith any completeness of inner reality, so long as we live concen-trated in the inferior Nature. For in this lesser movement Natureis an ignorance, a Maya; she shelters the Divine within its foldsand conceals him from herself and her creatures. The Godheadis hidden by the Maya of his own all-creating Yoga, the Eternalfigured in transience, Being absorbed and covered up by its ownmanifesting phenomena. In the Kshara taken alone as a thing initself, the mutable universal apart from the undivided Immutableand 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 awareand who is none of these things, but self and self only. ThisSpirit is eternal, always the same, never changed or affected bymanifestation, the one, the stable, a self-existence undivided andnot even seemingly divided by the division of things and powersin Nature, inactive in her action, immobile in her motion. It is theSelf of all and yet unmoved, indifferent, intangible, as if all thesethings which depend upon it were not-self, not its own resultsand powers and consequences, but a drama of action developedbefore the eye of an unmoved unparticipating spectator. For themind that stages and shares in the drama is other than the Selfwhich indifferently contains the action. This spirit is timeless,though we see it in Time; it is unextended in space, though wesee it as if pervading space. We become aware of it in proportionas we draw back from out inward, or look behind the action andmotion for something that is eternal and stable, or get away fromtime and its creation to the uncreated, away from phenomenon

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to being, from the personal to impersonality, from becoming tounalterable self-existence. This is the Akshara, the immutablein the mutable, the immobile in the mobile, the imperishable inthings perishable. Or rather, since there is only an appearanceof pervasion, it is the immutable, immobile and imperishablein which proceeds all the mobility of mutable and perishablethings.

The Kshara spirit visible to us as all natural existence andthe totality of all existences moves and acts pervadingly in theimmobile and eternal Akshara. This mobile Power of Self actsin that fundamental stability of Self, as the second principle ofmaterial Nature, Vayu, with its contactual force of aggregationand separation, attraction and repulsion, supporting the forma-tive force of the fiery (radiant, gaseous and electric) and otherelemental movements, ranges pervadingly in the subtly massivestability of ether. This Akshara is the self higher than the buddhi— it exceeds even that highest subjective principle of Naturein our being, the liberating intelligence, through which manreturning beyond his restless mobile mental to his calm eternalspiritual self is at last free from the persistence of birth and thelong chain of action, of Karma. This self in its highest status,param dhama, is an unmanifest beyond even the unmanifestprinciple of the original cosmic Prakriti, Avyakta, and, if thesoul turns to this Immutable, the hold of cosmos and Nature fallsaway from it and it passes beyond birth to an unchanging eternalexistence. These two then are the two spirits we see in the world;one emerges in front in its action, the other remains behind itsteadfast in that perpetual silence from which the action comesand in which all actions cease and disappear into timeless being,Nirvana. Dvav imau purus.au loke ks.aras caks.ara eva ca.

The difficulty which baffles our intelligence is that these twoseem to be irreconcilable opposites with no real nexus betweenthem or any transition from the one to the other except by anintolerant movement of separation. The Kshara acts, or at leastmotives action, separately in the Akshara; the Akshara standsapart, self-centred, separate in its inactivity from the Kshara. Atfirst sight it would almost seem better, more logical, more easy


of comprehension, if we admitted with the Sankhyas an originaland eternal duality of Purusha and Prakriti, if not even an eternalplurality of souls. Our experience of the Akshara would then besimply the withdrawal of each Purusha into himself, his turningaway from Nature and therefore from all contact with othersouls in the relations of existence; for each is self-sufficient andinfinite and complete in his own essence. But after all the finalexperience is that of a unity of all beings which is not merely acommunity of experience, a common subjection to one force ofNature, but a oneness in the spirit, a vast identity of consciousbeing beyond all this endless variety of determination, behind allthis apparent separativism of relative existence. The Gita takesits stand in that highest spiritual experience. It appears indeedto admit an eternal plurality of souls subject to and sustained bytheir eternal unity, for cosmos is for ever and manifestation goeson in unending cycles; nor does it affirm anywhere or use anyexpression that would indicate an absolute disappearance, laya,the annullation of the individual soul in the Infinite. But at thesame time it affirms with a strong insistence that the Akshara isthe one self of all these many souls, and it is therefore evident thatthese two spirits are a dual status of one eternal and universalexistence. That is a very ancient doctrine; it is the whole basis ofthe largest vision of the Upanishads, — as when the Isha tells usthat Brahman is both the mobile and the immobile, is the Oneand the Many, is the Self and all existences, atman, sarvabhutani,is the Knowledge and the Ignorance, is the eternal unborn statusand also the birth of existences, and that to dwell only on oneof these things to the rejection of its eternal counterpart is adarkness of exclusive knowledge or a darkness of ignorance. Ittoo insists like the Gita that man must know and must embraceboth and learn of the Supreme in his entirety — samagram mam,as the Gita puts it — in order to enjoy immortality and live in theEternal. The teaching of the Gita and this side of the teaching ofthe Upanishads are so far at one; for they look at and admit bothsides of the reality and still arrive at identity as the conclusionand the highest truth of existence.

But this greater knowledge and experience, however true


and however powerful in its appeal to our highest seeing, has stillto get rid of a very real and pressing difficulty, a practical as wellas a logical contradiction which seems at first sight to persist upto the highest heights of spiritual experience. The Eternal is otherthan this mobile subjective and objective experience, there is agreater consciousness, na idam yad upasate:2 and yet at the sametime all this is the Eternal, all this is the perennial self-seeing ofthe Self, sarvam khalu idam brahma,3 ayam atma brahma.4 TheEternal has become all existences, atma abhut sarvan. i bhutani;5

as the Swetaswatara puts it, “Thou art this boy and yondergirl and that old man walking supported on his staff,” — evenas in the Gita the Divine says that he is Krishna and Arjunaand Vyasa and Ushanas, and the lion and the aswattha tree, andconsciousness and intelligence and all qualities and the self of allcreatures. But how are these two the same, when they seem notonly so opposite in nature, but so difficult to unify in experience?For when we live in the mobility of the becoming, we may beaware of but hardly live in the immortality of timeless self-existence. And when we fix ourselves in timeless being, Timeand Space and circumstance fall away from us and begin toappear as a troubled dream in the Infinite. The most persuasiveconclusion would be, at first sight, that the mobility of the spiritin Nature is an illusion, a thing real only when we live in it, butnot real in essence, and that is why, when we go back into self,it falls away from our incorruptible essence. That is the familiarcutting of the knot of the riddle, brahma satyam jagan mithya.

The Gita does not take refuge in this explanation which hasenormous difficulties of its own, besides its failure to accountfor the illusion, — for it only says that it is all a mysterious andincomprehensible Maya, and then we might just as well say thatit is all a mysterious and incomprehensible double reality, spiritconcealing itself from spirit. The Gita speaks of Maya, but onlyas 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.


complete reality, lives in the phenomenon of mobile Nature andhas no sight of the Spirit of which she is the active Power, meprakr.tih. . When we transcend this Maya, the world does notdisappear, it only changes its whole heart of meaning. In thespiritual vision we find not that all this does not really exist, butrather that all is, but with a sense quite other than its presentmistaken significance: all is self and soul and nature of the God-head, all is Vasudeva. The world for the Gita is real, a creationof the Lord, a power of the Eternal, a manifestation from theParabrahman, and even this lower nature of the triple Mayais a derivation from the supreme divine Nature. Nor can wetake refuge altogether in this distinction that there is a double,an inferior active and temporal and a superior calm, still andeternal reality beyond action and that our liberation is to passfrom this partiality to that greatness, from the action to thesilence. For the Gita insists that we can and should, while welive, be conscious in the self and its silence and yet act withpower in the world of Nature. And it gives the example of theDivine himself who is not bound by necessity of birth, but free,superior to the cosmos, and yet abides eternally in action, vartaeva ca karman. i. Therefore it is by putting on a likeness of thedivine nature in its completeness that the unity of this doubleexperience becomes entirely possible. But what is the principleof 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 andthe highest experience, it is the knowledge of the whole-knowers,kr.tsnavidah. . The Akshara is para, supreme in relation to the ele-ments and action of cosmic Nature. It is the immutable Self of all,and the immutable Self of all is the Purushottama. The Aksharais he in the freedom of his self-existence unaffected by the actionof his own power in Nature, not impinged on by the urge ofhis own becoming, undisturbed by the play of his own qualities.But this is only one aspect though a great aspect of the integralknowledge. The Purushottama is at the same time greater thanthe Akshara, because he is more than this immutability and he isnot limited even by the highest eternal status of his being, param


dhama. Still, it is through whatever is immutable and eternal inus that we arrive at that highest status from which there is noreturning to birth, and that was the liberation which was soughtby the wise of old, the ancient sages. But when pursued throughthe Akshara alone, this attempt at liberation becomes the seek-ing of the Indefinable, a thing hard for our nature embodied aswe 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 highestunmanifest Akshara is still the Purushottama. Therefore, theGita has said, those also who follow after the Indefinable, cometo me, the eternal Godhead. But yet is he more even than ahighest unmanifest Akshara, more than any negative Absolute,neti neti, because he is to be known also as the supreme Purushawho extends this whole universe in his own existence. He isa supreme mysterious All, an ineffable positive Absolute of allthings here. He is the Lord in the Kshara, Purushottama not onlythere, but here in the heart of every creature, Ishwara. And theretoo even in his highest eternal status, paro avyaktah. , he is thesupreme Lord, Parameshwara, no aloof and unrelated Indefin-able, but the origin and father and mother and first foundationand eternal abode of self and cosmos and Master of all existencesand enjoyer of askesis and sacrifice. It is by knowing him atonce in the Akshara and the Kshara, it is by knowing him asthe Unborn who partially manifests himself in all birth and evenhimself descends as the constant Avatar, it is by knowing himin his entirety, samagram mam, that the soul is easily releasedfrom the appearances of the lower Nature and returns by avast sudden growth and broad immeasurable ascension into thedivine being and supreme Nature. For the truth of the Kshara toois a truth of the Purushottama. The Purushottama is in the heartof every creature and is manifested in his countless Vibhutis; thePurushottama is the cosmic spirit in Time and it is he that givesthe command to the divine action of the liberated human spirit.He is both Akshara and Kshara, and yet he is other becausehe is more and greater than either of these opposites. Uttamah.purus.as tvanyah. paramatmetyudahr.tah. , yo lokatrayam avisya


bibhartyavyaya ısvarah. , “But other than these two is that highestspirit called the supreme Self, who enters the three worlds andupbears them, the imperishable Lord.” This verse is the keywordof the Gita’s reconciliation of these two apparently oppositeaspects of our existence.

The idea of the Purushottama has been prepared, alludedto, adumbrated, assumed even from the beginning, but it is onlynow in the fifteenth chapter that it is expressly stated and thedistinction illuminated by a name. And it is instructive to seehow it is immediately approached and developed. To ascendinto the divine nature, we have been told, one must first fixoneself in a perfect spiritual equality and rise above the lowernature of the three gunas. Thus transcending the lower Prakritiwe fix ourselves in the impersonality, the imperturbable superi-ority to all action, the purity from all definition and limitationby quality which is one side of the manifested nature of thePurushottama, his manifestation as the eternity and unity of theself, the Akshara. But there is also an ineffable eternal multiplic-ity of the Purushottama, a highest truest truth behind the primalmystery of soul manifestation. The Infinite has an eternal power,an unbeginning and unending action of his divine Nature, andin that action the miracle of soul personality emerges from aplay of apparently impersonal forces, prakr.tir jıvabhuta. This ispossible because personality too is a character of the Divine andfinds in the Infinite its highest spiritual truth and meaning. Butthe Person in the Infinite is not the egoistic, separative, obliv-ious personality of the lower Prakriti; it is something exalted,universal and transcendent, immortal and divine. That mysteryof the supreme Person is the secret of love and devotion. Thespiritual person, purus.a, the eternal soul in us offers itself andall it has and is to the eternal Divine, the supreme Person andGodhead of whom it is a portion, amsa. The completeness ofknowledge finds itself in this self-offering, this uplifting of ourpersonal nature by love and adoration to the ineffable Masterof our personality and its acts; the sacrifice of works receivesby it its consummation and perfect sanction. It is then throughthese things that the soul of man fulfils itself most completely


in this other and dynamic secret, this other great and intimateaspect of the divine nature and possesses by that fulfilment thefoundation of immortality, the supreme felicity and the eternalDharma. And having so stated this double requisite, equality inthe one self, adoration of the one Lord, at first separately as ifthey were two different ways of arriving at the Brahmic status,brahmabhuyaya, — one taking the form of quietistic sannyasa,the other a form of divine love and divine action, — the Gitaproceeds now to unite the personal and the impersonal in thePurushottama and to define their relations. For the object of theGita is to get rid of exclusions and separative exaggerations andfuse these two sides of knowledge and spiritual experience intoa single and perfect way to the supreme perfection.

First there comes a description of cosmic existence in theVedantic image of the aswattha tree. This tree of cosmic exis-tence has no beginning and no end, nanto na cadih. , in space or intime; for it is eternal and imperishable, avyaya. The real form ofit cannot be perceived by us in this material world of man’s em-bodiment, nor has it any apparent lasting foundation here; it isan infinite movement and its foundation is above in the supremeof the Infinite. Its principle is the ancient sempiternal urge toaction, pravr.tti, which for ever proceeds without beginning orend from the original Soul of all existence, adyam purus.am yatah.pravr.ttih. prasr.ta puran. ı. Therefore its original source is above,beyond Time in the Eternal, but its branches stretch down belowand it extends and plunges its other roots, well-fixed and clingingroots of attachment and desire with their consequences of moreand more desire and an endlessly developing action, plungesthem downward here into the world of men. The hymns of theVeda are compared to its leaves and the man who knows thistree of the cosmos is the Veda-knower. And here we see thesense of that rather disparaging view of the Veda or at least ofthe Vedavada, which we had to notice at the beginning. For theknowledge the Veda gives us is a knowledge of the gods, of theprinciples and powers of the cosmos, and its fruits are the fruitsof a sacrifice which is offered with desire, fruits of enjoymentand lordship in the nature of the three worlds, in earth and


heaven and the world between earth and heaven. The branchesof this cosmic tree extend both below and above, below in thematerial, above in the supraphysical planes; they grow by thegunas of Nature, for the triple guna is all the subject of theVedas, traigun. ya-vis.aya vedah. . The Vedic rhythms, chandamsi,are the leaves and the sensible objects of desire supremely gainedby a right doing of sacrifice are the constant budding of thefoliage. Man, therefore, so long as he enjoys the play of thegunas and is attached to desire, is held in the coils of Pravritti,in the movement of birth and action, turns about constantlybetween the earth and the middle planes and the heavens andis unable to get back to his supreme spiritual infinitudes. Thiswas perceived by the sages. To achieve liberation they followedthe path of Nivritti or cessation from the original urge to action,and the consummation of this way is the cessation of birth itselfand a transcendent status in the highest supracosmic reach ofthe Eternal. But for this purpose it is necessary to cut these long-fixed roots of desire by the strong sword of detachment andthen to seek for that highest goal whence, once having reachedit, there is no compulsion of return to mortal life. To be free fromthe bewilderment of this lower Maya, without egoism, the greatfault of attachment conquered, all desires stilled, the duality ofjoy and grief cast away, always to be fixed in wide equality,always to be firm in a pure spiritual consciousness, these arethe steps of the way to that supreme Infinite. There we find thetimeless being which is not illumined by sun or moon or fire, butis itself the light of the presence of the eternal Purusha. I turnaway, says the Vedantic verse, to seek that original Soul aloneand to reach him in the great passage. That is the highest statusof the Purushottama, his supracosmic existence.

But it would seem that this can be attained very well, besteven, pre-eminently, directly, by the quiescence of Sannyasa. Itsappointed path would seem to be the way of the Akshara, acomplete renunciation of works and life, an ascetic seclusion,an ascetic inaction. Where is the room here, or at least whereis the call, the necessity, for the command to action, and whathas all this to do with the maintenance of the cosmic existence,


lokasangraha, the slaughter of Kurukshetra, the ways of theSpirit in Time, the vision of the million-bodied Lord and his high-voiced 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; itis he in his eternal multiplicity, that is the Gita’s answer. “Itis an eternal portion of me that becomes the Jiva in a worldof Jivas.” This is an epithet, a statement of immense bearingand consequence. For it means that each soul, each being inits spiritual reality is the very Divine, however partial its actualmanifestation of him in Nature. And it means too, if wordshave any sense, that each manifesting spirit, each of the many,is an eternal individual, an eternal unborn and undying powerof the one Existence. We call this manifesting spirit the Jiva,because it appears here as if a living creature in a world of livingcreatures, and we speak of this spirit in man as the human souland think of it in the terms of humanity only. But in truth it issomething greater than its present appearance and not boundto its humanity: it was a lesser manifestation than the humanin its past, it can become something much greater than mentalman in its future. And when this soul rises above all ignorantlimitation, then it puts on its divine nature of which its human-ity is only a temporary veil, a thing of partial and incompletesignificance. The individual spirit exists and ever existed beyondin the Eternal, for it is itself everlasting, sanatana. It is evidentlythis idea of the eternal individual which leads the Gita to avoidany expression at all suggestive of a complete dissolution, laya,and to speak rather of the highest state of the soul as a dwellingin the Purushottama, nivasis.yasi mayyeva. If when speaking ofthe one Self of all it seems to use the language of Adwaita,yet this enduring truth of the eternal individual, mamamsah.sanatanah. , adds something which brings in a qualification andappears almost to accept the seeing of the Visishtadwaita, —though we must not therefore leap at once to the conclusionthat that alone is the Gita’s philosophy or that its doctrine isidentical with the later doctrine of Ramanuja. Still this muchis clear that there is an eternal, a real and not only an illusive


principle of multiplicity in the spiritual being of the one divineExistence.

This eternal individual is not other than or in any way reallyseparate from the Divine Purusha. It is the Lord himself, theIshwara 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 upthis body and goes forth from the transient framework when itis cast away to disappear into the elements of Nature. He bringsin with him and cultivates for the enjoyment of the objects ofmind and sense the subjective powers of Prakriti, mind and thefive senses, and in his going forth too he goes taking them as thewind takes the perfumes from a vase. But the identity of the Lordand the soul in mutable Nature is hidden from us by outwardappearance and lost in the crowding mobile deceptions of thatNature. And those who allow themselves to be governed by thefigures of Nature, the figure of humanity or any other form,will never see it, but will ignore and despise the Divine lodgedin the human body. Their ignorance cannot perceive him in hiscoming in and his going forth or in his staying and enjoyingand assumption of quality, but sees only what is there visible tothe mind and senses, not the greater truth which can only beglimpsed by the eye of knowledge. Never can they have sightof him, even if they strive to do so, until they learn to putaway the limitations of the outward consciousness and buildin themselves their spiritual being, create for it, as it were, aform in their nature. Man, to know himself, must be kr.tatma,formed and complete in the spiritual mould, enlightened in thespiritual vision. The Yogins who have this eye of knowledge, seethe Divine Being we are in their own endless reality, their owneternity of spirit. Illumined, they see the Lord in themselves andare delivered from the crude material limitation, from the formof mental personality, from the transient life formulation: theydwell immortal in the truth of the self and spirit. But they seehim too not only in themselves, but in all the cosmos. In the lightof the sun that illumines all this world they witness the light ofthe Godhead which is in us; the light in the moon and in fire is


the light of the Divine. It is the Divine who has entered into thisform of earth and is the spirit of its material force and sustainsby his might these multitudes. The Divine is the godhead ofSoma who by the rasa, the sap in the Earth-mother, nourishesthe plants and trees that clothe her surface. The Divine and noother is the flame of life that sustains the physical body of livingcreatures and turns its food into sustenance of their vital force.He is lodged in the heart of every breathing thing; from himare memory and knowledge and the debates of the reason. Heis that which is known by all the Vedas and by all forms ofknowing; he is the knower of Veda and the maker of Vedanta.In other words, the Divine is at once the Soul of matter andthe Soul of life and the Soul of mind as well as the Soul of thesupramental light that is beyond mind and its limited reasoningintelligence.

Thus the Divine is manifest in a double soul of his mys-tery, a twofold power, dvav imau purus.au; he supports at oncethe spirit of mutable things that is all these existences, ks.arah.sarvan. i bhutani, and the immutable spirit that stands abovethem in his imperturbable immobility of eternal silence andcalm. And it is by the force of the Divine in them that themind and heart and will of man are so powerfully drawn indifferent directions by these two spirits as if by opposing andincompatible attractions one insistent to annul the other. But theDivine is neither wholly the Kshara, nor wholly the Akshara. Heis greater than the immutable Self and he is much greater than theSoul of mutable things. If he is capable of being both at once,it is because he is other than they, anyah. , the Purushottamaabove all cosmos and yet extended in the world and extendedin the Veda, in self-knowledge and in cosmic experience. Andwhoever thus knows and sees him as the Purushottama, is nolonger bewildered whether by the world-appearance or by theseparate attraction of these two apparent contraries. These atfirst confront each other here in him as a positive of the cosmicaction and as its negative in the Self who has no part in anaction that belongs or seems to belong entirely to the igno-rance of Nature. Or again they challenge his consciousness as


a positive of pure, indeterminable, stable, eternal self-existenceand as its negative of a world of elusive determinations andrelations, ideas and forms, perpetual unstable becoming andthe creating and uncreating tangle of action and evolution,birth and death, appearance and disappearance. He embracesand escapes them, overcomes their opposition and becomes all-knowing, sarvavid, a whole-knower. He sees the entire senseboth of the self and of things; he restores the integral realityof the Divine;6 he unites the Kshara and the Akshara in thePurushottama. He loves, worships, cleaves to and adores thesupreme Self of his and all existence, the one Lord of his andall energies, the close and far-off Eternal in and beyond theworld. And he does this too with no single side or portion ofhimself, exclusive spiritualised mind, blinding light of the heartintense but divorced from largeness, or sole aspiration of thewill in works, but in all the perfectly illumined ways of hisbeing and his becoming, his soul and his nature. Divine in theequality of his imperturbable self-existence, one in it with allobjects and creatures, he brings that boundless equality, thatdeep oneness down into his mind and heart and life and bodyand founds on it in an indivisible integrality the trinity of divinelove, divine works and divine knowledge. This is the Gita’s wayof salvation.

And is that not too after all the real Adwaita which makesno least scission in the one eternal Existence? This utmost undi-viding Monism sees the one as the one even in the multiplicitiesof Nature, in all aspects, as much in the reality of self and ofcosmos as in that greatest reality of the supracosmic which is thesource of self and the truth of the cosmos and is not bound eitherby any affirmation of universal becoming or by any universal orabsolute negation. That at least is the Adwaita of the Gita. Thisis the most secret Shastra, says the Teacher to Arjuna; this isthe supreme teaching and science which leads us into the heartof the highest mystery of existence. Absolutely to know it, toseize it in knowledge and feeling and force and experience is to

6 samagram mam.


be perfected in the transformed understanding, divinely satisfiedin heart and successful in the supreme sense and objective ofall will and action and works. It is the way to be immortal, torise towards the highest divine nature and to assume the eternalDharma.

XVI

The Fullness of Spiritual Action

THE DEVELOPMENT of the idea of the Gita has reacheda 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 thelaw of its present action to the immortal Dharma. The difficultyis one which is implied in certain of the positions laid downin the Gita, but has to be brought out into greater prominencethan it gets there and to be put into a clearer shape before ourintelligence. The Gita proceeded on a psychological knowledgewhich was familiar to the mind of the time, and in the steps ofits thought it was well able to abridge its transitions, to takemuch for granted and to leave many things unexpressed whichwe need to have put strongly into light and made precise to us.Its teaching sets out at the beginning to propose a new sourceand level for our action in the world; that was the starting-point and that motives also the conclusion. Its initial objectwas not precisely to propose a way of liberation, moks.a, butrather to show the compatibility of works with the soul’s efforttowards liberation and of spiritual freedom itself when onceattained with continued action in the world, muktasya karma.Incidentally, a synthetic Yoga or psychological method of ar-riving at spiritual liberation and perfection has been developedand certain metaphysical affirmations have been put forward,certain truths of our being and nature on which the validityof this Yoga reposes. But the original preoccupation remainsthroughout, the original difficulty and problem, how Arjuna,dislodged by a strong revulsion of thought and feeling from theestablished natural and rational foundations and standards ofaction, 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

The Fullness of Spiritual Action 451

no longer act according to the partial truths of the customaryreason and nature of man — and yet to do his appointed work onthe battle-field of Kurukshetra. To live inwardly calm, detached,silent in the silence of the impersonal and universal Self andyet do dynamically the works of dynamic Nature, and morelargely, to be one with the Eternal within us and to do all thewill of the Eternal in the world expressed through a sublimatedforce, a divine height of the personal nature uplifted, liberated,universalised, made one with God-nature, — this is the Gita’ssolution.

Let us see what this comes to in the most plain and positiveterms and from the standpoint of the problem which is at theroot of Arjuna’s difficulty and refusal. His duty as a humanbeing and a social being is the discharge of the high functionof the Kshatriya without which the frame of society cannot bemaintained, the ideals of the race cannot be vindicated, the har-monious order of right and justice cannot be upheld against theanarchic violence of oppression, wrong and injustice. And yetthe appeal to duty by itself can no longer satisfy the protagonistof the struggle because in the terrible actuality of Kurukshetrait presents itself in harsh, perplexed and ambiguous terms. Thedischarge of his social duty has suddenly come to signify assentto an enormous result of sin and sorrow and suffering; the cus-tomary means of maintaining social order and justice is foundto lead instead to a great disorder and chaos. The rule of justclaim and interest, that which we call rights, will not serve himhere; for the kingdom he has to win for himself and his brothersand his side in the war is indeed rightly theirs and its assertionan overthrow of Asuric tyranny and a vindication of justice, buta blood-bespattered justice and a kingdom possessed in sorrowand with the stain on it of a great sin, a monstrous harm doneto society, a veritable crime against the race. Nor will the ruleof Dharma, of ethical right, serve any better; for there is herea conflict of dharmas. A new and greater yet unguessed rule isneeded to solve the problem, but what is that rule?

For to withdraw from his work, to take refuge in a saintlyinactivity and leave the imperfect world with its unsatisfying


methods and motives to take care of itself is one possible solutioneasy to envisage, easy to execute, but this is the very cutting of theknot that has been insistently forbidden by the Teacher. Action isdemanded of man by the Master of the world who is the masterof all his works and whose world is a field of action, whetherdone through the ego and in the ignorance or partial light ofthe limited human reason or initiated from a higher and morelargely seeing plane of vision and motive. Again, to abandonthis particular action as evil would be another kind of solution,the ready resort of the shortsighted moralising mind, but to thisevasion too the Teacher refuses his assent. Arjuna’s abstentionwould work a much greater sin and evil: it would mean, if ithad any effect at all, the triumph of wrong and injustice andthe rejection of his own mission as an instrument of the divineworkings. A violent crisis in the destinies of the race has beenbrought about not by any blind motion of forces or solely by theconfused clash of human ideas, interests, passions, egoisms, butby a Will which is behind these outward appearances. This truthArjuna must be brought to see; he must learn to act impersonally,imperturbably as the instrument not of his little personal desiresand weak human shrinkings, but of a vaster and more luminousPower, a greater all-wise divine and universal Will. He must actimpersonally and universally in a high union of his soul with theinner and outer Godhead, yukta, in a calm Yoga with his ownsupreme Self and the informing Self of the universe.

But this truth cannot be rightly seen and this kind of actioncannot be rightly undertaken, cannot become real as long as manis governed by the ego, even by the half-enlightened unilluminedsattwic ego of the reason and the mental intelligence. For thisis a truth of the spirit, this is an action from a spiritual basis.A spiritual, not an intellectual knowledge is the indispensablerequisite for this way of works, its sole possible light, medium,incentive. First, therefore, the Teacher points out that all theseideas and feelings which trouble, perplex and baffle Arjuna, joyand sorrow, desire and sin, the mind’s turn towards governingaction by the outward results of action, the human shrinkingfrom what seems terrible and formidable in the dealings of the


universal Spirit with the world, are things born of the subjectionof our consciousness to a natural ignorance, the way of workingof a lower nature in which the soul is involved and sees itself as aseparate ego returning to the action of things upon it dual reac-tions of pain and pleasure, virtue and vice, right and wrong, goodhappening and evil fortune. These reactions create a tangled webof perplexity in which the soul is lost and bewildered by its ownignorance; it has to guide itself by partial and imperfect solutionsthat serve ordinarily with a stumbling sufficiency in the normallife, but fail when brought to the test of a wider seeing and aprofounder experience. To understand the real sense of actionand existence one must retreat behind all these appearances intothe truth of the spirit; one must found self-knowledge beforeone can have the basis of a right world-knowledge.

The first requisite is to shake the wings of the soul free fromdesire and passion and troubling emotion and all this perturbedand distorting atmosphere of human mind and arrive into anether of dispassionate equality, a heaven of impersonal calm, anegoless feeling and vision of things. For only in that lucid upperair, reaches free from all storm and cloud, can self-knowledgecome and the law of the world and the truth of Nature be seensteadily and with an embracing eye and in an undisturbed andall-comprehending and all-penetrating light. Behind this littlepersonality which is a helpless instrument, a passive or vainlyresistant puppet of Nature and a form figured in her creations,there is an impersonal self one in all which sees and knows allthings; there is an equal, impartial, universal presence and sup-port of creation, a witnessing consciousness that suffers Natureto work out the becoming of things in their own type, svabhava,but does not involve and lose itself in the action she initiates. Todraw back from the ego and the troubled personality into thiscalm, equal, eternal, universal, impersonal Self is the first steptowards a seeing action in Yoga done in conscious union withthe divine Being and the infallible Will that, however obscurenow to us, manifests itself in the universe.

When we live tranquilly poised in this self of impersonalwideness, then because that is vast, calm, quiescent, impersonal,


our other little false self, our ego of action disappears into itslargeness 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 Powerof eternal being in motion which takes different shapes andforms in this or that class of its creatures and in each individualof the species according to its type of natural existence andthe resultant function and law of its works. According to itsnature each creature must act and it cannot act by anything else.Ego and personal will and desire are nothing more than vividlyconscious forms and limited natural workings of a universalForce 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 instrumentsand creations. But the impersonal Self does not act and is notpart of Nature: it observes the action from behind and aboveand remains lord of itself and a free and impassive knower andwitness. The soul that lives in this impersonality is not affectedby the actions of which our nature is an instrument; it does notreply to them or their effects by grief and joy, desire and shrink-ing, attraction and repulsion or any of the hundred dualitiesthat draw and shake and afflict us. It regards all men and allthings and all happenings with equal eyes, watches the modesor qualities of Nature acting on the modes or qualities, sees thewhole secret of the mechanism, but is itself beyond these modesand qualities, a pure absolute essential being, impassive, free,at peace. Nature works out her action and the soul impersonaland universal supports her but is not involved, is not attached,is not entangled, is not troubled, is not bewildered. If we canlive in this equal self, we too are at peace; our works continueso 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, activePrakriti, is not, however, the whole of our being; these are not re-ally the two last words in the matter. If it were so, either all workswould be quite indifferent to the soul and this or that action orrefraining from action would take place by some ungoverned


turn of the mobile variations of the gunas, — Arjuna would bemoved to battle by rajasic impulse in the instruments or withheldfrom it by tamasic inertia or sattwic indifference, — or else, ifit so is that he must act and act only in this way, it would beby some mechanical determinism of Nature. Moreover, since thesoul in its retreat would come to live in the impersonal quiescentSelf and cease to live at all in active Nature, the final result wouldbe quiescence, cessation, inertia, not the action imposed by theGita. And, finally, this duality gives no real explanation whythe soul is at all called to involve itself in Nature and her works;for it cannot be that the one ever uninvolved self-conscient spiritgets itself involved and loses its self-knowledge and has to returnto that knowledge. This pure Self, this Atman is on the contraryalways there, always the same, always the one self-conscient im-personal aloof Witness or impartial supporter of the action. It isthis lacuna, this impossible vacuum that compels us to supposetwo Purushas or two poses of the one Purusha, one secret inthe Self that observes all from its self-existence — or perhapsobserves nothing, another self-projected into Nature that lendsitself to her action and identifies itself with her creations. Buteven this dualism of Self and Prakriti or Maya corrected by thedualism of the two Purushas is not the whole philosophic creedof the Gita. It goes beyond them to the supreme all-embracingoneness of a highest Purusha, Purushottama.

The Gita affirms that there is a supreme Mystery, a high-est Reality that upholds and reconciles the truth of these twodifferent manifestations. There is an utmost supreme Self, Lordand Brahman, one who is both the impersonal and the personal,but other and greater than either of them and other and greaterthan both of them together. He is Purusha, Self and soul of ourbeing, but he is also Prakriti; for Prakriti is the power of the All-Soul, the power of the Eternal and Infinite self-moved to actionand creation. The supreme Ineffable, the universal Person, hebecomes by his Prakriti all these creatures. The supreme Atmanand Brahman, he manifests by his Maya of self-knowledge andhis Maya of ignorance the double truth of the cosmic riddle. Thesupreme Lord, master of his Force, his Shakti, he creates, impels


and governs all this Nature and all the personality, power andworks of these innumerable existences. Each soul is a partialbeing of this self-existent One, an eternal soul of this All-Soul,a partial manifestation of this supreme Lord and his universalNature. All here is this Divine, this Godhead, Vasudeva; forby Nature and the soul in Nature he becomes all that is andeverything proceeds from him and lives in or by him, thoughhe himself is greater than any widest manifestation, any deepestspirit, any cosmic figure. This is the complete truth of existenceand this all the secret of the universal action that we have seendisengaging itself from the later chapters of the Gita.

But how does this greater truth modify or how affect theprinciple of spiritual action? It modifies it to begin with in thisfundamental matter that the whole meaning of the relation ofSelf and soul and Nature gets changed, opens out to a newvision, fills in the blanks that were left, acquires a greater ampli-tude, assumes a true and spiritually positive, a flawlessly integralsignificance. The world is no longer a purely mechanical qual-itative action and determination of Nature set over against thequiescence of an impersonal self-existence which has no qualityor power of self-determination, no ability or impulse to create.The chasm left by this unsatisfactory dualism is bridged andan uplifting unity revealed between knowledge and works, thesoul and Nature. The quiescent impersonal Self is a truth, —it is the truth of the calm of the Godhead, the silence of theEternal, the freedom of the Lord of all birth and becoming andaction and creation, his calm infinite freedom of self-existencenot bound, troubled or affected by his creation, not touched bythe action and reaction of his Nature. Nature itself is now noinexplicable illusion, no separated and opposite phenomenon,but a movement of the Eternal, all her stir and activity and mul-tiplicity founded and supported on the detached and observingtranquillity of an immutable self and spirit. The Lord of Natureremains that immutable self even while he is at the same timethe one and multiple soul of the universe and becomes in apartial manifestation all these forces, powers, consciousnesses,gods, animals, things, men. Nature of the gunas is a lower self-


limited action of his power; it is nature of imperfectly consciousmanifestation and therefore of a certain ignorance. The truth ofthe self, even as the truth of the Divine, is held back from hersurface force absorbed here in its outer action — much as man’sdeeper being is held back from the knowledge of his surfaceconsciousness — until the soul in her turns to find out this hid-den thing, gets inside itself and discovers its own real verities,its heights and its depths. That is why it has to draw backfrom its little personal and egoistic to its large and impersonal,immutable and universal Self in order to become capable ofself-knowledge. But the Lord is there, not only in that self, butin Nature. He is in the heart of every creature and guides byhis presence the turnings of this great natural mechanism. Heis present in all, all lives in him, all is himself because all is abecoming of his being, a portion or a figure of his existence.But all proceeds here in a lower partial working that has comeout of a secret, a higher and greater and completer nature ofDivinity, the eternal infinite nature or absolute self-power of theGodhead, devatmasakti. The perfect, integrally conscious soulhidden in man, an eternal portion of Deity, a spiritual beingof the eternal Divine Being, can open in us and can too openus to him if we live constantly in this true truth of his actionand our existence. The seeker of Godhead has to get back tothe reality of his immutable and eternal impersonal self and atthe same time he has to see everywhere the Divine from whomhe proceeds, to see him as all, to see him in the whole of thismutable Nature and in every part and result of her and in all herworkings, and there too to make himself one with God, theretoo to live in him, to enter there too into the divine oneness. Heunites in that integrality the divine calm and freedom of his deepessential existence with a supreme power of instrumental actionin his divinised self of Nature.

But how is this to be done? It can be done first by a rightspirit in our will of works. The seeker has to regard all hisaction as a sacrifice to the Lord of works who is the eternal anduniversal Being and his own highest Self and the Self of all oth-ers and the supreme all-inhabiting, all-containing, all-governing


Godhead in the universe. The whole action of Nature is sucha sacrifice, — offered at first indeed to the divine Powers thatmove her and move in her, but these powers are only limitedforms and names of the One and Illimitable. Man ordinarilyoffers his sacrifice openly or under a disguise to his own ego; hisoblation is the false action of his own self-will and ignorance. Orhe offers his knowledge, action, aspiration, works of energy andeffort to the gods for partial, temporal and personal aims. Theman of knowledge, the liberated soul offers on the contrary allhis activities to the one eternal Godhead without any attachmentto 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 objectwhich is of his own personal creation or for any constructionof his mental will or object of his vital longings, as a divineagent, not as a principal and separate profiteer in the world-commerce. And this, it must be noted, is a thing that cannot bereally done except in proportion as the mind arrives at equality,universality, wide impersonality, and a clear freedom from everydisguise of the insistent ego: for without these things the claimto be thus acting is a pretension or an illusion. The whole actionof the world is the business of the Lord of the universe, theconcern of the self-existent Spirit of whom it is the unceasingcreation, the progressive becoming, the significant manifestationand living symbol in Nature. The fruits are his, the results arethose determined by him and our personal action is only a minorcontribution ruled or overruled, so far as its motive is an egoisticclaim, by this Self and Spirit in us who is the Self and Spirit inall and governs things for the universal end and good and notfor the sake of our ego. To work impersonally, desirelessly andwithout attachment to the fruits of our work, for the sake ofGod and the world and the greater Self and the fulfilment ofthe universal will, — this is the first step towards liberation andperfection.

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


Will in and above her that demands action of us; the choiceand turn our ego gives to it is a contribution of our tamasic,rajasic, sattwic quality, a deformation in the lower Nature. Thedeformation comes by the ego thinking of itself as the doer; thecharacter of the act takes the form of the limited personal natureand the soul is bound up with that and its narrow figures anddoes not allow the act to proceed freely and purely from theinfinite power within it. And the ego is chained to the act and itsoutcome; it must suffer the personal consequence and reactioneven as it claims the responsible origination and personal will ofthe doing. The free perfect working comes first by referring andfinally by surrendering altogether the action and its originationto the divine Master of our existence; for we feel it progressivelytaken up by a supreme Presence within us, the soul drawn intodeep intimacy and close unity with an inner Power and Godheadand the work originated directly from the greater Self, from theall-wise, infinite, universal force of an eternal being and not fromthe ignorance of the little personal ego. The action is chosen andshaped according to the nature, but entirely by the divine Will inthe nature, and it is therefore free and perfect within, whateverits outward appearance; it comes stamped with the inward spiri-tual seal of the Infinite as the thing to be done, the movement andthe step of the movement decreed in the ways of the omniscientMaster of action, kartavyam karma. The soul of the liberatedman is free in its impersonality, even while he contributes to theaction as its means and its occasion his instrumental personalself-creation and the special will and power in his nature. Thatwill and power is now not separately, egoistically his own, buta force of the suprapersonal Divine who acts in this becomingof his own self, this one of his myriad personalities by means ofthe characteristic form of the natural being, the swabhava. Thisis the high secret and mystery, uttamam rahasyam, of the actionof the liberated man. It is the result of a growing of the humansoul into a divine Light and of the union of its nature with ahighest universal nature.

This change cannot come about except by knowledge. Thereis necessary a right knowledge of self and God and world and a


living and growing into the greater consciousness to which thatknowledge admits us. We know now what the knowledge is. Itis sufficient to remember that it reposes on another and widervision than the human mental, a changed vision and experienceby which one is first of all liberated from the limitations of theego 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 Godheadand one’s self too as a significant being and soul-power of thatone Godhead; it treats in a spiritual uniting consciousness allthe happenings of the lives of others as if they were happeningsof one’s own life; it allows no wall of separation and lives in auniversal sympathy with all existences, while amidst the world-movement one still does the work that has to be done for thegood of all, sarva-bhuta-hite, according to the way appointedby the Divine and in the measures imposed by the commandof the Spirit who is Master of Time. Thus living and acting inthis knowledge the soul of man becomes united with the Eternalin personality and in impersonality, lives in the Eternal thoughacting in Time, even as the Eternal acts, and is free, perfect andblissful whatever may be the form and determination of thework done in Nature.

The liberated man has the complete and total knowledge,kr.tsnavid, and does all works without any of the restrictionsmade by the mind, kr.tsna-karma-kr.t, according to the force andfreedom and infinite power of the divine will within him. Andsince he is united with the Eternal, he has too the pure spiritualand illimitable joy of his eternal existence. He turns with adora-tion to the Self of whom he is a portion, the Master of his worksand divine Lover of his soul and nature. He is not an impassivecalm spectator only; he lifts not only his knowledge and will tothe Eternal, but his heart also of love and adoration and passion.For without that uplifting of the heart his whole nature is notfulfilled and united with God; the ecstasy of the spirit’s calmneeds to be transformed by the ecstasy of the soul’s Ananda.Beyond the personal Jiva and the impersonal Brahman or Atmanhe reaches the supracosmic Purushottama who is immutable inimpersonality and fulfils himself in personality and draws us to


him through these two different attractions. The liberated seekerrises personally to that highest Numen by his soul’s love and joyin God and the adoration of the will in him for the Master ofits works; the peace and largeness of his impersonal universalknowledge is perfected by delight in the self-existent integralclose and intimate reality of this surpassing and universal God-head. This delight glorifies his knowledge and unites it withthe eternal delight of the Spirit in its self and its manifestation;this perfects too his personality in the superperson of the divinePurusha and makes his natural being and action one with eternalbeauty, eternal harmony, eternal love and Ananda.

But all this change means a total passing from the lower hu-man to the higher divine nature. It is a lifting of our whole beingor at least of the whole mental being that wills, knows and feelsbeyond what we are into some highest spiritual consciousness,some satisfying fullest power of existence, some deepest widestdelight of the spirit. And this may well be possible by a tran-scendence of our present natural life, it may well be possible insome celestial state beyond the earthly existence or still beyondin a supracosmic superconscience; it may happen by transitionto an absolute and infinite power and status of the Spirit. Butwhile we are here in the body, here in life, here in action, what inthis change becomes of the lower nature? For at present all ouractivities are determined in their trend and shape by the nature,and this Nature here is the nature of the three gunas, and in allnatural being and in all natural activities there is the triple guna,tamas with its ignorance and inertia, rajas with its kinesis andaction, its passion and grief and perversion, sattwa with its lightand happiness, and the bondage of these things. And grantedthat the soul becomes superior in the self to the three gunas,how does it escape in its instrumental nature from their workingand result and bondage? For even the man of knowledge, saysthe Gita, must act according to his nature. To feel and bearthe reactions of the gunas in the outer manifestation, but tobe free from them and superior in the observing conscious selfbehind is not sufficient; for it leaves still a dualism of freedomand subjection, a contradiction between what we are within and


what we are without, between our self and our power, what weknow ourselves to be and what we will and do. Where is therelease here, where the full elevation and transformation to thehigher spiritual nature, the immortal Dharma, the law properto the infinite purity and power of a divine being? If this changecannot be effected while in the body, then so it must be said, thatthe whole nature cannot be transformed and there must remainan unreconciled duality until the mortal type of existence dropsoff like a discarded shell from the spirit. But in that case thegospel of works cannot well be the right or at least cannot bethe ultimate gospel: a perfect quiescence or at least as perfect aquiescence as possible, a progressive Sannyasa and renunciationof works would seem still to be the true counsel of perfection,— as indeed the Mayavadin contends, who says that the Gita’sway is no doubt the right way so long as we remain in action, butstill all works are an illusion and quiescence the highest path. Toact in this spirit is well, but only as a transition to a renunciationof all works, to cessation, to an absolute quiescence.

This is the difficulty which the Gita has still to meet inorder to justify works to the seeker after the Spirit. Otherwiseit must say to Arjuna, “Act temporarily in this fashion, butafterwards seek the higher way of renunciation of works.” Buton the contrary it has said that not the cessation of works,but renunciation of desire is the better way; it has spoken ofthe action of the liberated man, muktasya karma. It has eveninsisted on doing all actions, sarvan. i karman. i, kr.tsna-karma-kr.t; it has said that in whatever way the perfected Yogin livesand acts, he lives and acts in God. This can only be, if the naturealso in its dynamics and workings becomes divine, a powerimperturbable, intangible, inviolate, pure and untroubled by thereactions of the inferior Prakriti. How and by what steps is thismost difficult transformation to be effected? What is this lastsecret of the soul’s perfection? what the principle or the processof this transmutation of our human and earthly nature?

XVII

Deva and Asura1

THE PRACTICAL difficulty of the change from the igno-rant and shackled normal nature of man to the dynamicfreedom of a divine and spiritual being will be apparent

if we ask ourselves, more narrowly, how the transition can beeffected from the fettered embarrassed functioning of the threequalities to the infinite action of the liberated man who is nolonger subject to the gunas. The transition is indispensable; forit is clearly laid down that he must be above or else withoutthe three gunas, trigun. atıta, nistraigun. ya. On the other hand itis no less clearly, no less emphatically laid down that in everynatural existence here on earth the three gunas are there in theirinextricable working and it is even said that all action of manor creature or force is merely the action of these three modesupon each other, a functioning in which one or other predomi-nates and the rest modify its operation and results, gun. a gun. es.uvartante. How then can there be another dynamic and kineticnature or any other kind of works? To act is to be subject to thethree qualities of Nature; to be beyond these conditions of herworking is to be silent in the Spirit. The Ishwara, the Supremewho is master of all her works and functions and guides anddetermines them by his divine will, is indeed above this mech-anism of quality, not touched or limited by her modes, but stillit would seem that he acts always through them, always shapesby the power of the swabhava and through the psychologicalmachinery of the gunas. These three are fundamental propertiesof Prakriti, necessary operations of the executive Nature-forcewhich takes shape here in us, and the Jiva himself is only aportion of the Divine in this Prakriti. If then the liberated manstill does works, still moves in the kinetic movement, it must be

1 Gita, XVI.


so that he moves and acts, in Nature and by the limitation of herqualities, subject to their reactions, not, in so far as the naturalpart of him persists, in the freedom of the Divine. But the Gitahas said exactly the opposite, that the liberated Yogin is deliv-ered from the guna reactions and whatever he does, however helives, moves and acts in God, in the power of his freedom andimmortality, in the law of the supreme eternal Infinite, sarvathavartamano’pi sa yogı mayi vartate. There seems here to be acontradiction, an impasse.

But this is only when we knot ourselves up in the rigid logicaloppositions of the analytic mind, not when we look freely andsubtly at the nature of spirit and at the spirit in Nature. Whatmoves the world is not really the modes of Prakriti, — these areonly the lower aspect, the mechanism of our normal nature. Thereal motive power is a divine spiritual Will which uses at presentthese 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 mustproceed from something inherent in the power of the Spirit;there must be powers in the divine Will-force from which theseaspects of Prakriti have their origin. For everything in the lowernormal nature is derived from the higher spiritual power of beingof the Purushottama, mattah. pravartate; it does not come intobeing de novo and without a spiritual cause. Something in theessential power of the spirit there must be from which the sattwiclight and satisfaction, the rajasic kinesis, the tamasic inertia ofour nature are derivations and of which they are the imperfector degraded forms. But once we get back to these sources intheir purity above this imperfection and degradation of them inwhich we live, we shall find that these motions put on a quitedifferent aspect as soon as we begin to live in the spirit. Beingand action and the modes of being and action become altogetherdifferent things, far above their present limited appearance.

For what is behind this troubled kinesis of the cosmos withall its clash and struggle? What is it that when it touches themind, when it puts on mental values, creates the reactions ofdesire, striving, straining, error of will, sorrow, sin, pain? It is a

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will of the spirit in movement, it is a large divine will in actionwhich is not touched by these things; it is a power2 of the freeand infinite conscious Godhead which has no desire because itexercises a universal possession and a spontaneous Ananda ofits movements. Wearied by no striving and straining, it enjoysa free mastery of its means and its objects; misled by no errorof the will, it holds a knowledge of self and things which is thesource of its mastery and its Ananda; overcome by no sorrow,sin or pain, it has the joy and purity of its being and the joyand purity of its power. The soul that lives in God acts by thisspiritual will and not by the normal will of the unliberated mind:its kinesis takes place by this spiritual force and not by the rajasicmode of Nature, precisely because it no longer lives in the lowermovement to which that deformation belongs, but has got backin the divine nature to the pure and perfect sense of the kinesis.

And again what is behind the inertia of Nature, behindthis Tamas which, when complete, makes her action like theblind driving of a machine, a mechanical impetus unobservantof anything except the groove in which it is set to spin andnot conscious even of the law of that motion, — this Tamasthat turns cessation of the accustomed action into death anddisintegration and becomes in the mind a power for inactionand ignorance? This tamas is an obscurity which mistranslates,we may say, into inaction of power and inaction of knowledgethe Spirit’s eternal principle of calm and repose — the reposewhich the Divine never loses even while he acts, the eternalrepose which supports his integral action of knowledge andthe force of his creative will both there in its own infinitiesand here in an apparent limitation of its working and self-awareness. The peace of the Godhead is not a disintegrationof energy or a vacant inertia; it would keep all that Infinity hasknown and done gathered up and concentratedly conscious inan omnipotent silence even if the Power everywhere ceased fora time actively to know and create. The Eternal does not needto sleep or rest; he does not get tired and flag; he has no need

2 tapas, cit-sakti.


of a pause to refresh and recreate his exhausted energies; for hisenergy is inexhaustibly the same, indefatigable and infinite. TheGodhead is calm and at rest in the midst of his action; and onthe other hand his very cessation of action would retain in it thefull power and all the potentialities of his kinesis. The liberatedsoul enters into this calm and participates in the eternal reposeof the spirit. This is known to everyone who has had any tasteat all of the joy of liberation, that it contains an eternal powerof calm. And that profound tranquillity can remain in the veryheart of action, can persevere in the most violent motion offorces. There may be an impetuous flood of thought, doing,will, movement, an overflowing rush of love, the emotion of theself-existent spiritual ecstasy at its strongest intensity, and thatmay extend itself to a fiery and forceful spiritual enjoyment ofthings and beings in the world and in the ways of Nature, andyet this tranquillity and repose would be behind the surge and init, always conscious of its depths, always the same. The calm ofthe liberated man is not an indolence, incapacity, insensibility,inertia; it is full of immortal power, capable of all action, attunedto deepest delight, open to profoundest love and compassion andto every manner of intensest Ananda.

And so too beyond the inferior light and happiness of thatpurest quality of Nature, Sattwa, the power that makes for as-similation and equivalence, right knowledge and right dealing,fine harmony, firm balance, right law of action, right posses-sion and brings so full a satisfaction to the mind, beyond thishighest thing in the normal nature, admirable in itself so far asit goes and while it can be maintained, but precarious, securedby limitation, dependent on rule and condition, there is at itshigh and distant source a greater light and bliss free in the freespirit. That is not limited nor dependent on limitation or ruleor condition but self-existent and unalterable, not the resultof this or that harmony amid the discords of our nature butthe fount of harmony and able to create whatever harmonyit will. That is a luminous spiritual and in its native action adirect supramental force of knowledge, jyotih. , not our modifiedand derivative mental light, prakasa. That is the light and bliss

Deva and Asura 467

of widest self-existence, spontaneous self-knowledge, intimateuniversal identity, deepest self-interchange, not of acquisition,assimilation, adjustment and laboured equivalence. That light isfull of a luminous spiritual will and there is no gulf or disparate-ness between its knowledge and its action. That delight is notour paler mental happiness, sukham, but a profound concen-trated intense self-existent bliss extended to all that our beingdoes, envisages, creates, a fixed divine rapture, Ananda. Theliberated soul participates more and more profoundly in thislight and bliss and grows the more perfectly into it, the moreintegrally it unites itself with the Divine. And while among thegunas of the lower Nature there is a necessary disequilibrium,a shifting inconstancy of measures and a perpetual struggle fordomination, the greater light and bliss, calm, will of kinesis ofthe Spirit do not exclude each other, are not at war, are not evenmerely in equilibrium, but each an aspect of the two others andin their fullness all are inseparable and one. Our mind when itapproaches the Divine may seem to enter into one to the exclu-sion of another, may appear for instance to achieve calm to theexclusion of kinesis of action, but that is because we approachhim first through the selecting spirit in the mind. Afterwardswhen we are able to rise above even the spiritual mind, we cansee that each divine power contains all the rest and can get ridof this initial error.3

We see then that action is possible without the subjectionof the soul to the normal degraded functioning of the modesof Nature. That functioning depends on the mental, vital andphysical limitation into which we are cast; it is a deformation,an incapacity, a wrong or depressed value imposed on us bythe 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 highestNature action corresponding to the gunas is not derived from the Gita, but introducedfrom spiritual experience. The Gita does not describe in any detail the action of thehighest Nature, rahasyam uttamam; it leaves that for the seeker to discover by his ownspiritual experience. It only points out the nature of the high sattwic temperament andaction through which this supreme mystery has to be reached and insists at the sametime on the overpassing of Sattwa and transcendence of the three gunas.


dharma or inferior law of Nature is replaced by the immortaldharma of the spirit; there is the experience of a free immortalaction, a divine illimitable knowledge, a transcendent power, anunfathomable repose. But still there remains the question of thetransition; for there must be a transition, a proceeding by steps,since nothing in God’s workings in this world is done by anabrupt action without procedure or basis. We have the thing weseek in us, but we have in practice to evolve it out of the inferiorforms of our nature.4 Therefore in the action of the modes itselfthere must be some means, some leverage, some point d’appui,by which we can effect this transformation. The Gita finds it inthe full development of the sattwic guna till that in its potentexpansion reaches a point at which it can go beyond itself anddisappear into its source. The reason is evident, because sattwais a power of light and happiness, a force that makes for calmand knowledge, and at its highest point it can arrive at a certainreflection, almost a mental identity with the spiritual light andbliss from which it derives. The other two gunas cannot getthis transformation, rajas into the divine kinetic will or tamasinto the divine repose and calm, without the intervention ofthe sattwic power in Nature. The principle of inertia will alwaysremain an inert inaction of power or an incapacity of knowledgeuntil its ignorance disappears in illumination and its torpid inca-pacity is lost in the light and force of the omnipotent divine willof repose. Then only can we have the supreme calm. Thereforetamas must be dominated by sattwa. The principle of rajas forthe same reason must remain always a restless, troubled, feverishor unhappy working because it has not right knowledge; its na-tive movement is a wrong and perverse action, perverse throughignorance. Our will must purify itself by knowledge; it must getmore and more to a right and luminously informed action beforeit 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 divineLight, Presence and Power into the being to transform it; otherwise the change at thepoint of culmination and beyond it cannot take place. That is why there comes in as thelast movement the necessity of an absolute self-surrender.

Deva and Asura 469

the necessity of the intervention of sattwa. The sattwic qualityis a first mediator between the higher and the lower nature. Itmust indeed at a certain point transform or escape from itself andbreak up and dissolve into its source; its conditioned derivativeseeking light and carefully constructed action must change intothe free direct dynamics and spontaneous light of the spirit. Butmeanwhile a high increase of sattwic power delivers us largelyfrom the tamasic and the rajasic disqualification; and its owndisqualification, once we are not pulled too much downwardby rajas and tamas, can be surmounted with a greater ease. Todevelop sattwa till it becomes full of spiritual light and calm andhappiness is the first condition of this preparatory discipline ofthe nature.

That, we shall find, is the whole intention of the remainingchapters of the Gita. But first it prefaces the consideration of thisenlightening movement by a distinction between two kinds ofbeing, the Deva and the Asura; for the Deva is capable of a highself-transforming sattwic action, the Asura incapable. We mustsee what is the object of this preface and the precise bearingof this distinction. The general nature of all human beings isthe same, it is a mixture of the three gunas; it would seem thenthat in all there must be the capacity to develop and strengthenthe sattwic element and turn it upward towards the heights ofthe divine transformation. That our ordinary turn is actuallytowards making our reason and will the servants of our rajasicor tamasic egoism, the ministers of our restless and ill-balancedkinetic desire or our self-indulgent indolence and static iner-tia, can only be, one would imagine, a temporary characteristicof our undeveloped spiritual being, a rawness of its imperfectevolution and must disappear when our consciousness rises inthe spiritual scale. But we actually see that men, at least menabove a certain level, fall very largely into two classes, thosewho have a dominant force of sattwic nature turned towardsknowledge, self-control, beneficence, perfection and those whohave a dominant force of rajasic nature turned towards egoisticgreatness, satisfaction of desire, the indulgence of their ownstrong will and personality which they seek to impose on the


world, not for the service of man or God, but for their own pride,glory and pleasure. These are the human representatives of theDevas and Danavas or Asuras, the Gods and the Titans. Thisdistinction is a very ancient one in Indian religious symbolism.The fundamental idea of the Rig Veda is a struggle betweenthe Gods and their dark opponents, between the Masters ofLight, sons of Infinity, and the children of Division and Night,a battle in which man takes part and which is reflected in all hisinner life and action. This was also a fundamental principle ofthe religion of Zoroaster. The same idea is prominent in laterliterature. The Ramayana is in its ethical intention the parable ofan enormous conflict between the Deva in human form and theincarnate Rakshasa, between the representative of a high cultureand Dharma and a huge unbridled force and gigantic civilisationof the exaggerated Ego. The Mahabharata, of which the Gita isa section, takes for its subject a lifelong clash between humanDevas and Asuras, the men of power, sons of the Gods, whoare governed by the light of a high ethical Dharma and otherswho are embodied Titans, the men of power who are out for theservice of their intellectual, vital and physical ego. The ancientmind, more open than ours to the truth of things behind thephysical veil, saw behind the life of man great cosmic Powersor beings representative of certain turns or grades of the uni-versal Shakti, divine, titanic, gigantic, demoniac, and men whostrongly represented in themselves these types of nature werethemselves considered as Devas, Asuras, Rakshasas, Pisachas.The Gita for its own purposes takes up this distinction anddevelops the difference between these two kinds of beings, dvaubhutasargau. It has spoken previously of the nature which isAsuric and Rakshasic and obstructs God-knowledge, salvationand perfection; it now contrasts it with the Daivic nature whichis turned to these things.

Arjuna, says the Teacher, is of the Deva nature. He neednot grieve with the thought that by acceptance of battle andslaughter he will be yielding to the impulses of the Asura. Theaction on which all turns, the battle which Arjuna has to fightwith the incarnate Godhead as his charioteer at the bidding of

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the Master of the world in the form of the Time-Spirit, is astruggle to establish the kingdom of the Dharma, the empire ofTruth, Right and Justice. He himself is born in the Deva kind;he has developed in himself the sattwic being, until he has nowcome to a point at which he is capable of a high transformationand liberation from the traigun. ya and therefore even from thesattwic nature. The distinction between the Deva and the Asurais not comprehensive of all humanity, not rigidly applicable toall its individuals, neither is it sharp and definite in all stagesof the moral or spiritual history of the race or in all phasesof the individual evolution. The tamasic man who makes solarge a part of the whole, falls into neither category as it is heredescribed, though he may have both elements in him in a lowdegree and for the most part serves tepidly the lower qualities.The normal man is ordinarily a mixture; but one or the othertendency is more pronounced, tends to make him predominantlyrajaso-tamasic or sattwo-rajasic and can be said to be preparinghim for either culmination, for the divine clarity or the titanicturbulence. For here what is in question is a certain culminationin the evolution of the qualitative nature, as will be evident fromthe descriptions given in the text. On one side there can be a sub-limation of the sattwic quality, the culmination or manifestationof the unborn Deva, on the other a sublimation of the rajasicturn of the soul in nature, the entire birth of the Asura. The oneleads towards that movement of liberation on which the Gitais about to lay stress; it makes possible a high self-exceedingof the sattwa quality and a transformation into the likeness ofthe divine being, vimoks.aya. The other leads away from thatuniversal potentiality and precipitates towards an exaggerationof our bondage to the ego. This is the point of the distinction.

The Deva nature is distinguished by an acme of the sattwichabits and qualities; self-control, sacrifice, the religious habit,cleanness and purity, candour and straightforwardness, truth,calm and self-denial, compassion to all beings, modesty, gen-tleness, forgivingness, patience, steadfastness, a deep sweet andserious freedom from all restlessness, levity and inconstancy areits native attributes. The Asuric qualities, wrath, greed, cunning,


treachery, wilful doing of injury to others, pride and arroganceand excessive self-esteem have no place in its composition. Butits gentleness and self-denial and self-control are free too fromall weakness: it has energy and soul force, strong resolution,the fearlessness of the soul that lives in the right and accordingto the truth as well as its harmlessness, tejah. , abhayam, dhr.tih. ,ahimsa, satyam. The whole being, the whole temperament isintegrally pure; there is a seeking for knowledge and a calm andfixed abiding in knowledge. This is the wealth, the plenitude ofthe 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. Asuricmen have no true knowledge of the way of action or the way ofabstention, the fulfilling or the holding in of the nature. Truth isnot in them, nor clean doing, nor faithful observance. They seenaturally in the world nothing but a huge play of the satisfactionof self; theirs is a world with Desire for its cause and seed andgoverning force and law, a world of Chance, a world devoid ofjust relation and linked Karma, a world without God, not true,not founded in Truth. Whatever better intellectual or higherreligious dogma they may possess, this alone is the true creedof their mind and will in action; they follow always the cult ofDesire and Ego. On that way of seeing life they lean in realityand by its falsehood they ruin their souls and their reason. TheAsuric man becomes the centre or instrument of a fierce, Titanic,violent action, a power of destruction in the world, a fount ofinjury and evil. Arrogant, full of self-esteem and the drunkennessof their pride, these misguided souls delude themselves, persist infalse and obstinate aims and pursue the fixed impure resolutionof their longings. They imagine that desire and enjoyment are allthe aim of life and in their inordinate and insatiable pursuit of itthey are the prey of a devouring, a measurelessly unceasing careand thought and endeavour and anxiety till the moment of theirdeath. Bound by a hundred bonds, devoured by wrath and lust,unweariedly occupied in amassing unjust gains which may servetheir enjoyment and the satisfaction of their craving, always theythink, “Today I have gained this object of desire, tomorrow I

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shall have that other; today I have so much wealth, more I willget 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, Iwill 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 inthemselves and God in man, they fall into the unclean hell oftheir own evil. They sacrifice and give, but from a self-regardingostentation, from vanity and with a stiff and foolish pride. In theegoism of their strength and power, in the violence of their wrathand arrogance they hate, despise and belittle the God hidden inthemselves and the God in man. And because they have thisproud hatred and contempt of good and of God, because theyare cruel and evil, the Divine casts them down continually intomore and more Asuric births. Not seeking him, they find himnot, and at last, losing the way to him altogether, sink down intothe lowest status of soul-nature, adhamam gatim.

This graphic description, even giving its entire value to thedistinction it implies, must not be pressed to carry more in it thanit means. When it is said that there are two creations of beingsin this material world, Deva and Asura,5 it is not meant thathuman souls are so created by God from the beginning eachwith its own inevitable career in Nature, nor is it meant thatthere is a rigid spiritual predestination and those rejected fromthe beginning by the Divine are blinded by him so that they maybe thrust down to eternal perdition and the impurity of Hell.All souls are eternal portions of the Divine, the Asura as wellas the Deva, all can come to salvation: even the greatest sinnercan 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 planeswhere the law of spiritual evolution does not govern the movement. There are worlds ofthe Devas, worlds of the Asuras, and there are in these worlds behind us constant typesof beings which support the complex divine play of creation indispensable to the marchof the universe and cast their influence also on the earth and on the life and nature ofman in this physical plane of existence.


is an adventure of which Swabhava and the Karma governed bythe swabhava are ever the chief powers; and if an excess in themanifestation of the swabhava, the self-becoming of the soul, adisorder in its play turns the law of being to the perverse side,if the rajasic qualities are given the upper hand, cultured to thediminution of sattwa, then the trend of Karma and its resultsnecessarily culminate not in the sattwic height which is capableof the movement of liberation, but in the highest exaggerationof the perversities of the lower nature. The man, if he does notstop short and abandon his way of error, has eventually theAsura full-born in him, and once he has taken that enormousturn away from the Light and Truth, he can no more reverse thefatal speed of his course because of the very immensity of themisused divine power in him until he has plumbed the depthsto which it falls, found bottom and seen where the way hasled him, the power exhausted and misspent, himself down inthe lowest state of the soul nature, which is Hell. Only whenhe understands and turns to the Light, does that other truth ofthe Gita come in, that even the greatest sinner, the most impureand violent evil-doer is saved the moment he turns to adore andfollow after the Godhead within him. Then, simply by that turn,he gets very soon into the sattwic way which leads to perfectionand freedom.

The Asuric Prakriti is the rajasic at its height; it leads tothe slavery of the soul in Nature, to desire, wrath and greed,the three powers of the rajasic ego, and these are the three-fold doors of Hell, the Hell into which the natural being fallswhen it indulges the impurity and evil and error of its lower orperverted instincts. These three are again the doors of a greatdarkness, they fold back into tamas, the characteristic powerof the original Ignorance; for the unbridled force of the rajasicnature, when exhausted, falls back into the weakness, collapse,darkness, incapacity of the worst tamasic soul-status. To escapefrom this downfall one must get rid of these three evil forcesand turn to the light of the sattwic quality, live by the right, inthe true relations, according to the Truth and the Law; then onefollows one’s own higher good and arrives at the highest soul-

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status. To follow the law of desire is not the true rule of ournature; there is a higher and juster standard of its works. Butwhere 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 highLaw 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 manand God and Nature. Shastra does not mean a mass of customs,some good, some bad, unintelligently followed by the customaryroutine mind of the tamasic man. Shastra is the knowledge andteaching laid down by intuition, experience and wisdom, thescience and art and ethic of life, the best standards availableto the race. The half-awakened man who leaves the observanceof its rule to follow the guidance of his instincts and desires,can get pleasure but not happiness; for the inner happiness canonly come by right living. He cannot move to perfection, cannotacquire the highest spiritual status. The law of instinct and desireseems to come first in the animal world, but the manhood of mangrows by the pursuit of truth and religion and knowledge anda right life. The Shastra, the recognised Right that he has setup to govern his lower members by his reason and intelligentwill, must therefore first be observed and made the authority forconduct and works and for what should or should not be done,till the instinctive desire nature is schooled and abated and putdown by the habit of self-control and man is ready first for afreer intelligent self-guidance and then for the highest supremelaw 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 artof spiritual living, Adhyatma-shastra, — the Gita itself describesits own teaching as the highest and most secret Shastra, — it for-mulates a rule of the self-transcendence of the sattwic nature anddevelops 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 thefreedom of the spirit when abandoning all dharmas the soulturns to God for its sole law of action, acts straight from the


divine will and lives in the freedom of the divine nature, not inthe Law, but in the Spirit. This is the development of the teachingwhich is prepared by the next question of Arjuna.

XVIII

The Gunas, Faith and Works1

THE GITA has made a distinction between action accord-ing to the licence of personal desire and action doneaccording to the Shastra. We must understand by the

latter the recognised science and art of life which is the outcomeof mankind’s collective living, its culture, religion, science, itsprogressive discovery of the best rule of life, — but mankindstill walking in the ignorance and proceeding in a half lighttowards knowledge. The action of personal desire belongs to theunregenerated state of our nature and is dictated by ignoranceor false knowledge and an unregulated or ill-regulated kinetic orrajasic egoism. The action controlled by Shastra is an outcomeof intellectual, ethical, aesthetic, social and religious culture; itembodies an attempt at a certain right living, harmony and rightorder and is evidently an effort, more or less advanced accord-ing to circumstances, of the sattwic element in man to overtop,regulate and control or guide, where it must be admitted, hisrajasic and tamasic egoism. It is the means to a step in advance,and therefore mankind must first proceed through it and makethis Shastra its law of action rather than obey the impulsionof its personal desires. This is a general rule which humanityhas always recognised wherever it has arrived at any kind ofestablished and developed society; it has an idea of an order,a law, a standard of its perfection, something other than theguidance of its desires or the crude direction of its raw impulses.This greater rule the individual finds usually outside himself insome more or less fixed outcome of the experience and wisdomof the race, which he accepts, to which his mind and the leadingparts of his being give their assent or sanction and which hetries to make his own by living it in his mind, will and action.

1 Gita, XVII.


And this assent of the being, its conscious acceptance and willto believe and realise, may be called by the name which the Gitagives to it, his faith, sraddha. The religion, the philosophy, theethical law, the social idea, the cultural idea in which I put myfaith, gives me a law for my nature and its works, an idea ofrelative right or an idea of relative or absolute perfection andin proportion as I have a sincerity and completeness of faith init and an intensity of will to live according to that faith, I canbecome what it proposes to me, I can shape myself into an imageof that right or an exemplar of that perfection.

But we see also that there is a freer tendency in man otherthan the leading of his desires and other than his will to acceptthe Law, the fixed idea, the safe governing rule of the Shastra.The individual frequently enough, the community at any mo-ment of its life is seen to turn away from the Shastra, becomesimpatient of it, loses that form of its will and faith and goes insearch of another law which it is now more disposed to accept asthe right rule of living and regard as a more vital or higher truthof existence. This may happen when the established Shastraceases to be a living thing and degenerates or stiffens into amass of customs and conventions. Or it may come because itis found that the Shastra is imperfect or no longer useful forthe progress demanded; a new truth, a more perfect law ofliving has become imperative. If that does not exist, it has tobe discovered by the effort of the race or by some great andillumined individual mind who embodies the desire and seekingof the race. The Vedic law becomes a convention and a Buddhaappears with his new rule of the eightfold path and the goalof Nirvana; and it may be remarked that he propounds it notas a personal invention, but as the true rule of Aryan livingconstantly rediscovered by the Buddha, the enlightened mind,the awakened spirit. But this practically means that there is anideal, an eternal Dharma which religion, philosophy, ethics andall other powers in man that strive after truth and perfectionare constantly endeavouring to embody in new statements ofthe science and art of the inner and outer life, a new Shastra.The Mosaic law of religious, ethical and social righteousness is

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convicted of narrowness and imperfection and is now besides aconvention; the law of Christ comes to replace it and claims atonce to abrogate and to fulfil, to abrogate the imperfect formand fulfil in a deeper and broader light and power the spirit of thething which it aimed at, the divine rule of living. And the humansearch does not stop there, but leaves these formulations too,goes back to some past truth it had rejected or breaks forwardto some new truth and power, but is always in search of thesame thing, the law of its perfection, its rule of right living, itscomplete, highest and essential self and nature.

This movement begins with the individual, who is no longersatisfied with the law because he finds that it no longer corre-sponds to his idea and largest or intensest experience of himselfand existence and therefore he can no longer bring to it the willto believe and practise. It does not correspond to his inner wayof being, it is not to him sat, the thing that truly is, the right, thehighest or best or real good; it is not the truth and law of his or ofall being. The Shastra is something impersonal to the individual,and that gives it its authority over the narrow personal law of hismembers; but at the same time it is personal to the collectivityand 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 ofthe Self or the eternal law of the Master of our nature, althoughit 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 andbe ready for a greater truth, a wider walk, a deeper intention ofthe Life-Spirit. The leading in him that departs from the Shastramay not indeed be always a higher movement; it may take theform of a revolt of the egoistic or rajasic nature seeking freedomfrom the yoke of something which it feels to be cramping to itsliberty of self-fulfilment and self-finding. But even then it is oftenjustified by some narrowness or imperfection of the Shastra orby the degradation of the current rule of living into a merelyrestricting or lifeless convention. And so far it is legitimate, itappeals to a truth, it has a good and just reason for existence: forthough it misses the right path, yet the free action of the rajasic


ego, because it has more in it of liberty and life, is better thanthe dead and hidebound tamasic following of a convention. Therajasic is always stronger, always more forcefully inspired andhas more possibilities in it than the tamasic nature. But also thisleading may be sattwic at its heart; it may be a turn to a largerand greater ideal which will carry us nearer to a more completeand ample truth of our self and universal existence than has yetbeen seen and nearer therefore to that highest law which is onewith the divine freedom. And in effect this movement is usuallyan attempt to lay hold on some forgotten truth or to move onto a yet undiscovered or unlived truth of our being. It is not amere licentious movement of the unregulated nature; it has itsspiritual justification and is a necessity of our spiritual progress.And even if the Shastra is still a living thing and the best rulefor the human average, the exceptional man, spiritual, inwardlydeveloped, is not bound by that standard. He is called upon togo beyond the fixed line of the Shastra. For this is a rule for theguidance, control and relative perfection of the normal imperfectman and he has to go on to a more absolute perfection: this is asystem of fixed dharmas and he has to learn to live in the libertyof the Spirit.

But what then shall be the secure base of an action whichdeparts both from the guidance of desire and from the normallaw? For the rule of desire has an authority of its own, no longersafe or satisfactory to us as it is to the animal or as it mighthave been to a primitive humanity, but still, so far as it goes,founded on a very living part of our nature and fortified by itsstrong indications; and the law, the Shastra has behind it all theauthority of long established rule, old successful sanctions and asecure past experience. But this new movement is of the natureof a powerful adventure into the unknown or partly known, adaring development and a new conquest, and what then is theclue to be followed, the guiding light on which it can dependor its strong basis in our being? The answer is that the clue andsupport is to be found in man’s sraddha, his faith, his will tobelieve, to live what he sees or thinks to be the truth of himselfand of existence. In other words this movement is man’s appeal


to himself or to something potent and compelling in himselfor in universal existence for the discovery of his truth, his lawof living, his way to fullness and perfection. And everythingdepends on the nature of his faith, the thing in himself or in theuniversal soul — of which he is a portion or manifestation — towhich he directs it and on how near he gets by it to his realself 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 willreach nothing true and will fall away to his lower nature. If he islured by false rajasic lights, he can be carried away by self-willinto bypaths that may lead to morass or precipice. In either casehis only chance of salvation lies in a return of sattwa upon himto impose a new enlightened order and rule upon his memberswhich will liberate him from the violent error of his self-will orthe dull error of his clouded ignorance. If on the other hand hehas the sattwic nature and a sattwic faith and direction for hissteps, he will arrive in sight of a higher yet unachieved ideal rulewhich may lead him even in rare instances beyond the sattwiclight some way at least towards a highest divine illuminationand divine way of being and living. For if the sattwic light is sostrong in him as to bring him to its own culminating point, thenhe will be able advancing from that point to make out his gate ofentrance into some first ray of that which is divine, transcendentand absolute. In all effort at self-finding these possibilities arethere; they are the conditions of this spiritual adventure.

Now we have to see how the Gita deals with this question onits own line of spiritual teaching and self-discipline. For Arjunaputs immediately a suggestive query from which the problem orone aspect of it arises. When men, he says, sacrifice to God or thegods with faith, sraddha, but abandon the rule of the Shastra,what is that concentrated will of devotion in them, nis.t.ha, whichgives them this faith and moves them to this kind of action? Isit sattwa, rajas or tamas? to which strand of our nature doesit belong? The answer of the Gita first states the principle thatthe faith in us is of a triple kind like all things in Nature andvaries according to the dominating quality of our nature. Thefaith of each man takes the shape, hue, quality given to it by his


stuff of being, his constituting temperament, his innate power ofexistence, sattvanurupa sarvasya sraddha. And then there comesa remarkable line in which the Gita tells us that this Purusha,this soul in man, is, as it were, made of sraddha, a faith, a willto 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.Sraddhamayo ’yam purus.o yo yac-chraddhah. sa eva sah. . If welook into this pregnant saying a little closely, we shall find thatthis single line contains implied in its few forceful words almostthe whole theory of the modern gospel of pragmatism. For if aman or the soul in a man consists of the faith which is in him,taken in this deeper sense, then it follows that the truth which hesees and wills to live is for him the truth of his being, the truthof himself that he has created or is creating and there can be forhim no other real truth. This truth is a thing of his inner andouter action, a thing of his becoming, of the soul’s dynamics,not of that in him which never changes. He is what he is todayby some past will of his nature sustained and continued by apresent will to know, to believe and to be in his intelligence andvital force, and whatever new turn is taken by this will and faithactive in his very substance, that he will tend to become in thefuture. We create our own truth of existence in our own actionof mind and life, which is another way of saying that we createour own selves, are our own makers.

But very obviously this is only one aspect of the truth, andall one-aspected statements are suspect to the thinker. Truth isnot merely whatever our own personality is or creates; that isonly the truth of our becoming, one point or line of emphasisin a movement of widest volume. Beyond our personality thereis, first, a universal being as well as a universal becoming ofwhich ours is a little movement; and beyond that too there is theeternal Being out of which all becoming derives and to whichit owes its potentialities, elements, original and final motives.We may say indeed that all becoming is only an act of universalconsciousness, is Maya, is a creation of the will to become,and the only other reality, if there is any, is a pure eternalexistence beyond consciousness, featureless, unexpressed and


inexpressible. That is practically the standpoint taken by theMayavadin’s Adwaita and the sense of the distinction he makesbetween pragmatic truth which to his mind is illusory or at leastonly temporarily and partly real — while modern pragmatismtakes it to be the true truth or at least the only recognisable realitybecause the only reality that we can act and know, — betweenthat pragmatic illusion and on the other side of creative Mayathe lonely Absolute featureless and inexpressible. But for theGita absolute Brahman is also supreme Purusha, and Purushais always conscious Soul, though its highest consciousness, itssuperconsciousness, if we will, — as, one may add, its lowestwhich we call the Inconscient, — is something very differentfrom our mind consciousness to which alone we are accustomedto give the name. There is in that highest superconscience ahighest truth and dharma of immortality, a greatest divine wayof being, a way of the eternal and infinite. That eternal wayof existence and divine manner of being exists already in theeternity of the Purushottama, but we are now attempting tocreate it here too in our becoming by Yoga; our endeavour is tobecome the Divine, to be as He, madbhava. That also dependson sraddha. It is by an act of our conscious substance and a beliefin its truth, an inmost will to live it or be it that we come by it;but this does not mean that it does not already exist beyond us.Though it may not exist for our outward mind until we see andcreate ourselves anew into it, it is still there in the Eternal andwe may say even that it is already there in our own secret self;for in us also, in our depths the Purushottama always is. Ourgrowing into that, our creation of it is his and its manifestationin us. All creation indeed since it proceeds from the conscioussubstance of the Eternal, is a manifestation of him and proceedsby a faith, acceptance, will to be in the originating consciousness,Chit-Shakti.

We are concerned at present, however, not with the meta-physical issue, but with the relation of this will or faith in ourbeing to our possibility of growth into the perfection of thedivine nature. This power, this sraddha is in any case our basis.When we live, when we are and do according to our desires, that


is a persistent act of sraddha belonging mostly to our vital andphysical, our tamasic and rajasic nature. And when we try tobe, to live and to do according to the Shastra, we proceed by apersistent act of sraddha which belongs, supposing it to be not aroutine faith, to a sattwic tendency that is constantly labouringto impose itself on our rajasic and tamasic parts. When we leaveboth these things and try to be, to live and to do accordingto some ideal or novel conception of truth of our own findingor our own individual acceptance, that too is a persistent actof sraddha which may be dominated by any one of these threequalities that constantly govern our every thought, will, feelingand act. And again when we try to be, to live and to do accordingto the divine nature, then too we must proceed by a persistent actof sraddha, which must be according to the Gita the faith of thesattwic nature when it culminates and is preparing to exceed itsown clear-cut limits. But all and any of these things implies somekinesis or displacement of nature, all suppose an inner or outeror ordinarily both an inner and an outer action. And what thenwill be the character of this action? The Gita states three mainelements of the work we have to do, kartavyam karma, and thesethree are sacrifice, giving and askesis. For when questioned byArjuna on the difference between the outer and inner renuncia-tion, sannyasa and tyaga, Krishna insists that these three thingsought not to be renounced at all but ought altogether to bedone, for they are the work before us, kartavyam karma, andthey purify the wise. In other words these acts constitute themeans of our perfection. But at the same time they may be doneunwisely or less wisely by the unwise. All dynamic action may bereduced in its essential parts to these three elements. For all dy-namic action, all kinesis of the nature involves a voluntary or aninvoluntary tapasya or askesis, an energism and concentrationof our forces or capacities or of some capacity which helps usto achieve, to acquire or to become something, tapas. All actioninvolves a giving of what we are or have, an expenditure whichis the price of that achievement, acquisition or becoming, dana.All action involves too a sacrifice to elemental or to universalpowers or to the supreme Master of our works. The question


is whether we do these things inconsciently, passively, or at bestwith an unintelligent ignorant half-conscient will, or with anunwisely or perversely conscient energism, or with a wisely con-scient will rooted in knowledge, in other words, whether oursacrifice, giving and askesis are tamasic, rajasic or sattwic innature.

For everything here, including physical things, partakes ofthis triple character. Our food, for example, the Gita tells us,is either sattwic, rajasic or tamasic according to its characterand effect on the body. The sattwic temperament in the mentaland physical body turns naturally to the things that increase thelife, increase the inner and outer strength, nourish at once themental, vital and physical force and increase the pleasure andsatisfaction and happy condition of mind and life and body, allthat is succulent and soft and firm and satisfying. The rajasictemperament prefers naturally food that is violently sour, pun-gent, hot, acrid, rough and strong and burning, the aliments thatincrease ill-health and the distempers of the mind and body. Thetamasic temperament takes a perverse pleasure in cold, impure,stale, rotten or tasteless food or even accepts like the animalsthe remnants half-eaten by others. All-pervading is the principleof the three gunas. The gunas apply at the other end in the sameway to the things of the mind and spirit, to sacrifice, givingand askesis, and the Gita distinguishes under each of these threeheads between the three kinds in the customary terms of thesethings as they were formulated by the symbolism of the oldIndian culture. But, remembering the very wide sense which theGita itself gives to the idea of sacrifice, we may well enlargethe surface meaning of these hints and open them to a freersignificance. And it will be convenient to take them in the reverseorder, from tamas to sattwa, since we are considering how wego upward out of our lower nature through a certain sattwicculmination and self-exceeding to a divine nature and actionbeyond the three gunas.

The tamasic sacrifice is work which is done without faith,without, that is to say, any full conscious idea and acceptanceand will towards the thing Nature yet compels us to execute. It is


done mechanically, because the act of living demands it, becauseit comes in our way, because others do it, to avoid some othergreater difficulty which may arise from not doing it, or fromany other tamasic motive. And it is apt to be done, if we havein the full this kind of temperament, carelessly, perfunctorily,in the wrong way. It will not be performed by the vidhi orright rule of the Shastra, will not be led in its steps accordingto the right method laid down by the art and science of lifeand the true science of the thing to be done. There will be nogiving of food in the sacrifice, — and that act in the Indian ritualis symbolic of the element of helpful giving inherent in everyaction that is real sacrifice, the indispensable giving to others,the fruitful help to others, to the world, without which ouraction becomes a wholly self-regarding thing and a violation ofthe true universal law of solidarity and interchange. The workwill be done without the dakshina, the much-needed giving orself-giving to the leaders of the sacrificial action, whether tothe outward guide and helper of our work or to the veiled ormanifest godhead within us. It will be done without the mantra,without the dedicating thought which is the sacred body of ourwill and knowledge lifted upwards to the godheads we serve byour sacrifice. The tamasic man does not offer his sacrifice to thegods, but to inferior elemental powers or to those grosser spiritsbehind the veil who feed upon his works and dominate his lifewith their darkness.

The rajasic man offers his sacrifice to lower godheads or toperverse powers, the Yakshas, the keepers of wealth, or to theAsuric and the Rakshasic forces. His sacrifice may be performedoutwardly according to the Shastra, but its motive is ostentation,pride or a strong lust after the fruit of his action, a vehementdemand for the reward of his works. All work therefore thatproceeds from violent or egoistic personal desire or from anarrogant will intent to impose itself on the world for personalobjects is of the rajasic nature, even if it mask itself with theinsignia of the light, even if it be done outwardly as a sacrifice.Although it is ostensibly given to God or to the gods, it remainsessentially an Asuric action. It is the inner state, motive and


direction which give their value to our works, and not merelythe apparent outer direction, the divine names we may call tosanction them or even the sincere intellectual belief which seemsto justify us in the performance. Wherever there is a dominatingegoism in our acts, there our work becomes a rajasic sacrifice.The true sattwic sacrifice on the other hand is distinguished bythree signs that are the quiet seal of its character. First, it isdictated by the effective truth, executed according to the vidhi,the right principle, the exact method and rule, the just rhythmand law of our works, their true functioning, their dharma; thatmeans that the reason and enlightened will are the guides anddeterminants of their steps and their purpose. Secondly, it isexecuted with a mind concentrated and fixed on the idea of thething to be done as a true sacrifice imposed on us by the divinelaw that governs our life and therefore performed out of a highinner obligation or imperative truth and without desire for thepersonal fruit, — the more impersonal the motive of the actionand the temperament of the force put out in it, the more sattwicis its nature. And finally it is offered to the gods without anyreservation; it is acceptable to the divine powers by whom — forthey are his masks and personalities — the Master of existencegoverns the universe.

This sattwic sacrifice comes then very near to the ideal andleads directly towards the kind of action demanded by the Gita;but it is not the last and highest ideal, it is not yet the action of theperfected man who lives in the divine nature. For it is carried outas a fixed dharma, and it is offered as a sacrifice or service to thegods, to some partial power or aspect of the Divine manifestedin ourselves or in the universe. Work done with a disinterestedreligious faith or selflessly for humanity or impersonally fromdevotion to the Right or the Truth is of this nature, and actionof that kind is necessary for our perfection; for it purifies ourthought and will and our natural substance. The culminationof the sattwic action at which we have to arrive is of a stilllarger and freer kind; it is the high last sacrifice offered by usto the supreme Divine in his integral being and with a seekingfor the Purushottama or with the vision of Vasudeva in all that


is, the action done impersonally, universally, for the good ofthe world, for the fulfilment of the divine will in the universe.That culmination leads to its own transcending, to the immortalDharma. For then comes a freedom in which there is no personalaction at all, no sattwic rule of dharma, no limitation of Shastra;the inferior reason and will are themselves overpassed and it isnot they but a higher wisdom that dictates and guides the workand commands its objective. There is no question of personalfruit; for the will that works is not our own but a supreme Will ofwhich the soul is the instrument. There is no self-regarding andno selflessness; for the Jiva, the eternal portion of the Divine,is united with the highest Self of his existence and he and allare one in that Self and Spirit. There is no personal action, forall actions are given up to the Master of our works and it ishe that does the action through the divinised Prakriti. There isno sacrifice, — unless we can say that the Master of sacrifice isoffering the works of his energy in the Jiva to himself in his owncosmic form. This is the supreme self-surpassing state arrived atby the action that is sacrifice, this the perfection of the soul thathas come to its full consciousness in the divine nature.

Tamasic tapasya is that which is pursued under a cloudedand deluded idea hard and obstinate in its delusion, maintainedby an ignorant faith in some cherished falsehood, performedwith effort and suffering imposed on oneself in pursuit of somenarrow and vulgar egoistic object empty of relation to any trueor great aim or else with a concentration of the energy in a willto do hurt to others. That which makes this kind of energismtamasic is not any principle of inertia, for inertia is foreign totapasya, but a darkness in the mind and nature, a vulgar narrow-ness and ugliness in the doing or a brutish instinct or desire inthe aim or in the motive feeling. Rajasic energisms of askesisare those which are undertaken to get honour and worshipfrom men, for the sake of personal distinction and outwardglory and greatness or from some other of the many motivesof egoistic will and pride. This kind of askesis is devoted tofleeting particular objects which add nothing to the heavenwardgrowth and perfection of the soul; it is a thing without fixed


and helpful principle, an energy bound up with changeful andpassing occasion and itself of that nature. Or even if there isostensibly a more inward and noble object and the faith andwill are of a higher kind, yet if any kind of arrogance or prideor any great strength of violent self-will or desire enters intothe askesis or if it drives some violent, lawless or terrible actioncontrary to the Shastra, opposed to the right rule of life andworks and afflicting to oneself and to others, or if it is of thenature of self-torture and hurts the mental, vital and physicalelements or violates the God within us who is seated in the innersubtle body, then too it is an unwise, an Asuric, a rajasic orrajaso-tamasic tapasya.

Sattwic tapasya is that which is done with a highest en-lightened faith, as a duty deeply accepted or for some ethical orspiritual or other higher reason and with no desire for any exter-nal or narrowly personal fruit in the action. It is of the characterof self-discipline and asks for self-control and a harmonising ofone’s nature. The Gita describes three kinds of sattwic askesis.First comes the physical, the askesis of the outward act; underthis head are especially mentioned worship and reverence ofthose deserving reverence, cleanness of the person, the action andthe life, candid dealing, sexual purity and avoidance of killingand injury to others. Next is askesis of speech, and that consistsin the study of Scripture, kind, true and beneficent speech and acareful avoidance of words that may cause fear, sorrow andtrouble to others. Finally there is the askesis of mental andmoral perfection, and that means the purifying of the wholetemperament, gentleness and a clear and calm gladness of mind,self-control and silence. Here comes in all that quiets or disci-plines the rajasic and egoistic nature and all that replaces it bythe happy and tranquil principle of good and virtue. This is theaskesis of the sattwic dharma so highly prized in the system ofthe ancient Indian culture. Its greater culmination will be a highpurity of the reason and will, an equal soul, a deep peace andcalm, a wide sympathy and preparation of oneness, a reflectionof the inner soul’s divine gladness in the mind, life and body.There at that lofty point the ethical is already passing away


into the spiritual type and character. And this culmination toocan be made to transcend itself, can be raised into a higher andfreer light, can pass away into the settled godlike energy of thesupreme nature. And what will remain then will be the spirit’simmaculate Tapas, a highest will and luminous force in all themembers acting in a wide and solid calm and a deep and purespiritual delight, Ananda. There will then be no farther need ofaskesis, no tapasya, because all is naturally and easily divine,all is that Tapas. There will be no separate labour of the lowerenergism, because the energy of Prakriti will have found its truesource and base in the transcendent will of the Purushottama.Then, because of this high initiation, the acts of this energy onthe lower planes also will proceed naturally and spontaneouslyfrom an innate perfect will and by an inherent perfect guidance.There will be no limitation by any of the present dharmas; forthere will be a free action far above the rajasic and tamasicnature, but also far beyond the too careful and narrow limits ofthe sattwic rule of action.

As with tapasya, all giving also is of an ignorant tamasic,an ostentatious rajasic or a disinterested and enlightened sattwiccharacter. The tamasic gift is offered ignorantly with no consid-eration of the right conditions of time, place and object; it is afoolish, inconsiderate and in reality a self-regarding movement,an ungenerous and ignoble generosity, the gift offered withoutsympathy or true liberality, without regard for the feelings ofthe recipient and despised by him even in the acceptance. Therajasic kind of giving is that which is done with regret, unwill-ingness or violence to oneself or with a personal and egoisticobject or in the hope of a return of some kind from whateverquarter or a corresponding or greater benefit to oneself fromthe receiver. The sattwic way of giving is to bestow with rightreason and goodwill and sympathy in the right conditions oftime and place and on the right recipient who is worthy or towhom the gift can be really helpful. Its act is performed for thesake of the giving and the beneficence, without any view to abenefit already done or yet to be done to oneself by the receiverof the benefit and without any personal object in the action.


The culmination of the sattwic way of dana will bring into theaction an increasing element of that wide self-giving to othersand to the world and to God, atma-dana, atma-samarpan. a,which is the high consecration of the sacrifice of works enjoinedby the Gita. And the transcendence in the divine nature will bea greatest completeness of self-offering founded on the largestmeaning of existence. All this manifold universe comes into birthand is constantly maintained by God’s giving of himself and hispowers and the lavish outflow of his self and spirit into all theseexistences; universal being, says the Veda, is the sacrifice of thePurusha. All the action of the perfected soul will be even such aconstant divine giving of itself and its powers, an outflowing ofthe knowledge, light, strength, love, joy, helpful shakti which itpossesses in the Divine and by his influence and effluence on allaround it according to their capacity of reception or on all thisworld and its creatures. That will be the complete result of thecomplete self-giving of the soul to the Master of our existence.

The Gita closes this chapter with what seems at first sighta recondite utterance. The formula OM, Tat, Sat, is, it says, thetriple definition of the Brahman, by whom the Brahmanas, theVedas and sacrifices were created of old and in it resides all theirsignificance. Tat, That, indicates the Absolute. Sat indicates thesupreme and universal existence in its principle. OM is the sym-bol of the triple Brahman, the outward-looking, the inward orsubtle and the superconscient causal Purusha. Each letter A, U,M indicates one of these three in ascending order and the syllableas a whole brings out the fourth state, Turiya, which rises to theAbsolute. OM is the initiating syllable pronounced at the outsetas a benedictory prelude and sanction to all act of sacrifice, allact of giving and all act of askesis; it is a reminder that ourwork should be made an expression of the triple Divine in ourinner being and turned towards him in the idea and motive. Theseekers of liberation indeed do these actions without desire offruit and only with the idea, feeling, Ananda of the absoluteDivine behind their nature. It is that which they seek by thispurity and impersonality in their works, this high desirelessness,this vast emptiness of ego and plenitude of Spirit. Sat means


good and it means existence. Both these things, the principle ofgood and the principle of reality, must be there behind all thethree kinds of action. All good works are Sat, for they preparethe soul for the higher reality of our being; all firm abiding insacrifice, giving and askesis and all works done with that centralview, as sacrifice, as giving, as askesis, are Sat, for they build thebasis for the highest truth of our spirit. And because sraddha isthe central principle of our existence, any of these things donewithout sraddha is a falsity and has no true meaning or truesubstance on earth or beyond, no reality, no power to endureor create in life here or after the mortal life in greater regionsof our conscious spirit. The soul’s faith, not a mere intellectualbelief, but its concordant will to know, to see, to believe andto do and be according to its vision and knowledge, is thatwhich determines by its power the measure of our possibilitiesof becoming, and it is this faith and will turned in all our innerand outer self, nature and action towards all that is highest,most divine, most real and eternal that will enable us to reachthe supreme perfection.

XIX

The Gunas, Mind and Works1

THE GITA has not yet completed its analysis of actionin the light of this fundamental idea of the three gunasand the transcendence of them by a self-exceeding cul-

mination of the highest sattwic discipline. Faith, sraddha, thewill to believe and to be, know, live and enact the Truth thatwe have seen is the principal factor, the indispensable force be-hind a self-developing action, most of all behind the growthof the soul by works into its full spiritual stature. But thereare also the mental powers, the instruments and the conditionswhich help to constitute the momentum, direction and charac-ter of the activity and are therefore of importance for a fullunderstanding of this psychological discipline. The Gita entersinto a summary psychological analysis of these things beforeit proceeds to its great finale, the culmination of all it teaches,the highest secret which is that of a spiritual exceeding of alldharmas, a divine transcendence. And we have to follow itin its brief descriptions, summarily, expanding just enough toseize fully the main idea; for these are secondary things, butyet each of great consequence in its own place and for its ownpurpose. It is their action cast in the type of the gunas thatwe have to bring out from the brief descriptions in the text;the nature of the culmination of any or each of them beyondthe gunas will automatically follow from the character of thegeneral transcendence.

This part of the subject is introduced by a last question ofArjuna regarding the principle of Sannyasa and the principle ofTyaga and their difference. The frequent harping, the reiteratedemphasis of the Gita on this crucial distinction has been amplyjustified by the subsequent history of the later Indian mind, its

1 Gita, XVIII. 1-39.


constant confusion of these two very different things and itsstrong bent towards belittling any activity of the kind taught bythe Gita as at best only a preliminary to the supreme inactionof Sannyasa. As a matter of fact, when people talk of Tyaga, ofrenunciation, it is always the physical renunciation of the worldwhich they understand by the word or at least on which theylay emphasis, while the Gita takes absolutely the opposite viewthat the real Tyaga has action and living in the world as its basisand not a flight to the monastery, the cave or the hill-top. Thereal Tyaga is action with a renunciation of desire and that too isthe real Sannyasa.

The liberating activity of the sattwic self-discipline mustno doubt be pervaded by a spirit of renunciation, — that is anessential element: but what renunciation and in what mannerof the spirit? Not the renunciation of work in the world, notany outward asceticism or any ostentation of a visible givingup of enjoyment, but a renunciation, a leaving, tyaga, of vitaldesire and ego, a total laying aside, sannyasa, of the separatepersonal life of the desire soul and ego-governed mind andrajasic vital nature. That is the true condition for entering intothe heights of Yoga whether through the impersonal self andBrahmic oneness or through universal Vasudeva or inwardlyinto the supreme Purushottama. More conventionally taken,Sannyasa in the standing terminology of the sages means thephysical depositing or laying aside of desirable actions: Tyaga— this is the Gita’s distinction — is the name given by the wiseto a mental and spiritual renunciation, an entire abandonmentof all attached clinging to the fruit of our works, to the actionitself or to its personal initiation or rajasic impulse. In that senseTyaga, not Sannyasa, is the better way. It is not the desirableactions that must be laid aside, but the desire which gives themthat character has to be put away from us. The fruit of theaction may come in the dispensation of the Master of works,but there is to be no egoistic demand for that as a reward andcondition of doing works. Or the fruit may not at all comeand still the work has to be performed as the thing to be done,kartavyam karma, the thing which the Master within demands

The Gunas, Mind and Works 495

of us. The success, the failure are in his hands and he will regulatethem according to his omniscient will and inscrutable purpose.Action, all action has indeed to be given up in the end, notphysically by abstention, by immobility, by inertia, but spiri-tually to the Master of our being by whose power alone canany action be accomplished. There has to be a renunciation ofthe false idea of ourselves as the doer; for in reality it is theuniversal Shakti that works through our personality and ourego. The spiritual transference of all our works to the Mas-ter and his Shakti is the real Sannyasa in the teaching of theGita.

The question still arises, what works are to be done? Thoseeven who stand for a final physical renunciation are not atone in this difficult matter. Some would have it that all worksmust be excised from our life, as if that were possible. But itis not possible so long as we are in the body and alive; norcan salvation consist in reducing our active selves by trance tothe lifeless immobility of the clod and the pebble. The silenceof Samadhi does not abrogate the difficulty, for as soon as thebreath comes again into the body, we are once more in action andhave toppled down from the heights of this salvation by spiritualslumber. But the true salvation, the release by an inner renun-ciation of the ego and union with the Purushottama remainssteady in whatever state, persists in this world or out of it orin whatever world or out of all world, is self-existent, sarvathavartamano’pi, and does not depend upon inaction or action.What then are the actions to be done? The thoroughgoing asceticanswer, not noted by the Gita — it was perhaps not altogethercurrent at the time — might be that solely begging, eating andmeditation are to be permitted among voluntary activities andotherwise only the necessary actions of the body. But the moreliberal and comprehensive solution was evidently to continue thethree most sattwic activities, sacrifice, giving and askesis. Andthese certainly are to be done, says the Gita, for they purify thewise. But more generally, and understanding these three thingsin their widest sense, it is the rightly regulated action, niyatamkarma, that has to be done, action regulated by the Shastra, the


science and art of right knowledge, right works, right living,or regulated by the essential nature, svabhava-niyatam karma,or, finally and best of all, regulated by the will of the Divinewithin and above us. The last is the true and only action ofthe liberated man, muktasya karma. To renounce these worksis not a right movement — the Gita lays that down plainlyand trenchantly in the end, niyatasya tu sannyasah. karman. onopapadyate. To renounce them from an ignorant confidencein the sufficiency of that withdrawal for the true liberation isa tamasic renunciation. The gunas follow us, we see, into therenunciation of works as well as into works. A renunciationwith attachment to inaction, sango akarman. i, would be equallya tamasic withdrawal. And to give them up because they bringsorrow or are a trouble to the flesh and a weariness to themind or in the feeling that all is vanity and vexation of spirit,is a rajasic renunciation and does not bring the high spiritualfruit; that too is not the true Tyaga. It is a result of intellectualpessimism or vital weariness, it has its roots in ego. No freedomcan come from a renunciation governed by this self-regardingprinciple.

The sattwic principle of renunciation is to withdraw notfrom action, but from the personal demand, the ego factorbehind it. It is to do works not dictated by desire but by thelaw of right living or by the essential nature, its knowledge, itsideal, its faith in itself and the Truth it sees, its sraddha. Or else,on a higher spiritual plane, they are dictated by the will of theMaster and done with the mind in Yoga, without any personalattachment either to the action or to the fruit of the action.There must be a complete renunciation of all desire and of allself-regarding egoistic choice and impulse and finally of thatmuch subtler egoism of the will which either says, “The workis mine, I am the doer”, or even “The work is God’s, but I amthe doer.” There must be no attachment to pleasant, desirable,lucrative or successful work and no doing of it because it hasthat nature; but that kind of work too has to be done, — donetotally, selflessly, with the assent of the spirit, — when it is theaction demanded from above and from within us, kartavyam


karma. There must be no aversion to unpleasant, undesirableor ungratifying action or work that brings or is likely to bringwith it suffering, danger, harsh conditions, inauspicious conse-quences; for that too has to be accepted, totally, selflessly, witha deep understanding of its need and meaning, when it is thework that should be done, kartavyam karma. The wise manputs away the shrinkings and hesitations of the desire-soul andthe doubts of the ordinary human intelligence, that measure bylittle personal, conventional or otherwise limited standards. Hefollows in the light of the full sattwic mind and with the power ofan inner renunciation lifting the soul to impersonality, towardsGod, towards the universal and eternal the highest ideal law ofhis nature or the will of the Master of works in his secret spirit.He will not do action for the sake of any personal result or forany reward in this life or with any attachment to success, profitor consequence: neither will his works be undertaken for thesake of a fruit in the invisible hereafter or ask for a reward inother births or in worlds beyond us, the prizes for which thehalf-baked religious mind hungers. The three kinds of result,pleasant, unpleasant and mixed, in this or other worlds, in thisor another life are for the slaves of desire and ego; these thingsdo not cling to the free spirit. The liberated worker who hasgiven up his works by the inner sannyasa to a greater Power isfree from Karma. Action he will do, for some kind of action,less or more, small or great, is inevitable, natural, right for theembodied soul, — action is part of the divine law of living, itis the high dynamics of the spirit. The essence of renunciation,the true Tyaga, the true Sannyasa is not any rule of thumb ofinaction but a disinterested soul, a selfless mind, the transitionfrom ego to the free impersonal and spiritual nature. The spiritof this inner renunciation is the first mental condition of thehighest culminating sattwic discipline.

The Gita then speaks of the five causes or indispensablerequisites for the accomplishment of works as laid down bythe Sankhya. These five are, first, the frame of body, life andmind which are the basis or standing-ground of the soul inNature, adhis.t.hana, next, the doer, karta, third, the various


instrumentation of Nature, karan. a, fourth, the many kinds ofeffort which make up the force of action, ces.t.ah. , and last, Fate,daivam, that is to say, the influence of the Power or powersother than the human factors, other than the visible mechanismof Nature, that stand behind these and modify the work anddispose its fruits in the steps of act and consequence. These fiveelements make up among them all the efficient causes, karan. a,that determine the shaping and outcome of whatever work manundertakes with mind and speech and body.

The doer is ordinarily supposed to be our surface personalego, but that is the false idea of the understanding that has notarrived at knowledge. The ego is the ostensible doer, but theego and its will are creations and instruments of Nature withwhich the ignorant understanding wrongly identifies our selfand they are not the only determinants even of human action,much less of its turn and consequence. When we are liberatedfrom ego, our real self behind comes forward, impersonal anduniversal, and it sees in its self-vision of unity with the uni-versal Spirit universal Nature as the doer of the work and theDivine Will behind as the master of universal Nature. Onlyso long as we have not this knowledge, are we bound by thecharacter of the ego and its will as the doer and do good andevil and have the satisfaction of our tamasic, rajasic or sattwicnature. But once we live in this greater knowledge, the characterand consequences of the work can make no difference to thefreedom of the spirit. The work may be outwardly a terribleaction like this great battle and slaughter of Kurukshetra; butalthough the liberated man takes his part in the struggle andthough he slay all these peoples, he slays no man and he is notbound by his work, because the work is that of the Master ofthe Worlds and it is he who has already slain in his hiddenomnipotent will all these armies. This work of destruction wasneeded that humanity might move forward to another creationand a new purpose, might get rid as in a fire of its past karmaof unrighteousness and oppression and injustice and move to-wards a kingdom of the Dharma. The liberated man does allhis appointed work as the living instrument one in spirit with


the universal Spirit. And knowing that all this must be andlooking beyond the outward appearance he acts not for selfbut for God and man and the human and cosmic order,2 notin fact himself acting, but conscious of the presence and powerof the divine Force in his deeds and their issue. He knows thatthe supreme Shakti is doing in his mental, vital and physicalbody, adhis.t.hana, as the sole doer the thing appointed by aFate which is in truth not Fate, not a mechanical dispensation,but the wise and all-seeing Will that is at work behind humanKarma. This “terrible work” on which the whole teaching ofthe Gita turns, is an extreme example of action inauspiciousin appearance, akusalam, though a great good lies beyond theappearance. Impersonally has it to be done by the divinely ap-pointed man for the holding together of the world purpose,loka-sangrahartham, without personal aim or desire, because itis the appointed service.

It is clear then that the work is not the sole thing that mat-ters; the knowledge in which we do works makes an immensespiritual difference. There are three things, says the Gita, whichgo to constitute the mental impulsion to works, and they are theknowledge in our will, the object of knowledge and the knower;and into the knowledge there comes always the working of thethree gunas. It is this element of the gunas that makes all the dif-ference to our view of the thing known and to the spirit in whichthe knower does his work. The tamasic ignorant knowledge isa small and narrow, a lazy or dully obstinate way of looking atthings which has no eye for the real nature of the world or of thething done or its field or the act or its conditions. The tamasicmind does not look for real cause and effect, but absorbs itself inone movement or one routine with an obstinate attachment to it,can see nothing but the little section of personal activity beforeits eyes and does not know in fact what it is doing but blindly letsnatural impulsion work out through its deed results of which ithas no conception, foresight or comprehending intelligence. The

2 The cosmic order comes into question, because the triumph of the Asura in humanitymeans to that extent the triumph of the Asura in the balance of the world-forces.


rajasic knowledge is that which sees the multiplicity of thingsonly in their separateness and variety of operation in all theseexistences and is unable to discover a true principle of unity orrightly coordinate its will and action, but follows the bent ofego and desire, the activity of its many-branching egoistic willand various and mixed motive in response to the solicitation ofinternal and environing impulsions and forces. This knowing is ajumble of sections of knowledge, often inconsistent knowledge,put forcefully together by the mind in order to make some kindof pathway through the confusion of our half-knowledge andhalf-ignorance. Or else it is a restless kinetic multiple actionwith no firm governing higher ideal and self-possessed law oftrue light and power within it. The sattwic knowledge on thecontrary sees existence as one indivisible whole in all these di-visions, one imperishable being in all becomings; it masters theprinciple of its action and the relation of the particular actionto the total purpose of existence; it puts in the right place eachstep of the complete process. At the highest top of knowledgethis seeing becomes the knowledge of the one spirit in the world,one in all these many existences, of the one Master of all works,of the forces of cosmos as expressions of the Godhead and ofthe work itself as the operation of his supreme will and wisdomin man and his life and essential nature. The personal will hascome to be entirely conscious, illumined, spiritually awake, andit lives and works in the One, obeys more and more perfectly hissupreme mandate and grows more and more a faultless instru-ment of his light and power in the human person. The supremeliberated action arrives through this culmination of the sattwicknowledge.

There are again three things, the doer, the instrument and thework done, that hold the action together and make it possible.And here again it is the difference of the gunas that determinesthe character of each of these elements. The sattwic mind thatseeks always for a right harmony and right knowledge is thegoverning instrument of the sattwic man and moves all therest of the machine. An egoistic will of desire supported by thedesire-soul is the dominant instrument of the rajasic worker. An


ignorant instinct or the unenlightened impulsion of the physicalmind and the crude vital nature is the chief instrumental forceof the tamasic doer of action. The instrument of the liberatedman is a greater spiritual light and power, far higher than thehighest sattwic intelligence, and it works in him by an envelopingdescent from a supraphysical centre and uses as a clear channelof its force a purified and receptive mind, life and body.

Tamasic action is that done with a confused, deluded andignorant mind, in mechanical obedience to the instincts, im-pulsions and unseeing ideas, without regarding the strength orcapacity or the waste and loss of blind misapplied effort or theantecedent and consequence and right conditions of the impulse,effort or labour. Rajasic action is that which a man undertakesunder the dominion of desire, with his eyes fixed on the workand its hoped-for fruit and nothing else, or with an egoisticsense of his own personality in the action, and it is done withinordinate effort, with a passionate labour, with a great heavingand straining of the personal will to get at the object of its desire.Sattwic action is that which a man does calmly in the clear lightof reason and knowledge and with an impersonal sense of rightor duty or the demand of an ideal, as the thing that ought tobe done whatever may be the result to himself in this world oranother, a work performed without attachment, without likingor disliking for its spur or its drag, for the sole satisfaction ofhis reason and sense of right, of the lucid intelligence and theenlightened will and the pure disinterested mind and the highcontented spirit. At the line of culmination of sattwa it will betransformed and become a highest impersonal action dictated bythe spirit within us and no longer by the intelligence, an actionmoved by the highest law of the nature, free from the lower egoand its light or heavy baggage and from limitation even by bestopinion, noblest desire, purest personal will or loftiest mentalideal. There will be none of these impedimenta; in their placethere will stand a clear spiritual self-knowledge and illuminationand an imperative intimate sense of an infallible power that actsand of the work to be done for the world and for the world’sMaster.


The tamasic doer of action is one who does not put himselfreally into the work, but acts with a mechanical mind, or obeysthe most vulgar thought of the herd, follows the common routineor is wedded to a blind error and prejudice. He is obstinate in stu-pidity, stubborn in error and takes a foolish pride in his ignorantdoing; a narrow and evasive cunning replaces true intelligence;he has a stupid and insolent contempt for those with whomhe has to deal, especially for wiser men and his betters. A dulllaziness, slowness, procrastination, looseness, want of vigour orof sincerity mark his action. The tamasic man is ordinarily slowto act, dilatory in his steps, easily depressed, ready soon to giveup his task if it taxes his strength, his diligence or his patience.The rajasic doer of action on the contrary is one eagerly attachedto the work, bent on its rapid completion, passionately desirousof fruit and reward and consequence, greedy of heart, impureof mind, often violent and cruel and brutal in the means heuses; he cares little whom he injures or how much he injuresothers so long as he gets what he wants, satisfies his passionsand will, vindicates the claims of his ego. He is full of an incon-tinent joy in success and bitterly grieved and stricken by failure.The sattwic doer is free from all this attachment, this egoism,this violent strength or passionate weakness; his is a mind andwill unelated by success, undepressed by failure, full of a fixedimpersonal resolution, a calm rectitude of zeal or a high andpure and selfless enthusiasm in the work that has to be done.At and beyond the culmination of sattwa this resolution, zeal,enthusiasm become the spontaneous working of the spiritualTapas and at last a highest soul-force, the direct God-Power, themighty and steadfast movement of a divine energy in the humaninstrument, the self-assured steps of the Seer-will, the gnosticintelligence and with it the wide delight of the free spirit in theworks of the liberated nature.

The reason armed with the intelligent will works in man inwhatever manner or measure he may possess these human giftsand it is accordingly right or perverted, clouded or luminous,narrow and small or large and wide like the mind of its pos-sessor. It is the understanding power of his nature, buddhi, that


chooses the work for him or, more often, approves and sets itssanction on one or other among the many suggestions of hiscomplex instincts, impulsions, ideas and desires. It is that whichdetermines for him what is right or wrong, to be done or notto be done, Dharma or Adharma. And the persistence of thewill3 is that continuous force of mental Nature which sustainsthe work and gives it consistence and persistence. Here againthere is the incidence of the gunas. The tamasic reason is a false,ignorant and darkened instrument which chains us to see allthings in a dull and wrong light, a cloud of misconceptions, astupid ignoring of the values of things and people. This reasoncalls light darkness and darkness light, takes what is not the truelaw and upholds it as the law, persists in the thing which oughtnot to be done and holds it up to us as the one right thing tobe done. Its ignorance is invincible and its persistence of will isa persistence in the satisfaction and dull pride of its ignorance.That is on its side of blind action; but it is pursued also by aheavy stress of inertia and impotence, a persistence in dullnessand sleep, an aversion to mental change and progress, a dwellingon the fears and pains and depressions of mind which deter us inour path or keep us to base, weak and cowardly ways. Timidity,shirking, evasion, indolence, the justification by the mind of itsfears and false doubts and cautions and refusals of duty and itslapses and turnings from the call of our higher nature, a safefollowing of the line of least resistance so that there may bethe least trouble and effort and peril in the winning of the fruitof our labour, — rather no fruit or poor result, it says, than agreat and noble toil or a perilous and exacting endeavour andadventure, — these are characteristics of the tamasic will andintelligence.

The rajasic understanding, when it does not knowinglychoose error and evil for the sake of the error and evil, can makedistinctions between right and wrong, between what should orshould not be done, but not rightly, rather with a pulling awryof their true measures and a constant distortion of values. And

3 dhr.ti.


this is because its reason and will are a reason of the ego anda will of desire, and these powers misrepresent and distort thetruth and the right to serve their own egoistic purpose. It is onlywhen we are free from ego and desire and look steadily witha calm, pure, disinterested mind concerned only with the truthand its sequences that we can hope to see things rightly and intheir just values. But the rajasic will fixes its persistent attentionon the satisfaction of its own attached clingings and desires inits pursuit of interest and pleasure and of what it thinks orchooses to think right and justice, Dharma. Always it is apt toput on these things the construction which will most flatter andjustify its desires and to uphold as right or legitimate the meanswhich will best help it to get the coveted fruits of its work andendeavour. That is the cause of three fourths of the falsehoodand misconduct of the human reason and will. Rajas with itsvehement hold on the vital ego is the great sinner and positivemisleader.

The sattwic understanding sees in its right place, right form,right measure the movement of the world, the law of action andthe law of abstention from action, the thing that is to be doneand the thing that is not to be done, what is safe for the soul andwhat is dangerous, what is to be feared and shunned and whatis to be embraced by the will, what binds the spirit of man andwhat sets it free. These are the things that it follows or avoids bythe persistence of its conscious will according to the degree ofits light and the stage of evolution it has reached in its upwardascent to the highest self and Spirit. The culmination of thissattwic intelligence is found by a high persistence of the aspiringbuddhi when it is settled on what is beyond the ordinary reasonand mental will, pointed to the summits, turned to a steadycontrol of the senses and the life and a union by Yoga withman’s highest Self, the universal Divine, the transcendent Spirit.It is there that arriving through the sattwic guna one can passbeyond the gunas, can climb beyond the limitations of the mindand its will and intelligence and sattwa itself disappear into thatwhich is above the gunas and beyond this instrumental nature.There the soul is enshrined in light and enthroned in firm union


with the Self and Spirit and Godhead. Arrived upon that summitwe can leave the Highest to guide Nature in our members in thefree spontaneity of a divine action: for there there is no wrong orconfused working, no element of error or impotence to obscureor distort the luminous perfection and power of the Spirit. Allthese lower conditions, laws, dharmas cease to have any holdon us; the Infinite acts in the liberated man and there is no lawbut the immortal truth and right of the free spirit, no Karma, nokind of bondage.

Harmony and order are the characteristic qualities of thesattwic mind and temperament, quiet happiness, a clear andcalm content and an inner ease and peace. Happiness is indeedthe one thing which is openly or indirectly the universal pursuitof our human nature, — happiness or its suggestion or somecounterfeit of it, some pleasure, some enjoyment, some satisfac-tion of the mind, the will, the passions or the body. Pain is anexperience our nature has to accept when it must, involuntarilyas a necessity, an unavoidable incident of universal Nature, orvoluntarily as a means to what we seek after, but not a thing de-sired for its own sake, — except when it is so sought in perversityor with an ardour of enthusiasm in suffering for some touch offierce pleasure it brings or the intense strength it engenders. Butthere are various kinds of happiness or pleasure according to theguna which dominates in our nature. Thus the tamasic mind canremain well-pleased in its indolence and inertia, its stupor andsleep, its blindness and its error. Nature has armed it with theprivilege of a smug satisfaction in its stupidity and ignorance,its dim lights of the cave, its inert contentment, its petty or basejoys and its vulgar pleasures. Delusion is the beginning of thissatisfaction and delusion is its consequence; but still there isgiven a dull, a by no means admirable but a sufficient pleasurein his delusions to the dweller in the cave. There is a tamasichappiness founded in inertia and ignorance.

The mind of the rajasic man drinks of a more fiery andintoxicating cup; the keen, mobile, active pleasure of the sensesand the body and the sense-entangled or fierily kinetic will andintelligence are to him all the joy of life and the very significance


of living. This joy is nectar to the lips at the first touch, butthere is a secret poison in the bottom of the cup and after itthe bitterness of disappointment, satiety, fatigue, revolt, disgust,sin, suffering, loss, transience. And it must be so because thesepleasures in their external figure are not the things which thespirit in us truly demands from life; there is something behindand beyond the transience of the form, something that is lasting,satisfying, self-sufficient. What the sattwic nature seeks, there-fore, is the satisfaction of the higher mind and the spirit andwhen it once gets this large object of its quest, there comes in aclear, pure happiness of the soul, a state of fullness, an abidingease and peace. This happiness does not depend on outwardthings, but on ourselves alone and on the flowering of what isbest and most inward within us. But it is not at first our normalpossession; it has to be conquered by self-discipline, a labour ofthe soul, a high and arduous endeavour. At first this means muchloss of habitual pleasure, much suffering and struggle, a poisonborn of the churning of our nature, a painful conflict of forces,much revolt and opposition to the change due to the ill-will ofthe members or the insistence of vital movements, but in theend the nectar of immortality rises in the place of this bitternessand as we climb to the higher spiritual nature we come to theend of sorrow, the euthanasia of grief and pain. That is thesurpassing happiness which descends upon us at the point orline of culmination of the sattwic discipline.

The self-exceeding of the sattwic nature comes when weget beyond the great but still inferior sattwic pleasure, beyondthe pleasures of mental knowledge and virtue and peace to theeternal calm of the self and the spiritual ecstasy of the divineoneness. That spiritual joy is no longer the sattwic happiness,sukham, but the absolute Ananda. Ananda is the secret delightfrom which all things are born, by which all is sustained inexistence and to which all can rise in the spiritual culmination.Only then can it be possessed when the liberated man, free fromego and its desires, lives at last one with his highest self, one withall beings and one with God in an absolute bliss of the spirit.

XX

Swabhava and Swadharma1

IT IS then by a liberating development of the soul out ofthis lower nature of the triple gunas into the supreme divinenature beyond the three gunas that we can best arrive at

spiritual perfection and freedom. And this again can best bebrought about by an anterior development of the predominanceof the highest sattwic quality to a point at which sattwa alsois overpassed, mounts beyond its own limitations and breaksup into a supreme freedom, absolute light, serene power of theconscious spirit in which there is no determination by conflictinggunas. A highest sattwic faith and aim new-shaping what we areaccording to the highest mental conception of our inner possibil-ities that we can form in the free intelligence, is changed by thistransition into a vision of our own real being, a spiritual self-knowledge. A loftiest ideality or standard of dharma, a pursuitof the right law of our natural existence, is transformed into afree assured self-existent perfection in which all dependence onstandards is transcended and the spontaneous law of the immor-tal self and spirit displaces the lower rule of the instruments andmembers. The sattwic mind and will change into that spiritualknowledge and dynamic power of identical existence in whichthe whole nature puts off its disguise and becomes a free self-expression of the godhead within it. The sattwic doer becomesthe Jiva in contact with his source, united with the Purushot-tama; he is no longer the personal doer of the act, but a spiritualchannel of the works of the transcendent and universal Spirit.His natural being transformed and illumined remains to be theinstrument of a universal and impersonal action, the bow of thedivine Archer. What was sattwic action becomes the free activityof the perfected nature in which there is no longer any personal



limitation, any tethering to this or that quality, any bondage ofsin and virtue, self and others or any but a supreme spiritual self-determination. That is the culmination of works uplifted to thesole Divine Worker by a God-seeking and spiritual knowledge.

But there is still an incidental question of great importancein the old Indian system of culture and, even apart from thatantique view, of considerable general importance, on which wehave had some passing pronouncements already by the Gita andwhich now falls into its proper place. All action on the normallevel is determined by the gunas; the action which is to be done,kartavyam karma, takes the triple form of giving, askesis andsacrifice, and any or all of these three may assume the characterof any of the gunas. Therefore we have to proceed by the raisingof these things to the highest sattwic height of which they arecapable and go yet farther beyond to a largeness in which allworks become a free self-giving, an energy of the divine Tapas,a perpetual sacrament of the spiritual existence. But this is ageneral law and all these considerations have been the enunci-ation of quite general principles and refer indiscriminately toall actions and to all men alike. All can eventually arrive byspiritual evolution to this strong discipline, this large perfection,this highest spiritual state. But while the general rule of mindand action is the same for all men, we see too that there isa constant law of variation and each individual acts not onlyaccording to the common laws of the human spirit, mind, will,life, but according to his own nature; each man fulfils differentfunctions or follows a different bent according to the rule of hisown circumstances, capacities, turn, character, powers. Whatplace is to be assigned to this variation, this individual rule ofnature in the spiritual discipline?

The Gita has laid some stress on this point and even as-signed to it a great preliminary importance. At the very start ithas spoken of the nature, rule and function of the Kshatriya asArjuna’s own law of action, svadharma;2 it has proceeded to layit down with a striking emphasis that one’s own nature, rule,

2 II. 31. svadharmam api caveks.ya.

Swabhava and Swadharma 509

function should be observed and followed, — even if defective,it is better than the well-performed rule of another’s nature.Death in one’s own law of nature is better for a man thanvictory in an alien movement. To follow the law of another’snature is dangerous to the soul,3 contradictory, as we may say, tothe natural way of his evolution, a thing mechanically imposedand therefore imported, artificial and sterilising to one’s growthtowards the true stature of the spirit. What comes out of thebeing is the right and healthful thing, the authentic movement,not what is imposed on it from outside or laid on it by life’scompulsions or the mind’s error. This swadharma is of fourgeneral kinds formulated outwardly in the action of the fourorders of the old Indian social culture, caturvarn. ya. That sys-tem corresponds, says the Gita, to a divine law, it “was createdby me according to the divisions of the gunas and works,” —created from the beginning by the Master of existence. In otherwords, there are four distinct orders of the active nature, orfour fundamental types of the soul in nature, svabhava, and thework and proper function of each human being correspondsto his type of nature. This is now finally explained in preciserdetail. The works of Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shu-dras, says the Gita, are divided according to the qualities (gun. as)born of their own inner nature, spiritual temperament, essentialcharacter (svabhava). Calm, self-control, askesis, purity, long-suffering, candour, knowledge, acceptance of spiritual truth arethe work of the Brahmin, born of his swabhava. Heroism, highspirit, resolution, ability, not fleeing in the battle, giving, lordship(ısvara-bhava, the temperament of the ruler and leader) are thenatural work of the Kshatriya. Agriculture, cattle-keeping, tradeinclusive of the labour of the craftsman and the artisan are thenatural work of the Vaishya. All work of the character of servicefalls within the natural function of the Shudra. A man, it goeson to say, who devotes himself to his own natural work in lifeacquires spiritual perfection, not indeed by the mere act itself,but if he does it with right knowledge and the right motive, if he

3 III. 35.


can make it a worship of the Spirit of this creation and dedicate itsincerely to the Master of the universe from whom is all impulseto action. All labour, all action and function, whatever it be, canbe consecrated by this dedication of works, can convert the lifeinto a self-offering to the Godhead within and without us and isitself converted into a means of spiritual perfection. But a worknot naturally one’s own, even though it may be well performed,even though it may look better from the outside when judgedby an external and mechanical standard or may lead to moresuccess in life, is still inferior as a means of subjective growthprecisely because it has an external motive and a mechanicalimpulsion. One’s own natural work is better, even if it looksfrom some other point of view defective. One does not incursin or stain when one acts in the true spirit of the work andin agreement with the law of one’s own nature. All action inthe three gunas is imperfect, all human work is subject to fault,defect or limitation; but that should not make us abandon ourown proper work and natural function. Action should be rightlyregulated action, niyatam karma, but intrinsically one’s own,evolved from within, in harmony with the truth of one’s being,regulated by the Swabhava, svabhava-niyatam karma.

What precisely is the intention of the Gita? Let us take itfirst in its more outward meaning and consider the tinge givento the principle it enounces by the ideas of the race and the time— the hue of the cultural environment, the ancient significance.These verses and the earlier pronouncements of the Gita on thesame subject have been seized upon in current controversies onthe caste question and interpreted by some as a sanction of thepresent system, used by others as a denial of the hereditary basisof caste. In point of fact the verses in the Gita have no bearingon the existing caste system, because that is a very differentthing from the ancient social ideal of caturvarn.a, the four clear-cut orders of the Aryan community, and in no way correspondswith the description of the Gita. Agriculture, cattle-keeping andtrade of every kind are said here to be the work of the Vaishya;but in the later system the majority of those concerned in tradeand in cattle-keeping, artisans, small craftsmen and others are


actually classed as Shudras, — where they are not put altogetheroutside the pale, — and, with some exceptions, the merchantclass is alone and that too not everywhere ranked as Vaishya.Agriculture, government and service are the professions of allclasses from the Brahmin down to the Shudra. And if the eco-nomical divisions of function have been confounded beyond anypossibility of rectification, the law of the guna or quality is stillless a part of the later system. There all is rigid custom, acara,with no reference to the need of the individual nature. If againwe take the religious side of the contention advanced by theadvocates of the caste system, we can certainly fasten no suchabsurd idea on the words of the Gita as that it is a law of a man’snature that he shall follow without regard to his personal bentand capacities the profession of his parents or his immediateor distant ancestors, the son of a milkman be a milkman, theson of a doctor a doctor, the descendants of shoemakers remainshoemakers to the end of measurable time, still less that bydoing so, by this unintelligent and mechanical repetition of thelaw of another’s nature without regard to his own individual calland qualities a man automatically farthers his own perfectionand arrives at spiritual freedom. The Gita’s words refer to theancient system of caturvarn. a, as it existed or was supposed toexist in its ideal purity, — there is some controversy whether itwas ever anything more than an ideal or general norm more orless loosely followed in practice, — and it should be consideredin that connection alone. Here too there is considerable difficultyas to the exact outward significance.

The ancient system of the four orders had a triple aspect; ittook a social and economic, a cultural and a spiritual appear-ance. On the economic side it recognised four functions of thesocial man in the community, the religious and intellectual, thepolitical, the economic and the servile functions. There are thusfour kinds of work, the work of religious ministration, letters,learning and knowledge, the work of government, politics, ad-ministration and war, the work of production, wealth-makingand exchange, the work of hired labour and service. An endeav-our was made to found and stabilise the whole arrangement


of society on the partition of these four functions among fourclearly marked classes. This system was not peculiar to India, butwas with certain differences the dominating feature of a stage ofsocial evolution in other ancient or mediaeval societies. The fourfunctions are still inherent in the life of all normal communities,but the clear divisions no longer exist anywhere. The old systemeverywhere broke down and gave place to a more fluid orderor, as in India, to a confused and complex social rigidity andeconomic immobility degenerating towards a chaos of castes.Along with this economic division there existed the associationof a cultural idea which gave to each class its religious custom,its law of honour, ethical rule, suitable education and training,type of character, family ideal and discipline. The facts of life didnot always correspond to the idea, — there is always a certaingulf found between the mental ideal and the vital and physicalpractice, — but there was a constant and strenuous endeavour tokeep up as much as possible a real correspondence. The impor-tance of this attempt and of the cultural ideal and atmosphereit created in the past training of the social man, can hardlybe put too high; but at the present day it has little more than ahistorical, a past and evolutionary significance. Finally, whereverthis system existed, it was given more or less a religious sanction(more in the East, very little in Europe) and in India a profounderspiritual use and significance. This spiritual significance is thereal kernel of the teaching of the Gita.

The Gita found this system in existence and its ideal inpossession of the Indian mind and it recognised and acceptedboth the ideal and system and its religious sanction. “The four-fold order was created by me,” says Krishna, “according to thedivisions of quality and active function.” On the mere strengthof this phrase it cannot altogether be concluded that the Gitaregarded this system as an eternal and universal social order.Other ancient authorities did not so regard it; rather they dis-tinctly state that it did not exist in the beginning and will collapsein a later age of the cycle. Still we may understand from thephrase that the fourfold function of social man was consideredas normally inherent in the psychological and economic needs


of every community and therefore a dispensation of the Spiritthat expresses itself in the human corporate and individual ex-istence. The Gita’s line is in fact an intellectual rendering ofthe well-known symbol in the Vedic Purusha-Sukta. But whatthen should be the natural basis and form of practice of thesefunctions? The practical basis in ancient times came to be thehereditary principle. A man’s social function and position wereno doubt determined originally, as they are still in freer, lessclosely ordered communities by environment, occasion, birthand capacity; but as there set in a more fixed stratification, hisrank came practically to be regulated by birth mainly or aloneand in the later system of caste birth came to be the sole ruleof status. The son of a Brahmin is always a Brahmin in status,though he may have nothing of the typical Brahmin qualitiesor character, no intellectual training or spiritual experience orreligious worth or knowledge, no connection whatever with theright function of his class, no Brahminhood in his work and noBrahminhood in his nature.

This was an inevitable evolution, because the external signsare the only ones which are easily and conveniently determinableand birth was the most handy and manageable in an increasinglymechanised, complex and conventional social order. For a timethe possible disparity between the hereditary fiction and theindividual’s real inborn character and capacity was made up orminimised by education and training: but eventually this effortceased to be sustained and the hereditary convention held abso-lute rule. The ancient lawgivers, while recognising the hereditarypractice, insisted that quality, character and capacity were theone sound and real basis and that without them the hereditarysocial status became an unspiritual falsehood because it hadlost its true significance. The Gita too, as always, founds itsthought on the inner significance. It speaks indeed in one verseof the work born with a man, sahajam karma; but this doesnot in itself imply a hereditary basis. According to the Indiantheory of rebirth, which the Gita recognises, a man’s inbornnature and course of life are essentially determined by his ownpast lives, are the self-development already effected by his past


actions and mental and spiritual evolution and cannot dependsolely on the material factor of his ancestry, parentage, physicalbirth, which can only be of subordinate moment, one effectivesign perhaps, but not the dominant principle. The word sahajameans that which is born with us, whatever is natural, inborn,innate; its equivalent in all other passages is svabhavaja. Thework or function of a man is determined by his qualities, karmais determined by gun. a; it is the work born of his Swabhava,svabhavajam karma, and regulated by his Swabhava, svabhava-niyatam karma. This emphasis on an inner quality and spiritwhich finds expression in work, function and action is the wholesense of the Gita’s idea of Karma.

And from this emphasis on the inner truth and not on theouter form arises the spiritual significance and power which theGita assigns to the following of the Swadharma. That is thereally important bearing of the passage. Too much has beenmade of its connection with the outer social order, as if theobject of the Gita were to support that for its own sake or tojustify it by a religio-philosophical theory. In fact it lays very littlestress on the external rule and a very great stress on the internallaw which the Varna system attempted to put into regulatedoutward practice. And it is on the individual and spiritual valueof this law and not on its communal and economic or othersocial and cultural importance that the eye of the thought isfixed in this passage. The Gita accepted the Vedic theory ofsacrifice, but gave it a profound turn, an inner, subjective anduniversal meaning, a spiritual sense and direction which altersall its values. Here too and in the same way it accepts the theoryof the four orders of men, but gives to it a profound turn, aninner, subjective and universal meaning, a spiritual sense anddirection. And immediately the idea behind the theory changesits values and becomes an enduring and living truth not boundup with the transience of a particular social form and order.What the Gita is concerned with is not the validity of the Aryansocial order now abolished or in a state of deliquescence, —if that were all, its principle of the Swabhava and Swadharmawould have no permanent truth or value, — but the relation of


a man’s outward life to his inward being, the evolution of hisaction from his soul and inner law of nature.

And we see in fact that the Gita itself indicates very clearlyits intention when it describes the work of the Brahmin and theKshatriya not in terms of external function, not defined as learn-ing, priest-work and letters or government, war and politics,but entirely in terms of internal character. The language readsa little curiously to our ear. Calm, self-control, askesis, purity,long-suffering, candour, knowledge, acceptance and practice ofspiritual truth would not ordinarily be described as a man’sfunction, work or life occupation. Yet this is precisely what theGita means and says, — that these things, their development,their expression in conduct, their power to cast into form thelaw of the sattwic nature are the real work of the Brahmin:learning, religious ministration and the other outer functionsare only its most suitable field, a favourable means of this innerdevelopment, its appropriate self-expression, its way of fixingitself into firmness of type and externalised solidity of character.War, government, politics, leadership and rule are a similar fieldand means for the Kshatriya; but his real work is the develop-ment, the expression in conduct, the power to cast into formand dynamic rhythm of movement the law of the active battlingroyal or warrior spirit. The work of the Vaishya and Shudra isexpressed in terms of external function, and this opposite turnmay have some significance. For the temperament moved toproduction and wealth-getting or limited in the circle of labourand service, the mercantile and the servile mind, are usuallyturned outward, more occupied with the external values of theirwork than its power for character, and this disposition is not sofavourable to a sattwic or spiritual action of the nature. That toois the reason why a commercial and industrial age or a societypreoccupied with the idea of work and labour creates around itan atmosphere more favourable to the material than the spirituallife, more adapted to vital efficiency than to the subtler per-fection of the high-reaching mind and spirit. Nevertheless, thiskind of nature too and its functions have their inner significance,their spiritual value and can be made a means and power for


perfection. As has been said elsewhere, not alone the Brahminwith his ideal of spirituality, ethical purity and knowledge andthe Kshatriya with his ideal of nobility, chivalry and high charac-ter, but the wealth-seeking Vaishya, the toil-imprisoned Shudra,woman with her narrow, circumscribed and subject life, thevery outcaste born from a womb of sin, papayonayah. , can bythis road rise at once towards the highest inner greatness andspiritual freedom, towards perfection, towards the liberationand fulfilment of the divine element in the human being.

Three propositions suggest themselves even at the first viewand may be taken as implicit in all that the Gita says in this pas-sage. First, all action must be determined from within becauseeach man has in him something his own, some characteristicprinciple and inborn power of his nature. That is the efficientpower of his spirit, that creates the dynamic form of his soul innature and to express and perfect it by action, to make it effectivein capacity and conduct and life is his work, his true Karma: thatpoints him to the right way of his inner and outer living and is theright starting-point for his farther development. Next, there arebroadly four types of nature each with its characteristic functionand ideal rule of work and character and the type indicates theman’s proper field and should trace for him his just circle offunction in his outer social existence. Finally, whatever work aman does, if done according to the law of his being, the truth ofhis nature, can be turned Godwards and made an effective meansof spiritual liberation and perfection. The first and last of thesepropositions are suggestions of an evident truth and justice. Theordinary way of man’s individual and social living seems indeedto be a contradiction of these principles; for certainly we bear aterrible weight of external necessity, rule and law and our needfor self-expression, for the development of our true person, ourreal soul, our inmost characteristic law of nature in life is atevery turn interfered with, thwarted, forced from its course,given a very poor chance and scope by environmental influ-ences. Life, State, society, family, all surrounding powers seemto be in a league to lay their yoke on our spirit, compel us intotheir moulds, impose on us their mechanical interest and rough


immediate convenience. We become parts of a machine; we arenot, are hardly allowed to be men in the true sense, manus.ya,purus.a, souls, minds, free children of the spirit empowered todevelop the highest characteristic perfection of our being andmake it our means of service to the race. It would seem that weare not what we make ourselves, but what we are made. Yet themore we advance in knowledge, the more the truth of the Gita’srule is bound to appear. The child’s education ought to be anoutbringing of all that is best, most powerful, most intimate andliving in his nature; the mould into which the man’s action anddevelopment ought to run is that of his innate quality and power.He must acquire new things, but he will acquire them best, mostvitally on the basis of his own developed type and inborn force.And so too the functions of a man ought to be determined by hisnatural turn, gift and capacities. The individual who developsfreely in this manner will be a living soul and mind and will havea much greater power for the service of the race. And we areable now to see more clearly that this rule is true not only of theindividual but of the community and the nation, the group soul,the collective man. The second proposition of the four types andtheir functions is more open to dispute. It may be said that itis too simple and positive, that it takes no sufficient account ofthe complexity of life and the plasticity of human nature, and,whatever the theory or its intrinsic merits, the outward socialapplication must lead precisely to that tyranny of a mechanicalrule which is the flat contradiction of all law of Swadharma.But it has a profounder meaning under the surface which givesit a less disputable value. And even if we reject it, the thirdproposition will yet stand in its general significance. Whatevera man’s work and function in life, he can, if it is determinedfrom within or if he is allowed to make it a self-expressionof his nature, turn it into a means of growth and of a greaterinner perfection. And whatever it be, if he performs his naturalfunction in the right spirit, if he enlightens it by the ideal mind, ifhe turns its action to the uses of the Godhead within, serves withit the Spirit manifested in the universe or makes it a consciousinstrumentation for the purposes of the Divine in humanity,


he can transmute it into a means towards the highest spiritualperfection and freedom.

But the Gita’s teaching here has a still profounder signifi-cance if we take it not as a detached quotation self-contained inmeaning, as is too often done, but as we should do, in connec-tion with all that it has been saying throughout the work andespecially in the last twelve chapters. The Gita’s philosophy oflife and works is that all proceeds from the Divine Existence, thetranscendent and universal Spirit. All is a veiled manifestationof the Godhead, Vasudeva, yatah. pravr.ttir bhutanam yena sar-vam idam tatam, and to unveil the Immortal within and in theworld, to dwell in unity with the Soul of the universe, to rise inconsciousness, knowledge, will, love, spiritual delight to onenesswith the supreme Godhead, to live in the highest spiritual naturewith the individual and natural being delivered from shortcom-ing and ignorance and made a conscious instrument for theworks of the divine Shakti is the perfection of which humanityis capable and the condition of immortality and freedom. Buthow is this possible when in fact we are enveloped in naturalignorance, the soul shut up in the prison of ego, overcome,beset, hammered and moulded by the environment, mastered bythe mechanism of Nature, cut off from our hold on the realityof our own secret spiritual force? The answer is that all thisnatural action, however now enveloped in a veiled and contraryworking, still contains the principle of its own evolving freedomand perfection. A Godhead is seated in the heart of every manand is the Lord of this mysterious action of Nature. And thoughthis Spirit of the universe, this One who is all, seems to be turningus on the wheel of the world as if mounted on a machine by theforce of Maya, shaping us in our ignorance as the potter shapes apot, as the weaver a fabric, by some skilful mechanical principle,yet is this spirit our own greatest self and it is according to thereal idea, the truth of ourselves, that which is growing in usand finding always new and more adequate forms in birth afterbirth, in our animal and human and divine life, in that whichwe were, that which we are, that which we shall be, — it is inaccordance with this inner soul-truth that, as our opened eyes


will discover, we are progressively shaped by this spirit within usin its all-wise omnipotence. This machinery of ego, this tangledcomplexity of the three gunas, mind, body, life, emotion, desire,struggle, thought, aspiration, endeavour, this locked interactionof pain and pleasure, sin and virtue, striving and success andfailure, soul and environment, myself and others, is only theoutward imperfect form taken by a higher spiritual Force inme which pursues through its vicissitudes the progressive self-expression of the divine reality and greatness I am secretly inspirit and shall overtly become in nature. This action containsin itself the principle of its own success, the principle of theSwabhava and Swadharma.

The Jiva is in self-expression a portion of the Purushottama.He represents in Nature the power of the supreme Spirit, he isin his personality that Power; he brings out in an individualexistence the potentialities of the Soul of the universe. This Jivaitself is spirit and not the natural ego; the spirit and not the formof ego is our reality and inner soul principle. The true force ofwhat we are and can be is there in that higher spiritual Powerand this mechanical Maya of the three gunas is not the inmostand fundamental truth of its movements; it is only a presentexecutive energy, an apparatus of lower convenience, a schemeof outward exercise and practice. The spiritual Nature which hasbecome this multiple personality in the universe, para prakr.tirjıva-bhuta, is the basic stuff of our existence: all the rest is lowerderivation and outer formation from a highest hidden activityof the spirit. And in Nature each of us has a principle and will ofour own becoming; each soul is a force of self-consciousness thatformulates an idea of the Divine in it and guides by that its actionand evolution, its progressive self-finding, its constant varyingself-expression, its apparently uncertain but secretly inevitablegrowth to fullness. That is our Swabhava, our own real nature;that is our truth of being which is finding now only a constantpartial expression in our various becoming in the world. Thelaw of action determined by this Swabhava is our right law ofself-shaping, function, working, our Swadharma.

This principle obtains throughout cosmos; there is every-


where the one Power at work, one common universal Nature,but in each grade, form, energy, genus, species, individual crea-ture she follows out a major Idea and minor ideas and principlesof constant and complex variation that found both the perma-nent dharma of each and its temporary dharmas. These fix forit the law of its being in becoming, the curve of its birth andpersistence and change, the force of its self-preservation and self-increasing, the lines of its stable and evolving self-expressionand self-finding, the rules of its relations to all the rest of theexpression of the Self in the universe. To follow the law of itsbeing, Swadharma, to develop the idea in its being, Swabhava, isits ground of safety, its right walk and procedure. That does notin the end chain down the soul to any present formulation, butrather by this way of development it enriches itself most surelywith new experiences assimilated to its own law and principleand can most powerfully grow and break at its hour beyondpresent moulds to a higher self-expression. To be unable tomaintain its own law and principle, to fail to adapt itself toits environment in such a way as to adapt the environment toitself and make it useful to its own nature is to lose its self,forfeit its right of self, deviate from its way of self, is perdition,vinas.t.i, is falsehood, death, anguish of decay and dissolutionand necessity of painful self-recovery often after eclipse anddisappearance, is the vain circuit of the wrong road retardingour real progress. This law obtains in one form or another inall Nature; it underlies all that action of law of universality andlaw of variation revealed to us by science. The same law obtainsin the life of the human being, his many lives in many humanbodies. Here it has an outward play and an inward spiritualtruth, and the outward play can only put on its full and realmeaning when we have found the inward spiritual truth andenlightened all our action with the values of the spirit. Thisgreat and desirable transformation can be effected with rapidityand power in proportion to our progress in self-knowledge.

And first we have to see that the Swabhava means one thingin the highest spiritual nature and takes quite another form andsignificance in the lower nature of the three gunas. There too it


acts, but is not in full possession of itself, is seeking as it were forits own true law in a half light or a darkness and goes on its waythrough many lower forms, many false forms, endless imperfec-tions, perversions, self-losings, self-findings, seekings after normand rule before it arrives at self-discovery and perfection. Ournature here is a mixed weft of knowledge and ignorance, of truthand falsehood, of success and failure, of right and wrong, of find-ing and losing, of sin and virtue. It is always the Swabhava thatis looking for self-expression and self-finding through all thesethings, svabhavas tu pravartate, a truth which should teach usuniversal charity and equality of vision, since we are all subjectto the same perplexity and struggle. These motions belong, notto the soul, but to the nature. The Purushottama is not limitedby this ignorance; he governs it from above and guides the soulthrough its changes. The pure immutable self is not touchedby these movements; it witnesses and supports by its intangibleeternity this mutable Nature in her vicissitudes. The real soulof the individual, the central being in us, is greater than thesethings, but accepts them in its outward evolution in Nature. Andwhen we have got at this real soul, at the changeless universalself sustaining us and at the Purushottama, the Lord within uswho presides over and guides the whole action of Nature, wehave found all the spiritual meaning of the law of our life. For webecome aware of the Master of existence expressing himself forever in his infinite quality, anantagun. a, in all beings. We becomeaware of a fourfold presence of the Divinity, a Soul of self-knowledge and world-knowledge, a Soul of strength and powerthat seeks for and finds and uses its powers, a Soul of mutualityand creation and relation and interchange between creature andcreature, a Soul of works that labours in the universe and servesall in each and turns the labour of each to the service of all others.We become aware too of the individual Power of the Divine inus, that which directly uses these fourfold powers, assigns ourstrain of self-expression, determines our divine work and officeand raises us through it all to his universality in manifoldnesstill we can find by it our spiritual oneness with him and with allthat he is in the cosmos.


The external idea of the four orders of men in life is con-cerned only with the more outward working of this truth ofthe divine action; it is limited to one side of its operation in thefunctioning of the three gunas. It is true that in this birth men fallvery largely into one of four types, the man of knowledge, theman of power, the productive vital man, the man of rude labourand service. These are not fundamental divisions, but stages ofself-development in our manhood. The human being starts witha sufficient load of ignorance and inertia; his first state is oneof rude toil enforced on his animal indolence by the needs ofthe body, by the impulsion of life, by necessity of Nature and,beyond a certain point of need, by some form of direct or indirectcompulsion which society lays upon him, and those who are stillgoverned by this tamas are the Shudras, the serfs of society whogive it their toil and can contribute nothing or very little else incomparison with more developed men to its manifold play oflife. By kinetic action man develops the rajasic guna in him andwe get a second type of man who is driven by a constant instinctfor useful creation, production, having, acquisition, holding andenjoying, the middle economic and vital man, the Vaishya. Ata higher elevation of the rajasic or kinetic quality of our onecommon nature we get the active man with a more dominantwill, with bolder ambitions, with the instinct to act, battle, andenforce his will, at the strongest to lead, command, rule, carrymasses of men in his orbit, the fighter, leader, ruler, prince, king,Kshatriya. And where the sattwic mind predominates, we getthe Brahmin, the man with a turn for knowledge, who bringsthought, reflection, the seeking for truth and an intelligent orat the highest a spiritual rule into life and illumines by it hisconception and mode of existence.

There is always in human nature something of all thesefour personalities developed or undeveloped, wide or narrow,suppressed or rising to the surface, but in most men one or theother tends to predominate and seems to take up sometimesthe whole space of action in the nature. And in any society weshould have all four types, — even, for an example, if we createa purely productive and commercial society such as modern


times have attempted, or for that matter a Shudra society oflabour, of the proletariate such as attracts the most modernmind and is now being attempted in one part of Europe andadvocated in others. There would still be the thinkers movedto find the law and truth and guiding rule of the whole matter,the captains and leaders of industry who would make all thisproductive activity an excuse for the satisfaction of their need ofadventure and battle and leadership and dominance, the manytypical purely productive and wealth-getting men, the averageworkers satisfied with a modicum of labour and the rewardof their labour. But these are quite outward things, and if thatwere all, this economy of human type would have no spiritualsignificance. Or it would mean at most, as has been sometimesheld in India, that we have to go through these stages of develop-ment in our births; for we must perforce proceed progressivelythrough the tamasic, the rajaso-tamasic, the rajasic or rajaso-sattwic to the sattwic nature, ascend and fix ourselves in aninner Brahminhood, brahman. ya, and then seek salvation fromthat basis. But in that case there would be no logical room forthe Gita’s assertion that even the Shudra or Chandala can byturning his life Godwards climb straight to spiritual liberty andperfection.

The fundamental truth is not this outward thing, but a forceof our inner being in movement, the truth of the fourfold activepower of the spiritual nature. Each Jiva possesses in his spiritualnature these four sides, is a soul of knowledge, a soul of strengthand of power, a soul of mutuality and interchange, a soul ofworks and service, but one side or other predominates in theaction and expressive spirit and tinges the dealings of the soulwith its embodied nature; it leads and gives its stamp to theother powers and uses them for the principal strain of action,tendency, experience. The Swabhava then follows, not crudelyand rigidly as put in the social demarcation, but subtly andflexibly the law of this strain and develops in developing it theother three powers. Thus the pursuit of the impulse of works andservice rightly done develops knowledge, increases power, trainscloseness or balance of mutuality and skill and order of relation.


Each front of the fourfold godhead moves through the enlarge-ment of its own dominant principle of nature and enrichmentby the other three towards a total perfection. This developmentundergoes the law of the three gunas. There is possible a tamasicand rajasic way of following even the dharma of the soul ofknowledge, a brute tamasic and a high sattwic way of followingthe dharma of power, a forceful rajasic or a beautiful and noblesattwic way of following the dharma of works and service. Toarrive at the sattwic way of the inner individual Swadharmaand of the works to which it moves us on the ways of life is apreliminary condition of perfection. And it may be noted thatthe inner Swadharma is not bound to any outward social orother form of action, occupation or function. The soul of worksor that element in us that is satisfied to serve, can, for example,make the life of the pursuit of knowledge, the life of struggleand power or the life of mutuality, production and interchangea means of satisfying its divine impulse to labour and to service.

And in the end to arrive at the divinest figure and mostdynamic soul-power of this fourfold activity is a wide doorwayto a swiftest and largest reality of the most high spiritual per-fection. This we can do if we turn the action of the Swadharmainto a worship of the inner Godhead, the universal Spirit, thetranscendent Purushottama and, eventually, surrender the wholeaction into his hands, mayi sannyasya karman. i. Then as weget beyond the limitation of the three gunas, so also do weget beyond the division of the fourfold law and beyond thelimitation of all distinctive dharmas, sarvadharman parityajya.The Spirit takes up the individual into the universal Swabhava,perfects and unifies the fourfold soul of nature in us and doesits self-determined works according to the divine will and theaccomplished power of the godhead in the creature.

The Gita’s injunction is to worship the Divine by our ownwork, sva-karman. a; our offering must be the works determinedby our own law of being and nature. For from the Divine allmovement of creation and impulse to act originates and by himall this universe is extended and for the holding together ofthe worlds he presides over and shapes all action through the


Swabhava. To worship him with our inner and outer activities,to make our whole life a sacrifice of works to the Highest isto prepare ourselves to become one with him in all our willand substance and nature. Our work should be according tothe truth within us, it should not be an accommodation withoutward and artificial standards: it must be a living and sincereexpression of the soul and its inborn powers. For to follow outthe living inmost truth of this soul in our present nature willhelp us eventually to arrive at the immortal truth of the samesoul in the now superconscious supreme nature. There we canlive in oneness with God and our true self and all beings and,perfected, become a faultless instrument of divine action in thefreedom of the immortal Dharma.

XXI

Towards the Supreme Secret1

THE TEACHER has completed all else that he needed tosay, he has worked out all the central principles and thesupporting suggestions and implications of his message

and elucidated the principal doubts and questions that mightrise around it, and now all that rests for him to do is to putinto decisive phrase and penetrating formula the one last word,the heart itself of the message, the very core of his gospel. Andwe find that this decisive, last and crowning word is not merelythe essence of what has been already said on the matter, notmerely a concentrated description of the needed self-discipline,the Sadhana, and of that greater spiritual consciousness whichis to be the result of all its effort and askesis; it sweeps out, as itwere, yet farther, breaks down every limit and rule, canon andformula and opens into a wide and illimitable spiritual truthwith an infinite potentiality of significance. And that is a signof the profundity, the wide reach, the greatness of spirit of theGita’s teaching. An ordinary religious teaching or philosophicaldoctrine is well enough satisfied to seize on certain great andvital aspects of truth and turn them into utilisable dogma andinstruction, method and practice for the guidance of man inhis inner life and the law and form of his action; it does notgo farther, it does not open doors out of the circle of its ownsystem, does not lead us out into some widest freedom andunimprisoned largeness. This limitation is useful and indeed fora time indispensable. Man bounded by his mind and will hasneed of a law and rule, a fixed system, a definite practice selectiveof his thought and action; he asks for the single unmistakablehewn path hedged, fixed and secure to the tread, for the limitedhorizons, for the enclosed resting-places. It is only the strong


Towards the Supreme Secret 527

and few who can move through freedom to freedom. And yet inthe end the free soul ought to have an issue out of the forms andsystems in which the mind finds its account and takes its limitedpleasure. To exceed our ladder of ascent, not to stop short evenon the topmost stair but move untrammelled and at large in thewideness of the spirit is a release important for our perfection;the spirit’s absolute liberty is our perfect status. And this is howthe Gita leads us: it lays down a firm and sure but very largeway of ascent, a great Dharma, and then it takes us out beyondall that is laid down, beyond all dharmas, into infinitely openspaces, divulges to us the hope, lets us into the secret of anabsolute perfection founded in an absolute spiritual liberty, andthat secret, guhyatamam, is the substance of what it calls itssupreme word, that the hidden thing, the inmost knowledge.

And first the Gita restates the body of its message. It sum-marises the whole outline and essence in the short space of fifteenverses, lines of a brief and concentrated expression and signif-icance that miss nothing of the kernel of the matter, couchedin phrases of the most lucid precision and clearness. And theymust therefore be scanned with care, must be read deeply inthe light of all that has gone before, because here it is evidentlyintended to extract what the Gita itself considers to be the cen-tral sense of its own teaching. The statement sets out from theoriginal starting-point of the thought in the book, the enigmaof human action, the apparently insuperable difficulty of livingin the highest self and spirit while yet we continue to do theworks of the world. The easiest way is to give up the problem asinsoluble, life and action as an illusion or an inferior movementof existence to be abandoned as soon as we can rise out of thesnare of the world into the truth of spiritual being. That is theascetic solution, if it can be called a solution; at any rate it isa decisive and effective way out of the enigma, a way to whichancient Indian thought of the highest and most meditative kind,as soon as it commenced to turn at a sharp incline from its firstlarge and free synthesis, had moved with an always increasingpreponderance. The Gita like the Tantra and on certain sidesthe later religions attempts to preserve the ancient balance: it


maintains the substance and foundation of the original synthesis,but the form has been changed and renovated in the light of adeveloping spiritual experience. This teaching does not evadethe difficult problem of reconciling the full active life of manwith the inner life in the highest self and spirit; it advanceswhat it holds to be the real solution. It does not at all deny theefficacy of the ascetic renunciation of life for its own purpose,but it sees that that cuts instead of loosening the knot of theriddle and therefore it accounts it an inferior method and holdsits own for the better way. The two paths both lead us out ofthe lower ignorant normal nature of man to the pure spiritualconsciousness and so far both must be held to be valid and evenone in essence: but where one stops short and turns back, theother advances with a firm subtlety and high courage, opens agate on unexplored vistas, completes man in God and unites andreconciles in the spirit soul and Nature.

And therefore in the first five of these verses the Gita sophrases its statement that it shall be applicable to both the wayof the inner and the way of the outer renunciation and yet in sucha manner that one has only to assign to some of their commonexpressions a deeper and more inward meaning in order to getthe sense and thought of the method favoured by the Gita. Thedifficulty of human action is that the soul and nature of manseem fatally subjected to many kinds of bondage, the prison ofthe ignorance, the meshes of the ego, the chain of the passions,the hammering insistence of the life of the moment, an obscureand limited circle without an issue. The soul shut up in this circleof action has no freedom, no leisure or light of self-knowledgeto make the discovery of its self and the true value of life andmeaning of existence. It has indeed such hints of its being as itcan get from its active personality and dynamic nature, but thestandards of perfection it can erect there are much too temporal,restricted and relative to be a satisfactory key to its own riddle.How, while absorbed and continually forced outward by theengrossing call of its active nature, is it to get back to its real selfand spiritual existence? The ascetic renunciation and the way ofthe Gita are both agreed that it must first of all renounce this


absorption, must cast from it the external solicitation of out-ward things and separate silent self from active nature; it mustidentify itself with the immobile Spirit and live in the silence.It must arrive at an inner inactivity, nais.karmya. It is thereforethis saving inner passivity that the Gita puts here as the firstobject of its Yoga, the first necessary perfection in it or Siddhi.“An understanding without attachment in all things, a soul self-conquered and empty of desire, man attains by renunciation asupreme perfection of nais.karmya.”

This ideal of renunciation, of a self-conquered stillness, spir-itual passivity and freedom from desire is common to all theancient wisdom. The Gita gives us its psychological foundationwith an unsurpassed completeness and clearness. It rests on thecommon experience of all seekers of self-knowledge that thereare two different natures and as it were two selves in us. Thereis the lower self of the obscure mental, vital and physical naturesubject to ignorance and inertia in the very stuff of its conscious-ness and especially in its basis of material substance, kineticand vital indeed by the power of life but without inherent self-possession and self-knowledge in its action, attaining in the mindto some knowledge and harmony, but only with difficult effortand by a constant struggle with its own disabilities. And there isthe higher nature and self of our spiritual being, self-possessedand self-luminous but in our ordinary mentality inaccessible toour experience. At times we get glimpses of this greater thingwithin us, but we are not consciously within it, we do not livein its light and calm and illimitable splendour. The first of thesetwo very different things is the Gita’s nature of the three gunas.Its seeing of itself is centred in the ego idea, its principle of actionis desire born of ego, and the knot of ego is attachment to theobjects of the mind and sense and the life’s desire. The inevitableconstant result of all these things is bondage, settled subjectionto a lower control, absence of self-mastery, absence of self-knowledge. The other greater power and presence is discoveredto be nature and being of the pure spirit unconditioned by ego,that which is called in Indian philosophy self and impersonalBrahman. Its principle is an infinite and an impersonal existence


one and the same in all: and, since this impersonal existence iswithout ego, without conditioning quality, without desire, needor stimulus, it is immobile and immutable; eternally the same,it regards and supports but does not share or initiate the actionof the universe. The soul when it throws itself out into activeNature is the Gita’s Kshara, its mobile or mutable Purusha; thesame soul gathered back into pure silent self and essential spiritis the Gita’s Akshara, immobile or immutable Purusha.

Then evidently the straight and simplest way to get out ofthe close bondage of the active nature and back to spiritualfreedom is to cast away entirely all that belongs to the dynamicsof the ignorance and to convert the soul into a pure spiritualexistence. That is what is called becoming Brahman, brahma-bhuya. It is to put off the lower mental, vital, physical existenceand to put on the pure spiritual being. This can best be done bythe intelligence and will, buddhi, our present topmost principle.It has to turn away from the things of the lower existence andfirst and foremost from its effective knot of desire, from ourattachment to the objects pursued by the mind and the senses.One must become an understanding unattached in all things,asakta-buddhih. sarvatra. Then all desire passes away from thesoul in its silence; it is free from all longings, vigata-spr.hah. . Thatbrings with it or it makes possible the subjection of our lowerand the possession of our higher self, a possession dependent oncomplete self-mastery, secured by a radical victory and conquestover our mobile nature, jitatma. And all this amounts to anabsolute inner renunciation of the desire of things, sannyasa.Renunciation is the way to this perfection and the man whohas thus inwardly renounced all is described by the Gita asthe true Sannyasin. But because the word usually signifies aswell an outward renunciation or sometimes even that alone,the Teacher uses another word, tyaga, to distinguish the inwardfrom the outward withdrawal and says that Tyaga is better thanSannyasa. The ascetic way goes much farther in its recoil fromthe dynamic Nature. It is enamoured of renunciation for its ownsake and insists on an outward giving up of life and action, acomplete quietism of soul and nature. That, the Gita replies, is


not possible entirely so long as we live in the body. As far asit is possible, it may be done, but such a rigorous diminutionof works is not indispensable: it is not even really or at leastordinarily advisable. The one thing needed is a complete innerquietism and that is all the Gita’s sense of nais.karmya.

If we ask why this reservation, why this indulgence to thedynamic principle when our object is to become the pure self andthe pure self is described as inactive, akarta, the answer is thatthat inactivity and divorce of self from Nature are not the wholetruth of our spiritual release. Self and Nature are in the end onething; a total and perfect spirituality makes us one with all theDivine in self and in nature. In fact this becoming Brahman,this assumption into the self of eternal silence, brahma-bhuya,is not all our objective, but only the necessary immense basefor a still greater and more marvellous divine becoming, mad-bhava. And to get to that greatest spiritual perfection we haveindeed to be immobile in the self, silent in all our members,but also to act in the power, Shakti, Prakriti, the true and highforce of the Spirit. And if we ask how a simultaneity of whatseem to be two opposites is possible, the answer is that that isthe very nature of a complete spiritual being; always it has thisdouble poise of the Infinite. The impersonal self is silent; we toomust be inwardly silent, impersonal, withdrawn into the spirit.The impersonal self looks on all action as done not by it but byPrakriti; it regards with a pure equality all the working of herqualities, modes and forces: the soul impersonalised in the selfmust similarly regard all our actions as done not by itself but bythe qualities of Prakriti; it must be equal in all things, sarvatra.And at the same time in order that we may not stop here, inorder that we may eventually go forward and find a spiritualrule and direction in our works and not only a law of innerimmobility and silence, we are asked to impose on the intelli-gence and will the attitude of sacrifice, all our action inwardlychanged and turned into an offering to the Lord of Nature, to theBeing of whom she is the self-power, sva prakr.tih. , the supremeSpirit. Even we have eventually to renounce all into his hands,to abandon all personal initiation of action, sarvarambhah. , to


keep our natural selves only as an instrument of his works andhis purpose. These things have been already explained fully andthe Gita does not here insist, but uses simply without fartherqualification the common terms, sannyasa and nais.karmya.

A completest inner quietism once admitted as our necessarymeans towards living in the pure impersonal self, the questionhow practically it brings about that result is the next issue thatarises. “How, having attained this perfection, one thus attains tothe Brahman, hear from me, O son of Kunti, — that which is thesupreme concentrated direction of the knowledge.” The knowl-edge meant here is the Yoga of the Sankhyas, — the Yoga of pureknowledge accepted by the Gita, jnana-yogena sankhyanam, sofar as it is one with its own Yoga which includes also the way ofworks of the Yogins, karma-yogena yoginam. But all mentionof works is kept back for the moment. For by Brahman hereis meant at first the silent, the impersonal, the immutable. TheBrahman indeed is both for the Upanishads and the Gita allthat is and lives and moves; it is not solely an impersonal Infi-nite or an unthinkable and incommunicable Absolute, acintyamavyavaharyam. All this is Brahman, says the Upanishad; all thisis Vasudeva, says the Gita, — the supreme Brahman is all thatmoves or is stable and his hands and feet and eyes and headsand faces are on every side of us. But still there are two aspectsof this All, — his immutable eternal self that supports existenceand his self of active power that moves abroad in the worldmovement. It is only when we lose our limited ego personalityin the impersonality of the self that we arrive at the calm and freeoneness by which we can possess a true unity with the universalpower of the Divine in his world movement. Impersonality is adenial of limitation and division, and the cult of impersonality isa natural condition of true being, an indispensable preliminaryof true knowledge and therefore a first requisite of true action. Itis very clear that we cannot become one self with all or one withthe universal Spirit and his vast self-knowledge, his complex willand his widespread world-purpose by insisting on our limitedpersonality of ego; for that divides us from others and it makesus bound and self-centred in our view and in our will to action.


Imprisoned in personality we can only get at a limited union bysympathy or by some relative accommodation of ourselves to theview-point and feeling and will of others. To be one with all andwith the Divine and his will in the cosmos we must become atfirst impersonal and free from our ego and its claims and fromthe ego’s way of seeing ourselves and the world and others.And we cannot do this if there is not something in our beingother than the personality, other than the ego, an impersonalself one with all existences. To lose ego and be this impersonalself, to become this impersonal Brahman in our consciousness istherefore the first movement of this Yoga.

How then is this to be done? First, says the Gita, througha union of our purified intelligence with the pure spiritual sub-stance in us by the yoga of the buddhi, buddhya visuddhayayuktah. . This spiritual turning of the buddhi from the outwardand downward to the inward and upward look is the essenceof the Yoga of knowledge. The purified understanding has tocontrol the whole being, atmanam niyamya; it must draw usaway from attachment to the outward-going desires of the lowernature by a firm and a steady will, dhr.tya, which in its con-centration faces entirely towards the impersonality of the purespirit. The senses must abandon their objects, the mind must castaway the liking and disliking which these objects excite in it, —for the impersonal self has no desires and repulsions; these arevital reactions of our personality to the touches of things and thecorresponding response of the mind and senses to the touches istheir support and their basis. An entire control has to be acquiredover the mind, speech and body, over even the vital and physicalreactions, hunger and cold and heat and physical pleasure andpain; the whole of our being must become indifferent, unaffectedby these things, equal to all outward touches and to their inwardreactions and responses. This is the most direct and powerfulmethod, the straight and sharp way of Yoga. There has to be acomplete cessation of desire and attachment, vairagya; a strongresort to impersonal solitude, a constant union with the inmostself by meditation is demanded of the seeker. And yet the objectof this austere discipline is not to be self-centred in some supreme


egoistic seclusion and tranquillity of the sage and thinker averseto the trouble of participation in the world-action; the objectis to get rid of all ego. One must put away utterly first therajasic kind of egoism, egoistic strength and violence, arrogance,desire, wrath, the sense and instinct of possession, the urge ofthe passions, the strong lusts of life. But afterwards must bediscarded egoism of all kinds, even of the most sattwic type; forthe aim is to make soul and mind and life free in the end fromall imprisoning I-ness and my-ness, nirmama. The extinction ofego and its demands of all sorts is the method put before us. Forthe pure impersonal self which, unshaken, supports the universehas no egoism and makes no demand on thing or person; it iscalm and luminously impassive and silently regards all thingsand persons with an equal and impartial eye of self-knowledgeand world-knowledge. Then clearly it is by living inwardly in asimilar or identical impersonality that the soul within, releasedfrom the siege of things, can best become capable of onenesswith this immutable Brahman which regards and knows but isnot affected by the forms and mutations of the universe.

This first pursuit of impersonality as enjoined by the Gitabrings with it evidently a certain completest inner quietism andis identical in its inmost parts and principles of practice withthe method of Sannyasa. And yet there is a point at which itstendency of withdrawal from the claims of dynamic Nature andthe external world is checked and a limit imposed to prevent theinner quietism from deepening into refusal of action and a phys-ical withdrawal. The renunciation of their objects by the senses,vis.ayams tyaktva, is to be of the nature of Tyaga; it must be agiving up of all sensuous attachment, rasa, not a refusal of theintrinsic necessary activity of the senses. One must move amongsurrounding things and act on the objects of the sense-field witha pure, true and intense, a simple and absolute operation ofthe senses for their utility to the spirit in divine action, kevalairindriyais caran, and not at all for the fulfilment of desire. Thereis to be vairagya, not in the common significance of disgust oflife or distaste for the world action, but renunciation of raga,as also of its opposite, dves.a. There must be a withdrawal from


all mental and vital liking as from all mental and vital dislikingwhatsoever. And this is asked not for extinction, but in orderthat there may be a perfect enabling equality in which the spiritcan give an unhampered and unlimited assent to the integral andcomprehensive divine vision of things and to the integral divineaction in Nature. A continual resort to meditation, dhyana-yoga-paro nityam, is the firm means by which the soul of man canrealise its self of Power and its self of silence. And yet there mustbe no abandonment of the active life for a life of pure meditation;action must always be done as a sacrifice to the supreme Spirit.This movement of recoil in the path of Sannyasa prepares anabsorbed disappearance of the individual in the Eternal, andrenunciation of action and life in the world is an indispensablestep in the process. But in the Gita’s path of Tyaga it is a prepa-ration rather for the turning of our whole life and existenceand of all action into an integral oneness with the serene andimmeasurable being, consciousness and will of the Divine, andit preludes and makes possible a vast and total passing upwardof the soul out of the lower ego to the inexpressible perfectionof the supreme spiritual nature, para prakr.ti.

This decisive departure of the Gita’s thought is indicated inthe next two verses, of which the first runs with a significant se-quence, “When one has become the Brahman, when one neithergrieves nor desires, when one is equal to all beings, then one getsthe supreme love and devotion to Me.” But in the narrow pathof knowledge bhakti, devotion to the personal Godhead, can beonly an inferior and preliminary movement; the end, the climaxis the disappearance of personality in a featureless oneness withthe impersonal Brahman in which there can be no place forbhakti: for there is none to be adored and none to adore; allelse is lost in the silent immobile identity of the Jiva with theAtman. Here there is given to us something yet higher than theImpersonal, — here there is the supreme Self who is the supremeIshwara, here there is the supreme Soul and its supreme nature,here there is the Purushottama who is beyond the personal andimpersonal and reconciles them on his eternal heights. The egopersonality still disappears in the silence of the Impersonal, but


at the same time there remains even with this silence at the backthe action of a supreme Self, one greater than the Impersonal.There is no longer the lower blind and limping action of the egoand the three gunas, but instead the vast self-determining move-ment of an infinite spiritual Force, a free immeasurable Shakti.All Nature becomes the power of the one Divine and all actionhis action through the individual as channel and instrument. Inplace of the ego there comes forward conscious and manifestthe true spiritual individual in the freedom of his real nature, inthe power of his supernal status, in the majesty and splendourof his eternal kinship to the Divine, an imperishable portion ofthe supreme Godhead, an indestructible power of the supremePrakriti, mamaivamsah. sanatanah. , para prakr.tir jıva-bhuta. Thesoul of man then feels itself to be one in a supreme spiritualimpersonality with the Purushottama and in its universalisedpersonality a manifest power of the Godhead. Its knowledge isa light of his knowledge; its will is a force of his will; its unitywith all in the universe is a play of his eternal oneness. It is in thisdouble realisation, it is in this union of two sides of an ineffableTruth of existence by either and both of which man can approachand enter into his own infinite being, that the liberated man hasto live and act and feel and determine or rather have determinedfor him by a greatest power of his supreme self his relationswith all and the inner and outer workings of his spirit. And inthat unifying realisation adoration, love and devotion are notonly still possible, but are a large, an inevitable and a crown-ing portion of the highest experience. The One who eternallybecomes the Many, the Many who in their apparent divisionare still eternally one, the Highest who displays in us this secretand mystery of existence, not dispersed by his multiplicity, notlimited by his oneness, — this is the integral knowledge, this isthe reconciling experience which makes one capable of liberatedaction, muktasya karma.

This knowledge comes, says the Gita, by a highest bhakti.It is attained when the mind exceeds itself by a supramentaland high spiritual seeing of things and when the heart too risesin unison beyond our more ignorant mental forms of love and


devotion to a love that is calm and deep and luminous withwidest knowledge, to a supreme delight in God and an illimitableadoration, the unperturbed ecstasy, the spiritual Ananda. Whenthe soul has lost its separative personality, when it has becomethe Brahman, it is then that it can live in the true Person andcan attain to the supreme revealing bhakti for the Purushottamaand can come to know him utterly by the power of its profoundbhakti, its heart’s knowledge, bhaktya mam abhijanati. That isthe integral knowledge, when the heart’s fathomless vision com-pletes the mind’s absolute experience, — samagram mam jnatva.“He comes to know Me,” says the Gita, “who and how much Iam and in all the reality and principles of my being, yavan yascasmi tattvatah. .” This integral knowledge is the knowledge ofthe Divine present in the individual; it is the entire experience ofthe Lord secret in the heart of man, revealed now as the supremeSelf of his existence, the Sun of all his illumined consciousness,the Master and Power of all his works, the divine Fountain of allhis soul’s love and delight, the Lover and Beloved of his worshipand adoration. It is the knowledge too of the Divine extendedin the universe, of the Eternal from whom all proceeds andin whom all lives and has its being, of the Self and Spirit of thecosmos, of Vasudeva who has become all this that is, of the Lordof cosmic existence who reigns over the works of Nature. It is theknowledge of the divine Purusha luminous in his transcendenteternity, the form of whose being escapes from the thought of themind but not from its silence; it is the entire living experience ofhim as absolute Self, supreme Brahman, supreme Soul, supremeGodhead: for that seemingly incommunicable Absolute is at thesame time and even in that highest status the originating Spiritof the cosmic action and Lord of all these existences. The soulof the liberated man thus enters by a reconciling knowledge,penetrates by a perfect simultaneous delight of the transcendentDivine, of the Divine in the individual and of the Divine in theuniverse into the Purushottama, mam visate tadanantaram. Hebecomes one with him in his self-knowledge and self-experience,one with him in his being and consciousness and will and world-knowledge and world-impulse, one with him in the universe and


in his unity with all creatures in the universe and one with himbeyond world and individual in the transcendence of the eternalInfinite, sasvatam padam avyayam. This is the culmination ofthe supreme bhakti that is at the core of the supreme knowledge.

And it then becomes evident how action continual and un-ceasing and of all kinds without diminution or abandonment ofany part of the activities of life can be not only quite consistentwith a supreme spiritual experience, but as forceful a means ofreaching this highest spiritual condition as bhakti or knowledge.Nothing can be more positive than the Gita’s statement in thismatter. “And by doing also all actions always lodged in Me heattains by my grace the eternal and imperishable status.” Thisliberating action is of the character of works done in a profoundunion of the will and all the dynamic parts of our nature withthe Divine in ourself and the cosmos. It is done first as a sacrificewith the idea still of our self as the doer. It is done next withoutthat idea and with a perception of the Prakriti as the sole doer. Itis done last with the knowledge of that Prakriti as the supremepower of the Divine and a renunciation, a surrender of all ouractions to him with the individual as a channel only and aninstrument. Our works then proceed straight from the Self andDivine within us, are a part of the indivisible universal action,are initiated and performed not by us but by a vast transcendentShakti. All that we do is done for the sake of the Lord seatedin the heart of all, for the Godhead in the individual and forthe fulfilment of his will in us, for the sake of the Divine in theworld, for the good of all beings, for the fulfilment of the worldaction and the world purpose, or in one word for the sake ofthe Purushottama and done really by him through his universalShakti. These divine works, whatever their form or outwardcharacter, cannot bind, but are rather a potent means for risingout of this lower Prakriti of the three gunas to the perfection ofthe supreme, divine and spiritual nature. Disengaged from thesemixed and limited dharmas we escape into the immortal Dharmawhich comes upon us when we make ourselves one in all ourconsciousness and action with the Purushottama. That onenesshere brings with it the power to rise there into the immortality


beyond Time. There we shall exist in his eternal transcendence.Thus these eight verses carefully read in the light of the

knowledge already given by the Teacher are a brief, but still acomprehensive indication of the whole essential idea, the entirecentral method, all the kernel of the complete Yoga of the Gita.

XXII

The Supreme Secret1

THE ESSENCE of the teaching and the Yoga has thus beengiven to the disciple on the field of his work and battle andthe divine Teacher now proceeds to apply it to his action,

but in a way that makes it applicable to all action. Attached to acrucial example, spoken to the protagonist of Kurukshetra, thewords bear a much wider significance and are a universal rulefor all who are ready to ascend above the ordinary mentalityand to live and act in the highest spiritual consciousness. Tobreak out of ego and personal mind and see everything in thewideness of the self and spirit, to know God and adore him inhis integral truth and in all his aspects, to surrender all oneself tothe transcendent Soul of nature and existence, to possess and bepossessed by the divine consciousness, to be one with the One inuniversality of love and delight and will and knowledge, one inhim with all beings, to do works as an adoration and a sacrificeon the divine foundation of a world in which all is God and inthe divine status of a liberated spirit, is the sense of the Gita’sYoga. It is a transition from the apparent to the supreme spiritualand real truth of our being, and one enters into it by putting offthe many limitations of the separative consciousness and themind’s attachment to the passion and unrest and ignorance, thelesser light and knowledge, the sin and virtue, the dual lawand standard of the lower nature. Therefore, says the Teacher,“devoting all thyself to me, giving up in thy conscious mind allthy actions into Me, resorting to Yoga of the will and intelligencebe always one in heart and consciousness with Me. If thou artthat at all times, then by my grace thou shalt pass safe throughall difficult and perilous passages; but if from egoism thou hearnot, thou shalt fall into perdition. Vain is this thy resolve, that

1 Gita, XVIII. 57-66, 73.

The Supreme Secret 541

in thy egoism thou thinkest, saying ‘I will not fight’; thy natureshall appoint thee to thy work. What from delusion thou desirestnot to do, that helplessly thou shalt do bound by thy own workborn of thy swabhava. The Lord is stationed in the heart ofall existences, O Arjuna, and turns them all round and roundmounted on a machine by his Maya. In him take refuge in everyway of thy being and by his grace thou shalt come to the supremepeace and the eternal status.”

These are lines that carry in them the innermost heart ofthis Yoga and lead to its crowning experience and we mustunderstand them in their innermost spirit and the whole vastnessof that high summit of experience. The words express the mostcomplete, intimate and living relation possible between God andman; they are instinct with the concentrated force of religiousfeeling that springs from the human being’s absolute adoration,his upward surrender of his whole existence, his unreserved andperfect self-giving to the transcendent and universal Divinityfrom whom he comes and in whom he lives. This stress of feelingis in entire consonance with the high and enduring place that theGita assigns to bhakti, to the love of God, to the adoration of theHighest, as the inmost spirit and motive of the supreme actionand the crown and core of the supreme knowledge. The phrasesused and the spiritual emotion with which they vibrate seem togive the most intense prominence possible and an utmost impor-tance to the personal truth and presence of the Godhead. It is noabstract Absolute of the philosopher, no indifferent impersonalPresence or ineffable Silence intolerant of all relations to whomthis complete surrender of all our works can be made and thiscloseness and intimacy of oneness with him in all the parts ofour conscious existence imposed as the condition and law of ourperfection or of whom this divine intervention and protectionand deliverance are the promise. It is a Master of our works,a Friend and Lover of our soul, an intimate Spirit of our life,an indwelling and overdwelling Lord of all our personal andimpersonal self and nature who alone can utter to us this nearand moving message. And yet this is not the common relationestablished by the religions between man living in his sattwic or


other ego-mind and some personal form and aspect of the Deity,is.t.a-deva, constructed by that mind or offered to it to satisfy itslimited ideal, aspiration or desire. That is the ordinary sense andactual character of the normal mental being’s religious devotion;but here there is something wider that passes beyond the mindand its limits and its dharmas. It is something deeper than themind that offers and something greater than the Ishta-deva thatreceives the surrender.

That which surrenders here is the Jiva, the essential soul,the original central and spiritual being of man, the individualPurusha. It is the Jiva delivered from the limiting and ignorantego-sense who knows himself not as a separate personality but asan eternal portion and power and soul-becoming of the Divine,amsa sanatana, the Jiva released and uplifted by the passingaway of ignorance and established in the light and freedom ofhis own true and supreme nature which is one with that of theEternal. It is this central spiritual being in us who thus entersinto a perfect and closely real relation of delight and union withthe origin and continent and governing Self and Power of ourexistence. And he who receives our surrender is no limited Deitybut the Purushottama, the one eternal Godhead, the one supremeSoul of all that is and of all Nature, the original transcendentSpirit of existence. An immutable impersonal self-existence is hisfirst obvious spiritual self-presentation to the experience of ourliberated knowledge, the first sign of his presence, the first touchand impression of his substance. A universal and transcendentinfinite Person or Purusha is the mysterious hidden secret of hisvery being, unthinkable in form of mind, acintya-rupa, but verynear and present to the powers of our consciousness, emotion,will and knowledge when they are lifted out of themselves, outof their blind and petty forms into a luminous spiritual, animmeasurable supramental Ananda and power and gnosis. It isHe, ineffable Absolute but also Friend and Lord and Enlightenerand Lover, who is the object of this most complete devotion andapproach and this most intimate inner becoming and surrender.This union, this relation is a thing lifted beyond the forms andlaws of the limiting mind, too high for all these inferior dharmas;


it is a truth of our self and spirit. And yet or rather therefore,because it is the truth of our self and spirit, the truth of itsoneness with that Spirit from which all comes and by it and asits derivations and suggestions all exists and travails, it is not anegation but a fulfilment of all that mind and life point to andbear in them as their secret and unaccomplished significance.Thus it is not by a nirvana, an exclusion and negating extinctionof all that we are here, but by a nirvana, an exclusion and negat-ing extinction of ignorance and ego and a consequent ineffablefulfilment of our knowledge and will and heart’s aspiration, anuplifted and limitless living of them in the Divine, in the Eternal,nivasis.yasi mayyeva, a transfigurement and transference of allour consciousness to a greater inner status that there comes thissupreme perfection and release in the spirit.

The crux of the spiritual problem, the character of this tran-sition of which it is so difficult for the normal mind of manto get a true apprehension, turns altogether upon the capitaldistinction between the ignorant life of the ego in the lowernature and the large and luminous existence of the liberatedJiva in his own true spiritual nature. The renunciation of thefirst must be complete, the transition to the second absolute.This is the distinction on which the Gita dwells here with allpossible emphasis. On the one side is this poor, trepidant, brag-gart egoistic condition of consciousness, ahankr.ta bhava, thecrippling narrowness of this little helpless separative personalityaccording to whose view-point we ordinarily think and act, feeland respond to the touches of existence. On the other are the vastspiritual reaches of immortal fullness, bliss and knowledge intowhich we are admitted through union with the divine Being, ofwhom we are then a manifestation and expression in the eternallight and no longer a disguise in the darkness of the ego-nature.It is the completeness of this union which is indicated by theGita’s satatam mac-cittah. . The life of the ego is founded on aconstruction of the apparent mental, vital and physical truthof existence, on a nexus of pragmatic relations between theindividual soul and Nature, on an intellectual, emotional andsensational interpretation of things used by the little limited I in


us to maintain and satisfy the ideas and desires of its boundedseparate personality amid the vast action of the universe. All ourdharmas, all the ordinary standards by which we determine ourview of things and our knowledge and our action, proceed uponthis narrow and limiting basis, and to follow them even in thewidest wheelings round our ego centre does not carry us out ofthis petty circle. It is a circle in which the soul is a contented orstruggling prisoner, for ever subject to the mixed compulsionsof Nature.

For Purusha veils himself in this round, veils his divine andimmortal being in ignorance and is subject to the law of aninsistent limiting Prakriti. That law is the compelling rule ofthe three gunas. It is a triple stair that stumbles upward to-wards the divine light but cannot reach it. At its base is thelaw or dharma of inertia: the tamasic man inertly obeys in acustomary mechanical action the suggestions and impulses, theround of will of his material and his half-intellectualised vitaland sensational nature. In the middle intervenes the kinetic lawor dharma; the rajasic man, vital, dynamic, active, attempts toimpose himself on his world and environment, but only increasesthe wounding weight and tyrant yoke of his turbulent passions,desires and egoisms, the burden of his restless self-will, the yokeof his rajasic nature. At the top presses down upon life theharmonic regulative law or dharma; the sattwic man attemptsto erect and follow his limited personal standards of reasoningknowledge, enlightened utility or mechanised virtue, his reli-gions and philosophies and ethical formulas, mental systems andconstructions, fixed channels of idea and conduct which do notagree with the totality of the meaning of life and are constantlybeing broken in the movement of the wider universal purpose.The dharma of the sattwic man is the highest in the circle of thegunas; but that too is a limited view and a dwarfed standard.Its imperfect indications lead to a petty and relative perfection;temporarily satisfying to the enlightened personal ego, it is notfounded either on the whole truth of the self or on the wholetruth of Nature.

And in fact the actual life of man is not at any time one


of these things alone, neither a mechanical routine executionof the first crude law of Nature, nor the struggle of a kineticsoul of action, nor a victorious emergence of conscious lightand reason and good and knowledge. There is a mixture ofall these dharmas out of which our will and intelligence makea more or less arbitrary construction to be realised as best itcan, but never in fact realised except by compromise with othercompelling things in the universal Prakriti. The sattwic idealsof our enlightened will and reason are either themselves com-promises, at best progressive compromises, subject to a constantimperfection and flux of change, or if absolute in their character,they can be followed only as a counsel of perfection ignored forthe most part in practice or successful only as a partial influence.And if sometimes we imagine we have completely realised them,it is because we ignore in ourselves the subconscious or half-conscious mixture of other powers and motives that are usuallyas much or more than our ideals the real force in our action. Thatself-ignorance constitutes the whole vanity of human reason andself-righteousness; it is the dark secret lining behind the spotlesswhite outsides of human sainthood and alone makes possiblethe specious egoisms of knowledge and virtue. The best humanknowledge is a half knowledge and the highest human virtue athing of mixed quality and, even when most sincerely absolutein standard, sufficiently relative in practice. As a general lawof living the absolute sattwic ideals cannot prevail in conduct;indispensable as a power for the betterment and raising of per-sonal aspiration and conduct, their insistence modifies life butcannot wholly change it, and their perfect fulfilment images itselfonly in a dream of the future or a world of heavenly nature freefrom the mixed strain of our terrestrial existence. It cannot beotherwise because neither the nature of this world nor the natureof man is or can be one single piece made of the pure stuff ofsattwa.

The first door of escape we see out of this limitation of ourpossibilities, out of this confused mixture of dharmas is in acertain high trend towards impersonality, a movement inwardstowards something large and universal and calm and free and


right and pure hidden now by the limiting mind of ego. Thedifficulty is that while we can feel a positive release into thisimpersonality in moments of the quiet and silence of our be-ing, an impersonal activity is by no means so easy to realise.The pursuit of an impersonal truth or an impersonal will inour conduct is vitiated so long as we live at all in our normalmind by that which is natural and inevitable to that mind, thelaw of our personality, the subtle urge of our vital nature, thecolour of ego. The pursuit of impersonal truth is turned by theseinfluences into an unsuspected cloak for a system of intellec-tual preferences supported by our mind’s limiting insistence; thepursuit of a disinterested impersonal action is converted into agreater authority and apparent high sanction for our personalwill’s interested selections and blind arbitrary persistences. Onthe other hand an absolute impersonality would seem to im-pose an equally absolute quietism, and this would mean thatall action is bound to the machinery of the ego and the threegunas and to recede from life and its works the only way out ofthe circle. This impersonal silence however is not the last wordof wisdom in the matter, because it is not the only way andcrown or not all the way and the last crown of self-realisationopen to our endeavour. There is a mightier fuller more positivespiritual experience in which the circle of our egoistic personalityand the round of the mind’s limitations vanish in the unwalledinfinity of a greatest self and spirit and yet life and its worksnot only remain still acceptable and possible but reach up andout to their widest spiritual completeness and assume a grandascending significance.

There have been different gradations in this movement tobridge the gulf between an absolute impersonality and the dy-namic possibilities of our nature. The thought and practice ofthe Mahayana approached this difficult reconciliation throughthe experience of a deep desirelessness and a large dissolvingfreedom from mental and vital attachment and sanskaras and onthe positive side a universal altruism, a fathomless compassionfor the world and its creatures which became as it were the floodand outpouring of the high Nirvanic state on life and action.


That reconciliation was equally the sense of yet another spiri-tual experience, more conscious of a world significance, moreprofound, kindling, richly comprehensive on the side of action,a step nearer to the thought of the Gita: this experience we findor can at least read behind the utterances of the Taoist thinkers.There there seems to be an impersonal ineffable Eternal who isspirit and at the same time the one life of the universe: it supportsand flows impartially in all things, samam brahma; it is a Onethat is nothing, Asat, because other than all that we perceiveand yet the totality of all these existences. The fluid personalitythat forms like foam on this Infinite, the mobile ego with itsattachments and repulsions, its likings and dislikings, its fixedmental distinctions, is an effective image that veils and deformsto us the one reality, Tao, the supreme All and Nothing. Thatcan be touched only by losing personality and its little structuralforms in the unseizable universal and eternal Presence and, thisonce achieved, we live in that a real life and have another greaterconsciousness which makes us penetrate all things, ourselvespenetrable to all eternal influences. Here, as in the Gita, thehighest way would seem to be a complete openness and self-surrender to the Eternal. “Your body is not your own,” says theTaoist thinker, “it is the delegated image of God: your life is notyour own, it is the delegated harmony of God: your individualityis not your own, it is the delegated adaptability of God.” Andhere too a vast perfection and liberated action are the dynamicresult of the soul’s surrender. The works of ego personality are aseparative running counter to the bias of universal nature. Thisfalse movement must be replaced by a wise and still passivityin the hands of the universal and eternal Power, a passivity thatmakes us adaptable to the infinite action, in harmony with itstruth, plastic to the shaping breath of the Spirit. The man whohas this harmony may be motionless within and absorbed insilence, but his Self will appear free from disguises, the divineInfluence will be at work in him and while he abides in tranquil-lity and an inward inaction, nais.karmya, yet he will act with anirresistible power and myriads of things and beings will moveand gather under his influence. The impersonal force of the Self


takes up his works, movements no longer deformed by ego,and sovereignly acts through him for the keeping together andcontrol of the world and its peoples, loka-sangraharthaya.

There is little difference between these experiences and thefirst impersonal activity inculcated by the Gita. The Gita alsodemands of us renunciation of desire, attachment and ego, tran-scendence of the lower nature and the breaking up of our per-sonality and its little formations. The Gita also demands of usto live in the Self and Spirit, to see the Self and Spirit in all andall in the Self and Spirit and all as the Self and Spirit. It demandsof us like the Taoist thinker to renounce our natural personalityand its works into the Self, the Spirit, the Eternal, the Brahman,atmani sannyasya, brahman. i. And there is this coincidence be-cause that is always man’s highest and freest possible experienceof a quietistic inner largeness and silence reconciled with anouter dynamic active living, the two coexistent or fused togetherin the impersonal infinite reality and illimitable action of the oneimmortal Power and sole eternal Existence. But the Gita addsa phrase of immense import that alters everything, atmani athomayi. The demand is to see all things in the self and then in “Me”the Ishwara, to renounce all action into the Self, Spirit, Brahmanand thence into the supreme Person, the Purushottama. Thereis here a still greater and profounder complex of spiritual expe-rience, a larger transmutation of the significance of human life,a more mystic and heart-felt sweep of the return of the streamto the ocean, the restoration of personal works and the cosmicaction to the Eternal Worker. The stress on pure impersonalityhas this difficulty and incompleteness for us that it reduces theinner person, the spiritual individual, that persistent miracle ofour inmost being, to a temporary, illusive and mutable formationin the Infinite. The Infinite alone exists and except in a passingplay has no true regard on the soul of the living creature. Therecan be no real and permanent relation between the soul in manand the Eternal, if that soul is even as the always renewable bodyno more than a transient phenomenon in the Infinite.

It is true that the ego and its limited personality are even sucha temporary and mutable formation of Nature and therefore it


must be broken and we must feel ourselves one with all andinfinite. But the ego is not the real person; when it has beendissolved there still remains the spiritual individual, there is stillthe eternal Jiva. The ego limitation disappears and the soul livesin a profound unity with the One and feels its universal unitywith all things. And yet it is still our own soul that enjoys thisexpanse and oneness. The universal action, even when it is feltas the action of one and the same energy in all, even when it isexperienced as the initiation and movement of the Ishwara, stilltakes different forms in different souls of men, amsah. sanatanah. ,and a different turn in their nature. The light of spiritual knowl-edge, the manifold universal Shakti, the eternal delight of beingstream into us and around us, concentrate in the soul and flowout on the surrounding world from each as from a centre ofliving spiritual consciousness whose circumference is lost in theinfinite. More, the spiritual individual remains as a little universeof divine existence at once independent and inseparable from thewhole infinite universe of the divine self-manifestation of whichwe see a petty portion around us. A portion of the Transcendent,creative, he creates his own world around him even while heretains this cosmic consciousness in which are all others. If it beobjected that this is an illusion which must disappear when heretreats into the transcendent Absolute, there is after all no verycertain certainty in that matter. For it is still the soul in man thatis the enjoyer of this release, as it was the living spiritual centreof the divine action and manifestation; there is something morethan the mere self-breaking of an illusory shell of individuality inthe Infinite. This mystery of our existence signifies that what weare is not only a temporary name and form of the One, but as wemay say, a soul and spirit of the Divine Oneness. Our spiritualindividuality of which the ego is only a misleading shadow andprojection in the ignorance has or is a truth that persists beyondthe ignorance; there is something of us that dwells for ever in thesupreme nature of the Purushottama, nivasis.yasi mayi. This isthe profound comprehensiveness of the teaching of the Gita thatwhile it recognises the truth of the universalised impersonalityinto which we enter by the extinction of ego, brahma-nirvan. a,


— for indeed without it there can be no liberation or at leastno absolute release, — it recognises too the persistent spiritualtruth of our personality as a factor of the highest experience.Not this natural but that divine and central being in us is theeternal Jiva. It is the Ishwara, Vasudeva who is all things, thattakes up our mind and life and body for the enjoyment of thelower Prakriti; it is the supreme Prakriti, the original spiritualnature of the supreme Purusha that holds together the universeand appears in it as the Jiva. This Jiva then is a portion of thePurushottama’s original divine spiritual being, a living power ofthe living Eternal. He is not merely a temporary form of lowerNature, but an eternal portion of the Highest in his supremePrakriti, an eternal conscious ray of the divine existence andas everlasting as that supernal Prakriti. One side of the highestperfection and status of our liberated consciousness must thenbe to assume the true place of the Jiva in a supreme spiritualNature, there to dwell in the glory of the supreme Purusha andthere to have the joy of the eternal spiritual oneness.

This mystery of our being implies necessarily a similarsupreme mystery of the being of the Purushottama, rahasyamuttamam. It is not an exclusive impersonality of the Absolutethat is the highest secret. This highest secret is the miracle ofa supreme Person and apparent vast Impersonal that are one,an immutable transcendent Self of all things and a Spirit thatmanifests itself here at the very foundation of cosmos as aninfinite and multiple personality acting everywhere, — a Selfand Spirit revealed to our last, closest, profoundest experienceas an illimitable Being who accepts us and takes us to him, notinto a blank of featureless existence, but most positively, deeply,wonderfully into all Himself and in all the ways of his and ourconscious existence. This highest experience and this largest wayof seeing open a profound, moving and endless significance toour parts of nature, our knowledge, will, heart’s love and ado-ration, which is lost or diminished if we put an exclusive stresson the impersonal, because that stress suppresses or minimisesor does not allow of the intensest fulfilment of movements andpowers that are a portion of our deepest nature, intensities and


luminosities that are attached to the closest essential fibres ofour self-experience. It is not the austerity of knowledge alonethat can help us; there is room and infinite room for the heart’slove and aspiration illumined and uplifted by knowledge, amore mystically clear, a greater calmly passionate knowledge. Itis by the perpetual unified closeness of our heart-consciousness,mind-consciousness, all consciousness, satatam maccittah. , thatwe get the widest, the deepest, the most integral experience ofour oneness with the Eternal. A nearest oneness in all the being,profoundly individual in a divine passion even in the midst ofuniversality, even at the top of transcendence is here enjoinedon the human soul as its way to reach the Highest and its wayto possess the perfection and the divine consciousness to whichit is called by its nature as a spirit. The intelligence and will haveto turn the whole existence in all its parts to the Ishwara, to thedivine Self and Master of that whole existence, buddhi-yogamupasritya. The heart has to cast all other emotion into the delightof oneness with him and the love of Him in all creatures. Thesense spiritualised has to see and hear and feel him everywhere.The life has to be utterly his life in the Jiva. All the actions haveto proceed from his sole power and sole initiation in the will,knowledge, organs of action, senses, vital parts, body. This wayis deeply impersonal because the separateness of ego is abolishedfor the soul universalised and restored to transcendence. Andyet it is intimately personal because it soars to a transcendentpassion and power of indwelling and oneness. A featurelessextinction may be a rigorous demand of the mind’s logic ofself-annulment; it is not the last word of the supreme mystery,rahasyam uttamam.

The refusal of Arjuna to persevere in his divinely appointedwork proceeded from the ego sense in him, ahankara. Behindit was a mixture and confusion and tangled error of ideas andimpulsions of the sattwic, rajasic, tamasic ego, the vital nature’sfear of sin and its personal consequences, the heart’s recoil fromindividual grief and suffering, the clouded reason’s covering ofegoistic impulses by self-deceptive specious pleas of right andvirtue, our nature’s ignorant shrinking from the ways of God


because they seem other than the ways of man and imposethings terrible and unpleasant on his nervous and emotionalparts and his intelligence. The spiritual consequences will beinfinitely worse now than before, now that a higher truth and agreater way and spirit of action have been revealed to him, if yetpersisting in his egoism he perseveres in a vain and impossiblerefusal. For it is a vain resolution, a futile recoil, since it springsonly from a temporary failure of strength, a strong but passingdeviation from the principle of energy of his inmost character,and is not the true will and way of his nature. If now he castsdown his arms, he will yet be compelled by that nature to resumethem when he sees the battle and slaughter go on without him,his abstention a defeat of all for which he has lived, the causefor whose service he was born weakened and bewildered by theabsence or inactivity of its protagonist, vanquished and afflictedby the cynical and unscrupulous strength of the champions of aself-regarding unrighteousness and injustice. And in this returnthere will be no spiritual virtue. It was a confusion of the ideasand feelings of the ego mind that impelled his refusal; it will behis nature working through a restoration of the characteristicideas and feelings of the ego mind that will compel him to annulhis refusal. But whatever the direction, this continued subjectionto the ego will mean a worse, a more fatal spiritual refusal, aperdition, vinas.t.i; for it will be a definite falling away from agreater truth of his being than that which he has followed inthe ignorance of the lower nature. He has been admitted to ahigher consciousness, a new self-realisation, he has been shownthe possibility of a divine instead of an egoistic action; the gateshave been opened before him of a divine and spiritual in placeof a merely intellectual, emotional, sensuous and vital life. He iscalled to be no longer a great blind instrument, but a conscioussoul and an enlightened power and vessel of the Godhead.

For there is this possibility within us: there is open to useven at our human highest this consummation and transcen-dence. The ordinary mind and life of man is a half-enlightenedand mostly an ignorant development and a partial uncompletedmanifestation of something concealed within him. There is a


godhead there concealed from himself, subliminal to his con-sciousness, immobilised behind the obscure veil of a workingthat is not wholly his own and the secret of which he has notyet mastered. He finds himself in the world thinking and willingand feeling and acting and he takes himself instinctively or in-tellectually conceives of himself or at least conducts his life as aseparate self-existent being who has the freedom of his thoughtand will and feeling and action. He bears the burden of his sinand error and suffering and takes the responsibility and meritof his knowledge and virtue; he claims the right to satisfy hissattwic, rajasic or tamasic ego and arrogates the power to shapehis own destiny and to turn the world to his own uses. It is thisidea of himself through which Nature works in him, and shedeals with him according to his own conception, but fulfils allthe time the will of the greater Spirit within her. The error ofthis self-view of man is like most of his errors the distortion ofa truth, a distortion that creates a whole system of erroneousand yet effective values. What is true of his spirit he attributesto his ego-personality and gives it a false application, a falseform and a mass of ignorant consequences. The ignorance liesin this fundamental deficiency of his surface consciousness thathe identifies himself only with the outward mechanical part ofhim which is a convenience of Nature and with so much onlyof the soul as reflects and is reflected in these workings. Hemisses the greater inner spirit within which gives to all his mindand life and creation and action an unfulfilled promise and ahidden significance. A universal Nature here obeys the power ofthe Spirit who is the master of the universe, shapes each creatureand determines its action according to the law of its own nature,Swabhava, shapes man too and determines his action accordingto the general law of nature of his kind, the law of a mental beingemmeshed and ignorant in the life and the body, shapes too eachman and determines his individual action according to the lawof his own distinct type and the variations of his own originalswabhava. It is this universal Nature that forms and directs themechanical workings of the body and the instinctive operationsof our vital and nervous parts; and there our subjection to her


is very obvious. And she has formed and directs the action too,hardly less mechanical as things now are, of our sense-mindand will and intelligence. Only, while in the animal the mindworkings are a wholly mechanical obedience to Prakriti, manhas this distinction that he embodies a conscious developmentin which the soul more actively participates, and that gives tohis outward mentality the sense, useful to him, indispensable,but very largely a misleading sense, of a certain freedom andincreasing mastery of his instrumental nature. And it is especiallymisleading because it blinds him to the hard fact of his bondageand his false idea of freedom prevents him from finding a trueliberty and lordship. For the freedom and mastery of man overhis nature are hardly even real and cannot be complete until hebecomes aware of the Divinity within him and is in possession ofhis own real self and spirit other than the ego, atmavan. It is thatwhich Nature is labouring to express in mind and life and body;it is that which imposes on her this or that law of being andworking, Swabhava; it is that which shapes the outward destinyand the evolution of the soul within us. It is therefore only whenhe is in possession of his real self and spirit that his nature canbecome a conscious instrument and enlightened power of thegodhead.

For then, when we enter into that inmost self of our exis-tence, we come to know that in us and in all is the one Spiritand Godhead whom all Nature serves and manifests and weourselves are soul of this Soul, spirit of this Spirit, our body hisdelegated image, our life a movement of the rhythm of his life,our mind a sheath of his consciousness, our senses his instru-ments, our emotions and sensations the seekings of his delightof being, our actions a means of his purpose, our freedom onlya shadow, suggestion or glimpse while we are ignorant, butwhen we know him and ourselves a prolongation and effectivechannel of his immortal freedom. Our masteries are a reflectionof his power at work, our best knowledge a partial light of hisknowledge, the highest most potent will of our spirit a projectionand delegation of the will of this Spirit in all things who is theMaster and Soul of the universe. It is the Lord seated in the heart


of every creature who has been turning us in all our inner andouter action during the ignorance as if mounted on a machineon the wheel of this Maya of the lower Nature. And whetherobscure in the Ignorance or luminous in the Knowledge, it is forhim in us and him in the world that we have our existence. Tolive consciously and integrally in this knowledge and this truthis to escape from ego and break out of Maya. All other highestdharmas are only a preparation for this Dharma, and all Yoga isonly a means by which we can come first to some kind of unionand finally, if we have the full light, to an integral union with theMaster and supreme Soul and Self of our existence. The greatestYoga is to take refuge from all the perplexities and difficultiesof our nature with this indwelling Lord of all Nature, to turn tohim with our whole being, with the life and body and sense andmind and heart and understanding, with our whole dedicatedknowledge and will and action, sarva-bhavena, in every way ofour conscious self and our instrumental nature. And when wecan at all times and entirely do this, then the divine Light andLove and Power takes hold of us, fills both self and instrumentsand leads us safe through all the doubts and difficulties andperplexities and perils that beset our soul and our life, leads usto a supreme peace and the spiritual freedom of our immortaland eternal status, param santim, sthanam sasvatam.

For after giving out all the laws, the dharmas, and the deep-est essence of its Yoga, after saying that beyond all the firstsecrets revealed to the mind of man by the transforming lightof spiritual knowledge, guhyat, this is a still deeper more secrettruth, guhyataram, the Gita suddenly declares that there is yet asupreme word that it has to speak, paramam vacah. , and a mostsecret truth of all, sarva-guhyatamam. This secret of secrets theTeacher will tell to Arjuna as his highest good because he is thechosen and beloved soul, is.t.a. For evidently, as had already beendeclared by the Upanishad, it is only the rare soul chosen by theSpirit for the revelation of his very body, tanum svam, who canbe admitted to this mystery, because he alone is near enoughin heart and mind and life to the Godhead to respond truly toit in all his being and to make it a living practice. The last, the


closing supreme word of the Gita expressing the highest mysteryis spoken in two brief, direct and simple slokas and these are leftwithout farther comment or enlargement to sink into the mindand reveal their own fullness of meaning in the soul’s experience.For it is alone this inner incessantly extending experience thatcan make evident the infinite deal of meaning with which are forever pregnant these words in themselves apparently so slight andsimple. And we feel, as they are being uttered, that it was this forwhich the soul of the disciple was being prepared all the timeand the rest was only an enlightening and enabling disciplineand doctrine. Thus runs this secret of secrets, the highest mostdirect message of the Ishwara. “Become my-minded, my loverand adorer, a sacrificer to me, bow thyself to me, to me thoushalt come, this is my pledge and promise to thee, for dear artthou to me. Abandon all dharmas and take refuge in me alone.I will deliver thee from all sin and evil, do not grieve.”

The Gita throughout has been insisting on a great and well-built discipline of Yoga, a large and clearly traced philosophicalsystem, on the Swabhava and the Swadharma, on the sattwiclaw of life as leading out of itself by a self-exceeding exaltationto a free spiritual dharma of immortal existence utterly widein its spaces and high-lifted beyond the limitation of even thishighest guna, on many rules and means and injunctions andconditions of perfection, and now suddenly it seems to breakout of its own structure and says to the human soul, “Abandonall dharmas, give thyself to the Divine alone, to the supremeGodhead above and around and within thee: that is all thatthou needest, that is the truest and greatest way, that is the realdeliverance.” The Master of the worlds in the form of the divineCharioteer and Teacher of Kurukshetra has revealed to man themagnificent realities of God and Self and Spirit and the natureof the complex world and the relation of man’s mind and lifeand heart and senses to the Spirit and the victorious means bywhich through his own spiritual self-discipline and effort he canrise out of mortality into immortality and out of his limitedmental into his infinite spiritual existence. And now speaking asthe Spirit and Godhead in man and in all things he says to him,


“All this personal effort and self-discipline will not in the end beneeded, all following and limitation of rule and dharma can atlast be thrown away as hampering encumbrances if thou canstmake a complete surrender to Me, depend alone on the Spiritand Godhead within thee and all things and trust to his soleguidance. Turn all thy mind to me and fill it with the thoughtof me and my presence. Turn all thy heart to me, make thyevery action, whatever it be, a sacrifice and offering to me. Thatdone, leave me to do my will with thy life and soul and action;do not be grieved or perplexed by my dealings with thy mindand heart and life and works or troubled because they do notseem to follow the laws and dharmas man imposes on himselfto guide his limited will and intelligence. My ways are the waysof a perfect wisdom and power and love that knows all thingsand combines all its movements in view of a perfect eventualresult; for it is refining and weaving together the many threadsof an integral perfection. I am here with thee in thy chariot ofbattle revealed as the Master of Existence within and withoutthee and I repeat the absolute assurance, the infallible promisethat I will lead thee to myself through and beyond all sorrow andevil. Whatever difficulties and perplexities arise, be sure of thisthat I am leading thee to a complete divine life in the universaland an immortal existence in the transcendent Spirit.”

The secret thing, guhyam, that all deep spiritual knowledgereveals to us, mirrored in various teachings and justified in thesoul’s experience, is for the Gita the secret of the spiritual selfhidden within us of which mind and external Nature are onlymanifestations or figures. It is the secret of the constant relationsbetween soul and Nature, Purusha and Prakriti, the secret of anindwelling Godhead who is the lord of all existence and veiledfrom us in its forms and movements. These are the truths taughtin many ways by Vedanta and Sankhya and Yoga and synthetisedin the earlier chapters of the Gita. And amidst all their apparentdistinctions they are one truth and all the different ways ofYoga are various means of spiritual self-discipline by which ourunquiet mind and blinded life are stilled and turned towards thismany-aspected One and the secret truth of self and God made


so real to us and intimate that we can either consciously liveand dwell in it or lose our separate selves in the Eternal and nolonger be compelled at all by the mental Ignorance.

The more secret thing, guhyataram, developed by the Gitais the profound reconciling truth of the divine Purushottama,at once self and Purusha, supreme Brahman and a sole, inti-mate, mysterious, ineffable Godhead. That gives to the thoughta larger and more deeply understanding foundation for an ul-timate knowledge and to the spiritual experience a greater andmore fully comprehending and comprehensive Yoga. This deepermystery is founded on the secret of the supreme spiritual Prakritiand of the Jiva, an eternal portion of the Divine in that eternaland this manifested Nature and of one spirit and essence withhim in his immutable self-existence. This profounder knowledgeescapes from the elementary distinction of spiritual experiencebetween the Beyond and what is here. For the Transcendentbeyond the worlds is at the same time Vasudeva who is allthings in all worlds; he is the Lord standing in the heart ofevery creature and the self of all existences and the origin andsupernal meaning of everything that he has put forth in hisPrakriti. He is manifested in his Vibhutis and he is the Spirit inTime who compels the action of the world and the Sun of allknowledge and the Lover and Beloved of the soul and the Mas-ter of all works and sacrifice. The result of an inmost openingto this deeper, truer, more secret mystery is the Gita’s Yoga ofintegral knowledge, integral works and integral bhakti. It is thesimultaneous experience of spiritual universality and a free andperfected spiritual individuality, of an entire union with Godand an entire dwelling in him as at once the frame of the soul’simmortality and the support and power of our liberated actionin the world and the body.

And now there comes the supreme word and most secretthing of all, guhyatamam, that the Spirit and Godhead is anInfinite free from all dharmas and though he conducts the worldaccording to fixed laws and leads man through his dharmasof ignorance and knowledge, sin and virtue, right and wrong,liking and disliking and indifference, pleasure and pain, joy and


sorrow and the rejection of these opposites, through his physicaland vital, intellectual, emotional, ethical and spiritual forms andrules and standards, yet the Spirit and Godhead transcends allthese things, and if we too can cast away all dependence ondharmas, surrender ourselves to this free and eternal Spirit and,taking care only to keep ourselves absolutely and exclusivelyopen to him, trust to the light and power and delight of theDivine in us and, unafraid and ungrieving, accept only his guid-ance, then that is the truest, the greatest release and that bringsthe absolute and inevitable perfection of our self and nature. Thisis the way offered to the chosen of the Spirit, — to those only inwhom he takes the greatest delight because they are nearest tohim and most capable of oneness and of being even as he, freelyconsenting and concordant with Nature in her highest powerand movement, universal in soul consciousness, transcendent inthe spirit.

For a time comes in spiritual development when we becomeaware that all our effort and action are only our mental and vitalreactions to the silent and secret insistence of a greater Presencein and around us. It is borne in upon us that all our Yoga, ouraspiration and our endeavour are imperfect or narrow forms,because disfigured or at least limited by the mind’s associations,demands, prejudgments, predilections, mistranslations or halftranslations of a vaster truth. Our ideas and experiences andefforts are mental images only of greatest things which wouldbe done more perfectly, directly, freely, largely, more in harmonywith the universal and eternal will by that Power itself in us if wecould only put ourselves passively as instruments in the hands ofa supreme and absolute strength and wisdom. That Power is notseparate from us; it is our own self one with the self of all othersand at the same time a transcendent Being and an immanentPerson. Our existence, our action taken up into this greatestExistence would be no longer, as it seems to us now, individuallyour own in a mental separation. It would be the vast movementof an Infinity and an intimate ineffable Presence; it would bethe constant spontaneity of formation and expression in us ofthis deep universal self and this transcendent Spirit. The Gita


indicates that in order that that may wholly be, the surrendermust be without reservations; our Yoga, our life, our state ofinner being must be determined freely by this living Infinite, notpredetermined by our mind’s insistence on this or that dharma orany dharma. The divine Master of the Yoga, yogesvarah. kr.s.n. ah. ,will then himself take up our Yoga and raise us to our utmostpossible perfection, not the perfection of any external or mentalstandard or limiting rule, but vast and comprehensive, to themind incalculable. It will be a perfection developed by an all-seeing Wisdom according to the whole truth, first indeed of ourhuman swabhava, but afterwards of a greater thing into whichit will open, a spirit and power illimitable, immortal, free andall-transmuting, the light and splendour of a divine and infinitenature.

All must be given as material of that transmutation. Anomniscient consciousness will take up our knowledge and ourignorance, our truth and our error, cast away their forms ofinsufficiency, sarva-dharman parityajya, and transform all intoits infinite light. An almighty Power will take up our virtueand sin, our right and wrong, our strength and our weakness,cast away their tangled figures, sarva-dharman parityajya, andtransform all into its transcendent purity and universal good andinfallible force. An ineffable Ananda will take up our petty joyand sorrow, our struggling pleasure and pain, cast away theirdiscordances and imperfect rhythms, sarva-dharman parityajya,and transform all into its transcendent and universal unimagin-able delight. All that all the Yogas can do will be done and more;but it will be done in a greater seeing way, with a greater wisdomand truth than any human teacher, saint or sage can give us. Theinner spiritual state to which this supreme Yoga will take us, willbe above all that is here and yet comprehensive of all things inthis and other worlds, but with a spiritual transformation of all,without limitation, without bondage, sarva-dharman parityajya.The infinite existence, consciousness and delight of the Godheadin its calm silence and bright boundless activity will be there, willbe its essential, fundamental, universal stuff, mould and char-acter. And in that mould of infinity the Divine made manifest


will overtly dwell, no longer concealed by his Yogamaya, andwhenever and as he wills build in us whatever shapes of theInfinite, translucent forms of knowledge, thought, love, spiritualjoy, power and action according to his self-fulfilling will and im-mortal pleasure. And there will be no binding effect on the freesoul and the unaffected nature, no unescapable crystallising intothis or that inferior formula. For all the action will be executedby the power of the Spirit in a divine freedom, sarva-dharmanparityajya. An unfallen abiding in the transcendent Spirit, paramdhama, will be the foundation and the assurance of this spiritualstate. An intimate understanding oneness with universal beingand all creatures, released from the evil and suffering of the sep-arative mind but wisely regardful of true distinctions, will be theconditioning power. A constant delight, oneness and harmony ofthe eternal individual here with the Divine and all that he is willbe the effect of this integral liberation. The baffling problemsof our human existence of which Arjuna’s difficulty stands asan acute example, are created by our separative personality inthe Ignorance. This Yoga because it puts the soul of man intoits right relation with God and world-existence and makes ouraction God’s, the knowledge and will shaping and moving it hisand our life the harmony of a divine self-expression, is the wayto their total disappearance.

The whole Yoga is revealed, the great word of the teachingis given, and Arjuna the chosen human soul is once more turned,no longer in his egoistic mind but in this greatest self-knowledge,to the divine action. The Vibhuti is ready for the divine life inthe human, his conscious spirit for the works of the liberatedsoul, muktasya karma. Destroyed is the illusion of the mind; thesoul’s memory of its self and its truth concealed so long by themisleading shows and forms of our life has returned to it andbecome its normal consciousness: all doubt and perplexity gone,it can turn to the execution of the command and do faithfullywhatever work for God and the world may be appointed andapportioned to it by the Master of our being, the Spirit andGodhead self-fulfilled in Time and universe.

XXIII

The Core of the Gita’s Meaning

WHAT THEN is the message of the Gita and what itsworking value, its spiritual utility to the human mindof the present day after the long ages that have elapsed

since it was written and the great subsequent transformationsof thought and experience? The human mind moves always for-ward, alters its viewpoint and enlarges its thought substance,and the effect of these changes is to render past systems ofthinking obsolete or, when they are preserved, to extend, tomodify and subtly or visibly to alter their value. The vitality ofan ancient doctrine consists in the extent to which it naturallylends itself to such a treatment; for that means that whatevermay have been the limitations or the obsolescences of the formof its thought, the truth of substance, the truth of living visionand experience on which its system was built is still sound andretains a permanent validity and significance. The Gita is a bookthat has worn extraordinarily well and it is almost as fresh andstill in its real substance quite as new, because always renewablein experience, as when it first appeared in or was written intothe frame of the Mahabharata. It is still received in India asone of the great bodies of doctrine that most authoritativelygovern religious thinking and its teaching acknowledged as ofthe highest value if not wholly accepted by almost all shades ofreligious belief and opinion. Its influence is not merely philo-sophic or academic but immediate and living, an influence bothfor thought and action, and its ideas are actually at work as apowerful shaping factor in the revival and renewal of a nationand a culture. It has even been said recently by a great voice thatall we need of spiritual truth for the spiritual life is to be foundin the Gita. It would be to encourage the superstition of thebook to take too literally that utterance. The truth of the spiritis infinite and cannot be circumscribed in that manner. Still it

The Core of the Gita’s Meaning 563

may be said that most of the main clues are there and that afterall the later developments of spiritual experience and discoverywe can still return to it for a large inspiration and guidance.Outside India too it is universally acknowledged as one of theworld’s great scriptures, although in Europe its thought is betterunderstood than its secret of spiritual practice. What is it thenthat gives this vitality to the thought and the truth of the Gita?

The central interest of the Gita’s philosophy and Yoga is itsattempt, the idea with which it sets out, continues and closes,to reconcile and even effect a kind of unity between the innerspiritual truth in its most absolute and integral realisation andthe outer actualities of man’s life and action. A compromisebetween the two is common enough, but that can never be a finaland satisfactory solution. An ethical rendering of spirituality isalso common and has its value as a law of conduct; but that is amental solution which does not amount to a complete practicalreconciliation of the whole truth of spirit with the whole truthof life and it raises as many problems as it solves. One of these isindeed the starting-point of the Gita; it sets out with an ethicalproblem raised by a conflict in which we have on one side thedharma of the man of action, a prince and warrior and leaderof men, the protagonist of a great crisis, of a struggle on thephysical plane, the plane of actual life, between the powers ofright and justice and the powers of wrong and injustice, thedemand of the destiny of the race upon him that he shall resistand give battle and establish even though through a terriblephysical struggle and a giant slaughter a new era and reign oftruth and right and justice, and on the other side the ethical sensewhich condemns the means and the action as a sin, recoils fromthe price of individual suffering and social strife, unsettling anddisturbance and regards abstention from violence and battle asthe only way and the one right moral attitude. A spiritualisedethics insists on Ahinsa, on non-injuring and non-killing as thehighest law of spiritual conduct. The battle, if it is to be foughtout at all, must be fought on the spiritual plane and by somekind of non-resistance or refusal of participation or only by soulresistance, and if this does not succeed on the external plane,


if the force of injustice conquers, the individual will still havepreserved his virtue and vindicated by his example the highestideal. On the other hand a more insistent extreme of the innerspiritual direction, passing beyond this struggle between socialduty and an absolutist ethical ideal, is apt to take the asceticturn and to point away from life and all its aims and standardsof action towards another and celestial or supracosmic state inwhich alone beyond the perplexed vanity and illusion of man’sbirth and life and death there can be a pure spiritual existence.The Gita rejects none of these things in their place, — for itinsists on the performance of the social duty, the followingof the dharma for the man who has to take his share in thecommon action, accepts Ahinsa as part of the highest spiritual-ethical ideal and recognises the ascetic renunciation as a wayof spiritual salvation. And yet it goes boldly beyond all theseconflicting positions; greatly daring, it justifies all life to the spiritas a significant manifestation of the one Divine Being and assertsthe compatibility of a complete human action and a completespiritual life lived in union with the Infinite, consonant with thehighest Self, expressive of the perfect Godhead.

All the problems of human life arise from the complexity ofour existence, the obscurity of its essential principle and the se-crecy of the inmost power that makes out its determinations andgoverns its purpose and its processes. If our existence were of onepiece, solely material-vital or solely mental or solely spiritual, oreven if the others were entirely or mainly involved in one of theseor were quite latent in our subconscient or our superconscientparts, there would be nothing to perplex us; the material andvital law would be imperative or the mental would be clear toits own pure and unobstructed principle or the spiritual self-existent and self-sufficient to spirit. The animals are aware ofno problems; a mental god in a world of pure mentality wouldadmit none or would solve them all by the purity of a mentalrule or the satisfaction of a rational harmony; a pure spiritwould be above them and self-content in the infinite. But theexistence of man is a triple web, a thing mysteriously physical-vital, mental and spiritual at once, and he knows not what are


the true relations of these things, which the real reality of his lifeand his nature, whither the attraction of his destiny and wherethe sphere of his perfection.

Matter and life are his actual basis, the thing from which hestarts and on which he stands and whose requirement and lawhe has to satisfy if he would exist at all on earth and in the body.The material and vital law is a rule of survival, of struggle,of desire and possession, of self-assertion and the satisfactionof the body, the life and the ego. All the intellectual reasoningin the world, all the ethical idealism and spiritual absolutism ofwhich the higher faculties of man are capable cannot abolish thereality and claim of our vital and material base or prevent therace from following under the imperative compulsion of Natureits aims and the satisfaction of its necessities or from making itsimportant problems a great and legitimate part of human destinyand human interest and endeavour. And the intelligence of maneven, failing to find any sustenance in spiritual or ideal solu-tions that solve everything else but the pressing problems of ouractual human life, often turns away from them to an exclusiveacceptance of the vital and material existence and the reasonedor instinctive pursuit of its utmost possible efficiency, well-beingand organised satisfaction. A gospel of the will to live or thewill to power or of a rationalised vital and material perfectionbecomes the recognised dharma of the human race and all elseis considered either a pretentious falsity or a quite subsidiarything, a side issue of a minor and dependent consequence.

Matter and life however in spite of their insistence and greatimportance are not all that man is, nor can he wholly acceptmind as nothing but a servant of the life and body admitted tocertain pure enjoyments of its own as a sort of reward for itsservice or regard it as no more than an extension and flower ofthe vital urge, an ideal luxury contingent upon the satisfaction ofthe material life. The mind much more intimately than the bodyand the life is the man, and the mind as it develops insists moreand more on making the body and the life an instrument — anindispensable instrument and yet a considerable obstacle, oth-erwise there would be no problem — for its own characteristic


satisfactions and self-realisation. The mind of man is not only avital and physical, but an intellectual, aesthetic, ethical, psychic,emotional and dynamic intelligence, and in the sphere of eachof its tendencies its highest and strongest nature is to straintowards some absolute of them which the frame of life will notallow it to capture wholly and embody and make here entirelyreal. The mental absolute of our aspiration remains as a partlygrasped shining or fiery ideal which the mind can make inwardlyvery present to itself, inwardly imperative on its effort, and caneven effectuate partly, but not compel all the facts of life into itsimage. There is thus an absolute, a high imperative of intellectualtruth and reason sought for by our intellectual being; there isan absolute, an imperative of right and conduct aimed at by theethical conscience; there is an absolute, an imperative of love,sympathy, compassion, oneness yearned after by our emotionaland psychic nature; there is an absolute, an imperative of de-light and beauty quivered to by the aesthetic soul; there is anabsolute, an imperative of inner self-mastery and control of lifelaboured after by the dynamic will; all these are there togetherand impinge upon the absolute, the imperative of possession andpleasure and safe embodied existence insisted on by the vital andphysical mind. And the human intelligence, since it is not able torealise entirely any of these things, much less all of them together,erects in each sphere many standards and dharmas, standards oftruth and reason, of right and conduct, of delight and beauty, oflove, sympathy and oneness, of self-mastery and control, of self-preservation and possession and vital efficiency and pleasure,and tries to impose them on life. The absolute shining idealsstand far above and beyond our capacity and rare individualsapproximate to them as best they can: the mass follow or professto follow some less magnificent norm, some established possibleand relative standard. Human life as a whole undergoes theattraction and yet rejects the ideal. Life resists in the strengthof some obscure infinite of its own and wears down or breaksdown any established mental and moral order. And this must beeither because the two are quite different and disparate thoughmeeting and interacting principles or because mind has not the


clue to the whole reality of life. The clue must be sought insomething greater, an unknown something above the mentalityand morality of the human creature.

The mind itself has the vague sense of some surpassing factorof this kind and in the pursuit of its absolutes frequently strikesagainst it. It glimpses a state, a power, a presence that is nearand within and inmost to it and yet immeasurably greater andsingularly distant and above it; it has a vision of somethingmore essential, more absolute than its own absolutes, intimate,infinite, one, and it is that which we call God, Self or Spirit. Thisthen the mind attempts to know, enter, touch and seize wholly,to approach it or become it, to arrive at some kind of unity orlose itself in a complete identity with that mystery, ascaryam.The difficulty is that this spirit in its purity seems somethingyet farther than the mental absolutes from the actualities oflife, something not translatable by mind into its own terms,much less into those of life and action. Therefore we have theintransigent absolutists of the spirit who reject the mental andcondemn the material being and yearn after a pure spiritualexistence happily purchased by the dissolution of all that we arein life and mind, a Nirvana. The rest of spiritual effort is forthese fanatics of the Absolute a mental preparation or a com-promise, a spiritualising of life and mind as much as possible.And because the difficulty most constantly insistent on man’smentality in practice is that presented by the claims of his vitalbeing, by life and conduct and action, the direction taken bythis preparatory endeavour consists mainly in a spiritualising ofthe ethical supported by the psychical mind — or rather it bringsin the spiritual power and purity to aid these in enforcing theirabsolute claim and to impart a greater authority than life allowsto the ethical ideal of right and truth of conduct or the psychicideal of love and sympathy and oneness. These things are helpedto some highest expression, given their broadest luminous basisby an assent of the reason and will to the underlying truth ofthe absolute oneness of the spirit and therefore the essentialoneness of all living creatures. This kind of spirituality linkedon in some way to the demands of the normal mind of man,


persuaded to the acceptance of useful social duty and currentlaw of social conduct, popularised by cult and ceremony andimage is the outward substance of the world’s greater religions.These religions have their individual victories, call in some ray ofa higher light, impose some shadow of a larger spiritual or semi-spiritual rule, but cannot effect a complete victory, end flatlyin a compromise and in the act of compromise are defeated bylife. Its problems remain and even recur in their fiercest forms —even such as this grim problem of Kurukshetra. The idealisingintellect and ethical mind hope always to eliminate them, todiscover some happy device born of their own aspiration andmade effective by their own imperative insistence, which willannihilate this nether untoward aspect of life; but it enduresand is not eliminated. The spiritualised intelligence on the otherhand offers indeed by the voice of religion the promise of somevictorious millennium hereafter, but meanwhile half convincedof terrestrial impotence, persuaded that the soul is a strangerand intruder upon earth, declares that after all not here in thelife of the body or in the collective life of mortal man but in someimmortal Beyond lies the heaven or the Nirvana where alone isto be found the true spiritual existence.

It is here that the Gita intervenes with a restatement of thetruth of the Spirit, of the Self, of God and of the world andNature. It extends and remoulds the truth evolved by a laterthought from the ancient Upanishads and ventures with assuredsteps on an endeavour to apply its solving power to the problemof life and action. The solution offered by the Gita does notdisentangle all the problem as it offers itself to modern mankind;as stated here to a more ancient mentality, it does not meet theinsistent pressure of the present mind of man for a collectiveadvance, does not respond to its cry for a collective life thatwill at last embody a greater rational and ethical and if possibleeven a dynamic spiritual ideal. Its call is to the individual whohas become capable of a complete spiritual existence; but forthe rest of the race it prescribes only a gradual advance, tobe wisely effected by following out faithfully with more andmore of intelligence and moral purpose and with a final turn to


spirituality the law of their nature. Its message touches the othersmaller solutions but, even when it accepts them partly, it is topoint them beyond themselves to a higher and more integralsecret into which as yet only the few individuals have shownthemselves fit to enter.

The Gita’s message to the mind that follows after the vitaland material life is that all life is indeed a manifestation of theuniversal Power in the individual, a derivation from the Self,a ray from the Divine, but actually it figures the Self and theDivine veiled in a disguising Maya, and to pursue the lowerlife for its own sake is to persist in a stumbling path and toenthrone our nature’s obscure ignorance and not at all to findthe true truth and complete law of existence. A gospel of thewill to live, the will to power, of the satisfaction of desire, ofthe glorification of mere force and strength, of the worship ofthe ego and its vehement acquisitive self-will and tireless self-regarding intellect is the gospel of the Asura and it can lead onlyto some gigantic ruin and perdition. The vital and material manmust accept for his government a religious and social and idealdharma by which, while satisfying desire and interest under rightrestrictions, he can train and subdue his lower personality andscrupulously attune it to a higher law both of the personal andthe communal life.

The Gita’s message to the mind occupied with the pursuit ofintellectual, ethical and social standards, the mind that insists onsalvation by the observance of established dharmas, the morallaw, social duty and function or the solutions of the liberatedintelligence, is that this is indeed a very necessary stage, thedharma has indeed to be observed and, rightly observed, canraise the stature of the spirit and prepare and serve the spirituallife, but still it is not the complete and last truth of existence. Thesoul of man has to go beyond to some more absolute dharma ofman’s spiritual and immortal nature. And this can only be doneif we repress and get rid of the ignorant formulations of thelower mental elements and the falsehood of egoistic personality,impersonalise the action of the intelligence and will, live in theidentity of the one self in all, break out of all ego-moulds into the


impersonal spirit. The mind moves under the limiting compul-sion of the triple lower nature, it erects its standards in obedienceto the tamasic, rajasic or at highest the sattwic qualities; but thedestiny of the soul is a divine perfection and liberation and thatcan only be based in the freedom of our highest self, can onlybe found by passing through its vast impersonality and univer-sality beyond mind into the integral light of the immeasurableGodhead and supreme Infinite who is beyond all dharmas.

The Gita’s message to those, absolutist seekers of the Infi-nite, who carry impersonality to an exclusive extreme, entertainan intolerant passion for the extinction of life and action andwould have as the one ultimate aim and ideal an endeavour tocease from all individual being in the pure silence of the ineffa-ble Spirit, is that this is indeed one path of journey and entryinto the Infinite, but the most difficult, the ideal of inaction adangerous thing to hold up by precept or example before theworld, this way, though great, yet not the best way for man andthis knowledge, though true, yet not the integral knowledge.The Supreme, the all-conscious Self, the Godhead, the Infiniteis not solely a spiritual existence remote and ineffable; he ishere in the universe at once hidden and expressed through manand the gods and through all beings and in all that is. And itis by finding him not only in some immutable silence but inthe world and its beings and in all self and in all Nature, itis by raising to an integral as well as to a highest union withhim all the activities of the intelligence, the heart, the will, thelife that man can solve at once his inner riddle of self and Godand the outer problem of his active human existence. MadeGodlike, God-becoming, he can enjoy the infinite breadth of asupreme spiritual consciousness that is reached through worksno less than through love and knowledge. Immortal and free,he can continue his human action from that highest level andtransmute it into a supreme and all-embracing divine activity,— that indeed is the ultimate crown and significance here of allworks and living and sacrifice and the world’s endeavour.

This highest message is first for those who have the strengthto follow after it, the master men, the great spirits, the God-


knowers, God-doers, God-lovers who can live in God and forGod and do their work joyfully for him in the world, a divinework uplifted above the restless darkness of the human mindand the false limitations of the ego. At the same time, and herewe get the gleam of a larger promise which we may even extendto the hope of a collective turn towards perfection, — for if thereis hope for man, why should there not be hope for mankind?— the Gita declares that all can if they will, even to the lowestand sinfullest among men, enter into the path of this Yoga. Andif there is a true self-surrender and an absolute unegoistic faithin the indwelling Divinity, success is certain in this path. Thedecisive turn is needed; there must be an abiding belief in theSpirit, a sincere and insistent will to live in the Divine, to be inself one with him and in Nature — where too we are an eternalportion of his being — one with his greater spiritual Nature,God-possessed in all our members and Godlike.

The Gita in the development of its idea raises many issues,such as the determinism of Nature, the significance of the univer-sal manifestation and the ultimate status of the liberated soul,questions that have been the subject of unending and inconclu-sive debate. It is not necessary in this series of essays of whichthe object is a scrutiny and positive affirmation of the substanceof the Gita and a disengaging of its contribution to the abidingspiritual thought of humanity and its kernel of living practice,to enter far into these discussions or to consider where we maydiffer from its standpoint or conclusions, make any reservesin our assent or even, strong in later experience, go beyondits metaphysical teaching or its Yoga. It will be sufficient toclose with a formulation of the living message it still brings forman the eternal seeker and discoverer to guide him through thepresent circuits and the possible steeper ascent of his life up tothe luminous heights of his spirit.

XXIV

The Message of the Gita

“THE SECRET of action,” so we might summarise themessage of the Gita, the word of its divine Teacher, “isone with the secret of all life and existence. Existence is

not merely a machinery of Nature, a wheel of law in which thesoul is entangled for a moment or for ages; it is a constant man-ifestation of the Spirit. Life is not for the sake of life alone, butfor God, and the living soul of man is an eternal portion of theGodhead. Action is for self-finding, for self-fulfilment, for self-realisation and not only for its own external and apparent fruitsof the moment or the future. There is an inner law and meaningof all things dependent on the supreme as well as the manifestednature of the self; the true truth of works lies there and can berepresented only incidentally, imperfectly and disguised by igno-rance in the outer appearances of the mind and its action. Thesupreme, the faultless largest law of action is therefore to find outthe truth of your own highest and inmost existence and live in itand not to follow any outer standard and dharma. All life andaction must be till then an imperfection, a difficulty, a struggleand a problem. It is only by discovering your true self and livingaccording to its true truth, its real reality that the problem canbe finally solved, the difficulty and struggle overpassed and yourdoings perfected in the security of the discovered self and spiritturn into a divinely authentic action. Know then your self; knowyour true self to be God and one with the self of all others; knowyour soul to be a portion of God. Live in what you know; livein the self, live in your supreme spiritual nature, be united withGod and Godlike. Offer, first, all your actions as a sacrifice tothe Highest and the One in you and to the Highest and the Onein the world; deliver last all you are and do into his hands forthe supreme and universal spirit to do through you his own willand works in the world. This is the solution that I present toyou and in the end you will find that there is no other.”

The Message of the Gita 573

Here it is necessary to state the Gita’s view of the funda-mental opposition on which like all Indian teaching it takes itsposition. This finding of the true self, this knowledge of the God-head within us and all is not an easy thing; nor is it an easy thingeither to turn this knowledge, even though seen by the mind, intothe stuff of our consciousness and the whole condition of our ac-tion. All action is determined by the effective state of our being,and the effective state of our being is determined by the state ofour constant self-seeing will and active consciousness and by itsbasis of kinetic movement. It is what we see and believe with ourwhole active nature ourselves to be and our relations with theworld to mean, it is our faith, our sraddha, that makes us whatwe are. But the consciousness of man is of a double kind andcorresponds to a double truth of existence; for there is a truth ofthe inner reality and a truth of the outer appearance. Accordingas he lives in one or the other, he will be a mind dwelling inhuman ignorance or a soul founded in divine knowledge.

In its outer appearance the truth of existence is solely whatwe call Nature or Prakriti, a Force that operates as the whole lawand mechanism of being, creates the world which is the objectof our mind and senses and creates too the mind and senses as ameans of relation between the creature and the objective worldin which he lives. In this outer appearance man in his soul, hismind, his life, his body seems to be a creature of Nature differen-tiated from others by a separation of his body, life and mind andespecially by his ego-sense — that subtle mechanism constructedfor him that he may confirm and centralise his consciousness ofall this strong separateness and difference. All in him, his soul ofmind and its action as well as the functioning of his life and body,is very evidently determined by the law of his nature, cannot getoutside of it, cannot operate otherwise. He attributes indeed acertain freedom to his personal will, the will of his ego; but thatin reality amounts to nothing, since his ego is only a sense whichmakes him identify himself with the creation that Nature hasmade of him, with the varying mind and life and body she hasconstructed. His ego is itself a product of her workings, and asis the nature of his ego, so will be the nature of its will and


according to that he must act and he can no other.This then is man’s ordinary consciousness of himself, this

his faith in his own being, that he is a creature of Nature, a sep-arate ego establishing whatever relations with others and withthe world, making whatever development of himself, satisfyingwhatever will, desire, idea of his mind may be permissible in hercircle and consonant with her intention or law in his existence.

There is, however, something in man’s consciousness whichdoes not fall in with the rigidity of this formula; he has afaith, which grows greater as his soul develops, in another andan inner reality of existence. In this inner reality the truth ofexistence is no longer Nature but Soul and Spirit, Purusha ratherthan Prakriti. Nature herself is only a power of Spirit, Prakritithe force of the Purusha. A Spirit, a Self, a Being one in all isthe master of this world which is only his partial manifestation.That Spirit is the upholder of Nature and her action and thegiver of the sanction by which alone her law becomes imperativeand her force and its ways operative. That Spirit within her is theKnower who illuminates her and makes her conscient in us; his isthe immanent and superconscient Will that inspires and motivesher workings. The soul in man, a portion of this Divinity, shareshis nature. Our nature is our soul’s manifestation, operates byits sanction and embodies its secret self-knowledge and self-consciousness and its will of being in her motions and formsand changes.

The real soul and self of us is hidden from our intelligenceby its ignorance of inner things, by a false identification, byan absorption in our outward mechanism of mind, life andbody. But if the active soul of man can once draw back fromthis identification with its natural instruments, if it can see andlive in the entire faith of its inner reality, then all is changedto it, life and existence take on another appearance, action adifferent meaning and character. Our being then becomes nolonger this little egoistic creation of Nature, but the largenessof a divine, immortal and spiritual Power. Our consciousnessbecomes no longer that of this limited and struggling mental andvital creature, but an infinite, divine and spiritual consciousness.


And our will and action too are no longer that of this boundedpersonality and its ego, but a divine and spiritual will and action,the will and power of the Universal, the Supreme, the All-Selfand Spirit acting freely through the human figure.

“This is the great change and transfiguration,” runs the mes-sage of the Godhead in man, the Avatar, the divine Teacher, “towhich I call the elect, and the elect are all who can turn their willaway from the ignorance of the natural instruments to the soul’sdeepest experience, its knowledge of the inner self and spirit, itscontact with the Godhead, its power to enter into the Divine.The elect are all who can accept this faith and this greater law.It is difficult indeed to accept for the human intellect attachedalways to its own cloud-forms and half lights of ignorance andto the yet obscurer habits of man’s mental, nervous and physicalparts; but once received it is a great and sure and saving way,because it is identical with the true truth of man’s being and itis the authentic movement of his inmost and supreme nature.

“But the change is a very great one, an enormous trans-formation, and it cannot be done without an entire turning andconversion of your whole being and nature. There will be neededa complete consecration of your self and your nature and yourlife to the Highest and to nothing else but the Highest; for allmust be held only for the sake of the Highest, nothing acceptedexcept as it is in God and a form of God and for the sake of theDivine. There will be needed an admission of new truth, an entireturn and giving of your mind to a new knowledge of self andothers and world and God and soul and Nature, a knowledgeof oneness, a knowledge of universal Divinity, which will be atfirst an acceptance by the understanding but must become in theend a vision, a consciousness, a permanent state of the soul andthe frame of its movements.

“There will be needed a will that shall make this new knowl-edge, vision, consciousness a motive of action and the sole mo-tive. And it must be the motive not of an action grudging, limited,confined to a few necessary operations of Nature or to the fewthings that seem helpful to a formal perfection, apposite to a re-ligious turn or to an individual salvation, but rather all action of


human life taken up by the equal spirit and done for the sake ofGod and the good of all creatures. There will be needed an uplift-ing of the heart in a single aspiration to the Highest, a single loveof the Divine Being, a single God-adoration. And there must bea widening too of the calmed and enlightened heart to embraceGod in all beings. There will be needed a change of the habitualand normal nature of man as he is now to a supreme and divinespiritual nature. There will be needed in a word a Yoga whichshall be at once a Yoga of integral knowledge, a Yoga of the inte-gral will and its works, a Yoga of integral love, adoration and de-votion and a Yoga of an integral spiritual perfection of the wholebeing and of all its parts and states and powers and motions.

“What then is this knowledge that will have to be admittedby the understanding, supported by the soul’s faith and madereal and living to the mind, heart and life? It is the knowledgeof the supreme Soul and Spirit in its oneness and its wholeness.It is the knowledge of One who is for ever, beyond Timeand Space and name and form and world, high beyond hisown personal and impersonal levels and yet from whom allthis proceeds, One whom all manifests in manifold Natureand her multitude of figures. It is the knowledge of him as animpersonal eternal immutable Spirit, the calm and limitless thingwe call Self, infinite, equal and always the same, unaffected andunmodified and unchanged amid all this constant changing andall this multitude of individual personalities and soul powersand Nature powers and the forms and forces and eventualitiesof this transitory and apparent existence. It is the knowledgeof him at the same time as the Spirit and Power who seemsever mutable in Nature, the Inhabitant who shapes himself toevery form and modifies himself to every grade and degree andactivity of his power, the Spirit who, becoming all that is evenwhile he is for ever infinitely more than all that is, dwells in manand animal and thing, subject and object, soul and mind and lifeand matter, every existence and every force and every creature.

“It is not by insisting on this or that side only of the truth thatyou can practise this Yoga. The Divine whom you have to seek,the Self whom you have to discover, the supreme Soul of whom


your soul is an eternal portion, is simultaneously all these things;you have to know them simultaneously in a supreme oneness, en-ter into all of them at once and in all states and all things see Himalone. If he were solely the Spirit mutable in Nature, there wouldbe only an eternal and universal becoming. If you limit your faithand knowledge to that one aspect, you will never go beyond yourpersonality and its constant changeful figures; on such a founda-tion you would be bound altogether in the revolutions of Nature.But you are not merely a succession of soul moments in Time.There is an impersonal self in you which supports the streamof your personality and is one with God’s vast and impersonalspirit. And incalculable beyond this impersonality and person-ality, dominating these two constant poles of what you are here,you are eternal and transcendent in the Eternal Transcendence.

“If, again, there were only the truth of an eternal impersonalself that neither acts nor creates, then the world and your soulwould be illusions without any real basis. If you limit your faithand knowledge to this one lonely aspect, the renunciation of lifeand action is your only resource. But God in the world and youin the world are realities; the world and you are true and actualpowers and manifestations of the Supreme. Therefore acceptlife and action and do not reject them. One with God in yourimpersonal self and essence, an eternal portion of the Godheadturned to him by the love and adoration of your spiritual per-sonality for its own Infinite, make of your natural being what itis intended to be, an instrument of works, a channel, a powerof the Divine. That it always is in its truth, but now uncon-sciously and imperfectly, through the lower nature, doomed to adisfigurement of the Godhead by your ego. Make it consciouslyand perfectly and without any distortion by ego a power of theDivine in his supreme spiritual nature and a vehicle of his willand his works. In this way you will live in the integral truth ofyour own being and you will possess the integral God-union,the whole and flawless Yoga.

“The Supreme is the Purushottama, eternal beyond all man-ifestation, infinite beyond all limitation by Time or Space orCausality or any of his numberless qualities and features. But


this does not mean that in his supreme eternity he is unconnectedwith all that happens here, cut off from world and Nature, alooffrom all these beings. He is the supreme ineffable Brahman, he isimpersonal self, he is all personal existences. Spirit here and lifeand matter, soul and Nature and the works of Nature are aspectsand movements of his infinite and eternal existence. He is thesupreme transcendent Spirit and all comes into manifestationfrom him and are his forms and his self-powers. As the one selfhe is here all-pervasive and equal and impersonal in man andanimal and thing and object and every force of Nature. He is thesupreme Soul and all souls are tireless flames of this one Soul. Allliving beings are in their spiritual personality deathless portionsof the one Person or Purusha. He is the eternal Master of allmanifested existence, Lord of the worlds and their creatures.He is the omnipotent originator of all actions, not bound byhis works, and to him go all action and effort and sacrifice. Heis in all and all are in him; he has become all and yet too he isabove all and not limited by his creations. He is the transcendentDivine; he descends as the Avatar; he is manifest by his power inthe Vibhuti; he is the Godhead secret in every human being. Allthe gods whom men worship are only personalities and formsand names and mental bodies of the one Divine Existence.

“The Supreme has manifested the world from his spiritualessence and in his own infinite existence and manifested himselftoo variously in the world. All things are his powers and figuresand to the powers and figures of him there is no end, becausehe himself is infinite. As a pervading and containing impersonalself-existence he informs and sustains equally and without anypartiality, preference or attachment to any person or thing orhappening or feature all this infinite manifestation in Time andthe universe. This pure and equal Self does not act, but supportsimpartially all the action of things. And yet it is the Supreme, butas the cosmic Spirit and the Time Spirit, who wills and conductsand determines the action of the world through his multitudi-nous power-to-be, that power of the Spirit which we call Nature.He creates, sustains and destroys his creations. He is seated tooin the heart of every living creature and from there as a secret


Power in the individual, no less than from his universal presencein the Cosmos, he originates by force of Nature, manifests someline of his mystery in quality of nature and in executive energy ofnature, shapes each thing and being separately according to itskind and initiates and upholds all action. It is this transcendentfirst origination from the Supreme and this constant universaland individual manifestation of Him in things and beings whichmakes the complex character of the cosmos.

“There are always these three eternal states of the DivineBeing. There is always and for ever this one eternal immutableself-existence which is the basis and support of existent things.There is always and for ever this Spirit mutable in Nature man-ifested by her as all these existences. There is always and forever this transcendent Divine who can be both of these othersat once, can be a pure and silent Spirit and at the same timethe active soul and life of the cycles of the universe, becausehe is something other and more than these two whether takenseparately or together. In us is the Jiva, a spirit of this Spirit, aconscious power of the Supreme. He is one who carries in hisdeepest self the whole of the immanent Divine and in Naturelives in the universal Divine, — no temporary creation but aneternal soul acting and moving in the eternal Self, in the eternalInfinite.

“This conscient soul in us can adopt either of these threestates of the Spirit. Man can live here in the mutability of Na-ture and in that alone. Ignorant of his real self, ignorant ofthe Godhead within him, he knows only Nature: he sees heras a mechanical executive and creative Force and sees himselfand others as her creations, — egos, separated existences in heruniverse. It is thus, superficially, that he now lives and, while it isso and until he exceeds this outer consciousness and knows whatis within him, all his thought and science can only be a shadowof light thrown upon screens and surfaces. This ignorance ispossible, is even imposed, because the Godhead within is hiddenby the veil of his own power. His greater reality is lost to ourview by the completeness with which he has identified himself ina partial appearance with his creations and images and absorbed


the created mind in the deceptive workings of his own Nature.And it is possible also because the real, the eternal, the spiritualNature which is the secret of things in themselves is not manifestin their outward phenomena. The Nature which we see whenwe look outwards, the Nature which acts in our mind and bodyand senses is a lower Force, a derivation, a Magician who createsfigures of the Spirit but hides the Spirit in its figures, concealsthe truth and makes men look upon masks, a Force which isonly capable of a sum of secondary and depressed values, notof the full power and glory and ecstasy and sweetness of themanifestation of the Divine. This Nature in us is a Maya of theego, a tangle of the dualities, a web of ignorance and the threegunas. And so long as the soul of man lives in the surface fact ofmind and life and body and not in his self and spirit, he cannotsee God and himself and the world as they really are, cannotovercome this Maya, but must do what he can with its termsand figures.

“It is possible by drawing back from the lower turn of hisnature in which man now lives, to awake from this light thatis darkness and live in the luminous truth of the eternal andimmutable self-existence. Man then is no longer bound up in hisnarrow prison of personality, no longer sees himself as this littleI that thinks and acts and feels and struggles and labours fora little. He is merged in the vast and free impersonality of thepure spirit; he becomes the Brahman; he knows himself as onewith the one self in all things. He is no longer aware of ego, nolonger troubled by the dualities, no longer feels anguish of griefor disturbance of joy, is no longer shaken by desire, is no longertroubled by sin or limited by virtue. Or if the shadows of thesethings remain, he sees and knows them only as Nature workingin her own qualities and does not feel them to be the truth ofhimself in which he lives. Nature alone acts and works out hermechanical figures: but the pure spirit is silent, inactive and free.Calm, untouched by her workings, it regards them with a perfectequality and knows itself to be other than these things. Thisspiritual state brings with it a still peace and freedom but notthe dynamic divinity, not the integral perfection; it is a great step,


but it is not the integral God-knowledge and self-knowledge.“A perfect perfection comes only by living in the supreme

and the whole Divine. Then the soul of man is united with theGodhead of which it is a portion; then it is one with all beings inthe self and spirit, one with them both in God and in Nature; thenit is not only free but complete, plunged in the supreme felicity,ready for its ultimate perfection. He still sees the self as an eternaland changeless Spirit silently supporting all things; but he seesalso Nature no longer as a mere mechanical force that works outthings according to the mechanism of the gunas, but as a powerof the Spirit and the force of God in manifestation. He sees thatthe lower Nature is not the inmost truth of the spirit’s action;he becomes aware of a highest spiritual nature of the Divine inwhich is contained the source and the yet to be realised greatertruth of all that is imperfectly figured now in mind, life andbody. Arisen from the lower mental to this supreme spiritualnature, he is delivered there from all ego. He knows himself as aspiritual being, in his essence one with all existences and in hisactive nature a power of the one Godhead and an eternal soul ofthe transcendent Infinite. He sees all in God and God in all; hesees all things as Vasudeva. He is delivered from the dualities ofjoy and grief, from the pleasant and the unpleasant, from desireand disappointment, from sin and virtue. All henceforth is to hisconscious sight and sense the will and working of the Divine. Helives and acts as a soul and portion of the universal consciousnessand power; he is filled with the transcendent divine delight, aspiritual Ananda. His action becomes the divine action and hisstatus the highest spiritual status.

** *

“This is the solution, this the salvation, this the perfectionthat I offer to all those who can listen to a divine voice withinthem and are capable of this faith and knowledge. But to climb tothis pre-eminent condition the first necessity, the original radicalstep is to turn away from all that belongs to your lower Nature


and fix yourself by concentration of the will and intelligence onthat which is higher than either will or intelligence, higher thanmind and heart and sense and body. And first of all you mustturn to your own eternal and immutable self, impersonal andthe same in all creatures. So long as you live in ego and mentalpersonality, you will always spin endlessly in the same roundsand there can be no real issue. Turn your will inward beyond theheart and its desires and the sense and its attractions; lift it up-ward beyond the mind and its associations and attachments andits bounded wish and thought and impulse. Arrive at somethingwithin you that is eternal, ever unchanged, calm, unperturbed,equal, impartial to all things and persons and happenings, notaffected by any action, not altered by the figures of Nature. Bethat, be the eternal self, be the Brahman. If you can become thatby a permanent spiritual experience, you will have an assuredbasis on which you can stand delivered from the limitationsof your mind-created personality, secure against any fall frompeace and knowledge, free from ego.

“Thus to impersonalise your being is not possible so longas you nurse and cherish and cling to your ego or anything thatbelongs to it. Desire and the passions that arise from desire arethe principal sign and knot of ego. It is desire that makes yougo on saying I and mine and subjects you through a persistentegoism to satisfaction and dissatisfaction, liking and disliking,hope and despair, joy and grief, to your petty loves and hatreds,to wrath and passion, to your attachment to success and thingspleasant and to the sorrow and suffering of failure and of thingsunpleasant. Desire brings always confusion of mind and limi-tation of the will, an egoistic and distorted view of things, afailure and clouding of knowledge. Desire and its preferencesand violences are the first strong root of sin and error. Therecan be while you cherish desire no assured stainless tranquillity,no settled light, no calm pure knowledge. There can be no rightbeing — for desire is a perversion of the spirit — and no firmfoundation for right thought, action and feeling. Desire, if per-mitted to remain under whatever colour, is a perpetual menaceeven to the wisest and can at any moment subtly or violently cast


down the mind from even its firmest and most surely acquiredfoundation. Desire is the chief enemy of spiritual perfection.

“Slay then desire; put away attachment to the possessionand enjoyment of the outwardness of things. Separate yourselffrom all that comes to you as outward touches and solicitations,as objects of the mind and senses. Learn to bear and reject all therush of the passions and to remain securely seated in your innerself even while they rage in your members, until at last they ceaseto affect any part of your nature. Bear and put away similarly theforceful attacks and even the slightest insinuating touches of joyand sorrow. Cast away liking and disliking, destroy preferenceand hatred, root out shrinking and repugnance. Let there be acalm indifference to these things and to all the objects of desirein all your nature. Look on them with the silent and tranquilregard of an impersonal spirit.

“The result will be an absolute equality and the power ofunshakable calm that the universal spirit maintains in front ofits creations, facing ever the manifold action of Nature. Lookwith equal eyes; receive with an equal heart and mind all thatcomes to you, success and failure, honour and dishonour, theesteem and love of men and their scorn and persecution andhatred, every happening that would be to others a cause ofjoy and every happening that would be to others a cause ofsorrow. Look with equal eyes on all persons, on the good andthe wicked, on the wise and the foolish, on the Brahmin andthe outcaste, on man at his highest and every pettiest creature.Meet equally all men whatever their relations to you, friendand ally, neutral and indifferent, opponent and enemy, loverand hater. These things touch the ego and you are called to befree from ego. These are personal relations and you have toobserve all with the deep regard of the impersonal spirit. Theseare temporal and personal differences which you have to seebut not be influenced by them; for you must fix not on thesedifferences but on that which is the same in all, on the one selfwhich all are, on the Divine in every creature and on the oneworking of Nature which is the equal will of God in men andthings and energies and happenings and in all endeavour and


result and whatever outcome of the world’s labour.“Action will still be done in you because Nature is always at

work; but you must learn and feel that your self is not the doerof the action. Observe simply, observe unmoved the workingof Nature and the play of her qualities and the magic of thegunas. Observe unmoved this action in yourself; look on all thatis being done around you and see that it is the same workingin others. Observe that the result of your works and theirs isconstantly other than you or they desired or intended, not theirs,not yours, but omnipotently fixed by a greater Power that willsand acts here in universal Nature. Observe too that even the willin your works is not yours but Nature’s. It is the will of the egosense in you and is determined by the predominant quality inyour composition which she has developed in the past or elsebrings forward at the moment. It depends on the play of yournatural personality and that formation of Nature is not yourtrue person. Draw back from this external formation to yourinner silent self; you will see that you the Purusha are inactive,but Nature continues to do always her works according to hergunas. Fix yourself in this inner inactivity and stillness: no longerregard yourself as the doer. Remain seated in yourself above theplay, free from the perturbed action of the gunas. Live secure inthe purity of an impersonal spirit, live untroubled by the mortalwaves that persist in your members.

“If you can do this, then you will find yourself uplifted intoa great release, a wide freedom and a deep peace. Then you willbe aware of God and immortal, possessed of your dateless self-existence, independent of mind and life and body, sure of yourspiritual being, untouched by the reactions of Nature, unstainedby passion and sin and pain and sorrow. Then you will dependfor your joy and desire on no mortal or outward or worldlything, but will possess inalienably the self-sufficient delight of acalm and eternal spirit. Then you will have ceased to be a mentalcreature and will have become spirit illimitable, the Brahman.And into this eternity of the silent self, rejecting from your mindall seed of thought and all root of desire, rejecting the figure ofbirth in the body, you can pass at your end by concentration in


the pure Eternal and a mighty transference of your consciousnessto the Infinite, the Absolute.

** *

“This however is not all the truth of the Yoga and this endand way of departure, though a great end and a great way, is notthe thing I propose to you. For I am the eternal Worker withinyou and I ask of you works. I demand of you not a passiveconsent to a mechanical movement of Nature from which inyour self you are wholly separated, indifferent and aloof, butaction complete and divine, done as the willing and understand-ing instrument of the Divine, done for God in you and othersand for the good of the world. This action I propose to you,first no doubt as a means of perfection in the supreme spiritualNature, but as a part too of that perfection. Action is a part ofthe integral knowledge of God, of his greater mysterious truthand of an entire living in the Divine; action can and shouldbe continued even after perfection and freedom are won. I askof you the action of the Jivanmukta, the works of the Siddha.Something has to be added to the Yoga already described, — forthat was only a first Yoga of knowledge. There is also a Yogaof action in the illumination of God-experience; works can bemade one spirit with knowledge. For works done in a total self-vision and God-vision, a vision of God in the world and ofthe world in God are themselves a movement of knowledge, amovement of light, an indispensable means and an intimate partof spiritual perfection.

“Therefore now to the experience of a high impersonalityadd too this knowledge that the Supreme whom one meets asthe pure silent Self can be met also as a vast dynamic Spirit whooriginates all works and is Lord of the worlds and the Masterof man’s action and endeavour and sacrifice. This apparentlyself-acting mechanism of Nature conceals an immanent divineWill that compels and guides it and shapes its purposes. But youcannot feel or know that Will while you are shut up in your


narrow cell of personality, blinded and chained to your view-point of the ego and its desires. For you can wholly respond toit only when you are impersonalised by knowledge and widenedto see all things in the self and in God and the self and God inall things. All becomes here by the power of the Spirit; all dotheir works by the immanence of God in things and his presencein the heart of every creature. The Creator of the worlds is notlimited by his creations; the Lord of works is not bound byhis works; the divine Will is not attached to its labour and theresults of its labour: for it is omnipotent, all-possessing and all-blissful. But still the Lord looks down on his creations from histranscendence; he descends as the Avatar; he is here in you; herules from within all things in the steps of their nature. And youtoo must do works in him, after the way and in the steps of thedivine nature, untouched by limitation, attachment or bondage.Act for the best good of all, act for the maintenance of the marchof the world, for the support or the leading of its peoples. Theaction asked of you is the action of the liberated Yogin; it isthe spontaneous output of a free and God-held energy, it is anequal-minded movement, it is a selfless and desireless labour.

“The first step on this free, this equal, this divine way ofaction is to put from you attachment to fruit and recompenseand to labour only for the sake of the work itself that has to bedone. For you must deeply feel that the fruits belong not to youbut to the Master of the world. Consecrate your labour and leaveits returns to the Spirit who manifests and fulfils himself in theuniversal movement. The outcome of your action is determinedby his will alone and whatever it be, good or evil fortune, successor failure, it is turned by him to the accomplishment of his worldpurpose. An entirely desireless and disinterested working of thepersonal will and the whole instrumental nature is the first ruleof Karmayoga. Demand no fruit, accept whatever result is givento you; accept it with equality and a calm gladness: successfulor foiled, prosperous or afflicted, continue unafraid, untroubledand unwavering on the steep path of the divine action.

“This is no more than the first step on the path. For youmust be not only unattached to results, but unattached also to


your labour. Cease to regard your works as your own; as youhave abandoned the fruits of your work, so you must surrenderthe work also to the Lord of action and sacrifice. Recognisethat your nature determines your action; your nature rules theimmediate motion of your Swabhava and decides the expressiveturn and development of your spirit in the paths of the executiveforce of Prakriti. Bring in no longer any self-will to confuse thesteps of your mind in following the Godward way. Accept theaction proper to your nature. Make of all you do from thegreatest and most unusual effort to the smallest daily act, makeof each act of your mind, each act of your heart, each act of yourbody, of every inner and outer turn, of every thought and willand feeling, of every step and pause and movement, a sacrificeto the Master of all sacrifice and Tapasya.

“Next know that you are an eternal portion of the Eternaland the powers of your nature are nothing without him, nothingif not his partial self-expression. It is the Divine Infinite that isbeing progressively fulfilled in your nature. It is the supremepower-to-be, it is the Shakti of the Lord that shapes and takesshape in your swabhava. Give up then all sense that you arethe doer; see the Eternal alone as the doer of the action. Letyour natural being be an occasion, an instrument, a channel ofpower, a means of manifestation. Offer up your will to him andmake it one with his eternal will: surrender all your actions inthe silence of your self and spirit to the transcendent Master ofyour nature. This cannot be really done or done perfectly solong as there is any ego sense in you or any mental claim orvital clamour. Action done in the least degree for the sake ofthe ego or tinged with the desire and will of the ego is not aperfect sacrifice. Nor can this great thing be well and truly doneso long as there is inequality anywhere or any stamp of ignorantshrinking and preference. But when there is a perfect equality toall works, results, things and persons, a surrender to the Highestand not to desire or ego, then the divine Will determines withoutstumbling or deflection and the divine Power executes freelywithout any nether interference or perverting reaction all worksin the purity and safety of your transmuted nature. To allow


your every act to be shaped through you by the divine Will in itsimmaculate sovereignty is the highest degree of the perfectionthat comes by doing works in Yoga. That done, your nature willfollow its cosmic walk in a complete and constant union withthe Supreme, express the highest Self, obey the Ishwara.

“This way of divine works is a far better release and amore perfect way and solution than the physical renunciationof life and works. A physical abstention is not entirely possibleand is not in the measure of its possibility indispensable to thespirit’s freedom; it is besides a dangerous example, for it exerts amisleading influence on ordinary men. The best, the greatest setthe standard which the rest of humanity strive to follow. Thensince action is the nature of the embodied spirit, since works arethe will of the eternal Worker, the great spirits, the master mindsshould set this example. World-workers should they be, doingall works of the world without reservation, God-workers free,glad and desireless, liberated souls and natures.

** *

“The mind of knowledge and the will of action are not all;there is within you a heart whose demand is for delight. Heretoo in the heart’s power and illumination, in its demand fordelight, for the soul’s satisfaction your nature must be turned,transformed and lifted to one conscious ecstasy with the Divine.The knowledge of the impersonal self brings its own Ananda;there is a joy of impersonality, a singleness of joy of the purespirit. But an integral knowledge brings a greater triple delight.It opens the gates of the Transcendent’s bliss; it releases intothe limitless delight of a universal impersonality; it discovers therapture of all this multitudinous manifestation: for there is ajoy of the Eternal in Nature. This Ananda in the Jiva, a portionhere of the Divine, takes the form of an ecstasy founded in theGodhead who is his source, in his supreme self, in the Masterof his existence. An entire God-love and adoration extends to alove of the world and all its forms and powers and creatures; in


all the Divine is seen, is found, is adored, is served or is felt inoneness. Add to knowledge and works this crown of the eternaltriune delight; admit this love, learn this worship; make it onespirit with works and knowledge. That is the apex of the perfectperfection.

“This Yoga of love will give you a highest potential forcefor spiritual largeness and unity and freedom. But it must bea love which is one with God-knowledge. There is a devotionwhich seeks God in suffering for consolation and succour anddeliverance; there is a devotion which seeks him for his gifts,for divine aid and protection and as a fountain of the satisfac-tion of desire; there is a devotion that, still ignorant, turns tohim for light and knowledge. And so long as one is limited tothese forms, there may persist even in their highest and noblestGodward turn a working of the three gunas. But when the God-lover is also the God-knower, the lover becomes one self withthe Beloved; for he is the chosen of the Most High and the electof the Spirit. Develop in yourself this God-engrossed love; theheart spiritualised and lifted beyond the limitations of its lowernature will reveal to you most intimately the secrets of God’simmeasurable being, bring into you the whole touch and influxand glory of his divine Power and open to you the mysteries ofan eternal rapture. It is perfect love that is the key to a perfectknowledge.

“This integral God-love demands too an integral work forthe sake of the Divine in yourself and in all creatures. The or-dinary man does works in obedience to some desire sinful orvirtuous, some vital impulse low or high, some mental choicecommon or exalted or from some mixed mind and life motive.But the work done by you must be free and desireless; work donewithout desire creates no reaction and imposes no bondage.Done in a perfect equality and an unmoved calm and peace,but without any divine passion, it is at first the fine yoke of aspiritual obligation, kartavyam karma, then the uplifting of adivine sacrifice; at its highest it can be the expression of a calmand glad acquiescence in active oneness. The oneness in love willdo much more: it will replace the first impassive calm by a strong


and deep rapture, not the petty ardour of egoistic desire but theocean of an infinite Ananda. It will bring the moving sense andthe pure and divine passion of the presence of the Beloved intoyour works; there will be an insistent joy of labour for God inyourself and for God in all beings. Love is the crown of worksand the crown of knowledge.

“This love that is knowledge, this love that can be the deepheart of your action, will be your most effective force for anutter consecration and complete perfection. An integral unionof the individual’s being with the Divine Being is the condition ofa perfect spiritual life. Turn then altogether towards the Divine;make one with him by knowledge, love and works all yournature. Turn utterly towards him and give up ungrudgingly intohis hands your mind and your heart and your will, all yourconsciousness and even your very senses and body. Let yourconsciousness be sovereignly moulded by him into a flawlessmould of his divine consciousness. Let your heart become alucid or flaming heart of the Divine. Let your will be an impec-cable action of his will. Let your very sense and body be therapturous sensation and body of the Divine. Adore and sacrificeto him with all you are; remember him in every thought andfeeling, every impulsion and act. Persevere until all these thingsare wholly his and he has taken up even in most common andoutward things as in the inmost sacred chamber of your spirithis constant transmuting presence.

** *

“This triune way is the means by which you can rise entirelyout of your lower into your supreme spiritual nature. That is thehidden superconscient nature in which the Jiva, a portion of thehigh Infinite and Divine and intimately one in law of being withhim, dwells in his Truth and not any longer in an externalisedMaya. This perfection, this unity can be enjoyed in its own nativestatus, aloof in a supreme supracosmic existence: but here alsoyou may and should realise it, here in the human body and


physical world. It is not enough for this end to be calm, inactiveand free from the gunas in the inner self and to watch and allowindifferently their mechanical action in the outer members. Forthe active nature as well as the self has to be given to the Divineand to become divine. All that you are must grow into one law ofbeing with the Purushottama, sadharmya; all must be changedinto my conscious spiritual becoming, mad-bhava. A completestsurrender must be there. Take refuge with Me in all the manyways and along all the living lines of your nature; for that alonewill bring about this great change and perfection.

“This high consummation of the Yoga will at once solveor rather it will wholly remove and destroy at its roots theproblem of action. Human action is a thing full of difficultiesand perplexities, tangled and confused like a forest with a fewmore or less obscure paths cut into it rather than through it;but all this difficulty and entanglement arises from the singlefact that man lives imprisoned in the ignorance of his mental,vital and physical nature. He is compelled by its qualities andyet afflicted with responsibility in his will because somethingin him feels that he is a soul who ought to be what now he isnot at all or very little, master and ruler of his nature. All hislaws of living, all his dharmas must be under these conditionsimperfect, temporary and provisional and at best only partlyright or true. His imperfections can cease only when he knowshimself, knows the real nature of the world in which he livesand, most of all, knows the Eternal from whom he comes and inwhom and by whom he exists. When he has once achieved a trueconsciousness and knowledge, there is no longer any problem;for then he acts freely out of himself and lives spontaneously inaccordance with the truth of his spirit and his highest nature.At its fullest, at the highest height of this knowledge it is not hewho acts but the Divine, the One eternal and infinite who actsin him and through him in his liberated wisdom and power andperfection.

“Man in his natural being is a sattwic, rajasic and tamasiccreature of Nature. According as one or other of her qualitiespredominates in him, he makes and follows this or that law


of his life and action. His tamasic, material, sensational mindsubject to inertia and fear and ignorance either obeys partlythe compulsion of its environment and partly the spasmodicimpulses of its desires or finds a protection in the routine follow-ing of a dull customary intelligence. The rajasic mind of desirestruggles with the world in which it lives and tries to possessalways new things, to command, battle, conquer, create, destroy,accumulate. Always it goes forward tossed between success andfailure, joy and sorrow, exultation or despair. But in all, whateverlaw it may seem to admit, it follows really only the law of thelower self and ego, the restless, untired, self-devouring and all-devouring mind of the Asuric and Rakshasic nature. The sattwicintelligence surmounts partly this state, sees that a better lawthan that of desire and ego must be followed and erects andimposes on itself a social, an ethical, a religious rule, a Dharma,a Shastra. This is as high as the ordinary mind of man can go, toerect an ideal or practical rule for the guidance of the mind andwill and as faithfully as possible observe it in life and conduct.This sattwic mind must be developed to its highest point whereit succeeds in putting away the mixture of ego motive altogetherand observes the Dharma for its own sake as an impersonalsocial, ethical or religious ideal, the thing disinterestedly to bedone solely because it is right, kartavyam karma.

“The real truth of all this action of Prakriti is, however,less outwardly mental and more inwardly subjective. It is thisthat man is an embodied soul involved in material and mentalnature, and he follows in it a progressive law of his developmentdetermined by an inner law of his being; his cast of spirit makesout his cast of mind and life, his swabhava. Each man has aswadharma, a law of his inner being which he must observe,find out and follow. The action determined by his inner nature,that is his real Dharma. To follow it is the true law of his devel-opment; to deviate from it is to bring in confusion, retardationand error. That social, ethical, religious or other law and ideal isbest for him always which helps him to observe and follow outhis Swadharma.

“All this action however is even at its best subject to the


ignorance of the mind and the play of the gunas. It is only whenthe soul of man finds itself that he can overpass and erase fromhis consciousness the ignorance and the confusion of the gunas.It is true that even when you have found yourself and live in yourself, your nature will still continue on its old lines and act fora time according to its inferior modes. But now you can followthat action with a perfect self-knowledge and can make of it asacrifice to the Master of your existence. Follow then the lawof your Swadharma, do the action that is demanded by yourSwabhava whatever it may be. Reject all motive of egoism, allinitiation by self-will, all rule of desire, until you can make thecomplete surrender of all the ways of your being to the Supreme.

“And when you are once able to do that sincerely, that willbe the moment to renounce the initiation of your acts withoutexception into the hands of the supreme Godhead within you.Then you will be released from all laws of conduct, liberatedfrom all dharmas. The Divine Power and Presence within youwill free you from sin and evil and lift you far above humanstandards of virtue. For you will live and act in the absoluteand spontaneous right and purity of the spiritual being and theimmaculate force of the divine nature. The Divine and not youwill enact his own will and works through you, not for yourlower personal pleasure and desire, but for the world-purposeand for your divine good and the manifest or secret good of all.Inundated with light, you will see the form of the Godhead inthe world and in the works of Time, know his purpose and hearhis command. Your nature will receive as an instrument his willonly whatever it may be and do it without question, becausethere will come with each initiation of your acts from above andwithin you an imperative knowledge and an illumined assent tothe divine wisdom and its significance. The battle will be his, histhe victory, his the empire.

“This will be your perfection in the world and the body,and beyond these worlds of temporal birth the supreme eternalsuperconsciousness will be yours and you will dwell for ever inthe highest status of the Supreme Spirit. The cycles of incarnationand the fear of mortality will not distress you; for here in life


you will have accomplished the expression of the Godhead, andyour soul, even though it has descended into mind and body,will already be living in the vast eternity of the Spirit.

“This then is the supreme movement, this complete sur-render of your whole self and nature, this abandonment of alldharmas to the Divine who is your highest Self, this absoluteaspiration of all your members to the supreme spiritual nature.If you can once achieve it, whether at the outset or much lateron the way, then whatever you are or were in your outward na-ture, your way is sure and your perfection inevitable. A supremePresence within you will take up your Yoga and carry it swiftlyalong the lines of your swabhava to its consummate completion.And afterwards whatever your way of life and mode of action,you will be consciously living, acting and moving in him and theDivine Power will act through you in your every inner and outermotion. This is the supreme way because it is the highest secretand mystery and yet an inner movement progressively realisableby all. This is the deepest and most intimate truth of your real,your spiritual existence.”

THE END

Note on the Text

ESSAYS ON THE GITA was first published in the monthlyreview Arya in two series. The first series, covering the firstsix chapters of the Gita, ran from August 1916 to July 1918.The second series, covering the last twelve chapters, ran fromAugust 1918 to July 1920.

The first series, slightly revised and with some new chap-ter titles, was brought out as a book in 1922 by V. RamaswamySastrulu and Sons, Madras. New editions of the first serieswere published by Arya Publishing House, Calcutta, in 1926,1937, 1944 and 1949. The same publisher issued an exten-sively revised edition of the second series in 1928, and neweditions of this series in 1942, 1945 and 1949.

The 1922 edition of the first series may be consideredan incomplete first edition of Essays on the Gita. The firstand second series pairs of 1926 and 1928, 1937 and 1942,1944 and 1945, and 1949 (both series) may be considered thesecond, third, fourth and fifth editions of the book.

Since 1949 the two series of Essays on the Gita have ap-peared in one volume. An American edition was published byThe Sri Aurobindo Library, New York, in 1950. The sixth andseventh Indian editions were published by the Sri AurobindoInternational Centre of Education in 1959 and 1966. In 1970Essays on the Gita formed volume 13 of the Sri AurobindoBirth Centenary Library. This, the eighth Indian edition, wasreprinted many times.

The text of the present, ninth, edition has been carefullychecked against Sri Aurobindo’s extant manuscripts and alleditions published before 1950.

Essays on the Gita - Sri Aurobindo

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