दैवासुरसम्पद्विभागयोगः
daivāsurasampadvibhāgayogaḥ
Grieve not, for the soul born to the light has only to close the three doors of desire, wrath and greed, and its divine endowment will carry it towards freedom.
- puruṣottama — the Supreme known and adored, while the nature is not yet made his
- daivī sampad — the divine endowment that leads to liberation
From the summit of the Purushottama the Gita turns, as a wise guide turns, to the ground under the traveller’s feet. One question alone remains, Sri Aurobindo says: how our nature, bound and defective, is to pass not only in principle but in all its movements from the law of the three gunas to the immortal Dharma. The soul may know the Highest and still act through a nature of desire and inertia; and the Gita’s answer, which governs all its remaining chapters, is to develop the sattwic element until it exceeds itself and opens into the light and calm of the spirit. Before that ascent is traced, the chapter sets two kinds of beings side by side, for the one is capable of such a self-exceeding and the other is not.
The divine endowment is named first: fearlessness, purity of temperament, steadfastness in knowledge, giving, self-control, sacrifice, candour, harmlessness, truth, absence of wrath, compassion to all beings, gentleness, modesty, energy, forgiveness, patience (16·1–3). It would be easy to read this as a portrait of mild virtue. Sri Aurobindo will not let us.
But its gentleness and self-denial and self-control are free too from all weakness: it has energy and soul force, strong resolution, the fearlessness of the soul that lives in the right and according to the truth as well as its harmlessness
Against it stands the Asuric endowment, pride and arrogance and wrath and harshness (16·4), and the Asuric view of the world: “The world is without God, not true, not founded in truth… with Desire for its sole cause, a world of Chance” (16·8). The verses that follow have lost nothing of their force: bound by a hundred bonds, devoured by wrath and lust, such men think, “To-day I have gained this object of desire, to-morrow I shall have that other… I have killed this my enemy, the rest too I will kill… who is there like unto me?” (16·12–15); they sacrifice from ostentation (16·17), and hate the God hidden in themselves and in man (16·18). Sri Aurobindo sees in the Asura the rajasic ego raised to its height, the same titanic type that the Veda figured in the war of Gods and Titans and that the epics set against the Deva in human form. And into this struggle comes a word of reassurance to the disciple: “Grieve not, thou art born in the Deva-nature, O Pandava” (16·5).
Yet the chapter is no doctrine of predestination. The two creations are culminations of a nature that has been cultivated, not decrees fixed from the beginning.
All souls are eternal portions of the Divine, the Asura as well as the Deva, all can come to salvation: even the greatest sinner can turn to the Divine.
The downward way has three doors, desire, wrath and greed (16·21); the man delivered from them follows his own higher good and arrives at the highest soul-status (16·22). Until he can walk by the spirit, let the Shastra be his authority (16·23–24). Sri Aurobindo reads the Shastra largely, not as a mass of customs but as the knowledge laid down by intuition, experience and wisdom, the science and art and ethic of life by which the desire-nature is schooled. It is a means, not an end; the supreme end is the freedom of the spirit acting “not in the Law, but in the Spirit.” Nor is that freedom a bare impersonal calm; the heart too must be lifted into it.
For without that uplifting of the heart his whole nature is not fulfilled and united with God; the ecstasy of the spirit’s calm needs to be transformed by the ecstasy of the soul’s Ananda.
So the soul leaves this threshold with its orientation chosen: turned towards the light, clear of the three doors, content for a while to be disciplined by the best that the race has known. But a question already stirs at the edge of the law. What of those whose faith carries them beyond the rule? The next threshold asks what faith itself is.
Essays on the Gita
Key verses
