श्रद्धात्रयविभागयोगः
śraddhātrayavibhāgayogaḥ
Man is made of his faith: turn yours to the highest, and let every sacrifice, gift and askesis begin with OM and be offered to That which is.
- daivī sampad — the divine endowment, disciplined by the law of the Shastra
- oṃ tat sat — works of faith consecrated to the Real
The sixteenth chapter bade the soul take the Shastra for its authority. At once Arjuna asks the question that every living age asks of its law: “When men sacrifice to God or the gods with faith, but abandon the rule of the Shastra,” what is the nature of that faith (17·1)? Sri Aurobindo honours the question. Man is always leaving an old law for a new truth, and such a turn may be a revolt of the ego or the discovery of a larger ideal; its only clue and support is the soul’s śraddhā, its will to believe and to live what it sees to be true.
The answer goes to the root. Faith is threefold, like all in Nature, and takes the shape of each man’s stuff of being (17·2–3); and then comes the line that Sri Aurobindo calls pregnant with almost a whole philosophy: “This Purusha, this soul in man, is, as it were, made of shraddha,” and whatever his faith, that he is (17·3). We become what we believe with our whole being. Yet he guards against the half-truth that we merely create our own truth. Our endeavour is to become the Divine, madbhāva, and that divine way of being already exists in the eternity of the Purushottama and in our own depths; faith is the power by which we grow into it here.
It is by an act of our conscious substance and a belief in 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.
The chapter then walks through the whole of life in the light of the three modes: food (17·7–10), sacrifice (17·11–13), askesis (17·14–19) and gift (17·20–22). Sri Aurobindo reads it upward, from tamas to sattwa, as a stair. The tamasic sacrifice is done without faith, without the mantra and the dakshina, the giving without which action becomes wholly self-regarding (17·13); the rajasic is offered for fruit and ostentation (17·12); the sattwic is done as a thing that ought to be done, with the mind fixed on the idea of the sacrifice and without desire for its fruit (17·11).
It is the inner state, motive and direction which give their value to our works, and not merely the apparent outer direction, the divine names we may call to sanction them or even the sincere intellectual belief which seems to justify us in the performance.
The Gita rejects the violent austerities that torment the body and the God seated within it (17·5–6), and gives instead a threefold askesis of body, speech and mind, whose last word is “a clear and calm gladness of mind” (17·14–16). Sri Aurobindo carries each discipline to its culmination beyond the modes: sacrifice ends where the Master of sacrifice offers his own works to himself through the Jiva; askesis ends in the spirit’s immaculate Tapas, when all is naturally divine and no labour of discipline is needed; giving ends in the soul’s constant outflowing of light, love and strength upon the world, as the universe itself is born of God’s giving of himself.
The chapter closes on a syllable. OM, Tat, Sat is the triple designation of the Brahman (17·23). With OM every act of sacrifice, gift and askesis is begun (17·24); with Tat, That, it is done without desire of fruit by those who seek liberation (17·25); Sat, which means both the good and the real, names every work so offered, for such works prepare the soul for the higher reality of its being (17·26–27). Whatever is done without faith is asat, nought here or hereafter (17·28). The soul leaves this threshold with its whole life turned into an offering to the Real. There remains only the last question, what must finally be renounced, and the last word, which renounces even the law.
Essays on the Gita
Key verses
