The Divine Teacher

II

हृषीकेशः प्रहसन्निव

hṛṣīkeśaḥ prahasanniva

He is the secret Master of works and sacrifice and the Friend of the human peoples.

Of all the great scriptures of the world the Gita alone is spoken on a battlefield, between two hosts drawn up for slaughter, in the held breath before the first shafts fly; and Sri Aurobindo, opening his Essays, will not let us forget it. The author, he observes, is careful again and again to recall the situation from which the teaching arose, even in the midst of his profoundest philosophy, and we must give that insistence its full weight. Three things in the Gita, he says, are spiritually significant and almost symbolic, typical of the deepest relations of the spiritual life: “the divine personality of the Teacher, his characteristic relations with his disciple and the occasion of his teaching.” Before we can rightly hear what is taught, we must see who it is that teaches, and how he teaches.

For the Teacher of the Gita is not a sage who has found the truth and hands it down; he is himself the truth, come into a human form to lead a human soul up into it. That is why in this scripture the method of the teaching can never be separated from the self-revelation of the Teacher. He begins as a friend holding the reins of a war-chariot and ends as the Lord seated in the heart of all beings, who asks for everything and promises everything; and between these two points the whole Gita unfolds as one long and patient withdrawing of a veil. Through it all runs a note which the severer readings of the Gita are apt to pass over, the note of a divine ease and delight, a love that is not troubled by the disciple’s trouble, a smile that rests upon the edge of the abyss. To follow the Teacher of the Gita is to follow that smile to its source.

acyuta

The Charioteer behind the Veil

In the vast action of the Mahabharata Krishna is not the hero. He stands behind it, in Sri Aurobindo’s phrase, “not as its hero, but as its secret centre and hidden guide,” leader to some, counsellor and friend to others, to others again the baffler of their designs and their slayer, felt at every crisis and yet so hidden that all the actors imagine themselves the protagonists. Even Arjuna, his nearest friend and chosen instrument, has received counsel from his wisdom and help from his power, has loved and been loved, and yet, when at last the veil is torn, he must cry out that he had called him “O Krishna, O Yadava, O Comrade” not knowing his greatness (11·41–42); he “has to confess at last that all the while he did not really know his divine Friend.” And when the hour of Kurukshetra comes, the Avatar takes up no weapon. He takes the reins.

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

Consider, then, how the teaching actually begins. It begins before a single word of doctrine is spoken, with a request and an obedience. Arjuna, confident and eager, bids his charioteer stay the car between the two armies (1·21), naming him Acyuta, the faultless, the immovable, so that he may look upon the champions of unrighteousness whom he must meet “in this holiday of fight.” And Hrishikesha, the master of the senses, drives the chariot not merely between the hosts but, as the text is careful to say, “in front of Bhishma, Drona and all the princes of earth,” and speaks only this: behold these Kurus gathered together (1·24). Nothing more. The first act of the divine Teacher is a placing. He sets the disciple before the one sight which his whole formation had never permitted him to see, and the meaning of the war comes home to him, as Sri Aurobindo says, “like a blow delivered at the very centre of his sensational, vital and emotional being.”

Then the Teacher is silent. He does not interrupt the trembling of the limbs, the grieving of the heart, the reasoning of the ethical mind that gathers its case against the deed; he lets the whole outer being of the man come forward and declare itself, until the bow slips from the hand and the warrior sinks down upon the seat of the chariot (1·46). Only when the old dharma, the law by which Arjuna had lived and acted, has pronounced its own bankruptcy, will the new word be spoken. Arjuna asked to see his enemies and he was shown his kin; the Friend answered the prayer that was made, and in answering it laid bare what the prayer concealed. So it is always with that hidden Guide in the life of man. He consents to our movement and carries it further than we meant, until we stand before the knot that must be cut.

nara-nārāyaṇa

Nara and Narayana

Who, then, is this charioteer? The historical mind answers with a name and a chronicle; Sri Aurobindo answers with a truth of our own being. Behind the figure of Krishna he sees the ancient Vaishnava image of Nara-Narayana. Nara is the human soul, the eternal companion of the Divine, which finds itself only when it awakens to that companionship and begins to live in God; Narayana is the divine Soul always present in our humanity, “the secret guide, friend and helper of the human being.” The Avatar is this inner companion become visible, stepping out from behind the veil of the heart to stand in a human body at a human side. “The inner Divinity is the eternal Avatar in man,” Sri Aurobindo writes; “the human manifestation is its sign and development in the external world.” Hence he can set aside, almost with a gesture, the quarrels of the historian: “So too the Krishna who matters to us is the eternal incarnation of the Divine and not the historical teacher and leader of men.”

The Gita gives the same truth in its own words when, in the fourth chapter, the Teacher lets fall the mystery of his birth: though he is the unborn and the Lord of all existences, he stands upon his own Nature and comes into birth by his self-Maya (4·6). And a moment before, in one quiet line, he has given the whole relation of master and disciple: “Many are my lives that are past, and thine also, O Arjuna; all of them I know, but thou knowest not” (4·5). Two companions who have travelled together through many births, one who remembers and one who has forgotten: that is the situation of the Gita, and of every soul before its God. The teaching will be, in the end, a remembering.

Indian thought has other figures of this companionship, and Sri Aurobindo recalls them: Indra and Kutsa riding in one chariot to the home of Light, the two birds upon one tree of the Upanishad, the twin seers Nara and Narayana doing tapasyā, the concentrated askesis of the spirit, together for the knowledge. But in these it is the divine knowledge in which all action culminates that is in view. The Gita reverses the emphasis.

Arjuna and Krishna, this human and this divine, stand together not as seers in the peaceful hermitage of meditation, but as fighter and holder of the reins in the clamorous field, in the midst of the hurtling shafts, in the chariot of battle.

The place of the charioteer is exactly chosen. He does not fight in Arjuna’s stead, nor take the bow from his hand; he holds the reins, determines the direction, bears the destiny of the fight, and leaves to the human fighter the full use of his strength and skill. So the Teacher of the Gita is not only the God who unveils himself in the word of knowledge, but “the God in man who moves our whole world of action.” The divine companion is not waiting for us beyond the world at the end of a long withdrawal; he is already in the car, in the dust and clamour of our works, with the reins in his hands.

prahasann iva

Smiling, As It Were

Arjuna has made his last plea. “I will not fight,” he says to Govinda, and becomes silent (2·9). The whole weight of the human crisis hangs in that silence: the collapse of a noble nature, the failure of every standard by which it had walked, the grief that dries up the senses. And into that silence the poet sets a single phrase, so slight that a hurried reader passes it by.

तमुवाच हृषीकेशः प्रहसन्निव भारत ।सेनयोरुभयोर्मध्ये विषीदन्तमिदं वचः ॥

tamuvāca hṛṣīkeśaḥ prahasanniva bhāratasenayorubhayormadhye viṣīdantamidaṃ vacaḥ

Hrishikesha, “smiling as it were,” spoke to him between the two armies. It is the first thing we are told of the Teacher’s inner state, and it is not grave. Not mockery, for the words that follow are full of care; not indifference, for he has come down into this very anguish to lift it; but the smile of one who sees the whole where the disciple sees only the torn fragment, who knows that those for whom Arjuna grieves are not lost, that the soul is not slain with the slaying of the body (2·20), that the terrible field is also a stage on which the eternal plays at mortality. The qualifying iva, “as it were,” is itself a tenderness: the divine amusement is veiled, lest it wound the one who weeps. In the Bengali commentary, where Sri Aurobindo lets the Teacher’s first reply (2·11) unfold at length, the reason of the smile is given:

He is aware of these facts: there is no death, no separation, no sorrow, we are immortal, eternally the same, we are the children of delight, children of immortality; we have come to this earth to play at hide and seek with life and death, with joy and sorrow, we are enacting a drama of laughter and weeping in the huge play-house of Nature

Yet the smile does not spare the disciple. The first words are a rebuke: whence has come to thee this stain and darkness of the soul in the hour of peril? Fall not from the virility of the fighter; shake off this paltry faintheartedness and arise (2·2–3). “The answer of a hero to a hero, shall we say,” Sri Aurobindo asks, and not what we expect from a divine Teacher? He answers that to the Indian mind compassion has always figured as one of the largest elements of the divine nature, and that it is precisely because Arjuna’s pity is not that compassion that it is rebuked. His is the shrinking of the nerves and the grief of a heart bound to “its own people”; and self-pity, Sri Aurobindo says bluntly, “is among the most ignoble and un-Aryan of moods.” The true compassion is of another quality:

This compassion observes with an eye of love and wisdom and calm strength the battle and the struggle, the strength and weakness of man, his virtues and sins, his joy and suffering, his knowledge and his ignorance, his wisdom and his folly, his aspiration and his failure and it enters into it all to help and to heal.

The smile and the rebuke are therefore one movement of one love. The eye that smiles is the eye that sees clearly; the voice that rebukes is the voice that believes in the strength it summons. The Teacher does not console the weakness; he refuses to take it for the man.

buddhiyoga

Not the Friend and Lover Speaks First

Arjuna now does the one thing that makes the teaching possible. He owns that poorness of spirit has smitten away his true nature, that his whole consciousness is bewildered in its view of right and wrong, and he takes refuge as a disciple: śiṣyas te ‘haṃ śādhi māṃ tvāṃ prapannam, “I take refuge as a disciple with thee; enlighten me” (2·7). But he asks for something quite definite. “He does not ask for the secret of life or of the world, the meaning and purpose of it all, but for a dharma,” a clear rule by which he may again walk with confidence. And it is exactly this that the Teacher will not give him, or will give only by giving him far more. For the divine Teacher means to lead him beyond all dharmas into the one vast rule of living consciously in the Divine and acting from that consciousness; and so he begins, not with a rule of action, but with the state of the soul from which right action must flow.

Not the Friend and Lover of man speaks first, but the guide and teacher who has to remove from him his ignorance of his true self and of the nature of the world and of the springs of his own action.

Here the pedagogy of the Gita becomes visible, and it is a pedagogy of exact proportion. The first word is addressed to the buddhi, the intelligent will, because it is a wrong understanding that binds man to his works; the knowledge of the immortal Self is given to cut the root of grief; then equality, then the Yoga of the intelligent will that casts away the bondage of works (2·39), then desireless action offered as sacrifice. The supreme truths are not withheld from any want of love, but held back until the disciple can bear them. Sri Aurobindo notes that the Gita keeps the idea of the Purushottama in the background of its first chapters “so that it may not disturb the firmness of the first steps by reaching out prematurely to things too great as yet for the mind of the human disciple”; and if it were a living teacher speaking and not a written scripture, he adds, one could imagine him pausing after the sixth chapter to say, “Work this out first, there is plenty for you to do to realise it and you have the largest possible basis.”

Nor is the disciple silenced. He interrupts, and every interruption is received. He asks how the sage of settled understanding speaks, how he sits, how he walks (2·54), wanting an outward sign of an inward state; he complains that he is bewildered by a mingled speech and demands one decisive thing (3·1–2); he protests that the mind is restless, vehement and as hard to hold as the wind (6·34). The Teacher neither scolds the impatience nor waves away the difficulty. To the practical demand he returns the inward truth, persisting, as Sri Aurobindo remarks, “merely in enlarging upon the ideas he has already brought forward, on the soul-state behind the action, not on the action itself”; to the honest complaint about the mind he concedes everything and gives a means equal to it, constant practice and non-attachment (6·35). The Teacher is measuring his light to the eye that must receive it.

janma karma ca me divyam

The Teacher Who Is His Own Example

A human teacher points beyond himself to a truth he has seen. The Teacher of the Gita points to himself, and that is the great strangeness of this scripture. When he wishes to show Arjuna how the liberated man should act, he does not cite a rule but gives his own example: “I have no work that I need to do in all the three worlds, I have nothing that I have not gained and have yet to gain, and I abide verily in the paths of action” (3·22); for if he ceased, men who follow in every way his path would sink into confusion (3·23–24). Sri Aurobindo draws out the full sense of the passage in words he puts, as a paraphrase, into the mouth of the Avatar: “I, the Divine, am the rule and the standard; it is I who make the path in which men tread; I am the way and the goal.”

In the fourth chapter the self-disclosure deepens. The Yoga he teaches, Krishna says, is the ancient and original Yoga once given to Vivasvan, handed down from royal sage to royal sage and lost in the great lapse of Time, and now declared again to Arjuna for one reason only:

स एवायं मया तेऽद्य योगः प्रोक्तः पुरातनः ।भक्तोऽसि मे सखा चेति रहस्यं ह्येतदुत्तमम् ॥

sa evāyaṃ mayā te’dya yogaḥ proktaḥ purātanaḥbhakto’si me sakhā ceti rahasyaṃ hyetaduttamam

The highest secret is given because of a relation: “for thou art My devotee and My friend.” The Yoga is renewed for Arjuna, as Sri Aurobindo puts it, “because he is the lover and devotee, friend and comrade of the Avatar.” From this point the teaching is never again merely instruction; it is the self-giving of one who loves to one who is loved. And when Arjuna, taking the words in their most physical sense, asks how one born only now could have spoken to the Sun-God in the beginning (4·4), the answer is the revelation of the avatāra, the descent of the Divine into human birth, for the enthroning of the Right from age to age (4·7–8). Sri Aurobindo sees in that descent not a miracle to be wondered at but a model held out for our ascent:

It is the manifestation from above of that which we have to develop from below; it is the descent of God into that divine birth of the human being into which we mortal creatures must climb; it is the attracting divine example given by God to man in the very type and form and perfected model of our human existence.

Here the pedagogy passes into revelation, because the Teacher is himself the truth he teaches. To know “in its right principles” his divine birth and his divine works (4·9) is already to begin to share them. The Avatar, Sri Aurobindo writes, comes “as the divine personality which shall fill the consciousness of the human being and replace the limited egoistic personality.” What the disciple learns is therefore not a doctrine about God but the very form of God’s own being and working, set before him in a human body on the seat of a chariot. And the manner of that working is love answering love: “As men approach Me, so I accept them to My love” (4·11); or, in Sri Aurobindo’s rendering, “in whatever way men accept, love and take joy in God, in that way God accepts, loves and takes joy in man.”

divyaṃ cakṣuḥ

The Veil Withdrawn and Given Back

Slowly, through the middle of the Gita, the “I” of the Teacher widens. It is the Self seated in all beings, the origin of the gods, the Father and Mother of the world, the refuge and the benignant friend (9·17–18); and at a precise moment the growing love of the disciple becomes the condition of a further gift. “Again, O mighty-armed, hearken to my supreme word, that I will speak to thee from my will for thy soul’s good, now that thy heart is taking delight in me” (10·1). Sri Aurobindo lingers on the phrase: “For this delight of the heart in God is the whole constituent and essence of true bhakti.” The Teacher opens his deeper secrets not to the cleverest understanding but to the heart that has begun to rejoice in him.

Then Arjuna asks for what no argument can give: to see (11·3–4). And the Teacher, who had placed him before the armies in the first chapter, now places him before the universe. “This thy human eye cannot grasp; but there is a divine eye and that eye I now give to thee” (11·8). Arjuna sees the Godhead of a million forms, and Time the destroyer arisen for the destruction of the nations, the warriors of both hosts already slain in him (11·32). The friend of the chariot is revealed as the Lord of the worlds; and the first cry of the human heart, once the terror has had its say, is a cry of remorse for its old familiarity:

तस्मात्प्रणम्य प्रणिधाय कायंप्रसादये त्वामहमीशमीड्यम् ।पितेव पुत्रस्य सखेव सख्युःप्रियः प्रियायार्हसि देव सोढुम् ॥

tasmātpraṇamya praṇidhāya kāyaṃprasādaye tvāmahamīśamīḍyampiteva putrasya sakheva sakhyuḥpriyaḥ priyāyārhasi deva soḍhum

What had been sweet has for a moment become a fault in his eyes: the jests, the shared couch and seat and banquet, the careless “O Comrade” (11·41–42). Yet the prayer that follows asks for nothing else than that same intimacy raised to its truth, that God should bear with him “as a friend to his friend and comrade, as one dear with him he loves.” And the Teacher grants it. He does not leave the disciple alone with the overwhelming vastness; he reassumes the human form, “the desired form of grace and love and sweetness,” and consoles the terrified one (11·50). Sri Aurobindo sees in this return not a descent from truth into a comfortable illusion but a truth of the divine dealings with man:

But there is too the gracious mediating form of divine Narayana, the God who is so close to man and in man, the Charioteer of the battle and the journey, with his four arms of helpful power, a humanised symbol of Godhead, not this million-armed universality.

In that mediating figure, he says, the human mind sees “the calm, helpfulness and delight of a friendly Godhead.” And Arjuna’s answer shows that the gift has reached its mark: beholding again the gentle human form, his heart is filled with delight and he is restored to his own nature (11·51). The Teacher has given the whole, and then, out of love, the bearable; and the soul that has seen the Infinite is sent back to its work under the eyes of a Friend.

sarvaguhyatamam

Dear Art Thou to Me

The last movement of the Teacher is the most surprising of all. He has given the whole knowledge: the Self, the Lord in the heart who turns all beings as if mounted on a machine by his Maya (18·61), the refuge to be taken in him in every way of one’s being (18·62). And then, having expounded “a knowledge more secret than that which is hidden,” he stands back and sets the disciple free: “having reflected on it fully, do as thou wouldest” (18·63). The Divine who could command, and whose will is already accomplishing itself through Time, will not impose the last step. The highest truth is offered, not enforced, and the freedom he leaves is itself a sign of the respect of the Divine for the soul he has made his friend.

Yet he does not leave it there. Unasked, he speaks once more, and gives a reason that is nothing else than love: “Further hear the most secret, the supreme word that I shall speak to thee; beloved art thou intimately of Me, therefore will I speak for thy good” (18·64). The secret of secrets is told, as Sri Aurobindo says, “because he is the chosen and beloved soul.”

मन्मना भव मद्भक्तो मद्याजी मां नमस्कुरु ।मामेवैष्यसि सत्यं ते प्रतिजाने प्रियोऽसि मे ॥

manmanā bhava madbhakto madyājī māṃ namaskurumāmevaiṣyasi satyaṃ te pratijāne priyo’si me

Two brief and simple verses follow, left without comment by the Gita to sink into the soul and reveal their fullness in experience: become my-minded, my lover and adorer, and come to me, for dear art thou to me; abandon all dharmas and take refuge in me alone; I will deliver thee from all sin and evil; do not grieve (18·65–66). The disciple had asked, at the beginning, for a dharma. He is given, at the end, the release from all dharmas into a relation.

And we feel, as they are being uttered, that it was this for which the soul of the disciple was being prepared all the time and the rest was only an enlightening and enabling discipline and doctrine.

So the whole pedagogy of the Gita is seen at last for what it was: the patient preparation of a soul for a single act of self-giving, and the gradual disclosure of the One to whom it is to be given. The Teacher who began by holding the reins outside Arjuna ends by revealing himself as the Lord seated within him, the same charioteer now driving from the heart. In Sri Aurobindo’s paraphrase of that last assurance the two images meet: “I am here with thee in thy chariot of battle revealed as the Master of Existence within and without thee and I repeat the absolute assurance, the infallible promise that I will lead thee to myself through and beyond all sorrow and evil.”

The Teacher unveils himself

The Gita, looked at in this light, is enclosed between two assurances spoken by the same smiling voice. Its first word to the disciple is that he grieves for those who should not be grieved for, aśocyān anvaśocas tvam (2·11); its last is mā śucaḥ, do not grieve (18·66). Between these two the Teacher has done everything: he has placed and waited, rebuked and consoled, reasoned and withheld, shown his own example, confessed his love, opened the divine eye and closed it again in mercy, and at last given himself. The smile that rested upon him between the two armies was already this last word, seen from within by one who knew how the story would end.

And the Teacher does not remain on the field of Kurukshetra. Sri Aurobindo reminds us that what the Indian religious consciousness seeks in the image of the temple, in the worship of the Avatars and in the devotion to the human Guru, is always the one world-Teacher, the human Guru being one “through whom the voice of the one world-Teacher makes itself heard.” The charioteer of Arjuna is the Narayana who sits in every heart, the secret Friend of the human peoples, who holds the reins of our lives before we know that he is there. When at the end Arjuna says that his delusion is destroyed and his memory regained through that grace, and that he will do the word he has heard (18·73), the Teacher’s work is complete; the smile has passed from the face of the Friend into the peace of the disciple, and the one who taught is found to have been, all the while, the one who was being remembered.

The verses of this essay

Chapter 1

1. 21
2. 24
3. 46

Chapter 2

1. 7
2. 9
3. 10
4. 11
5. 2
6. 3
7. 39
8. 54

Chapter 3

1. 2

Chapter 6

1. 34
2. 35

Chapter 3

1. 22

Chapter 4

1. 3
2. 5
3. 6
4. 9
5. 11

Chapter 10

1. 1

Chapter 11

1. 8
2. 44
3. 50
4. 51

Chapter 18

1. 61
2. 63
3. 64
4. 65
5. 66
6. 73

• The Divine Teacher
• The Human Disciple
• The Creed of the Aryan Fighter
• The Yoga of the Intelligent Will
• The Principle of Divine Works
• The Possibility and Purpose of Avatarhood
• The Divine Birth and Divine Works
• The Gist of the Karmayoga
• The Supreme Divine
• The Supreme Word of Gita
• The Vision of the World Spirit; The Double Aspect
• The Supreme Secret
• The Unreality of Death (Bengali writings on the Gita)