The Nature of the Disciple

III

नष्टो मोहः स्मृतिर्लब्धा

naṣṭo mohaḥ smṛtirlabdhā

Arjuna, the disciple who receives his initiation on the battlefield, is a counterpart of this conception; he is the type of the struggling human soul who has not yet received the knowledge, but has grown fit to receive it by action in the world in a close companionship and an increasing nearness to the higher and divine Self in humanity.

Every teaching is shaped as much by the one who receives it as by the one who gives. The Gita might have been spoken to a sage in a forest hermitage, and it would then have been another scripture, a gospel of withdrawal and of the silent Self. It was spoken instead to a warrior in a chariot, at the moment when his whole life of action had brought him to the brink of an act he could neither do nor refuse; and the character of that man, his temperament, his virtues, even his limitations, have entered into the very substance of the teaching. To understand the Gita we must understand Arjuna, not as a figure in an old story but as the human nature that the Divine takes up in order to remake it.

Sri Aurobindo reads him with a double gaze. On the surface Arjuna is the practical man of action, formed by the three modes of Nature, by the law of his order and the code of his society, and brought by that very formation to a crisis in which every standard fails him at once. Beneath the surface he is Nara beside Narayana, the human soul in the eternal companionship of the Divine, a soul whose true nature, his svabhāva, is not destroyed by the crisis but eclipsed, and whose recovery is the secret aim of all the Teacher’s labour. The Gita is the history of how such a nature is met, layer by layer, in the order in which it can be reached, and lifted without violence into the divine man: not an abolition of the Kshatriya but his transfiguration, not the extinction of the man but his remembrance of what he is.

nara

Nara: the Soul of Action

Beside the divine Teacher stands the human disciple, and Sri Aurobindo is careful to see in him neither a mere character of epic nor an allegory of the inner life. The Gita, he insists, is written in plain terms and deals with the real difficulties of human life and action; to turn its battle into a symbol of the soul’s inward wars alone would be to wrest its straightforward language into a laborious mystification. Yet the setting, though not symbolical, is typical. Arjuna is the representative man of a great world-struggle, the closest friend and chosen instrument of the Avatar, and in the Gita he stands for the human soul of action brought, through that action itself, face to face with the problem of life at its sharpest.

The old images of the human and the divine in companionship help us to see what is peculiar in him. In the Veda the human soul Kutsa rides with Indra in one chariot to the home of Light, and Kutsa, Sri Aurobindo notes, is called “the son of Arjuna or Arjuni, the White One, child of Switra the White Mother,” that is, “the sattwic or purified and light-filled soul which is open to the unbroken glories of the divine knowledge.” At the end of that journey the human has grown into so exact a likeness of the divine companion that he can hardly be told from him. The name of our disciple carries the same whiteness. But the Gita turns the old figure towards another road.

But the Gita starts from action and Arjuna is the man of action and not of knowledge, the fighter, never the seer or the thinker.

This is the first fact of his nature, and it governs everything. He has not come to the Teacher as a seeker after truth; he has come as a warrior with a work to do, and he will turn to the knowledge only because his work has become impossible without it. The Divine does not ask him first to become a philosopher. He meets him in his action and through his action, and makes the very field of battle the place of initiation. That is why the disciple of the Gita is so near to us: most men are not seers but doers, living by the standards they have received and acting in a world they have not fathomed, and it is to such a soul that the Gita’s word is spoken.

Yet he is a doer of no common height. The Teacher himself, naming the chief among each kind of being in which the Divine is most manifest, says, “I am Krishna among the Vrishnis, Arjuna among the Pandavas” (10·37). He is a vibhūti, a soul in whom the divine power stands out above the common level; and his crisis is great in proportion to the greatness of what has been built in him. He is Nara, the human soul which, as Sri Aurobindo says of that eternal companion, finds itself only when it awakens to the companionship of Narayana.

svabhāva

The Rajasic Man with a Sattwic Ideal

To know the disciple we must know the stuff of which his nature is woven. The Gita accepts the Sankhya analysis of the three guṇas, the modes of the one world-energy: sattva, the mode of poise, light and harmony; rajas, the mode of passion, action and struggling desire; tamas, the mode of ignorance and inertia. Every human temperament is some mixture of these, and each meets the battle of life in the manner of its dominant quality. Sri Aurobindo places Arjuna precisely within this scheme in a single sentence.

Arjuna is the Kshatriya, the rajasic man who governs his rajasic action by a high sattwic ideal.

The rajasic force is the ground of his being: the energy that flings itself into the struggle, the joy of battle, the pride of strength and victory. He advances to Kurukshetra, Sri Aurobindo writes, “with the full acceptance of the joy of battle, as to “a holiday of fight”, but with a proud confidence in the righteousness of his cause” (1·21). But this force is not left to its own violence. It is governed from above by a sattwic ideal, by the law of right, by honour, chivalry and the protection of the weak. He is not a slave of his passions but has been trained to a high calm and self-control; he has lived and guided himself by the śāstra, the moral and social code; he is “the high-minded, self-governed, chivalrous prince and warrior and leader of Aryan men.” He justifies his name, Sri Aurobindo says, “only in being so far pure and sattwic as to be governed by high and clear principles and impulses and habitually control his lower nature by the noblest Law which he knows.”

शौर्यं तेजो धृतिर्दाक्ष्यं युद्धे चाप्यपलायनम् ।दानमीश्वरभावश्च क्षात्रं कर्म स्वभावजम् ॥

śauryaṃ tejo dhṛtirdākṣyaṃ yuddhe cāpyapalāyanamdānamīśvarabhāvaśca kṣātraṃ karma svabhāvajam

Heroism, high spirit, resolution, ability, not fleeing in battle, generosity, and īśvarabhāva, the temperament of the ruler and leader: these are the qualities the Gita will later name as the natural work of the Kshatriya (18·43), and Sri Aurobindo insists that it names them in terms not of outward function but of inner character. The real work of such a man is “the power to cast into form and dynamic rhythm of movement the law of the active battling royal or warrior spirit.” That is Arjuna’s svabhāva, and the Gita will never ask him to cast it away.

Yet the finest formation of the lower nature is still a formation of the lower nature. Arjuna, Sri Aurobindo notes, is egoistic like other men, “but with the purer or sattwic egoism which regards the moral law and society and the claims of others and not only or predominantly his own interests, desires and passions.” It is a noble ego, and its very nobility makes it hard to see as ego at all. Here lies the hidden condition of the whole drama. A nature governed by a sattwic ideal can go far and can go high; but it cannot go beyond the ideal that governs it, and when that ideal itself breaks, it has nothing left to stand upon.

viṣāda

The Blow at the Centre

The break comes, characteristically, not through thought but through sight. The pragmatic man awakens, as Sri Aurobindo says, through his sensations. He has asked to see his enemies; the chariot is stayed before Bhishma and Drona; and he sees grandsires, teachers, uncles, brothers, sons, comrades, all whom the social man holds most sacred, ranked against him for slaughter (1·26–27). He knew all this before, but he had never realised it; now it strikes him at once in every part of his being. The crisis of Arjuna is not the question of the thinker who turns inward in search of the truth of things; it is the revolt of the whole outer man, and Sri Aurobindo traces it through each of his members in turn.

The revolt itself is the most elemental and simple possible; sensationally, the elemental feeling of horror, pity and disgust; vitally, the loss of attraction and faith in the recognised and familiar objects of action and aims of life; emotionally, the recoil of the ordinary feelings of social man, affection, reverence, desire of a common happiness and satisfaction, from a stern duty outraging them all; morally, the elementary sense of sin and hell and rejection of “blood-stained enjoyments”; practically, the sense that the standards of action have led to a result which destroys the practical aims of action.

The Gita’s first chapter is the anatomy of that revolt. The body goes first: the limbs collapse, the mouth is parched, the frame shakes, the hair stands on end, the skin burns, and the bow Gandiva slips from the hand (1·28–30). Then the vital motive of action drains away: “I desire not victory, nor kingdom, nor pleasures”; what is kingdom, what enjoyment, what even life, when those for whose sake these are desired stand here to be slain (1·31–35)? Then the heart cries out for “my own people,” and the moral mind comes forward to justify the heart with its arguments of sin, of the ruin of families, of the destruction of the ancient law (1·36–44). And at last the practical will simply refuses: better to be slain unarmed and unresisting (1·45). He sinks down in the chariot and casts away the bow (1·46).

What has happened in the terms of the gunas is exact. It is, Sri Aurobindo says, “the uprush of the tamasic quality into the rajasic man,” a collapse towards ignorance and inertia wearing the aspect of virtue; “the recoil of Arjuna is the tamasic recoil from action of the sattwa-rajasic man.” The pity that seems so noble is shot through with the shrinking of the nerves and the self-regard of a heart that cannot bear the emptiness of its own life after the deed. And the result is total: not one part of the being but the whole of it finds itself without a law. “That for the soul of action in the mental being is the worst possible crisis, failure and overthrow.” It is exactly here, where the best of the ordinary human formation reaches the end of its resources, that the Gita begins.

kārpaṇyadoṣopahatasvabhāva

The Nature Smitten

Out of this overthrow comes the verse on which the whole relation of the disciple to the Teacher turns. It is at once a confession, a bewilderment and a surrender.

कार्पण्यदोषोपहतस्वभावःपृच्छामि त्वां धर्मसम्मूढचेताः ।यच्छ्रेयः स्यान्निश्चितं ब्रूहि तन्मेशिष्यस्तेऽहं शाधि मां त्वां प्रपन्नम् ॥

kārpaṇyadoṣopahatasvabhāvaḥpṛcchāmi tvāṃ dharmasammūḍhacetāḥyacchreyaḥ syānniścitaṃ brūhi tanmeśiṣyaste’haṃ śādhi māṃ tvāṃ prapannam

“It is poorness of spirit that has smitten away from me my true heroic nature,” runs the translation, and every word bears weight. Kārpaṇya, the meanness or poverty of spirit, is named as a fault; Arjuna knows that what has seized him is a weakness and not a wisdom. But the thing it has struck is his svabhāva, his own essential nature, and the word is significant: the nature is not said to have changed, only to have been smitten, overlaid, driven from its seat. And from this eclipse arises the second bewilderment: his whole consciousness, dharmasammūḍhacetāḥ, is confused in its view of right and wrong. Then, having nothing left of his own to lean upon, he does what the proud warrior had never done: “I take refuge as a disciple with thee; enlighten me.”

Yet even the surrender is not yet complete. He accepts the rebuke and refuses the command; he still pleads the claims of his nerves, his heart, his customary morality and his reason, and he ends by saying “I will not fight” and falling silent (2·9). Sri Aurobindo, looking back from the close of the Gita, names the source of this refusal without ambiguity: it proceeded from the ego-sense in him, a tangle of sattwic, rajasic and tamasic motives, “the vital nature’s fear of sin and its personal consequences, the heart’s recoil from individual grief and suffering, the clouded reason’s covering of egoistic impulses by self-deceptive specious pleas of right and virtue.” And he adds a judgment which is the key to Arjuna’s whole nature:

For it is a vain resolution, a futile recoil, since it springs only from a temporary failure of strength, a strong but passing deviation from the principle of energy of his inmost character, and is not the true will and way of his nature.

This is the Teacher’s certainty from the first moment, and the reason why his rebuke is not a condemnation. He sees through the eclipse to the sun behind it. The fall is real, but it is a fall from the man’s own nature, not a revelation of it; and so the first work of the divine guide is not to give Arjuna a new nature but to give him back his own on a new foundation. At the end he will say it plainly: “Vain is this thy resolve, that in thy egoism thou thinkest, saying ‘I will not fight’; thy nature shall appoint thee to thy work” (18·59). The whole Gita lies between the smitten svabhāva of the second chapter and that sovereign assurance of the eighteenth.

vyāmiśra vākya

The Questions of the Practical Man

If the crisis revealed the layers of Arjuna’s being, his questions reveal the movement of his mind as it climbs. For the disciple of the Gita does not listen in silence. Again and again he breaks in, and the character of every interruption is the same. He is, in Sri Aurobindo’s portrait, “the practical or the pragmatic man, the emotional, sensational, moral and intelligent human being not habituated to profound and original reflection,” who wants from all metaphysics only one thing, a law by which he may act. He asks for the outward signs of the inner sage, how he speaks, how he sits, how he walks (2·54). He protests that the Teacher bewilders his understanding with a mingled speech, praising knowledge above works and yet appointing him to a terrible work, and demands that one thing be told him decisively (3·1–2).

But to live and act in the world, yet be above it, this is a “mingled” and confusing word the sense of which he has no patience to grasp.

The questions follow the same temperament all the way through the scripture. When he is told to follow the law of his own nature, the moralist in him asks what then is this in us that drives a man to sin even against his own struggling will (3·36); his literal mind stumbles on the claim of the Teacher to have given the Yoga to the Sun-God in the beginning (4·4); he asks again for one clear word between renunciation and works (5·1); he fears, as the practical man must, what becomes of the one who attempts the Yoga and fails (6·37). Later, when the Divine has become his law, his questions become more luminous but no less practical: how shall he know the Godhead in its manifestations (10·17); may he see the very form of That which speaks to him (11·3); what is the difference between the Field and its Knower, and what are the marks of the man who has risen above the gunas (13·1, 14·21); and finally, once more, what is the true difference between renunciation and the inner giving up of works (18·1).

Nothing in this disciple is suppressed in order that he may be taught. His impatience, his literalness, his insistence on a workable rule, even his fear of failure, are all taken up and made into stairs. Each question is the voice of a nature that has advanced to a new ledge and can see the next height it must reach; and the Teacher, who could have overwhelmed him with the whole truth at once, answers each at the level where it was asked and lifts it one level higher. The rajasic demand for decisive action has become the motive power of an ascent into knowledge; and the practical man, still practical, finds that he has been led, question by question, into the heart of the supreme secret.

prītamanāḥ

The Heart That Learns Delight

There is a deeper change working beneath the questions, and it is a change of the heart. The same emotional being that recoiled in horror from the slaying of “my own people” begins, as the revelation unfolds, to turn towards the Teacher himself with an awakening joy. By the tenth chapter the Teacher can say that he speaks his supreme word now that the disciple’s heart is taking delight in him (10·1), and Arjuna’s own speech has changed its tone: the revelation, Sri Aurobindo writes, is “delivering him from the perplexity and stumbling differentiations of his mind which was crying for a clue, a guiding truth amid the bewildering problems of a world of oppositions, and it is to his hearing the nectar of immortality.” The heart that clung to a circle of kinsmen is learning to love the One in whom all kinsmen and all enemies have their being.

Arjuna himself is a Vibhuti; he is a man high in the spiritual evolution, a figure marked out in the crowd of his contemporaries, a chosen instrument of the divine Narayana, the Godhead in humanity.

Because he is this, he may ask to see; and because he is still human, he cannot yet bear all that he sees. In the World-Form his eyes behold the Godhead of a million faces and Time devouring the nations, and he cries out in fear, “I would know who Thou art who wast from the beginning, for I know not the will of Thy workings” (11·31). “I have seen what never was seen before and I rejoice, but my mind is troubled with fear” (11·45). Sri Aurobindo marks the limit with precision: if the soul were one with the Godhead in the vision, all that is terrible in it would lose its terror, and “Arjuna has not yet done that, therefore we find that he has fear when he sees.” The Teacher does not force the instrument beyond its present strength. He tells him that he should behold the vision without pain and without any sinking of the members, and bids him cast away fear and let his heart rejoice (11·49); but since, in Sri Aurobindo’s paraphrase of that speech, “the lower nature in thee is not yet prepared to look upon it with that high strength and tranquillity,” he resumes the gentle human form. And Arjuna’s reply is one of the most quietly beautiful lines in the poem:

अर्जुन उवाच

दृष्ट्वेदं मानुषं रूपं तव सौम्यं जनार्दन ।इदानीमस्मि संवृत्तः सचेताः प्रकृतिं गतः ॥

dṛṣṭvedaṃ mānuṣaṃ rūpaṃ tava saumyaṃ janārdanaidānīmasmi saṃvṛttaḥ sacetāḥ prakṛtiṃ gataḥ

“My heart is filled with delight and I am restored to my own nature.” Prakṛtiṃ gataḥ: he has come back to himself. The nature smitten in the second chapter is here, for a moment, given back to him, and it returns not as the old sattwic poise of the warrior but as a heart that has seen the Infinite and rests in the Friend. The transformation respects the limits of the vessel while it widens them; it does not shatter the human in order to fill it with the divine.

svadharma

The Kshatriya Transfigured

What, then, becomes of the Kshatriya? The easy answer, and the one the later Indian mind was often inclined to give, is that the liberated man should leave the battle, that knowledge dissolves the warrior into the ascetic. The Gita’s answer is the opposite, and it rests upon its whole doctrine of svabhāva and svadharma, one’s own nature and the law of action that flows from it. “Better is one’s own law of works, though in itself faulty, than an alien law well wrought out” (3·35, 18·47). Sri Aurobindo lifts this far above any rule of social station. The Swabhava, he writes, is the soul’s own truth of being seeking expression through Nature:

each soul is a force of self-consciousness that formulates an idea of the Divine in it and guides by that its action and evolution, its progressive self-finding, its constant varying self-expression, its apparently uncertain but secretly inevitable growth to fullness. That is our Swabhava, our own real nature; that is our truth of being which is finding now only a constant partial expression in our various becoming in the world.

In the lower nature of the three gunas this truth is only half found, seeking its law in a half light through many imperfections; in the higher nature it is possessed. Arjuna’s heroism, his high spirit, his lordship and his delight in battle are the partial expression, in the terms of rajas governed by sattwa, of an idea of the Divine that his soul is. The Gita therefore does not ask him to kill his nature but to purify it of its ego. First the rajasic egoism must go, and then, Sri Aurobindo adds, “egoism of all kinds, even of the most sattwic type” (18·53). What remains when the ego is gone is not a blank but the true person behind it: “The Jiva is in self-expression a portion of the Purushottama,” an eternal portion of the Divine that has become the living soul in a world of living beings (15·7).

From that centre the old qualities become the instruments of a divine work. The Teacher can reassure him that he is of the Deva nature and need not grieve (16·5); the command given from the World-Form can bid him arise, conquer and enjoy the kingdom, for the enemies are already slain and he is to be the occasion only, nimittamātram (11·33). The warrior’s delight, which Sri Aurobindo elsewhere takes as an image of the soul’s hidden pleasure in the whole mingled play of life, “a complete delight in the godhead of battle,” is freed from its egoistic object and given back to its source. So, in his own words, “Arjuna, the chief instrument of the hidden Will, the great protagonist, must become the divine man capable of doing the work consciously as the action of the Divine.”

smṛti

The Memory of the Soul

The last question in the Gita is asked not by the disciple but by the Teacher: “Hath this been heard by thee, O son of Pritha, with a concentrated mind? Has thy delusion, caused by ignorance, been destroyed?” (18·72). And the last words of Arjuna are the answer to the whole crisis of his nature.

अर्जुन उवाच

नष्टो मोहः स्मृतिर्लब्धा त्वत्प्रसादान्मयाच्युत ।स्थितोऽस्मि गतसन्देहः करिष्ये वचनं तव ॥

naṣṭo mohaḥ smṛtirlabdhā tvatprasādānmayācyutasthito’smi gatasandehaḥ kariṣye vacanaṃ tava

Naṣṭo mohaḥ smṛtir labdhā: destroyed is my delusion, I have regained memory. He does not say that he has understood a doctrine or accepted a rule. He says that he remembers. The second chapter had described the fall of the soul in exactly these terms: from desire comes wrath, from wrath bewilderment, from bewilderment the loss of memory, and with that the destruction of the intelligence (2·62–63), a fall, as Sri Aurobindo renders it, “from the memory of one’s true self.” Arjuna’s delusion at Kurukshetra was such a forgetting. His svabhāva had been smitten; his consciousness was bewildered as to right and wrong; he no longer knew who he was or whose he was. Now the forgotten thing has come back.

Destroyed is the illusion of the mind; the soul’s memory of its self and its truth concealed so long by the misleading shows and forms of our life has returned to it and become its normal consciousness: all doubt and perplexity gone, it can turn to the execution of the command and do faithfully whatever work for God and the world may be appointed and apportioned to it by the Master of our being, the Spirit and Godhead self-fulfilled in Time and universe.

So the disciple ends where he began, in his chariot, with the bow in his hand and the same armies before him. Nothing outward has changed; everything inward has. “I am firm, dispelled are my doubts, I will act according to Thy word.” It is still the Kshatriya who speaks, with the Kshatriya’s resolution and readiness; but the one who now acts is no longer the sattwic ego with its code, but the soul that remembers its eternal companionship, Nara come home to Narayana.

The disciple’s nature, taken up and transformed

We may see now why the Gita needed exactly this disciple. A soul too little formed would have had no nobility to break; a seer already at rest in the Self would have had no crisis of works to resolve. Arjuna is the best of the ordinary human formation, the rajasic force disciplined by a sattwic ideal, the ego at its purest, carried by the logic of its own virtue to the point where virtue itself gives way. He is ourselves at our most honourable, and at the end of our resources. In him the Gita shows that the Divine does not wait for us to become other than we are before taking us up. He takes the body that trembles, the heart that clings, the mind that argues and demands a rule, the will that refuses, and works upon each in its turn, until beneath them all the soul that was there from the beginning comes forward and remembers.

Nothing true in the nature is lost in this remaking. The strength becomes the strength of the divine instrument, the love that bound becomes the love that sees the One in all, the demand for a law is answered by the Law that is a Person, and the delight of battle becomes the delight of the Spirit in its own mighty working. And through it all runs the note which the Gita never loses, the note of a friendship between the human and the divine that has lasted through many lives and has only been forgotten. What the disciple recovers at Kurukshetra is not a new self but his own, given back to him by the Friend who had never forgotten it.

The verses of this essay

Chapter 1

1. 21
2. 26
3. 28
4. 31
5. 36
6. 46

Chapter 2

1. 7
2. 9
3. 54

Chapter 3

1. 1
2. 2
3. 35
4. 36

Chapter 4

1. 4

Chapter 6

1. 37

Chapter 10

1. 1
2. 37

Chapter 11

1. 3
2. 31
3. 45
4. 49
5. 51
6. 33

Chapter 14

1. 21

Chapter 15

1. 7

Chapter 16

1. 5

Chapter 18

1. 1
2. 43
3. 47
4. 53
5. 59

Chapter 2

1. 62
2. 63

Chapter 18

1. 72
2. 73

• The Divine Teacher
• The Human Disciple
• Man and the Battle of Life
• The Creed of the Aryan Fighter
• The Yoga of the Intelligent Will
• The Theory of the Vibhuti
• God in Power of Becoming
• The Vision of the World Spirit; Time and Destroyer
• Equality
• Towards the Supreme Secret
• Swabhava and Swadharma
• The Supreme Secret