The Questions of the Seeker and the Answers of the Master

IV

नष्टो मोहः स्मृतिर्लब्धा

naṣṭo mohaḥ smṛtirlabdhā

Yet it is precisely this secret for which he does not ask, or at least so much of the knowledge as is necessary to lead him into a higher life, to which the divine Teacher intends to lead this disciple; for he means him to give up all dharmas except the one broad and vast rule of living consciously in the Divine and acting from that consciousness.

A scripture may be a single voice addressing the ages from a height, or it may be a conversation overheard. The Gita is the second. Its revelation does not descend all at once like a law graven on stone; it is drawn out, stage by stage, by the questions of a man who stands in a chariot between two armies and must know how he is to act. Again and again Arjuna breaks in upon the Teacher with an objection, a perplexity, a plea, a longing; and again and again the discourse turns upon his word and rises from it to a new height. To follow the questions is to follow the hidden architecture of the whole book.

“The rest of Arjuna’s questions and utterances proceed from the same temperament and character,” Sri Aurobindo writes, having shown in the opening crisis the nature of the disciple: the practical man of action, emotional, moral and intelligent, who wants above all a law by which he can walk. The temperament indeed remains the same to the end. But the plane from which it asks does not remain the same. The first questions come from a body and heart in collapse, the next from a practical reason that wants a single decisive word, then from a moral sense that has turned its gaze inward, from a practiser afraid of failure, from a heart that has begun to take delight, from a soul that asks to see, and at last from an illumined intelligence that wants only to know clearly what it has already accepted. Each question rises from a deeper stratum of the one being; and the Master answers not the question only but the consciousness that asks it, and always gives more than was asked.

pṛcchāmi tvām

The Cry Before the Question

The Gita’s first movement contains no true question at all. What Arjuna speaks in the first chapter is lament and argument, the voice of a whole nature in revolt; and even the interrogations with which he meets Krishna’s rebuke, “How shall I strike Bhishma and Drona with weapons in battle?” (2·4), are not requests for knowledge but objections that expect no answer. A human being in the grip of such a crisis does not yet ask; he states his condition, and his condition is itself the only question he is capable of. Krishna, who reads hearts, answers the condition first. He rebukes the collapse before he instructs the mind.

Then comes the first real question of the Gita, and it is born at the moment when self-justification has exhausted itself.

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

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

Pṛcchāmi tvām, “I ask thee.” Everything that will follow is already folded in this verse. There is the confession of bewilderment, dharmasammūḍhacetāḥ. There is the demand of the practical man for śreyas, the better, the soul’s true good, a word he first used in despair on the field, “nor do I see any good in slaying my own people” (1·31), and which he will ask for again and again. There is the demand for decisiveness, niścitam, which will return in the same form twice more. And there is, at the very end of the verse, a self-giving he does not yet understand: tvāṃ prapannam, “I have taken refuge in thee.” The supreme secret at the close will say, māmekaṃ śaraṇaṃ vraja, “take refuge in Me alone” (18·66). The first question already holds, as a seed, the final answer.

He is resolved that on the old basis of thought and motive he will not fight and he awaits in silence the answer to objections that seem to him unanswerable.

And the answer, when it comes, is not the answer he awaits. He has asked for a rule of conduct; he receives the knowledge of the immortal Self, of the soul that is not slain when the body is slain (2·11–25), and of an equality in which grief and happiness, loss and gain, are made alike to the soul (2·38). He has asked on the old basis; the Teacher changes the basis. That is the pattern of the whole dialogue, fixed from this first exchange.

niścitam

Signs, and a Single Decisive Word

The next questions come from the practical intelligence, and they have the recognisable accent of the man of action who wants things plain. Krishna has spoken of the sage whose understanding is established in the Self. Arjuna at once asks what such a man looks like from outside: “How does the sage of settled understanding speak, how sit, how walk?” (2·54).

Arjuna, voicing the average human mind, asks for some outward, physical, practically discernible sign of this great Samadhi; how does such a man speak, how sit, how walk? … No such signs can be given, nor does the Teacher attempt to supply them; for the only possible test of its possession is inward

The Teacher answers the question by refusing its premise: the only signs of this state are inward, desire expelled from the mind and the self satisfied in the self (2·55). But the practical mind is not yet appeased, and its impatience breaks out in the most human of all the questions: “If thou holdest the intelligence to be greater than works, why then dost thou appoint me to a terrible work? Thou seemest to bewilder my intelligence with a confused and mingled speech; tell me then decisively that one thing by which I may attain to my soul’s weal” (3·1–2). To live and act in the world and yet be above it, Sri Aurobindo observes, is to such a mind “a ‘mingled’ and confusing word the sense of which he has no patience to grasp.”

Krishna’s answer is the whole doctrine of works as sacrifice. None can remain even for a moment without action, for Nature compels every creature to act (3·5); the world is bound not by works but by works done otherwise than as sacrifice (3·9). The question was, “Knowledge or action?” The answer is, action done in knowledge and offered to the Lord. And when, two chapters later, the same demand returns in almost the same words, “which one of these is the better way, that tell me with a clear decisiveness” (5·1), because the subtle reconciliation has seemed to him, in Sri Aurobindo’s phrase, “too slight, too subtle and expressed almost in riddling words,” the Teacher again declines the either-or. Renunciation and the Yoga of works both lead to the soul’s salvation, but the Yoga of works is the greater (5·2), because the true renunciation is inward. Three times Arjuna has asked for niścaya, decisiveness. He is never given the narrow certainty he wants; he is given, each time, a wider truth in which the alternatives he feared are reconciled.

kena prayuktaḥ

The Enemy Within and the Birth Beyond Memory

With the next question the gaze of the disciple turns inward. Krishna has told him that each must follow the law of his own nature, even if it seem faulty beside another’s (3·35); and the moral man in Arjuna is troubled. The nature! but is it not this very nature that drives men into sin? “What is this in us that drives a man to sin, as if by force, even against his own struggling will?” (3·36). This is no longer a question about the battle outside but about the compulsion within, and the answer is as swift as it is exact: “This is desire and its companion wrath, children of rajas, all-devouring, all-polluting, know thou this as the soul’s great enemy” (3·37). At this word the war moves inward. The Kauravas are still on the field, but the true adversary is now named, and it stands within the ranks of Arjuna’s own being.

The question that follows seems at first to fall back from this depth into a merely literal perplexity. Krishna has said that he taught this Yoga in the beginning to Vivasvan, the Sun-God; and Arjuna, taking the words in their most physical sense, objects that the Sun-God was among the first-born of beings while Krishna has only now been born into the world (4·4). Yet it is precisely this naive question that opens the door to one of the great revelations of the Gita. Krishna, as Sri Aurobindo notes, “accepts instead the opportunity which Arjuna gives him of declaring his concealed Godhead.” He speaks now openly as the Avatar, the Unborn who comes into birth by his own Maya, and who is born from age to age for the enthroning of the Right (4·6–8).

Here we learn something about the questions of the seeker. They need not be profound to be fruitful. A question asked from the lowest level of the understanding may be the occasion of the highest disclosure, if it is asked sincerely of the one who knows. And the first words of that disclosure strike a note that will not be heard again in full until the last verse of the dialogue: “Many are my lives that are past, and thine also, O Arjuna; all of them I know, but thou knowest not” (4·5). The Divine remembers; the human soul has forgotten. The whole long answering of the Gita will be the patient restoring of that memory.

cañcalaṃ hi manaḥ

The Practiser’s Fear

When the Teacher has described the Yoga of equality in its fullness, the self-controlled soul seated in meditation, seeing the Self in all beings and all beings in the Self, the disciple is appalled by its difficulty. This question comes from the practiser, from one who has already tried, and it is one of the most honest in the Gita: “This Yoga of the nature of equality … I see no stable foundation for it owing to restlessness. Restless indeed is the mind, O Krishna; it is vehement, strong and unconquerable; I deem it as hard to control as the wind” (6·33–34). The Teacher does not dismiss the complaint. “Without doubt, O mighty-armed, the mind is restless and very difficult to restrain,” he concedes; “but O Kaunteya, it may be controlled by constant practice and non-attachment” (6·35). The answer is proportioned to the question: not a doctrine for the intellect but a discipline for the will, abhyāsa and vairāgya, the patient repetition of the effort and the steady withdrawal of the clinging that feeds the restlessness.

Then the practiser’s fear goes deeper, and becomes the fear of the heart.

When he realises fully the nature of the Yoga which he is bidden to embrace, his pragmatic nature accustomed to act from mental will and preference and desire is appalled by its difficulty and he asks what is the end of the soul which attempts and fails, whether it does not lose both this life of human activity and thought and emotion which it has left behind and the Brahmic consciousness to which it aspires and falling from both perish like a dissolving cloud?

To this question, which is the secret question of every sincere seeker, Krishna gives an answer that is pure reassurance: “neither in this life nor hereafter is there destruction for him; never does anyone who practises good, O beloved, come to woe” (6·40). And in that answer a new word is heard. Tāta, “beloved,” “dear child”: nowhere else in the Gita does the Teacher call his disciple by this name, the name a father gives his son. The question of fear has drawn from the Master a tenderness that the questions of argument never drew. The chapter closes on the same note, raised into a principle: of all yogins, the one most united with the Divine is he who, with all his inner self given up, has for Him love and faith (6·47). The heart, which asked only not to be lost, is told that it is the heart which unites.

prīyamāṇa

When the Heart Takes Delight

Between the practiser’s question and the next great turn there is a question of the mind seeking exact terms: what is that Brahman, what is the Self, what is Karma, what the principle of the elements and of the gods and of sacrifice, and how is the Divine to be known at the hour of departure (8·1–2)? Krishna answers briefly; nowhere, Sri Aurobindo remarks, does the Gita linger long upon a purely metaphysical explanation, but gives “only so much and in such a way as will make their truth just seizable for the soul to proceed on to experience.” The terms are given so that the seeing may begin.

And then the quality of the questioning changes altogether. The tenth chapter opens with the Teacher’s own avowal of why he speaks: “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). The disciple’s heart has begun to take delight, and “this delight of the heart in God,” Sri Aurobindo writes, “is the whole constituent and essence of true bhakti.” Arjuna breaks into acclamation, “Thou art the supreme Brahman, the supreme Abode, the supreme Purity” (10·12–13), and his question is born out of that acclamation: “How shall I know Thee, O Yogin, by thinking of Thee everywhere at all moments, and in what pre-eminent becomings should I think of Thee?” (10·17).

विस्तरेणात्मनो योगं विभूतिं च जनार्दन ।भूयः कथय तृप्तिर्हि शृण्वतो नास्ति मेऽमृतम् ॥

vistareṇātmano yogaṃ vibhūtiṃ ca janārdanabhūyaḥ kathaya tṛptirhi śṛṇvato nāsti me’mṛtam

This is no longer the practical man asking what he must do. It is the lover asking to find the Beloved everywhere. And its closing phrase is the most unguarded confession of joy in the whole dialogue: “it is nectar of immortality to me, and however much of it I hear, I am not satiated.” The earlier questions wanted an end to the teaching, a decisive word that would let the hearer go and act; this question wants the teaching never to end.

Here we get an indication in the Gita of something which the Gita itself does not bring out expressly, but which occurs frequently in the Upanishads and was developed later on by Vaishnavism and Shaktism in a greater intensity of vision, man’s possible joy of the Divine in the world-existence, the universal Ananda, the play of the Mother, the sweetness and beauty of God’s Lila.

Krishna answers with the Vibhutis: in the sun among lights, in the Ganges among rivers, in whatever is glorious and strong and beautiful, the Divine stands manifest. The questioner who wanted a rule is now given the whole world as a field of recognition.

ko bhavān ugrarūpaḥ

The Question Inside the Vision

The Vibhutis have been shown to the mind; now the soul asks to see. “So it is, as Thou hast declared Thyself, O Supreme Lord; I desire to see Thy divine form and body, O Purushottama. If Thou thinkest that it can be seen by me … then show me Thy imperishable Self” (11·3–4). The request is humble, for it leaves the decision to the Teacher, and it is granted beyond all measure. “What thou hast to see, this thy human eye cannot grasp; but there is a divine eye (an inmost seeing) and that eye I now give to thee” (11·8). The questioner is not only answered; he is given a new organ with which to receive the answer.

What he sees overwhelms him. The warriors of both hosts rush into the flaming mouths of the Form; the worlds tremble; and out of his terror there rises the deepest question of the Gita.

आख्याहि मे को भवानुग्ररूपोनमोऽस्तु ते देववर प्रसीद ।विज्ञातुमिच्छामि भवन्तमाद्यंन हि प्रजानामि तव प्रवृत्तिम् ॥

ākhyāhi me ko bhavānugrarūpo namo’stu te devavara prasīdavijñātumicchāmi bhavantamādyaṃ na hi prajānāmi tava pravṛttim

“I know not the will of Thy workings”: this is the question of the first chapter asked again, but from the summit instead of from the depths. On the field Arjuna could not understand why this slaughter should be required of him; now, seeing the universal Being devour the nations, he asks what the will is that works in all this destruction. Sri Aurobindo says of this cry that Arjuna “puts the ancient question and breathes the eternal prayer.” The answer is the most terrible utterance in the Gita and the most liberating: “I am the Time-Spirit, destroyer of the world … By me and none other already even are they slain, do thou become the occasion only” (11·32–33). The question of the first chapter is not solved by an argument. It is answered by a vision in which the questioner sees that the deed he dreaded is already accomplished in a greater Will, and that his part is to be its conscious instrument.

Yet the last movement of the eleventh chapter belongs not to terror but to love. Arjuna begs forgiveness for every time he treated the Godhead as only his comrade, and asks to be borne with “as a father to his son, as a friend to his friend and comrade, as one dear with him he loves” (11·44); and his final plea is to see again the familiar form (11·45–46).

From the first words there comes the suggestion that the hidden truth behind these terrifying forms is a reassuring, a heartening and delightful truth. There is something that makes the heart of the world to rejoice and take pleasure in the name and nearness of the Divine.

The request is granted, and the chapter ends in an answering joy: “Beholding again Thy gentle human form, O Janardana, my heart is filled with delight and I am restored to my own nature” (11·51).

kair liṅgaiḥ

The Questions of the Illumined Mind

After the vision, the questions grow quiet and exact. They no longer come from a being in crisis but from an intelligence that has been illumined and wishes to see its whole ground clearly. Which have the greater knowledge of Yoga, those who seek the Divine as “Thee,” in constant union, or those who seek the unmanifest Immutable (12·1)? To this Krishna replies, in Sri Aurobindo’s words, “with an emphatic decisiveness”: those who found their mind in Him with supreme faith are the most perfectly in union (12·2), though the seekers of the Immutable also arrive to Him (12·3). The heart’s way does not deny the way of knowledge; it takes it up into a greater completeness.

The questions that follow are of a new kind: they are almost placed in Arjuna’s mouth by the needs of the teaching. Of the question on Prakriti and Purusha, the Field and the Knower of the Field (13·1), Sri Aurobindo says that “Arjuna is therefore made to put a question which shall evoke a clearer elucidation of these still ill-lighted matters.” The disciple’s asking and the Teacher’s intention are now at one. And one of these late questions is a quiet echo of an early one. In the second chapter Arjuna asked for the signs of the sage in Samadhi. In the fourteenth he asks, “What are the signs of the man who has risen above the three gunas, O Lord? What his action and how does he surmount the gunas?” (14·21).

The sign, says Krishna, is that equality of which I have so constantly spoken; the sign is that inwardly he regards happiness and suffering alike, gold and mud and stone as of equal value and that to him the pleasant and the unpleasant, praise and blame, honour and insult, the faction of his friends and the faction of his enemies are equal things. He is steadfast in a wise imperturbable and immutable inner calm and quietude.

It is the same answer that was given at the beginning: equality, and signs that are inward. What has changed is not the answer but the hearer, who can now receive as a luminous description what he once heard as a refusal. So too the last two questions, on the faith that sacrifices without the rule of the Shastra (17·1) and on the difference between Sannyasa and Tyaga (18·1), return to the very doubts of the early chapters, the authority of the law and the choice between renunciation and works. The old perplexities come back once more, but they come back calm, as matters to be known, no longer as wounds to be healed.

iṣṭo 'si me

The Word That No Question Asked

Then the questions cease, and the Gita’s crowning word is spoken without being asked for. Krishna has expounded “a knowledge more secret than that which is hidden,” and he gives the disciple back his freedom: “having reflected on it fully, do as thou wouldest” (18·63). Nothing more need be said. And yet he says more, unprompted: “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 supreme secret is not wrung from the Teacher by any question; Sri Aurobindo notes that it is told to Arjuna “because he is the chosen and beloved soul.” The highest truth is not the answer to an inquiry but the gift of 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.

And now a last reversal completes the form of the dialogue. The final question of the Gita is asked not by the disciple but by the Master: “Hath this been heard by thee, O son of Pritha, with a concentrated mind? Has thy delusion, caused by ignorance, been destroyed, O Dhananjaya?” (18·72). The one who has answered every question now asks one; and the one who has asked every question now answers.

अर्जुन उवाच

नष्टो मोहः स्मृतिर्लब्धा त्वत्प्रसादान्मयाच्युत ।स्थितोऽस्मि गतसन्देहः करिष्ये वचनं तव ॥

naṣṭo mohaḥ smṛtirlabdhā tvatprasādānmayācyutasthito’smi gatasandehaḥ kariṣye vacanaṃ tava

Every word of this reply undoes a word of the crisis. Naṣṭo mohaḥ, “destroyed is my delusion”: it was a consciousness sammūḍha, bewildered, that first asked to be taught. Smṛtir labdhā, “I have regained memory”: the Teacher had said in the second chapter that from bewilderment comes loss of memory and from that the ruin of the understanding (2·63), and in the fourth, “all of them I know, but thou knowest not”; now the memory is restored, by grace. Sthito ‘smi gatasandehaḥ, “I am firm, dispelled are my doubts”: the one who sank down on the seat of the chariot stands. And kariṣye vacanaṃ tava, “I will act according to Thy word”: the man who said, “I will not fight,” has no further question to ask.

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.

The Questions of Arjuna across the Eighteen Chapters

We too come to the Gita with questions, and they rise, as Arjuna’s rose, from whatever part of us is most alive or most wounded at the hour: the body’s fear, the moral mind’s scruple, the practical reason’s impatience for a single decisive word, the practiser’s dread of failure, the heart’s longing to find the Beloved everywhere. None of them is too small to be asked, and none of them will be answered on its own level alone. The Teacher answers the question and then answers the questioner, and in answering him lifts him to the plane where the next question can be born.

And at the end the order is reversed. There comes a moment when it is no longer we who ask, but we who are asked, “Has thy delusion been destroyed?” and the only fitting answer is not a further question but an act. Sanjaya, who has overheard it all, can only say that remembering, remembering this wonderful and holy dialogue, he rejoices again and again (18·76). That rejoicing is the last word on the questions of the seeker: they were never obstacles to the revelation. They were the doors by which the Beloved entered.

The verses of this essay

Chapter 2

1. 7
2. 54

Chapter 3

1. 1
2. 2
3. 36

Chapter 4

1. 4
2. 5

Chapter 5

1. 1

Chapter 6

1. 34
2. 37
3. 40

Chapter 8

1. 1

Chapter 10

1. 1
2. 17
3. 18

Chapter 11

1. 4
2. 31
3. 32
4. 51

Chapter 12

1. 1

Chapter 13

1. 1

Chapter 14

1. 21

Chapter 17

1. 1

Chapter 18

1. 1
2. 64
3. 72
4. 73

• The Human Disciple
• The Creed of the Aryan Fighter
• The Yoga of the Intelligent Will
• Sankhya, Yoga and Vedanta
• The Possibility and Purpose of Avatarhood
• The Supreme Divine
• The Supreme Word of Gita
• God in Power of Becoming
• The Vision of the World Spirit; Time and Destroyer
• The Vision of the World Spirit; The Double Aspect
• The Way and the Bhakta
• The Field and its Knower
• Above the Gunas
• The Supreme Secret