The Ascending Law

VI

सर्वधर्मान्परित्यज्य मामेकं शरणं व्रज

sarvadharmānparityajya māmekaṃ śaraṇaṃ vraja

To exceed our ladder of ascent, not to stop short even on the topmost stair but move untrammelled and at large in the wideness of the spirit is a release important for our perfection; the spirit’s absolute liberty is our perfect status.

The first word of the Gita, spoken by a blind king who cannot see the field of which he asks, is dharmakṣetre: on the field of Kurukshetra, which Sri Aurobindo’s rendering calls “the field of the working out of the Dharma” (1·1). The last word of its teaching, spoken by the Friend to the beloved disciple, is sarvadharmān parityajya: abandon all dharmas (18·66). A reader who sets these two words side by side may think that the poem has contradicted itself, that it began by asking what the right law is and ended by abolishing law altogether. But the Gita is not a book of contradictions; it is a book of ascent. Between its first word and its last there rises a whole stair of dharmas, each true upon its own level, each taken up and exceeded by the one above it, until the soul stands before That which is the source of every law and is bound by none.

To read this ascent rightly is to be saved from two opposite errors. The first would stop upon one of the lower stairs and call it the summit, making of some social order or moral code the final authority over the soul. The second would leap from the lowest stair to the highest and use the supreme word as a licence for desire. The Gita guards against both. It honours every law it passes through, and it passes through every one of them.

dharmasammūḍhacetāḥ

The Field of the Dharma

Arjuna’s anguish in the first chapter is not the fear of a coward. It is the anguish of a man who takes dharma seriously and finds that his dharmas have turned against one another. He sees in the coming battle the destruction of the eternal laws of the race and the moral law of the family (1·42); he has heard that men whose family morals are corrupted dwell in hell (1·43). His warrior’s law bids him fight, his law of kinship and reverence forbids him to slay his elders and teachers, and between the two his whole being gives way. Gandiva slips from his hand (1·29); he sinks down upon the seat of the chariot (1·46). When he speaks again to Krishna, it is to confess that his “whole consciousness is bewildered in its view of right and wrong”, dharmasammūḍhacetāḥ, and to take refuge as a disciple (2·7).

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

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

This is the Yoga of the dejection of Arjuna, and the commentary sees in it far more than the private distress of one prince. It is the moment that comes to every awakened soul when the moral structures in which it has lived are shown to be insufficient to the real face of existence.

What is this aspect of existence which appals his awakened mind and brings about what the title of the first chapter of the Gita calls significantly the Yoga of the dejection of Arjuna, the dejection and discouragement felt by the human being when he is forced to face the spectacle of the universe as it really is with the veil of the ethical illusion, the illusion of self-righteousness torn from his eyes, before a higher reconciliation with himself is effected?

The first stair of the ascent is thus revealed in the very act of its breaking. The dharma of family, of race, of inherited order, is a real law; it holds together the life of men and gives it form and continuity. But it is a law of the visible formation, and when the visible formation is shaken to its foundations it has no answer to give. Arjuna has asked for a dharma. What he will receive is not simply another and better rule set in place of the old, but a way that leads through all rules to their source.

kṣātra dharma

The Creed of the Warrior

Krishna’s first answer is given on the plane where Arjuna stands. He speaks to him of his svadharma as a Kshatriya: looking to thine own law of action thou shouldst not tremble, for there is no greater good for the Kshatriya than righteous battle (2·31); if thou dost not this battle for the Right, thou hast abandoned thy duty and virtue and thy glory, and sin shall be thy portion (2·33). It is the language of honour, of the heroic code, of the social order in which the warrior’s function is protection of the right. Some readers are troubled that a divine Teacher should begin so, on so worldly a level. But the commentary sees in it the wisdom of an ancient culture that knew how men grow.

But Indian ethics has always seen the practical necessity of graded ideals for the developing moral and spiritual life of man. The Kshatriya ideal, the ideal of the four orders is here placed in its social aspect, not as afterwards in its spiritual meaning.

The social dharma is not therefore a mere convention to be despised. In the ancient view which the Gita inherits, society itself was a school of the soul, and every function in it a means of inner growth.

Nor did it consider man primarily as a social being or the fullness of his social existence as the highest ideal, but rather as a spiritual being in process of formation and development and his social life, ethical law, play of temperament and exercise of function as means and stages of spiritual formation.

Yet no sooner has the heroic law been restored than the Teacher lifts it. In the very next breath he gives the verse which the commentary calls “the real teaching of the Gita”.

सुखदुःखे समे कृत्वा लाभालाभौ जयाजयौ ।ततो युद्धाय युज्यस्व नैवं पापमवाप्स्यसि ॥

sukhaduḥkhe same kṛtvā lābhālābhau jayājayautato yuddhāya yujyasva naivaṃ pāpamavāpsyasi

This is the first higher dharma, and it is not a rule of conduct at all but a poise of the soul. The warrior is still to fight, but no longer for victory or for the avoidance of shame; he is to make grief and happiness, loss and gain, victory and defeat equal to his soul, and so he shall not incur sin. With this verse the ladder of dharma turns inward. The outer act has not changed; the law by which it is done has begun to rise from the social into the spiritual.

svadharma

The Law of One’s Own Being

The next stair is the law of one’s own being. “Better is one’s own law of works, though in itself faulty, than an alien law well wrought out; death in one’s own law of being is better, perilous is it to follow an alien law” (3·35). The verse returns in the eighteenth chapter with a still deeper setting (18·47), and there it is joined to the fourfold order which the Divine declares he has created “according to the divisions of quality and active function” (4·13). Upon these verses a whole social controversy has been built. The commentary sets it aside with a firm hand: the Gita’s words, it says, have no bearing on the later caste system, which has lost all reference to the individual nature; what the Gita describes is the inner character of each type, calm and knowledge in the Brahmin, heroism and high spirit in the Kshatriya (18·42–43), and the sahaja karma, the work born with a man, is born of his own past and his soul’s self-development, not merely of his parentage.

What comes out of the being is the right and healthful thing, the authentic movement, not what is imposed on it from outside or laid on it by life’s compulsions or the mind’s error.

Here dharma passes from outside to inside. The rule is no longer the rule of the family or the order; it is the law of the svabhāva, the soul’s own nature, its characteristic power of becoming. Every Jiva, the commentary tells us, bears in him a soul of knowledge, a soul of strength and power, a soul of mutuality and interchange, a soul of works and service, with one of these leading and colouring the rest; and to follow the strain that is truly one’s own is to grow, while to put on another’s dharma, however admirable, is to grow falsely. But this law, too, is not an end in itself. Its whole meaning is revealed only when it becomes an offering.

यतः प्रवृत्तिर्भूतानां येन सर्वमिदं ततम् ।स्वकर्मणा तमभ्यर्च्य सिद्धिं विन्दति मानवः ॥

yataḥ pravṛttirbhūtānāṃ yena sarvamidaṃ tatamsvakarmaṇā tamabhyarcya siddhiṃ vindati mānavaḥ

“By worshipping Him by his own work, a man reacheth perfection.” It is not the work itself that perfects, but the work turned into worship of the One from whom all beings originate. The inborn function becomes an altar; the smith’s forge and the scholar’s page and the warrior’s bow are equally places of sacrifice. And so the law of one’s own nature, followed to its heart, opens of itself upon the next and greater law.

yajña · tyāga

The Law of Sacrifice

That greater law is sacrifice. The Gita announces it early, in the third chapter, and it is the hinge on which all its teaching of works turns: by doing works otherwise than for sacrifice this world of men is in bondage to works (3·9). With sacrifice the Lord of creatures created creatures of old (3·10); by sacrifice the gods and men foster one another; and he who follows not the wheel thus set in movement lives in vain (3·16). This is no longer the law of a particular order or a particular nature. It is the law of existence itself, which the commentary reads with a large and searching eye.

The universal law of sacrifice is the sign that the world is of God and belongs to God and that life is his dominion and house of worship and not a field for the self-satisfaction of the independent ego

At this stair the question of dharma changes its form. It is no longer only “what must I do?” but “for whom, and in what spirit?” The Gita observes that some Yogins follow the sacrifice which is of the gods, with its various ordinances and settled rites, while others offer the sacrifice by the sacrifice itself into the Brahman-fire (4·25); and for these, the commentary says, the simple fact of sacrifice, of casting every work into the Divine, “is their one means, their one dharma”. The many dharmas are already beginning to be gathered into one. The offering widens until it covers the whole life, whatever is done, eaten, given, suffered or striven for (9·27).

Together with sacrifice goes its inward twin, tyāga. The sages, the Gita says, call Sannyasa the physical laying aside of desirable works, but the wise call Tyaga the abandonment of all attached clinging to the fruit (18·2); and the sattwic renunciation is that which performs the rightly regulated action because it has to be done, without attachment either to the act or to its fruit (18·9). Dharma is not dissolved here; it is purified. The work is done as before, but the ego has withdrawn its claim upon it. And the purer the offering becomes, the more clearly a new question comes into view: whether even the purest law, held by a mind still within the modes of Nature, can be the final law of the soul.

traiguṇya

The Triple Stair

For all our dharmas, so long as they are made and held by the mind in the lower nature, are shaped by the three guṇas. The Gita knows the half-awakened man who casts aside the rule of the Shastra to follow the promptings of desire and so attains neither perfection nor happiness (16·23); therefore let the Shastra, the recognised science and art of right living, be his authority for what should and should not be done (16·24). This is a genuine stair, and a necessary one. But even the Shastra is a construction of the sattwic mind, and the commentary looks at the whole range of mental dharmas with an unsentimental clearness.

It is a triple stair that stumbles upward towards the divine light but cannot reach it. … The dharma of the sattwic man is the highest in the circle of the gunas; but that too is a limited view and a dwarfed standard.

At the base of this stair is the law of inertia, the customary mechanical round of the tamasic man; in the middle the kinetic law of the rajasic man who would impose himself upon his world; at the top the harmonic and regulative law of the sattwic man, with his reasoned knowledge, his enlightened utility, his ethical formulas. The last is the noblest, and the Gita never lowers it. But sattwa too binds, “by attachment to knowledge and attachment to happiness” (14·6); the best human knowledge, the commentary does not hesitate to say, is a half knowledge, and the highest human virtue a thing of mixed quality. There is a shadow behind the whitest sainthood of the ego, and it is the very clarity of the sattwic law that hides it from our sight.

What then is to be done? Not to fall back from the sattwic law into the rajasic or the tamasic; that would be to descend the stair. The Gita’s way is to raise the sattwic dharma to its utmost height until it breaks beyond itself. A loftiest standard of dharma, as the commentary puts it at the opening of its chapter on the Swabhava, is transformed into a free, self-existent perfection “in which all dependence on standards is transcended”. The ladder is not kicked away from below; it is climbed until there is no more ladder, and the climber finds himself not on a higher stair but in open sky.

sarvaguhyatamam

The Most Secret Word

So the Gita comes to its close. It has given its teaching of works and knowledge and devotion; it has summed up the whole Yoga in the verses on the soul that becomes the Brahman and so gains the supreme love of the Divine (18·54–56); it has spoken of the Lord seated in the heart of all beings, in whom the disciple must take refuge with the whole of his being (18·61–62). It has called all this “a knowledge more secret than that which is hidden” and has left Arjuna free to reflect on it and do as he will (18·63). And then, as though that freedom were not enough, it speaks once more: “Further hear the most secret, the supreme word that I shall speak to thee; beloved art thou intimately of Me” (18·64).

The tone has changed. It is no longer the Teacher addressing the intelligence of a pupil but the Friend speaking to the heart of the one he loves. “Become my-minded, my lover and adorer, a sacrificer to Me, bow thyself to Me, to Me thou shalt come, this is my pledge and promise to thee, for dear art thou to Me” (18·65). And then the word for which, as the commentary says, the soul of the disciple has been prepared all along.

सर्वधर्मान्परित्यज्य मामेकं शरणं व्रज ।अहं त्वा सर्वपापेभ्यो मोक्षयिष्यामि मा शुचः ॥

sarvadharmānparityajya māmekaṃ śaraṇaṃ vrajaahaṃ tvā sarvapāpebhyo mokṣayiṣyāmi mā śucaḥ

The commentary places this word exactly where the whole ascent requires it. All the laws the Gita has taught were stairs, and the Shastra itself, even at its loftiest, was a preparation.

Yet all Shastra is built on a number of preparatory conditions, dharmas; it is a means, not an end. The supreme end is the freedom of the spirit when abandoning all dharmas the soul turns to God for its sole law of action, acts straight from the divine will and lives in the freedom of the divine nature, not in the Law, but in the Spirit.

“Not in the Law, but in the Spirit.” The abandonment of all dharmas is not the negation of the long ascent but its secret meaning disclosed. Each dharma was a partial expression of the Divine will translated into the terms of a limited mind; now the soul is asked to turn from the translations to the Speaker. And the promise that goes with the command answers the very first cry of the poem. Arjuna had sunk down “overwhelmed with sorrow”; he had seen nothing that could thrust from him the grief that dries up the senses (2·8). Now the last word to him is mā śucaḥ: do not grieve. The dharma that began in grief ends in the assurance of love.

mā śucaḥ

Not Below the Law but Above It

It must be said with all clearness that this supreme freedom is not a door by which desire may re-enter under a holier name. The Gita has taken every care to prevent that reading. The Shastra, the commentary says, must first be observed and made the authority for conduct, until the instinctive desire-nature is schooled and abated and man is ready for a freer intelligent self-guidance and only then for the supreme law and supreme liberty of the spiritual nature. The abandonment is not of the law to the ego but of the law and the ego together to the Divine. One who has not climbed the stair cannot stand where it ends; and even the commentary grants that “it is only the strong and few who can move through freedom to freedom.”

What then is it to live beyond dharma? It is to be as the Divine himself is in the world, who conducts all things by their laws and yet is bound by none; it is to become, in the commentary’s words, “unbound by any dharma even when following in appearance this or that dharma”. The outward conduct of such a soul may be as ordered as the most faithful follower of the law, for the Divine who moves it is also the Lord of all order. But its motive has passed out of the reach of every rule, into direct obedience to the Lord in the heart. And the whole of what it was, its knowledge and its ignorance, its virtue and its sin, its joy and its sorrow, is not rejected but transmuted. In the commentary’s closing pages the words sarva-dharmān parityajya return again and again like a refrain, each time over a different part of our nature given up to be remade.

An almighty Power will take up our virtue and sin, our right and wrong, our strength and our weakness, cast away their tangled figures, … and transform all into its transcendent purity and universal good and infallible force.

This is the immortal Dharma of which the commentary speaks at the close of the chapter on the Swabhava, in which the perfected soul becomes “a faultless instrument of divine action in the freedom of the immortal Dharma”. It is not lawlessness but the living source of law become conscious in a man. And its first fruit, strangely and beautifully, is that Arjuna returns to the very act from which he fled. “Destroyed is my delusion, I have regained memory through Thy grace, O Infallible One, I am firm, dispelled are my doubts, I will act according to Thy word” (18·73). The warrior takes up the bow of his svadharma once more. But he takes it up now not as the servant of a code, not even as the servant of his own nature, but as the beloved of the One who is beyond all codes and natures and who has chosen to act through him.

The Law Within, Without, and Beyond

The field of the Dharma has become the field of the Friend. On the first day Arjuna stood upon it clutching at the laws that had formed him, and they gave way beneath his feet. On the last day he stands upon the same ground, among the same armies, with the same terrible work before him; but the laws are no longer beneath his feet as a floor that may break. They are within him, gathered up and fulfilled in a Presence that is their source, and he moves among them with the freedom of one who knows the Lawgiver.

That is why the charioteer could smile at the beginning (2·10). He knew that every dharma through which he would lead his friend, the honour of the warrior, the law of his nature, the long discipline of sacrifice, the bright and narrow rule of sattwa, was a step of a single ascent whose summit was himself. The ascending law does not end in a void of freedom, nor in a still higher code; it ends in a Person who says, “dear art thou to Me”, and asks only to be trusted.

The verses of this essay

Chapter 1

1. 1

Chapter 2

1. 7
2. 31
3. 38

Chapter 3

1. 9
2. 35

Chapter 4

1. 13
2. 25

Chapter 9

1. 27

Chapter 14

1. 6

Chapter 16

1. 24

Chapter 18

1. 2
2. 9
3. 46
4. 47
5. 61
6. 64
7. 65
8. 66
9. 73

• Kurukshetra
• Man and the Battle of Life
• The Creed of the Aryan Fighter
• The Lord of the Sacrifice
• Deva and Asura
• The Gunas, Faith and Works
• Swabhava and Swadharma
• Towards the Supreme Secret
• The Supreme Secret
• The Principle of Divine Works