The One Yoga of Works, Knowledge and Love

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मन्मना भव मद्भक्तो मद्याजी मां नमस्कुरु

manmanā bhava madbhakto madyājī māṃ namaskuru

This is the Gita’s teaching of divine love and devotion, in which knowledge, works and the heart’s longing become one in a supreme unification, a merging of all their divergences, an intertwining of all their threads, a high fusion, a wide identifying movement.

Among those who have loved the Gita there has long been a habit of dividing it into three: the first six chapters given to the Yoga of works, the middle six to the Yoga of devotion, the last six to the Yoga of knowledge, as though Krishna had set three roads before the disciple and left him to choose the one that suited his temperament. There is a truth in the division, for the emphasis does move, and each part brings a new power of the soul into the foreground. But the Gita itself will not be so parcelled out. Its words on works are spoken in a light of knowledge, its words on knowledge end in adoration, and its words of adoration return at the close to the battle and the command to act. Its Yoga is one Yoga, as the human being to whom it is addressed is one being, a single soul with a mind that must know, a will that must act and a heart that must love.

The image that suits this Yoga is not the fork in the road but the braid, the cord of three strands twisted together so that each gives strength to the others and none can be drawn out without loosening the whole. Sri Aurobindo’s own images are of this kind: the two wings of the soul’s ascent, the triple cord of the sacrifice, the triune key of the highest secret. In what follows we trace the three strands through the Gita, marking the places where they cross and bind, until at the end they are gathered into one knot by the hand of the Charioteer.

vyāmiśreṇa vākyena

One Clear Road

The question that the braid answers is first put by Arjuna himself. Having heard the praise of the intelligence that stands firm in equality, he asks why then he is appointed to a terrible work (3·1): “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” (3·2). It is the natural demand of the human mind, which loves a single principle and a clear road and feels every combination of truths as a compromise. If knowledge is better than works, let us have knowledge and renounce works; if works are demanded, let knowledge be their servant and no more.

The Teacher does not give Arjuna the one thing he asks for, because the one thing he asks for does not exist. The human being is not a single faculty, and a Yoga addressed to a single faculty can liberate only a part of him. There is the thought that seeks the truth, the will that seeks to act, the heart that seeks delight; and a way to the Highest that engaged only one of these would leave the others unredeemed, turning in their old circles while the chosen faculty soared. Sri Aurobindo therefore speaks of “the triune path of man,” the path of his will, heart and thought raising themselves to the Highest, and he refuses decisively the reading that would narrow the Gita to one road among three.

Therefore this Yoga of the Gita is not, as some contend, only the Karmayoga, one and the lowest, according to them, of the three paths, but a highest Yoga synthetic and integral directing Godward all the powers of our being.

Yet the Gita knows the separate paths and does not despise them. It speaks of the Yoga of knowledge of the Sankhyas and the Yoga of works of the Yogins (3·3); it acknowledges those who seek the unmanifest Immutable by a hard and lonely ascent, and grants that they too arrive (12·3–4). What it will not allow is that any one of these, pursued to the exclusion of the others, is the complete way. Each exclusive path bears the mark of its exclusion: knowledge alone tends towards a silence that abandons the world, works alone towards an activity that never escapes the ego, devotion alone towards a fervour that may be intense but remains narrow. The “mingled speech” of the Gita is not confusion but the refusal of these mutilations. It mingles because the truth is mingled, because the Divine it reveals is at once the silent Self, the Lord of works and the Lover of the soul, and cannot be wholly met by any single power of our nature.

Arjuna’s bewilderment is thus the first knot in the braid. It is tied by the mind’s demand for exclusiveness; it is untied not by choosing one strand but by the discovery that the strands were never truly separate.

jñāna and karma

The Two Wings

The Gita begins, significantly, not with works but with knowledge. Before a single word is said about the right way to act, the Teacher turns Arjuna’s gaze to the Self that is not born and does not die (2·11–30). The order is deliberate. Action taken up by a soul still possessed by grief would be action powered by grief; the ground must first be shifted from the perishable to the imperishable before the command to fight can be anything but a command to suffer. Knowledge enters first, as the light in which works can be seen for what they are.

Then comes the great formula of works: “Thou hast a right to action, but only to action, never to its fruits” (2·47); “Fixed in Yoga do thy actions … for it is equality that is meant by Yoga” (2·48). But this equality is itself a fruit of knowledge. No one can be truly equal in success and failure who has not glimpsed, however dimly, the Self that neither touches; and no one can hold that glimpse steadily who does not prove it in the stress of works. Here Sri Aurobindo finds the first binding of the strands.

The two wings indeed assist each other’s flight; acting together, yet with a subtle alternation of mutual aid, like the two eyes in a man which see together because they see alternately, they increase one another mutually by interchange of substance. As the works grow more and more desireless, equal-minded, sacrificial in spirit, the knowledge increases; with the increase of the knowledge the soul becomes firmer in the desireless, sacrificial equality of its works.

The fourth chapter carries this mutual growth to its first culmination: “The sacrifice of knowledge … is greater than any material sacrifice. Knowledge is that in which all this action culminates” (4·33); “as a fire kindled turns to ashes its fuel … so the fire of knowledge turns all works to ashes” (4·37). A hasty reading takes this for the end of works, as though knowledge, once come, left nothing further to be done. Sri Aurobindo reads it otherwise. It is not the works that are burned but their bondage: the liberated man is able to do works as a sacrifice because his mind, heart and spirit are founded in self-knowledge, and his work, as soon as done, dissolves into the Brahman and leaves no reactionary consequence upon the soul. Knowledge does not end action; it frees it. And action does not distract knowledge; it proves and deepens it.

Neither strand is sufficient alone. Works without knowledge remain the works of the ego, however disciplined their outward form; knowledge without works tends towards that quietism which the Gita, from the second chapter to the last, consistently refuses. Together they rise as the two wings of a single flight, and the bird they bear upward is the soul itself.

yajña

Works Become Sacrifice

The third chapter introduces the word that will carry the strand of works to its heart: sacrifice. “By doing works otherwise than for sacrifice, this world of men is in bondage to works” (3·9). At first the sacrifice may seem the old Vedic rite, the offering to the gods for the fruits of earth and heaven; but the Gita widens and deepens it until every act of life becomes an offering, and the one who receives the offering is revealed as the Supreme himself. “Giving up thy works to Me, with thy consciousness founded in the Self, free from desire and egoism, fight delivered from the fever of thy soul” (3·30).

Here, in the very heart of the Yoga of works, the strand of devotion has already appeared. To give works to Me is not merely to renounce them; it is to offer them to Someone, and every true offering carries the beginning of love. The worker who has learned to act without desire finds, as his equality deepens, that his action is not falling into a void but is being received; and the receiving Presence becomes gradually more real to him than the work itself. Surveying the whole movement of the teaching, Sri Aurobindo describes it as three steps, each taking up the one before it without casting it away.

The last step is Bhaktiyoga, adoration and seeking of the supreme Self as the Divine Being, and here the insistence is on devotion; but the knowledge is not subordinated, only raised, vitalised and fulfilled, and still the sacrifice of works continues; the double path becomes the triune way of knowledge, works and devotion.

We should mark carefully what kind of succession this is. There is an order of emphasis, and in the actual growth of the soul there are stages: first the selfless sacrifice of works, then the knowledge of the Self and of Nature as the doer, then the adoration of the Supreme who governs Nature. But nothing is left behind. The path of works, he says, “becomes one with but does not disappear into the path of Knowledge”; knowledge is raised and not subordinated when devotion comes; the sacrifice of works continues to the end. The succession is not that of three roads taken one after another, but of a cord in which first one strand and then another comes to the surface, while all three remain bound in the twisting.

Even the image of the ancient rite is gathered into this unity. “Brahman is the giving, Brahman is the food-offering, by Brahman it is offered into the Brahman-fire” (4·24): the act, the offering, the fire and the offerer are all the one Reality. The worker who sees this has knowledge; the worker who offers in this spirit has devotion; and the work goes on. Nor is the Master of this sacrifice an abstraction. He is the Enjoyer of sacrifice and askesis, the mighty lord of all the worlds, “the friend of all creatures,” and the one who knows him so “comes by the peace” (5·29). Already in the fifth chapter the Lord of works shows the face of the Friend.

yuktatama

The Hinge of Love

The first six chapters, which the dividing reading would give wholly to works, close upon a word that belongs to love. The sixth chapter has taught the discipline of meditation, the stilling of the mind, the vision of the self in all beings and all beings in the self (6·29); and then, in a verse where knowledge passes into intimacy, “He who sees Me everywhere and sees all in Me, to him I do not get lost, nor does he get lost to Me” (6·30). The Yogin, it declares, is greater than the doers of askesis, greater than the men of knowledge, greater than the men of works (6·46). And then the last word:

योगिनामपि सर्वेषां मद्गतेनान्तरात्मना ।श्रद्धावान्भजते यो मां स मे युक्ततमो मतः ॥

yogināmapi sarveṣāṃ madgatenāntarātmanāśraddhāvānbhajate yo māṃ sa me yuktatamo mataḥ

The verse does not deny what went before. The Yogin most united with the Divine is still one who works, who knows, who meditates; but here the power is revealed that gathers these into their fullness. Sri Aurobindo sees in this verse the seed of all that follows.

It is this that is the closing word of these first six chapters and contains in itself the seed of the rest, of that which still remains unspoken and is nowhere entirely spoken; for it is always and remains something of a mystery and a secret…

Why should love be the gathering power? Because it alone engages the whole being. The intellect may know the Self and remain aloof; the will may act without desire and still hold back its inmost part; but love, when it is love of the Highest, cannot give less than all, and in giving all it carries the knowing and the willing with it. Sri Aurobindo describes the first six chapters as a large preliminary basis of works and knowledge which contains “an element leading up to bhakti and to a greater knowledge, but not yet fully arriving.” The hinge verse is the place where that element shows itself, the first clear sign of the direction in which the whole braid is being drawn. He imagines Arjuna, if the discourse were broken off here, pressing the Teacher with the question it raises: bhakti is the greatest thing, but to whom is it to be offered? Not to the still impersonal Self, for the silent witness returns no answer to love; it must be offered to the Lord who is greater than the Self. To reveal that Lord is the work of the chapters that follow.

jñānī bhakta

Knowledge Kindled into Adoration

From the seventh chapter the strand of knowledge changes its colour. It is no longer the knowledge of the silent Self alone but the integral knowledge of the Divine in all the principles of his being, Self and Nature and Jiva and Lord; and it is precisely this widening that turns knowledge into love. Among those who turn to the Divine, the Gita says, there are four kinds: the sufferer, the seeker of good in the world, the seeker of knowledge, and the one who adores with knowledge (7·16). All are noble, but the knower who is ever in union and whose bhakti is concentrated on the One excels them; “he loves Me perfectly and is my beloved” (7·17). The crown of knowledge is the great soul, very rare, who knows that Vasudeva is all (7·19); and that knowing is itself a coming to him, prapadyate.

It is the constant teaching of Sri Aurobindo that the knowledge the Gita means cannot remain a cognition of the mind. To know the Divine truly is to be touched by him, and what the inner being is touched by, it rises to embrace.

Indeed the knowledge which is not companioned by an aspiration and vivified by an uplifting is no true knowledge, for it can be only an intellectual seeing and a barren cognitive endeavour. The vision of God brings infallibly the adoration and passionate seeking of the Divine, — a passion for the Divine in his self-existent being, but also for the Divine in ourselves and for the Divine in all that is.

So the ninth chapter can speak of those who “seek Me out by the sacrifice of knowledge and worship Me in My oneness and in every separate being and in all My million universal faces” (9·15). Knowledge has become a sacrifice, that is, a work; and it has become a worship, that is, a love. The strands are no longer merely touching; they have begun to pass through one another. The sacrifice of works turns likewise into adoration, for the Divine becomes himself the flame and the offering, the flame being the Godward will and that will God himself within us; and Sri Aurobindo concludes, “This sacrifice is therefore at once works and adoration and knowledge.”

यत्करोषि यदश्नासि यज्जुहोषि ददासि यत् ।यत्तपस्यसि कौन्तेय तत्कुरुष्व मदर्पणम् ॥

yatkaroṣi yadaśnāsi yajjuhoṣi dadāsi yatyattapasyasi kaunteya tatkuruṣva madarpaṇam

Here the braid descends into the smallest acts of life. A leaf, a flower, a fruit, a cup of water, offered with love, is accepted (9·26); the least circumstance assumes a divine significance. There is great tenderness in these verses, and a great delight. The Lord who has just named himself the Father of this world, the Mother, the path and goal, the benignant friend (9·17), stoops to receive the leaf and the water; and the soul that offers them finds its works lightened of every burden, because they are no longer its own. It is at the close of this chapter that Sri Aurobindo finds the image at the root of this essay, a teaching in which knowledge, works and the heart’s longing become one, “an intertwining of all their threads.”

matkarmakṛt madbhaktaḥ

Doer of My Works, My Lover

In the eleventh chapter the braid is made visible in one overwhelming image. Arjuna, granted the divine eye, sees the World-Spirit as Time the destroyer and hears the command that returns the whole teaching to its starting-point on the battlefield: the enemies are already slain, “do thou become the occasion only” (11·33). Here is the strand of works, now become instrumentation; and here the strand of knowledge, now become vision. But the Teacher declares that this vision is not won by Veda or austerity or gift or sacrifice; it can be seen, known and entered into only by a bhakti that loves him alone in all things (11·54). And then he gives in a single verse the formula of the whole Yoga: be a doer of my works, accept Me as the supreme, become my bhakta, free from attachment and without enmity to any being (11·55).

This vision can be reached only by the absolute adoration, the love, the intimate unity that crowns at their summit the fullness of works and knowledge. … In other words superiority to the lower nature, unity with all creatures, oneness with the cosmic Godhead and the Transcendence, oneness of will with the Divine in works, absolute love for the One and for God in all, — this is the way to that absolute spiritual self-exceeding and that unimaginable transformation.

The twelfth chapter takes up Arjuna’s question about the two ways, the way of the personal Divine and the way of the unmanifest Immutable, and its answer is instructive for our theme. Those who found their mind in Him and seek him with a supreme faith are the most perfectly in union (12·2); the seekers of the Indefinable arrive too, but by a harder and a less complete way. Then follows a gentle descending sequence (12·8–11): lodge thy whole mind and understanding in Me; if thou canst not, seek Me by the Yoga of practice; if not that, do all actions for My sake; if not even that, renounce the fruit of works. Each lower rung is a door into the others. Works done for the Lord’s sake are already devotion; and the renunciation of the fruit, to which the Gita gives the palm, brings the calm in which, as Sri Aurobindo says, “knowledge, will and devotion can lift their pinnacles from a firm soil of solid calm into the ether of Eternity.” Whatever strand the soul can first seize, it will find the others bound to it.

The portrait of the beloved bhakta that follows (12·13–20) is composed of qualities the dividing reading would assign to other yogas: equality to friend and foe, freedom from I-ness and my-ness, a universal compassion, a swiftness and skill in works that comes of pure instrumentation of the divine will. The lover of God in the Gita is no sentimental devotee withdrawn from the world, but the equal-souled sage and the desireless worker made dear to God by love. The crown of this equality, Sri Aurobindo says, “is love founded on knowledge, fulfilled in instrumental action, extended to all things and beings.” In one breath the three strands are named.

sarvadharmān parityajya

The Knot of Surrender

The last chapter gathers every strand once more and ties them in a single knot. Works return, not abandoned but transfigured: a man reaches perfection by worshipping with his own work Him from whom all beings originate and by whom all this is pervaded (18·46). The work of the swabhava, done with right knowledge and dedicated to the Master of the universe, has become an act of worship. Knowledge returns, and it too is transfigured. When one has become the Brahman and is equal to all beings, one gets the supreme devotion (18·54), and “by devotion he comes to know Me, who and how much I am” (18·55). The order the dividing mind expected is here reversed: it is not knowledge that crowns devotion, but devotion that completes knowledge, the heart’s fathomless vision completing the mind’s absolute experience. And the command to act is given again in the same breath as the call to love: “Devoting all thyself to Me, giving up in thy conscious mind all thy actions into Me … be always one in heart and consciousness with Me” (18·57).

Then the Teacher, having said all else, speaks the word towards which the whole Gita has been moving.

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

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

Every strand is present in this one line. My-minded: the whole knowledge turned upon the Divine. My lover and adorer: the whole heart. A sacrificer to Me: the whole will and all its works. And the promise that follows is spoken not by a lawgiver but by a Friend: “to Me thou shalt come, this is my pledge and promise to thee, for dear art thou to Me.” Then the last verse breaks through every rule: “Abandon all dharmas and take refuge in Me alone. I will deliver thee from all sin and evil, do not grieve” (18·66). The grief with which the Gita began is answered at last, not by an argument, but by a pledge of love.

It would be a strange misreading to take this surrender as the abandonment of works and knowledge in favour of an emotion. What is abandoned is every partial law, every separate dharma of the lower nature, every exclusive path; what remains is the whole being, knowing, willing and loving, given in one movement to the One who is its Self, its Lord and its Beloved. Rendering the Gita’s final message in the Teacher’s own voice, Sri Aurobindo puts it plainly.

Add to knowledge and works this crown of the eternal triune delight; admit this love, learn this worship; make it one spirit with works and knowledge. That is the apex of the perfect perfection.

This is the knot in which the braid ends, and from which, for the soul that has tied it, a new life begins. The surrender is not a retirement from the field. Arjuna rises from it and takes up his bow; his action goes on, but it is now the action of a knower who has seen the Purushottama and of a lover who has given himself to him. The strands are not unwound at the end; they have become one motion.

The Triple Cord: Works, Knowledge and Devotion through the Gita

The Gita’s Yoga is one because the Divine it reveals is one, and because the soul that seeks him is one. Were the Supreme only the silent Absolute, knowledge alone might reach him; were he only the Lord of the cosmic action, works might suffice; were he only a personal God apart from the Self and the universe, the heart might go to him alone. But he is the Purushottama, the silent Self and the Master of works and the Lover of the soul at once, and he can be met wholly only by a being that knows and acts and loves at once. So the three strands, which to the mind seem three ways, are to the spirit three motions of a single self-giving.

To him who is the source of all that we are, we give all that we are. Our persistent consecration turns into knowledge of him all our knowing and into light of his power all our action. The passion of love in our self-giving carries us up to him and opens the mystery of his deepest heart of being. Love completes the triple cord of the sacrifice, perfects the triune key of the highest secret…

There is joy in this, and the Gita does not hide it. The Teacher who smiled upon Arjuna’s grief between the two armies ends by calling him dear; the stern discipline of equality and the high austerity of knowledge are found at the last to have been the preparation of a friendship. The braid is not a rope of bondage but a cord of love, and the Hand that draws it upward is the Hand that held the reins through all the battle.

The verses of this essay

Chapter 3

1. 2

Chapter 2

1. 47
2. 48

Chapter 4

1. 33

Chapter 3

1. 30

Chapter 4

1. 24

Chapter 6

1. 47

Chapter 7

1. 17
2. 19

Chapter 9

1. 15
2. 27

Chapter 11

1. 55

Chapter 12

1. 8

Chapter 18

1. 46
2. 55
3. 65
4. 66

• Kurukshetra
• The Possibility and Purpose of Avatarhood
• The Core of the Teaching
• Equality and Knowledge
• Nirvana and Works in the World
• The Gist of the Karmayoga
• The Supreme Divine
• Works, Devotion and Knowledge
• The Vision of the World Spirit; The Double Aspect
• The Way and the Bhakta
• The Supreme Secret
• The Message of the Gita