The Unfolding of the Doctrine

XI

असंशयं समग्रं मां यथा ज्ञास्यसि

asaṃśayaṃ samagraṃ māṃ yathā jñāsyasi

The Gita is not a weapon for dialectical warfare; it is a gate opening on the whole world of spiritual truth and experience and the view it gives us embraces all the provinces of that supreme region. It maps out, but it does not cut up or build walls or hedges to confine our vision.

There is a way of reading the Gita that goes to it as to a treasury, taking from it one jewel and leaving the rest of the casket unexamined. One reader carries away the right to action without claim upon the fruit; another the silence of the Brahman in which all works cease; a third the word of love and refuge with which the book closes; and each, holding his single jewel to the light, supposes that he holds the whole. Yet the Gita was not given as a treasury but as a dialogue, spoken between two armies to one man at the crisis of his life, and its truths come to him not all at once but in the order in which his soul is able to receive them. It is a teaching that grows, and it grows as living things grow, from within, each new unfolding disclosing what the seed already held and could not yet show.

These pages follow that growth through the eighteen chapters. It begins at the moment when a great warrior’s will breaks and his charioteer, prahasann iva, “smiling as it were” (2·10), begins to speak; it ends when the same voice tells him, “dear art thou to Me” (18·65), and the warrior answers that his delusion is destroyed and he will act according to the word (18·73). Between that smile and that avowal of love lies the whole architecture of the teaching: the Sankhya of the immortal Self and the Yoga of the intelligent will, the sacrifice of works, the divine birth, the peace of the Brahman, the two Natures, the vision of the World-Spirit, the Field and its Knower, the Purushottama and the supreme secret. Each of these is a step which the step before it made necessary, and none can be taken out without the whole losing its poise; for the Teacher builds nothing in this book for ornament, and everything for the soul that must climb it.

samagra

A Developing Argument

The difficulty of the Gita is not that it is obscure but that it is rich. Its thought moves in a wide and winding current, now insisting on works, now on knowledge, now on devotion, and it is always easy for the reasoning mind, which loves a single key, to seize one of these currents and declare it the river. Sri Aurobindo names this as the peculiar danger of the book: it is easy, he writes, by throwing particular emphasis on one of its aspects or on some salient text, “to turn it into a partisan of our own doctrine or dogma.” The modern mind in particular, eager to get to work, has made of it a Gospel of Duty whose great word is the famous injunction of 2·47; true in its place, that reading falsifies the rest when it is made exclusive.

The Gita can only be understood, like any other great work of the kind, by studying it in its entirety and as a developing argument.

A developing argument does not state its last truth first. The right to action without claim upon the fruit is, in Sri Aurobindo’s reading, not the summit of the Gita but “only a preliminary word governing the first state of the disciple when he begins ascending the hill of Yoga.” It is already exceeded when the Teacher declares in 3·27 that it is Nature and her modes that do all works and the egoism that says “I do”; for then even the right to act dissolves with the illusion of the doer, and the soul must find a greater basis than any claim. That basis is not given at once. The Purushottama, the Supreme Person in whom the whole teaching finds its reconciliation, is present from the beginning in the “Me” and the “I” of the Teacher, but is withheld from explicit statement until the fifteenth chapter; and Sri Aurobindo observes that the Gita accepts certain obscurities in its early chapters “so that it may not disturb the firmness of the first steps by reaching out prematurely to things too great as yet for the mind of the human disciple.”

This is the method of a Teacher who is also a Friend. He neither overwhelms the pupil with the whole truth nor flatters him with a part of it called the whole; he gives what can be lived, and then what the changed life can receive. The promise which governs the entire unfolding is spoken at the opening of the seventh chapter, where Krishna undertakes that Arjuna shall know Him “without any remainder of doubt, integrally” (7·1). Every chapter before that verse prepares the ground for this integral knowing; every chapter after it is the keeping of the promise.

sāṅkhya-yoga

The Crisis That Calls the Teaching

The teaching does not begin with a question about God. It begins with a man who can no longer act. Arjuna has seen his kinsmen ranged against him, the bow has slipped from his hand, and his whole consciousness, as he confesses, is bewildered in its view of right and wrong (2·7). What he asks for is not the secret of existence; in Sri Aurobindo’s words, “He does not ask for the secret of life or of the world, the meaning and purpose of it all, but for a dharma,” a rule by which he may know what to do. Yet it is precisely this unasked-for secret that the Teacher means to give him, because no rule drawn from the ordinary mind can resolve a crisis in which all the rules have broken against one another. The soul that has come to the end of its dharmas is the soul that can at last be taught.

Krishna’s answer therefore proceeds on two lines. There is first a brief reply drawn from the highest ideas of the culture in which the warrior was bred, the honour of the Kshatriya and the shame of flight; and there is then “another and larger founded on a more intimate knowledge, opening into deeper truths of our being, which is the real starting-point of the teaching of the Gita.” That deeper beginning is the Sankhya: the discrimination of the immortal Self from the body and the mind in which it dwells. “The enlightened man does not mourn either for the living or for the dead” (2·11); the Self is not born and does not die, and grief for its passing garments is grief misplaced. This stone is laid first because Arjuna’s recoil rests on the belief that to slay the body is to slay the man.

But the Gita does not remain in the Sankhya even for a single chapter. Scarcely has it established the immortal Self than it turns, with a phrase like the swing of a door, to another way of seeing the same truth.

एषा तेऽभिहिता सांख्ये बुद्धिर्योगे त्विमां शृणु ।बुद्ध्या युक्तो यया पार्थ कर्मबन्धं प्रहास्यसि ॥

eṣā te’bhihitā sāṃkhye buddhiryoge tvimāṃ śṛṇubuddhyā yukto yayā pārtha karmabandhaṃ prahāsyasi

The intelligence that has been shown in the Sankhya is now to be heard in the Yoga; the knowledge that discriminates is to become a will that acts. Here already is the whole method of the book: a truth of knowledge is given and at once made the basis of works.

The Sankhya is taken as the starting-point and the basis; but it is from the beginning and with a progressively increasing emphasis permeated with the ideas and methods of Yoga and remoulded in its spirit.

The Yoga of the intelligent will, buddhiyoga, gathers the scattered understanding into a single resolute point, sets it above desire, makes it equal in success and failure (2·48), and ends with the sage whose wisdom stands firm. The warrior has been lifted above his grief. He has not yet been told for whom he is to act.

yajña

Works Offered, and the Divine Worker Revealed

It is Arjuna’s own bewilderment that carries the teaching forward. He has heard the intelligence praised above works, and he asks with a kind of anguish why, if that is so, he is appointed to “a terrible work”; the speech, he complains, is confused and mingled, and he would have the one thing by which he may attain his soul’s weal (3·1–2). The Teacher does not rebuke the question. He answers it by unfolding what was only implicit before: the doctrine of works as sacrifice, yajña. The world is bound by works done otherwise than for sacrifice (3·9); the same works, offered, become a means of freedom. And behind the offering there begins to appear the One to whom it is offered, for in 3·30 the Teacher speaks for the first time with the full weight of the divine “I”: “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.”

Who is this Me? The fourth chapter answers in part, and the answer is itself an event in the drama. The charioteer declares that he has taught this Yoga of old, that he has passed through many births, and that whensoever there is the fading of the Dharma he looses himself forth into birth (4·7–8). The Avatar is revealed, not as a doctrine to be believed but as the living example of what the teaching intends. Here is one who acts in the world with the whole of his being and is bound by none of his works; one whose birth is divine and whose works are divine, and who promises that whoever knows these in their principle comes to Him (4·9). The model of the free worker stands in the chariot beside the bound one.

And the divine birth of the Avatar is not given to Arjuna only for his admiration. It is the pattern of what is to be accomplished in himself: the birth of the human soul out of the ego into the divine nature. This is the hidden hope of the whole Gita, and Sri Aurobindo, later in his study, describes how that hope is fulfilled.

The Godhead works out the divine birth in us progressively, simply, infallibly, by taking up our being into his and by filling it with his own knowledge and power … he lays hands on our obscure ignorant nature and transforms it into his own light and wideness.

So the Karmayoga of the third and fourth chapters, which began as a counsel to act without desire, ends by opening a door on the Divine Worker himself. Works are to be done as sacrifice; the sacrifice is to be offered to the Lord; and the Lord is here, in a human form, holding the reins. The disciple who began by asking for a rule of conduct has been given, without yet knowing it, a Person.

brahmanirvāṇa

The Silence of the Brahman and the Seed of Love

The fifth and sixth chapters seem at first to move away from this nearness into a vast impersonal peace. They speak of the Brahman, of the equal self that is the same in the learned Brahmin and the outcaste, of Nirvana, of the yogin who sits in a clean place and gathers his mind into the silence. The reader who stops here may well conclude that the Gita, having begun with action, ends in quietism. But the Nirvana of these chapters is a strange one. The sages who win it are those “occupied in doing good to all creatures” (5·25); the yogin whose self is in Yoga sees the self in all beings and all beings in the self (6·29); and in the verse that closes the fifth chapter the Divine is known as “the friend of all creatures,” suhṛdaṃ sarvabhūtānām, whose knowledge brings the peace (5·29). The silence into which the soul is led is not empty. It is the silence of One who loves.

Sri Aurobindo treats these six chapters as a single foundation, “a sort of preliminary block of the teaching,” and imagines that a living teacher, not bound to carry a written scripture to its end, might well have paused here and said to his disciple: “Work this out first, there is plenty for you to do to realise it and you have the largest possible basis.” Much has been given: the discrimination of Self and Nature, the Yoga of the intelligent will, desireless works offered as sacrifice, equality, the Brahmic consciousness. Much has been hinted and withheld: the working of the gunas, the higher Nature, the relation of the silent Self to the Lord of works, and above all the place of love.

It is with this last that the first block closes, as if the Teacher had been waiting through six chapters to let fall one word.

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

yogināmapi sarveṣāṃ madgatenāntarātmanāśraddhāvānbhajate yo māṃ sa me yuktatamo mataḥ

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 … the highest spiritual mystery and the divine secret.

The seed has been sown in the heart of the Yoga of knowledge and works. Of all yogins, the one most perfectly united is not the one who has most completely stilled the mind, nor the one who has most perfectly renounced the fruit, but the one who “with all his inner self given up to me, for me has love and faith.” The whole second half of the Gita is the unfolding of this seed.

parā prakṛti

Know Me Integrally

With the seventh chapter the teaching changes its manner. Sri Aurobindo observes that in the first six “the progress is a little laboured and moves through several involutions and returns,” while here we seem to reach clearer ground and a more concise statement. The reason is that a question left open by the first block has now become urgent. The soul has been shown how to rise above the three gunas into the silent Self; but the silent Self does not act, and the Teacher still asks for works. From where, then, is the divine action to proceed? “Is there then a higher Nature than that of the three gunas?”

The answer is the doctrine of the two Natures. There is the lower, eightfold Nature of the elements, mind, reason and ego; and there is another, supreme Nature, which “becomes the Jiva and by which this world is upheld” (7·4–5). The individual soul is not a stranger in the world, nor a mere product of its mechanism: it is itself the higher Nature of the Divine in manifestation. From this truth all the rest follows. The Lord is the origin of all things and their dissolution; he is the taste in the waters and the light of sun and moon; and very rare is the great soul who at the end of many births knows that Vasudeva is all that is (7·19).

The ninth chapter calls this the king-knowledge and the king-secret, and its close gathers the three paths into one movement of the being toward the Divine: “Become my minded, my lover and adorer, a sacrificer to me” (9·34), a verse which the eighteenth chapter will take up again almost word for word as the seal of the whole. The tenth opens with the Teacher offering his “supreme word” to Arjuna “now that thy heart is taking delight in me” (10·1); and Sri Aurobindo, reading that phrase, says simply, “For this delight of the heart in God is the whole constituent and essence of true bhakti.” Then follows the long litany of the Vibhutis, in which every splendour and every power in the world is shown as a spark of the one Godhead (10·20, 10·41).

All that has gone before laid the foundations of the knowledge or prepared its first necessary materials or scaffolding, but now the full frame of the structure is to be placed before his unsealed vision.

What has happened in these four chapters is that knowledge has become intimate. The Self which the Sankhya discriminated from Nature is found again as the Lord of Nature; the Brahman of the fifth chapter is found again as the Friend and the Beloved; the works offered in sacrifice are now offered to One who is all. It remains for the disciple to see.

viśvarūpa

Where Doctrine Becomes Vision

Sri Aurobindo marks the eleventh chapter as the place where the second great movement of the Gita, having established knowledge and devotion together, is suddenly given a turn toward life and action.

The seventh to the twelfth chapters lay down a large metaphysical statement of the nature of the Divine Being and on that foundation closely relate and synthetise knowledge and devotion, just as the first part of the Gita related and synthetised works and knowledge. The vision of the World-Purusha intervenes in the eleventh chapter, gives a dynamic turn to this stage of the synthesis and relates it vividly to works and life.

Why must doctrine become vision here? Because a truth held by the mind does not yet move the whole man. Arjuna has accepted with his understanding that all is the Divine; but, as the Essays put it, “intellectual clarity is not enough; he must see with the inner sight illumining his blind outward human vision, so that he may act with the consent of his whole being.” He asks to see the form of God (11·3); he is told that the human eye cannot grasp it and is given a divine eye (11·8); and he sees the One in the many, the light as of a thousand suns, and then the devouring mouths of Time into which the armies are already pouring. From that vision comes the command which the first chapter could not receive: “By me and none other already even are they slain, do thou become the occasion only” (11·33). The original question is answered by a revelation, terrible and consoling at once, for the same chapter ends with the return of the gentle human form and the declaration that this vision is entered only by a love that is given to God alone (11·54).

In Sri Aurobindo’s words, “In the eleventh chapter of the Gita the original object of the teaching has been achieved and brought up to a certain completeness.” Yet the Gita does not end here, and the reason it does not is revealing. The disciple has received the command from the cosmic Godhead, yet he was earlier told to sink his personality in the impersonal Self, and the two instructions are not yet reconciled. So the twelfth chapter opens with his question: which have the greater knowledge of Yoga, those who worship the Lord in constant union, or those who seek the unmanifest Immutable (12·1)? The answer is decisive: those who found their mind in Him with supreme faith are “the most perfectly in union of Yoga” (12·2). And the chapter closes with the portrait of the bhakta, dear to God, equal to friend and enemy. “The twelfth chapter,” Sri Aurobindo writes, “leads up to this remaining knowledge and the last six that follow develop it to a grand final conclusion.”

puruṣottama

The Field, the Gunas and the Supreme Person

The last block of the Gita returns, as it were, to the analytic knowledge from which the teaching set out, but now with the Supreme in full view. The thirteenth chapter distinguishes the Field, which is the whole working of the lower Nature in body, mind and sense, from the Knower of the Field (13·2); and it adds at once, “Understand Me as the Knower of the Field in all Fields” (13·3). The Sankhya discrimination of the second chapter reappears, but its witness-Self is now known as the Lord. In Sri Aurobindo’s reading this closing part “restates in another form the enlightenment the Teacher has already imparted,” so as to found on a clear and complete knowledge the way of the soul’s rising out of the lower into the divine nature.

The fourteenth chapter then analyses the three gunas that bind the soul in its lower nature and describes the one who has passed beyond them; but its last word is again a word of love: “He also who loves and strives after Me with an undeviating love and adoration, passes beyond the three gunas” (14·26), for the Purushottama is himself “the foundation of the silent Brahman and of Immortality” (14·27). The long preparation has reached its keystone.

The doctrine of the Gita from the beginning to the end converges on all its lines and through all the flexibility of its turns towards one central thought … This central thought is the idea of a triple consciousness, three and yet one, present in the whole scale of existence.

There are two Purushas in the world, the mutable, which is all these existences, and the immutable, the high-seated consciousness of the Brahmic status (15·16); but other than these two is the highest Spirit, the imperishable Lord who enters the three worlds and upholds them (15·17). “Since I am beyond the mutable and am greater and higher even than the immutable, in the world and the Veda I am proclaimed as the Purushottama” (15·18). Here at last the difficulty that ran beneath all the earlier chapters is resolved. The silent Self of the Sankhya and the active Lord of the Yoga are not rivals between whom the seeker must choose, for both are poises of one Being who exceeds and contains them. The knowledge of the Self and the works of Nature and the adoration of the Lord meet in him, and the chapter draws the consequence in a single verse: whoever knows Him thus as the Purushottama “adores Me … with all-knowledge and in every way of his natural being” (15·19). Knowledge, having reached its summit, turns of itself into love.

The sixteenth and seventeenth chapters then descend again toward the ground of life, distinguishing the nature of the Deva from that of the Asura and showing how faith, śraddhā, shapes the soul: “whatever is that will, faith or constituting belief in him, he is that and that is he” (17·3).

sarvaguhyatama

The Secret Beyond All Dharmas

The eighteenth chapter gathers everything. It distinguishes the true renunciation, which is inward, from the mere abandonment of works; it traces the action of the gunas in knowledge, work, doer, understanding and happiness; it grounds the whole of action in svabhāva and svadharma, so that the Lord from whom all beings originate is worshipped by each “by his own work” (18·46). And then, when the way of ascent has been laid down in full, there comes a movement that seems to break every limit the book has set. “When one has become the Brahman,” says the Teacher, “when one, serene in the Self, neither grieves nor desires, when one is equal to all beings, then one gets the supreme love and devotion to Me” (18·54). The Brahmic consciousness which in the fifth chapter looked like the summit is here the threshold; beyond it lies the supreme bhakti.

The Lord is seated in the heart of all beings, turning them by his Maya (18·61); in Him the disciple is to take refuge in every way of his being (18·62). And then the Teacher, having spoken a knowledge “more secret than that which is hidden” (18·63), says that there is yet a supreme word, the most secret of all, and that he will speak it because Arjuna is intimately beloved (18·64).

And this is how the Gita leads us: it lays down a firm and sure but very large way of ascent, a great Dharma, and then it takes us out beyond all that is laid down, beyond all dharmas, into infinitely open spaces, divulges to us the hope, lets us into the secret of an absolute perfection founded in an absolute spiritual liberty …

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

sarvadharmānparityajya māmekaṃ śaraṇaṃ vrajaahaṃ tvā sarvapāpebhyo mokṣayiṣyāmi mā śucaḥ

This is the last unfolding, and it undoes nothing that went before. The disciple who first asked for a dharma is now told to abandon all dharmas; but he can hear that word only because every dharma has been lived through and exceeded in its turn, the warrior’s honour by the equality of the Sankhya, equality by the sacrifice of works, sacrifice by the knowledge of the Lord, knowledge by love. The crisis of the first chapter asked for a rule; the answer of the last is a relation. And Arjuna, who began with the bow slipping from his hand, rises with his memory restored: “Destroyed is my delusion, I have regained memory through Thy grace … I will act according to Thy word” (18·73).

The rising revelation across the eighteen chapters

Looked at from its close, the Gita reveals the shape it had from the beginning. It is not a staircase of doctrines, each abandoned as the next is reached, but a single truth disclosing more and more of itself to a soul that grows able to receive it. The Self of the second chapter is not cancelled by the Lord of the fourth, nor the Brahman of the fifth by the Purushottama of the fifteenth; each is taken up and seen more wholly. Works remain to the end, but offered; knowledge remains, but warmed into love; love remains, and becomes the very heart of action. Sri Aurobindo speaks of the Gita as moving by “three great steps by which action rises out of the human into the divine plane,” from desireless sacrifice to the knowledge of Self and Nature and thence to the adoration of the supreme Purusha; and he sums up the fulfilment in a phrase that could stand over the whole unfolding: “Love is the crown of works and the crown of knowledge.”

Such a teaching could only have been given by a Teacher who delighted in his disciple. The patience with which the higher truths are held back until the lower have been lived, the tenderness with which each objection is received and made the occasion of a larger answer, the smile of the second chapter and the avowal of the eighteenth, are not ornaments added to the doctrine. They are the doctrine seen from within. The Divine who unfolds himself step by step in the Gita is the same who unfolds himself step by step in every seeking soul, and he does it for the same reason: not to burden it with a system but to draw it, with a lover’s care, into the fullness of his being, samagraṃ mām.

The verses of this essay

Chapter 2

1. 7
2. 10
3. 39

Chapter 3

1. 1
2. 30

Chapter 4

1. 7
2. 9

Chapter 5

1. 29

Chapter 6

1. 47

Chapter 7

1. 1
2. 19

Chapter 9

1. 34

Chapter 11

1. 8
2. 33

Chapter 12

1. 2

Chapter 13

1. 3

Chapter 15

1. 18

Chapter 18

1. 54
2. 65
3. 66
4. 73

• Our Demand and Need from the Gita
• The Human Disciple
• The Core of the Teaching
• The Creed of the Aryan Fighter
• Sankhya, Yoga and Vedanta
• Nirvana and Works in the World
• The Gist of the Karmayoga
• The Two Natures
• The Secret of Secrets
• The Supreme Word of Gita
• The Way and the Bhakta
• The Field and its Knower
• The Three Purushas
• Towards the Supreme Secret
• The Core of the Gita’s Meaning
• The Message of the Gita