The Drama of the Divine Charioteer

XIV

नष्टो मोहः स्मृतिर्लब्धा

naṣṭo mohaḥ smṛtirlabdhā

Arjuna and Krishna, this human and this divine, stand together not as seers in the peaceful hermitage of meditation, but as fighter and holder of the reins in the clamorous field, in the midst of the hurtling shafts, in the chariot of battle.

It is possible to read the Bhagavad Gita as a treatise that happens to have a setting, a body of doctrine delivered on a convenient occasion and then lifted clear of it, as a jewel is lifted from its box. Sri Aurobindo will not allow this. He insists that the author has woven his teaching inextricably into the epic, that he returns to the situation again and again, in the very midst of his profoundest disquisitions, and that the teaching of the Gita must be regarded “as bearing upon a practical crisis in the application of ethics and spirituality to human life.” The Gita is not a philosophy with a battle painted behind it. It is a drama in which a human soul is placed, broken, taught, shown, sheltered and sent back into action, and in which every beat of the story does its own work upon that soul.

The Gita owes its poetical success to its starting from a great and critical situation in life, having that in view and always returning upon it, and to its method which is to seize on a spiritual experience or moment or stage of the inner life and throw it into the form of thought…

To follow the Gita as a drama is to watch its gestures as closely as its words: the conches blown before a syllable of wisdom is spoken, the chariot halted where it will wound, the bow slipping from a trembling hand, the long silence of the narrator, the blaze of the World-Form and the gentle face that returns after it, the warrior’s last short sentence and the witness’s cry of joy. And it is to discover that the chief actor in this drama is not grim. The charioteer smiles. Beneath all the thunder of Kurukshetra there moves the delight of Krishna, who knows the end from the beginning and plays His part in the terrible hour as the Friend who has already won.

dharmakṣetre kurukṣetre

A Blind King, a Seeing Witness, and the Conches

The first voice in the Gita is that of a blind king, and his first question already divides the world. On the field of Kurukshetra, the field of the Dharma, what did they do, my people and the Pandavas 1·1? Dhritarashtra cannot see the field, and in his very grammar he has taken sides; he asks as one who fears the answer. The one who answers him can see. Sanjaya, seated far away in the palace, has received from Vyasa the gift of divine sight, and it is through his eyes and ears that the whole of the Gita reaches us. In his Bengali writings on the Gita Sri Aurobindo defends this gift as no poetic fancy but a real power of the subtle vision.

In any case, with the divine vision given him by Vyasa, Sanjaya while remaining in Hastinapur saw with his eyes as if he were standing in the battlefield of Kurukshetra the partisans of Dhritarashtra and the Pandavas gathered there, heard with his ears the words of Duryodhana, the fierce battle-cry of grandfather Bhishma, the mighty sound of Panchajanya proclaiming the destruction of the Kurus, and the dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna bringing out the import of the Gita.

So the drama opens with sound. Bhishma, the ancient of the Kurus, roars like a lion and blows his conch to cheer the heart of Duryodhana 1·12; conches and drums and horns blare out on every side 1·13. Then from a great chariot yoked to white horses Madhava and the son of Pandu blow their divine conches 1·14, and it is Hrishikesha whose conch is named first, Panchajanya, before Arjuna’s Devadatta and the conches of the brothers 1·15. That uproar, resounding through earth and sky, tears the hearts of the sons of Dhritarashtra 1·19. It is the music of the old heroic confidence, and Arjuna is its very image.

He advances to this gigantic struggle, to this Kurukshetra with the full acceptance of the joy of battle, as to “a holiday of fight”, but with a proud confidence in the righteousness of his cause; he advances in his rapid chariot tearing the hearts of his enemies with the victorious clamour of his war-conch…

The dramatic irony is complete. Within a few verses this confident conch-blower will sink down weeping, and the heart that was to tear the hearts of others will itself be torn. Yet the first sound Krishna makes in the Gita is not a word but a blast of battle, and we should not forget whose breath it is. The lips that blow Panchajanya above the armies are the lips that, in the legend of Vrindavan which Sri Aurobindo notes as hinted in the epic, once played the flute. The conch announces the war of the Dharma; the flute, unheard beneath it, is already calling the soul that will be delivered by it.

senayor ubhayor madhye

The Chariot Between the Armies

Arjuna speaks his first words to Krishna as a commander to a charioteer: O Achyuta, stay my chariot between the two armies, that I may look upon these myriads eager for battle, whom I must meet in this holiday of fight 1·21–23. The Immovable, the Unfallen, is given an order, and He obeys it. There is a divine humour in this reversal which the Gita does not underline but which it leaves for us to feel. The Lord of the worlds has taken the reins of a mortal’s war-car and waits upon his word; and Sri Aurobindo sees in this very situation the figure of God’s dealings with men, who are moved by a Power they do not recognise while they imagine themselves the sole doers of their works. Until the terrible issue of Kurukshetra, the Avatar has not revealed himself even to his chosen; he stands at last, “still not as fighter, but as the charioteer in the battle-car which carries the destiny of the fight.”

Yet the obedience is also a mastery. Hrishikesha halts the chariot not simply between the armies but in front of Bhishma and Drona and all the princes of the earth, and He speaks one line only: O Partha, behold these Kurus gathered together 1·24–25. Arjuna had asked to see his enemies; the charioteer shows him his grandsire and his teacher. It is the first act of the divine pedagogy, and it is an act, not a lesson. Before a word of instruction the Teacher places the disciple where the truth must strike him.

And now it is shown to his vision by the divine charioteer, placed sensationally before his eyes, and comes home to him like a blow delivered at the very centre of his sensational, vital and emotional being.

Then saw Partha, the text goes on, uncles and grandsires, teachers, brothers, sons and comrades standing on both sides, and he was invaded by great pity 1·27. The chariot is the stage of the whole Gita. It never moves again until the dialogue is ended; everything that follows is spoken in this halted war-car between the two hosts, the human and the divine seated together, as Sri Aurobindo says, “as fighter and holder of the reins in the clamorous field.” It is a figure old in India, the soul and the Godhead riding in one chariot; but here the chariot has stopped, and it will not start again until the soul has learned who holds the reins.

visṛjya saśaraṃ cāpam

The Fallen Bow

What follows is one of the longest speeches Arjuna makes in the whole Gita, and Krishna does not interrupt it. The limbs fail, the mouth dries, the body shakes, the hair stands on end, the skin burns, and Gandiva slips from the hand 1·28–30. Then the cry of the heart, then the arguments of the moral mind, the ruin of the clan, the corruption of the family law, the hell of the destroyers of the race. The drama requires this completeness. Every layer of the ordinary human complex must speak itself out to the end, so that nothing is hidden and nothing is left in reserve against the teaching; the whole of the old man must stand exposed upon the stage before the new man can be born.

And the scene closes on a gesture, not a word.

सञ्जय उवाच

एवमुक्त्वार्जुनः संख्ये रथोपस्थ उपाविशत् ।विसृज्य सशरं चापं शोकसंविग्नमानसः ॥

evamuktvārjunaḥ saṃkhye rathopastha upāviśatvisṛjya saśaraṃ cāpaṃ śokasaṃvignamānasaḥ

The bow and the inexhaustible quiver were given by the gods for that tremendous hour, and they lie now on the floor of the chariot. The Gita could have told us simply that Arjuna refused to fight; it chooses instead to show us the weapon falling, because the fallen bow is the visible form of a fallen will. In his Bengali commentary on this verse Sri Aurobindo observes that “the poet has left a hint that Arjuna was determined to act in this un-Aryan manner unworthy of a Kshatriya because there had been a confusion in his understanding on account of grief.” The Sanskrit says it in a single compound: śokasaṃvignamānasaḥ, his mind shaken with sorrow.

The fallen bow is the most eloquent object in the drama, and the Gita does not forget it. Through eighteen chapters it lies where it fell. It is never said to be picked up. But in the very last verse of the poem, when Sanjaya pronounces his verdict on the whole colloquy, Arjuna is named not as the disciple nor as the son of Pritha only but as pārtho dhanurdharaḥ, Partha the bearer of the bow 18·78. Between the bow that slips from the hand in the first chapter and the bow that is borne in the last, the whole transformation is enacted. The Gita’s teaching is the story of how that bow was taken up again, and by whom.

prahasann iva

The Silence and the Smile

Rebuked, Arjuna does not rise. He pleads once more, and then he does the thing that alters the whole relation: he gives up the claim to judge his own case. My whole consciousness is bewildered in its view of right and wrong; I take refuge as a disciple with thee; enlighten me 2·7. Until this moment he has spoken as a friend and a prince to his charioteer. Now for the first time the charioteer is asked to be the Teacher. Yet even here he holds to his refusal, and the drama gives us one of its most eloquent pauses.

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.

“I will not fight,” he says, and becomes silent 2·9. And into that silence falls the most tender verse of the Gita.

तमुवाच हृषीकेशः प्रहसन्निव भारत ।सेनयोरुभयोर्मध्ये विषीदन्तमिदं वचः ॥

tamuvāca hṛṣīkeśaḥ prahasanniva bhāratasenayorubhayormadhye viṣīdantamidaṃ vacaḥ

Prahasann iva, smiling as it were. The Gita does not say that Krishna frowned at the collapse of his friend, nor that he grieved with him, nor that he answered with the thunder the moment seemed to call for. He smiled, between the two armies, at a man in tears. It is not the smile of mockery, for the words that follow are the gentlest and deepest ever spoken to a disheartened soul. It is the smile of One who sees the whole and is not troubled by the part, who knows that the grief is for those that should not be grieved for 2·11, and who takes delight even now in the disciple He is about to lift. Here the Lila shows its face for an instant beneath the war.

And with this verse the narrator falls silent. Sanjaya, whose voice had carried the conches and the chariot and the fallen bow, does not speak again until the World-Form is unveiled in the eleventh chapter. Through all the intervening chapters there is no battle, no clamour, no report of the armies; there is only the dialogue, as though the whole field had been held still around the chariot. Sri Aurobindo, writing in Bengali of how such a dialogue was possible amid the armies, answers that it was by the power of Yoga: “amidst the din of battle, at one particular spot, with Sri Krishna and Arjuna peace reigned within and without; the noise of war could not affect these two.” The silence of Sanjaya is the outward sign of that inner peace. The drama has turned inward, and the world waits.

praśna

The Questions of the Disciple and the Slow Unveiling

A treatise would proceed by its own logic; a drama proceeds by the resistance of its persons. The Gita’s teaching does not unroll smoothly from premise to conclusion. It is driven forward, chapter after chapter, by the questions of a disciple who remains, as Sri Aurobindo portrays him, the practical man of action seeking a clear law to walk by, impatient of what seems to him a mingled word. If thou holdest the intelligence to be greater than works, why dost thou appoint me to a terrible work 3·1–2? Thou art only now born, and the Sun-God was of the first-born; how am I to understand that thou didst declare this Yoga to him 4·4? Which is the better way, renunciation or works 5·1? The mind is restless and as hard to hold as the wind 6·34; what is the end of one who strives and fails 6·37?

Each question is a turn of the plot. The doubt about Krishna’s age draws out the declaration of the Avatar, that whenever the Dharma declines He comes forth, born from age to age 4·7–8. The complaint about the restless mind draws out the teaching of practice and non-attachment. And steadily, beneath the argument, the Teacher is revealing Himself. Sri Aurobindo marks this hidden movement of the drama.

“Throughout Krishna, the Avatar, the Teacher, the charioteer of the human soul in the world-action, has been preparing the revelation of the secret of himself, Nature’s deepest secret.” First the Friend speaks as a guide who removes ignorance; then as the Avatar; then as the Lord of the lower and the higher Nature; then as the supreme on whom all that is here is strung like pearls upon a thread 7·7; then as the king-secret of all secrets 9·2; then as the birth of everything, whose splendour, light and energy shine in every glorious and mighty creature 10·8, 10·41. The disciple’s questions change with the revelation. From asking for a rule of action Arjuna comes to ask who this is who speaks to him: Thou art the supreme Brahman, the supreme Abode 10·12; how shall I know Thee, O Yogin 10·17? At last the question becomes a longing for sight. I desire to see Thy divine form and body, O Purushottama; if Thou thinkest that it can be seen by me, show me Thy imperishable Self 11·3–4. The companion of many years has become the object of adoration, and the drama is ready for its climax.

divyaṃ cakṣuḥ

The World-Vision

What thou hast to see this human eye cannot grasp; but there is a divine eye, and that I now give thee 11·8. At this moment, and not before, Sanjaya’s voice returns: Having thus spoken, O King, the Master of the great Yoga, Hari, showed to Partha His supreme Form 11·9. The narrator, himself seeing by a divine sight, reappears exactly when the disciple is given one; the frame and the centre of the drama are for an instant made one vision.

What Arjuna sees is at first a glory: a light as if a thousand suns had risen at once in heaven 11·12, all the worlds gathered in one body, and he bows, overcome with marvel, his hair standing on end, hṛṣṭaromā 11·14. Then the glory becomes terror. The mouths of Time devour the heroes of both armies; the nations rush into the flaming jaws as rivers to the sea and as moths into the fire; and Arjuna, trembling, cries, Declare to me who Thou art 11·31. The answer is the most dreadful sentence in the Gita: I am Time, the destroyer of the world, arisen for the destruction of the nations; by Me and none other already even are they slain; be thou the occasion only 11·32–33.

No argument could have done this work. In the second chapter Krishna had reasoned with Arjuna about the undying Self; here He shows him the whole action of the universe, and the reasoning becomes sight. “Life a battle and a field of death, this is Kurukshetra; God the Terrible, this is the vision that Arjuna sees on that field of massacre.” But the vision is not given in order to crush him.

If the soul can arrive at unity with the Godhead in this vision, — Arjuna has not yet done that, therefore we find that he has fear when he sees, — all even that is terrible in the world loses its terror. We see that it too is an aspect of the Godhead and once we have found his meaning in it, not looking at it by itself alone, we can accept the whole of existence with an all-embracing joy and a mighty courage, go forward with sure steps to the appointed work and envisage beyond it the supreme consummation.

Arjuna has not yet reached that unity, and the drama is honest about it. Sanjaya speaks again to show him with clasped hands, trembling, speaking in a faltering voice, very much terrified 11·35. The trembling of the first chapter has returned, vepamānaḥ, but its cause is no longer the sight of kinsmen; it is the sight of God. The shock is the same in the nerves; its meaning has been transfigured.

saumyaṃ mānuṣaṃ rūpam

The Return of the Gentle Form

Having seen what never was seen before, Arjuna rejoices and is afraid, and he makes a prayer that is among the most human in all scripture: show me that other form of Thine; turn Thy heart to grace 11·45; I would see Thee as before, crowned, with mace and discus, in Thy four-armed shape 11·46. Sri Aurobindo hears in this prayer a note that runs beneath the whole terrible vision: “From the first words there comes the suggestion that the hidden truth behind these terrifying forms is a reassuring, a heartening and delightful truth.”

The Godhead grants it. Cast away fear, He says, and let thy heart rejoice; behold again this other form of Mine 11·49; and Sanjaya, speaking a third time, tells how the Mahatman, assuming again the desired form of grace and love and sweetness, consoled the terrified one 11·50. The return is not an anticlimax, a retreat from the heights into comfort. It is as necessary to the drama as the vision itself.

But there is too the gracious mediating form of divine Narayana, the God who is so close to man and in man, the Charioteer of the battle and the journey, with his four arms of helpful power, a humanised symbol of Godhead, not this million-armed universality. It is this mediating aspect which man must have for his support constantly before him.

अर्जुन उवाच

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

dṛṣṭvedaṃ mānuṣaṃ rūpaṃ tava saumyaṃ janārdanaidānīmasmi saṃvṛttaḥ sacetāḥ prakṛtiṃ gataḥ

Saumyaṃ mānuṣaṃ rūpam, the gentle human form; sacetāḥ prakṛtiṃ gataḥ, I am come to myself, restored to my own nature. The soul that could not bear the Infinite in its unmitigated splendour is given back the Friend, and in the Friend it finds its own nature again. This is the drama’s answer to a question no treatise could settle: how a finite being may live with the knowledge of the Infinite. Not by staring always into the blaze of the World-Form, but by receiving it in the face of the Beloved, the Charioteer of the battle and the journey, in whom all that terror is held and made gentle. From here the Gita moves towards the Bhakta, the lover who is dear to the Lord, and the whole second half of the poem is spoken in the light of that returned face.

naṣṭo mohaḥ

The Most Secret Word and the Last Word of Arjuna

The later chapters are sometimes read as a descent from the climax, a return to analysis after the vision. In the dramatic order they are the assimilation of what was seen, the patient work by which the Field and its Knower, the three modes of Nature, faith and works and one’s own law of being are brought within the reach of a soul that must live and act. And then, when the great structure of the teaching is complete, the drama breaks through it. Further hear the most secret, the supreme word; beloved art thou intimately of Me 18·64. Become My-minded, My lover and adorer; to Me thou shalt come; this is My pledge, for dear art thou to Me 18·65. Abandon all dharmas and take refuge in Me alone; I will deliver thee from all sin and evil; do not grieve 18·66.

The eleventh chapter overwhelmed by magnitude; the eighteenth overwhelms by nearness. Sri Aurobindo renders the spirit of this last word as a promise spoken from within the chariot itself.

I am here with thee in thy chariot of battle revealed as the Master of Existence within and without thee and I repeat the absolute assurance, the infallible promise that I will lead thee to myself through and beyond all sorrow and evil.

Then the Teacher asks, as a teacher asks at the end of a long lesson, whether it has been heard with a concentrated mind, whether the delusion born of ignorance is destroyed 18·72. And Arjuna answers in one breath.

अर्जुन उवाच

नष्टो मोहः स्मृतिर्लब्धा त्वत्प्रसादान्मयाच्युत ।स्थितोऽस्मि गतसन्देहः करिष्ये वचनं तव ॥

naṣṭo mohaḥ smṛtirlabdhā tvatprasādānmayācyutasthito’smi gatasandehaḥ kariṣye vacanaṃ tava

These are the last words Arjuna speaks in the Gita, and they are few. He does not summarise the doctrine or declare his assent to a philosophy. He reports a change in himself and announces an act. Each phrase undoes a scene of the drama. Naṣṭo mohaḥ: the bewilderment he confessed at 2·7 is gone. Smṛtir labdhā: the memory of himself, whose loss the second chapter named as the ruin of the intelligence 2·63, is regained, and regained by grace, tvatprasādāt. Sthito’smi: he who sank down on the chariot-seat now stands. Gatasandehaḥ: the objections that seemed unanswerable have dissolved. Kariṣye vacanaṃ tava: the man who said “I will not fight” and fell silent now says, I will do Thy word. The silence of the second chapter is answered, and the drama of the disciple is over.

hṛṣyāmi ca muhur muhuḥ

The Rapture of the Witness

But the Gita does not end with Arjuna. It ends with Sanjaya, and the last voice of the poem is neither the Teacher’s nor the disciple’s but the witness’s, and it is a cry of joy. I heard this wonderful dialogue of Vasudeva and the great-souled Partha, he says, and it made my hair stand on end, romaharṣaṇam 18·74. The same bodily sign has now appeared three times in the drama. In the first chapter Arjuna’s hair stood on end in horror at the sight of his kinsmen 1·29; in the eleventh it stood on end in awe before the World-Form 11·14; in the eighteenth the witness’s hair stands on end in rapture. What was dread has become wonder, and what was wonder has become delight.

राजन्संस्मृत्य संस्मृत्य संवादमिममद्भुतम् ।केशवार्जुनयोः पुण्यं हृष्यामि च मुहुर्मुहुः ॥

rājansaṃsmṛtya saṃsmṛtya saṃvādamimamadbhutamkeśavārjunayoḥ puṇyaṃ hṛṣyāmi ca muhurmuhuḥ

Remembering, remembering, I rejoice again and again; remembering also that most marvellous form of Hari, great is my wonder, and I rejoice again and again 18·77. The word the witness repeats is the word the disciple has just spoken. Arjuna has regained memory; Sanjaya is lost in remembering. The smṛti which was the whole issue of the inner drama overflows here into the frame, and memory, which in its failure was the ruin of the soul, becomes in its fullness an inexhaustible delight. The blind king who began the Gita in fear is left at its close with a seer who cannot stop rejoicing.

Then comes the verdict, not as an argument but as a vision of the eternal pair. Wherever is Krishna, the Master of Yoga, wherever is Partha, the bearer of the bow, there are glory, victory, prosperity and the immutable Law of Right 18·78. The dialogue on the halted chariot is thus universalised. It is no longer only an event in the Bharata war; it is the perpetual meeting of the human soul and the Divine, and wherever that meeting is real the victory is already won, because, in words Sri Aurobindo gives to the Gita’s own message, “The battle will be his, his the victory, his the empire.” The bow has been taken up again, and it is borne now by a man who knows whose hands move in his.

The Rise and Fall of the Soul in the Drama of the Charioteer

A treatise could be summarised, and the Gita has been summarised a thousand times. A drama can only be lived through, and the Gita, followed beat by beat, turns out to be exactly that: a movement through which a soul is carried from the confident clamour of the conches, through the collapse of all its standards, the silence of its surrender, the shattering sight of the Infinite and the consolation of the gentle Face, to a last word that is an act and a last cry that is joy. Its doctrine is the meaning of its events; its events are the working of its doctrine upon a living man.

And through all of it the charioteer is smiling. He smiled when the bow fell; He showed the dreadful Form and then, at a word, put it by and showed His gentle face; He spoke His last secret as a lover speaks, because the disciple was dear to Him. The Gita is often called a gospel of works, and so it is. But it is also the story of a Divine who takes delight in His human friend, who drives his chariot into the midst of death for his sake, and who will not rest until the friend can stand beside Him, bow in hand, knowing at last who has been holding the reins.

The verses of this essay

Chapter 1

1. 1
2. 15
3. 19
4. 24–25
5. 28–30
6. 46

Chapter 2

1. 7
2. 9
3. 10

Chapter 3

1. 1–2

Chapter 4

1. 7–8

Chapter 11

1. 3–4
2. 8
3. 14
4. 32–33
5. 45
6. 50
7. 51

Chapter 18

1. 64–66
2. 73
3. 74
4. 76
5. 78

• The Divine Teacher
• The Human Disciple
• Kurukshetra
• Man and the Battle of Life
• The Creed of the Aryan Fighter
• The Secret of Secrets
• The Vision of the World Spirit; Time and Destroyer
• The Vision of the World Spirit; The Double Aspect
• The Supreme Secret
• The Message of the Gita