The Great Verses Restored to Their Movement

XV

मामेकं शरणं व्रज

māmekaṃ śaraṇaṃ vraja

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.

There are lines in the Gita which have travelled farther than the book itself. They are carved over doorways, printed on the first page of diaries, spoken at the bedside of the dying and on the parade-ground of armies; they have been made to serve the counsels of prudence and the commands of power, the resignation of the weary and the self-assurance of the strong. Their very density is the cause of their fortune, for a verse that gathers a whole movement of the spirit into sixteen syllables can be carried anywhere; and it is also the cause of their danger, for what is carried away is the gathered form without the movement that gathered it. A great verse of the Gita is not a maxim that happens to stand in a poem. It is the crest of a wave, and a crest lifted out of the sea is no longer a wave but only a little spray.

The modern reading of the Gita, as Sri Aurobindo observed, fixed upon a handful of such crests in the first chapters and made of one of them the mahāvākya, the great word, of the whole scripture. His method was the opposite: to hear each word where it is spoken, to whom, at what hour of the disciple’s growth, and towards what larger word it is already moving. We follow him here through the verses most often quoted and most often misheard, and we try in each case to restore the line to its living place in the dialogue. It is well to remember, as we do so, the tone in which the dialogue begins. Arjuna has sunk down in the chariot with the bow fallen from his hand, and Hrishikesha speaks to him prahasann iva, smiling as it were, between the two armies. Every great verse that follows is spoken from within that smile, which is neither mockery nor indifference but the calm delight of One who sees the whole movement while the soul before him sees only its own darkness.

ajo nityaḥ śāśvataḥ

The Deathless and the Grieving

The first of the great verses is also the first that Krishna gives as a foundation, and it is given against grief. Arjuna has cloaked the revolt of his nerves and heart in the language of righteousness; he mourns in advance for kinsmen and teachers who are still alive,. Into this confusion the Teacher lets fall the verse of the unborn Self, the soul that is not born and does not die, that did not come into being once to pass away for ever, ancient, sempiternal, not slain when the body is slain.

न जायते म्रियते वा कदाचिन् नायं भूत्वा भविता वा न भूयः ।अजो नित्यः शाश्वतोऽयं पुराणो न हन्यते हन्यमाने शरीरे ॥

na jāyate mriyate vā kadācinnāyaṃ bhūtvā bhavitā vā na bhūyaḥajo nityaḥ śāśvato’yaṃ purāṇona hanyate hanyamāne śarīre

Two misreadings wait upon this verse. The gentler turns it into a consolation for the bereaved, a pious assurance that the dead have survived and are somewhere well; the harsher turns it into a warrant for slaughter, as though the immortality of the soul made the killing of bodies a thing of no account. Neither is the Gita’s sense. The verse does not speak of survival, which is the common lot of every creature that has a mind; it speaks of a status of the spirit which birth and death do not touch at all, and it invites Arjuna not to believe a doctrine about the dead but to become himself one who lives in that status.

For by immortality is meant not the survival of death, — that is already given to every creature born with a mind, — but the transcendence of life and death. It means that ascension by which man ceases to live as a mind-informed body and lives at last as a spirit and in the Spirit.

Nor does the verse, taken alone, justify the battle. Sri Aurobindo is careful to put the question himself: this knowledge may free us from grief and the fear of death, but how does it justify the action demanded of Arjuna? The answer he finds is not in 2.20 but in what the Gita builds upon it, first the law of the fighter’s own nature, then the Yoga of the intelligent will, and at last the will of the Master of works who stands in the chariot. The verse of the deathless Self is thus a ground cleared, not a building raised. It takes from Arjuna the false centre of his grief, the body mistaken for the man, so that another centre may be given to him; and whoever reads it as a licence has forgotten that it is spoken to a soul who must first become fit for immortality, which means one who has ceased to be a slave to the touches of transient things. For the rest it is a beautiful sentence, and a dangerous one.

karmaṇy evādhikāras te

A Right that Must Disappear

No line of the Gita has been quoted so often as the forty-seventh verse of the second chapter, and none has been so completely detached from the argument that gives it its force. It has become, in the modern mind, the charter of a gospel of duty: do the work that falls to you and do not trouble about the reward. Sri Aurobindo notes that the saying came to be quoted as the great word of the scripture; he adds, with a quiet decision, that it is not the great word at all, but only a preliminary word governing the first state of the disciple when he begins ascending the hill of Yoga.

कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन ।मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर् मा ते संगोऽस्त्वकर्मणि ॥

karmaṇyevādhikāraste mā phaleṣu kadācanamā karmaphalaheturbhūr mā te saṃgo’stvakarmaṇi

The verse has two edges, and the popular reading keeps only one. It forbids the fruit as motive, and it forbids with the same breath saṅgo ‘stv akarmaṇi, any attachment to inaction. Arjuna is not a man greedy of victory; his temptation is the opposite, to lay down the bow and call his abdication renunciation. The verse closes that door as firmly as it closes the door of desire.

Yet even the right to action, which the verse seems to grant, is granted only for a time. As the teaching advances, the disciple is shown that it is Nature with her modes who does the work (3·27), and that the works themselves are to be given up into the Lord (3·30). What then becomes of a right which belongs to a doer who is found not to be the doer?

Therefore the “right to action” is an idea which is only valid so long as we are still under the illusion of being the doer; it must necessarily disappear from the mind like the claim to the fruit, as soon as we cease to be to our own consciousness the doer of our works. All pragmatic egoism, whether of the claim to fruits or of the right to action, is then at an end.

Restored to its movement, then, the verse is not a rule of conduct for the virtuous worker but the first loosening of a knot. It lifts the hand from the fruit so that later the hand itself may be seen to belong to another; it is the earliest form, still framed in the language of the ego’s rights, of a surrender that will end by abolishing the ego’s rights altogether. Its truth is a truth of passage, and it is most truly kept by those who are prepared to outgrow it.

samatvaṃ yoga ucyate

Equality Is Not Indifference

The verse that follows gives the Gita’s first definition of its own Yoga: fixed in Yoga, do thy works, having cast away attachment, equal in success and failure, for equality is called Yoga, samatvaṃ yoga ucyate (2·48). A few verses later comes a second definition, that Yoga is skill in works (2·50). Both have been flattened by use. Equality is taken for a temperament of coolness, the unruffled manner of the man who does not care very much; skill in works is taken for efficiency, a recommendation of competence to the ambitious.

The equality which the Gita preaches is not disinterestedness … it is a state of inner poise and wideness which is the foundation of spiritual freedom.

Sri Aurobindo draws his evidence for this from the Gita’s own later command, spoken after the whole structure of the teaching has been built: arise, conquer thy enemies, enjoy an opulent kingdom (11·33). That is not the language of a white and dispassionate abnegation. The equality of 2.48 is not a withdrawal of interest from the world but a withdrawal of the soul’s subjection to the dualities of the world, so that it may act in the world with the whole of its power and none of its fever. It is the condition of freedom before it is a quality of character.

And because it is freedom, it is also skill. The action done in Yoga, he writes, is not only the highest but the wisest and most potent even for the affairs of the world, since it is informed by the knowledge and will of the Master of works. The skill of 2.50 is not the cleverness of the ego but the fitness of an instrument no longer deflected by hope and fear. Nor does equality remain what it first seems. In its earlier forms it may resemble the Stoic’s endurance or the philosopher’s aloofness; in its completion it is something warmer and vaster, and the Essays say of it simply: This equality is founded upon oneness with all beings. The poise that began as a guard against disturbance ends as a wideness in which every being is received as oneself. Such is the living sense of the word that has been made to mean a shrug.

svadharma

The Law of One’s Own Being

Better one’s own law of works, though faulty, than an alien law well wrought out; death in one’s own law is better, perilous is it to follow another’s. Few verses have been drawn into sharper controversy, and from two opposite sides. The social conservative has heard in it a sanction for remaining in the station of one’s birth; the modern individualist has heard in it permission to follow whatever his nature happens to demand. Both have taken the word svadharma in a sense the Gita does not give it.

श्रेयान्स्वधर्मो विगुणः परधर्मात्स्वनुष्ठितात् ।स्वधर्मे निधनं श्रेयः परधर्मो भयावहः ॥

śreyānsvadharmo viguṇaḥ paradharmātsvanuṣṭhitātsvadharme nidhanaṃ śreyaḥ paradharmo bhayāvahaḥ

Against the second reading the context itself stands guard. Between the verse that says all creatures follow their nature (3·33) and the verse of the svadharma, the Gita sets a warning: in the objects of each sense liking and disliking lie in ambush; fall not into their power (3·34). And when Arjuna at once objects that nature seems to drive men into sin, the answer is that this driving force is desire and its companion wrath, children of rajas, the enemy to be slain (3·36–37). The law of one’s being is therefore not the impulse of the lower nature but something that the lower nature often obscures.

Against the first reading Sri Aurobindo is no less plain. When the Gita returns to the svadharma in its last chapter, he refuses to fasten on its words the notion that a man must follow the calling of his ancestors irrespective of his inner bent, and he lifts the teaching out of every social order in which it was once framed.

What the Gita is concerned with is not the validity of the Aryan social order now abolished or in a state of deliquescence, — if that were all, its principle of the Swabhava and Swadharma would have no permanent truth or value, — but the relation of a man’s outward life to his inward being, the evolution of his action from his soul and inner law of nature.

So understood, the verse becomes one of the most liberating in the book. It tells the soul that its truest action is not an imitation, however admirable, of another’s greatness, but the unfolding of the divine idea that is secretly its own; that an imperfect work done from within is worth more to its growth than a perfect one borrowed from without. And it points forward to the chapter where this law of the swabhava is itself made an offering, worship of the Lord by one’s own work (18·46), until at the last even the svadharma is given up into the hands of Him from whom it came.

sambhavāmi yuge yuge

The Descent that Opens an Ascent

The verses of the Avatar are among the most recited in India, and among the easiest to diminish. Whenever the Dharma fades and unrighteousness rises, I loose myself forth into birth; for the deliverance of the good, the destruction of evil-doers and the enthroning of the Right I am born from age to age. Heard as a proud claim of one religion over others, they become sectarian; heard as the promise of a heavenly champion who descends to settle the political quarrels of earth, they become mythology.

यदा यदा हि धर्मस्य ग्लानिर्भवति भारत ।अभ्युत्थानमधर्मस्य तदात्मानं सृजाम्यहम् ॥

yadā yadā hi dharmasya glānirbhavati bhārataabhyutthānamadharmasya tadātmānaṃ sṛjāmyaham

Their place in the dialogue is precise. Krishna has said that he taught this Yoga of old to Vivasvan; Arjuna, the practical man, cannot reconcile this with the friend born in his own generation, and his question draws from the Teacher a disclosure of his own nature. Though unborn and imperishable, the Lord of all existences, he comes into birth by his own Nature and his own Maya (4·6), not driven like the creature but self-determined; and it is this self-determined birth which makes the verses of the Avatar a teaching of divine works, a showing of how the Transcendent can act in the world without being bound by it.

The word dharma itself, Sri Aurobindo insists, must not be taken in a merely ethical or a merely religious sense, for the Avatar’s work is double, an outward change in the life of the race and an inward change in its soul. And the inward change is the heart of it.

The Avatar comes as the manifestation of the divine nature in the human nature, the apocalypse of its Christhood, Krishnahood, Buddhahood, in order that the human nature may by moulding its principle, thought, feeling, action, being on the lines of that Christhood, Krishnahood, Buddhahood transfigure itself into the divine.

The descent is for the sake of an ascent. That is why the verses do not end with the enthroning of the Right, but pass at once into the promise that whoever knows in its principles the divine birth and the divine works comes to Me (4·9), and then into one of the tenderest sayings of the Gita: as men approach Me, so I accept them to My love (4·11). The Avatar is not only the restorer of a law; he is the gate through which the human being may pass into a divine birth of his own.

uddhared ātmanātmānam

The Self that Lifts the Self

In the sixth chapter, at the threshold of the Yoga of meditation, stands a verse whose Sanskrit turns upon a single word repeated like a bell: uddhared ātmanātmānaṃ nātmānam avasādayet. By the self thou shouldst deliver the self; thou shouldst not cast down the self; for the self is the friend of the self, and the self is its enemy.

उद्धरेदात्मनात्मानं नात्मानमवसादयेत् ।आत्मैव ह्यात्मनो बन्धुर् आत्मैव रिपुरात्मनः ॥

uddharedātmanātmānaṃ nātmānamavasādayetātmaiva hyātmano bandhur ātmaiva ripurātmanaḥ

The verse has been welcomed by every doctrine of self-help as a Sanskrit blessing upon will-power: raise yourself by your own effort, for no one else will. It has been read by the stern as a charter of self-mortification, the higher self as a warder set over a prisoner. Sri Aurobindo’s own rendering quietly forbids both readings by its parenthesis, which tells us that the self may be cast down whether by self-indulgence or suppression. The ego that flogs itself is not delivering the self; it is only another form of the same captivity.

The key is in the next verse (6·6), which distinguishes the two selves the first has left folded together. To the man in whom the lower self has been conquered by the higher, his self is a friend; to him who is not in possession of his higher self, the lower acts as an enemy. The deliverer is not the ego straining upward by its own bootstraps but the spiritual self which is already free, and the whole labour of Yoga is to let that self take up and master the natural being. So the Essays can put it in a single phrase: to master the lower self by the higher, the natural self by the spiritual is the way of man’s perfection and liberation. In the chapter on equality the same verse is given its inward tone: the seeker takes care not to dethrone himself by casting his being into the hands of desire and passion, but delivers himself out of that imprisonment by his own inner power.

There is a gentleness in this verse which the popular readings miss. It says that the self can be a friend, bandhu, the word for kinsman and companion. The Yoga of the Gita does not begin with self-contempt; it begins with the discovery that there is within us one who is already our ally, and that to be delivered is to consent to his friendship.

patraṃ puṣpaṃ phalaṃ toyam

A Leaf, a Flower, and the Whole of Life

The ninth chapter, which the Gita calls the king-secret, holds two verses that have been cherished by the devout of every generation. To those who worship Me with no other thought, ever joined to Me, I bring their getting and their having, yogakṣemaṃ vahāmy aham (9·22). And a little further: whoever offers Me with love a leaf, a flower, a fruit, a cup of water, that offering of love from the striving soul I accept (9·26).

पत्रं पुष्पं फलं तोयं यो मे भक्त्या प्रयच्छति ।तदहं भक्त्युपहृतम् अश्नामि प्रयतात्मनः ॥

patraṃ puṣpaṃ phalaṃ toyaṃ yo me bhaktyā prayacchatitadahaṃ bhaktyupahṛtam aśnāmi prayatātmanaḥ

Each has its small misreading. The first is taken as a spiritual insurance, a promise that the pious will be provided for; the second as a gracious concession to simplicity, a reassurance that little gifts will do and that devotion need not disturb the rest of life. But the condition of the first is ananyāḥ, those who make the Divine alone the whole object of their thought, and what is promised to such a soul is far more than provision. Of him Sri Aurobindo writes that God himself becomes the spontaneous bringer to him of every good and of all his inner and outer getting and having; and the joy of heaven and of earth are but a small shadow of what flows upon one who grows into the Divine.

The second verse does not stop at the leaf and the flower. It flows at once into the next, which gathers the whole of life into the offering: whatever thou doest, whatever thou enjoyest, whatever thou sacrificest or givest, whatever energy of tapasya thou puttest forth, make it an offering unto Me (9·27). The leaf is the first word, not the last.

Here the least, the slightest circumstance of life, the most insignificant gift out of oneself or what one has, the smallest action assumes a divine significance and it becomes an acceptable offering to the Godhead who makes it a means for his possession of the soul and life of the God-lover.

So the verse which seemed to ask little asks everything, and it asks it in the gentlest possible way, by showing that nothing is too small to be received. And it is followed by words that reveal the heart behind the receiving: none is hated by Me and none is dear, yet those who turn to Me with love are in Me and I in them (9·29); even the man of very evil conduct who turns to Me with sole love is to be counted a saint (9·30); he who loves Me shall not perish (9·31). The leaf is accepted because the Lover of all beings wishes to be given, not a leaf only, but the hand that offers it.

nimittamātraṃ bhava

Time, and the Occasion Only

At the centre of the World-Vision a voice speaks out of the fiery form: I am Time, the destroyer of the peoples, arisen and increased; even without thee all these warriors shall be not (11·32). Therefore arise, get thee glory, conquer thy enemies; by Me and none other already are they slain; do thou become the occasion only, O Savyasachin (11·33).

तस्मात्त्वमुत्तिष्ठ यशो लभस्वजित्वा शत्रून् भुङ्क्ष्व राज्यं समृद्धम् ।मयैवैते निहताः पूर्वमेवनिमित्तमात्रं भव सव्यसाचिन् ॥

tasmāttvamuttiṣṭha yaśo labhasvajitvā śatrūn bhuṅkṣva rājyaṃ samṛddhammayaivaite nihatāḥ pūrvamevanimittamātraṃ bhava savyasācin

These are among the most perilous words in any scripture, and their perils run in two directions. Read as fatalism, they seem to say that all is fixed, so that human choice is a shadow and nothing we do matters. Read as sanction, they seem to hand to every commander who believes his cause divine the right to call his violence the will of God. The Gita guards against both by the whole road that leads to this moment. It is not spoken to any man; it is spoken to one who has been told that he is not the doer, who has been asked to act without desire and without the sense of I and mine, and who has himself begged to see the form of the Master of the worlds.

What he sees is not a blind fate but a foreseeing Will. Sri Aurobindo reads Time here as the present will of the Godhead’s workings, and destruction as the first condition of progress, the inner as well as the outer: the man who does not destroy his lower self-formations cannot rise to a greater existence. The human being is not abolished by this vision but placed; he is to be nimitta-mātra, the occasion only, which is the highest dignity an instrument can have, and the most exacting.

Therefore Arjuna is bidden to resist, to fight, to conquer; but, to fight without hatred or personal desire or personal enmity or antagonism, since to the liberated soul these feelings are impossible.

Here is the measure by which every claim to divine instrumentality must be judged. The instrument of the Time-Spirit is one from whom hatred has gone out and to whom victory is not a possession; one who can hear, as Arjuna heard, that the fruit is given, and receive it as the Divine’s glory in his Vibhuti rather than as his own. It is also the sense in which the terror of this vision is not the last word of the Godhead. Arjuna, shaken, prays prasīda, turn thy heart to grace (11·31); and the chapter closes with the return of the gentle human form of the Friend. The destroyer and the charioteer are one Being, and the command of Time is given by the same voice that smiled between the armies.

sarvadharmān parityajya

The Last Word, Heard from the Other Side

At the close of the Gita, after the long discipline of equality and sacrifice, knowledge and devotion, after the analysis of the gunas and the teaching of the svabhava, comes the word which the Teacher calls the most secret of all. Abandon all dharmas and take refuge in Me alone; I will deliver thee from all sin and evil; do not grieve.

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

sarvadharmānparityajya māmekaṃ śaraṇaṃ vrajaahaṃ tvā sarvapāpebhyo mokṣayiṣyāmi mā śucaḥ

Because it is the most absolute sentence in the book, it is the most easily abused. The antinomian hears in it a release from every rule, as if devotion could excuse whatever it chose to do; the passive hears in it a permission to leave all effort aside and wait. Both forget where the verse stands. It comes after Krishna has said to Arjuna, having reflected on it fully, do as thou wouldest (18·63), so that the disciple is set free to choose before he is asked to surrender; it comes after the declaration, beloved art thou intimately of Me (18·64), and after the call to become my-minded, my lover and adorer, a sacrificer to Me (18·65). The surrender asked is not the dropping of a burden by one too weary to carry it, but the gift of a whole being to One who has already given Himself.

Sri Aurobindo notes that at this moment the Gita seems to break out of its own structure. It had insisted on a great and well-built discipline; now it says to the soul, cast even that away. Yet the dharmas are not thrown aside because they were worthless, but because the soul has reached That which they were always serving. From the very beginning, he observes, the Teacher meant his disciple to give up all dharmas except the one broad and vast rule of living consciously in the Divine and acting from that consciousness.

… the Spirit and Godhead is an Infinite free from all dharmas … if we too can cast away all dependence on dharmas, surrender ourselves to this free and eternal Spirit and, taking care only to keep ourselves absolutely and exclusively open to him, trust to the light and power and delight of the Divine in us and, unafraid and ungrieving, accept only his guidance, then that is the truest, the greatest release and that brings the absolute and inevitable perfection of our self and nature.

Read so, the last word does not abolish the discipline; it is the discipline’s own flower, the moment when the effort that was necessary gives place to a trust that is no longer an effort. And it ends, like the first answer of the second chapter, against grief: mā śucaḥ, do not grieve. The dialogue that began with a man weeping in his chariot closes with the Friend’s assurance that there is nothing left to weep for.

The Slogan and the Living Word

The proof that the great verses have been heard is not given by Krishna but by Arjuna. His last words are few: 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). He does not say that he has understood a doctrine. He says that something has been restored to him, smṛti, the memory of what he truly is, and that he will act.

That is the test which every quotation of the Gita must pass. The verse of the deathless Self is heard when grief has lost its centre; the verse of works without fruit is heard when the hand has opened; the verse of equality is heard when the soul is wide enough to hold friend and enemy alike; the verse of the svadharma when action rises from within; the verse of the Avatar when the divine birth begins in the one who reads it; the verse of the leaf when the whole of life has become the flower offered; the verse of Time when the will is emptied of hatred; the last word when the soul, no longer grieving, lets itself be carried. Out of their movement these lines are maxims, and maxims can be made to serve any master. Within it they are what they were when first spoken, the words of the Charioteer to a soul he loves, spoken with a smile that already sees the end.

The verses of this essay

Chapter 2

1. 10
2. 20
3. 47
4. 48
5. 50

Chapter 3

1. 35

Chapter 4

1. 7
2. 8
3. 11

Chapter 6

1. 5
2. 6

Chapter 9

1. 22
2. 26
3. 27

Chapter 11

1. 32
2. 33

Chapter 18

1. 63
2. 65
3. 66
4. 73

• The Core of the Teaching
• The Creed of the Aryan Fighter
• The Yoga of the Intelligent Will
• Equality
• The Determinism of Nature
• The Possibility and Purpose of Avatarhood
• The Divine Birth and Divine Works
• Works, Devotion and Knowledge
• The Vision of the World Spirit; Time and Destroyer
• Swabhava and Swadharma
• The Human Disciple
• The Supreme Secret