The Living Words

XVI

समत्वं योग उच्यते

samatvaṃ yoga ucyate

Yoga is the practice of the Truth of which knowledge gives the vision, and its practice has for its motor-power a spirit of illumined devotion, of calm or fervent consecration to that which knowledge sees to be the Highest.

The Gita thinks in a language whose words still show their making. Almost every one of its great terms can be taken back to a verbal root, a dhātu, and to the suffix that shaped it into a noun of action or of quality, so that a word like yoga or dharma carries within it, for the ear that knows how to listen, the act from which it was formed. This is a real and a precious thing, but it has been made to bear burdens it cannot carry. Because Sanskrit invites meditation on its sounds, it has also invited a kind of devout fancy which finds in every syllable a hidden doctrine and presents the finding as though grammar had proved it. The ancient teachers themselves practised a sacred play of derivation, and the Upanishads delight in it; but a play of the spirit upon a word is one thing, and the history of the word is another.

In what follows we keep three things distinct and try never to let one pass for the other. There is first the grammar: the root, its sense, and how the word is built, stated as plainly as the grammarians allow, and with an honest confession where the origin is uncertain. There is next the Gita’s use: the verses in which the word lives and the turns it takes as the dialogue advances. And there is last the meaning which Sri Aurobindo draws out of that use, the power of consciousness which the word names when it is lived. He warned his readers that the Gita employs familiar terms in a connotation wider than the technical sense now familiar to us; it is that wider connotation we are seeking. The words are not a glossary appended to the teaching. They are the teaching in its most compact form, spoken by the Friend in the chariot, and each of them, rightly heard, opens into the one Yoga of which all of them are limbs.

yoga · samatva

The Yoke and the Union

The root is √yuj, to yoke, to harness, to join; it is the same root, by a kinship the philologists hold certain, that gives the Latin iugum and the English yoke. The noun yoga is formed from it in the regular way of nouns of action, the vowel strengthened and the final j turned to g, as bhoga, enjoyment, is formed from √bhuj. Its participle is yukta, yoked, joined, fitted; its agent is the yogin; and the Gita loves to set the root and its noun side by side, as when it says yogāya yujyasva, yoke thyself to Yoga (2·50).

What is striking is how freely the Gita redefines the word it inherits. At its first definition, Yoga is equality, samatvaṃ yoga ucyate (2·48); at its second, skill in works (2·50); in the sixth chapter it plays upon its own root and calls Yoga the unyoking from the yoke of pain, duḥkha-saṃyoga-viyogam (6·23), which Sri Aurobindo renders as the divorce of the mind’s marriage with grief. There the grammar and the meaning truly meet, for saṃyoga and viyoga are both from √yuj, and the Gita itself is making the point: the true joining is also a disjoining. Of the word yukta he observes that when the Yoga is attained it means not merely moderate or regulated, but in Yoga with the Divine in all states, in waking and in sleeping, in food and play and action. And at the close of the sixth chapter the root rises to its superlative, yuktatamaḥ, the one most united, and the most united is the one who loves (6·47).

Samatva, the equality that the first definition names, is built on sama, even, same, equal (a cousin of the English same), with the abstract suffix -tva; samatā is the same idea with the suffix -tā. The Gita’s equal-seeing sage is samadarśana (6·29).

By Yoga is meant union through divine works done without desire, with equality of soul to all things and all men, as a sacrifice to the Supreme, while knowledge is that on which this desirelessness, this equality, this power of sacrifice is founded.

He is speaking there of the early part of the teaching, and the word grows as the teaching grows, until it becomes the whole union of the being with the Purushottama in knowledge, works and love. That is why Yoga stands at the centre of the other words. Each of them names a limb of this joining, or a power by which it is made, or the Person to whom the soul is joined.

buddhi

The Awakened Will

Buddhi comes from √budh, to wake, to become aware, to perceive and understand; the word buddha, the awakened, is its past participle. The noun is formed with the suffix -ti, and by a regular rule of sound the aspirate of the root passes forward, budh and ti becoming buddhi. So much the grammar tells us, and it is enough; the rest must come from the Gita’s use of the word.

That use is large. In the second chapter the Teacher sets before Arjuna the buddhi of the Sankhya and the buddhi of the Yoga (2·39), and then distinguishes two kinds of intelligence: the one resolute and single, vyavasāyātmikā, a word built on vi-ava-√so, to settle and determine; the other many-branching and endless, the intelligence of the irresolute (2·41).

Buddhi, the word used, means, properly speaking, the mental power of understanding but it is evidently used by the Gita in a large philosophic sense for the whole action of the discriminating and deciding mind which determines both the direction and use of our thoughts and the direction and use of our acts … Will, then, and knowledge are the two functions of the Buddhi.

This is why Sri Aurobindo names the teaching of the second chapter not the Yoga of the intellect but the Yoga of the intelligent will. The buddhi is the faculty by which the soul chooses as well as sees, and its disorder is less a scattering of ideas than a scattering of aims. Unified, it becomes the first instrument of liberation: buddhau śaraṇam anviccha, seek refuge in the intelligence (2·49). It is worth marking that word śaraṇa, refuge, for we shall meet it again at the end.

The history of the word in the Gita is the history of the intelligence turned Godward. It begins as the discriminating reason that sees through the dualities; it becomes the settled understanding of the sage whose clear tranquillity brings peace (2·65–66); and in the later chapters it is no longer something the seeker achieves but something the Lord gives. To those ever united with Him, who adore Him with delight, prīti-pūrvakam, He gives the buddhiyoga by which they come to Him (10·10); and in the last counsel Arjuna is asked to lodge his understanding in the Divine and to resort to this Yoga of the will and intelligence as the way of an unbroken oneness (12·8, 18·57). The awakened faculty, awakened wholly, finds that its light was always borrowed from a greater Light, and gives itself back.

karma · kartṛ · ahaṃkāra

The Doer, the Deed and the I-Maker

No root is more at home in the Gita than √kṛ, to do, to make. From it comes karman, nominative karma, the root strengthened to kar- and joined to the suffix -man: the doing, the deed, the work. From it comes kartṛ, the doer; kriyā, the act; and, with the prefix pra, forth, prakṛti, the making-forth, Nature. The Gita knows this family well enough to let it sound five times in a single line. All works are being done, kriyamāṇāni, by the modes of prakṛti; yet he whose self is bewildered by ahaṃkāra, the I-maker, thinks, I am the doer, kartāham (3·27).

प्रकृतेः क्रियमाणानि गुणैः कर्माणि सर्वशः ।अहंकारविमूढात्मा कर्ताहमिति मन्यते ॥

prakṛteḥ kriyamāṇāni guṇaiḥ karmāṇi sarvaśaḥahaṃkāravimūḍhātmā kartāhamiti manyate

Here the grammar itself is a small drama, and it is a drama the text truly stages rather than one we impose upon it: Nature makes, the works are made, and a thing called the maker of the I claims the making for itself. The word ahaṃkāra is exactly what it appears to be, aham, I, with kāra, making, from the same root. The whole problem of works is in that line.

The Gita does not solve the problem by stopping work. None can remain even for a moment without action (3·5); the way of works is thick and tangled, gahanā karmaṇo gatiḥ, and one must understand action, wrong action, vikarma, and inaction, akarma, the last formed with the negative prefix (4·17). The wise man sees inaction in action and action in inaction (4·18), and the same verse, with a last turn of the root, calls him kṛtsna-karma-kṛt, the doer of the entire work.

The deepest sense of the word appears in the eighth chapter, where Karma is defined not as human deed but as the creative movement of the universe (8·3).

Karma, it says, is the name given to the creative impulse and energy … which looses out things from this first essential self-becoming, this Swabhava, and effects, creates, works out under its influence the cosmic becoming of existences in Prakriti.

So the word which in popular speech has come to mean an account of debts and payments is, in the Gita’s own definition, the outpouring of the Spirit’s becoming. Human work is bondage only while it is appropriated by the I-maker; returned to its source, it is a share in that outpouring, and the doer of the entire work is the one who knows he is not its owner.

yajña · arpaṇa · tyāga

The Fire and the Handing-Over

Yajña is formed from √yaj, to worship, to offer to the gods, with the suffix -na; the meeting of j and n is written as the conjunct jña. The eye sometimes finds in this conjunct the letters of jñāna, knowledge, and a pious fancy has been built on the likeness; but the likeness is of script, not of root, for jñāna comes from √jñā, to know. Nor is yajña related to yoga: √yaj and √yuj are different roots. The Gita will bring sacrifice, knowledge and Yoga together, but it does so by its teaching, not by any secret of the alphabet.

Around the root gathers the old vocabulary of the fire-rite: √hu, to pour into the fire, which gives hutam, the oblation, and juhoṣi, thou pourest; and arpaṇa, the handing-over, from the causative of √ṛ, to cause to go. The Gita takes these ritual words and fills them with a universal sense. In the third chapter it speaks of the wheel of sacrifice, by which creatures and gods foster one another (3·9, 3·14–15); in the fourth it lifts the whole rite into a single vision in which giving, offering, fire, giver and goal are all the Brahman (4·24).

The universal energy into which the action is poured is the Divine; the consecrated energy of the giving is the Divine; whatever is offered is only some form of the Divine; the giver of the offering is the Divine himself in man; the action, the work, the sacrifice is itself the Divine in movement, in activity; the goal to be reached by sacrifice is the Divine.

At the heart of the ninth chapter the ritual words are given to the whole of life: whatever thou doest, eatest, pourest in sacrifice, givest, make it mad-arpaṇam, an offering handed over to Me (9·27). The Lord of the Gita is bhoktāraṃ yajñatapasām, the enjoyer of all sacrifice and askesis, and also suhṛdaṃ sarvabhūtānām, the friend of all creatures (5·29); the sacrifice is received by a Friend.

Two other words belong here, for they name the two ways of giving up. Saṃnyāsa is from sam-ni-√as, where √as is the root that means to throw, not its homonym that means to be: a throwing down, a laying aside. Tyāga is from √tyaj, to leave, to let go. The sages, says the eighteenth chapter, call the laying aside of desireful works saṃnyāsa, and the giving up of the fruit of all works tyāga (18·2); and the Gita, which honours the first, chooses the second. The true renunciation is not the throwing down of works but the letting go of their fruit into the fire of the offering.

dharma · svabhāva · svadharma

The Law that Holds

Dharma is from √dhṛ, to hold, to bear, to support, the root strengthened to dhar- with the suffix -ma: that which holds, that which upholds. The sense is not a speculation, for the Gita uses the same root in its verbal form when it speaks of the higher Nature, the jīva-nature by which this world is upheld, yayedaṃ dhāryate jagat (7·5). The Dharma is what holds things in their true course, and the book opens on a field named for it, dharmakṣetre (1·1).

Dharma is a word which has an ethical and practical, a natural and philosophical and a religious and spiritual significance, and it may be used in any of these senses exclusive of the others, in a purely ethical, a purely philosophical or a purely religious sense.

Sri Aurobindo’s warning is that the Gita uses it in all these senses together, and that every narrowing of it narrows the teaching. It is the social rule which Arjuna has lost and asks to be given back (2·7); it is the law of right which the Avatar comes to restore (4·7); it is the law of one’s own being which the third chapter places above every borrowed ideal (3·35); and at the end it is all these laws together, which the soul is bidden to abandon for a refuge greater than law (18·66).

The bridge between the universal Dharma and the individual is the word svabhāva. It is sva, own, with bhāva, from √bhū, to become, to come into being, the root lengthened as in all such nouns: own-becoming, the self-nature. The distinction between √bhū and √as, the root that gives asmi, I am, and sat, the existent, is worth keeping: √as is pure being, √bhū is being that comes forth. The Gita names the svabhāva as adhyātma, the spiritual law of the soul (8·3), and it calls the action governed by it svabhāva-niyataṃ karma (18·47). The Essays draw the conclusion in a single sentence: Dharma, says the Gita elsewhere, is action governed by the swabhava, the essential law of one’s nature.

So svadharma, own-law, is not a caste and not a caprice. It is the upholding law that rises from the soul’s own becoming, the way in which the divine idea in each being unfolds itself in works. The word that began as the holding of the world ends as the holding of the soul by its own truth, and then, at the last, as the soul’s consent to be held by the Lord alone.

prakṛti · guṇa · puruṣa

Strands, Nature and the Witness

Three words name the stuff of the world and the witness of it. Prakṛti, as we have seen, is pra-√kṛ with the suffix -ti, the making-forth, the original doing from which all things are done. Guṇa has no verbal root that the grammarians can give with confidence; its oldest sense is a single strand or thread of a cord, and from that it comes to mean a secondary element, a quality. The Gita, without any play on etymology, keeps the image alive: the three gunas, sattva, rajas and tamas, born of Nature, bind, nibadhnanti, the imperishable dweller in the body (14·5). Strands that twist into a cord and a cord that binds belong to the same picture, and the picture is the text’s own.

Puruṣa, the person, the conscious being, is more mysterious. Its origin is not known with certainty. The Upanishads play upon it and call the Purusha puriśaya, he who lies in the city, the city of the body; that is a sacred reading, a nirvacana, not a derivation, and it should be honoured as the one and not mistaken for the other.

Purusha is the Soul, not in the ordinary or popular sense of the word, but of pure conscious Being immobile, immutable and self-luminous. Prakriti is Energy and its process.

That is the Sankhya pair, and the Gita begins from it: all works are done by Nature’s modes, the soul is their witness. But it does not end there. It speaks of two Natures, the lower eightfold Prakriti of elements, mind, reason and ego, and a higher Nature which has become the jīva (7·4–5). It declares both Purusha and Prakriti beginningless (13·20), assigns to Nature the chain of cause and effect and the state of being the doer, and to the Purusha the enjoying of pleasure and pain (13·21). And then it names the Purusha in the body with a cascade of titles that lift him far above the passive witness of the Sankhya: upadraṣṭā anumantā ca bhartā bhoktā maheśvaraḥ, the witness, the giver of consent, the upholder, the enjoyer, the great Lord (13·23).

Each of those titles is a movement of consciousness, and together they show why the soul need not flee from Nature to be free. It may withdraw its consent, and be the witness; it may give its consent, and be the upholder; it may enjoy, and be the lord. The strands bind only the soul that has forgotten which of these it is.

ātman · brahman · īśvara · puruṣottama

The Names of the Highest

The highest names in the Gita are the least certain in their history, and it is well to say so. Ātman serves in the language as the ordinary reflexive pronoun, oneself, as in the verse where it turns back upon itself, uddhared ātmanātmānam, by the self deliver the self (6·5); some connect it with an old word for breath, as in the German Atem, but the derivation is not settled. Brahman, the neuter noun, has been derived by Indian tradition from √bṛh, to grow great, to expand, and the derivation is beautiful and may be true, but modern philology neither confirms it nor rules it out. Two words are clear. Īśvara is from √īś, to own, to be master, with the suffix -vara: the Lord, the one who possesses. And puruṣottama is simply puruṣa with uttama, the superlative of ud, up: the uppermost, the highest Person.

The Gita’s own vocabulary here is exact. There are two Purushas in the world, kṣara and akṣara, the mutable and the immutable (15·16); kṣara is from √kṣar, to flow, to melt away, and akṣara is that which does not flow away. But other than these is the highest spirit, who enters the three worlds and upholds them (15·17); since I am beyond the mutable and higher even than the immutable, in the world and in the Veda I am proclaimed Puruṣottama (15·18).

यस्मात्क्षरमतीतोऽहम् अक्षरादपि चोत्तमः ।अतोऽस्मि लोके वेदेच प्रथितः पुरुषोत्तमः ॥

yasmātkṣaramatīto’ham akṣarādapi cottamaḥato’smi loke vedeca prathitaḥ puruṣottamaḥ

The Purushottama is in the heart of every creature and is manifested in his countless Vibhutis; the Purushottama is the cosmic spirit in Time and it is he that gives the command to the divine action of the liberated human spirit.

The Īśvara is this same Being seen in the heart: the Lord is seated in the heart of all creatures (18·61). And sat, the present participle of √as, is given its double sense in the Gita’s own words: Sat means good and it means existence (17·26). The names have climbed from the self that must lift itself, through the Self that is one in all, to the Person who is at once the silent immutable and the active Lord, the Time-Spirit and the Friend. Where the grammar grows uncertain, the Gita grows most sure.

śraddhā · bhakti · jñāna

Faith, Love and Knowledge

Jñāna, knowledge, is from √jñā, to know, with the suffix -ana; the root is kin to the Greek gnō- and the English know. The Gita distinguishes jñāna from vijñāna, the essential knowledge and the comprehensive knowledge that sees the One in all its manifold becoming (7·2), and it declares that nothing in the world is equal in purity to knowledge (4·38). But it adds at once the condition by which knowledge is won: śraddhāvān labhate jñānam, the man of faith attains knowledge (4·39).

Śraddhā is one of the oldest words in the language. It is formed of śrad- and √dhā, to set, to place, and it is the same compound, the philologists agree, that lies behind the Latin credo; what śrad meant by itself is less certain, and to translate it confidently as heart is to say more than we know. The meaning that the Gita gives it is certain enough, and it is astonishing.

And then there comes a remarkable line in which the Gita tells us that this Purusha, this soul in man, is, as it were, made of śraddhā … a faith, a will to be, a belief in itself and existence, and whatever is that will, faith or constituting belief in him, he is that and that is he.

Bhakti is from √bhaj, to divide and share, to have a share in, and so to resort to, to serve, to honour and to love; the noun is formed with -ti, the j becoming k before it, as in bhakta, the lover. The sense of sharing is in the root; that devotion is therefore a participation in the Divine is a reading, not a derivation, but it is a reading the Gita seems to invite, for it says of those who worship with bhakti that they are in Me and I also in them (9·29). And the verb returns upon the Lord himself: as men approach Me, so I accept them to My love, bhajāmi (4·11). The love is mutual before it is understood.

These three words make a single movement in the Gita. Faith is the soul’s will to be, turned towards the Highest; love is its self-giving; and knowledge is not left behind by love but perfected in it: by bhakti he comes to know Me, who and how much I am, and knowing Me he enters into That (18·55). Sri Aurobindo will not let the three be ranked as rival roads. A passive identity, he writes, excludes the joy of adoration, but bhakti is the very soul and heart and summit of this richer, completer, more intimate union.

prasāda · śaraṇa · mokṣa

Grace and Refuge

The last words of the Gita’s vocabulary are words of grace, and the first of them is prasāda. It is from pra-√sad, to sit down, to settle, the root lengthened in the noun; its oldest sense is the settling of troubled water until it is clear, and so clearness, brightness, serenity, and so again graciousness and favour. The participle prasanna means both clear and pleased. In the second chapter the word is psychological: by ranging among the objects with senses freed from liking and disliking, the sage attains prasāda, and in that clearness all sorrows are destroyed (2·64–65). Sri Aurobindo calls it a large and sweet clearness of soul, and writes that that clear tranquillity is the source of the soul’s felicity.

In the last chapter the same word is the Lord’s: mat-prasādāt, by My grace, the soul attains the eternal status and passes safe through all difficult passages (18·56, 18·58); by His grace, tat-prasādāt, thou shalt come to the supreme peace (18·62). And Arjuna’s last speech begins with it: tvat-prasādāt, through Thy grace my delusion is destroyed (18·73). The language of the Gita uses one word for the clearness that dawns in the disciple and for the grace that descends from the Master. Grammar cannot tell us that they are one thing; it can only tell us that the Gita did not trouble to give them two names.

Śaraṇa is an old word for a shelter, a house of protection, a refuge; its root is not certain. We met it first as refuge in the buddhi (2·49); the ninth chapter gives it to the Lord among the names of His relation to the soul, the goal, the upholder, the master, the witness, the abode, the refuge, the friend, śaraṇaṃ suhṛt (9·18); and in the last counsel it is the whole of the way: tam eva śaraṇaṃ gaccha sarvabhāvena, take refuge in Him with every way of thy being (18·62), and then, mām ekaṃ śaraṇaṃ vraja, go to Me alone for refuge (18·66). The imperative vraja is from √vraj, to go, to proceed: the refuge is not a place one waits in but a going.

तमेव शरणं गच्छ सर्वभावेन भारत ।तत्प्रसादात्परां शान्तिं स्थानं प्राप्स्यसि शाश्वतम् ॥

tameva śaraṇaṃ gaccha sarvabhāvena bhāratatatprasādātparāṃ śāntiṃ sthānaṃ prāpsyasi śāśvatam

And the promise that answers it is mokṣayiṣyāmi, I will deliver thee, a future of the causative stem mokṣ-, itself formed from √muc, to loosen, to release. The knot that the I-maker tied in the third chapter is untied, at the end, not by the soul’s own hand but by the hand in which it has taken refuge.

The Words around Yoga

If we return now to the word from which we began, we find that it has gathered all the others into itself. Yoga was a yoking; it has become the union of the whole being with the Purushottama. Into it the buddhi has brought its resolute light, karma its outpouring, yajña its fire, dharma its holding and the svabhava its own becoming; Prakriti has yielded her strands, the Purusha has found its titles of witness, upholder and lord; faith has turned into knowledge and knowledge into love; and the clear serenity of the sage has been discovered to be the grace of the Friend. The roots remain what they were, sober facts of a language, and we should not ask them to prove more than they prove. But the Gita has done with its words what the Yoga does with the soul: it has taken what was given by nature and made it the vessel of the Divine.

At the end Arjuna speaks one more word from this vocabulary, smṛti, from √smṛ, to remember: smṛtir labdhā, I have regained memory (18·73). The living words are not learned; they are remembered, as the soul remembers what it has always been, and they come back to it, like the whole teaching, through grace.

The verses of this essay

Chapter 2

1. 48
2. 50
3. 41
4. 49

Chapter 3

1. 27

Chapter 4

1. 17
2. 24

Chapter 9

1. 27

Chapter 3

1. 35

Chapter 7

1. 5

Chapter 8

1. 3

Chapter 14

1. 5

Chapter 13

1. 23

Chapter 15

1. 18

Chapter 17

1. 3

Chapter 4

1. 11

Chapter 18

1. 55
2. 62
3. 66
4. 73

• Sankhya and Yoga
• The Yoga of the Intelligent Will
• Equality
• The Significance of Sacrifice
• The Divine Birth and Divine Works
• The Two Natures
• The Supreme Divine
• The Three Purushas
• The Gunas, Faith and Works
• The Supreme Word of Gita
• Swabhava and Swadharma