तमुवाच हृषीकेशः प्रहसन्निव भारत ।
“To him thus depressed and discouraged, Hrishikesha, smiling as it were, O Bharata, spoke these words between the two armies.”
The Chariot Between the Armies
There are books which we read, and there are books which read us; the Gita is of the second kind. It opens not in a temple nor in a forest hermitage but on a field of battle, between two armies drawn up for a war of annihilation, and it places there, in the very centre of the tumult, a chariot, a bewildered man and a Charioteer who smiles. That is its whole method in a single image. It does not take us out of life to show us God; it brings God into the chariot of our life and lets Him take the reins.
Sri Aurobindo read the Gita as a living synthesis and not as a doctrine to be disputed, a gospel of divine works in which knowledge and love and action become one movement of the soul turned towards the Divine. The eighteen chapters are therefore not a sequence of separate topics but eighteen stations of a single ascent, each answering the necessity which the last has disclosed, from the dejection of Arjuna, which the tradition itself calls a Yoga, to the supreme secret in which every law is exceeded and every grief undone. This edition is built to be walked as that ascent.
Its Sanskrit is carefully established, its translation Sri Aurobindo’s own, its commentary his Essays on the Gita given entire; around them stand sixteen companion essays and eighteen gateways written after him, which gather his light upon each movement of the dialogue. Every verse may be heard, for the recitations are joined to it; every verse may be opened into its sounds, its prose order and its words; and every verse may be carried into silence. The design follows that threefold movement which the Indian tradition names for all true study of a scripture.
Śravaṇa — hearing
Receive the verse as sound and meaning: the Sanskrit, the recitation, the translation. Let it enter before it is examined.
Manana — reflection
Open the verse: the joined sounds parted, the sentence laid out in prose order, each word shown in its case and its root, the whole drawn as a wheel of relations round the verb.
Nididhyāsana — dwelling
Hold the verse in the light of Sri Aurobindo and the companion essays until it becomes a state of your own; keep what you find in your journal.
The Ascent of the Soul
Each chapter is a threshold: the soul enters in one state and leaves in another. Follow the river from the field of the Dharma to the refuge beyond all dharmas. The ring about each station fills as you open its verses.
