The Kurukshetra example is not to be taken as an exact parallel but rather as a traditional instance of the war between two world-forces in which the side favoured by the Divine triumphed, because the leaders made themselves His instruments.* It is not to be envisaged as a battle between virtue and wickedness, the good and the evil men. After all, were even the Pandavas virtuous without defect, quite unselfish and without passions? …
In taking over the administration from Britain we had inevitably to follow the line of least resistance and proceed on the basis of the artificial British-made provinces, at least for the time; this provisional arrangement now threatens to become permanent, at least in the main and some see an advantage in this permanence. For they think it will help the unification of the country and save us from the necessity of preserving regional sub-nations which in the past kept a country from an entire and thoroughgoing unification and uniformity. In a rigorous unification they see the only true union, a single nation with a standardised and uniform administration, language, literature, culture, art, education,—all carried on through the agency of one national tongue. How far such a conception can be carried out in the future one cannot forecast, but at present it is obviously impracticable, and it is doubtful if it is for India truly desirable. The ancient diversities of the country carried in them great advantages as well as drawbacks. By these differences the country was made the home of many living and pulsating centres of life, art, culture, a richly and brilliantly coloured diversity in unity; all was not drawn up into a few provincial capitals or an imperial metropolis, other towns and regions remaining subordinated and indistinctive or even culturally asleep; the whole nation lived with a full life in its many parts and this increased enormously the creative energy of the whole. There is no possibility any longer that this diversity will endanger or diminish the unity of India. Those vast spaces which kept her people from closeness and a full interplay have been abolished in their separating effect by the march of Science and the swiftness of the means of communication. The idea of federation and a complete machinery for its perfect working have been discovered and will be at full work. Above all, the spirit of patriotic unity has been too firmly established in the people to be easily effaced or diminished, and it would be more endangered by refusing to allow the natural play of life of the sub-nations than by satisfying their legitimate aspirations. The Congress itself in the days before liberation came had pledged itself to the formation of linguistic provinces, and to follow it out, if not immediately, yet as early as may conveniently be, might well be considered the wisest course. India’s national life will then be founded on her natural strengths and the principle of unity in diversity which has always been normal to her and its fulfilment the fundamental course of her being and its very nature, the Many in the One, would place her on the sure foundation of her Swabhava and Swadharma.
In this hour, in the second year of its liberation the nation has to awaken to many more very considerable problems, to vast possibilities opening before her but also to dangers and difficulties that may, if not wisely dealt with, become formidable. There is a disordered world-situation left by the war, full of risks and sufferings and shortages and threatening another catastrophe which can only be solved by the united effort of the peoples and can only be truly met by an effort at world-union such as was conceived at San Francisco but has not till now been very successful in the practice; still the effort has to be continued and new devices found which will make easier the difficult transition from the perilous divisions of the past and present to a harmonious world-order; for otherwise there can be no escape from continuous calamity and collapse. There are deeper issues for India herself, since by following certain tempting directions she may conceivably become a nation like many others evolving an opulent industry and commerce, a powerful organisation of social and political life, an immense military strength, practising power-politics with a high degree of success, guarding and extending zealously her gains and her interests, dominating even a large part of the world, but in this apparently magnificent progression forfeiting its Swadharma, losing its soul. Then ancient India and her spirit might disappear altogether and we would have only one more nation like the others and that would be a real gain neither to the world nor to us. There is a question whether she may prosper more harmlessly in the outward life yet lose altogether her richly massed and firmly held spiritual experience and knowledge. It would be a tragic irony of fate if India were to throw away her spiritual heritage at the very moment when in the rest of the world there is more and more a turning towards her for spiritual help and a saving Light. This must not and will surely not happen; but it cannot be said that the danger is not there. There are indeed other numerous and difficult problems that face this country or will very soon face it. No doubt we will win through, but we must not disguise from ourselves the fact that after these long years of subjection and its cramping and impairing effects a great inner as well as outer liberation and change, a vast inner and outer progress is needed if we are to fulfil India’s true destiny.
Samata of the Gita.
Gita “The equal Brahman.”
Gita.
The law of sacrifice, the giving of oneself or of what one envisages as belonging to oneself in a spirit of love and devotion to that which is other than oneself, is the common divine action thrown out into the world from the beginning in order to limit, correct and gradually eliminate the errors of its egoistic starting-point. “With sacrifice as their companion” says the Gita “the All-Father created these peoples.” Sacrifice is the practical recognition by the ego that it is neither alone in the world nor chief in the world and that in that which is not its egoistic self there is something greater, completer which demands from it subordination and service. Sacrifice is compelled by Nature even from those who do not consciously recognise the law; and inevitably, because it is the ineffuggable nature of things, because the ego is not and cannot be alone nor separate nor live to itself even if it would. It is continually giving out of its stock physical, vital, mental to all that is around it and receiving back in return. And by this giving and receiving it effects its own growth at the same time that it helps the sum of things.
This profound idea of sacrifice is the basis of the teaching in the Gita. We can see at once that it differs from the ordinary idea in as much as its essence is not self-immolation and its tendency is to discourage self-mortification, self-torture, self-mutilation and self-effacement. These things may be temporarily necessary when the egoism is violent and obstinate and has to be met by a sort of answering internal violence and repression. But the Gita discourages this path; the self within is really the God himself, it is Krishna, it is the Divine and it has not to be troubled and tortured as the Titans of the world trouble and torture themselves, but to be fostered and cherished. What has to be discouraged, expelled, slain is the band of its enemies, desire, wrath, inequality, the attachment to outward pleasures and pains, which are the cause of its errors and sufferings. The nature of sacrifice is self-giving, not self-immolation; its object is not self-effacement but self-fulfilment by the merging of the incomplete ego and its discovery of its own real completeness in others, in all things, in God. In consequence, sacrifice is not a giving without any return, but a mutual fostering; for even though no return is demanded or insisted upon, yet there is the knowledge that a return is inevitable. The soul knows that it does not give itself to God in vain.
What is demanded of us in fact by the Gita is to turn our whole life into a conscious sacrifice or continual devoted self-giving to the Divine. All our actions, the smallest and most ordinary as well as the greatest and most uncommon, we are to perform with the consciousness of consecration and of a giving to That which is beyond our ego. When we give, no matter what the gift or to whom offered, we must have the consciousness that we are giving to God, to the one and divine Being in all. When we eat, we must be equally conscious that we are offering to That and the sense of mere physical self-gratification must pass from us. When we undertake any great labour, high discipline or difficult or noble enterprise for ourselves, for others or for humanity, we must go beyond the idea of ourselves, of others or of humanity and we must realise the thing that we are doing as a sacrifice of works offered to the One and Divine in all, to the Infinite and Most High by whom alone all labour and aspiration are possible, in whose being all labour and aspiration take place and for whom all labour and aspiration are taken from us by Nature and offered on His altar. And even in those things in which Nature herself is obviously the worker and we ourselves only witness and support her works, there should be the same constant memory and consciousness; our very inspiration and respiration, our very heart-beats we must regard as also such a sacrifice.
Finally, the practice of this Yoga of sacrifice implies the elimination of egoism out of all our actions, since all is done for the Divine and towards the Divine and nothing for our separate self as a separate self, nothing for others whether neighbours, friends, family, country, mankind or other creatures merely because they are connected with our personal life and thought and therefore the ego takes an interest in them. We cannot fail to arrive finally at the constant conception and realisation in practice of all works and all life as a divine offering to the Divine in His own being—or as it is expressed in the Gita, the sacrifice of Brahman to Brahman by Brahman in Brahman. Therefore this path is a path of Works complete and integral. The three kindred Yogas are naturally combined by it into a single movement.
Thus in the knowledge of the Divine the Gita takes successively different attitudes. The first essential is to realise the Divine in its pure self and truth and therefore in its primary relations with the universe, for without this realisation there can be no true knowledge. That truth and relation may be expressed in the formula of the uncreated self and created existences, Being and its becomings. But as a formula this is only an intellectual and metaphysical notion; the object of Yoga is not thought but experience. We have therefore to come to the actual experience, the actual perception, feeling and communion with a real Infinite Presence in which all things exist and move and act and which inhabits all things as their real infinite self. To see, not merely to conceive the Self in all existences and all existences in the Self is the Gita’s first rule of divine knowledge.
But the realisation of the Self is not all. If we regard the Divine as an abstraction or only a vague ineffable Presence, if we divest it of all element of personality and all possibility of personal relation with us, we may develop knowledge, and satisfy the mind, but we shall leave the heart either atrophied or poorly and imperfectly satisfied; we shall miss all those immense potentialities for our perfection which devotion and divine love open to us. And our knowledge will remain imperfect. We shall have the clear knowledge of the self to which the mind aspires, we shall not have the rich knowledge of God to which the heart is the key. The true knowledge beyond both mind and heart comprises in itself both of these perfected and unified. By neglecting either heart or mind we fail to arrive at that perfection. Therefore the Gita enjoins not only the realisation of the Self, but the realisation of the Lord, the personality of God as well as His impersonality.
The essence of the divine Personality is for us the experience of a Presence not merely vague, abstract, without contents, but a living Presence exceeding indeed all possible definite experiences, because it is infinite, but not excluding them,—rather containing in itself all possible relations and experiences and especially, as we are human beings, all human relations. God does not exclude Man, but contains Man in Himself. Therefore we do not wander from the Truth of things when we conceive God humanly and enter into human relations with the Divine, but only when we confine ourself to the anthropomorphic conception and exclude all the rest of the Infinite. Indian Yoga therefore admits the experience of all human relations with God, especially those of friend with friend, of servant and master, of the child to the father or the mother or of the parent to the child, and as a supreme experience, the intense relation of the lover. For through all these things we attain to something of the divine Mystery which escapes the search of the reasoning intellect. The Gita even prefers these divine relations to the pursuit of the indefinable, unseizable and merely ineffable. And at any rate for our perfection they are absolutely essential.
Adoration is fulfilled in love and delight. A surpassing love and delight in the Transcendent awaits us at the goal of the path of Devotion; but also a universal love for all beings, perceiving and embracing behind every veil the Divine, the All-blissful and All-beautiful, and consequently a universal delight in all His endless manifestation. The discord of forms and appearances ceases to affect the heart that has felt the one Truth behind them all. Thus, the impartial equality of soul of the selfless worker and knower is transformed by the magic touch of divine Love into an all-embracing ecstasy; for all things become bodies and playings of the divine Beloved.
Selfless action without desire is founded, we have seen, on equality of soul towards all results and all experiences; for without that equality personal preference and desire must persist. But when we see the Divine in all things, the field of this equality extends itself to all objects and all beings. The Gita insists not only on equality of soul towards joy and sorrow, pain and pleasure, success and failure, fortunate happening and unfortunate happening, but towards man and animal, high and low, saint and sinner, friend and enemy. This does not mean that our eyes will be blind or our reason irresponsive to the differences of the manifestation, but that behind all differences the soul will know the One and the Divine and that what the soul sees the heart and the nature shall follow. That oneness and not the apparent difference shall determine the core of our sense, our feeling, our knowing and our working. Otherwise we are still slaves of the phenomenon and cannot enter into the freedom of the divine and the universal.
The solution of love and philanthropy offers itself,—to ignore human distinctions, to do the works of love only and not the works of strife, to seek the good of the world impartially as between man and man, creature and creature, regardless of any minor relation. This is, at their highest, Christianity, Buddhism, humanitarianism, and it is a high, a beautiful, a shining ideal; but it does not seem to be the solution of the Gita, for the whole of that profound scripture is written around the injunction upon Arjuna to engage in a battle, to fight foremost in a terrible, a devastating, an internecine struggle. It is obvious indeed that the humanitarian solution, the solution of the apparent works of Love, while it may be sufficient for personal salvation and ethical or spiritual satisfaction, does not subserve adequately the sole general object which the Gita proposes for the liberated worker, the upholding of the world in its great struggle and labour forward in the actual conditions of that labour and struggle. The works we do in obedience to Love and philanthropy help on one side and palliate suffering; we do not find that they can actually remove the causes of that suffering. Indeed all action, the Gita declares, has if we look at its outer aspects, a surrounding cloud of defect like the smoke that rises from a burning fire. The renunciation of the human battle, of the works of the warrior in the largest sense of that word, to do only ambulance service does not escape from this general perplexity; for if by entering into the strife we do hurt to that which has to be destroyed, by refusing it we may be refusing the cry of the world for succour at the very core of its labour where it most needs its strongest souls in that which is most necessary for its preservation. Complex is the world that God has made for us, difficult is the problem that He has set us and the pursuit of a single divine principle cannot be its solution.
It would seem, therefore, that the law of works done as a sacrifice, while it supplies an incentive for action in the place of desire, does not provide a clue to the personal choice of action. The reason is that no personal choice is intended. All forms of personal choice, even the highest, belong to the realm of that which we are striving to leave; they proceed from the idea of the independent ego as a starting-point. But the solution towards which we are working rises to a higher plane of being. The Gita, therefore, points us to a step beyond. When we have banished personal desire from our actions, when we have trained ourselves to do all works as a sacrifice, we have next to renounce not only the fruit of our works, but the works themselves into the hands of the Master of all works. In other words, we have to call into ourselves the divine Light, the divine Will, the divine Power which will choose the work in the place of the ego and will carry it out while our mind, heart and body become the passive and obedient instruments of that omnipotent Power and eternal Illumination.
Gita.
Secondly, we must remember always that the Divine works through our nature and according to our nature, and if that nature is imperfect, the Work also will be imperfect, marred by error, falsehood, moral weaknesses without yet ceasing to be the work of the Divine in us. This perception will keep us safe, if constantly enforced, both from the rajasic egoism which is prone to pride, desire and eagerness and the tamasic egoism which desponds, is crushed by the sense of sin and error or refuses the work and the effort from an excessive humility. It is here that the perception of the working of Nature through the three gunas becomes of the utmost use to us, for we cease to attribute either the virtue and the power or the sin and the weakness to ourselves, but we say in the language of the Gita “It is the modes of Nature that work in the field of her modes.” Calm, untroubled, unelated we aid by a sanction more and more passive but more and more persistent, complete and irresistible the pressure of the Divine upon us whose aim is to remove our imperfections and purify all the workings of the living instrument.
Gita
By our analysis of the path of Karmayoga we have been able to map out in its broad lines and essential stages the movement by which the soul, liberated from desire and egoism, can become free in the Divine. The realisation of the Divine, the Lord, the supreme Self through works, the union with the Divine by works and in works, the power to live in the presence of That and in its being and no longer in the ego is the goal to which by this path we ascend. And it is evident that by this path we can arrive also at the supreme knowledge which is the fruit of the Yoga of knowledge and the supreme love and ecstasy which is the fruit of the Yoga of devotion. Nevertheless, the particular form of the knowledge at which we shall first arrive by the path of works is that of the Self as the supreme, transcendent and universal Purusha holding and conditioning the works of Nature in the individual life and soul; and the particular form of devotion proper to this path is that offered to the Lord as the Master of the world and its works, the devotion of self-surrender, self-dedication, sacrifice of all our being and activities to the Divine. The whole knowledge and the whole ecstasy, not limited by any form, can be added and must come to us, if we seek them, once we stand in the presence and live in the being of the Lord and supreme Soul. But they come more directly, with a more spontaneous and integral fullness by the special self-discipline and the peculiar methods which belong to the other two branches of the triune path. To these paths, successively, we must now direct our attention.
We have chosen the Karmayoga as our starting-point because for the great majority of men at the present day this is the direction in which the awakening soul most naturally turns. Action and life are nearer to human aspiration today and occupy a larger part in the mentality of the race than either abstract thought or absorbing religious faith. Nevertheless, knowledge and devotion are the real dominant strain in the nature of many even of those who are led by their ideals or the atmosphere in which they live to place the highest value on work done for God or humanity; and for these knowledge or devotion and not works is the true starting-point. Our nature much more than our education or acquired ideals is the real sign-post; by following the path it indicates we arrive more swiftly and surely at the goal. As, then, we have studied in its principles, chief movements and broad results the Yoga of works, so now we should study the Yoga of knowledge,—not in its well-known forms and conventional terms, but always in the active principles that underly them, and not towards the dissolution of our world-existence which is the sole aim recognised by the Jnanayoga long current in India, but as part of the integral Yoga which recognises the Lord no less than the pure quiescent Self, God in the world no less than the world-transcending Ineffable and accepts therefore the divine Play on the basis of the divine Repose, the divine Action that is supported by the divine Quiescence, the Word that is the self-expression of the Silence.
Gita.
Gita.
Vibhuti
Essays on the Gita
Essays on the Gita
Essays on the Gita
KURUKSHETRA.
Praviliyante karmani. Gita.
Essays on the Gita
Essays on the Gita
Essays on the Gita
Essays on the Gita
Essays on the Gita
Essays on the Gita
Buddhiyoga is fulfilled in karmayoga; the Yoga of the self-liberating intelligent will finds its full meaning in the Yoga of desireless works. Thus the Gita founds its teaching of the necessity of desireless works, nishkâma karma, and unites the subjective practice of the Sankhyas—rejecting their merely physical rule—with the practice of Yoga.
Essays on the Gita
