दण्डो दमयतामस्मि नीतिरस्मि जिगीषताम् ।मौनं चैवास्मि गुह्यानां ज्ञानं ज्ञानवतामहम् ॥
daṇḍo damayatāmasmi nītirasmi jigīṣatāmmaunaṁ caivāsmi guhyānāṁ jñānaṁ jñānavatāmaham
I am the mastery and power of all who rule and tame and vanquish and the policy of all who succeed and conquer; I am the silence of things secret and the knowledge of the knower.
Compiled rendering · Anilbaran Roy
Essays on the Gita
In living beings, the Godhead tells Arjuna, I am consciousness by which they are aware of themselves and their surroundings. I am mind among the senses, mind by which they receive the impressions of objects and react upon them. I am man’s qualities of mind and character and body and action; I am glory and speech and memory and intelligence and steadfastness and forgiveness, the energy of the energetic and the strength of the mighty. I am resolution and perseverance and victory, I am the10·21–40 sattwic quality of the good, I am the gambling of the cunning; I am the mastery and power of all who rule and tame and vanquish and the policy of all who succeed and conquer; I am the silence of things secret, the knowledge of the knower, the logic of those who debate. I am the letter A among letters, the dual among compounds, the sacred syllable OM among words, the Gayatri among metres, the Sama-veda among the Vedas and the great Sama among the mantras. I am Time the head of all reckoning to those who reckon and measure. I am spiritual knowledge among the many philosophies, arts and sciences. I am all the powers of the human being and all the energies of the universe and its creatures.
But this greater knowledge and experience, however true and however powerful in its appeal to our highest seeing, has still to get rid of a very real and pressing difficulty, a practical as well as a logical contradiction which seems at first sight to persist up to the highest heights of spiritual experience. The Eternal is other than this mobile subjective and objective experience, there is a greater consciousness, na idaṁ yad upāsate:* and yet at the same time all this is the Eternal, all this is the perennial self-seeing of the Self, sarvaṁ khalu idaṁ brahma, ayam ātmā brahma*.* The eternal has become all existences, ātmā abhūt sarvāṇi bhūtāni;* as the Swetaswatara puts it, “Thou art this boy and yonder girl and that old man walking supported on his staff,”—even as in the Gita the Divine says that he is Krishna and Arjuna and10·21–38 Vyasa and Ushanas, and the lion and the Ashwattha tree, and consciousness and intelligence and all qualities and the self of all creatures. But how are these two the same, when they seem not only so opposite in nature, but so difficult to unify in experience? For when we live in the mobility of the becoming, we may be aware of but hardly live in the immortality of timeless being, Time and Space and circumstance fall away from us and begin to appear as a troubled dream in the Infinite. The most persuasive conclusion would be, at first sight, that the mobility of the spirit in Nature is an illusion, a thing real only when we live in it, but not real in essence, and that is why, when we go back into self, it falls away from our incorruptible essence. That is the familiar cutting of the knot of the riddle, brahma satyaṁ jagan mithyā.
