Essays on the Gita
Destruction, replies the Godhead, is the will of my workings11·32 with which I stand here on this field of Kurukshetra, the field of the working out of the Dharma, the field of human action,—as we might symbolically translate the descriptive phrase,1·1 dharma-kṣetre kuru-kṣetre,—a world-wide destruction which has come in the process of the Time-Spirit. I have a foreseeing purpose which11·33 fulfils itself infallibly and no participation or abstention of any human being can prevent, alter or modify it; all is done by me already in my eternal eye of will before it can at all be done by man upon earth. I as Time have to destroy the old structures and to build up a new, mighty and splendid kingdom. Thou as a human instrument of the divine Power and Wisdom hast in this struggle which thou canst not prevent to battle for the right and slay and conquer its opponents. Thou too, the human soul in Nature, hast to enjoy in Nature the fruit given by me, the empire of right and justice. Let this be sufficient for thee,—to be one with God in thy soul, to receive his command, to do his will, to see calmly a supreme purpose fulfilled in the world.11·32–34 “I am Time the waster of the peoples arisen and increased whose will in my workings is here to destroy the nations. Even without thee all these warriors shall be not, who are ranked in the opposing armies. Therefore arise, get thee glory, conquer thy enemies and enjoy an opulent kingdom. By me and none other already even are they slain, do thou become the occasion only, O Savyasachin. Slay, by me who are slain, Drona, Bhishma, Jayadratha, Karna and other heroic fighters; be not pained and troubled. Fight, thou shalt conquer the adversary in the battle.” The fruit of the great and terrible work is promised and prophesied, not as a fruit hungered for by the individual,—for to that there is to be no attachment,—but as the result of the divine will, the glory and success of the thing to be done accomplished, the glory given by the Divine to himself in his Vibhuti. Thus is the final and compelling command to action given to the protagonist of the world-battle.
The highest way appointed for him is to carry out the will11·33 of God without egoism, as the human occasion and instrument of that which he sees to be decreed, with the constant supporting8·7 memory of the Godhead in himself and man, mām anusmaran, and in whatever ways are appointed for him by the Lord of his11·33 Nature. Nimittamātraṁ bhava savyasācin. He will not cherish personal enmity, anger, hatred, egoistic desire and passion, will not hasten towards strife or lust after violence and destruction3·20 like the fierce Asura, but he will do his work, lokasaṅgrahāya. Beyond the action he will look towards that to which it leads, that for which he is warring. For God the Time-Spirit does not destroy for the sake of destruction, but to make the ways clear in the cyclic process for a greater rule and a progressing manifestation,11·33 rājyaṁ samṛddham. He will accept in its deeper sense, which the superficial mind does not see, the greatness of the struggle, the glory of the victory,—if need be, the glory of the victory which comes masked as defeat,—and lead man too in the enjoyment of his opulent kingdom. Not appalled by the face of the Destroyer, he will see within it the eternal Spirit imperishable in all these perishing bodies and behind it the face of the Charioteer, the Leader of man, the Friend of all creatures, suhṛdaṁ sarvabhūtānām. This formidable World-Form once seen5·29 and acknowledged, it is to that reassuring truth that the rest of the chapter is directed; it discloses in the end a more intimate face and body of the Eternal.
But it would seem that this can be attained very well, best even, pre-eminently, directly, by the quiescence of Sannyasa. Its appointed path would seem to be the way of the Akshara, a complete renunciation of works and life, an ascetic seclusion, an ascetic inaction. Where is the room here, or at least where is the call, the necessity, for the command to action, and what has all this to do with the maintenance of the cosmic existence,3·20 lokasaṅgraha, the slaughter of Kurukshetra, the ways of the Spirit in Time, the vision of the million-bodied Lord and his high-voiced bidding,11·33 “Arise, slay the foe, enjoy a wealthy kingdom”? And what then is this soul in Nature? This spirit too, this Kshara, this enjoyer of our mutable existence, is the Purushottama; it is he in15·7 his eternal multiplicity, that is the Gita’s answer. “It is an eternal portion of me that becomes the Jiva in a world of Jivas.” This is an epithet, a statement of immense bearing and consequence. For it means that each soul, each being in its spiritual reality is the very Divine, however partial its actual manifestation of him in Nature. And it means too, if words have any sense, that each manifesting spirit, each of the many, is an eternal individual, an eternal unborn and undying power of the one Existence. We call this manifesting spirit the Jiva, because it appears here as if a living creature in a world of living creatures, and we speak of this spirit in man as the human soul and think of it in the terms of humanity only. But in truth it is something greater than its present appearance and not bound to its humanity: it was a lesser manifestation than the human in its past, it can become something much greater than mental man in its future. And when this soul rises above all ignorant limitation, then it puts on its divine nature of which its humanity is only a temporary veil, a thing of partial and incomplete significance. The individual spirit exists and ever existed beyond in the Eternal, for it is itself everlasting, sanātana. It is evidently this idea of the eternal individual which leads the Gita to avoid any expression at all suggestive of a complete dissolution, laya, and to speak rather of the highest state of the soul as a dwelling in the Purushottama, nivasiṣyasi mayyeva. If when12·8 speaking of the one Self of all it seems to use the language of Adwaita, yet this enduring truth of the eternal individual, mamāṁśaḥ sanātanaḥ, adds something which brings in a15·7 qualification and appears almost to accept the seeing of the Visishtadwaita,—though we must not therefore leap at once to the conclusion that that alone is the Gita’s philosophy or that its doctrine is identical with the later doctrine of Ramanuja. Still this much is clear that there is an eternal, a real and not only an illusive principle of multiplicity in the spiritual being of the one divine Existence.
The Synthesis of Yoga
Thus are made possible the final steps when the veil of Nature is withdrawn and the seeker is face to face with the Master of all existence and his activities are merged in the action of a supreme Energy which is pure, true, perfect and blissful for ever. Thus can he utterly renounce to the supramental Shakti his works as well as the fruits of his works and act only as the conscious instrument of the eternal Worker. No longer giving the sanction, he will rather receive in his instruments and follow in her hands a divine mandate. No longer doing works, he will accept their execution through him by her unsleeping Force. No longer willing the fulfilment of his own mental constructions and the satisfaction of his own emotional desires, he will obey and participate in an omnipotent Will that is also an omniscient Knowledge and a mysterious, magical and unfathomable Love and a vast bottomless sea of the eternal Bliss of Existence.
We see in the teaching of the Gita how subtle a thing is the freedom from egoism which is demanded. Arjuna is driven to fight by the egoism of strength, the egoism of the Kshatriya; he is turned from the battle by the contrary egoism of weakness, the shrinking, the spirit of disgust, the false pity that overcomes the mind, the nervous being and the senses,—not that divine compassion which strengthens the arm and clarifies the knowledge. But this weakness comes garbed as renunciation, as virtue: “Better the life of the beggar than to taste these blood-stained enjoyments; I desire not the rule of all the earth, no, nor the kingdom of the gods.” How foolish of the Teacher, we might say, not to confirm this mood, to lose this sublime chance of adding one more great soul to the army of Sannyasins, one more shining example before the world of a holy renunciation. But the Guide sees otherwise, the Guide who is not to be deceived by words; “This is weakness and delusion and egoism that speak in thee. Behold the Self, open thy eyes to the knowledge, purify thy soul of egoism.” And afterwards? “Fight, conquer, enjoy a wealthy kingdom.” Or to take another example from ancient Indian tradition. It was egoism, it would seem, that drove Rama, the Avatara, to raise an army and destroy a nation in order to recover his wife from the King of Lanka. But would it have been a lesser egoism to drape himself in indifference and misusing the formal terms of the knowledge to say, “I have no wife, no enemy, no desire; these are illusions of the senses; let me cultivate the Brahman-knowledge and let Ravana do what he will with the daughter of Janaka”?
The Master of things cannot be affected or troubled by the reactions of things; if he were, he would be subject to them, not master, not free to develop them according to his sovereign will and wisdom and according to the inner truth and necessity of what is behind their relations, but obliged rather to act according to the claim of temporary accident and phenomenon. The truth of all things is in the calm of their depths, not in the shifting inconstant wave form on the surface. The supreme conscious Being in his divine knowledge and will and love governs their evolution—to our ignorance so often a cruel confusion and distraction—from these depths and is not troubled by the clamour of the surface. The divine nature does not share in our gropings and our passions; when we speak of the divine wrath or favour or of God suffering in man, we are using a human language which mistranslates the inner significance of the movement we characterise. We see something of the real truth of them when we rise out of the phenomenal mind into the heights of the spiritual being. For then we perceive that whether in the silence of self or in its action in the cosmos, the Divine is always Sachchidananda, an infinite existence, an infinite consciousness and self-founded power of conscious being, an infinite bliss in all his existence. We ourselves begin to dwell in an equal light, strength, joy—the psychological rendering of the divine knowledge, will and delight in self and things which are the active universal outpourings from those infinite sources. In the strength of that light, power and joy a secret self and spirit within us accepts and transforms always into food of its perfect experience the dual letters of the mind’s transcript of life, and if there were not the hidden greater existence even now within us, we could not bear the pressure of the universal force or subsist in this great and dangerous world. A perfect equality of our spirit and nature is a means by which we can move back from the troubled and ignorant outer consciousness into this inner kingdom of heaven and possess the spirit’s eternal kingdoms, rājyaṁ samṛddham, of greatness, joy and peace. That self-elevation to the divine nature is the complete fruit and the whole occasion of the discipline of equality demanded from us by the self-perfecting aim in Yoga.
Other writings
The old arrangement of a mass of slaves well fed and provided and a select class or classes enjoying in greater or less quantity the higher wants of humanity broke down in the mediaeval ages, because the heart began to develop too powerfully in humanity and under the influence of philosophy, ethics and religion began to spread its claim beyond the person, the class, the family, the clan to the nation and to humanity or to all creation. A temporary makeshift was invented to replace slavery, called free labour, by which men were paid and bribed to accept voluntarily the position of slaves, contenting themselves with the coarse satisfaction of the animal necessities and in return providing by their labour the higher wants of their masters now called superiors or higher classes. This also has become a solution which will no longer serve. The whole of humanity now demands not merely the satisfaction of the body, the anna, but the satisfaction also of the prāṇa and the citta, the vital and emotional desires. Wealth, luxury, enjoyment for oneself and those dear to us, participation in the satisfaction of national wealth, pride, lordship, rivalry, war, alliance, peace, once the privilege of the few, the higher classes, of prince, burgess and noble are now claimed by all humanity. Political, social and economic liberty and equality, two things difficult to harmonise, must now be conceded to all men and harmonised as well as the present development of humanity will allow. It is this claim that arose, red with fury and blinded with blood, in the French Revolution. This is Democracy, this Socialism, this Anarchism; and, however fiercely the privileged and propertied classes may rage, curse and denounce these forerunners of Demogorgon, they can only temporarily resist. Their interests may be hoary and venerable with the sanction of the ages, but the future is mightier than the past and evolution proceeds relentlessly in its course trampling to pieces all that it no longer needs. Those who fight against her fight against the will of God, against a decree written from of old, and are already defeated and slain in the kāraṇa jagat, the world of types and causes where Nature fixes everything before she works it out in the visible world. Nihatāḥ pūrvameva.
What is yoga? Not a certain process. When we think of yoga, we think of a man who shuts himself up in a cave and subjects himself to certain practices. He frees himself from all bondage. But Srikrishna uses yoga in a different sense. He says: Do action in yoga. The first element is samata. Samata means you shall look with equal eyes upon happiness and misfortune, praise and blame, honour and dishonour, and success and failure. You shall regard none of these, but with a calm and unshaken mind you should proceed with the work which you are given to do, unshaken by the praise or censure of the world. The man who has this samata has no friends and no enemies. He looks upon all with equal feelings, because he has knowledge, because he has looked into himself, then out into the world. He finds himself everywhere and all in himself. He finds himself in all because God is in all. Whether he looks at the high or low, he sees no difference and sees that in every creature there is Narayana. He sees that he is only an ansha of one who is in every particle of matter. If there be any differences, they are only temporary and outward. He is only that through which Vasudeva carries on his lila. He is not anxious to know what will happen tomorrow, because the action is not guided by laws. The man who has communion with God has no reason to be guided by laws, because he knows God is alone and all. He is not troubled by the fruits of his action. “You have the right to action, to work, but not to the fruit. Work and leave the result to me. Those men whom you shrink from slaying are already slain. These men would all perish. Therefore the fruit is already obtained beforehand by me. Your anxiety for the result is ignorance.” The destiny of the world is fixed. When a man has to do anything he must know that the fruits are with God. Man is to do what God wills.
कालोऽस्मि लोकक्षयकृत् प्रवृद्धो लोकान् समाहर्तुमिह प्रवृत्तः । ऋतेऽपि त्वां न भविष्यन्ति सर्वे येऽवस्थिताः प्रत्यनीकेषु योधाः ।। तस्मात्त्वमुत्तिष्ठ यशो लभस्व जित्वा शत्रून् भुङ्क्ष्व राज्यं समृद्धम् । मयैवैते निहताः पूर्वमेव निमित्तमात्रं भव सव्यसाचिन् ।।
“I am Time who waste and destroy the peoples; lo, I have arisen in my might, I am here to swallow up the nations. Even without thee all they shall not be, the men of war who stand arrayed in the opposing squadrons. Therefore do thou arise and get thee great glory, conquer thy foes and enjoy a great and wealthy empire. For these, they were slain even before and it is I who have slain them; be the occasion only, O Savyasachin.”
Practically, therefore, the renunciation demanded of us is the renunciation by the lower unreal & incomplete self, mind, senses, vitality, intellect, will, egoism of all that they are & seek to our real, complete & transcendental Self, the Lord. And that renunciation we make not by substituting another demand, the demand to be rid of all these things & released from the fulfilment of His cosmic purpose, but in order the better to fulfil His purpose & enjoy Him utterly in His movement, in all experience & all action that He in us & through us is manifesting & perfecting. For that which we have to enjoy is not only Ish but jagat,—for as we shall see both are one Brahman & by enjoying Him entirely we must come to enjoy all His movement, since He is here as the Lord of his own movement. For this reason the word Ish has been selected as the fundamental relation of God to ourselves & the world—the master of all our existence to whom we renounce, the Lord who for his purposes has made & governs the world—for in this relation of “Lord” he is inseparable from His movement. It is a relation that depends on the existence & play of the world of which He is the ruler & master. Envisaging the ruler, we envisage that which he rules, the habitation for the sake of the inhabitant indeed, but still the habitation. We get therefore in this first verse of the Upanishad the foundations of the great principle of activity with renunciation with which the teaching of the Gita begins & the still greater principle of atmasamarpana or entire surrender to God, the uttamam rahasyam with which it culminates. We get the reason & spirit of the command to Arjuna from which all the moral teaching of the Gita starts & to which it returns, jitva shatrun bhunkshva rajyam samriddham, the command of activity, the command of enjoyment—but activity for God only, yajnartham, without ahankara, enjoyment in God only, mayi sannyasya, without desire or attachment, neither demanding what He does not take for Himself in us, nor rejecting what He is here to enjoy, whether the enjoyment be of victory or defeat, of the patched loin cloth of the beggar or the imperial crown.
Desire, the cause of our pain, has itself its cause or rather its secret essence in the ego-sense transferred from the discriminating mind to the responsive heart. Vedantic psychology sums up the motion of the Jagati in our mentality,—the complex thing we call mind,—in a quadruple knot;—the nodus of sense-forming mind reactive to outward impacts, the nodus of discriminating mind receptive and critical of these reactions, the nodus of responsive & formative heart or temperamental mind setting in motion waves of emotional or temperamental consciousness which first forms the stuff of the others & shapes itself out as their reaction and their criticism, the nodus of ego-sense which centralises & relates to one mental self-idea all these functionings;—buddhi, manas, chitta, ahankara. Formed in the discriminating mind, egoism enslaves its creator & descends to dominate the heart. “I am I” cries the discriminating mind, enslaved by egoism, “he is he; mine is mine & not his; his is his & so long as I cannot have or take, I can never regard it as mine.” Thus discriminative ego shuts up man in his one bodily habitation and prevents him from enjoying his proper estate, the rich universe, rájyam samriddham, full of beautiful and noble possessions. Egoistic reason turns man into a sort of monomaniac emperor self-confined & limited who fancies himself a prisoner in his single palace, although, really, & if he chose, the wide earth is freely his and all that it contains. The heart accepts from the discriminating mind this false limitation & delusion, undergoes sense of want, sense of confinement, sense of difference & is tortured by their evil emotional results. While desire is our counsellor, pain and suffering must always be our heritage.
