उदासीनवदासीनो गुणैर्यो न विचाल्यते ।गुणा वर्तन्त इत्येव योऽवतिष्ठति नेङ्गते ॥
udāsīnavadāsīno guṇairyo na vicālyateguṇā vartanta ityeva yo’vatiṣṭhati neṅgate
He who, established in a position as of one seated high above, is unshaken by the gunas; who seeing that it is the gunas that are in process of action stands apart immovable;
Compiled rendering · Anilbaran Roy
AI translation
Essays on the Gita
It is the spiritual nature of the equality enjoined, high and universal in its character and comprehension, which gives its distinctive note to the teaching of the Gita in this matter. For otherwise the mere teaching of equality in itself as the most desirable status of the mind, feelings and temperament in which we rise superior to human weakness, is by no means peculiar to the Gita. Equality has always been held up to admiration as the philosophic ideal and the characteristic temperament of the sages. The Gita takes up indeed this philosophic ideal, but carries it far beyond into a higher region where we find ourselves breathing a larger and purer air. The Stoic poise, the philosophic poise of the soul are only its first and second steps of ascension out of the whirl of the passions and the tossings of desire to a serenity and bliss, not of the Gods, but of the Divine himself in his supreme self-mastery. The Stoic equality, making character its pivot, founds itself upon self-mastery by austere endurance; the happier and serener philosophic equality prefers self-mastery by knowledge, by detachment, by a high intellectual indifference seated above the disturbances to which our nature is prone, udāsīnavad āsīnaḥ9·9, as the Gita expresses it; there is also the religious or Christian equality which is a perpetual kneeling or a prostrate resignation and submission to the will of God. These are the three steps and means towards divine peace, heroic endurance, sage indifference, pious resignation, titikṣā, udāsīnatā, namas or nati. The Gita takes them all in its large synthetic manner and weaves them into its upward soul-movement, but it gives to each a profounder root, a larger outlook, a more universal and transcendent significance. For to each it gives the values of the spirit, its power of spiritual being beyond the strain of character, beyond the difficult poise of the understanding, beyond the stress of the emotions.
But what, asks Arjuna, are the signs of such a man, what his action and how is he said even in action to be above the three gunas? The sign, says Krishna, is that equality of which I have so constantly spoken; the sign is that inwardly he regards happiness and suffering alike, gold and mud and stone as of equal value and that to him the pleasant and the unpleasant, praise and blame, honour and insult, the faction of his friends and the faction of his enemies are equal things. He is steadfast in a wise imperturbable and immutable inner calm and quietude. He initiates no action, but leaves all works to be done by the gunas of Nature. Sattwa, rajas or tamas may rise or cease in his outer mentality and his physical movements with their results of enlightenment, of impulsion to works or of inaction and the clouding over of the mental and nervous being, but he does not rejoice when this comes or that ceases, nor on the other hand does he abhor or shrink from the operation or the cessation of these things. He has seated himself in the conscious light of another principle than the nature of the gunas and that greater consciousness remains steadfast in him, above these powers and unshaken by their motions like the sun above clouds to one who has risen into a higher atmosphere. He from that height sees that it is the gunas that are in process of action and that their storm and calm are not himself but only a movement of Prakriti; his self is immovable above and his spirit does not participate in that shifting mutability of things unstable. This is the impersonality of the Brahmic status; for that higher principle, that greater wide high-seated consciousness, kūṭastha, is the immutable Brahman.14·21, 14·21–26, 14·22, 14·23
The Synthesis of Yoga
And so too we shall have the same equality of mind and soul towards all happenings, painful or pleasurable, defeat and success, honour and disgrace, good repute and ill-repute, good fortune and evil fortune. For in all happenings we shall see the will of the Master of all works and results and a step in the evolving expression of the Divine. He manifests himself, to those who have the inner eye that sees, in forces and their play and results as well as in things and in creatures. All things move towards a divine event; each experience, suffering and want no less than joy and satisfaction, is a necessary link in the carrying out of a universal movement which it is our business to understand and second. To revolt, to condemn, to cry out is the impulse of our unchastened and ignorant instincts. Revolt like everything else has its uses in the play and is even necessary, helpful, decreed for the divine development in its own time and stage; but the movement of an ignorant rebellion belongs to the stage of the soul’s childhood or to its raw adolescence. The ripened soul does not condemn but seeks to understand and master, does not cry out but accepts or toils to improve and perfect, does not revolt inwardly but labours to obey and fulfil and transfigure. Therefore we shall receive all things with an equal soul from the hands of the Master. Failure we shall admit as a passage as calmly as success until the hour of the divine victory arrives. Our souls and minds and bodies will remain unshaken by acutest sorrow and suffering and pain if in the divine dispensation they come to us, unoverpowered by intensest joy and pleasure. Thus supremely balanced we shall continue steadily on our way meeting all things with an equal calm until we are ready for a more exalted status and can enter into the supreme and universal Ananda.
This is the greater consciousness into which our inferior consciousness has to be transformed, this nature of the Ignorance with its unquiet unbalanced activity of the three modes changed into this greater luminous supernature. At first we become free from the three gunas, detached, untroubled, nistraiguṇya; but this is the recovery of the native state of the soul, the self, the spirit free and watching in its motionless calm the motion of Prakriti in her force of the Ignorance. If on this basis the nature, the motion of Prakriti, is also to become free, it must be by a quiescence of action in a luminous peace and silence in which all necessary movements are done without any conscious reaction or participation or initiation of action by the mind or by the life-being, without any ripple of thought or eddy of the vital parts: it must be done under the impulsion, by the initiation, by the working of an impersonal cosmic or a transcendent Force. A cosmic Mind, Life, Substance must act, or a pure transcendent Self-Power and Bliss other than our own personal being or its building of Nature. This is a state of freedom which can come in the Yoga of works through renunciation of ego and desire and personal initiation and the surrender of the being to the cosmic Self or to the universal Shakti; it can come in the Yoga of knowledge by the cessation of thought, the silence of the mind, the opening of the whole being to the cosmic Consciousness, to the cosmic Self, the cosmic Dynamis or to the supreme Reality; it can come in the Yoga of devotion by the surrender of the heart and the whole nature into the hands of the All-Blissful as the adored Master of our existence. But the culminating change intervenes by a more positive and dynamic transcendence: there is a transference or transmutation into a superior spiritual status, triguṇātīta, in which we participate in a greater spiritual dynamisation; for the three lower unequal modes pass into an equal triune mode of eternal calm, light and force, the repose, kinesis, illumination of the divine Nature.
When there is an insufficient purity in the mental being, the release appears at first to be partial and temporary; the Jiva seems to descend again into the egoistic life and the higher consciousness to be withdrawn from him. In reality, what happens is that a cloud or veil intervenes between the lower nature and the higher consciousness and the Prakriti resumes for a time its old habit of working under the pressure but not always with a knowledge or present memory of that high experience. What works in it then is a ghost of the old ego supporting a mechanical repetition of the old habits upon the remnants of confusion and impurity still left in the system. The cloud intervenes and disappears, the rhythm of ascent and descent renews itself until the impurity has been worked out. This period of alternations may easily be long in the integral Yoga; for there an entire perfection of the system is required; it must be capable at all times and in all conditions and all circumstances, whether of action or inaction, of admitting and then living in the consciousness of the supreme Truth. Nor is it enough for the sadhaka to have the utter realisation only in the trance of Samadhi or in a motionless quietude, but he must in trance or in waking, in passive reflection or energy of action be able to remain in the constant Samadhi of the firmly founded Brahmic consciousness. But if or when our conscious being has become sufficiently pure and clear, then there is a firm station in the higher consciousness. The impersonalised Jiva, one with the universal or possessed by the Transcendent, lives high-seated above and looks down undisturbed at whatever remnants of the old working of Nature may revisit the system. He cannot be moved by the workings of the three modes of Prakriti in his lower being, nor can he be shaken from his station by the attacks even of grief and suffering. And finally, there being no veil between, the higher peace overpowers the lower disturbance and mobility. There is a settled silence in which the soul can take sovereign possession of itself above and below and altogether.
When this liberation of the nature comes, there is a liberation also of all the spiritual sense of the dualities of Nature. In the lower nature the dualities are the inevitable effect of the play of the gunas on the soul affected by the formations of the sattwic, rajasic and tamasic ego. The knot of this duality is an ignorance which is unable to seize on the spiritual truth of things and concentrates on the imperfect appearances, but meets them not with a mastery of their inner truth, but with a strife and a shifting balance of attraction and repulsion, capacity and incapacity, liking and disliking, pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, acceptance and repugnance; all life is represented to us as a tangle of these things, of the pleasant and the unpleasant, the beautiful and the unbeautiful, truth and falsehood, fortune and misfortune, success and failure, good and evil, the inextricable double web of Nature. Attachment to its likings and repugnances keeps the soul bound in this web of good and evil, joys and sorrows. The seeker of liberation gets rid of attachment, throws away from his soul the dualities, but as the dualities appear to be the whole act, stuff and frame of life, this release would seem to be most easily compassed by a withdrawal from life, whether a physical withdrawal, so far as that is possible while in the body, or an inner retirement, a refusal of sanction, a liberating distaste, vairāgya, for the whole action of Nature. There is a separation of the soul from Nature. Then the soul watches seated above and unmoved, udāsīna, the strife of the gunas in the natural being and regards as an impassive witness the pleasure and pain of the mind and body. Or it is able to impose its indifference even on the outer mind and watches with the impartial calm or the impartial joy of the detached spectator the universal action in which it has no longer an active inner participation. The end of this movement is the rejection of birth and a departure into the silent self, mokṣa.
Other writings
“God stands in the heart of all beings, whirling round all, as on a wheel, by the Maya of the three guṇas.” You will then be able to perceive the action of the three guṇas in you and watch the machinery at its work, no longer saying, tathā karomi, I do, but guṇā vartanta eva, it is merely the guṇas that work. One great difficulty in these stages, especially before you can distinguish the action of the guṇas, is the perception of the impurity of the svabhāva, the haunting idea of sin and virtue. You must always remember that, since you have put yourself in God’s hands, he will work out the impurities and you have only to be careful, as you cannot be attached either to pāpa or puṇya, sin or virtue. For he has repeatedly given the abhaya vacana, the assurance of safety. “Pratijānīhi,” he says in the Gita, “na me bhaktaḥ praṇaśyati, he who is devoted to Me cannot perish.”
Writings in Bengali
udāsīnavadāsīno guṇairyo na vicālyate
guṇā vartanta ityeva yo’vatiṣṭhati neṅgate (14.23)
নান্যং গুণেভ্যঃ কর্ত্তারং যদা দ্রষ্টানুপশ্যতি।
গুণেভ্যশ্চ পরং বেত্তি মদ্ভাবং সোঽধিগচ্ছতি॥
গুণানেতানতীত্য ত্রীন্ দেহী দেহসমুদ্ভবান্।
জন্মমৃত্যুজরাদুঃখৈর্বিমুক্তোঽমৃতমশ্নুতে॥
প্রকাশঞ্চ প্রবৃত্তিঞ্চ মোহমেব চ পাণ্ডব।
ন দ্বেষ্টি সংপ্রবৃত্তানি ন নিবৃত্তানি কাঙ্ক্ষতি॥
উদাসীনবদাসীনো গুণৈর্যো ন বিচাল্যতে।
গুণা বর্ত্তন্ত ইত্যেব যোঽবতিষ্ঠতি নেঙ্গতে॥
সমদুঃখসুখঃ স্বস্থঃ সমলোষ্টাশ্মকাঞ্চনঃ।
তুল্যপ্রিয়াপ্রিয়ো ধীরস্তুল্যনিন্দাত্মসংস্তুতিঃ॥
মানাপমানয়োস্তুল্যস্তুল্যো মিত্রারিপক্ষয়োঃ।
সর্ব্বারম্ভপরিত্যাগী গুণাতীতঃ স উচ্যতে॥
মাঞ্চ যোঽব্যভিচারেণ ভক্তিযোগেন সেবতে।
স গুণান্ সমতীত্যৈতান্ ব্রহ্মভূয়ায় কল্পতে॥
“যখন জীব সাক্ষী হইয়া গুণত্রয় অর্থাৎ ভগবানের ত্রৈগুণ্যময়ী শক্তিকেই একমাত্র কর্ত্তা বলিয়া দেখে এবং এই গুণত্রয়েরও উপর শক্তির প্রেরক ঈশ্বরকে জানিতে পারে, তখন সে-ই ভগবৎ-সাধর্ম্ম্য লাভ করে। তখন দেহস্থ জীব স্থূল ও সূক্ষ্ম এই দুই প্রকার দেহসম্ভূত গুণত্রয়কে অতিক্রম করিয়া জন্ম মৃত্যু জরাদুঃখ হইতে বিমুক্ত হইয়া অমরত্ব ভোগ করে। সত্ত্বজনিত জ্ঞান, রজোজনিত প্রবৃত্তি বা তমোজনিত নিদ্রা নিশ্চেষ্টা ভ্রমস্বরূপ মোহ আসিলে বিরক্ত হয় না, এই গুণত্রয়ের আগমন নির্গমনে সমান ভাব রাখিয়া উদাসীনের ন্যায় স্থির হইয়া থাকে, গুণগ্রাম তাহাকে বিচলিত করিতে পারে না, এই সবই গুণের স্বধর্ম্মজাত বৃত্তি বলিয়া দৃঢ় থাকে। যাহার পক্ষে সুখদুঃখ সমান, প্রিয়াপ্রিয় সমান, নিন্দাস্তুতি সমান, কাঞ্চন লোষ্ট্র উভয়ই প্রস্তরের তুল্য, যে ধীরস্থির, নিজের মধ্যে অটল, যাহার নিকট মান-অপমান একই, মিত্রপক্ষ ও শত্রুপক্ষ সমান প্রিয়, যে স্বয়ং প্রেরিত হইয়া কোন কার্য্যারম্ভ করে না, সকল কর্ম্ম ভগবানকে সমর্পণ করিয়া তাঁহারই প্রেরণায় কর্ম্ম করে, তাহাকেই গুণাতীত বলে। যে আমাকে নির্দ্দোষ ভক্তিযোগে সেবা করে, সে-ই এই তিন গুণকে অতিক্রম করিয়া ব্রহ্মপ্রাপ্তির উপযুক্ত হয়।”
