अश्रद्धया हुतं दत्तं तपस्तप्तं कृतं च यत् ।असदित्युच्यते पार्थ न च तत्प्रेत्य नो इह ॥
aśraddhayā hutaṁ dattaṁ tapastaptaṁ kṛtaṁ ca yatasadityucyate pārtha na ca tatpretya no iha
Whatever is wrought without faith, oblation, giving, askesis or other work, Asat it is called, O Partha; it is nought here, or hereafter.
Compiled rendering · Anilbaran Roy
Essays on the Gita
The Gita closes this chapter with what seems at first sight a recondite utterance. The formula OM, Tat, Sat, is, it says, the triple definition of the Brahman, by whom the Brahmanas, the Vedas and sacrifices were created of old and in it resides all their significance. Tat, That, indicates the Absolute. Sat indicates the supreme and universal existence in its principle. OM is the symbol of the triple Brahman, the outward-looking, the inward or subtle and the superconscient causal Purusha. Each letter A, U, M indicates one of these three in ascending order and the syllable as a whole brings out the fourth state, Turiya, which rises to the Absolute. OM is the initiating syllable pronounced at the outset as a benedictory prelude and sanction to all act of sacrifice, all act of giving and all act of askesis; it is a reminder that our work should be made an expression of the triple Divine in our inner being and turned towards him in the idea and motive. The seekers of liberation indeed do these actions without desire of fruit and only with the idea, feeling, Ananda of the absolute Divine behind their nature. It is that which they seek by this purity and impersonality in their works, this high desirelessness, this vast emptiness of ego and plenitude of Spirit. Sat means good and it means existence. Both these things, the principle of good and the principle of reality, must be there behind all the three kinds of action. All good works are Sat, for they prepare the soul for the higher reality of our being; all firm abiding in sacrifice, giving and askesis and all works done with that central view, as sacrifice, as giving, as askesis, are Sat, for they build the basis for the highest truth of our spirit. And because śraddhā is the central principle of our existence, any of these things done without śraddhā is a falsity and has no true meaning or true substance on earth or beyond, no reality, no power to endure or create in life here or after the mortal life in greater regions of our conscious spirit. The soul’s faith, not a mere intellectual belief, but its concordant will to know, to see, to believe and to do and be according to its vision and knowledge, is that which determines by its power the measure of our possibilities of becoming, and it is this faith and will turned in all our inner and outer self, nature and action towards all that is highest, most divine, most real and eternal that will enable us to reach the supreme perfection.17·23–28
Other writings
What is Truth? said Pilate confronted with a mighty messenger of the truth, not jesting surely, not in a spirit of shallow lightness, but turning away from the Christ with the impatience of the disillusioned soul for those who still use high words that have lost their meaning and believe in great ideals which the test…Read the whole passage · 856 wordsClose the passage
What is Truth? said Pilate confronted with a mighty messenger of the truth, not jesting surely, not in a spirit of shallow lightness, but turning away from the Christ with the impatience of the disillusioned soul for those who still use high words that have lost their meaning and believe in great ideals which the test of the event has proved to be fallacious. What is truth,—this phantom so long pursued, so impossible to grasp firmly,—that a man young, beautiful, gifted, eloquent and admired should consent to be crucified for its sake? Have not circumstance and event justified the half-pitying, half-sorrowful question of the Roman governor? The Messenger suffered on the cross, and what happened to the truth that was his message? As Christ himself foresaw, it has never been understood even by its professors. For five hundred years it was a glorious mirage for which thousands of men and women willingly underwent imprisonment, torture and death in order that Christ’s kingdom might come on earth & felicity possess the nations. But the kingdom that came was not Christ’s; it was Constantine’s, it was Hildebrand’s, it was Alexander Borgia’s. For another thirteen centuries the message was—what? Has it not been the chief support of fanaticism, falsehood, cruelty and hypocrisy, the purveyor of selfish power, the keystone of a society that was everything Christ had denounced? Jesus died on the cross, for the benefit, it would seem, of those who united to slay him, the Sadducee, atheist & high priest, the Pharisee, zealot, hypocrite & persecutor and the brutal, self-seeking, callous military Roman. Now in its last state, after such a lamentable career, Christ’s truth stands finally rejected by the world’s recent enlightenment as a hallucination or a superstition which sometimes helpfully, sometimes harmfully amused the infancy of the human intellect. This history is written in too pronounced characters to be the exact type of all messages that the world has received, but is it not in some sort a type of the fate of all truth? What idea has stood successfully the test of a prolonged & pitiless inquiry? what ideal has stood successfully the test of time? Has not mankind been busy for the last fifty years and more denying almost all that it had formerly affirmed? And now that under the name of rationalism or materialism the denial has shaped itself into some form of workably practical affirmation, mankind is again at its work of denying its denial and rearranging—but this time doubtingly—its old affirmations. The scepticism of Pilate would therefore seem to have some excuse in a recurrent human experience. Is there, indeed, such a thing as truth,—beyond of course that practical truth of persistent material appearances by which we govern our lives, the truth of death, birth, hunger, sexuality, pain, pleasure, commerce, money making, ease, discomfort, ambition, failure and success? Has not indeed the loftiest of our philosophical systems declared all things here to be Maya? And if Maya is illusion, a deceit of the thinking consciousness, then indeed there can be no truth anywhere in the world except that indefinable Existence which we cannot comprehend and which, after all, Buddhism, not without logic and plausibility, setting it down as another & more generalised sanskara, a false sensation of consciousness in the eternal Void, denies. And yet man is so constituted that he must follow after truth whether it is attained or not; something in him secret, masterful, essential to his existence, forbids him to be satisfied with a falsehood; the moment it is perceived or even believed to be a falsehood, he rejects it and the thing begins to crumble. If he persists in his rejection, it cannot last. Yesterday it was, today we see it tottering, tomorrow we shall look for it and find that it is no longer. It has passed back into Prakriti; it has dissolved into that of which it was made. For sraddha is the condition of all existence in consciousness and that to which sraddha is denied, ceases to have existence whether here or elsewhere, na caivamutra no iha. It is not, neither in this world nor in another. We may not unreasonably infer from this importance and this imperative necessity that Truth does really exist and everything is not illusion. If then Truth is always escaping our hold and leaving us to disillusionment and derision, it may be because we have neither formed any clear conception of what Truth itself is nor taken hold of the right means by which it can be grasped. Let us leave aside, for a while, Buddha’s world of sanskaras; let us put aside, packed away in an accessible corner of the brain, Shankara’s gospel of Maya, and start instead from the old Vedantic beginnings OM Tat Sat, That (Brahman) is the thing that Is, and Sarvam khalvidam Brahma, Verily, all this, everything of which we are aware, is Brahman. It is at least possible that we may return from this inquiry with a deeper idea both of sanskaras and of Maya and may find that we have answered Pilate’s question by discovering the nature and conditions of Truth.
Writings in Bengali
প্রথম অন্তরায়, লোকের অনাস্থা ও উৎসাহের অভাব। বৈধ উপায় অবলম্বন করিতে পারিলে আমরা উন্নতির দিকে অগ্রসর হইতে পারিব, প্রৌঢ়লোকের মধ্যে এই বিশ্বাস আছে, — মধ্যপন্থীর অনুমোদিত উপায়ের উপর হইতে সকলের আস্থা উঠিয়া গিয়াছে; কিন্তু তাহা হইলেও কি হয়, গবর্ণমেণ্ট সেই বৈধ উপায় অবলম্বন করিতে দিবেন না। তাহাদের হাতে যখন আইন করিবার সম্পূর্ণ অধিকার, জজ ম্যাজিষ্ট্রেট পুলিস তাঁহাদেরই চাকর, দেশবাসীর প্রভু, তখন কোনও বৈধ আন্দোলন করা অসম্ভব। আমরা দেখিয়াছি, এই মতের এত প্রাবল্য হইতেছে যে বৈধ আন্দোলন ও বৈধ প্রতিরোধ আর চলে না। লোকের আস্থা নাই, শ্রদ্ধা নাই, — শ্রদ্ধারহিত কর্ম্ম বৃথা, তাহার ফল ‘ন চৈবামুত্র নো ইহ’। বৈধ আন্দোলনের পক্ষে স্বাধীন চিন্তা ও স্বাধীন মতের প্রকাশ ও প্রতিষ্ঠা আবশ্যক, নচেৎ আন্দোলন হইতে পারে না। সভাসমিতির স্বাধীন অধিকার চাই, তাহা সভা বন্ধ আইনের ঘোষণায় অপহৃত হইয়াছে, — সংবাদপত্রের স্বাধীন মত প্রকাশের অধিকার চাই, তাহা নূতন রাজদ্রোহ আইনে সত্বর অপহৃত হইবে — স্থায়ী সভা সংঘটনে ও সেই সভার কর্ম্মতৎপরতায় স্বাধীন মত প্রতিষ্ঠার অধিকার চাই, তাহা বিনা কারণে
