यं हि न व्यथयन्त्येते पुरुषं पुरुषर्षभ ।समदुःखसुखं धीरं सोऽमृतत्वाय कल्पते ॥
yaṁ hi na vyathayantyete puruṣaṁ puruṣarṣabhasamaduḥkhasukhaṁ dhīraṁ so’mṛtatvāya kalpate
The man whom these do not trouble nor pain, O lion-hearted among men, the firm and wise who is equal in pleasure and suffering, makes himself apt for Immortality.
Compiled rendering · Anilbaran Roy
AI translation
His translation
KRISHNA Thou grievest for whom thou shouldst not grieve and yet speakest wise-seeming words, but the wise grieve not whether for the dead or for the living. It is not that I was not before, nor thou nor these lords of the folk, nor yet that we all shall not be again hereafter. Even as the embodied spirit passes in this body to boyhood and youth and age, so also it passes away from this body to another; the strong man suffers not his soul to be clouded by this. But the things of material touch, O son of Coonty, which bring cold and warmth, pleasure and pain, they come and they pass; transient are they, these seek to abandon, O Bharata. The man whom these vex not, O lion of men, who is strong and receiveth sorrow & bliss as one, that man is ready for immortality. For that which is not, there is no coming into being and for that which is, there is no ceasing to be; yea of both of these the lookers into truth have seen an end. But That in which all this universe is extended, know to be imperishable; none hath force to bring to nought the One who decays not neither passes away. Finite and transient are these bodies called of the eternal, imperishable and immeasurable embodied Spirit; arise therefore and fight, O seed of Bharat. Who knoweth the Spirit as slayer and who deemeth Him to be slain, both of these discern not: He slayeth not neither is He slain. “He is not born nor dieth ever, nor having once been shall He not be again; He is unborn for ever and perpetual, He is the Ancient One who is not slain with the slaying of the body.” He who knoweth Him to be imperishable, eternal, unborn and undecaying, whom doth that man, O Partha, slay or cause to be slain? As a man casteth from him his worn out robes and taketh to him other & new raiment, so the embodied Spirit casteth away its worn out bodies and goeth to other & new casings. Him the sword cleaveth not, Him the fire cannot burn, Him water wetteth not and the hot wind withereth not away; indivisible, unconsumable, unmergible, unwitherable is He. He is for ever & everywhere, constant and moveth not, He is the One Sempiternal Being. If thou knowest Him as such, thou hast no cause to grieve.
Essays on the Gita
What is that real fact? that highest aim? This, that human life and death repeated through the aeons in the great cycles of the world are only a long progress by which the human being2·15 prepares and makes himself fit for immortality. And how shall he prepare himself? who is the man that is fit? The man who rises above the conception of himself as a life and a body, who does not accept the material and sensational touches of the world at their own value or at the value which the physical man attaches to them, who knows himself and all as souls, learns himself to live in his soul and not in his body and deals with others too as souls and not as mere physical beings. For by immortality is meant not the survival of death,—that is already given to every creature born with a mind,—but the transcendence of life and death. It means that ascension by which man ceases to live as a mind-informed body and lives at last as a spirit and in the Spirit. Whoever is subject to grief and sorrow, a slave to the sensations and emotions, occupied by the touches of things transient cannot become fit for immortality. These things must be borne until they are conquered, till they can give no pain to the liberated man, till he is able to receive all the material happenings of the world whether joyful or sorrowful with a wise and calm equality, even2·15 as the tranquil eternal Spirit secret within us receives them. To be disturbed by sorrow and horror as Arjuna has been disturbed, to be deflected by them from the path that has to be travelled, to be overcome by self-pity and intolerance of sorrow and recoil from the unavoidable and trivial circumstance of the death of the body, this is un-Aryan ignorance. It is not the way of the Aryan climbing in calm strength towards the immortal life.
The Gita, making its call on the warrior nature of Arjuna, starts with this heroic movement. It calls on him to turn on the great enemy desire and slay it. Its first description of equality is that of the Stoic philosopher. “He whose mind is undisturbed2·56–57 in the midst of sorrows and amid pleasures is free from desire, from whom liking and fear and wrath have passed away, is the sage of settled understanding. Who in all things is without affection though visited by this good or that evil and neither hates nor rejoices, his intelligence sits firmly founded in wisdom.” If one abstains from food, it says, giving a physical example, the2·59 object of sense ceases to affect, but the affection itself of the sense, the rasa, remains; it is only when, even in the exercise of the sense, it can keep back from seeking its sensuous aim in the object, artha, and abandon the affection, the desire for the pleasure of taste, that the highest level of the soul is reached. It is by using the mental organs on the objects, “ranging over them with the2·64 senses,” viṣayān indriyaiś caran, but with senses subject to the self, freed from liking and disliking, that one gets into a large and sweet clearness of soul and temperament in which passion and grief find no place. All desires have to enter into the soul, as waters into the sea, and yet it has to remain immovable, filled but not disturbed: so in the end all desires can be abandoned. To be freed from wrath and passion and fear and attraction is repeatedly stressed as a necessary condition of the liberated status, and for this we must learn to bear their shocks, which cannot be done without exposing ourselves to their causes.5·23 “He who can bear here in the body the velocity of wrath and desire, is the Yogin, the happy man.” Titikṣā, the will and power to endure, is the means. “The material touches which cause heat and cold, happiness and pain, things transient which come and go,2·14–15 these learn to endure. For the man whom these do not trouble nor pain, the firm and wise who is equal in pleasure and suffering, makes himself apt for immortality.” The equal-souled has to bear suffering and not hate, to receive pleasure and not rejoice. Even the physical affections are to be mastered by endurance and this too is part of the Stoic discipline. Age, death, suffering, pain are not fled from, but accepted and vanquished by a high indifference.* Not to flee appalled from Nature in her lower masks, but to meet and conquer her is the true instinct of the strong nature, puruṣarṣabha, the leonine soul among men. Thus compelled, she throws aside her mask and reveals to him his true nature as the free soul, not her subject but her king and lord, svarāṭ, samrāṭ.
- Dhīras tatra na muhyati, says the Gita; the strong and wise soul is not perplexed, troubled or moved by them. But still they are accepted only to be conquered, jarā-maraṇa-mokṣāya yatanti.
The Synthesis of Yoga
There is nothing that is not ancient and familiar in the first of these three transforming inner movements; for it has always been one of the principal objects of spiritual discipline. It has been best formulated in the already expressed doctrine of the Gita by which a complete renouncement of desire for the fruits as the motive of action, a complete annulment of desire itself, the complete achievement of a perfect equality are put forward as the normal status of a spiritual being. A perfect spiritual equality is the one true and infallible sign of the cessation of desire,—to be equal-souled to all things, unmoved by joy and sorrow, the pleasant and the unpleasant, success or failure, to look with an equal eye on high and low, friend and enemy, the virtuous and the sinner, to see in all beings the manifold manifestation of the One and in all things the multitudinous play or the slow masked evolution of the embodied Spirit. It is not a mental quiet, aloofness, indifference, not an inert vital quiescence, not a passivity of the physical consciousness consenting to no movement or to any movement that is the condition aimed at, though these things are sometimes mistaken for this spiritual condition, but a wide comprehensive unmoved universality such as that of the Witness Spirit behind Nature. For all here seems to be a mobile half-ordered half-confused organisation of forces, but behind them one can feel a supporting peace, silence, wideness, not inert but calm, not impotent but potentially omnipotent with a concentrated, stable, immobile energy in it capable of bearing all the motions of the universe. This Presence behind is equal-souled to all things: the energy it holds in it can be unloosed for any action, but no action will be chosen by any desire in the Witness Spirit; a Truth acts which is beyond and greater than the action itself or its apparent forms and impulses, beyond and greater than mind or life-force or body, although it may take for the immediate purpose a mental, a vital or a physical appearance. It is when there is this death of desire and this calm equal wideness in the consciousness everywhere, that the true vital being within us comes out from the veil and reveals its own calm, intense and potent presence. For such is the true nature of the vital being, prāṇamaya puruṣa; it is a projection of the Divine Purusha into life,—tranquil, strong, luminous, many-energied, obedient to the Divine Will, egoless, yet or rather therefore capable of all action, achievement, highest or largest enterprise. The true Life-Force too reveals itself as no longer this troubled harassed divided striving surface energy, but a great and radiant Divine Power, full of peace and strength and bliss, a wide-wayed Angel of Life with its wings of Might enfolding the universe.
This equality cannot come except by a protracted ordeal and patient self-discipline; so long as desire is strong, equality cannot come at all except in periods of quiescence and the fatigue of desire, and it is then more likely to be an inert indifference or desire’s recoil from itself than the true calm and the positive spiritual oneness. Moreover, this discipline or this growth into equality of spirit has its necessary epochs and stages. Ordinarily we have to begin with a period of endurance; for we must learn to confront, to suffer and to assimilate all contacts. Each fibre in us must be taught not to wince away from that which pains and repels and not to run eagerly towards that which pleases and attracts, but rather to accept, to face, to bear and to conquer. All touches we must be strong to bear, not only those that are proper and personal to us but those born of our sympathy or our conflict with the worlds around, above or below us and with their peoples. We shall endure tranquilly the action and impact on us of men and things and forces, the pressure of the Gods and the assaults of Titans; we shall face and engulf in the unstirred seas of our spirit all that can possibly come to us down the ways of the soul’s infinite experience. This is the stoical period of the preparation of equality, its most elementary and yet its heroic age. But this steadfast endurance of the flesh and heart and mind must be reinforced by a sustained sense of spiritual submission to a divine Will: this living clay must yield not only with a stern or courageous acquiescence, but with knowledge or with resignation, even in suffering, to the touch of the divine Hand that is preparing its perfection. A sage, a devout or even a tender stoicism of the God-lover is possible, and these are better than the merely pagan self-reliant endurance which may lend itself to a too great hardening of the vessel of God: for this kind prepares the strength that is capable of wisdom and of love; its tranquillity is a deeply moved calm that passes easily into bliss. The gain of this period of resignation and endurance is the soul’s strength equal to all shocks and contacts.
Other writings
To be capable of silence, stillness, illuminated passivity is to be fit for immortality—amṛtatvāya kalpate. It is to be dhīra, the ideal of our ancient civilisation, which does not mean to be tamasic, inert and a block. The inaction of the tamasic man is a stumbling-block to the energies around him, the inaction of the Yogin creates, preserves and destroys; his action is dynamic with the direct, stupendous driving-power of great natural forces. It is a stillness within often covered by a ripple of talk and activity without,—the ocean with its lively surface of waves. But even as men do not see the reality of God’s workings from the superficial noise of the world and its passing events, for they are hidden beneath that cover, so also shall they fail to understand the action of the Yogin, for he is different within from what he is outside. The strength of noise and activity is, doubtless, great,—did not the walls of Jericho fall by the force of noise? But infinite is the strength of the stillness and the silence, in which great forces prepare for action.
Writings in Bengali
yaṁ hi na vyathayantyete puruṣaṁ puruṣarṣabha
samaduḥkhasukhaṁ dhīraṁ so’mṛtatvāya kalpate (15)Sri Krishna first mentioning the eternity of the Soul then showed the way to loosen the knot of ignorance. Mātrā means various contacts of objects, the cause of dualities like pleasure, pain etc. These contacts are transient; they have beginning and end; because they are transient attachment has to be abandoned. If we are attached to transient objects, we are pleased at their arrival, sad or pained at their destruction or absence. This state is called ignorance. In ignorance the eternal nature and homogeneous delight of the imperishable Soul are covered; we remain maddened only with momentary states and objects; we are plunged in the ocean of grief at the sorrow of their destruction. He who can endure the contacts of objects without being thus overwhelmed, that is, he who realising the duality can receive pleasure and pain, heat and cold, pleasant and unpleasant, good and evil, success and failure equally with a cheerful heart and smiling face without feeling joy and grief, that person becomes free from attraction and repulsion; cutting the knot of ignorance becomes able to realise the eternal nature and delight,—amṛtatvāya kalpate.
যং হি ন ব্যথয়ন্ত্যেতে পুরুষং পুরুষর্ষভ।
সমদুঃখসুখং ধীরং সোঽমৃতত্বায় কল্পতে॥১৫॥
শ্রীকৃষ্ণ প্রথম আত্মার নিত্যতার উল্লেখ করিয়া পরে অজ্ঞানের বন্ধন শিথিল করিবার উপায় দেখাইলেন। মাত্রা অর্থাৎ বিষয়ের নানারূপ স্পর্শ, সুখ, দুঃখ ইত্যাদি দ্বন্দ্বের কারণ। এই স্পর্শসকল অনিত্য, তাহাদের আরম্ভও আছে, অন্তও আছে, অনিত্য বলিয়া আসক্তি পরিত্যাগ করিতে হয়। অনিত্য বস্তুতে যদি আসক্ত হই, তাহার আগমনে হৃষ্ট হই, তাহার নাশে বা অভাবে দুঃখিত বা ব্যথিত হই। এই অবস্থাকে অজ্ঞান বলে। অজ্ঞানে অনশ্বর আত্মার সনাতন ভাব ও অক্ষয় আনন্দ আচ্ছন্ন হয়, কেবল ক্ষণস্থায়ী ভাব ও বস্তুতে মত্ত হইয়া থাকি, তাহার নাশের দুঃখে শোকসাগরে নিমগ্ন হই। এইরূপ অভিভূত না হইয়া যে বিষয়ের স্পর্শসকল সহ্য করিতে পারে, অর্থাৎ যে দ্বন্দ্ব উপলব্ধি করিয়াও সুখ-দুঃখে, শীতোষ্ণে, প্রিয়াপ্রিয়ে, মঙ্গলামঙ্গলে, সিদ্ধি-অসিদ্ধিতে হর্ষ ও শোক অনুভব না করিয়া সমানভাবে প্রফুল্লচিত্তে হাস্যমুখে গ্রহণ করিতে পারে, সে পুরুষ রাগদ্বেষ হইতে বিমুক্ত হয়, অজ্ঞানের বন্ধন কাটিয়া সনাতন ভাব ও আনন্দ উপলব্ধি করিতে সমর্থ হয়, — অমৃতত্বায় কল্পতে।
The Arya — text not in the CWSA
* Gita II. 1–38.
