नासतो विद्यते भावो नाभावो विद्यते सतः ।उभयोरपि दृष्टोऽन्तस् त्वनयोस्तत्त्वदर्शिभिः ॥
nāsato vidyate bhāvo nābhāvo vidyate sataḥubhayorapi dṛṣṭo’ntas tvanayostattvadarśibhiḥ
That which really is, cannot go out of existence, just as that which is non-existent cannot come into being. The end of this opposition of ‘is’ and ‘is not’ has been perceived by the seers of essential truths.
Compiled rendering · Anilbaran Roy
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
There is no such thing as death, for it is the body that dies and the body is not the man. That which really is, cannot go out of existence, though it may change the forms through which2·16–25 it appears, just as that which is non-existent cannot come into being. The soul is and cannot cease to be. This opposition of is and is not, this balance of being and becoming which is the mind’s view of existence, finds its end in the realisation of the soul as the one imperishable self by whom all this universe has been extended. Finite bodies have an end, but that which possesses and uses the body, is infinite, illimitable, eternal, indestructible. It casts away old and takes up new bodies as a man changes worn-out raiment for new; and what is there in this to grieve at and recoil and shrink? This is not born, nor does it die, nor is it a thing that comes into being once and passing away will never come into being again. It is unborn, ancient, sempiternal; it is not slain with the slaying of the body. Who can slay the immortal spirit? Weapons cannot cleave it, nor the fire burn, nor do the waters drench it, nor the wind dry. Eternally stable, immobile, all-pervading, it is for ever and for ever. Not manifested like the body, but greater than all manifestation, not to be analysed by the thought, but greater than all mind, not capable of change and modification like the life and its organs and their objects, but beyond the changes of mind and life and body, it is yet the Reality which all these strive to figure.
Other writings
नासतो विद्यते भावो नाभावो विद्यते सतः
The bureaucracy as usual has overreached itself in instituting a case under the sedition clause against the editor of the Yugantar. The Punjabee prosecution did untold harm to their prestige and helped to shatter the not overabundant remnants of their moral ascendancy; its work was negative and destructive. But the Yugantar prosecution has been a positive gain to the national cause; it has begun the positive work of building up the moral ascendancy of the people which is to replace that of the alien and nullify his mere material superiority. This momentous result the editor of Yugantar has brought about by his masterly inactivity. His refusal to plead has been worth many sensational trials. It has produced an enormous effect on the public mind all over India, not only as an individual instance of moral courage and readiness to suffer quietly and simply, without ostentation and self-advertisement, as a matter of course and one’s plain duty to the country, but as the first practical application in the face of persecution of the sheer uncompromising spirit of Swarajism. For the first time a man has been found who can say to the power of alien Imperialism, “With all thy pomp of empire and splendour and dominion, with all thy boast of invincibility and mastery irresistible, with all thy wealth of men and money and guns and cannon, with all thy strength of the law and strength of the sword, with all thy power to confine, to torture or to slay the body, yet for me, for the spirit, the real man in me, thou art not. Thou art only a phase, a phenomenon, a passing illusion, and the only lasting realities are my Mother and my freedom.”
The world is a great game of hide and seek in which the real hides behind the apparent, spirit behind matter. The apparent masquerades as real, the real is seen dimly as if it were an unsubstantial shadow. The grandeur of the visible universe and its laws enslaves men’s imaginations. “This is a mighty machine,” we cry, “but it moves of its own force and needs neither guide nor maker; for its motion is eternal.” Blinded by a half truth we fail to see that, instead of a machine without a maker, there is really only an existence and no machine. The Hindus have many images by which they seek to convey their knowledge of the relation between God and the world, but the idea of the machine does not figure largely among them. It is a spider and his web, a fire with many sparks, a pool of salt water in which every particle is penetrated by the salt. The world is a waking dream, an embodied vision, a mass of knowledge arranged in corporeal appearances expressing so many ideas which are each only a part of one unchanging truth. Everything becomes, nothing is made. Everything is put out from latency, nothing is brought into existence. Only that which was, can be, not that which was not. And that which is, cannot perish; it can only lose itself. All is eternal in the eternal spirit.
But the real powers, the wonderful fundamental greatnesses of the Horse are, the Sage would have us remember, not the material. What are they then? The sunrise & sunset, day & night are their symbols, not the magnitudes of space, but the magnitudes of Time,—Time, that mysterious condition of universal mind which alone makes the ordering of the universe in Space possible, although its own particular relations to matter are necessarily determined by material events & movements—for itself subtle as well as infinite it offers no means by which it can be materially measured. Sunrise & sunset, that is to say birth & death, are the front & hind part of the body of the horse, Time expressed in matter. But on Day & Night the sage fixes a deeper significance. Day is the symbol of the continual manifestation of material things [in] the vyakta, the manifest or fundamentally in Sat, in infinite being; Night is the symbol of their continual disappearance in Avyakta, the unmanifest or finally into Asat, into infinite non-being. They appear according to the swift movement of this Horse of the Worlds, anu ajayata, or, as I have written, translating the idea & rhythm of the Upanishad rather than the exact words, as he gallops. Day is the greatness that appears in his front, Night is the greatness that appears in his rear,—whatever this Time-Spirit, this Zeitgeist, turns his face towards or arrives at as he gallops through Time, that appears or, as we say, comes into being, whatever he passes away from & leaves, that disappears out of being or, as we say, perishes. Not that things are really destroyed, for nothing that is can be destroyed—nabhavo vidyate satah, but they no longer appear, they are swallowed up in this darkness of his refusal of consciousness; for the purposes of manifestation they cease to exist. All things exist already in Parabrahman, but all are not here manifest. They are already there in Being, not in Time. The universal Thought expressing itself as Time reaches them, they seem to be born; It passes away from them, they seem to perish; but there they still are, in Being, but not in Time. These two greatnesses of the appearance of things in Time & Space & their disappearance in Time & Space act always & continuously so long as the Horse is galloping, are his essential greatnesses. Etau vai mahimanau. The birth of one is in the eastern ocean, of the other in the western, that is to say in Sat & Asat, in the ocean of Being & the ocean of denial of Being or else in Vyakrita Prakriti & Avyakrita Prakriti, occult sea of Chaos, manifest sea of Cosmos.
We must not however pass from this idea,* as it is easy to pass, into another which is only a popular error,—that evolution is the object of existence. Evolution is not an universal law, it is a particular process, nor as a process has it any very wide applicability. Some would affirm that every particle of matter in the universe is bound to evolve life, mind, an individualised soul, a finally triumphant spirit. The idea is exhilarating, but impossible. There is no such rigid law, no such self-driven & unintelligent destiny in things. In the conceptions of the Upanishads Brahman in the world is not only Prajna, but Ishwara. He is not subject to law, but uses process. It is only the individual soul in a state of ignorance on which process seems to impose itself as law. Brahman on the other hand has an omnipotent power of selection and limitation. He is not bound to develop self-conscious individuality in every particle of matter, nor has He any object in such a colossal and monotonous application of one particular movement of things. He has nothing to gain by evolving, nothing to lose by not evolving. For to Him all being is only a play of His universal self-consciousness, the will so to exist the only reason of this existence and its own pleasurability its only object in existence. In that play He takes an equal delight in all, He is sama in ananda—an equal delight in the evolved state, the unevolved & the evolving. He is equal also in Being; when He has evolved Himself in the perfect man, He is no more than He already was in the leaf & clod. To suppose that all existence has one compelling purpose of growth, of progress, of consummation is to be guilty of the Western error and misunderstand the nature of being. Existence is already consummate, all change & variety in it is for delight, not for a gain or a development. The Vedantist cannot admit that anything is really developed in the sense of something new emerging into existence by whatever combination or accident which had no previous being. Nasato vidyate bhavah. That which was not cannot come into existence. The play of Brahman is not in its real nature an evolution, but a manifestation, it is not an adding of something that was wanting or a developing of something that was non-existent, but merely a manifesting of something that was hidden. We are already what we shall become. That which is still future in matter, is present in spirit.
Writings in Bengali
nāsato vidyate bhāvo nābhāvo vidyate sataḥ
ubhayorapi dṛṣṭo’ntastvanayostattvadarśibhiḥ (16)That which is not, cannot come into being; that which is, cannot cease to be. The limit of both of these has been perceived by the seers of truth.
নাসতো বিদ্যতে ভাবো নাভাবো বিদ্যতে সতঃ।
উভয়োরপি দৃষ্টোঽন্তস্ত্বনয়োস্তত্ত্বদর্শিভিঃ॥১৬॥
The Arya — text not in the CWSA
* Gita II. 1–38.
