Verse 2·29

आश्चर्यवत्पश्यति कश्चिदेन-माश्चर्यवद्वदति तथैव चान्यः ।आश्चर्यवच्चैनमन्यः शृणोतिश्रुत्वाप्येनं वेद न चैव कश्चित् ॥

āścaryavatpaśyati kaścidena-māścaryavadvadati tathaiva cānyaḥāścaryavaccainamanyaḥ śṛṇotiśrutvāpyenaṁ veda na caiva kaścit

One sees it as a mystery or one speaks of it or hears of it as a mystery, none knows it.

Compiled rendering · Anilbaran Roy

AI translationAI-synthesised translation — not Sri Aurobindo’s text

Mottoes of The Life Divine

One sees it as a mystery or one speaks of it or hears of it as a mystery, but none knows it.

His translation

And now if yet thou deemest of the Spirit as ever born or ever dying, even so thou hast no cause to grieve for him, O strong-armed. For of that which is born the death is certain, and of that which is dead, the birth is sure; therefore in a thing inevitable thou oughtest not to grieve. Unmanifested in their beginning are creatures, manifested in the middle, O Bharata; they become but unmanifest again at death; what room is here for lamentation? As a Mystery one seeth Him, as a Mystery another speaketh of Him, as a Mystery a third heareth of Him, but even with revelation not one knoweth Him. The embodied One is for ever unslayable in the body of every man, O Bharata, and from Him are all creatures; therefore thou hast no cause for grief. Moreover if thou considerest the law of thine own being, thou oughtest not to tremble, for than battle in a just cause the Kshatriya knows no greater bliss. Happy are the Kshatriyas, O Partha, who win such a battle to their portion; ‘tis as though one came past by chance and found the door of Paradise open. Now if thou wilt not wage this just & righteous battle, then hast thou cast from thee thy glory and the law of thy being, and brought sin upon thy head; yea thy shame shall be eternal in the mouth of all creatures, and for one who has been honoured, shame is worse than death. The warriors will think that from fear thou hast ceased from battle, and in their eyes who thought highly of thee, thou shalt be belittled. And thine illwishers will speak of thee many unutterable words, disparaging thy might and thy greatness, than which there is no worse bitterness under the skies. Slain thou shalt conquer heaven, victorious thou shalt enjoy earth for thy kingdom, therefore, O son of Coonty, arise with a heart resolute for war. Make thou thy soul indifferent to pain and pleasure, to gain and loss, to victory & defeat, then gird thyself to the combat; sin shall not touch thee then.

Essays on the Gita

Even if the truth of our being were a thing less sublime, vast, intangible by death and life, if the self were constantly subject2·26–29 to birth and death, still the death of beings ought not to be a cause of sorrow. For that is an inevitable circumstance of the soul’s self-manifestation. Its birth is an appearing out of some state in which it is not non-existent but unmanifest to our mortal senses, its death is a return to that unmanifest world or condition and out of it it will again appear in the physical manifestation. The to-do made by the physical mind and senses about death and the horror of death whether on the sick-bed or the battlefield, is the most ignorant of nervous clamours. Our sorrow for the death of men is an ignorant grieving for those for whom there is no cause to grieve, since they have neither gone out of existence nor suffered any painful or terrible change of condition, but are beyond death no less in being and no more unhappy in circumstance than in life. But in reality the higher truth is the real truth. All are that Self, that One, that Divine whom we look on and speak and hear of as the wonderful beyond our comprehension, for after all our seeking and declaring of knowledge and learning from those who have knowledge no human mind has ever known this Absolute. It is this which is here veiled by the world, the master of the body; all life is only its shadow; the coming of the soul into physical manifestation and our passing out of it by death is only one of its minor movements. When we have known ourselves as this, then to speak of ourselves as slayer or slain is2·19 an absurdity. One thing only is the truth in which we have to live, the Eternal manifesting itself as the soul of man in the great cycle of its pilgrimage with birth and death for milestones, with worlds beyond as resting-places, with all the circumstances of life happy or unhappy as the means of our progress and battle and victory and with immortality as the home to which the soul travels.

The mind itself has the vague sense of some surpassing factor of this kind and in the pursuit of its absolutes frequently strikes against it. It glimpses a state, a power, a presence that is near and within and inmost to it and yet immeasurably greater and singularly distant and above it; it has a vision of something…Read the whole passage · 594 wordsClose the passage

The mind itself has the vague sense of some surpassing factor of this kind and in the pursuit of its absolutes frequently strikes against it. It glimpses a state, a power, a presence that is near and within and inmost to it and yet immeasurably greater and singularly distant and above it; it has a vision of something more essential, more absolute than its own absolutes, intimate, infinite, one, and it is that which we call God, Self or Spirit. This then the mind attempts to know, enter, touch and seize wholly, to approach it or become it, to arrive at some kind of unity or lose itself in a complete identity with that mystery,2·29 āścaryam. The difficulty is that this spirit in its purity seems11·6 something yet farther than the mental absolutes from the actualities of life, something not translatable by mind into its own terms, much less into those of life and action. Therefore we have the intransigent absolutists of the spirit who reject the mental and condemn the material being and yearn after a pure spiritual existence happily purchased by the dissolution of all that we are in life and mind, a Nirvana. The rest of spiritual effort is for these fanatics of the Absolute a mental preparation or a compromise, a spiritualising of life and mind as much as possible. And because the difficulty most constantly insistent on man’s mentality in practice is that presented by the claims of his vital being, by life and conduct and action, the direction taken by this preparatory endeavour consists mainly in a spiritualising of the ethical supported by the psychical mind—or rather it brings in the spiritual power and purity to aid these in enforcing their absolute claim and to impart a greater authority than life allows to the ethical ideal of right and truth of conduct or the psychic ideal of love and sympathy and oneness. These things are helped to some highest expression, given their broadest luminous basis by an assent of the reason and will to the underlying truth of the absolute oneness of the spirit and therefore the essential oneness of all living creatures. This kind of spirituality linked on in some way to the demands of the normal mind of man, persuaded to the acceptance of useful social duty and current law of social conduct, popularised by cult and ceremony and image is the outward substance of the world’s greater religions. These religions have their individual victories, call in some ray of a higher light, impose some shadow of a larger spiritual or semi-spiritual rule, but cannot effect a complete victory, end flatly in a compromise and in the act of compromise are defeated by life. Its problems remain and even recur in their fiercest forms—even such as this grim problem of Kurukshetra. The idealising intellect and ethical mind hope always to eliminate them, to discover some happy device born of their own aspiration and made effective by their own imperative insistence, which will annihilate this nether untoward aspect of life; but it endures and is not eliminated. The spiritualised intelligence on the other hand offers indeed by the voice of religion the promise of some victorious millennium hereafter, but meanwhile half convinced of terrestrial impotence, persuaded that the soul is a stranger and intruder upon earth, declares that after all not here in the life of the body or in the collective life of mortal man but in some immortal Beyond lies the heaven or the Nirvana where alone is to be found the true spiritual existence.

Mottoes of The Life Divine

One sees it as a mystery or one speaks of it or hears of it as a mystery, but none knows it.
Gita.^*

Other writings

*āścaryavat paśyati kaścid enam,     āścaryavad vadati tathaiva cānyaḥ; āścaryavac cainam anyaḥ śṛṇoti,     śrutvāpyenaṁ veda na caiva kaścit.*

“One looks on it and sees a miracle, another speaks of it as a miracle, as a miracle another hears of it, but what it is, for all the hearing, none knoweth.” We know that an evolution there is, but not what evolution is; that remains still one of the initial mysteries of Nature.

But we are not limited to the evidence [of] isolated passages or collected inferences for the symbolic, spiritual and psychological character of the Vedic sacrifice. There are entire hymns in which this character is brought out with a remarkable consistency & vividness. We will take first the brief & striking colloquy between the Rishi Agastya and the great god Indra which forms the five verses of Hymn 170 in the first Mandala. It opens with a verse spoken, it would seem, by Indra, one of the most remarkable riks in the whole Veda. “It is not now nor tomorrow; who knoweth that which is utterly wonderful? its movement has for its field the knowledge of another, but when it is approached, it disappears.” To this allocution which might have come straight out of the deepest passages of the Upanishads Agastya replies by a complaint, “Why, O Indra, wouldst thou slay us; the Maruts are thy brothers,—with them do thou work for our perfection; smite us not in our struggle.” Indra defends himself, justifies the blows he has struck: “Wherefore, O my brother Agastya, dost thou, though our comrade, think beyond us; verily we know of thee how to us thou willest not to give the offering of thy mind. Let them make the altar ready; let them kindle utterly Agni in front;—there is the awakening to immortality; let us two extend thy sacrifice.” Agastya yields & consents: “Thou art the master, O lord of substance among the Vasus, thou utterly disposest, O lord of love among the Mitras. Indra, do thou hold talk with the Maruts, taste in the truth the offerings.” It seems to me that the sense of this little hymn, so beautiful, simple & profound in its expression & substance, is perfectly straightforward, perfectly lucid & only a preconceived theory or a perverse ingenuity can lead us astray. That which is neither now nor tomorrow, but beyond all Time, the wonderful thing which no man can know, that which reveals itself by its activity in the consciousness of another, in ourselves, in Indra, in the Maruts, in every living being or active force, but if we seek to approach, study & seize it vanishes from our ken, is the Brahman. No other conception of Indian thought fits this profound & subtle description. What sublime & numerous echoes wake in our memory as we repeat this mantra. There comes to us the solemn stanza of the Gita, Ascharyavat pashyati kaschid enam…; there come the words of the Mandukya Upanishad, yachchanyat trikalatitam; the solemn assertion of the Kena, na tatra vag gacchati no manah; its subtle distinction avijnatam vijanatam vijnatam avijanatam; vividly there comes the great fable of the mighty Yaksha who stood before the gods, the advance of this very Indra to know him, the vanishing of the Brahman as soon as approached, utadhitam vi nashyati. The whole of Vedanta might be described as one vast commentary on the four words, anyasya chittam abhi sancharenyam.

Writings in Bengali

āścaryavat paśyati kaścidenam āścaryavad vadati tathaiva cānyaḥ
āścaryavaccainamanyaḥ śṛṇoti śrutvāpyenaṁ veda na caiva kaścit (29)

আশ্চর্য্যবৎ পশ্যতি কশ্চিদেনমাশ্চর্য্যবদ্ বদতি তথৈব চান্যঃ।
আশ্চর্য্যবচ্চৈনমন্যঃ শৃণোতি শ্রুত্বাপ্যেনং বেদ ন চৈব কশ্চিৎ॥২৯॥

The Arya — text not in the CWSA

* Gita II. 1–38.

*âscharyavat paçyati kaschid enam,