श्रेयान्द्रव्यमयाद्यज्ञाज् ज्ञानयज्ञः परन्तप ।सर्वं कर्माखिलं पार्थ ज्ञाने परिसमाप्यते ॥
śreyāndravyamayādyajñāj jñānayajñaḥ parantapasarvaṁ karmākhilaṁ pārtha jñāne parisamāpyate
The sacrifice of knowledge, O Parantapa, is greater than any material sacrifice. Knowledge is that in which all this action culminates (not any lower knowledge, but the highest self-knowledge and God-knowledge), O Partha!
Compiled rendering · Anilbaran Roy
AI translation
His translation
Brahman is his giving and Brahman is his sacrifice, Brahman casteth Brahman into the fire that is Brahman, by Samadhi of his works in Brahman unto Brahman he goeth. Of the Yogins some make to the natural Gods their session of sacrifice, others offer the sacrifice by the sacrifice into the fire that is Brahman. And…Read the whole passage · 619 wordsClose the passage
Brahman is his giving and Brahman is his sacrifice, Brahman casteth Brahman into the fire that is Brahman, by Samadhi of his works in Brahman unto Brahman he goeth. Of the Yogins some make to the natural Gods their session of sacrifice, others offer the sacrifice by the sacrifice into the fire that is Brahman. And some offer the hearing and all the senses into the fires of self-mastery and some offer sound and the other things of sense into the fires of the senses. And others offer into the Yoga-fire of a controlled Spirit that knowledge hath kindled with her hands all the works of the senses and all the works of vital breathing. And some make the sacrifice of their goods and some make a sacrifice of austerity. Some offer up their Yoga as a sacrifice, others the knowledge of the Veda; lords of askesis are they all, keen in the vow of their undertaking. Some offer the upper breath into the lower and the lower breath into the upper, stopping the passages of the inbreath and outbreath, absorbed in government of Breath that is life; others eating temperately, offer up the breaths into the breaths as into a sacrificial fire. And all these, yea all are wise in sacrifice & by sacrifice the obscuration of sin fades away from them, for they live on the remnants of their Sacrifice deeming it as the food of Gods and pass over into Brahman that is for ever. This world belongeth not to him who doeth not sacrifice, how then shall another, O prince of the Kurus? Thus are many sorts of Sacrifice extended in the mouth of the eternal; know all these to be born of works; so knowing thou shalt find deliverance. Better than the sacrifice that is all of goods is the sacrifice of knowledge, O scourge of thy foemen, for all man’s work upon earth accomplisheth itself utterly in Wisdom. This Wisdom thou must learn by prostration and questioning and service, then shall the Knowers, they who have seen the Truth of Existence initiate thee in the Knowledge which when thou hast learnt thou shalt not again fall into delusion, O son of Pandou; by the knowledge thou shalt see all creatures even to the meanest in the Self, therefore in Me. Yea wert thou the vilest and most lewd in sin of all sinners, yet shouldest thou pass over to the other shore of Perversity in the ship of the Knowledge. As a fire when it hath been kindled, O Urjoona, burneth to ashes the fuel of it, even so doth the Fire of the Knowledge burn all a man’s works to nothingness. In all the world there is nought that is so great and pure as Wisdom and one who hath been made perfect by Yoga findeth Wisdom in his Self naturally and by the mere lapse of time. The man of faith, the self-devoted who has bridled his senses, he wins the Knowledge, and when a man has got the Knowledge he attains very quickly to the high and perfect peace. But the ignorant, the man of little faith, the soul full of doubts, these go to perdition; this world is not for the doubting soul, nor the other world, nor any kind of happiness. But he that reposeth all his works in Yoga and cleaveth Doubt asunder with the sharp edge of Knowledge, the man that possesseth his Self, O Dhanunjoy, his works cannot bind. Therefore take up the sword of Knowledge, O Urjoona, and cleave asunder this Doubt that hath made his seat in thy heart, the child of Ignorance, lay fast hold upon Yoga, arise, O seed of Bharat.
Essays on the Gita
The symbolic companionship of Arjuna and Krishna, the human and the divine soul, is expressed elsewhere in Indian thought, in the heavenward journey of Indra and Kutsa seated in one chariot, in the figure of the two birds upon one tree in the Upanishad, in the twin figures of Nara and Narayana, the seers who do tapasyā together for the knowledge.4·33 But in all three it is the idea of the divine knowledge in which, as the Gita says, all action culminates that is in view; here it is instead the action which leads to that knowledge and in which the divine Knower figures himself. Arjuna and Krishna, this human and this divine, stand together not as seers in the peaceful hermitage of meditation, but as fighter and holder of the reins in the clamorous field, in the midst of the hurtling shafts, in the chariot of battle. The Teacher of the Gita is therefore not only the God in man who unveils himself in the word of knowledge, but the God in man who moves our whole world of action, by and for whom all our humanity exists and struggles and labours, towards whom all human life travels and progresses. He is the secret Master of works and sacrifice and the Friend of the human peoples.
The Gita resolves this opposition by insisting that the Devas are only forms of the one Deva, the Ishwara, the Lord of all Yoga and worship and sacrifice and austerity, and if it is true that sacrifice offered to the Devas leads only to material results and to Paradise, it is also true that sacrifice offered to the Ishwara leads beyond them to the great liberation. For the Lord and the immutable Brahman are not two different beings, but one and the same Being, and whoever strives towards either, is striving towards that one divine Existence. All works in their totality find their culmination and completeness in the knowledge of the4·33 Divine, sarvaṁ karmākhilaṁ pārtha jñāne parisamāpyate. They are not an obstacle, but the way to the supreme knowledge. Thus this opposition too is reconciled with the help of a large elucidation of the meaning of sacrifice. In fact its conflict is only a restricted form of the larger opposition between Yoga and Sankhya. Vedism is a specialised and narrow form of Yoga; the principle of the Vedantists is identical with that of the Sankhyas, for to both the movement of salvation is the recoil of the intelligence, the buddhi, from the differentiating powers of Nature, from ego, mind, senses, from the subjective and the objective, and its return to the undifferentiated and the immutable. It is with this object of reconciliation in his mind that the Teacher first approaches his statement of the doctrine of sacrifice; but throughout, even from the very beginning, he keeps his eye not on the restricted Vedic sense of sacrifice and works, but on their larger and universal application,—that widening of narrow and formal notions to admit the great general truths they unduly restrict which is always the method of the Gita.
But there are gradations in the range of these various forms of sacrifice, the physical offering the lowest, the sacrifice of knowledge the highest. Knowledge is that in which all this action4·33–35 culminates, not any lower knowledge, but the highest, self-knowledge and God-knowledge, that which we can learn from those who know the true principles of existence, that by possessing which we shall not fall again into the bewilderment of the mind’s ignorance and into its bondage to mere sense-knowledge and to the inferior activity of the desires and passions. The knowledge in which all culminates is that by which “thou shalt see all existences (becomings, bhūtāni) without exception in the Self, then in Me.” For the Self is that one, immutable, all-pervading, all-containing, self-existent reality or Brahman hidden behind our mental being into which our consciousness widens out when it is liberated from the ego; we come to see all beings as becomings, bhūtāni, within that one self-existence.
But this is only a long intermediate stage. It is still subject to the law of desire, to the centrality of all things in the conceptions and needs of his ego and to the control of his being as well as his works by Nature, though it is a regulated and governed desire, a clarified ego and a Nature more and more subtilised and enlightened by the sattwic, the highest natural principle. All this is still within the domain, though the very much enlarged domain, of the mutable, finite and personal. The real self-knowledge and4·33 consequently the right way of works lies beyond; for the sacrifice done with knowledge is the highest sacrifice and that alone brings a perfect working. That can only come when he perceives that the self in him and the self in others are one being and this self is something higher than the ego, an infinite, an impersonal, a universal existence in whom all move and have their being,—when he perceives that all the cosmic gods to whom he offers his sacrifice are forms of one infinite Godhead and when again, leaving all his limited and limiting conceptions of that one Godhead, he perceives him to be the supreme and ineffable Deity who is at once the finite and the infinite, the one self and the many, beyond Nature though manifesting himself through Nature, beyond limitation by qualities though formulating the power of his being through infinite quality. This is the Purushottama to whom the sacrifice has to be offered, not for any transient personal fruit of works, but for the soul’s possession of God and in order to live in harmony and union with the Divine.
Yoga and knowledge are, in this early part of the Gita’s teaching, the two wings of the soul’s ascent. By Yoga is meant union through divine works done without desire, with equality of soul to all things and all men, as a sacrifice to the Supreme, while knowledge is that on which this desirelessness, this equality, this power of sacrifice is founded. The two wings indeed assist each other’s flight; acting together, yet with a subtle alternation of mutual aid, like the two eyes in a man which see together because they see alternately, they increase one another mutually by interchange of substance. As the works grow more and more desireless, equal-minded, sacrificial in spirit, the knowledge increases; with the increase of the knowledge the soul becomes firmer in the desireless, sacrificial equality of its works. The sacrifice of knowledge, says the Gita therefore,4·33 is greater than any material sacrifice. “Even if thou art the greatest doer of sin beyond all sinners, thou shalt cross over all the crookedness of evil in the ship of knowledge…. There is nothing in the world equal in purity to knowledge.” By knowledge desire and its first-born child, sin, are destroyed. The liberated man is able to do works as a sacrifice because he is freed from attachment through his mind, heart and spirit being firmly founded in self-knowledge, gata-saṅgasya jñānāvasthita-cetasaḥ. All his work4·23 disappears completely as soon as done, suffers laya, as one might say, in the being of the Brahman, pravilīyate; it has no reactionary consequence on the soul of the apparent doer. The work is done by the Lord through his Nature, it is no longer personal to the human instrument. The work itself becomes but power of the nature and substance of the being of the Brahman.
It is in this sense that the Gita is speaking when it says that all the totality of work finds its completion, culmination, end in4·37 knowledge, sarvaṁ karmākhilaṁ jñāne parisamāpyate. “As a fire kindled turns to ashes its fuel, so the fire of knowledge turns all works to ashes.” By this it is not at all meant that when knowledge is complete, there is cessation from works. What is meant is made clear by the Gita when it says that he who has destroyed all doubt by knowledge and has by Yoga given up all works and is in possession of the Self is not bound by his works,4·41 yoga-sannyasta-karmāṇam ātmavantaṁ na karmāṇi nibadhnanti, and that he whose self has become the self of all existences, acts and yet is not affected by his works, is not caught in them, receives5·7 from them no soul-ensnaring reaction, kurvann api na lipyate. Therefore, it says, the Yoga of works is better than the physical renunciation of works, because, while Sannyasa is difficult for embodied beings who must do works so long as they are in the body, Yoga of works is entirely sufficient and it rapidly and easily brings the soul to Brahman. That Yoga of works is, we have seen, the offering of all action to the Lord, which induces as its culmination an inner and not an outer, a spiritual, not a5·10 physical giving up of works into the Brahman, into the being of3·30 the Lord, brahmaṇi ādhāya karmāṇi, mayi sannyasya. When7·6 works are thus “reposed on the Brahman,” the personality of18·57 the instrumental doer ceases; though he acts, he does nothing; for he has given up not only the fruits of his works, but the works themselves and the doing of them to the Lord. The Divine then takes the burden of works from him; the Supreme becomes the doer and the act and the result.
The Synthesis of Yoga
Action is the first power of life. Nature begins with force and its works which, once conscious in man, become will and its achievements; therefore it is that by turning his action God-wards the life of man best and most surely begins to become divine. It is the door of first access, the starting-point of the initiation. When the will in him is made one with the divine will and the whole action of the being proceeds from the Divine and is directed towards the Divine, the union in works is perfectly accomplished. But works fulfil themselves in knowledge; all the totality of works, says the Gita, finds its rounded culmination in knowledge, sarvaṁ karmākhilaṁ jñāne parisamāpyate. By union in will and works we become one in the omnipresent conscious being from whom all our will and works have their rise and draw their power and in whom they fulfil the round of their energies. And the crown of this union is love; for love is the delight of conscious union with the Being in whom we live, act and move, by whom we exist, for whom alone we learn in the end to act and to be. That is the trinity of our powers, the union of all three in God to which we arrive when we start from works as our way of access and our line of contact.
