श्रीभगवानु वाच
बहूनि मे व्यतीतानि जन्मानि तव चार्जुन ।तान्यहं वेद सर्वाणि न त्वं वेत्थ परन्तप ॥
bahūni me vyatītāni janmāni tava cārjunatānyahaṁ veda sarvāṇi na tvaṁ vettha parantapa
The Blessed Lord said: Many are my lives that are past, and thine also, O Arjuna; all of them I know, but thou knowest not, O scourge of the foe.
Compiled rendering · Anilbaran Roy
His translation
KRISHNA Many are my births that are past and gone and thine also, Urjoona; all of them I know but thou knowest not, O scourge of thy foemen. Yea, though I be unborn and imperishable Spirit, though I be the Lord of all creatures, yet I resort to my own nature and am born by the power of my Self-Illusion. For whenever…Read the whole passage · 585 wordsClose the passage
KRISHNA Many are my births that are past and gone and thine also, Urjoona; all of them I know but thou knowest not, O scourge of thy foemen. Yea, though I be unborn and imperishable Spirit, though I be the Lord of all creatures, yet I resort to my own nature and am born by the power of my Self-Illusion. For whenever and whenever righteousness and justice decline & faint upon the earth, O Bharata, and unrighteousness and injustice arise and flourish, then do I put forth myself; for the salvation of the pure and the destruction of evildoers, to raise up justice and righteousness I am born again from age to age. He who in this sort knoweth aright my divine birth and works, cometh not to rebirth when he leaveth the body, to Me he cometh, Urjoona. Many have sought refuge with me and made themselves full of me, who have risen beyond love and wrath and fear, and they made themselves holy by the austere energisms of knowledge, and became even as Myself. In whatsoever way men come to me, in their own way I accept and love them; utterly do men, O son of Pritha, follow in the path in which I tread. Desiring good success of their works men sacrifice to the gods on earth, for very quickly in the world of men cometh the success that is born of works. By me were the four orders created according unto the division of the workings of the stuff of their nature, know me for their maker and yet neither for doer nor maker who am imperishable. On Me actions leave no stain for I have no craving for their fruit; he who really knows this of me, is not bound by his works. Knowing that in this wise works were done by the ancient seekers after salvation, do thou also do works that were done in old time by the men of old. What is action and what is inaction, as to this the very sages are bewildered; therefore I will declare action unto thee by the knowledge whereof thou shalt be delivered out of evil. For of works thou must understand, of miswork thou must understand, and thou must understand also of inaction; very difficult is the way of works and their mystery. He who in action can see inaction and action in inaction, he is the understanding mind among men; he doeth all works, yet is in Yoga. When the imaginations of desire are shut out from all that a man beginneth & undertaketh, and his works have been burned up in the fires of Knowledge, then it is he that the wise call the truly learned. He hath relinquished attachment to the fruit of his works, is ever satisfied of soul and dependeth not on any outward things; such a man though he engage himself deep in works, yet really doeth nothing:—pure of lusts, he is governed in heart and spirit, he has surrendered all sense of belonging, doing actions only with his body he receives no stain of sin:—well-content with the gains that chance & time may bring him, lifted above the plane of the dualities, void of jealousy, receiving success & failure alike as friends, though he do works, yet is he not bound by them:—leaving all heart clingings behind him, a spirit released, a mind safe in its tower of knowledge, performing works for a sacrifice, all his works are swallowed up & vanish.
Essays on the Gita
But all this, though of considerable historical importance, has none whatever for our present purpose. We are concerned only with the figure of the divine Teacher as it is presented to us in the Gita and with the Power for which it there stands in the spiritual illumination of the human being. The Gita accepts the human Avatarhood;4·5–6 for the Lord speaks of the repeated, the constant* manifestation of the Divine in humanity, when He the eternal Unborn assumes by his Maya, by the power of the infinite Consciousness to clothe itself apparently in finite forms, the conditions of becoming which we call birth. But it is not this upon which stress is laid, but on the transcendent, the cosmic and the internal Divine; it is on the Source of all things and the Master of all and on the Godhead secret in man. It is this internal divinity who is meant when the Gita speaks of the doer of violent Asuric austerities troubling the God within or of the sin of those who despise the Divine lodged in the human body or of the same Godhead destroying our ignorance by the blazing lamp of knowledge. It is then the eternal Avatar, this God in man, the divine Consciousness always present in the human being who manifested in a visible form speaks to the human soul in the Gita, illumines the meaning of life and the secret of divine action and gives it the light of the divine knowledge and guidance and the assuring and fortifying word of the Master of existence in the hour when it comes face to face with the painful mystery of the world. This is what the Indian religious consciousness seeks to make near to itself in whatever form, whether in the symbolic human image it enshrines in its temples or in the worship of its Avatars or in the devotion to the human Guru through whom the voice of the one world-Teacher makes itself heard. Through these it strives to awaken to that inner voice, unveil that form of the Formless and stand face to face with that manifest divine Power, Love and Knowledge.
- bahūni me vyatītāni janmāni … sambhavāmi yuge yuge.
The rest of Arjuna’s questions and utterances proceed from the same temperament and character.3·35 When he is told that once the soul-state is assured there need be no apparent change in the action, he must act always by the law of his nature, even if the act itself seem faulty and deficient compared with that of another law than his own, he is troubled. The nature! but what of this sense of sin in the action with which he is preoccupied? is it not this very nature which drives men as if by force and even against their better will into sin and guilt? His practical intelligence is baffled by Krishna’s assertion that it was he who in4·1–8 ancient times revealed to Vivasvan this Yoga, since lost, which he is now again revealing to Arjuna, and by his demand for an explanation he provokes the famous and oft-quoted statement of Avatarhood and its mundane purpose. He is again perplexed by the words in which Krishna continues to reconcile action and renunciation of action and asks once again for a decisive statement of that which is the best and highest, not this “mingled” word. When he realises fully the nature of the Yoga which he is bidden to embrace, his pragmatic nature accustomed6·33–34 to act from mental will and preference and desire is appalled by its difficulty and he asks what is the end of the soul which attempts and fails, whether it does not lose both this life of human activity and thought and emotion which it has left behind and the Brahmic consciousness to which it aspires and falling from both perish like a dissolving cloud?
We have had occasion already, when speaking of the divine Teacher, to state briefly the doctrine of Avatarhood as it appears to us in the light of Vedanta, the light in which the Gita presents it to us. We must now look a little more closely at this Avatarhood and at the significance of the divine Birth of which it is the outward expression; for that is a link of considerable importance in the integral teaching of the Gita. And we may first translate the words of the Teacher himself in which the nature and purpose of Avatarhood are given summarily and remind ourselves also of other passages or references which bear upon it. “Many are my lives that are past, and thine also, O Arjuna; all of them I know,4·5–11 but thou knowest not, O scourge of the foe. Though I am the unborn, though I am imperishable in my self-existence, though I am the Lord of all existences, yet I stand upon my own Nature and I come into birth by my self-Maya. For whensoever there is the fading of the Dharma and the uprising of unrighteousness, then I loose myself forth into birth. For the deliverance of the good, for the destruction of the evil-doers, for the enthroning of the Right I am born from age to age. He who knoweth thus in its right principles my divine birth and my divine work, when he abandons his body, comes not to rebirth, he comes to Me, O Arjuna. Delivered from liking and fear and wrath, full of me, taking refuge in me, many purified by austerity of knowledge have arrived at my nature of being (madbhāvam, the divine nature of the Purushottama). As men approach me, so I accept them to my love (bhajāmi); men follow in every way my path, O son of Pritha.”
There is therefore a distinction to be made between what is essential in the nature, its native and inevitable action, which it avails not at all to repress, suppress, coerce, and what is accidental to it, its wanderings, confusions, perversions, over which we must certainly get control. There is a distinction implied too between coercion and suppression, nigraha, and control with right use and right guidance, saṁyama. The former is a violence done to the nature by the will, which in the end depresses the natural powers of the being, ātmānam avasādayet; the latter is the control of the lower by the higher self, which successfully gives to those powers their right action and their maximum2·50 efficiency, — yogaḥ karmasu kauśalam. This nature of saṁyama is made very clear by the Gita in the opening of its sixth chapter, “By the self thou shouldst deliver the self, thou shouldst not4·5–7 depress and cast down the self (whether by self-indulgence or suppression); for the self is the friend of the self and the self is the enemy. To the man is his self a friend in whom the (lower) self has been conquered by the (higher) self, but to him who is not in possession of his (higher) self, the (lower) self is as if an enemy and it acts as an enemy.” When one has conquered one’s self and attained to the calm of a perfect self-mastery and self-possession, then is the supreme self in a man founded and poised even in his outwardly conscious human being, samāhita. In other words, to master the lower self by the higher, the natural self by the spiritual is the way of man’s perfection and liberation.
Letters
Yuge yuge* may be used in a general sense, as in English “from age to age” and not refer technically to the yuga proper according to the Puranic computation. But the bahūni has an air of referring to very numerous lives especially when coupled with tava ca. In that case all these many births could not be full incarnations,—many may have been merely Vibhuti births carrying on the thread from incarnation to incarnation. About Arjuna’s accompanying him in each and every birth, nothing is said, but it would not be likely—many, of course.
- In the Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna, “Many are my lives that are past” (4.5) and again, “I am born from age to age.” (4.8) The correspondent asked how Krishna’s past lives could be many (bahūni) if he was born only from age to age (yuge yuge).—Ed.
Evening talks
The mind takes things in a fixed, rigid way. Whoever has realised the supermind is reluctant to speak about it because the mind deforms the truths of supermind. Rebirth, Karma cannot be grasped by the mind. How did the first action arise? Actions alone are not ultimately responsible for rebirth. Birth is not due to action but to a certain impulse to manifest, and the Avatar is as much impelled to manifest as anybody else. It may be that Krishna manifested his personalities several times before he took birth (the Gita’s bahuni vyatitani me janmani). When the Avatar takes birth, he may draw all his past personalities into his being. All the births may not be full manifestations. They may not even constitute known historical personalities. It is not always the known historical personalities who are great in the spiritual sense.
Now suppose we supramentalise the body. In that case we can carry the full physical experience and return with the fullest physical, vital and mental force and manifest the Divine. That is what happens in the case of Avatars and Vibhutis, — there is full memory of the past vital and mental experiences and in the case of the Avatar even of the physical experiences. If we can supramentalise the body it can be retained or thrown away at will —_icchā mṛtyu_.And even when the body is thrown away, when the process of manifestation is undertaken the soul has not to gather the physical and the vital and the mental from any of the formations of Universal Nature — as in the case of ordinary souls. In case these — the physical, the vital, and the mental — are supramentalised the whole being is quite ready; one has simply to take up the ready formation and manifest the Divine.
Dr. Manilal: In the Gita Sri Krishna says that he knows all about Arjuna’s past lives.
