बाह्यस्पर्शेष्वसक्तात्मा विन्दत्यात्मनि यत्सुखम् ।स ब्रह्मयोगयुक्तात्मा सुखमक्षयमश्नुते ॥
bāhyasparśeṣvasaktātmā vindatyātmani yatsukhamsa brahmayogayuktātmā sukhamakṣayamaśnute
When the soul is no longer attached to the touches of outward things, then one finds the happiness that exists in the Self; such a one enjoys an imperishable happiness, because his self is in Yoga, yukta, by Yoga with the Brahman.
Compiled rendering · Anilbaran Roy
Essays on the Gita
then one finds the happiness that exists in the Self; such a one enjoys an imperishable happiness, because his self is in Yoga, *yukta*, by Yoga with the Brahman.
His translation
KRISHNA Renunciation of works or Yoga in works, both of these make for the soul’s highest welfare, but of these two Yoga in works is distinguished above renunciation of works. Know him for the perpetual Sunnyasin, who neither hates nor desires aught, for the mind that rises above the dualities, O strong of arm, is…Read the whole passage · 966 wordsClose the passage
KRISHNA Renunciation of works or Yoga in works, both of these make for the soul’s highest welfare, but of these two Yoga in works is distinguished above renunciation of works. Know him for the perpetual Sunnyasin, who neither hates nor desires aught, for the mind that rises above the dualities, O strong of arm, is easily and happily released from bondage. It is children who talk of Sankhya & Yoga as distinct & different, not the learned; he who cleaveth wholly to even one of these findeth the fruit of both. To the high heaven whereto the Sankhyas win, the men of Yoga go also, and he who seeth Sankhya and Yoga as one, seeth indeed. But without Yoga, O great of arm, renunciation is very difficult to arrive at and the sage that hath Yoga travelleth very swiftly to God. When a man hath Yoga, the self of him is purified from obscuration, he is master [of] the Self and victor over the senses; he whose Self has become one with the self of all created things, though he do works, can receive no defilement. The Yogin sees the reality of things and thinks “Truly I do nothing at all”; yea when he sees or hears or touches, when he smells and when he tastes, in his going and in his sleeping and in his breathing, whether he talk, whether he put out or take in, whether he close his eyes or open them, still he holds to it, “Lo, ‘tis but the senses that move in the fields of the senses.” When a man doeth, reposing all his works on the Eternal and abandoning attachment, sin cannot stay on his soul even as water on the leaf of a lotus. With their body, mind and understanding self and with the pure and unaffected senses the Yogins relinquishing attachment do works for the cleansing of the Self. The soul that has Yoga abandons the fruit of its works and gains instead a confident and utter peace, but the soul that has not Yoga clings to the fruit of its works and by the working of desire it falls into bondage. When a man is master of his self and has renounced all works in his heart, then the embodied spirit sitteth at ease in his nine-gated city, neither doing nor causing to be done. The Lord createth not works nor the authorship of works for His people neither yoketh He them to the fruits of their works; ‘tis the nature in a man that is busy & taketh its course. The Lord taketh to himself the sin of none neither accepteth He the righteousness of any; but Wisdom is clouded over with Nescience and ‘tis by this that these living beings fall into delusion. But on all of those who by Knowledge have destroyed the nescience of the Self, Wisdom riseth like the sun and lighteth up that Highest Self of All. Then they perceive Him alone and are Self of Him and to Him consecrated in faith and all for Him, and the revolving wheel clutches them not in any more, because wisdom hath washed them pure of all stain. The Brahmin endowed with learning and modest culture, the cow & the elephant and the very dog and the Pariah, all these the wise regard with equal eyes. Even in this human life they have conquered this creation whose minds have taken root in that divine equality, for the Eternal also is without a defect and He looketh on all his creatures with equal eyes; therefore in the Eternal they have their root. He is not overjoyed when he getteth what is pleasant, he groweth not troubled when he tasteth bitterness, whose reason is firm & steadfast and he subjecteth not himself to delusion but knoweth the Eternal and in him abideth. His soul clings not to the touches of outward things but what happiness he finds, he finds in the Self, therefore his Self is made one in Yoga with Eternal Brahman & the happiness he tastes, does not cease or diminish. For the enjoyments that are born of touch and contact are very wombs of misery, they begin and they end; the wise man taketh no delight in these. For he who even on this earth and before his release from this mortal body hath strength to stand up in the speed and rush of wrath and lust, he hath Yoga, he is the happy man. That man is the Yogin whose bliss is within and his delight & ease are inward and an inner light illumines him & not this outer sun; he goeth to cessation in Eternal Brahman, for he becometh Brahman. Cessation in Brahman falleth to those who are Rishis from whom all stain & darkness have faded away, who have cut doubt away from their hearts and are masters of Self, whose whole delight & work is to do good to all created things. Round the strivers after perfection, round the governed souls, who are delivered from the grip of wrath and desire, lo the Paradise of cessation in Brahman liveth all about them, who have got the knowledge of the Self within. He who shuts out the touches of outward things from his soul and concentrates sight between his eyebrows, making equal the outbreath and the inbreath as they move within the nostrils, master of his sense and mind and reason who utterly desireth salvation and desire and wrath and fear have departed from him for ever, verily he is already a released and delivered soul. He knows me for the One that feasteth on man’s sacrifices and austerities, a mighty God who is the friend of every created thing, and knowing he travels to the Peace.
Essays on the Gita
Thirteen other principles constitute the subjective aspect of the cosmic Energy,—Buddhi or Mahat, Ahankara, Manas and its ten sense-functions, five of knowledge, five of action. Manas, mind, is the original sense which perceives all objects and reacts upon them; for it has at once an inferent and an efferent activity, receives by perception what the Gita calls the outward touches of things, bāhya sparśa, and so forms its idea of the world and exercises its reactions of active vitality. But it specialises its most ordinary functions of reception by aid of the five perceptive senses of hearing, touch, sight, taste and smell, which make the five properties of things their respective objects, and specialises certain necessary vital functions of reaction by aid of the five active senses which operate for speech, locomotion, the seizing of things, ejection and generation. Buddhi, the discriminating principle, is at once intelligence and will; it is that power in Nature which discriminates and coordinates. Ahankara, the ego-sense, is the subjective principle in Buddhi by which the Purusha is induced to identify himself with Prakriti and her activities. But these subjective principles are themselves as mechanical, as much a part of the inconscient energy as those which constitute her objective operations. If we find it difficult to realise how intelligence and will can be properties of the mechanical Inconscient and themselves mechanical (jaḍa), we have only to remember that modern Science itself has been driven to the same conclusion. Even in the mechanical action of the atom there is a power which can only be called an inconscient will and in all the works of Nature that pervading will does inconsciently the works of intelligence. What we call mental intelligence is precisely the same thing in its essence as that which discriminates and coordinates subconsciously in all the activities of the material universe, and conscious Mind itself, Science has tried to demonstrate, is only a result and transcript of the mechanical action of the inconscient. But Sankhya explains what modern Science leaves in obscurity, the process by which the mechanical and inconscient takes on the appearance of consciousness. It is because of the reflection of Prakriti in Purusha; the light of consciousness of the Soul is attributed to the workings of the mechanical energy and it is thus that the Purusha, observing Nature as the witness and forgetting himself, is deluded with the idea generated in her that it is he who thinks, feels, wills, acts, while all the time the operation of thinking, feeling, willing, acting is conducted really by her and her three modes and not by himself at all. To get rid of this delusion is the first step towards the liberation of the soul from Nature and her works.
Again, the sign of the divine worker is that which is central to the divine consciousness itself, a perfect inner joy and peace which depends upon nothing in the world for its source or its continuance; it is innate, it is the very stuff of the soul’s consciousness, it is the very nature of divine being. The ordinary man depends upon outward things for his happiness; therefore he has desire; therefore he has anger and passion, pleasure and pain, joy and grief; therefore he measures all things in the balance of good fortune and evil fortune. None of these things can affect the divine soul; it is ever satisfied without any kind of dependence, nitya-tṛpto nirāśrayaḥ; for its delight, its divine ease,4·20 its happiness, its glad light are eternal within, ingrained in itself, ātma-ratiḥ, antaḥ-sukho ’ntar-ārāmas tathāntar-jyotir eva yaḥ. What5·24 joy it takes in outward things is not for their sake, not for things which it seeks in them and can miss, but for the self in them, for their expression of the Divine, for that which is eternal in them and which it cannot miss. It is without attachment to their outward touches, but finds everywhere the same joy that it finds in itself, because its self is theirs, has become one self with the self of all beings, because it is united with the one and equal Brahman in them through all their differences, brahmayoga-yuktātmā, sarvabhūtātma-bhūtātmā. It does not rejoice in the touches of the pleasant or feel anguish in the touches of the unpleasant; neither the wounds of things, nor the wounds of friends, nor the wounds of enemies can disturb the firmness of its outgazing mind or bewilder its receiving heart; this soul is in its nature, as the Upanishad puts it, avraṇam, without wound or scar. In all things it has the same imperishable Ananda, sukham akṣayam aśnute.5·21
The pure philosopher, the thinker, the born sage not only relies upon the sattwic principle in him as his ultimate justification, but uses it from the beginning as his instrument of self-mastery. He starts from the sattwic equality. He too observes the transitoriness of the material and external world and its failure to satisfy the desires or to give the true delight, but this causes in him no grief, fear or disappointment. He observes all with an eye of tranquil discernment and makes his choice without repulsion or perplexity. “The enjoyments born of the touches5·22 of things are causes of sorrow, they have a beginning and an end; therefore the sage, the man of awakened understanding, budhaḥ, does not place his delight in these.” “The self in him is5·21 unattached to the touches of external things; he finds his happiness in himself.” He sees, as the Gita puts it, that he is himself his own enemy and his own friend, and therefore he takes care not to dethrone himself by casting his being into the hands of6·5 desire and passion, nātmānam avasādayet, but delivers himself out of that imprisonment by his own inner power, uddhared ātmanātmānam; for whoever has conquered his lower self, finds in his higher self his best friend and ally. He becomes satisfied with knowledge, master of his senses, a Yogin by sattwic equality, — for equality is Yoga, samatvaṁ yoga ucyate, — regarding alike2·48 clod and stone and gold, tranquil and self-poised in heat and cold, suffering and happiness, honour and disgrace. He is equal in soul to friend and enemy and to neutral and indifferent, because he sees that these are transitory relations born of the changing conditions of life. Even by the pretensions of learning and purity and virtue and the claims to superiority which men base upon these things, he is not led away. He is equal-souled to all men, to the sinner and the saint, to the virtuous, learned and cultured Brahmin and the fallen outcaste. All these are the Gita’s descriptions of the sattwic equality, and they sum up well enough what is familiar to the world as the calm philosophic equality of the sage.
The Gita after speaking of the perfect equality of the Brahman-knower5·20 who has risen into the Brahman-consciousness, brahmavid brahmaṇi sthitaḥ, develops in nine verses that follow its idea of Brahmayoga and of Nirvana in the Brahman. “When the soul is no longer attached to the touches of outward things,” it begins,5·21 “then one finds the happiness that exists in the Self; such a one enjoys an imperishable happiness, because his self is in Yoga, yukta, by Yoga with the Brahman.” The non-attachment is essential, it says, in order to be free from the attacks of desire and wrath and passion, a freedom without which true happiness is not possible. That happiness and that equality are to be gained entirely by man in the body: he is not to suffer any least remnant of the subjection to the troubled lower nature to remain in the idea that the perfect release will come by a putting off of the body; a perfect spiritual freedom is to be won here upon earth and possessed and enjoyed in the human life, prāk śarīra-vimokṣaṇāt. It then continues, “He who has the inner happiness and the5·24 inner ease and repose and the inner light, that Yogin becomes the Brahman and reaches self-extinction in the Brahman, brahma-nirvāṇam.” Here, very clearly, Nirvana means the extinction of the ego in the higher spiritual, inner Self, that which is for ever timeless, spaceless, not bound by the chain of cause and effect and the changes of the world-mutation, self-blissful, self-illumined and for ever at peace. The Yogin ceases to be the ego, the little person limited by the mind and the body; he becomes the Brahman; he is unified in consciousness with the immutable divinity of the eternal Self which is immanent in his natural being.
The Synthesis of Yoga
In fact the manas is a development from the external chitta; it is a first organising of the crude stuff of the consciousness excited and aroused by external contacts, bāhya-sparśa. What we are physically is a soul asleep in matter which has evolved to the partial wakefulness of a living body pervaded by a crude stuff of external consciousness more or less alive and attentive to the outward impacts of the external world in which we are developing our conscious being. In the animal this stuff of externalised consciousness organises itself into a well-regulated mental sense or organ of perceiving and acting mind. Sense is in fact the mental contact of the embodied consciousness with its surroundings. This contact is always essentially a mental phenomenon; but in fact it depends chiefly upon the development of certain physical organs of contact with objects and with their properties to whose images it is able by habit to give their mental values. What we call the physical senses have a double element, the physical-nervous impression of the object and the mental-nervous value we give to it, and the two together make up our seeing, hearing, smell, taste, touch with all those varieties of sensation of which they, and the touch chiefly, are the starting-point or first transmitting agency. But the manas is able to receive sense impressions and draw results from them by a direct transmission not dependent on the physical organ. This is more distinct in the lower creation. Man, though he has really a greater capacity for this direct sense, the sixth sense in the mind, has let it fall into abeyance by an exclusive reliance on the physical senses supplemented by the activity of the buddhi.
These three ways coincide in spite of their separate starting-points, first, by their inhibition of the normal reactions of the mind to the touches of outward things, bāhya-sparśān, secondly, by their separation of the self or spirit from the outward action of Nature. But it is evident that our perfection will be greater and more embracingly complete, if we can have a more active equality which will enable us not only to draw back from or confront the world in a detached and separated calm, but to return upon it and possess it in the power of the calm and equal Spirit. This is possible because the world, Nature, action are not in fact a quite separate thing, but a manifestation of the Self, the All-Soul, the Divine. The reactions of the normal mind are a degradation of the divine values which would but for this degradation make this truth evident to us,—a falsification, an ignorance which alters their workings, an ignorance which starts from the involution of the Self in a blind material nescience. Once we return to the full consciousness of Self, of God, we can then put a true divine value on things and receive and act on them with the calm, joy, knowledge, seeing will of the Spirit. When we begin to do that, then the soul begins to have an equal joy in the universe, an equal will dealing with all energies, an equal knowledge which takes possession of the spiritual truth behind all the phenomena of this divine manifestation. It possesses the world as the Divine possesses it, in a fullness of the infinite light, power and Ananda.
