योऽन्तःसुखोऽन्तरारामस् तथान्तर्ज्योतिरेव यः ।स योगी ब्रह्मनिर्वाणं ब्रह्मभूतोऽधिगच्छति ॥
yo’ntaḥsukho’ntarārāmas tathāntarjyotireva yaḥsa yogī brahmanirvāṇaṁ brahmabhūto’dhigacchati
He who has the inner happiness and the inner ease and repose and the inner light; that Yogin becomes the Brahman and reaches self-extinction in the Brahman, brahmanirvanam.
Compiled rendering · Anilbaran Roy
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
The answer is important, for it puts the whole distinction very clearly and indicates though it does not develop entirely the5·2–4 line of reconciliation. “Renunciation and Yoga of works both bring about the soul’s salvation, but of the two the Yoga of works is distinguished above the renunciation of works. He should be known as always a Sannyasin (even when he is doing action) who neither dislikes nor desires; for free from the dualities he is released easily and happily from the bondage. Children speak of Sankhya and Yoga apart from each other, not the wise; if a man applies himself integrally to one, he gets the fruit of both,” because in their integrality each contains the other.5·5–7 “The status which is attained by the Sankhya, to that the men of the Yoga also arrive; who sees Sankhya and Yoga as one, he sees. But renunciation is difficult to attain without Yoga; the sage who has Yoga attains soon to the Brahman; his self becomes the self of all existences (of all things that have become), and even though he does works, he is not involved in them.” He knows that the actions are not his, but Nature’s and by that very knowledge he is free; he has renounced works, does no actions, though actions are done through him; he becomes the Self, the Brahman, brahmabhūta, he sees all existences as becomings5·24 (bhūtāni) of that self-existent Being, his own only one of them, all their actions as only the development of cosmic Nature working through their individual nature and his own actions also as a part of the same cosmic activity. This is not the whole teaching of the Gita; for as yet there is only the idea of the immutable self or Purusha, the Akshara Brahman, and of Nature, Prakriti, as that which is responsible for the cosmos and not yet the idea, clearly expressed, of the Ishwara, the Purushottama; as yet only the synthesis of works and knowledge and not yet, in spite of certain hints, the introduction of the supreme element of devotion which becomes so important afterwards; as yet only the one inactive Purusha and the lower Prakriti and not yet the distinction of the triple Purusha and the double Prakriti. It is true the Ishwara is spoken of, but his relation to the self and nature is not yet made definite. The first six chapters only carry the synthesis so far as it can be carried without the clear expression and decisive entrance of these all-important truths which, when they come in, must necessarily enlarge and modify, though without abolishing, these first reconciliations.
The Vedantic idea of knowledge does not present the same difficulties. The Gita takes it over at once and completely and throughout the six chapters quietly substitutes the still immutable Brahman of the Vedantins, the One without a second immanent in all cosmos, for the still immutable but multiple Purusha of the…Read the whole passage · 552 wordsClose the passage
The Vedantic idea of knowledge does not present the same difficulties. The Gita takes it over at once and completely and throughout the six chapters quietly substitutes the still immutable Brahman of the Vedantins, the One without a second immanent in all cosmos, for the still immutable but multiple Purusha of the Sankhyas. It accepts throughout these chapters knowledge and realisation of the Brahman as the most important, the indispensable means of liberation, even while it insists on desireless works as an essential part of knowledge. It accepts equally5·24 Nirvana of the ego in the infinite equality of the immutable, impersonal Brahman as essential to liberation; it practically identifies this extinction with the Sankhya return of the inactive immutable Purusha upon itself when it emerges out of identification with the actions of Prakriti; it combines and fuses the language of the Vedanta with the language of the Sankhya, as had already indeed been done by certain of the Upanishads. But still there is a defect in the Vedantic position which has to be overcome. We may, perhaps, conjecture that at this time the Vedanta had not yet redeveloped the later theistic tendencies which in the Upanishads are already present as an element, but not so prominent as in the Vaishnava philosophies of the later Vedantins where they become indeed not only prominent but paramount. We may take it that the orthodox Vedanta was, at any rate in its main tendencies, pantheistic at the basis, monistic at the summit. It knew of the Brahman, one without a second; it knew of the Gods, Vishnu, Shiva, Brahma and the rest, who all resolve themselves into the Brahman; but the one supreme Brahman as the one Ishwara, Purusha, Deva—words often applied to it in the Upanishads and justifying to that extent, yet passing beyond the Sankhya and the theistic conceptions—was an idea that had fallen from its pride of place; the names could only be applied in a strictly logical Brahmavada to subordinate or inferior phases of the Brahman-idea. The Gita proposes not only to restore the original equality of these names and therefore of the conceptions they indicate, but to go a step farther. The Brahman in its supreme and not in any lower aspect has to be presented as the Purusha with the lower Prakriti for its Maya, so to synthetise thoroughly Vedanta and Sankhya, and as Ishwara, so to synthetise thoroughly both with Yoga; but the Gita is going to represent the Ishwara, the Purushottama, as higher even than the still15·17 and immutable Brahman, and the loss of ego in the impersonal comes in at the beginning as only a great initial and necessary step towards union with the Purushottama. For the Purushottama is the supreme Brahman. It therefore passes boldly beyond the Veda and the Upanishads as they were taught by their best authorised exponents and affirms a teaching of its own which it has developed from them, but which may not be capable of being fitted in within the four corners of their meaning as ordinarily interpreted by the Vedantins. In fact without this free and synthetic dealing with the letter of the Scripture a work of large synthesis in the then state of conflict between numerous schools and with the current methods of Vedic exegesis would have been impossible.
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 mark of this status is the supreme peace of a calm self-extinction, śāntiṁ nirvāṇa-paramām, and, as if to make it quite clear that it is not the Buddhist’s Nirvana in a blissful negation of being, but the Vedantic loss of a partial in a perfect being that it intends, the Gita uses always the phrase brahma-nirvāṇa, extinction in the Brahman; and the Brahman here certainly seems to mean the Immutable, to denote primarily at least the inner timeless Self withdrawn from active participation even though immanent in the externality of Nature. We have to see then what is the drift of the Gita here, and especially whether this peace is the peace of an absolute inactive cessation, whether the self-extinction in the Akshara means the absolute excision of all knowledge and consciousness of the Kshara and of all action in the Kshara. We are accustomed indeed to regard Nirvana and any kind of existence and action in the world as incompatible and we might be inclined to argue that the use of the word is by itself sufficient and decides the question. But if we look closely at Buddhism, we shall doubt whether the absolute incompatibility really existed even for the Buddhists; and if we look closely at the Gita, we shall see that it does not form part of this supreme Vedantic teaching.5·24–26, 6·15, 2·72
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
The first calm that comes is of the nature of peace, the absence of all unquiet, grief and disturbance. As the equality becomes more intense, it takes on a fuller substance of positive happiness and spiritual ease. This is the joy of the spirit in itself, dependent on nothing external for its absolute existence, nirāśraya, as the Gita describes it, antaḥ-sukho antarārāmaḥ, an exceeding inner happiness, brahmasaṁsparśam atyantaṁ sukham aśnute. Nothing can disturb it, and it extends itself to the soul’s view of outward things, imposes on them too the law of this quiet spiritual joy. For the base of it is still calm, it is an even and tranquil neutral joy, ahaituka. And as the supramental light grows, a greater Ananda comes, the base of the abundant ecstasy of the spirit in all it is, becomes, sees, experiences and of the laughter of the Shakti doing luminously the work of the Divine and taking his Ananda in all the worlds.
Record of Yoga
योऽन्तःसुखोऽन्तरारामस्तथांतज्योतिरेव यः । स योगी ब्रह्मनिर्वाणं ब्रह्मभूतोऽधिगच्छति ।। लभंते ब्रह्मनिर्वाणमृषयः क्षीणकल्मषाः । छिन्नद्वैधा यतात्मानः सर्वभूतहिते रताः ।।
There is a distinct advance towards the universalisation of chidghana-shuddhananda & the sense of universal divine beauty in place of shuddha ahaituka ananda and the sense of natural beauty. If this is established, the अंतःसुखोऽन्तरारामः will be complete.
Antahsukha & antararama are therefore well founded, but antarjyotih is only beginning. It cannot be complete except by complete conversion of manas into vijnana.
Antarjyoti may now be considered as established. Brahma-bhava is growing, but has to be made more vivid & steady.
Evening talks
Sri Aurobindo: Why is he particular about the Non-Being? You arrive at the Non-Being by following the negative path. That is to say, when you start from mind, I mean spiritual mind, you come or open yourself to the experience of Nirvana. This Nirvana is the negation of all that the mind can affirm as the Being but it is only a gate of entry into the Absolute. From this Nirvana you can either take up the negative or the affirmative path. By the negative you reach the Non-Being or what the Gita calls _anirdeshyam_ (the Indeterminate). This Non-Being is the Buddhist Nirvana or the Chinese Tao. The Buddhists consider it as Shunya, the Void, while to the Taoists this Void contains everything. Again, this Nirvana is not the same as the Brahmanirvana of the Gita.
