EIGHTH CHAPTER

THE SUPREME DIVINE

(In the last two slokas of the seventh chapter we have certain expressions which give us in their brief sum the chief essential truths of the manifestation of the supreme Divine in the cosmos. All the originative and effective aspects of it are there, all that concerns the soul in its return to integral self-knowledge. First, there is that Brahman, tad brahma; adhyatma, second, the principle of the self in nature; adhibhutao and adhidaiva next, the objective phenomenon and subjective phenomenon of being; adhiyajna last, the secret of the cosmic principle of works and sacrifice. I, the Purushottama (maw viduh}, says in effect Krishna, I who am above all these 'things, must yet be sought and known through all together and by means of their relations,—that is the only complete way for the human consciousness which is seeking its path back towards Me. But these terms in themselves are not at first quite clear or at least they are open to different interpretations, they have to be made precise in their connotation, and Arjuna the disciple at once asks for their elucidation. Krishna answers very briefly,—nowhere does the Gita linger very long upon any purely metaphysical explanation; it gives only so much and in such a way as will make their truth just seizable for the soul to proceed on ; to experience.)

1. Arjuna said: What is tad brahma, what adhy-atma, what karma, O Purushottam? And what is declared to be adhibhuta, what is called adhidaiva?

Page 125

2. What is adhiyajna in this body, O Madhusudana? And how, in the critical moment of departure from physical existence, art Thou to be known by the self-controlled?

3. The Blessed Lord said: The Akshara is the supreme Brahman: swabhava is called adhyatama; Karma is the name given to the creative movement, visarga, which brings into existence all beings and their subjective and objective states. ¹

4. Adhibhuta is ksharobhava, adhidaiva is the Purusha; I myself am the Lord of sacrifice, adhiyajna here in the body, 0 best of embodied beings.

__________________________________________

l. Here we find the universal principles enumerated. By that Brahman, a phrase which in the Upanishads is more than once used for tlie self-existent as opposed to the phenomenal being, the Gita intends, it appears, the immutable self-existence which is the highest self-expression of the Divine and on whose unalterable eternity all the rest, all that moves and evolves, is founded, aksharam paramam. By adhyatma it means swabhava, the spiritual way and law of being of the soul in the supreme Nature. Karma, it says, is the name given to the creative impulse and energy, visarga, which looses out things from this first essential self-becoming, this swabhava, and effects, creates, works out under its influence the cosmic becoming of existences in Prakriti. By adhibhuta is to be understood all the result of mutable becoming, Ksharobhava. By adhidaiva is intended the Purusha, the soul in Nature, the subjective being who observes and enjoys as the object of his consciousness all that is this mutable becoming of his essential existence worked out here by Karma in Nature. By adhiyajna, the Lord .of works and sacrifice, I mean, says Krishna, myself, the Divine, the Godhead, the Purushottama here secret in the body of all these embodied existences. All that is, therefore, falls within this formula.

Page 126

5. Whoever leaves his body and departs remembering Me at his time of end, comes to my bhava (that of ¦the Purushottama, my status of being); there is no I doubt of that.

6 Whosoever at the end ^l abandons the body, "thinking upon any form of being, to that form he attains, 0 Kaunteya, into which the soul was at each moment growing inwardly during the physical life.

7. Therefore at all times remember me and fight; for if thy mind and thy understanding are always fixed * on and given up to Me, to Me thou shalt surely come.

_________________________________________

1 Man, born into the world, revolves between world and world in the action of Prakriti and Karma. Purusha in Prakriti is his formula: what the soul in him thinks, contem- plates and acts that always he becomes. All that he had been, determined his present birth; and all that he is, thinks, does in this life up to the moment of his death, determines what he will become in the worlds beyond and in lives yet to be. If birth is a becoming, death also is a becoming, not by any means a cessation. The body is abandoned, but the soul goes on its way, tyakfwa kalevaram. Much then depends on what he is at the critical moment of his departure. But it is not a death-bed remembrance at variance with or insufficiently prepared by the whole tenor of our life and our past subjectivity that can have this saving power. The thought of the Gita here is not on a par with the indulgences and facilities of popular religion; it has nothing in common with the crude fancies that make the absolution and last unction of the priest an edifying "Christian" death after an unedifying, profane life or the precaution or accident of a death in sacred Benares or holy Ganges a sufficient machinery of salvation. The divine subjective becoming on which the mind has to be fixed firmly in the moment of the physical death, must have been one into which the soul was at each moment growing inwardly during the physical life.

Page 127

8. For it is by thinking always of him with a consciousness united with him in an undeviating Yoga of constant practice that one comes to the divine and supreme Purusha, 0 Partha.

9-10. This supreme Self is the Seer, ¹ the Ancient of Days, subtler than the subtle and (in his eternal self- vision and wisdom) the Master and Ruler of all existence who sets in their place in his being all things that are; his form is unthinkable, he is refulgent as the sun beyond the darkness; he who thinketh upon this Purusha in the time of departure, with motionless mind, a soul armed with the strength of Yoga, a union with God in bhakti ² and the life-force entirely drawn up and set between the brows in the seat of mystic vision, he attains to this supreme divine Purusha.

11 This supreme Soul ³ is the immutable self- existent Brahman of whom the Veda-knowers speak,

____________________________________________

1. We arrive here at the first description of this supreme Purusha,—the Godhead who is even more and greater than the-- Immutable and to whom the Gita gives subsequently the name of Purushottama. He too in his timeless eternity is immutable and far beyond all this manifestation and here in Time there dawn on us only faint glimpses of his being conveyed through many varied symbols and disguises, avyakto aksharah. Still he is not merely a featureless or indiscernible existence, anirde- shyam; or he is indiscernible only because he is subtler than the last subtlety of which the mind is aware and because the form of the Divine is beyond our thought.

2 The union by love is not here superseded by the featureless unification through knowledge, it remains to the end a part of the supreme force of the Yoga.

3 That eternal reality is the highest step, place, foothold of being (Radam); therefore is it the supreme goal of the soul's

Page 128

and this is that into which the doers of askesis enter when they have passed beyond the affections of the mind of mortality and for the desire of which they practise the control of the bodily passions; that status I will declare to thee with brevity.

12-13. All the "doors of the senses closed, the mind shut in into the heart, the life-force taken up out of its diffused movement into the head, the intelligence con- centrated in the utterance of the sacred syllable OM and its conceptive thought in the remembrance of the supreme Godhead, he who goes forth, abandoning the [ body, he attains to the highest status. ¹

14. He who continually remembers Me, thinking of none else, the Yogin, 0 Partha, who is in constant union with Me, finds Me easy to attain.

15. Having come to me, these great souls come not again to birth, this transient and painful condition

_________________________________________

movement in Time, itself no movement but a status original, sempiternal and supreme, paramam sthanam adyam.

1. The Gita describes the last state of the mind of the Yogin m which he passes from life through death to this supreme divine existence. This is the established Yogic way of going, a last offering up of the whole being to the Eternal, the-Transcendent. But still that is only a process; the essential condition is the constant undeviating memory of the Divine in the, even in action and battle—mam anusmara yudhya cha—and the turning of the whole act of living into an uninterrupted "Yoga, nitya-yoga.

Page 129

of our mortal being; they reach the highest perfection.¹

16. The highest heavens of the cosmic plan are subject to a return to rebirth, but, 0 Kaunteya, there is no rebirth imposed on the soul that comes to Me (the Purushottama).

17. Those who know the day ² of Brahma, a thousand ages (Yugas) in duration, and the night, a thousand ages in ending, they are the knowers of day and night.

18. At the coming of the Day all manifestations are born into being out of the unmanifest, at the coming of the Night all vanish or are dissolved into it.

1 The condition to which the soul arrives when it thus departs from life is supracosmic. Therefore whatever fruit can be had from the aspiration of knowledge to the indefinable Brahman, is acquired also by this other and comprehensive aspiration through knowledge, works and love to the self-existent Godhead who is the Master of works and the Friend of-. mankind and of all beings. To know him so and so to seek him does not bind to rebirth or to the chain of Karma; the soul can satisfy its desire to escape permanently from the transient and painful condition of our mortal being. And the Gita here, in order to make more precise to the mind this circling round of births and the escape from it, adopts the ancient theory of the cosmic cycles which became a fixed part of Indian cosmological notions.

2 There is an eternal cycle of alternating periods of cosmic manifestation and non-manifestation, each period called respectively a day and a night of the creator Brahma, each of equal length in Time, the long aeon of his working which "endures for a thousand ages, the long aeon of his sleep of another thousand silent ages.

Page 130

19. This multitude of existences helplessly comes into the becoming again and again, is dissolved at the P coming of the Night, 0 Partha, and is born into being
" at the coming of the Day.

20. But this unmanifest is not the original divinity of the Being; there is another status of his existence, a supracosmic unmanifest beyond this cosmic non- manifestation (which is eternally self-seated, is not an opposite of this cosmic status of manifestation but far above and unlike it, changeless, eternal), not forced to perish with the perishing of all these existences.

21. He is called the unmanifest immutable, him they speak of as the supreme soul and status, and those who attain to him return¹ not; that is my supreme place of being.

__________________________________________

1 For the soul attaining to it has escaped out of the cycle of cosmic manifestation and non-manifestation.

Whether we entertain or we dismiss this cosmological notion,—which depends on the value we are inclined to assign to the knowledge of " the knowers of day and night,"—the important thing is the turn the Gita gives to it. One might easily imagine that this eternally unmanifested Being whose status seems to have nothing to do with the manifestation or the non-manifestation, must be the ever undefined and indefinable Absolute, and the proper way to reach him is to get rid of all that we have become in the manifestation, not to carry up to it our whole inner consciousness in a combined concentration of the mind's knowledge, the heart's love, the Yogic will, the vital life-force. Especially, bhakti seems inapplicable to the Absolute who is void of every relation, avyavaharya. But the Gita insists in the next sloka that although this condition is supracosmic and although it is eternally unmanifest, still that supreme Purusha has to be won by bhakti.

Page 131

22. But that supreme Purusha has to be won by a bhakti which turns to him alone in whom all beings exist and by whom all this world has been extended in space.

23. That tirne¹ wherein departing Yogins do not return, and also that wherein departing they return, that time shall I declare to thee, 0 foremost of the Bharatas.

__________________________________________

In other words, the supreme Purusha is not an entirely relationless Absolute aloof from our illusions, but he is the Seer, Creator and Ruler of the worlds, kavim amishasitaram, dhataram, and it is by knowing and by loving Him as the One and the All, vasudevah sarvam iti, that we ought by a union with him of our whole conscious being in all things, all energies, all actions to seek the supreme consummation, the perfect perfection, the absolute release.

Then there comes a more curious thought which the Gita has adopted from the mystics of the early Vedanta. It gives the different times at which the Yogin has to leave his body according as he wills to seek rebirth or to avoid it.

1 Whatever psycho-physical fact or else symbolism there may be behind this notion, *—it comes down from the age of the mystics who saw in every physical thing an effective symbol of the psychological and who traced everywhere an interaction and a sort of identity of the outward with the inward, light and knowledge, the fiery principle and the spiritual energy,—we need observe only the turn by which the Gita closes the passage; " Therefore at all times be in Yoga. '

(* Yogic experience shows in fact that there is a real psycho- physical truth, not indeed absolute in its application, behind this idea, vis, that in the inner struggle between

page 132

24-25. Fire and light and smoke or mist, the day and the night, the bright fortnight of the lunar month and the dark, the northern solstice and the southern, these are the opposites. By the first in each pair the knowers of the Brahman go to the Brahman; but by the second the Yogin reaches the 'lunar light" and returns subsequently to human birth.

26. These are the bright and the dark paths (called the path of the gods and the path of the fathers in the Upanishads); by the one he departs who does not return, by the other he who returns again.

___________________________________________

the powers of the Light and the powers of the Darkness, the former tend to have a natural prevalence in the bright periods of the day or the year, the latter in the dark periods, and this balance may last until the fundamental victory is won.)

For that is after all the essential, to make the whole being one with the Divine, so entirely and in all ways one as to be naturally and constantly fixed in union, and thus to make all living, not only thought and meditation, but action, labour, battle, a remembering of God. "Remember me and fight," means not to lose the ever-present thought of the Eternal for one single moment in the clash of the temporal which normally absorbs our minds, and that seems sufficiently difficult, almost impossible. It is entirely possible indeed only if the other conditions are satisfied. If we have become in our conscious- ness one self with all, one self which is always to our thought the Divine, and even our eyes and our other senses see and sense the Divine Being everywhere so that it is impossible for us at any time at all to feel or think of anything as that merely which the unenlightened sense perceives, but only as the Godhead at once concealed and manifested in that form, and if our will is one in consciousness with a supreme will and every act of will, of mind, of body is felt to come from it, to be its movement, instinct with it or identical, then what the Gita demands can be integrally done. The remembrance of the Divine Being becomes no longer an intermittent act of the mind, but the natural condition of our activities and in a way the very substance of the consciousness. The Jiva has become possessed on its right and natural, its spiritual relation to the Purushottama and all our life is a Yoga, an accomplished and yet an eternally self-accomplishing oneness.

Page 133

27. The Yogin who knows them is not misled into any error, therefore at all times be in Yoga, 0 Arjuna.

28. The fruit of meritorious deeds declared in the Vedas, sacrifices, austerities and charitable gifts, the Yogin passes all these by having known this and attains to the supreme and sempiternal status.

Page 134