TENTH CHAPTER

I. THE SUPREME WORD OF THE GITA

1. The Blessed Lord said: Again,¹ 0 mighty- armed, hearken to my supreme word, that I will speak to thee from my will for thy soul's good, now that thy heart is taking delight ² in me

2. Neither the gods nor the great Rishis know any birth ³ of Me, for I am altogether and in every way the origin ⁴ of the gods ⁵ and the great Rishis.

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1 The divine Avatar declares, in a brief reiteration of the upshot of all that he has been saying, that this and no other is his supreme word which he had promised to reveal.

2 This delight of the heart in God is the whole constituent and essence of true bhakti, hhajanti pntipwvakam; this is put as a condition for the further development by which the final command to action comes at last to be given to the human instrument, Arjuna. The supreme word of the Lord contains the declaration of a unified knowledge and bhakti as the supreme Yoga.

3 The Gita harmonises the pantheistic, the theistic and the highest transcendental terms of our spiritual conception and spiritual experience. The Divine is the unborn Eternal, the transcendental Being, who has no origin.

4 But at the same time the divine Transcendence is not a negation, nor is it an Absolute empty of all relation to the universe. All cosmic relations derive from this Supreme; all cosmic existences return to it and find in it alone their true and immeasurable existence.

5 The god are the great undying Powers and immortal Personalities who consciously inform, constitute, preside over the subjective and objective forces of the cosmos. The gods

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3. Whosoever knows Me as the Unborn, without origin, mighty Lord of the worlds ¹ and peoples, lives unbewlldered ² among mortals and is delivered ³ from all sin and evil.

4-5. Understanding and knowledge and freedom from the bewilderment of the Ignorance, forgiveness and truth and self-government and calm of inner control,

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are spiritual forms of the eternal and original Deity who descend from him into the many processes of the world. All their own existence, nature, power, process proceeds in every way, in every principle, in its every strand from the truth of the transcendent Ineffable.

1 The Supreme who becomes all creation, yet infinitely transcends it, is not a will-less cause aloof from his creation. He is the mighty lord of the worlds and peoples, and governs all not only from within but from above, from his supreme transcendence. This is the theistic seeing of the universe.

2 All the perplexity of man's mind and action, all the stumbling, insecurity and affliction of his mind can be. Traced back to the groping and bewildered cognition and volition natural to his sense-obscured mortal mind in the body, sammoha. But when lie sees the divine Origin of all things, when he looks steadily from the cosmic appearance to its transcendent Reality and back from that Reality to the appearance, he is then delivered from this bewilderment of the mind, will, heart and senses.

3 Assigning to everything its supernal and real and not any longer only its present and apparent value, he finds the hidden links and connections; he consciously directs all life and acts to their high and true object and governs them by the light and power which comes to him from the Godhead within him. Thus' he escapes from the wrong cognition, the wrong mental and volitional reaction, the wrong sensational reception and impulse •Which here originate sin and error and suffering.

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grief and pleasure, coming into being and destruction, fear and fearlessness, glory and ingloriousness, non-'injuring and equality, contentment and austerity and giving, all here in their separate diversities are subjective becomings ¹ of existences, and they all proceed from Me.²

6. The great Rishis, ³ the seven Ancients of the I world, and also the four Manus, ⁴ are my mental

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1.We must observe here the emphatic collocation of the ' three words from the verb bhu to become, bhavanti, 'bhavah, bhutanain. All existences are becomings of the Divine, bhutani; ail subjective states and movements are his and their psycho- logical becomings, bhavah. These even, our lesser subjective conditions and their apparent results no less than the highest spiritual states, are all becomings from the supreme Being,. bhavanti matta eva.

2 The theism of the Gita is no shrinking and gingerly theism afraid of the world's contradictions, but one which sees God as the omniscient and omnipotent, the sole original Being, who manifests in himself all, whatever it may be, good and evil, pain and pleasure, light and darkness as stuff of Ills own existence, and governs himself what in himself he has manifest- ed. Unaffected by its oppositions, unbound by his creation, exceeding, yet intimately related to this Nature and closely one with her creatures, their Spirit, Lord, Lover, Friend, Refuge, he is ever leading them from within them and from above through the mortal appearances of ignorance and suffering and sin and evil towards a supreme light and bliss and immortality and transcendence. This is the fullness of the liberating know- ledge, the character of which is emphasised in three separate verses of promise in this chapter, 3, 7 and 11

3 The great Rishis, called here as in the Veda the seven original Seers, are intelligence powers of that divine Wisdom which has evolved all things out of its own self-conscious infinitude, prajna purani— developed them down the range of the seven principles of its own essence.

4.Along with these are coupled the four eternal Man' is, the spiritual fathers of every human mind and body,—for the active a ure of the Godhead is fourfold * and humanity expresses this nature in its fourfold character. These also, as their name implies, are mental beings.

*In its aspects as Knowledge, Power, Harmony and Work.

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becomings; from them¹ are all these living creatures in the world.

7. Whosoever knows in its right principles this my pervading lordship² and this my Yoga, ³ unites himself to me by an untrembling ⁴ Yoga; of this there is no doubt.

8. I am the birth of everything and from Me⁵ all proceeds into development of action and movement; understanding thus, the wise adore Me in rapt emotion ⁶.

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1 These are the creators of all this life that depends on manifest or latent mind for its action; all are their children and offspring.

2 The wisdom of the liberated man is not, in the view of the Gita, a consciousness of abstracted and unrelated impersonality, a do-nothing quietude. His mind and soul are firmly settled in a constant sense, an integral feeling of the pervasion of the world by the actuating and directing presence of the divine Master of the universe.

3 He is av/are of his spirit's transcendence of the cosmic order, but he is aware also of his oneness with it by the divine Yoga. And he sees each aspect of the transcendent, the cosmic and the individual existence in its right relation to the supreme Truth and puts all in their right place in the unity of the divine Yoga.

* By this Yoga once perfected, undeviating and fixed, lie is able to take up whatever poise of nature, assume whatever human condition, do whatever world-action without any fall from his oneness with the divine Self, without any loss of his constant communion with the Master of existence.

5 God does not create out of a void, out of a Nihil or out of an unsubstantial matrix of dream. Out of himself he creates, in himself he becomes; all are in his being and all is of his being. This truth admits and exceeds the pantheistic seeing of things. Vasudeva is all, Vasudevah sarvam, but Vasudeva is all that appears in the cosmos because he is too all that does not appear in it, all that is never manifested.

6 This knowledge translated into the affective, emotional, temperamental plane becomes a calm love and intense adoration

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9. Their consciousness full of Me, their life wholly given up to Me, illumining each other, mutually talking about Me, they are ever contented and joyful.

10. To these who are thus in a constant union with Me, and adore Me with an intense delight of love,¹ I give the Yoga of understanding² by which they come to Me.

11.Out of compassion for them, I, lodged in their elf, lift the blazing lamp of knowledge and destroy ^he darkness which is born of the ignorance.

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of the original and ranscendental Godhead above us, the ever-present Master of all things here. God in man. God in Nature. It is at first a wisdom of the intelligence, the buddhi; but that is accompanied by a moved spiritualised state of the affective nature, bhava. This change of the heart and mind is the beginning of a total change of all the nature. A new inner birth and becoming prepares us for oneness with the supreme object of our love and adoration, madbhavava. here is an intense delight of love in the greatness and beauty and perfection of the divine Being now seen everywhere in the world and above it, priti. That deeper ecstasy assumes the place of the .scattered and external pleasure of the mind in existence or rather it draws all other delight into it and transforms by a marvellous alchemy the mind's and the heart's feelings and all sense movements.

1.From the moment that this inner state begins, even in the stage of imperfection, the Divine confirms it by the perfect Yoga of the will and intelligence. He uplifts the blazing lamp Knowledge within us, he destroys the ignorance of the separative mind and will, he stands revealed in the human spirit.

2.By the Yoga of the will and intelligence n founded on an illumined union of works and knowledge the transition was

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effected from our lower troubled mind-ranges to the immutable all of the witnessing Soul above the active nature. But now by this greater Yoga of the Buddhi founded on an illumined union of love and adoration with an all-comprehending know- ledge the soul rises in a vast ecstasy to the whole transcendental truth of the absolute and all-originating Godhead. The Eternal is fulfilled in the individual spirit and individual nature" the individual spirit is exalted from birth in time to the infinitudes of the Eternal.

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