THIRTEENTH CHAPTER

THE FIELD AND ITS KNOWER

1. Arjuna¹ said: Prakriti and Purusha, the Field and the Knower of the Field, Knowledge and the object of Knowledge, these I fain would learn, 0 Keshava.

2. The Blessed Lord said: This body,² 0 son of Kunti, is called the Field; that which takes cognizance of the Field is called the Knower of the Field by the sages.

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1 Arjuna has been asked to do divine work as the instrument of the divine Will in the cosmos. As a pragmatic and practical man he asks to learn the actual difference between Purusha and Prakriti, the Field of being and the Knower of the Field, so important for the practice of desireless action under the drive of the divine Will. How does this way practically affect the great object of spiritual life, the rising from the lower into the higher nature, from mortal into immortal being ?

The Gita in its last six chapters, in order to found on a clear and complete knowledge the way of the soul's rising out of the lower into the divine nature, restates in another form the enlightenment the Teacher has already imparted to Arjuna. Essentially it is the same knowledge, but details and relations are now made prominent and assigned their entire significance, thoughts and truths brought out in their full value that were alluded to only in passing or generally stated in the light of another purpose.

2 It is evident from the definitions that succeed that it is not the physical body alone which is the Field (kshetra), but all too that the body supports, the working of nature, the mentality, the natural action of the objectivity and subjectivity of our

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3. Understand Me as the Knower of the Field in all¹ Fields, 0 Bharata; it is the knowledge at once of the Field and its Knower which is the real illumination and only wisdom.

4. What² that Field is and what are its character, nature, source, deformations, and what He is and what His powers, hear that now briefly from Me.

5. It has been sung by the Rishis³ in manifold ways in various inspired verses; and also by the Brahma

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being.* This wider body too is only the individual field; there is a larger, a universal, a world-body, a world-field of the same Knower. For in each embodied creature there is this one Knower,

*The Upanishad speaks of a fivefold body or sheath of Nature, a physical, vital, mental, ideal and divine body; this may be regarded as the totality of the Field, kshetra,

1 The world exists to us as it is seen in our single mind ; even this seemingly small embodied consciousness can so enlarge itself that it contains in itself the whole universe, atmani vishva- darshanam. But, physically, it is a microcosm in a macrocosm, and the macrocosm too, the large world too, is a body and field inahabited by the spiritual knower.

2 From the description which follows it becomes evident that it is the whole working of the lower Prakriti that is meant by the kshetra. That totality is the field of action of the embodied spirit here within us, the field of which it takes cognizance.

3 For a varied and detailed knowledge of all this world of Nature in its essential action as seen from the spiritual point of view we are referred to the Veda and Upanishads and to the Brahma Sutras. The Gita contents itself with a brief practical statement of the lower nature of our being in the terms of the Sankhya thinkers.

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Sutras which give us the rational and philosophic analysis.

6. The indiscriminate unmanifest Energy; the five elemental states of matter; the ten senses
and the one (mind), intelligence and ego; the five objects of the senses. (This is the constitution of the. kshetra.)

7. Liking and disliking, pleasure1 and pain (these are the principal deformations of the kshetra); consciousness,² collocation, persistence; these,³ briefly described, constitute the Field and its deformations.

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1 From the Vedantic point of view we may say that pleasure and pain are the vital or sensational deformations given by the lower energy to the spontaneous Ananda or delight, of the spirit when brought into contact with her workings. These dualities are the positive and negative terms in which the ego soul of the lower nature enjoys the universe.

2 There is a general consciousness that first informs and then illumines the Energy in its works; there is a faculty of that consciousness by which the Energy holds together the relations of objects; there is too a continuity, a persistence of the subjective and objective relations of our consciousness with its objects. These are the necessary powers of the field; all these are common and universal powers at once of the mental, vital and physical Nature.

3 All these things taken together constitute the fundamental character of our first transactions with the world of Nature, but it is evidently not the whole description of our being ;\\. is our actuality but not the limit of our possibilities. There is something beyond to be known, jneyam, and it is when the knower of the field turns from the field itself to learn of himself within it and of all that is behind its appearances that real knowledge begins, jnanam,—the true knowledge of the field no less than of the knower. For both soul and nature are the Brahman, but the true truth of the world of Nature can only be discovered by the liberated sage who possesses also the truth of

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8. A total absence of wordly pride and arrogance harmlessness, a candid soul, a tolerant, long-suffering and benignant heart, purity of mind and body, tranquil firmness and steadfastness, self-control and a masterful government of the lower nature and the heart's worship given to the Teacher.¹

9-10. A firm removal of the natural being's attraction to the objects of the senses, a radical freedom from egoism, absence of clinging to the attachment and absorption of family and home, a keen perception of the defective nature of the ordinary life of physical man with its aimless and painful subjection to birth and death and disease and age, a constant equalness to all pleasant or unpleasant happenings.²

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the Spirit. One Brahman, one reality in Self and Nature is the object of all knowledge.

The Gita then tells us what is the spiritual knowledge or rather it tells us what are the conditions of knowledge, the marks, the signs of the man whose soul is turned towards the inner wisdom. First, there comes a certain moral condition, a sattwic government of the natural being.

1 Whether to the divine Teacher within or to the human Master in whom the divine Wisdom is embodied,—for that is the sense of the reverence given to the Guru.

Then there is a nobler and freer attitude of perfect detachment and equality.

2 For the soul is seated within and impervious to the shocks of external events.

Finally, there is a strong turn within towards the thing5 that really matter.

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11-I2. A meditative mind turned towards solitude and away from the vain noise of crowds and the assemblies of men, a philosophic perception of the true sense and large principles of existence, a tranquil continuity of inner spiritual knowledge and light, the Yoga of an unswerving devotion, love of God, the heart's deep and .constant adoration of t he universal and eternal Presence; that is declared to be the knowledge; all against it is ignorance.

13. I will declare the one object to which the mind of spiritual knowledge must be turned, by fixity in which the soul clouded here recovers and enjoys its nature and original consciousness of immortality,¹ — the eternal supreme Brahman² called neither Sat (existence) nor Asat (non-existence).

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1 The soul, when it allows itself to be tyrannised over by the appearances of Nature, misses itself and goes whirling about in the cycle of the births and deaths of its bodies. There, passionately following without end the mutations of personality and its interests, it cannot draw back to the possession of its impersonal and unborn self-existence. To be able to do that is to find oneself and get back to one's true being, that which assumes these births but does not perish with the perishing of its forms. To enjoy the eternity to which birth and life are only outward circumstances, is the soul's true immortality and transcendence.

2 That Eternal or that Eternity is the Brahman. Brahman is That which is transcendent and That which is universal: u is the free spirit who supports in front the play of soul with nature and assures behind their imperishable oneness; it is at once the mutable and the immutable, the All that is the One. In his highest supracosmic status Brahman is a transcendent Eternity without origin or change far above the phenomenal opposition between which the outward world moves. But once seen in the substance and light of this eternity, the world also becomes other than it seems to the mind and senses; for then

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14. His hands and feet are on every side of us, his heads and eyes and faces are those innumerable visages which we see wherever we turn, his ear is everywhere, he immeasurably fills and surrounds all this world with himself, he is the universal Being in whose embrace we live.

15. All¹ the senses and their qualities reflect him but he is without any senses; he is unattached, yet all-supporting; he is enjoyer of the gunas, though not limited by them.

16. That which is in us is he and all that we experience outside ourselves is he. The inward and the outward, the far and the near, the moving and the unmoving, all this he is at once. He is the subtlety of the subtle which is beyond our knowledge.

17. He is indivisible and the One, but seems-to divide himself in forms and creatures and appears as all

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we see the universe no longer as a whirl of mind and life and matter or a mass of the determinations of energy and sub- stance, but as no other than this eternal Brahman.

l All relations of Soul and Nature are circumstances in the eternity of Brahman; sense and quality, their reflectors and constituents, are this supreme Soul's devices for the presentation of the workings that his own energy in things constantly liberates into movement. He is himself beyond the limitation of the senses, sees all things but not with the physical eye, hears all things but not with the physical ear, is aware of all things but not with the limiting mind—mind which represents but cannot truly know.

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the separate existences. All things are eternally born from him, upborne in his eternity, taken eternally back into his oneness.

18. He is the light of all lights and luminous beyond all the darkness of our ignorance. He is know- ledge¹ and the object of knowledge. He is seated in the hearts ² of all.

19. Thus the Field, Knowledge and the Object of Knowledge, have been briefly told. My devotee, thus knowing,³ attains to My bhava (the divine being and divine nature).

20. Know thou that Purusha (the Soul) and Prakriti (Nature) are both without origin and

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1 The spiritual supramental knowledge that floods the illumined mind and transfigures it is this spirit manifesting himself in light to the force-obscured soul which he has put forth into the action of Nature.

. 2 This eternal Light is in the heart of every being; it is he who is the secret knower of the field, kshetrajna, and presides as the Lord in the heart of things over this province and over all these kingdoms of his manifested becoming and action.

. 3 When man sees this eternal and universal Godhead within himself, when he becomes aware of the soul in all things and discovers the spirit in Nature, when he feels all the universe as a wave mounting in this Eternity and all that is as the one the existence he puts on the light of Goddhead and stands free in perfect of the wor Nature. A divine knowledge and a great turning with adoration to this Divine is the secret of the great spiritual liberation. Freedom, love and spiritual know- s raise us from mortal nature to immortal being.

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eternal¹ ; but the modes of Nature and the lower forms she assumes to our conscious experience have an origin in Prakriti (in the transactions of these two entities).

21. The cham² of cause and effect and the state of being the doer are created by Prakriti; Purusha enjoys pleasure and pain.

22. Purusha involved³ in Prakriti enjoys the qualities born of Prakriti; attachment to the qualities is the cause of his birth in good and evil wombs.

23. Witness, source of the consent, upholder of the work of Nature, her enjoyer, almighty Lord and

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1 The Soul and Nature are only two aspects of the eternal Brahman, an apparent duality which founds the operations of his universal existence. These operations, the modes of Nature and their derivative formations, constantly change and the Soul and Nature seem to change with them, but in themselves these two powers are eternal and always the same.

2 Nature creates and acts, the Soul enjoys her creation and action; but in this inferior form of her action she turns this enjoyment into the obscure and petty figures of pain and pleasure.

3 Forcibly the soul, the individual Purusha, is attracted by her qualitative workings and this attraction of her qualities draws him constantly to births of all kinds in which he enjoys the variation and vicissitudes, the good and evil of birth in Nature.

But this is only the outward experience of the soul mutable in conception by identification with mutable Nature. Seated in this body is her and our Divinity, the supreme Self, Paramatman, the supreme Soul, Para Purusha.

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supreme Self is the Supreme Soul¹ seated in this body.

24. He who thus knows Purusha and Prakriti with her qualities, howsoever he lives and acts, he shall not be born again.

25. This knowledge comes by an inner meditation through which the eternal Self becomes apparent to us in our self-existence. Or it comes by the Yoga of the Sankhyas (the separation of the soul from nature). Or it comes by the Yoga of works.²

26. Others, who are ignorant of these paths of Yoga, may hear of the truth from others and mould the mind into the sense of that to which it listens with faith and concentration. But however arrived at, it carries us beyond death to immortality.

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1 That is the self-knowledge to which we have to accustom our mentality before we can truly know ourselves as an eternal portion of the Eternal. Once that is fixed, no matter how the soul in us may comport itself outwardly in its transactions with Nature, whatever it may seem to do or however it may seem to assume this or that figure of personality and active force and embodied ego, it is in itself free, no longer bound to birth because one through impersonality of self with the inner unborn spirit of existence. That impersonality is our union with the supreme egoless I of all that is in cosmos.

2 In which the personal will is dissolved through the opening up of our mind and heart and all our active forces to the Lord who assumes to himself the whole of our works in nature.

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27. Whatever ¹ being, moving or unmoving, is born, know thou, 0 best of the Bharatas, that it is from the union between the Field and the Knower of the Field

28. Seated equally in all beings, the supreme Lord unperishing within the perishing—he who thus sees, he sees.²

29. Perceiving the equal Lord as the spiritual inhabitant in all forces, in all things and in all beings, he does not injure himself (by casting his being into the hands of desire and passions), and thus he attains to the supreme status.

30. He who sees that all action is verily done by Prakriti, and that the Self is the inactive witness, he sees.

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1 The whole of existence must be regarded as a field of the soul's construction and action in the midst of Nature. All life, all works are a transaction between the soul and Nature.

2 Knowledge shows us high above the mutable transactions of the soul with the mortality of nature our highest Self as the supreme Lord of her actions, one and equal in all objects and creatures, not born in the taking up of a body, not subject to death in the perishing of all these bodies. That is the true seeing, the seeing of that in us which is eternal and immortal. As we perceive more and more this equal spirit in all things, we pass into that equality of the spirit; as we dwell more and more in this universal being, we become ourselves universal beings; as we grow more and more aware of this eternal, we put on our own eternity and are for ever. We identify ourselves with the eternity of the self and no longer with the limitation and distress of our mental and physical ignorance.

Then we see that all our works are an evolution and operation of Nature and our real self not the executive doer, but the free witness and lord and unattached enjoyer of the action.

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31. When he perceives the diversified¹ existence of beings abiding in the one eternal Being, and spread- ing forth from it, then he attains to Brahman.

32. Because it is without origin and eternal, not limited by the qualities, the imperishable supreme Self, though seated in the body, 0 Kaunteya, does not² act, nor is affected.

33. As the all-pervading ether ³ is not affected by reason of its subtlety, so seated everywhere in the body, the Self is not affected.

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1 All this surface of cosmic movement is a diverse becoming of natural existences in the one eternal Being, all is extend- ed, manifested, rolled out by the universal Energy from the seeds of her Idea deep in his existence; but the spirit even though It takes up and enjoys her workings in this body of ours, is not affected by its mortality.

2 It does not act even in action kartaram api akartaram, because it supports natural action in a perfect spiritual freedom from its effects, it is the originator indeed of all activities, but in no way changed or affected by the play of its Nature.

3 As the ether is not affected or changed by the multiple forms it assumes, but remains always the same pure subtle original substance, even so this spirit when it has done and become all possible things, remains through it all the same pure immutable subtle infinite essence. That is the supreme status of the soul, para gatih, that is the divine being and nature, wadbhava, and whoever arrives at spiritual knowledge, rises to that supreme immortality of the Eternal.

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34. As the one sun illumines the entire earth, so the Lord¹ of the Field illumines the entire Field, 0 Bharata.

35. They who with the eye of knowledge perceive this difference between the Field and the Knower of the Field and the liberation of beings from Prakriti, they attain to the Supreme.

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1 This Brahman, this eternal and spiritual knower of the field of his own natural becoming, this Nature, his perpetual energy, which converts herself into that field, this immortality of the soul in mortal nature,—these things together make the whole reality of our existence. The spirit within, when we turn to it, illumines the entire field of Nature with his own truth in all the splendour of its rays. In the light of that sun of know- ledge the eye of knowledge opens in us and we live in that truth and no longer in this ignorance. Then we perceive that our limitation to our present mental and physical nature was an error of the darkness, then we are liberated from the law of the lower Prakriti, the law of the mind and body, then we attain to the supreme nature of the spirit. That splendid and lofty change is the last, the divine and infinite becoming, the putting off of mortal nature, the putting on of an immortal existence.

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