FIFTEENTH CHAPTER

THE THREE PURUSHAS

1.. The Blessed Lord said: With its original source above (in the Eternal), its branches stretching below, the Ashwattha¹ is said to be eternal and imperishable; the leaves of it are the hymns of the Veda; he who knows it is the Veda-knower^.2

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1 Here is a description of cosmic existence in the Vedantic image of the Ashwattha tree.

2 The knowledge the Veda gives us is a knowledge of the gods, of the principles and powers of the cosmos, and its fruits are the fruits of a sacrifice which is offered with desire, fruits of enjoyment and lordship in the nature of the three worlds, in earth and heaven and the world between earth and heaven. The branches of this cosmic tree extend both below and above, below in the material, above in the supraphysica) planes; they grow by the gunas of Nature, for the triple guna is all the subject of the Vedas, traigimya-vishaya vedah. The Vedic rhythms are the leaves and the sensible objects of desire supremely gained by a right doing of sacrifice are the constant budding of the foliage. Man, therefore, so long as he enjoys the play of the gunas and is attached to desire, is held in the coils of Pravritti, in the movement of birth and action, turns about constantly between the earth and the middle planes and the heavens and is unable to get back to his supreme spiritual infinitudes. This was perceived by the sages. To achieve liberation they followed the path of Nivritti or cessation from the original urge to action, and the consummation of this way is the cessation of birth itself and a transcendent status in the highest supracosmic reach of the Eternal.

But for this purpose it is necessary to cut these long-fixed roots of desire by the strong sword of detachment.

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2. The branches of this cosmic tree extend both below and above (below in the material, above in the supraphysical planes), they grow by the gunas of Nature; the sensible objects are its foliage, downward here into the world of men it plunges its roots of attachment and desire with their consequences of an endlessly developing action.

3-4. The real form of it cannot be perceived by us in this material world of man's embodiment, nor its beginning nor its end, nor its foundation; having cut down this firmly rooted Ashwattha by the strong sword of detachment, one should seek for that highest goal whence, once having reached it, there is no compulsion of return to mortal life; I turn away (says the Vedantic verse) to seek that original Soul alone from whom proceeds the ancient sempiternal urge to action.

5. To be free from the bewilderment of this lower Maya, without egoism, the great fault of attachment conquered, all desires stilled, the duality of joy and grief cast away, always to be fixed in a pure spiritual consciousness, these are the steps of the way to that supreme Infinite.

6. There we find the timeless being which is not illumined by sun or moon or fire (but is itself the light of the presence of the eternal Purusha); having gone thither they return not; that is the highest eternal status¹ of My Being.

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1 But it would seem that this can be attained very well, best even, pre-eminently, directly, by the quiescence of Sannyasa

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7. It is an eternal portion¹ of Me that becomes the ]iva in the world of living creatures and cultivates the subjective powers of Prakriti, mind and the five senses.

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Its appointed path would seem to be the way of the Akshara, a complete renunciation of works and life, an ascetic seclusion, an ascetic inaction. Where is the room here, or at least where is the call, the necessity, for the command to action, and what has all this to do with the maintenance of the cosmic existence, lokasan- graha, the slaughter of Kurukshetra, the ways of the Spirit in Time, the vision of the million-bodied Lord and his high-voiced bidding, "Arise, slay the foe, enjoy a wealthy kingdom "? And what then is this soul in Nature ? This spirit, too, this Kshara, this enjoyer of our mutable existence is the Purushottama; it , is he in his eternal multiplicity, that is the Gita's answer.

! This is an epithet, a statement of immense bearing and consequence. For it means that each soul, each being in its spiritual reality is the very Divine, however partial its actual manifestation of him in Nature. And it means too, if words have any sense, that each manifesting spirit, each of the many, is an ' eternal individual, an eternal unborn undying power of the one Existence. We call this manifesting spirit the Jiva, because it appears here as if a living creature in a world of living creatures, and we speak of this spirit in man as the human soul and think of it in the terms of humanity only. But in truth it is something greater than its present appearance and not bound to its humanity: it was a lesser manifestation than the human in its past, it can become something much greater than mental man in its future. And when this soul rises above all ignorant limitation, then it puts on its divine nature of which its humanity is only a temporary veil, a thing of partial and incomplete significance, The individual spirit exists and ever existed beyond in the Eternal, for it is itself everlasting, sanatana. It B evidently this idea of the eternal individual which leads the .Gita to avoid any expression at all suggestive of a complete dissolution, layal and to 'speak father of the highest state tee soul as a dwelling in the Purushottama, nivasishvasi mayyeva.

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8. When the Lord¹ takes up this body (he brings in with him the mind and the senses) and in his going forth too (casting away the body) he goes taking them as the wind takes the perfumes from a vase.

9. The ear, the eye, the touch, the taste and the smell, using these and the mind also, he enjoys the objects of mind and sense as the indwelling and over- dwelling Soul.

10.. The deluded do not perceive him in his coming in and his going forth or in his staying and enjoying and assumption of quality; ² they perceive who have the eye of knowledge.

11.. The Yogins who strive, see the Lord in them-selves ; but though they strive to do so, the ignorant³

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1 This eternal individual is not other than or in any way really separate from the Divine Purusha. It is the Lord him- self, the Ishwara who by virtue of the eternal multiplicity of his oneness—is not all existence a rendering of that truth of the Infinite ?—exists for ever as the immortal soul within us and has taken up this body and goes forth from the transient frame- work when it is cast away to disappear into the elements of Nature. But the identity of the Lord and the soul in mutable Nature is hidden from us by outward appearance and lost in the. crowding mobile deceptions of that Nature. And those who allow themselves to be governed by the figures of Nature, the figure of humanity or any other form, will never see it, but will ignore and despise the Divine lodged in the human body.

2 They see only what is there visible to the mind and senses, not the greater truth which can only be glimpsed by the eye of knowledge.

3 Never can they have sight of him, even if they strive to do so, until they learn to put away the limitations of the outward consciousness and build in themselves their spiritual

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perceive Him not, as they are not formed in the spiritual mould.

12. The light of the sun that illumines all this world, that which is in the moon and in fire, that light know as from Me.

13. I have entered into this form of earth (and am the spirit of its material force) and sustain by My might these multitudes. I am the godhead of Soma who by the rasa (the sap in the earth-mother) nourishes all plants and trees.

14. I, having become the flame of life, sustain the physical body of living creatures, and united with Prana and Apana, digest, the four kinds¹ of food.*

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being, create for it, as it were, a form in their nature. Man, to know himself, must be kritatma, formed and complete in the spiritual mould, enlightened in the spiritual vision. The Yogins who have this eye of knowledge, see the Divine Being we are in their own endless reality, their own eternity of spirit. Illumined, they see the Lord in themselves and are delivered from the crude material limitation, from the form of mental personality, from the transient life formulation : they dwell immortal in the truth of the self and spirit. But they see him too not only in themselves, but in all the cosmos.

1 In other words, the Divine is at once the Soul of matter and the Soul of life and the Soul of mind as well as the Soul of the supramental light that is beyond mind and its limited reasoning intelligence.

*Namely, that which is chewed, that which is sucked, that which is licked and that which is drunk,

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15. I am lodged in the heart of all; from Me are memory and knowledge and their absence. And that which is known by all the Vedas (and by all forms of knowing) am I; and I indeed the knower of Veda and the maker of Vedanta.

16. There are two Purushas¹ (spiritual beings) in this world, the immutable (and impersonal) and the mutable (and personal); the mutable is all these existences, the Kutastha (the high-seated consciousness of the Brahmic status) is called the immutable.

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1.These two are the two spirits we see in the world; one emerges in front in its action, the other remains behind it steadfast in that perpetual silence from which the action comes and in which all actions cease and disappear into timeless being, Nirvana. The difficulty which baffles our intelligence is that these two seem to be irreconcilable opposites with no real nexus between them or any transition from the one to the other except by an intolerant movement of separation. The Kshara acts, or at least motives action, separately in the Akshara; the Akshara stands apart self-centred, separate in its inactivity from the Kshara. When we live in the mobility of the becoming, we may be aware of but hardly live in the immortality of timeless self-existence. And when we fix ourselves in timeless being,
Time and Space and circumstance fall away from us and begin to appear as a troubled dream in the Infinite. The most persuasive conclusion would be, at first sight, that the mobility of the spirit in Nature is an illusion, a thing real only when we live in it, but not real in essence, and that is why, when we go back into self, it falls away from our incorruptible essence. That is the familiar cutting of the knot of the riddle, Brahma satyam jaganmithya.

The Gita does not take refuge in this explanation which has enormous difficulties of its own, besides its failure to account for the illusion,—for it only says that it is all a mysterious and incomprehensible Maya, and then we might just as well say that it is all a mysterious and incomprehensible double reality, spirit concealing itself from spirit. The Gita speaks of Maya, but only as a bewildering partial consciousness which loses hold of the complete reality, lives in the phenomenon of mobile Nature and has no sight of the Spirit of which she is the active power, me prakritih. When we transcend this Maya, the world does
not disappear, it only changes its whole heart of meaning. In

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17. But other than these two is that highest spirit called the supreme Self^,1 who enters the three worlds and upbears them, the imperishable Lord.

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the spiritual vision we find not that all this does not really exist, but rather that all is, but with a sense quite other than its present mistaken significance: all is self and soul and nature of the Godhead, all is Vasudeva. Tne world for the Gita is real, a creation of the Lord, a power of the Eternal, a manifestation from the Parabrahman, and even this lower nature of the triple Maya is a derivation from the supreme divine Nature. Nor can we take refuge altogether in this distinction that there is a double, an inferior active and temporal and a superior calm still and eternal reality beyond action and that our liberation is to pass from this partiality to that greatness, from the action to the silence. For the Gita insists that we can and should, while we live. be conscious in the self and its silence and yet act with power in the world of Nature. And it gives the example of the Divine himself who is not bound by necessity of birth, but free, superior to the cosmos, and yet abides eternally in action, varta eva cha karmani. Therefore it is by putting on a likeness of the divine nature in its completeness that the unity of this double experience becomes entirely possible. But what is the principle of that oneness ?

The Gita finds it in its supreme vision of the Purushottama; for that is the type, according to its doctrine, of the complete and the highest experience, it is the knowledge of the whole- knowers, kritsna-vidah.

1 The Akshara is para, supreme in relation to the elements and action of cosmic Nature. It is the immutable Self of all, and the immutable Self of all is the Purushottama. The Akshara is he in the freedom of his self-existence unaffected by the action of his own power in Nature, not impinged on by the urge of his own becoming, undisturbed by the play of his own qualities. But this is only one aspect though a great aspect of the integral knowledge. The Purushottama is at the same time greater than the Akshara, because he is more than this immutability and he is not limited even by the highest eternal status of being, param dhama. Still, it is through whatever is immutable and eternal in us that we arrive at that highest status from which there is no returning to birth, and that was the liberation
which was sought by the wise of old, the ancient sages. But when pursued through the Akshara alone, this attempt at liberation becomes the seeking of the Indefinable, a thing hard

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18. Since I am beyond the mutable and am greater and higher even than the immutable, in the world and the Veda I am proclaimed as the Purushottama (the supreme Self).

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for our nature embodied as we are here in Matter. The Indefinable, to which the Akshara, the pure intangible self here in us rises in its separative urge, is some supreme Unmani- fest, para avyakta, and that highest unmanifest Akshara is still the Purushottama. Therefore, the Gita has said, those also who follow after the Indenfinable, come to me, the eternal Godhead. But yet is he more even than a highest unmanifest Akshara, more than any negative Absolute, neti neti, because he is to be known also as the supreme Purusha who extends this whole universe in his own existence. He is a supreme mysterious All, an ineffable positive Absolute of all things here. He is the Lord in the Kshara, Purushottama not only there, but here in the heart of every creature, Ishwara. And there too even in his highest eternal status paro avyaktah, he is the supreme Lord, Parameshwara, no aloof and unrelated Indefinable, but the origin and father and mother and first foundation and eternal abode of self and cosmos and Master of all existences and enjoyer of askesis and sacrifice. It is by knowing him at once in the Akshara and the Kshara, it is by knowing him as the Unborn who partially manifests himself in all birth and even himself descends as the constant Avatar, it is by knowing him in his entirety, samagram maw,, that the soul is easily released from the appearances of the lower Nature and returns by a vast sudden growth and broad immeasurable ascension into the divine being and supreme Nature. For the truth of the Kshara too is 'a truth of the Purushottama. The Purushottama is in the heart of every creature and is manifested in his countless Vibhutis; the Purushottama is the cosmic spirit in Time and it is he that gives the command to the divine action of the liberated human spirit. He is both Akshara and Kshara and yet he is other because he is more and greater than either of these opposites.

The Divine is neither wholly the Kshara, nor wholly the Akshara. He is greater than the immutable Self and he is much greater than the Soul of mutable things. If he is capable of being both at once, it is because he is other than they, anyah, the Purushottama above all cosmos and yet extended in the world and extended in the Veda, in self-knowledge and in cosmic experience.

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19. He¹ who undeluded thus has knowledge of Me as the Purushottama, adores Me (has bhakti for Me) with all-knowledge and in every way of his natural being.

20. Thus by Me the most secret shastra (the supreme teaching and science) has been told, 0 sinless one. Absolutely to know it is to be perfected in under- standing and successful in the supreme sense, 0 Bharata.

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l He sees the entire sense both of the self and of things; he restores the integral reality of the Divine; he unites the Kshara and the Akshara in the Purushottama. He loves, worships, cleaves to and adores the supreme Self of his and all existence, the one Lord of his and all energies, the close and far-off Eternal in and beyond the world. And he does this too with no single side or portion of himself, exclusive spiritualised mind, blinding light of the heart intense but divorced from largeness, or sole aspiration of the will in works, but in all the perfectly illumined ways of his being and his becoming, his soul and his nature. Divine in the equality of his imperturbable self-existence, one in it with all objects and creatures, he brings that boundless equality, that deep oneness down into his mind and heart and life and body and founds on it in an indivisible integrality the trinity of divine love, divine works and divine knowledge This is the Gita's way of salvation,

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