Essays on the Gita, First Series (Arya Publishing House, 1922)
The text is shown on its own: no facing layer is held for this issue.
The quietist, the ascetic on the other hand cannot see any possibility of perfection into which life and action enter. Are they not the very seat of bondage and imperfection? Is not all action imperfect in its nature, like a fire that must produce smoke, is not the principle of action itself rajasic, the father of desire, a cause that must have its effect of obscuration of knowledge, its round of longing and success and failure, its oscillations of joy and ^ief, its duality of virtue and sin? God may be in the world, but he is not of the world ; he is a God of renunciation and not the Master or cause of our works ; the master of our works is desire and the cause of works is ignorance. If the world, the Kshara is in a sense a manifestation or a lild of the Divine, it is an imperfect play with the ignorance of Nature, an obscuration rather than a manifesta- tion. That is surely evident from our very first glance at the nature of the world and does not the fullest experience of the world teach us always the same truth? is it not a wheel of the ignorance binding the soul to continual birth by the impulse of desire and action until at last that is exhausted or cast away? Not only desire, but action also must be flung away ; seated in the silent self the soul will then pass away into the motionless, actionless, imperturbable, absolute Brahman. To this objection of the impersonalising quietist the Gita is at more pains to answer than to that of the man of the world, the kinetic individual. For this quietism having hold of a higher and more powerfol truth which is yet not the whole or the highest truth, its pro-
THE PRINCIPLE OF DIVINE WORKS mulgation as the universal, complete, highest ideal of human life is likely to be more confusing and disastrous to the advance of the human race towards its goal than the error of an exclusive kinetism. A strong onesid^ truth^ when set forth as the whole truth, creates a strong light but also a strong con- fusion ; for the very strength of its element of truth increases the strength of its element of error. The error of the kinetic ideal can only prolong the ignorance and retard the human advance by setting it in search of perfection where perfection cannot be found ; but the error of the quietistic ideal contains in itself the very principle of world-destruction. Were I to act upon it, says Krishna, I should destroy the peoples and be the author of confusion; and though the error of an individual human being, even though a nearly divine man, cannot destijoy the whole race, it may produce a widespread confusion which may be in its nature destructive of the principle of human life and disturbing to the settled line of its advance.
No commentary for this page under the selected tracks.
There is commentary on page 1.