Essays on the Gita, First Series (Arya Publishing House, 1922)
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THE POSSIBILITY AND PURPOSE OF AVATARHOOD In speaking of this Yoga in which action and knowle^^e become one, the Yoga of the samfice works with knowledge, in which worj^ are fuelled in knowledge, knowledge supports, changes and enlightens works, and both .are oJEered, to the Purushottama, the supreme Divinity who becomes manifest within us as Narayana,j Lord of all our being and action seated secret in our hearts for ever, who becomes manifest even in the human form as the Avatar, the divine birth taking possession of our humanity, Krishna has declared in passing that this was the ancient and original Yoga which he gave to Vivas van, the Sun-God, Vivasvan gave it to Manu, the father of men, Manu gave it to Ikshvaku, head of the solar line, and so it came down from royal sage to royal sage till it was lost in the great lapse of Time and is now renewed for Arjuna, because he is the lover and devotee, friend and comrade of the Avatar,* For this, he says, is the highest secret, — thus claiming for it a superiority to all other forms of Yoga, because those others lead to the impersonal Brahman or to a personal Deity, to a liberation in actionless knowledge or a THE POSSIBILITY AND PURPOSE OF AVATARHOOD liberation in absorbed beatitude, bm this gives the highest secret and the whole secret brings us to diYine^pea^ and divine works, tojiivine knowledge, action and ecstasy unified in a perlect^ freedom ; it unites into itself all the Yogic path^as the highest being of the Divine reconciles and makes one in itself all the different and even contmp powers and principles of its manifested being, (^herefor e th is Yoga of the_Gita Js/ not, as some contend, only the Karaiayoga, one and the lowest, according to them, of the three paths, ^ but ^a highest Yojga syntl^tic and integral directing God ward all the powers of our being)
"^"A^na takes the declaration about the trans- missFon of the Yoga in its most physical sense, — there is another significance in which it can be taken, — and ^ks hojy the Sun-God, one of the first- born of beings, ancestor of the Solar dynasty, can have received the^^oga from the man Krishna who is only now born into the world. Krishna does not repi)’, as we might have expected him to have done, that it was as the Divine who is the source of all knowledge that he gave the Word to the Deva who is his form of knowledge, giver of all inner and outer light , — bhargo savitur devasya yo no dhiyah prachodaydt ; Jie accepts instead the opportunity which Arjuna gives him of declaring his concealed Godhead, a declaration for which he had prepared when he gave Wmself as the divine example for the worker who is not Abound by his works, but which he has not yet quite explicitly made. He now openly announces himself as the in^rnate^Godhea^, t he Av atoi\
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