Essays on the Gita, First Series (Arya Publishing House, 1922)

The^Gita, making its call on the warrior nature of Arjunaj '^s tarts with this heroic movement. It calfi on him to turn on the great enemy desire and s^lay iL Its first description of equality is that of the Stoic philosopher. “He whose mind is undisturbed fn the midst of sorrows and amid pleasures is free from desire, from whom liking and fear and wrath have passed away, is the sage of settled under- standing. Who in all things is without affection though visited by this good or that evil and neither hates nor rejoices, his intelligence sits firmly founded in wisdom.'' If one abstains from food, it says, giving a physical example, the object of sense ceases to affect, but the affection itself of the sense, the rasa, remains ; it is only when, even in the exercise of the sense, it can keep back from seeking its sensuous aim in the object, artha, and abandon the affection, the desire for the pleasure of taste, that the highest level of the soul is reached. It is by using the mental organs on the objects, “ranging over them with the senses," vishayan indriyaig- charan, but with senses subject ""to the self, frepd from^iiklng and disliking, that one gets into a large and sweet clearness of soul and temperament in which passion and grief find no place. All desires have to enter into the soul, as waters into the sea, and yet it has to remain immovable, filled but not disturBecTT'^ so in the end all desires can be 3abandoned. To be freed from wrath and passion and fear and attraction is repeatedly stressed as a necessary condition of the liberated status, and for this we must learn to bear their shocks, which cannot be done without exposing ourselves to their causes, '‘He who can bear here in the body the velocity of wrath and desire, is the Yogin, the happy man.'' Titikshd, the will and power to endure, is the means. “The material touches which cause heat and cold, happiness and pain, things transient which come and go, these learn to endure. For the man whom these do not trouble nor pain, the firm and wise who is equal in pleasure and suffering, makes himself apt for immortality.” The equal- souled has to bear suffering and not hate, to receive pleasure and not rejoice. Even the physical affections are to be mastered by endurance and this too is part of the Stoic discipline. Age, death, suffering, pain are not fled from, but accepted and vanquished by a high indifference.*^ Not to flee appalled from Nature in her lower masks, but to meet and conquer her is the true instinct of the strong nature, purusharshabha, the leonine soul among men. Thus compelled, she throws aside her mask and reveals to him his true nature as the free soul, not her subject but her king and lord, swaxdty samrdt.