Essays on the Gita, First Series (Arya Publishing House, 1922)
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how the change to this state will aflEect the outward action of the man, what result it will have on his speech, his movements, his state, what difference it will make in this acting, living human being. Krishna persists merely in enlarging upon the ideas he has already brought forward, on the soul-state behind the action, not on the action itself. It is the fixed anchoring of the intelligence in a state of desireless equality that i^ the one thing needed. Arjuna breaks out impatiently, — for here is no rule of conduct such as he sought, but rather, as it seems to him, the negation of all action, — “If thou boldest the intelligence to be greater than action, why then dost thou appoint me to an action terrible in its nature? Thou bewilderest my understanding with a mingled word: speak one thing decisively by which I can attain to what is the best." It is always the pragmatic man who has no value for meta- physical thought or for the inner life except when they help him to his one demand, a dharma, a law of life in the world or, if need be, of leaving the world ; for that too is a decisive action which he can understand. But to live and act in the world, yet be above it, this is a “mingled" and confusing word the sense of which he has no patience to grasp.
The rest of Arjuna’s questions and utterances proceed from the same temperament and character, ^^len he is told that once the soul-state is assured there need be no apparent change in the action, he must act always by the law of his nature, even if the act itself seem faulty and deficient compared THE HUMAN DISCIPLE with that of another law than his own, he is troubled. The nature I but what of this sense of sin in the action with which he is preoccupied? is it not this very nature which drives men as if by force and even against their better will into sin and guilt? His practical intelligence is baffled by Krishna’s assertion that it was he who in ancient times revealed to Vivasvan this Yoga, since lost, which he is now again revealing to Arjuna, and by his demand for an explanation he provokes the famous and oft-quoted statement of Avatarhood and its mundane purpose. He is again perplexed by the words in which Krisfina continues to reconcile action and renunciation of action ) and asks once again for a decisive statement of that which is the best and highest, not this ‘"mingled” word. When he realises fully the nature of the Yoga which he is bidden to embrace, his pragmatic nature accustomed to act from mental will and preference and desire is appalled by its difficulty and he asks what is the end of the soul which attempts and fails, whether it dbes not lose both this life of human activity and thought and emotion which it has left behind and the Brahmic consciousness to which it aspires and falling from both perish like a dissolving cloiwj?.
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