Essays on the Gita, First Series (Arya Publishing House, 1922)
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Arjuna, himself, if the Teacher were to break off his discourse here, might well object ; ‘‘You have spoken much of the destruction of desire and attachment, of egiy.lky, of ~the conquest of the senses and the stilling of the mincT, of passionless and imperson^ action, of the sacrifice of works, of the inner as preferable to the outer renunciation, and these things I understand intellectually, how- ever difficult they may appear to me in practice. But you have also spoken of nsing^aboye the gunas, while yet one remains in action, and you have not Told me how the gunas workT, and unless I know that, it will be difficult for me to detect and rise above them. Besides, you have spoken of J>hakti as the greatest element in Yoga, yet you have talkecT much of works and knowl edg e, but very little or nothing of bhakti. And to whom is bhakti, this greatest thing, to be offered? Not to the still impersonal Self, certainly, but to you, the Lord. Tell me, then, what you are, who, as bhakti is greater even than this self-knowledge, are greater than the immutable Self, which is yet itself greater than mutable Nature and the world of action, even as knowledge is greater than works. What is the relat ion between these three things? between work s and kno wledge and divine loye? betwee n j:he soul in 5^ture and ^h^immutable Self and that 'wTiich is at once Ihe changeless Self of afl and the Master of knowledge and love and works, t he suprem e Divini ty who is here with me in this great battle and massacre, my charioteer in the chariot of this fierce and terrible action?” It is to answer these questions that the rest of the Gita is written, and in a complete intellectual solution they have indeed to be taken up without delay and resolved. But in actual sddhand one has to advance from stage to stage, leaving many things, indeed the greatest things to arise subsequently and solve themselves fully by the light of the advance we have made in spiritual experience. The Gita follows to a certain extent this curve of experience and puts first a sort of large preliminary basis of works and knowledge which contains an element leading up to bhakti and to a greater knowledge, but not yet fully arriving. The six ch apters present us wiA that basi^
We may then pause to consider how far they have carried the solution of the original problem with which the Gita started . The problem in itself, it may be’ useful again to remark, need not n^essarily ha ve led up to the whole question of the nature of existence and of the rejplace ment o f the iiormal by th ^ spiritua l life. I L might hav e l^Ji-dealtjykh.^^ ^ pragmatic al or an ethical basis THE GIST OF THE KARMA YOGA or from an intellectual or an i deal stand point or by a consider¥tidii of Si of these together ; that in fact would have been our modern method of solving the difficulty. By itself it raises in the first instance just this question, whether Arjuna should be governed by the ethical sense of personal sin in slaughter or by the consideration equally ethical of his public and social duty, the defence of the Right, the opposition demanded by conscience from all noble natures to the armed forces of injustice and oppression? That question has been raised in our own time and the present hour, and it can be solved, as we solve it now, by one or other of very various solutions, but all from the standpoint of our normal life and our normal human mind. It may be answered as a ques tion between the personal conscience and our to the society and ^e
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