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

the man called upon to the battle-field feels, like the conscientious objector of to-day or as a Tolstoy would feel, that in no circumstances is it permissible to take human life any more than to eat human flesh? It is obvious that here the moral law which is above all relative duties must prevail ; and that law depends on no social relation or conception of duty but on the awakened inner perception of man, the moral being.

There are in the world, in fact, two different laws of conduct each valid on its own plane, the rule principally^dependent on external status and the rule independent of status and entirely dependent on the thought and consaen^^^ The CT5”3oes noT teach us to subordinate the higher plane to the lower, it does not ask the awakened moral consciousness to slay itself on the altar of duty as a sacrifice and victim to the law of the social status. It calls us higher and not lower ; from the conflict of the two planes it bids us ascend to a supreme poise above the mainly practical, above the purely ethical, to the Brahmic consciousness. It replaces the conception of social duty by a divine obligation. The subjection to external law gives place to a certain principle of inner self-determina- tion of action proceeding by the souFs freedom from the tangled law of works. And this, as we shall see, — the Brahmic consciousnessj^he souFs freedom from works and the determinatiOT of works in the nature by the Lord within and above us, — ^is the kernel of the Gita’s teaching with regard to action.

The Gita can only be understood, like any other great work of the kind, by studying it in its entirety and as a developing argument. But the modern interpreters, starting from the great writer Bunkim Chundra. Chatterji who first gave to the Gita this new sense of a Gospel of Duty, have laid an almost exclusive stress'^oh the or four chapters and in those on the idea of equality, on the expression kartavyam karma, the work that is to be done, which they render by duty, and on the phrase “Thou hast a right to acticaj^_but jipne to the fruits of a^on^MvEichTr how popularly quoted as the great word, mahdvdkya, of the Gita. The rest of the eighteen chapters with their high philosophy are given a secondary importance, except indeed the great vision in the eleventh. This is natural enough for the modern mind which is, or has been till yesterday, inclined to be impatient of metaphysical subtleties and far-off spiritual seekings, eager to get to work and, like Arjuna himself, mainly concerned for a workable law of works, a dharma. But it is the wrong way to handle this Scripture.