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

knowledge of self and the world points you ; I have now shown you in what direction your social duty and the ethical standard of your order point you, swadharmam api chdvekshya. Whichever you consider, the result is the same. But if you are not satisfied with your social duty and the virtue of your order, if you think that leads you to sorrow and sin, then I bid you rise to SLiligher. and not sink to a lower ideal. ^ Put away all egoism fromjjfp^ dis- regard joy and sorrow, disregard gain and loss and all worldly results ; kok only at the cause you must serve and the work that you must achieve by divine command ; '‘so thou shalt not incur sin.” Thus fiJunaVplea of sorrow, his plea of the recoil from slaughter, his plea of the sense of sin, his plea of the unhappy results of his action, are answered according to the highest knowledge and ethical ideals to which his race and age had attained.

It is the creeds of the^ Aryan fighter. “Know God,” it says, '*know thyself, help man ; project jthe Right , do without feaf~^r weakness or faltering thy work of battle in the world. Thou ar t the eternaj and impemhable Spirit thy soul is here ojo^iis upward path to immortality ; life and death are nothing, sorrow and wounds and suffering are nothing, for these things have to be conquered and overcome. Look not at thy own p^le^re and gain and profit, but above and around, above at the shining summits to which thou climbest, around at this world of battle and trial in which good a nd evil, progress and retrogression are locked in stern THE CREED OF THE ARYAN FIGHTER conflict. Men call to thee, their strong man, their he ro for h elp ; help then, fight. Destroy ^^en ^ destruction the wor ld m ust a dvanc e, but hate not tliat which thou destroyest, neither grieve for all those who perish. Know everywhere rfie^n^se^ know alljp^bj^ immortal_soul^ the body to be but dust. Do thy work with a calm, strpng and ^ual spirit ; fight and fall nobly or conquer mightily. For this is the work that God and thy nature have given to thee to accomplish.” G

In the moment of his turning from this first and summary answer to Arjuna*s difficulties and in the very first words which strike the keynote of a spiritual solution, the Teacher makes at once a distinction which is of the utmost importance for the under- standing of the Gita, — the distinction of Sankhya and Yoga. ‘‘Such is the intelligence (the intelligent knowledge of things and will) declared to thee in the Sankhya, hear now this in the Yoga, for if thou art in Yoga by this intelligence, O son of Pritha, thou shalt cast away the bondage of works.*' That is the literal translation of the words in which the Gita announces the distinction it intends to make. The Gita is in its foundation a Vedantic work ; it is one of the three recognised authorities for the Vedantic teaching and, although not described as a revealed Scripture, s^^lthough, that is to say, it is largely mtellectual, ratiocinative, philosophicjil in its methodT founded indeed qjx the Tmth, but not the directly inspired Word which is the revelation of the Truth through the higher faculties of the seer, it is yet so highly esteemed as to be ranked almost as a thirteenth Upanishad. But still its Vedantic ideas are throughout and thoroughly coloured by the ideas SANKHYA AND YOGA