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

of the Sankhya and the Yoga way of thinking and it derives from this colouring the peculiar synthetic character of its philosophy. It is in fact primarily a practical system of Yoga that it teaches and it brings in metaphysical ideas only as explanatory of its practical system ; nor does it merely declare Vedantic knowledge, but it founds knowledge and devotion upon works, even as it uplifts works to knowledge their culmination, and informs them with devotion as their very heart and kernel of their spirit. Again its Yoga is founded upon the analytical philosophy of the SankhyaSj^ t^es that as a starting- point and always keeps it as a large element of its method and doctrine ; but still it proceeds far ^ypnd it, negatives even some of its characteristic tendencies and finds a means of recpnciling the lower analytical knowledge of Sankhya with the higher synthetic and Vedantic truth.

What, then, are the Sankhya and Yoga of which the Gita speaks? They are certainly not the systems which have come down to us under these names as enunciated respectively in the Sankhya Karika of Ishwara Krishna and the Yoga' aphorisms oF Patanj^ir/' This" Sankhya is not the system of Ae Karikas,~at least as that is generally understood ; for the Gita nowhere for a moment admits the multi- plicity of Purushas as a primal truth of being and it affirms einphaticairy wnaT the traditional Sankhya strenuously denies, the i3ne as SeJf^and^Purushg, that One again as the Lor^ Ishwara or Purushot- tama, and Ishwara as Ae cause _pf the uniyerae The traditional Sankhya is, to use our modern distinctions, atheistic; the Sankl^^l admits and subtly reconciles the theistic, p antheisti c and monist ic views of the univers^

Nor is this Yoga the Yoga system of Patanjali ; for 'tfiaTiTa "purely subjective method of Rajayoga, an internal discipline, limited, rigidly cut out, severely and isciefitifically graded, by which the mind is progressively stilled and taken up into Samadhi so that we may gain the temporal and eternal results of this self-exceeding, the temporal in a great expansion of the souFs knowledge and powers, the eternal in the divine union. But the Yoga of the Gita is a large, flexible and many-sided system with various elements, which are "all ^ccessTully har- monised by^a sort of natural and living assimilation, and of these elements'^Rajaypga is only one and not the most important an^ vital. This Yoga does not adopt any strict and scientific gradation but is a process of natural soul-development ; it seeks by the adoption of a^few principles of subjective j5oise aqdiaclipuL to bring about a renovation of the soul and a sort of change, ascension or new birth out of the lower nature into the divine. Accordingly, its idea„pf Saimdhi is quite differejit from the ordinary notion of the Yogic trance ; and'while P^ njaligive s to works only an initial importance forlmoral puri- fication and religious concentration, the Gita go es so far as to nmke works th e ^isdnoive.,^^ pr^oga. I Action to Patanjali is only a preliminary , in the^ita it is a perm anent toundation ; * in the