Essays on the Gita, First Series (Arya Publishing House, 1922)
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one deviation of capital importance, — the Purush a is regarded as one, not m any ; for the free, immaterial, immobileTeternal, immutable Self of the Gita, but for one detail, is a Vedantic description of the eternal, passive, immobile, immutable Purusha of the Sankhyas. But the capital difference is that there is One and ^CJJiany. This br ings in the whole difficulty which the SankEya multiplicity avoids and necessitates a quite different solution. This the Gita provides by b ringing in to its Vedantic Sankhya the ideas and principles of Vedaiuic Yo^. The first impomht new element we find is in the conception of Purusha i^jf. Prakriti conducts her activitie^Jor tEe”^15ure of Purusha ; but how is that pleasure detefmuied ? Tn the strict Sankhya analysis it can only be by a passive consent of the III silent Witness. Passively the Witness consents to the action of the intelligent will and the ego-sense, passively he consents to the recoil of that will from the ego-sense. He is Witness, s our ce of the consent, by reflection upholder of the work of Natujcip, anumantd bhartd, but nothing more. [ But the Purusha of the _Gita^i§. also the Lord of Nature ;^e i^TShwara. If the operation of th^ Mfelligen t will B elongs to Nature , the orig ination and power of the \yill pr oceed^ from th e ^"^nsciou s, SpujL ; he is the Lord of Nature. If the'lict of intelligence of the Will is_the_act o^JPraWt^ the source and light of the intelligence^ are actively con iribu ted by the Punis ha ; he is not^otjJijLt he f itness, b ut the^_| L.Qrd and Knower, master ot k^wle ^^^ncT^wjU, jndtd tshvarah. ,He is the su^ ^e cau seof the_ action of j Prakn jti the supreme cause of its witKffiiwal from action. In the Sankhya analysis Purusha and Prakriti in their dualism are the cause of the cosmos ; in this sy pthetir Sajnl^yg^ Purusha by his Praj riti is the cause of thc-XQsmQS. "We see at once how far we have travelled from the rigid purism of the traditional analysis.
But what of the one^elLimmutable, immobile, eternally free, with which the T?ita began? That is free from all change or involution in change, avikdryaj^ unbor n, umnanifcsied, the Biahni ffl, yet iTTsmat **b y wh ic h all t^ is e xtended. ” There- fore it would seem that the principle of the Ishwara is in its being ; if it is immobile, it is yet the cause and lord of all action and mobility. But how? II2 SANKHYA AND YOGA And what of the multiplicity of conscious beings in the cosmos? The’yTlu not seem to be the Lord, but rather very much not the Lord, anish, fair they are s ubject to the ^ction of the three^ras and the delusion of the e go-sense , arid ff,' as the Gita seems to say, they are all the one self, how did this involutioS; Objection and^HeTusiori come about or how is it explicable except by the pure passivity of the Purusha? And w hence the multipUdty? or how is it that the one self in one Wy and mind attains to liberation while in^otheis it reniairis uMer the deiusiorLof bondage? These are difficulties which cannot be passed by without a solution.
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