Fetching
One moment.
Fetching
One moment.
1We of the coming^ day stand ^ the head of a new 3ge of development which must l^ad to such a new and larger synthesis. We are not called upon to be orth^px_ye^ntins of any of the three schools or Tantrics or to adKere to one of the theistic religions of the past or to entrench ourselves within * All the Puranic tradition, it must be remembered, draws the richness of its contents from the Tantra. cosmic Play. the tour comers of the teaching of the Gita. That would be to limit ourselves and to attempt to create our spiritual life out of the being, knowledge and nature of others, of the men of the past, instead of gilding it put of our own being and potentialities. W£_do^Jiot belong to the past dawns, but to the noons o f the future. A mass of new material is flowing into us ; we have not only to assimilate the influences of the grea t theistic religions of India and of the worl d and a recovered sense of the** mining of Buddhism, but to take f ull a ccoimt of the potent though limited revelations oF^ modern knowledge and seeking ; and, beyond ^ ffiat, the rempjSFaM which seemed to be dead is^returning upon us with an effulgence of many luminous secrets long lost to the conscious ness of giank ind but now breaking out again from behind the veil. All this jpoints to a new, a very .rich, a very vast synthesis fresh and wiflefy embracing feaitHonisatt^^ is both an intellectual
2and a spiritual liecessity of the future. But iust as t^^e jpast syntheses have taken Aose which prece(fcd them for their starting-point, so also must that of the Juture, to be on firm ground, proceed frcaaa what the great bodies of realised spiritual thought and ej^rience in the past have given. Amon g them the Gita takes a most important place.^ Our obTect, then, in_studying_ the Gita will not be a schola^ic or acade mica l scrutiny of its thought, nor to place its p hi losoph y in the history of meta- j^ysical speculation, nor shall we deal with it OUR DEMAND AND NEED FROM THE GITA in the manner of the analytical dialectician. We approac h it f or help and light and our aim must tie to distinguish its essential and living mes^e, that in it on .which humanity has to seize for its perfection ana its highest spiritual welfare*
3The peculiarity of \the GitaJ among the great religious books of the world is that it does not stand apart. as a w^k by_itself^ the fruit of the g)iritual life of a creative personality like Qhrist, Mahomed or Buddha or of an epoch of pure spiritual searching like the Veda and Upanishads, but is gi ven as an episode in an epic history of naUdns and their wars and men and their deeds and arises out of a critkal moment in the soul of one of itsTeading personages Ece to'Iace with the crowning action of his life, a work terrible, violent and sanguinary, at the point when he must either recoil from it altogether or carry it through to its inexorable completion. It matters little whether or no/, as modern criticism supposes, the Gita is a latei:- comp osition inserted into the mass oFthe Mahabharata by its author in order to invest its teaching with the authority and popularity of the great national epic. There seem to me to be strong grounds against this supposition for which, besides, the evidence, extrinsic or internal, is in the last degree scanty and insufficient. But even if it be sound, there remains the fact that the author has not only taken pains to interweave his work inextricably into the vast 1 $ THE DIVINE TEACHER
The source text as printed, transcribed diplomatically. Where the source language uses a non-Latin script that reaches us only through a Victorian romanisation, this layer is labelled transliteration, because that is what we hold.
1We of the coming^ day stand ^ the head of a new 3ge of development which must l^ad to such a new and larger synthesis. We are not called upon to be orth^px_ye^ntins of any of the three schools or Tantrics or to adKere to one of the theistic religions of the past or to entrench ourselves within * All the Puranic tradition, it must be remembered, draws the richness of its contents from the Tantra. cosmic Play. the tour comers of the teaching of the Gita. That would be to limit ourselves and to attempt to create our spiritual life out of the being, knowledge and nature of others, of the men of the past, instead of gilding it put of our own being and potentialities. W£_do^Jiot belong to the past dawns, but to the noons o f the future. A mass of new material is flowing into us ; we have not only to assimilate the influences of the grea t theistic religions of India and of the worl d and a recovered sense of the** mining of Buddhism, but to take f ull a ccoimt of the potent though limited revelations oF^ modern knowledge and seeking ; and, beyond ^ ffiat, the rempjSFaM which seemed to be dead is^returning upon us with an effulgence of many luminous secrets long lost to the conscious ness of giank ind but now breaking out again from behind the veil. All this jpoints to a new, a very .rich, a very vast synthesis fresh and wiflefy embracing feaitHonisatt^^ is both an intellectual
2and a spiritual liecessity of the future. But iust as t^^e jpast syntheses have taken Aose which prece(fcd them for their starting-point, so also must that of the Juture, to be on firm ground, proceed frcaaa what the great bodies of realised spiritual thought and ej^rience in the past have given. Amon g them the Gita takes a most important place.^ Our obTect, then, in_studying_ the Gita will not be a schola^ic or acade mica l scrutiny of its thought, nor to place its p hi losoph y in the history of meta- j^ysical speculation, nor shall we deal with it OUR DEMAND AND NEED FROM THE GITA in the manner of the analytical dialectician. We approac h it f or help and light and our aim must tie to distinguish its essential and living mes^e, that in it on .which humanity has to seize for its perfection ana its highest spiritual welfare*
3The peculiarity of \the GitaJ among the great religious books of the world is that it does not stand apart. as a w^k by_itself^ the fruit of the g)iritual life of a creative personality like Qhrist, Mahomed or Buddha or of an epoch of pure spiritual searching like the Veda and Upanishads, but is gi ven as an episode in an epic history of naUdns and their wars and men and their deeds and arises out of a critkal moment in the soul of one of itsTeading personages Ece to'Iace with the crowning action of his life, a work terrible, violent and sanguinary, at the point when he must either recoil from it altogether or carry it through to its inexorable completion. It matters little whether or no/, as modern criticism supposes, the Gita is a latei:- comp osition inserted into the mass oFthe Mahabharata by its author in order to invest its teaching with the authority and popularity of the great national epic. There seem to me to be strong grounds against this supposition for which, besides, the evidence, extrinsic or internal, is in the last degree scanty and insufficient. But even if it be sound, there remains the fact that the author has not only taken pains to interweave his work inextricably into the vast 1 $ THE DIVINE TEACHER
The source text as printed, transcribed diplomatically. Where the source language uses a non-Latin script that reaches us only through a Victorian romanisation, this layer is labelled transliteration, because that is what we hold.
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