Essays on the Gita, First Series (Arya Publishing House, 1922)
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Bralmian. It therefore passes boldly beyond the Veda and the Upanishads as they were taught by their best authorised exponents and affirms a teaching_c£ jts'_o^_ wh^^ it has developed from them, but which may not be capable of being fitted in within the four corners of their meaning as ordinarily interpreted by the Vedantins.* In fact without this free and synthetic dealing with the letter of the Scripture a work of large synthesis in the then state of conflict between numerous schools • In reality the idea of the Purushottama is already announced in the Upanishads, though in a more scattered fashion than in the Gita and, as in the Gita, the Supreme Brahman or Supreme Purusha is constantly described as con- taining in himself the opposition of the Brahman with qualities and ‘v^rithput qualities, nirguna gunt. Efe is not one of these things to the exclusion of the other which seems to our intellect to b.e its contrary. SANKHYA, YOGA AND VEDANTA and with the current methods of Vedic exegesis would have been impossible.
The Gita in later chapters speaks highly of the Veda and the Upanishads. They are divine Scrip- tures, they are the Word. The Tjard bitnselLis the knoj^_ of Veda a nd the author ofj^e^^anta, yedavid veddniakrit ; ' the Lord is the^one object of know- le3ge in all the Vedas, sarvair vedair aham eva vedyah, a language which implies that the word Veda means the book of knowledge and that these Scriptures deserve their appellation. The Puru- shottama from his high supremacy above the immutable and the mutable has extended himself in the world and in the Veda. Still the letter of the Scripture binds and confuses, as the apostle of Christianity warned his disciples when he said that the jetter kilj^h^and it i{ the spirit, that saves ; and there is a point beyond which the utility of the Scripture itself ceases. The real source of know- ledge is the Lord in the he^t j *^^m seated m tEe "h eart of every m an and from - m e is k nowledgeul* ^ys the Gita ; the Scripture is onfy a verbal form of that inner Veda, of that self-luminous Reality, it is shabdabrahma : the mantra, says the Veda, has risen from the heart, from the secret place where is the seat of the truth, sadandd r*itasya, guhdydm. That origin is its sanction ; but still the infinite Truth is greater than its word. Nor shall you say of any Scripture that it alone is all-sufficient and no other truth can be admitted, as the Vedavadins said of the Veda, ndnyad astiti vddinah. This is a saving and liberating word which must be applied to all the Scriptures of the world. Take all the Scriptures that are or have been, Bible and Koran and the books of the Chinese, Veda and Upanishads and, Purana and Tantra and Shastra and the Gita itself and the sayings of thinkers and sages, prophets and Avatars, still you shall not say that there is nothing else or that the truth your intellect cannot find there is not true because you cannot find it there. That is the limited thought of the sectarian or the composite thought of the eclectic religionist, not the untrammelled truth-seeking of the free and illumined mind and God-experienced soul. Heard or unheard before, that alw^s is the truth which^^ is se^n byjthe heart of man in its illumined depths or Kard within from the Master of all knowledge, the knower of the eternal Veda. THE YOGA OF THE
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