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

The Yoga of the intelligent will and its culmination in the Brahmic status, which occupies all the close of the second chapter, contains the seed of much of the teaching of the Gita, — its doctrine of desireless works, of equality, of the rejection of outward renunciatujn, of devotion to the Divine ; but as yet all this is slight and obscure. What is most strongly emphasised as yet is the withdrawsu of the w in from the ordinary motive of human activities, desire, frniji man^s normal temperament of the sense-see kin g thoughit and will with its passions and ignorance, and from its customary habit of troubled many-branching ideas and wishes to the desireless calm unit^^ and passionless serenity of the Brahmic j>oi^. So much Arjuna has under- sfooil HeTs not unfamiliar with all this ; it is the substance of the current teaching which points man to the path of knowledge and to the renunciation of life and works as his way of perfection. The inteli igence^jvithdrawing froia sense and desire and human action and turning to the Highest, to the One, to the actionless Purusha^ to the immobile, to the featureless Brahman, that surely is the eternal seed of knowledge. There is no room here for 3works, since works belong to the Ignorance ; action is the very opposite of knowledge ; its seed is desire and its ^it is bondage. That is the orthodox philosophical doctrine, and Krishna seems quite to admit it when he says that works are far inferior to the Yoga of the intelligence. And yet works are insisted upon as part of the Yoga ; so that there seems to be in this”^ teaching a radical inconsistency. Not only so ; for some kind of work no doubt may persist for a while, the minimum, the most in- offensive ,* but here is a work wholly inconsistent with knowledge, with serenity and with the motion- less peace of the self-delighted soul, — ^a work terrible, even monstrous, a bloody strife, a rut hless b attle, a giant massacre. Yet it is this that is enjo ined , this that it Js sought to just^ by tl^ teaching^fjn^ peace and_desireless equality mui stati^ln^e Brahman [ Here then is an unreconciled contradiction. Arjuria complains that he has been given a contradictory and confusing doctrine, not the clear, strenuously single road by which the human intelligence can move straight and trenchantly to the supreme good. It is in answer to this objection that the Gita begins at once to develop more clearly its positive and im{>erative doctrine of Works.