Essays on the Gita, First Series (Arya Publishing House, 1922)
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^n order to indicate more perfectly his meaning, the divine Teacher, the Avatar gives his own example, his own standard to Arjuna. abjde iD thej^ath of action,” he seems to say, ‘‘the path that all men follow ; thou too must abide in action. In the way I act, in that way thou too must act. I am above the ^^ssity, of works, for I have nothing to gain by them ; I am the Divine who possess all things and all beings in the world andfl am m^^self beyond the world as well as in it and 1 do hot depend upon anything or any one in all the three worlds for any object ; yet I act. This too must be thy manner and spirit of working. I, the.Divme, am the rule and the standard ; it is I who make the path in which men tread ; I am the way and the goal. But 1 do all this largely, universally, visibly in part, but far more invisibly ; and men do not really know the way* of my workings. Thou, when thou knowest and seest, when thou hast become the divinised man, must be the individual power of God, the human yet divine example, even as I 2 m in my avatars,^ ^ost men dwell in the ignorance, the God-seer dwells in the knowledge ; but let him not confuse the minds of men by a dangerous example, rejecting in his superiority the works of the world ; let him not cut short the thread of action before it is spun out,^let him not perplex and falsify THE PRINCIPLE OF DIVINE WORKS stages and gradations of the ways I have hewn. The whole range of human action has been decreed by me with a view to the progress of man from, the lower ^ the higher nature, from„ the apparent undivine to the conscious Divine. The whole range of human works must be that in which the God- knower shall movev All individual, all social action, all the works of the_ intellect, the heart and the ^dy are still his, not any longer for his own separate sake, but for the sake of God in the world, of God in all beings and that all those beings may move forward, as he has moved, ^yL.the path of works towards ^e discovery of the Divine in them- selves. Outwardly his action^ may ^ not seem to essentially from theirs ; battle and rule as well as teaching and thought, all the various commerce of man with man may fall in his range ; spirit in which he does them must be very different, and it is that spirit which by its influence shall be the great attraction drawing men upwards to his own level, the great lever lifting the mass of men higher in their ascent."'
<The giving of the example pf God himself to the liberated man is profoundly significant ; for it reveals the whole , basis of _the _ Gita's philosophy^ of divine works. The l iberated m an_is he who has ^3^,ted him_sefi into, the^divine nature and according toj^at divinejwture^must be his actions. But what is the divine nature? It is not entirely and solely that of the Akshara, the immobile, inactive, i mperso nal relfj for that by itself would lead the
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