NINE
Sankhya, Yoga and Vedanta
THE
whole object of the first six chapters of the Gita is to synthetise in a large
frame of Vedantic truth the two methods, ordinarily supposed to be diverse and
even opposite, of the Sankhyas and the Yogins. The Sankhya is taken as the starting-point
and the basis; but it is from the beginning and with a progressively increasing
emphasis permeated with the ideas and methods of Yoga and remoulded in its
spirit. The practical difference, as it seems to have presented itself to the religious
minds of that day, lay first in this that Sankhya proceeded by knowledge and
through the Yoga of the intelligence, while Yoga proceeded by works and the
transformation of the active consciousness and, secondly, – a corollary of this
first distinction, – that Sankhya led to entire passivity and the renunciation
of works, sannyāsa, while Yoga
held to be quite sufficient the inner renunciation of desire, the purification
of the subjective principle which leads to action and the turning of works
Godwards, towards the divine existence and towards liberation. Yet both had the
same aim, the transcendence of birth and of this terrestrial existence and the
union of the human soul with the Highest. This at least is the difference as it
is presented to us by the Gita.
The difficulty
which Arjuna feels in understanding any possible synthesis of these oppositions
is an indication of the hard line that was driven in between these two systems
in the normal ideas of the time. The Teacher sets out by reconciling works and
the Yoga of the intelligence: the latter, he says, is far superior to mere
works; it is by the Yoga of the Buddhi, by knowledge raising man out of the
ordinary human mind and its desires into the purity and equality of the Brahmic
condition free from all desire that works can be made acceptable. Yet are works
a means of salvation, but works thus purified by knowledge.
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Filled with the notions of the
then prevailing culture, misled by the emphasis which the Teacher lays upon the
ideas proper to Vedantic Sankhya, conquest of the senses, withdrawal from mind
into the Self, ascent into the Brahmic condition, extinction of our lower
personality in the Nirvana of impersonality, – for the ideas proper to Yoga are
as yet subordinated and largely held back, – Arjuna is perplexed and asks, “If
thou holdest the intelligence to be greater than works, why then dost thou appoint
me to a terrible work? Thou seemest to bewilder my intelligence with a confused
and mingled speech; tell me then decisively that one thing by which I may
attain to my soul's weal.”
In answer
Krishna affirms that the Sankhya goes by knowledge and renunciation, the Yoga
by works; but the real renunciation is impossible without Yoga, without works
done as a sacrifice, done with equality and without desire of the fruit, with
the perception that it is Nature which does the actions and not the soul; but
immediately afterwards he declares that the sacrifice of knowledge is the
highest, all work finds its consummation in knowledge, by the fire of knowledge
all works are burnt up; therefore by Yoga works are renounced and their bondage
overcome for the man who is in possession of his Self. Again Arjuna is
perplexed; here are desireless works, the principle of Yoga, and renunciation
of works, the principle of Sankhya, put together side by side as if part of one
method, yet there is no evident reconciliation between them. For the kind of
reconciliation which the Teacher has already given, – in outward inaction to
see action still persisting and in apparent action to see a real inaction since
the soul has renounced its illusion of the worker and given up works into the hands
of the Master of sacrifice, – is for the practical mind of Arjuna too slight,
too subtle and expressed almost in riddling words; he has not caught their
sense or at least not penetrated into their spirit and reality. Therefore he
asks again, “Thou declarest to me the renunciation of works, O Krishna, and
again thou declarest to me Yoga; which one of these is the better way, that
tell me with a clear decisiveness.”
The answer is
important, for it puts the whole distinction very clearly and indicates though
it does not develop entirely the line of reconciliation. “Renunciation and Yoga
of works both
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bring about the soul's salvation,
but of the two the Yoga of works is distinguished above the renunciation of
works. He should be known as always a Sannyasin (even when he is doing action)
who neither dislikes nor desires; for free from the dualities he is released
easily and happily from the bondage. Children speak of Sankhya and Yoga apart
from each other, not the wise; if a man applies himself integrally to one, he
gets the fruit of both,” because in their integrality each contains the other.
“The status which is attained by the Sankhya, to that the men of the Yoga also
arrive; who sees Sankhya and Yoga as one, he sees. But renunciation is
difficult to attain without Yoga; the sage who has Yoga attains soon to the Brahman;
his self becomes the self of all existences (of all things that have become),
and even though he does works, he is not involved in them.” He knows that the
actions are not his, but Nature's and by that very knowledge he is free; he has
renounced works, does no actions, though actions are done through him; he
becomes the Self, the Brahman, brahmabhūta,
he sees all existences as becomings (bhūtāni)
of that self-existent Being, his own only one of them, all their actions as
only the development of cosmic Nature working through their individual nature
and his own actions also as a part of the same cosmic activity. This is not the
whole teaching of the Gita; for as yet there is only the idea of the immutable
self or Purusha, the Akshara Brahman, and of Nature, Prakriti, as that which is
responsible for the cosmos and not yet the idea, clearly expressed, of the
Ishwara, the Purushottama; as yet only the synthesis of works and knowledge and
not yet, in spite of certain hints, the introduction of the supreme element of
devotion which becomes so important afterwards; as yet only the one inactive
Purusha and the lower Prakriti and not yet the distinction of the triple
Purusha and the double Prakriti. It is true the Ishwara is spoken of, but his
relation to the self and nature is not yet made definite. The first six
chapters only carry the synthesis so far as it can be carried without the clear
expression and decisive entrance of these all-important truths which, when they
come in, must necessarily enlarge and modify, though without abolishing, these
first reconciliations.
Twofold, says Krishna,
is the self-application of the soul by
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which it enters into the Brahmic
condition: “that of the Sankhyas by the Yoga of knowledge, that of the Yogins
by the Yoga of works.” This identification of Sankhya with Jnanayoga and of
Yoga with the way of works is interesting; for it shows that quite a different
order of ideas prevailed at that time from those we now possess as the result
of the great Vedantic development of Indian thought, subsequent evidently to
the composition of the Gita, by which the other Vedic philosophies fell into
desuetude as practical methods of liberation. To justify the language of the
Gita we must suppose that at that time it was the Sankhya method which was very
commonly¹ adopted by those
who followed the path of knowledge. Subsequently, with the spread of Buddhism,
the Sankhya method of knowledge must have been much overshadowed by the
Buddhistic. Buddhism, like the Sankhya non-Theistic and anti-Monistic, laid
stress on the impermanence of the results of the cosmic energy, which it
presented not as Prakriti but as Karma because the Buddhists admitted neither
the Vedantic Brahman nor the inactive Soul of the Sankhyas, and it made the
recognition of this impermanence by the discriminating mind its means of
liberation. When the reaction against Buddhism arrived, it took up not the old
Sankhya notion, but the Vedantic form popularised by Shankara who replaced the
Buddhistic impermanence by the cognate Vedantic idea of illusion, Maya, and the
Buddhistic idea of Non-Being, indefinable Nirvana, a negative Absolute, by the
opposite and yet cognate Vedantic idea of the indefinable Being, Brahman, an
ineffably positive Absolute in which all feature and action and energy cease
because in That they never really existed and are mere illusions of the mind.
It is the method of Shankara based upon these concepts of his philosophy, it is
the renunciation of life as an
illusion of which we ordinarily
think when we speak now of the Yoga of knowledge. But in the time of the Gita
Maya was evidently not yet quite the master word of the Vedantic philosophy,
nor had it, at least with any decisive clearness, the connotation which
Shankara brought out of it with such a luminous force and distinctness; for in
the Gita there is little talk
¹The systems of the Puranas
and Tantras are full of the ideas of the Sankhya, though subordinated to the
Vedantic idea and mingled with many others.
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of Maya and much of Prakriti and,
even, the former word is used as little more than an equivalent of the latter
but only in its inferior status; it is the lower Prakriti of the three gunas, traigunyamayī māyā.
Prakriti, not illusive Maya, is in the teaching of the Gita the effective cause
of cosmic existence.
Still, whatever
the precise distinctions of their metaphysical ideas, the practical difference
between the Sankhya and Yoga as developed by the Gita is the same as that which
now exists between the Vedantic Yogas of knowledge and of works, and the
practical results of the difference are also the same. The Sankhya proceeded
like the Vedantic Yoga of knowledge by the Buddhi, by the discriminating
intelligence; it arrived by reflective thought, vicāra, at right discrimination, viveka, of the true nature of the soul and of the imposition on it
of the works of Prakriti through attachment and
identification, just as the Vedantic method arrives by the same means at
the right discrimination of the true nature of the Self and of the imposition
on it of cosmic appearances by mental illusion which leads to egoistic
identification and attachment. In the Vedantic method Maya ceases for the soul
by its return to its true and eternal status as the one Self, the Brahman, and the
cosmic action disappears; in the Sankhya method the working of the Gunas falls
to rest by the return of the soul to its true and eternal status as the
inactive Purusha and the cosmic action ends. The Brahman of the Mayavadins is
silent, immutable and inactive; so too is the Purusha of the Sankhya; therefore
for both ascetic renunciation of life and works is a necessary means of liberation.
But for the Yoga of the Gita, as for the Vedantic Yoga of works, action is not
only a preparation but itself the means of liberation; and it is the justice of
this view which the Gita seeks to bring out with such an unceasing force and
insistence, – an insistence, unfortunately, which could not prevail in India
against the tremendous tide of Buddhism,¹
was lost afterwards in the intensity of ascetic illusionism and the
fervour of world-shunning saints and
¹At the same time the Gita
seems to have largely influenced Mahayanist Buddhism and texts are taken bodily
from it into the Buddhist Scriptures. It may therefore have helped largely to
turn Buddhism, originally a school of quietistic and illuminated ascetics, into
that religion of meditative devotion and compassionate action which has so
powerfully influenced Asiatic culture.
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devotees and is only now
beginning to exercise its real and salutary influence on the Indian mind.
Renunciation is indispensable, but the true renunciation is the inner rejection
of desire and egoism; without that the outer physical abandoning of works is a
thing unreal and ineffective, with it it ceases even to be necessary, although
it is not forbidden. Knowledge is essential, there is no higher force for liberation, but works with
knowledge are also needed; by the union of knowledge and works the soul dwells entirely
in the Brahmic status not only in repose and inactive calm, but in the very
midst and stress and violence of action. Devotion is all-important, but works
with devotion are also important; by the union of knowledge, devotion and works
the soul is taken up into the highest status of the Ishwara to dwell there in
the Purushottama who is master at once of the eternal spiritual calm and the
eternal cosmic activity. This is the synthesis of the Gita.
But, apart from
the distinction between the Sankhya way of knowledge and the Yoga way of works,
there was another and similar opposition in the Vedanta itself, and this also
the Gita has to deal with, to correct and to fuse into its large restatement of
the Aryan spiritual culture. This was the distinction between Karmakanda and
Jnanakanda, between the original thought that led to the philosophy of the
Purva Mimansa, the Vedavada, and that which led to the philosophy of the Uttara
Mimansa,¹ the Brahmavada,
between those who dwelt in the tradition of the Vedic hymns and the Vedic
sacrifice and those who put these aside as a lower knowledge and laid stress on
the lofty metaphysical knowledge which emerges from the Upanishads. For the
pragmatic mind of the Vedavadins the Aryan religion of the Rishis meant the
strict performance of the Vedic sacrifices and the use of the sacred Vedic
mantras in order to possess all human desires in this world, wealth, progeny,
victory, every kind of good fortune, and the joys of immortality in Paradise
beyond. For the idealism of the Brahmavadins this was only a preliminary
preparation and the real object of man, true purusārtha, began with
¹Jaimini's idea of liberation
is the eternal Brahmaloka in which the soul that has come to know Brahman still
possesses a divine body and divine enjoyments. For the Gita the Brahmaloka is
not liberation; the soul must pass beyond to the supracosmic status.
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his turning to the knowledge of
the Brahman which would give him the true immortality of an ineffable spiritual
bliss far beyond the lower joys of this world or of any inferior heaven.
Whatever may have been the true and original sense of the Veda, this was the
distinction which had long established itself and with which therefore the Gita
has to deal.
Almost the first
word of the synthesis of works and knowledge is a strong, almost a violent
censure and repudiation of the Vedavada, “this flowery word which they declare
who have not clear discernment, devoted to the creed of the Veda, whose creed
is that there is nothing else, souls of desire, seekers of Paradise, – it gives
the fruits of the works of birth, it is multifarious with specialities of
rites, it is directed to enjoyment and lordship as its goal.” The Gita even
seems to go on to attack the Veda itself which, though it has been practically
cast aside, is still to Indian sentiment intangible, inviolable, the sacred
origin and authority for all its philosophy and religion. “The action of the
three Gunas is the subject matter of the Veda; but do thou become free from the
triple Guna, O Arjuna.” The Vedas in the widest terms, “all the Vedas”, – which
might well include the Upanishads also and seems to include them, for the
general term Sruti is used later on,
– are declared to be unnecessary for the man who knows. “As much use as there is
in a well with water in flood on every side, so much is there in all the Vedas
for the Brahmin who has the knowledge.” Nay, the Scriptures are even a
stumbling-block; for the letter of the Word – perhaps because of its conflict
of texts and its various and mutually dissentient interpretations – bewilders
the understanding, which can only find certainty and concentration by the light
within. “When thy intelligence shall cross beyond the whorl of delusion, then
shalt thou become indifferent to Scripture heard or that which thou hast yet to
hear, gantāsi nirvedam
śrotavyasya śrutasya ca. When thy intelligence which is
bewildered by the Sruti, śrutivipratipannā,
shall stand unmoving and stable in Samadhi, then shalt thou attain to Yoga.” So
offensive is all this to conventional religious sentiment that attempts are
naturally made by the convenient and indispensable human faculty of
text-twisting to put a different sense on some of these verses, but the meaning
is
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plain and hangs together from
beginning to end. It is confirmed and emphasised by a subsequent passage in which
the knowledge of the knower is described as passing beyond the range of Veda
and Upanishad, śabdabrahmātivartate.
Let us see,
however, what all this means; for we may be sure that a synthetic and catholic
system like the Gita's will not treat such important parts of the Aryan culture
in a spirit of mere negation and repudiation. The Gita has to synthetise the
Yoga doctrine of liberation by works and the Sankhya doctrine of liberation by
knowledge; it has to fuse karma
with jñāna. It has at the
same time to synthetise the Purusha and Prakriti idea common to Sankhya and
Yoga with the Brahmavada of the current Vedanta in which the Purusha, Deva,
Ishwara, – supreme Soul, God, Lord, – of the Upanishads all became merged in
the one all-swallowing concept of the immutable Brahman; and it has to bring
out again from its overshadowing by that concept but not with any denial of it
the Yoga idea of the Lord or Ishwara. It has too its own luminous thought to
add, the crown of its synthetic system, the doctrine of the Purushottama and of
the triple Purusha for which, though the idea is there, no precise and indisputable
authority can be easily found in the Upanishads and which seems indeed at first
sight to be in contradiction with that text of the Shruti where only two
Purushas are recognised. Moreover, in synthetising works and knowledge it has
to take account not only of the opposition of Yoga and Sankhya, but of the opposition
of works to knowledge in Vedanta itself, where the connotation of the two words
and therefore their point of conflict is not quite the same as the point of the
Sankhya-Yoga opposition. It is not surprising at all, one may observe in passing,
that with the conflict of so many philosophical schools all founding themselves
on the texts of the Veda and Upanishads, the Gita should describe the
understanding as being perplexed and confused, led in different directions by
the Sruti, śrutivipratipannā.
What battles are even now delivered by Indian pundits and metaphysicians over
the meaning of the ancient texts and to what different conclusions they lead!
The understanding may well get disgusted and indifferent, gantāsi nirvedam,
refuse to hear any more texts new or old, śrotavyasya
śrutasya ca,
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and go into itself to discover
the truth in the light of a deeper and inner and direct experience.
In the first six
chapters the Gita lays a large foundation for its synthesis of works and
knowledge, its synthesis of Sankhya, Yoga and Vedanta. But first it finds that karma, works, has a particular sense in
the language of the Vedantins; it means the Vedic sacrifices and ceremonies or
at most that and the ordering of life according to the Grihyasutras in which these
rites are the most important part, the religious kernel of the life. By works
the Vedantins understood these religious works, the sacrificial system, the yajña, full of a careful order, vidhi, of exact and complicated rites, kriyāviśesa-bahulām.
But in Yoga works had a much wider significance. The Gita insists on this wider
significance; in our conception of spiritual activity all works have to be
included, sarvakarmāni. At the same time it does not, like
Buddhism, reject the idea of the sacrifice, it prefers to uplift and enlarge
it. Yes, it says in effect, not only is sacrifice, yajña, the most important part of life, but all life, all works
should be regarded as sacrifice, are yajña, though by the ignorant they are performed
without the higher knowledge and by the most ignorant not in the true order, avidhipūrvakam. Sacrifice is the very
condition of life; with sacrifice as their eternal companion the Father of
creatures created the peoples. But the sacrifices of the Vedavadins are
offerings of desire directed towards material rewards, desire eager for the result
of works, desire looking to a larger enjoyment in Paradise
as immortality and highest salvation. This the system of the Gita cannot admit;
for that in its very inception starts with the renunciation of desire, with its
rejection and destruction as the enemy of the soul. The Gita does not deny the
validity even of the Vedic sacrificial works; it admits them, it admits that by
these means one may get enjoyment here and Paradise beyond; it is I myself,
says the divine Teacher, who accept these sacrifices and to whom they are
offered, I who give these fruits in the form of the gods since so men choose to
approach me. But this is not the true road, nor is the enjoyment of Paradise
the liberation and fulfillment which man has to seek. It is the ignorant who worship
the gods, not knowing whom they are worshipping ignorantly in these divine
forms;
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for they are worshipping, though
in ignorance, the One, the Lord, the only Deva, and it is he who accepts their offering.
To that Lord must the sacrifice be offered, the true sacrifice of all the
life's energies and activities, with devotion, without desire, for His sake and
for the welfare of the peoples. It is because the Vedavada obscures this truth
and with its tangle of ritual ties man down to the action of the three gunas
that it has to be so severely censured and put roughly aside; but its central
idea is not destroyed; transfigured and uplifted, it is turned into a most
important part of the true spiritual experience and of the method of
liberation.
The Vedantic
idea of knowledge does not present the same difficulties. The Gita takes it
over at once and completely and throughout the six chapters quietly substitutes
the still immutable Brahman of the Vedantins, the One without a second immanent
in all cosmos, for the still immutable but multiple Purusha of the Sankhyas. It
accepts throughout these chapters knowledge and realisation of the Brahman as
the most important, the indispensable means of liberation, even while it
insists on desireless works as an essential part of knowledge. It accepts
equally Nirvana of the ego in the infinite equality of the immutable,
impersonal Brahman as essential to liberation; it practically identifies this
extinction with the Sankhya return of the inactive immutable Purusha upon
itself when it emerges out of identification with the actions of Prakriti; it
combines and fuses the language of the Vedanta with the language of the
Sankhya, as had already indeed been done by certain of the Upanishads.¹ But still there is a defect in
the Vedantic position which has to be overcome. We may, perhaps, conjecture
that at this time the Vedanta had not yet redeveloped the later theistic
tendencies which in the Upanishads are already present as an element, but not
so prominent as in the Vaishnava philosophies of the later Vedantins where they
become indeed not only prominent but paramount. We may take it that the
orthodox Vedanta was, at any rate in its main tendencies, pantheistic at the
basis, monistic at the summit.²
¹Especially the Swetaswatara.
²The pantheistic formula is
that God and the All are one, the monistic adds that God or Brahman alone
exists and the cosmos is only an illusory appearance or else a real but partial
manifestation.
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It knew of the Brahman, one without
a second; it knew of the Gods, Vishnu, Shiva, Brahma and the rest, who all
resolve themselves into the Brahman; but the one supreme Brahman as the one
Ishwara, Purusha, Deva – words often applied to it in the Upanishads and
justifying to that extent, yet passing beyond the Sankhya and the theistic
conceptions – was an idea that had fallen from its pride of place;¹ the names could only be applied
in a strictly logical Brahmavada to subordinate or inferior phases of the
Brahman-idea. The Gita proposes not only to restore the original equality of
these names and therefore of the conceptions they indicate, but to go a step
farther. The Brahman in its supreme and not in any lower aspect has to be
presented as the Purusha with the lower Prakriti for its Maya, so to synthetise
thoroughly Vedanta and Sankhya, and as Ishwara, so to synthetise thoroughly both
with Yoga; but the Gita is going to represent the Ishwara, the Purushottama, as
higher even than the still and immutable Brahman, and the loss of ego in the
impersonal comes in at the beginning as only a great initial and necessary step
towards union with the Purushottama. For the Purushottama is the supreme
Brahman. It therefore passes boldly beyond the Veda and the Upanishads as they were taught by
their best authorised exponents and affirms a teaching of its own which 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.² 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 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
Scriptures, they are the Word. The Lord himself is the knower of Veda and the
author of
¹This is a little doubtful,
but we may say at least that there was a strong tendency in that direction of
which Shankara's philosophy was the last culmination.
²In 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 containing in himself the opposition of the
Brahman with qualities and without qualities, nirguno guni. He is not one of these things to the
exclusion of the other which seems to our intellect to be its contrary.
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Vedanta, vedavid vedāntakrt;
the Lord is the one object of knowledge 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 Purushottama 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 letter killeth and it
is the spirit that saves; and there is a point beyond which the utility of the
Scripture itself ceases. The real source of knowledge is the Lord in the heart;
“I am seated in the heart of every man and from me is knowledge,” says the
Gita; the Scripture is only a verbal form
of that inner Veda, of that
self-luminous Reality, it is śabdabrahma:
the mantra, says the Veda, has risen from the heart, from the secret place
where is the seat of the truth, sadanād
rtasya, guhāyām. 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, nānyad
astīti vāāāadinah. 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 always is the truth
which is seen by the heart of man in its illumined depths or heard within from
the Master of all knowledge, the knower of the eternal Veda.
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