FIFTEEN
The Possibility and Purpose of Avatarhood
IN
SPEAKING of this Yoga in which action and knowledge become one, the Yoga of the
sacrifice of works with knowledge, in which works are fulfilled in knowledge,
knowledge supports, changes and enlightens works, and both are offered to the Purushottama,
the supreme Divinity who becomes manifest within us as Narayana, Lord of all
our being and action seated secret in our hearts for ever, who becomes manifest
even in the human form as the Avatar, the divine birth taking possession of our
humanity, Krishna has declared in passing that this was the ancient and
original Yoga which he gave to Vivasvan, the Sun-God, Vivasvan gave it to Manu,
the father of men, Manu gave it to Ikshvaku, head of the Solar line, and so it
came down from royal sage to royal sage till it was lost in the great lapse of
Time and is now renewed for Arjuna, because he is the lover and devotee, friend
and comrade of the Avatar. For this, he says, is the highest secret, – thus claiming
for it a superiority to all other forms of Yoga, because those others lead to
the impersonal Brahman or to a personal Deity, to a liberation in actionless
knowledge or a liberation in absorbed beatitude, but this gives the highest
secret and the whole secret; it brings us to divine peace and divine works, to
divine knowledge, action and ecstasy unified in a perfect freedom; it unites
into itself all the Yogic paths as the highest being of the Divine reconciles
and makes one in itself all the different
and even contrary powers and principles of its manifested being. Therefore this
Yoga of the Gita is not, as some contend, only the Karmayoga, one and the
lowest, according to them, of the three paths, but a highest Yoga synthetic and
integral directing Godward all the powers of our being.
Arjuna takes the declaration about
the transmission of the
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Yoga in its most physical sense,
– there is another significance in which it can be taken, – and asks how the
Sun-God, one of the first-born of beings, ancestor of the Solar dynasty, can
have received the Yoga from the man Krishna who is only now born into the
world. Krishna does not reply, as we might have expected him to have done, that
it was as the Divine who is the source of all knowledge that he gave the Word
to the Deva who is his form of knowledge, giver of all inner and outer light, –
bhargah savitur devasya yo no dhiyah
pracodayāt; he accepts instead the opportunity which Arjuna gives him
of declaring his concealed Godhead, a declaration for which he had prepared
when he gave himself as the divine example for the worker who is not bound by his
works, but which he has not yet quite explicitly made. He now openly announces
himself as the incarnate Godhead, the Avatar.
We have had
occasion already, when speaking of the divine Teacher, to state briefly the
doctrine of Avatarhood as it appears to us in the light of Vedanta, the light
in which the Gita presents it to us. We must now look a little more closely at this
Avatarhood and at the significance of the divine Birth of which it is the
outward expression; for that is a link of considerable importance in the
integral teaching of the Gita. And we may first translate the words of the
Teacher himself in which the nature and purpose of Avatarhood are given
summarily and remind ourselves also of other passages or references which bear
upon it. “Many are my lives that are past, and thine also, O Arjuna; all of
them I know, but thou knowest not, O scourge of the foe. Though I am the
unborn, though I am imperishable in my self-existence, though I am the Lord of
all existences, yet I stand upon my own Nature and I come into birth by my
self-Maya. For whensoever there is the fading of the Dharma and the uprising of
unrighteousness, then I loose myself forth into birth. For the deliverance of
the good, for the destruction of the evil-doers, for the enthroning of the
Right I am born from age to age. He who knoweth thus in its right principles my
divine birth and my divine work, when he abandons his body, comes not to
rebirth, he comes to Me, O Arjuna. Delivered from liking and fear and wrath,
full of me, taking refuge in me, many purified by austerity of knowledge
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have arrived at my nature of
being (madbhāvam, the divine
nature of the Purushottama). As men approach me, so I accept them to my love (bhajāmi); men follow in every way
my path, O son of Pritha.”
But most men,
the Gita goes on to say, desiring the fulfilment of their works, sacrifice to
the gods, to various forms and personalities of the one Godhead, because the
fulfilment (siddhi) that is born of
works, – of works without knowledge, – is very swift and easy in the human
world; it belongs indeed to that world alone. The other, the divine
self-fulfilment in man by the sacrifice with knowledge to the supreme Godhead,
is much more difficult; its results belong to a higher plane of existence and
they are less easily grasped. Men therefore have to follow the fourfold law of
their nature and works and on this plane of mundane action they seek the
Godhead through his various qualities. But, says Krishna,
though I am the doer of the fourfold works and creator of its fourfold law, yet
I must be known also as the non-doer, the imperishable, the immutable Self.
“Works affect me not, nor have I desire for the fruit of works;” for God is the
impersonal beyond this egoistic personality and this strife of the modes of
Nature, and as the Purushottama also, the impersonal Personality, he possesses this
supreme freedom even in works. Therefore the doer of divine works even while
following the fourfold law has to know and live in that which is beyond, in the
impersonal Self and so in the supreme Godhead. “He who thus knows me is not bound
by his works. So knowing was work done by the men of old who sought liberation;
do therefore, thou also, work of that more ancient kind done by ancient men.”
The second portion
of these passages which has here been given in substance, explains the nature
of divine works, divyam karma, with
the principle of which we have had to deal in the last essay; the first, which
has been fully translated, explains the way of the divine birth, divyam janma, the Avatarhood. But we
have to remark carefully that the upholding of Dharma in the world is not the
only object of the descent of the Avatar, that great mystery of the Divine
manifest in humanity; for the upholding of the Dharma is not an all-sufficient
object in itself, not the supreme possible aim for the manifestation of a
Christ, a Krishna, a
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Buddha, but is only the general
condition of a higher aim and a more supreme and divine utility. For there are
two aspects of the divine birth; one is a descent, the birth of God in
humanity, the Godhead manifesting itself in the human form and nature, the
eternal Avatar; the other is an ascent, the birth of man into the Godhead, man
rising into the divine nature and consciousness, madbhāvam āgatah; it is the being born anew in a
second birth of the soul. It is that new birth which Avatarhood and the
upholding of the Dharma are intended to serve. This double aspect in the Gita's
doctrine of Avatarhood is apt to be missed by the cursory reader satisfied, as
most are, with catching a superficial view of its profound teachings, and it is
missed too by the formal commentator petrified in the rigidity of the schools.
Yet it is necessary, surely, to the whole meaning of the doctrine. Otherwise
the Avatar idea would be only a dogma, a popular superstition, or an imaginative
or mystic deification of historical or legendary supermen, not what the Gita
makes all its teaching, a deep philosophical and religious truth and an
essential part of or step to the supreme mystery of all, rahasyam uttamam.
If there were
not this rising of man into the Godhead to be helped by the descent of God into
humanity, Avatarhood for the sake of the Dharma would be an otiose phenomenon,
since mere Right, mere justice or standards of virtue can always be upheld by
the divine omnipotence through its ordinary means, by great men or great
movements, by the life and work of sages and kings and religious teachers,
without any actual incarnation. The Avatar comes as the manifestation of the
divine nature in the human nature, the apocalypse of its Christhood,
Krishnahood, Buddhahood, in order that the human nature may by moulding its
principle, thought, feeling, action, being on the lines of that Christhood,
Krishnahood, Buddhahood transfigure itself into the divine. The law, the Dharma
which the Avatar establishes is given for that purpose chiefly; the Christ, Krishna,
Buddha stands in its centre as the gate, he makes through himself the way men
shall follow. That is why each Incarnation holds before men his own example and
declares of himself that he is the way and the gate; he declares too the
oneness of his humanity with the divine being, declares that the Son of Man and
the Father above
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from whom he has descended are
one, that Krishna in the human body, mānusīm tanum āśritam,
and the supreme Lord and Friend of all creatures are but two revelations of the
same divine Purushottama, revealed there in his own being, revealed here in the
type of humanity.
That the Gita
contains as its kernel this second and real object of the Avatarhood, is
evident even from this passage by itself rightly considered; but it becomes
much clearer if we take it, not by itself, – always the wrong way to deal with
the texts of the Gita, – but in its right close connection with other passages
and with the whole teaching. We have to remember and take together its doctrine
of the one Self in all, of the Godhead seated in the heart of every creature,
its teaching about the relations between the Creator and his creation, its
strongly emphasised idea of the vibhūti,
– noting too the language in which the Teacher gives his own divine example of
selfless works which applies equally to the human Krishna and the divine Lord
of the worlds, and giving their due weight to such passages as that in the
ninth chapter, “Deluded minds despise me lodged in the human body because they
know not my supreme nature of being, Lord of all existences”; and we have to read
in the light of these ideas this passage we find before us and its declaration
that by the knowledge of his divine birth and divine works men come to the
Divine and by becoming full of him and even as he and taking refuge in him they
arrive at his nature and status of being, madbhāvam.
For then we shall understand the divine birth and its object, not as an
isolated and miraculous phenomenon, but in its proper place in the whole scheme
of the world-manifestation; without that we cannot arrive at its divine
mystery, but shall either scout it altogether or accept it ignorantly and, it
may be, superstitiously or fall into the petty and superficial ideas of the
modern mind about it by which it loses all its inner and helpful significance.
For to the
modern mind Avatarhood is one of the most difficult to accept or to understand
of all the ideas that are streaming in from the East upon the rationalised
human consciousness. It is apt to take it at the best for a mere figure for
some high manifestation of human power, character, genius, great work
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done for the world or in the
world, and at the worst to regard it as a superstition, – to the heathen a
foolishness and to the Greeks a stumbling-block. The materialist, necessarily, cannot
even look at it, since he does not believe in God; to the rationalist or the
Deist it is a folly and a thing of derision; to the thoroughgoing dualist who
sees an unbridgeable gulf between the human and the divine nature, it sounds
like a blasphemy. The rationalist objects that if God exists, he is extracosmic
or supracosmic and does not intervene in the affairs of the world, but allows
them to be governed by a fixed machinery of law, – he is, in fact, a sort of
far-off constitutional monarch or spiritual King Log, at the best an
indifferent inactive Spirit behind the activity of Nature, like some
generalised or abstract witness Purusha of the Sankhyas; he is pure Spirit and
cannot put on a body, infinite and cannot be finite as the human being is
finite, the ever unborn creator and cannot be the creature born into the world,
– these things are impossible even to his absolute omnipotence. To these
objections the thoroughgoing dualist would add that God is in his person, his
role and his nature different and separate from man; the perfect cannot put on
human imperfection; the unborn personal God cannot be born as a human
personality; the Ruler of the worlds cannot be limited in a nature-bound human
action and in a perishable human body. These objections, so formidable at first
sight to the reason, seem to have been present to the mind of the Teacher in
the Gita when he says that although the Divine is unborn, imperishable in his
self-existence, the Lord of all beings, yet he assumes birth by a supreme
resort to the action of his Nature and by force of his self-Maya; that he whom the
deluded despise because lodged in a human body, is verily in his supreme being
the Lord of all; that he is in the action of the divine consciousness the
creator of the fourfold Law and the doer of the works of the world and at the
same time in the silence of the divine consciousness the impartial witness of
the works of his own Nature, – for he is always, beyond both the silence and
the action, the supreme Purushottama. And the Gita is able to meet all these
oppositions and to reconcile all these contraries because it starts from the
Vedantic view of existence, of God and the universe.
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For in the
Vedantic view of things all these apparently formidable objections are null and
void from the beginning. The idea of the Avatar is not indeed indispensable to
its scheme, but it comes in naturally into it as a perfectly rational and
logical conception. For all here is God, is the Spirit or Self-existence, is Brahman, ekamevādvitīiyam, – there
is nothing else, nothing other and different from it and there can be nothing
else, can be nothing other and different from it; Nature is and can be nothing
else than a power of the divine consciousness; all beings are and can be
nothing else than inner and outer, subjective and objective soul-forms and
bodily forms of the divine being which exist in or result from the power of its
consciousness. Far from the Infinite being unable to take on finiteness, the
whole universe is nothing else but that; we can see, look as we may, nothing else
at all in the whole wide world we inhabit. Far from the Spirit being incapable
of form or disdaining to connect itself with form of matter or mind and to
assume a limited nature or a body, all here is nothing but that, the world exists
only by that connection, that assumption. Far from the world being a mechanism
of law with no soul or spirit intervening in the movement of its forces or the
action of its minds and bodies, – only some original indifferent Spirit passively
existing somewhere outside or above it, – the whole world and every particle of
it is on the contrary nothing but the divine force in action and that divine
force determines and governs its every movement, inhabits its every form, possesses
here every soul and mind; all is in God and in him moves and has its being, in
all he is, acts and displays his being; every creature is the disguised
Narayana.
Far from the
unborn being unable to assume birth, all beings are even in their individuality
unborn spirits, eternal without beginning or end, and in their essential
existence and their universality all are the one unborn Spirit of whom birth
and death are only a phenomenon of the assumption and change of forms. The
assumption of imperfection by the perfect is the whole mystic phenomenon of the
universe; but the imperfection appears in the form and action of the mind or
body assumed, subsists in the phenomenon, – in that which assumes it there is
no imperfection, even as in the Sun which illumines all there is no defect of
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light or of vision, but only in
the capacities of the individual organ of vision. Nor does God rule the world
from some remote heaven, but by his intimate omnipresence; each finite working
of force is an act of infinite Force and not of a limited separate self-existent
energy labouring in its own underived strength; in every finite working of will
and knowledge we can discover, supporting it, an act of the infinite all-will and
all-knowledge. God's rule is not an absentee, foreign and external government;
he governs all because he exceeds all, but also because he dwells within all
movements and is their absolute soul and spirit. Therefore none of the
objections opposed by our reason to the possibility of Avatarhood can stand in
their principle; for the principle is a vain division made by the intellectual
reason which the whole phenomenon and the whole reality of the world are busy
every moment contradicting and disproving.
But still, apart
from the possibility, there is the question of the actual divine working, – whether
actually the divine consciousness does appear coming forward from beyond the
veil to act at all directly in the phenomenal, the finite, the mental and
material, the limited, the imperfect. The finite is indeed nothing but a
definition, a face-value of the Infinite's self-representations to its own
variations of consciousness; the real value of each finite phenomenon is an
infinite value, is indeed the very Infinite. Each being is infinite in its
self-existence, whatever it may be in the action of its phenomenal nature, its
temporal self-representation. The man is not, when we look closely, himself
alone, a rigidly separate self-existent individual, but humanity in a mind and
body of itself; and humanity too is no rigidly separate self-existent species
or genus, it is the All-existence, the universal Godhead figuring itself in the
type of humanity; there it works out certain possibilities, develops, evolves,
as we now say, certain powers of its manifestations. What it evolves, is
itself, is the Spirit.
For what we mean by Spirit is self-existent
being with an infinite power of consciousness and unconditioned delight in its
being; it is either that or nothing, or at least nothing which has anything to
do with man and the world or with which, therefore, man or the world has
anything to do. Matter, body is only a massed motion of force of conscious
being employed
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as a starting-point for the
variable relations of consciousness working through its power of sense; nor is
Matter anywhere really void of consciousness, for even in the atom, the cell
there is, as is now made abundantly clear in spite of itself by modern Science,
a power of will, an intelligence at work; but that power is the power of will
and intelligence of the Self, Spirit or Godhead within it, it is not the
separate, self-derived will or idea of the mechanical cell or atom. This
universal will and intelligence, involved, develops its powers from form to
form, and on earth at least it is in man that it draws nearest to the full divine
and there first becomes, even in the outward intelligence in the form,
obscurely conscious of its divinity. But still there too there is a limitation,
there is that imperfection of the manifestation which prevents the lower forms
from having the self-knowledge of their identity with the Divine. For in each
limited being the limitation of the phenomenal action is accompanied by a
limitation also of the phenomenal consciousness which defines the nature of the
being and makes the inner difference between creature and creature. The Divine
works behind indeed and governs its special manifestation through this outer
and imperfect consciousness and will, but is itself secret in the cavern, guhāyām, as the Veda puts it,
or as the Gita expresses it, “In the heart of all existences the Lord abides
turning all existences as if mounted on a machine by Maya.” This secret working
of the Lord hidden in the heart from the egoistic nature-consciousness through
which he works, is God's universal method with creatures. Why then should we
suppose that in any form he comes forward into the frontal, the phenomenal
consciousness for a more direct and consciously divine action? Obviously, if at
all, then to break the veil between himself and humanity which man limited in
his own nature could never lift.
The Gita
explains the ordinary imperfect action of the creature by its subjection to the
mechanism of Prakriti and its limitation by the self-representations of Maya.
These two terms are only complementary aspects of one and the same effective
force of divine consciousness. Maya is not essentially illusion, – the element
or appearance of illusion only enters
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in by the ignorance of the lower
Prakriti, Maya of the three modes of Nature, – it is the divine consciousness in
its power of various self-representation of its being, while Prakriti is the
effective force of that consciousness which operates to work out each such
self-representation according to its own law and fundamental idea, svabhāva and svadharma, in its own proper quality and particular force of
working, guna-karma. “Leaning
– pressing down upon my own Nature (Prakriti) I create (loose forth into
various being) all this multitude of existences, all helplessly subject to the
control of Nature.” Those who know not the Divine lodged in the human body, are
ignorant of it because they are grossly subject to this mechanism of Prakriti,
helplessly subject to its mental limitations and acquiescent in them, and dwell
in an Asuric nature that deludes with desire and bewilders with egoism the will
and the intelligence, mohinīm prakrtim śritāh.
For the Purushottama within is not readily manifest to any and every being; he
conceals himself in a thick cloud of darkness or a bright cloud of light,
utterly he envelops and wraps himself in his Yogamaya.¹ “All this world,” says the Gita, “because it is
bewildered by the three states of being determined by the modes of Nature, fails
to recognise me, for this my divine Maya of the modes of Nature is hard to get
beyond; those cross beyond it who approach Me; but those who dwell in the
Asuric nature of being, have their knowledge reft from them by Maya.” In other
words, there is the inherent consciousness of the divine in all, for in all the
Divine dwells; but he dwells there covered by his Maya and the essential
self-knowledge of beings is reft from them, turned into the error of egoism by
the action of Maya, the action of the mechanism of Prakriti. Still by drawing
back from the mechanism of Nature to her inner and secret Master man can become
conscious of the indwelling Divinity.
Now it is
notable that with a slight but important variation of language the Gita
describes in the same way both the action of the Divine in bringing about the
ordinary birth of creatures and his action in his birth as the Avatar. “Leaning
upon my own Nature, prakrtim
svām avastabhya,” it will say later, “I loose
¹nāham prakāśah sarvasya yogamāayā-samāvrtah.
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forth variously, visrjāmi, this multitude of creatures helplessly subject owing to
the control of Prakriti, avaśam
prakrter vaśāt.” “Standing upon my own Nature,” it says
here, “I am born by my self-Maya, prakrtim
svām adhisthāya… ātmamāyayā, I
loose forth myself, ātmānam
srjāmi.” The action implied in the word avastabhya is a forceful downward pressure by which
the object controlled is overcome, oppressed, blocked or limited in its
movement or working and becomes helplessly subject to the controlling power, avaśam vaśāt; Nature in
this action becomes mechanical and its multitude of creatures are held helpless
in the mechanism, not lords of their own action. On the contrary the action
implied in the word adhisthāya
is a dwelling in, but also a standing upon and over the Nature, a conscious
control and government by the indwelling Godhead, adhīsthātrī devatā, in which the Purusha is not helplessly driven by the
Prakriti through ignorance, but rather the Prakriti is full of the light and
the will of the Purusha. Therefore in the normal birth that which is loosed
forth, – created, as we say, – is the multitude of creatures or becomings, bhūtagrāmam; in the divine
birth that which is loosed forth, self-created, is the self-conscious
self-existent being, ātmānam;
for the Vedantic distinction between ātmā
and bhūtāni is that which
is made in European philosophy between the Being and its becomings. In both
cases Maya is the means of the creation or manifestation, but in the divine
birth it is by self-Maya, ātmamāyayā,
not the involution in the lower Maya of the ignorance, but the conscious action
of the self-existent Godhead in its phenomenal self-representation, well aware
of its operation and its purpose, – that which the Gita calls elsewhere
Yogamaya. In the ordinary birth Yogamaya is used by the Divine to envelop and
conceal itself from the lower consciousness, so it becomes for us the means of
the ignorance, avidyāmāyā;
but it is by this same Yogamaya that self-knowledge also is made manifest in
the return of our consciousness to the Divine, it is the means of the
knowledge, vidyāmāyā;
and in the divine birth it so operates – as the knowledge controlling and
enlightening the works which are ordinarily done in the Ignorance.
The language of
the Gita shows therefore that the divine
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birth is that of the conscious
Godhead in our humanity and essentially the opposite of the ordinary birth even
though the same means are used, because it is not the birth into the Ignorance,
but the birth of the knowledge, not a physical phenomenon, but a soul-birth. It
is the Soul's coming into birth as the self-existent Being controlling
consciously its becoming and not lost to self-knowledge in the cloud of the
ignorance. It is the Soul born into the body as Lord of Nature, standing above
and operating in her freely by its will, not entangled and helplessly driven
round and round in the mechanism; for it works in the knowledge and not, as
most do, in the ignorance. It is the secret Soul in all coming forward from its
governing secrecy behind the veil to possess wholly in a human type, but as the
Divine, the birth which ordinarily it possesses only from behind the veil as
the Ishwara while the outward consciousness in front of the veil is rather
possessed than in possession because there it is a partially conscious being,
the Jiva lost to self-knowledge and bound in its works through a phenomenal
subjection to Nature. The Avatar¹
therefore is a direct manifestation in humanity by Krishna the divine Soul of
that divine condition of being to which Arjuna, the human soul, the type of a
highest human being, a Vibhuti, is called upon by the Teacher to arise, and to
which he can only arise by climbing out of the ignorance and limitation of his
ordinary humanity. It is the manifestation from above of that which we have to
develop from below; it is the descent of God into that divine birth of the
human being into which we mortal creatures must climb; it is the attracting
divine example given by God to man in the very type and form and perfected
model of our human existence.
¹The word Avatara means a descent; it is a coming down
of the Divine below the line which divides the divine from the human world or
status.
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