SIXTEEN
The Process of Avatarhood
WE SEE that the mystery of the divine Incarnation in man,
the assumption by the Godhead of the human type and the human nature, is in the
view of the Gita only the other side of the eternal mystery of human birth
itself which is always in its essence, though not in its phenomenal appearance,
even such a miraculous assumption. The eternal and universal self of every
human being is God; even his personal self is a part of the Godhead, mamaivāmśah, – not a
fraction or fragment, surely, since we cannot think of God as broken up into
little pieces, but a partial consciousness of the one Consciousness, a partial
power of the one Power, a partial enjoyment of world-being by the one and
universal Delight of being, and therefore in manifestation or, as we say, in
Nature a limited and finite being of the one infinite and illimitable Being.
The stamp of that limitation is an ignorance by which he forgets, not only the
Godhead from which he came forth, but the Godhead which is always within him,
there living in the secret heart of his own nature, there burning like a veiled
Fire on the inner altar in his own temple-house of human consciousness.
He is ignorant
because there is upon the eyes of his soul and all its organs the seal of that
Nature, Prakriti, Maya, by which he has been put forth into manifestation out
of God's eternal being; she has minted him like a coin out of the precious metal
of the divine substance, but overlaid with a strong coating of the alloy of her
phenomenal qualities, stamped with her own stamp and mark of animal humanity,
and although the secret sign of the Godhead is there, it is at first
indistinguishable and always with difficulty decipherable, not to be really
discovered except by that initiation into the mystery of our own being which
distinguishes a Godward from an earthward humanity. In the Avatar, the
divinely-born Man, the real
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substance shines through the
coating; the mark of the seal is there only for form, the vision is that of the
secret Godhead, the power of the life is that of the secret Godhead, and it
breaks through the seals of the assumed human nature; the sign of the Godhead,
an inner soul-sign, not outward, not physical, stands out legible for all to
read who care to see or who can see; for the Asuric nature is always blind to
these things, it sees the body and not the soul, the external being and not the
internal, the mask and not the Person. In the ordinary human birth the
Nature-aspect of the universal Divine assuming humanity prevails; in the incarnation
the God-aspect of the same phenomenon takes its place. In the one he allows the
human nature to take possession of his partial being and to dominate it; in the
other he takes possession of his partial type of being and its nature and
divinely dominates it. Not by evolution or ascent like the ordinary man, the
Gita seems to tell us, not by a growing into the divine birth, but by a direct
descent into the stuff of humanity and a taking up of its moulds.
But it is to
assist that ascent or evolution the descent is made or accepted; that the Gita
makes very clear. It is, we might say, to exemplify the possibility of the
Divine manifest in the human being, so that man may see what that is and take courage
to grow into it. It is also to leave the influence of that manifestation
vibrating in the earth-nature and the soul of that manifestation presiding over
its upward endeavour. It is to give a spiritual mould of divine manhood into
which the seeking soul of the human being can cast itself. It is to give a
dharma, a religion, – not a mere creed, but a method of inner and outer living,
– a way, a rule and law of self-moulding by which he can grow towards divinity.
It is too, since this growth, this ascent is no mere isolated and individual
phenomenon, but like all in the divine world-activities a collective business,
a work and the work for the race, to assist the human march, to hold it
together in its great crises, to break the forces of the downward gravitation
when they grow too insistent, to uphold or restore the great dharma of the
Godward law in man's nature, to prepare even, however far off, the kingdom of
God, the victory of the seekers of light and perfection, sādhūunām, and the
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overthrow of those who fight for
the continuance of the evil and the darkness. All these are recognised objects
of the descent of the Avatar, and it is usually by his work that the mass of
men seek to distinguish him and for that that they are ready to worship him. It
is only the spiritual who see that this external Avatarhood is a sign, in the
symbol of a human life, of the eternal inner Godhead making himself manifest in
the field of their own human mentality and corporeality so that they can grow
into unity with that and be possessed by it. The divine manifestation of a
Christ, Krishna, Buddha in external humanity has for its
inner truth the same manifestation of the eternal Avatar within in our own
inner humanity. That which has been done in the outer human life of earth, may
be repeated in the inner life of all human beings.
This is the
object of the incarnation, but what is the method? First, we have the rational
or minimising view of Avatarhood which sees in it only an extraordinary
manifestation of the diviner qualities moral, intellectual and dynamic by which
average humanity is exceeded. In this idea there is a certain truth. The Avatar
is at the same time the Vibhuti. This Krishna who in his
divine inner being is the Godhead in a human form, is in his outer human being
the leader of his age, the great man of the Vrishnis. This is from the point of
view of the Nature, not of the soul. The Divine manifests himself through
infinite qualities of his nature and the intensity of the manifestation is
measured by their power and their achievement. The vibhūti of the Divine is therefore, impersonally, the manifest
power of his quality, it is his outflowing, in whatever form, of Knowledge,
Energy, Love, Strength and the rest; personally, it is the mental form and the
animate being in whom this power is achieved and does its great works. A
pre-eminence in this inner and outer achievement, a greater power of divine
quality, an effective energy is always the sign. The human vibhūti is the hero of the race's struggle towards divine
achievement, the hero in the Carlylean sense of heroism, a power of God in man.
“I am Vasudeva (Krishna) among the Vrishnis,” says the
Lord in the Gita, “Dhananjaya (Arjuna) among the Pandavas, Vyasa among the
sages, the seer-poet Ushanas among the
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seer-poets,” the first in each
category, the greatest of each group, the most powerfully representative of the
qualities and works in which its characteristic soul-power manifests itself.
This heightening of the powers of the being is a very necessary step in the
progress of the divine manifestation. Every great man who rises above our
average level, raises by that very fact our common humanity; he is a living
assurance of our divine possibilities, a promise of the Godhead, a glow of the
divine Light and a breath of the divine Power.
It is this truth
which lies behind the natural human tendency to the deification of great minds
and heroic characters; it comes out clearly enough in the Indian habit of mind
which easily sees a partial (amśa)
Avatar in great saints, teachers, founders, or most significantly in the belief
of southern Vaishnavas that some of their saints were incarnations of the symbolic
living weapons of Vishnu, – for that is what all great spirits are, living
powers and weapons of the Divine in the upward march and battle. This idea is
innate and inevitable in any mystic or spiritual view of life which does not
draw an inexorable line between the being and nature of the Divine and our
human being and nature; it is the sense of the divine in humanity. But still
the Vibhuti is not the Avatar; otherwise Arjuna, Vyasa, Ushanas would be
Avatars as well as Krishna, even if in a less degree of
the power of Avatarhood. The divine quality is not enough; there must be the
inner consciousness of the Lord and Self governing the human nature by his
divine presence. The heightening of the power of the qualities is part of the
becoming, bhūtagrāma, an
ascent in the ordinary manifestation; in the Avatar there is the special
manifestation, the divine birth from above, the eternal and universal Godhead
descended into a form of individual humanity, ātmānam srjāmi,
and conscious not only behind the veil but in the outward nature.
There is an
intermediary idea, a more mystical view of Avatarhood which supposes that a
human soul calls down this descent into himself and is either possessed by the
divine consciousness or becomes an effective reflection or channel of it. This
view rests upon certain truths of spiritual experience. The divine birth in man,
his ascent, is itself a growing of the
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human into the divine
consciousness, and in its intensest culmination is a losing of the separate
self in that. The soul merges its individuality in an infinite and universal
being or loses it in the heights of a transcendent being; it becomes one with
the Self, the Brahman, the Divine or, as it is sometimes more absolutely put,
becomes the one Self, the Brahman, the Divine. The Gita itself speaks of the
soul becoming the Brahman, brahmabhūta,
and of its thereby dwelling in the Lord, in Krishna, but it does not, it must
be marked, speak of it as becoming the Lord or the Purushottama, though it does
declare that the Jiva himself is always Ishwara, the partial being of the Lord,
mamaivāmśah. For
this greatest union, this highest becoming is still part of the ascent; while
it is the divine birth to which every Jiva arrives, it is not the descent of
the Godhead, not Avatarhood, but at most Buddhahood according to the doctrine
of the Buddhists, it is the soul awakened from its present mundane
individuality into an infinite superconsciousness. That need not carry with it
either the inner consciousness or the characteristic action of the Avatar.
On the other
hand, this entering into the divine consciousness may be attended by a reflex
action of the Divine entering or coming forward into the human parts of our
being, pouring himself into the nature, the activity, the mentality, the corporeality
even of the man; and that may well be at least a partial Avatarhood. The Lord
stands in the heart, says the Gita, – by which it means of course the heart of
the subtle being, the nodus of the emotions, sensations, mental consciousness,
where the individual Purusha also is seated, – but he stands there veiled,
enveloped by his Maya. But above, on a plane within us but now superconscient
to us, called heaven by the ancient mystics, the Lord and the Jiva stand together
revealed as of one essence of being, the Father and the Son of certain
symbolisms, the Divine Being and the divine Man who comes forth from Him born
of the higher divine Nature,¹ the
virgin Mother, parā prakrti,
parā māyā, into the
lower or
¹In the Buddhist legend the
name of the mother of Buddha makes the symbolism clear; in the Christian the
symbol seems to have been attached by a familiar mythopoeic process to the
actual human mother of Jesus of Nazareth.
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human nature. This seems to be
the inner doctrine of the Christian incarnation; in its Trinity the Father is
above in this inner Heaven; the Son or supreme Prakriti become Jiva of the Gita
descends as the divine Man upon earth, in the mortal body; the Holy Spirit,
pure Self, Brahmic consciousness is that which makes them one and that also in
which they communicate; for we hear of the Holy Spirit descending upon Jesus
and it is the same descent which brings down the powers of the higher
consciousness into the simple humanity of the Apostles.
But also the
higher divine consciousness of the Purushottama may itself descend into the
humanity and that of the Jiva disappear into it. This is said by his
contemporaries to have happened in the occasional transfigurations of Chaitanya
when he who in his normal consciousness was only the lover and devotee of the
Lord and rejected all deification, became in these abnormal moments the Lord
himself and so spoke and acted, with all the outflooding light and love and
power of the divine Presence. Supposing this to be the normal condition, the
human receptacle to be constantly no more than a vessel of this divine Presence
and divine Consciousness, we should have the Avatar according to this
intermediary idea of the incarnation. That easily recommends itself as possible
to our human notions; for if the human being can elevate his nature so as to
feel a unity with the being of the Divine and himself a mere channel of its
consciousness, light, power, love, his own will and personality lost in that
will and that being, – and this is a recognised spiritual status, – then there
is no inherent impossibility of the reflex action of that Will, Being, Power,
Love, Light, Consciousness occupying the whole personality of the human Jiva. And
this would not be merely an ascent of our humanity into the divine birth and
the divine nature, but a descent of the divine Purusha into humanity, an
Avatar.
The Gita,
however, goes much farther. It speaks clearly of the Lord himself being born;
Krishna speaks of his many births that are past and makes it clear by his
language that it is not merely the receptive human being but the Divine of whom
he makes this affirmation, because he uses the very language of the
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Creator, the same language which
he will employ when he has to describe his creation of the world. “Although I
am the unborn Lord of creatures, I create (loose forth) my self by my Maya,”
presiding over the actions of my Prakriti. Here there is no question of the
Lord and the human Jiva or of the Father and the Son, the divine Man, but only
of the Lord and his Prakriti. The Divine descends by his own Prakriti into
birth in its human form and type and brings into it the divine Consciousness
and the divine Power, though consenting, though willing to act in the form,
type, mould of humanity, and he governs its actions in the body as the
indwelling and over-dwelling Soul, adhisthāya.
From above he governs always, indeed, for so he governs all nature, the human
included; from within also he governs all nature, always, but hidden; the difference
here is that he is manifest, that the nature is conscious of the divine
Presence as the Lord, the Inhabitant, and it is not by his secret will from
above, “the will of the Father which is in heaven,” but by his quite direct and
apparent will that he moves the nature. And here there seems to be no room for
the human intermediary; for it is by resort to his own nature, prakrtim svām, and not the
special nature of the Jiva that the Lord of all existence thus takes upon
himself the human birth.
This doctrine is
a hard saying, a difficult thing for the human reason to accept; and for an
obvious reason, because of the evident humanity of the Avatar. The Avatar is
always a dual phenomenon of divinity and humanity; the Divine takes upon
himself the human nature with all its outward limitations and makes them the
circumstances, means, instruments of the divine consciousness and the divine
power, a vessel of the divine birth and the divine works. But so surely it must
be, since otherwise the object of the Avatar's descent is not fulfilled; for
that object is precisely to show that the human birth with all its limitations
can be made such a means and instrument of the divine birth and divine works,
precisely to show that the human type of consciousness can be compatible with
the divine essence of consciousness made manifest, can be converted into its
vessel, drawn into nearer conformity with it by a change of its mould and a
heightening of its powers of light and love and strength and purity; and to
show
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also how it can be done. If the
Avatar were to act in an entirely supernormal fashion, this object would not be
fulfilled. A merely supernormal or miraculous Avatar would be a meaningless
absurdity; not that there need be an entire absence of the use of supernormal
powers such as Christ's so-called miracles of healing, for the use of
supernormal powers is quite a possibility of human nature; but there need not
be that at all, nor in any case is it the root of the matter, nor would it at
all do if the life were nothing else but a display of supernormal fireworks.
The Avatar does not come as a thaumaturgic magician, but as the divine leader
of humanity and the exemplar of a divine humanity. Even human sorrow and
physical suffering he must assume and use so as to show, first, how that
suffering may be a means of redemption, – as did Christ, – secondly, to show
how, having been assumed by the divine soul in the human nature, it can also be
overcome in the same nature, – as did Buddha. The rationalist who would have
cried to Christ, “If thou art the Son of God, come down from the cross,” or
points out sagely that the Avatar was not divine because he died and died too
by disease, – as a dog dieth, – knows not what he is saying: for he has missed
the root of the whole matter. Even, the Avatar of sorrow and suffering must
come before there can be the Avatar of divine joy; the human limitation must be
assumed in order to show how it can be overcome; and the way and the extent of
the overcoming, whether internal only or external also, depends upon the stage
of the human advance; it must not be done by a non-human miracle.
The question then
arises, and it is the sole real difficulty, for here the intellect falters and
stumbles over its own limits, how is this human mind and body assumed? For they
were not created suddenly and all of a piece, but by some kind of evolution,
physical or spiritual or both. No doubt, the descent of the Avatar, like the
divine birth from the other side, is essentially a spiritual phenomenon, as is
shown by the Gita's ātmānam
srjāmi, it is a
soul-birth; but still there is here an attendant physical birth. How then were
this human mind and body of the Avatar created? If we suppose that the body is
always created by the hereditary evolution, by inconscient Nature and its
immanent Life-spirit without the intervention of the individual soul, the
matter becomes
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simple. A physical and mental
body is prepared fit for the divine incarnation by a pure or great heredity and
the descending Godhead takes possession of it. But the Gita in this very
passage applies the doctrine of reincarnation, boldly enough, to the Avatar
himself, and in the usual theory of reincarnation the reincarnating soul by its
past spiritual and psychological evolution itself determines and in a way prepares
its own mental and physical body. The soul prepares its own body, the body is
not prepared for it without any reference to the soul. Are we then to suppose
an eternal or continual Avatar himself evolving, we might say, his own fit mental
and physical body according to the needs and pace of the human evolution and so
appearing from age to age, yuge yuge?
In some such spirit some would interpret the ten incarnations of Vishnu, first
in animal forms, then in the animal man, then in the dwarf man-soul, Vamana,
the violent Asuric man, Rama of the axe, the divinely-natured man, a greater
Rama, the awakened spiritual man, Buddha, and, preceding him in time, but final
in place, the complete divine manhood, Krishna, – for the last Avatar, Kalki,
only accomplishes the work Krishna began, – he fulfils in power the great
struggle which the previous Avatars prepared in all its potentialities. It is a
difficult assumption to our modern mentality, but the language of the Gita
seems to demand it. Or, since the Gita does not expressly solve the problem, we
may solve it in some other way of our own, as that the body is prepared by the
Jiva but assumed from birth by the Godhead or that it is prepared by one of the
four Manus, catvāro manavah,
of the Gita, the spiritual Fathers of every human mind and body. This is going far
into the mystic field from which the modern reason is still averse; but once we
admit Avatarhood, we have already entered into it and, once entered, may as
well tread in it with firm footsteps.
There the Gita's
doctrine of Avatarhood stands. We have had to advert to it at length in this
aspect of its method, as we did to the question of its possibility, because it
is necessary to look at it and face the difficulties which the reasoning mind
of man is likely to offer to it. It is true that the physical Avatarhood does
not fill a large space in the Gita, but still it does occupy a definite place
in the chain of its teachings and is implied in the whole
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scheme, the very
framework being the Avatar leading the vibhūti,
the man who has risen to the greatest heights of mere manhood, to the divine
birth and divine works. No doubt, too, the inner descent of the Godhead to
raise the human soul into himself is the main thing, – it is the inner Christ, Krishna
or Buddha that matters. But just as the outer life is of immense importance for
the inner development, so the external Avatarhood is of no mean importance for
this great spiritual manifestation. The consummation in the mental and physical
symbol assists the growth of the inner reality; afterwards the inner reality
expresses itself with greater power in a more perfect symbolisation of itself
through the outer life. Between these two, spiritual reality and mental and
physical expression, acting and returning upon each other constantly the
manifestation of the Divine in humanity has elected to move always in the
cycles of its concealment and its revelation.
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