{"id":3630,"date":"2013-07-13T01:50:04","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:50:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=3630"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:50:04","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:50:04","slug":"02-the-divine-teacher-vol-essays-on-the-gita-1950-edn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/02-other-editions\/essays-on-the-gita-1950-edn\/02-the-divine-teacher-vol-essays-on-the-gita-1950-edn","title":{"rendered":"-02_The Divine Teacher.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n

\nII<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\n
\nTHE DIVINE TEACHER <\/font><\/b>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nT<\/font>HE<\/font>
\nPECULIARITY<\/font> of the Gita among the great religious books of
\nthe world is that it does not stand apart as a work by itself, the
\nfruit of the spiritual life of a creative personality like Christ, Mahomed or Buddha or of an epoch of pure spiritual searching like the
\nVeda and Upanishads, but is given as an episode in an epic history
\nof nations and their wars and men and their deeds and arises out of
\na critical moment in the soul of one of its leading personages face to
\nface with the crowning action of his life, a work terrible, violent and
\nsanguinary, at the point when he must either recoil from it altogether
\nor carry it through to its inexorable completion. It matters little
\nwhether or no, as modern criticism supposes, the Gita is a later composition inserted into the mass of the Mahabharata by its author in
\norder to invest its teaching with the authority and popularity of the
\ngreat national epic. There seem to me to be strong grounds against this
\nsupposition for which, besides, the evidence, extrinsic or internal, is
\nin the last degree scanty and insufficient. But even if it be sound, there
\nremains the fact that the author has not only taken pains to interweave his work inextricably into the vast web of the larger poem,
\nbut is careful again and again to remind us of the situation from
\nwhich the teaching has arisen; he returns to it prominently, not only at the
\nend, but in the middle of his profoundest philosophical disquisitions. We must accept the insistence of the author and give its
\nfull importance to this recurrent preoccupation of the Teacher and
\nthe disciple. The teaching of the Gita must therefore be regarded not
\nmerely in the light of a general spiritual philosophy or ethical doctrine, but as bearing upon a practical crisis in the application of ethics
\nand spirituality to human life. For what that crisis stands, what is the
\nsignificance of the battle of Kurukshetra and its effect on Arjuna’s
\ninner being, we have first to determine if we would grasp the central
\ndrift of the ideas of the Gita. ; <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-11<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nVery obviously a great body of the profoundest teaching cannot be
\nbuilt round an ordinary occurrence which has no gulfs of deep suggestion and hazardous difficulty behind its superficial and outward
\naspects and can he governed well enough by the ordinary everyday
\nstandards of thought and action. There are indeed three things in the
\nGita which are spiritually significant, almost symbolic, typical of the
\nprofoundest relations and problems of the spiritual life and of human
\nexistence at its roots; they are the divine personality of the Teacher,
\nhis characteristic relations with his disciple and the occasion of his teaching.
\nThe teacher is God himself descended into humanity; the
\ndisciple is the first, as we might say in modern language, the representative man of his age, closest friend and chosen instrument of the
\nAvatar, his protagonist in an immense work and struggle the secret
\npurpose of which is unknown to the actors in it, known only to the
\nincarnate Godhead who guides it all from behind the veil of his unfathomable mind of knowledge; the occasion is the violent crisis o\u00a3
\nthat work and struggle at the moment when the anguish and moral
\ndifficulty and blind violence of its apparent movements forces itself
\nwith the shock of a visible revelation on the mind of its representative man and raises the whole question of the meaning of God in the
\nworld and the goal and drift and sense of human life and conduct. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nIndia has from ancient times held strongly a belief in the reality
\nof the Avatar, the descent into form, the revelation of the Godhead
\nin humanity. In the West this belief has never really stamped itself
\nupon the mind because it has been presented through exoteric Christianity as a theological dogma without any roots in the reason and
\ngeneral consciousness and attitude towards life. But in India it has
\ngrown up and persisted as a logical outcome of the Vedantic view
\nof life and taken firm root in the consciousness of the race. All existence is a manifestation of God because He is the only existence and
\nnothing can be except as either a real figuring or else a figment of
\nthat one reality. Therefore every conscious being is in part or in some
\nway a descent of the Infinite into the apparent finiteness of name and
\nform. But it is a veiled manifestation and there is a gradation between
\nthe supreme being1 of the Divine and the consciousness shrouded
\npartly or wholly by ignorance of self in the finite. The conscious embodied soul2 is the spark of the divine Fire and that soul in man opens <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\n1<\/sup>para bhāva. <\/i><\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n2<\/sup>dehī.<\/i> <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-12<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nout to self-knowledge as it develops out of ignorance of self into self-being. The Divine also, pouring itself into the forms of the cosmic
\nexistence, is revealed ordinarily in an efflorescence of its powers, in
\nenergies and magnitudes of its knowledge, love, joy, developed force
\nof being,8 in degrees and faces of its divinity. But when the divine
\nConsciousness and Power, taking upon itself the human form and
\nthe human mode of action, possesses it not only by powers and magnitudes, by degrees and outward faces of itself but out of its eternal
\nself-knowledge, when the Unborn knows itself and acts in the frame
\nof the mental being and the appearance of birth, that is the height of
\nthe conditioned manifestation; it is the full and conscious descent of
\nthe Godhead, it is the Avatar. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nThe Vaishnava form of Vedantism which has laid most stress upon
\nthis conception expresses the relation of God in man to man in God
\nby the double figure of Nara-Narayana, associated historically with
\nthe origin of a religious school very similar in its doctrines to the
\nteaching of the Gita. Nara is the human soul which, eternal companion of the Divine, finds itself only when it awakens to that companionship and begins, as the Gita would say, to live in God. Narayana is the divine Soul always present in our humanity, the secret
\nguide, friend and helper of the human being, the "Lord who abides
\nwithin the heart of creatures" of the Gita; when within us the veil
\nof that secret sanctuary is withdrawn and man speaks face to face
\nwith God, hears the divine voice, receives the divine light, acts in the
\ndivine power, then becomes possible the supreme uplifting of the
\nembodied human conscious-being into the unborn and eternal. He
\nbecomes capable of that dwelling in God and giving up of his whole
\nconsciousness into the Divine which the Gita upholds as the best or
\nhighest secret of things, uttamam rahasyam.<\/i> When this eternal divine
\nConsciousness always present in every human being, this God in man,
\ntakes possession partly4 or wholly of the human consciousness and
\nbecomes in visible human shape the guide, teacher, leader of the
\nworld, not as those who living in their humanity yet feel something
\nof the power or light or love of the divine Gnosis informing and conducting them, but out of that divine Gnosis itself, direct from its
\ncentral force and plenitude, then we have the manifest Avatar. The <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\ns<\/font><\/i><\/sup> vibhūti.<\/i>
\n<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n4<\/sup> Chaitanya, the Avatar of Nadiya, is said to have been thus partly or occasionally occupied by the divine Consciousness and Power. <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-13<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\ninner Divinity is the eternal Avatar in man; the human manifestation
\nis its sign and development in the external world. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nWhen we thus understand the conception of Avatarhood, we see
\nthat whether for the fundamental teaching of the Gita, our present
\nsubject, or for spiritual life generally the external aspect has only a
\nsecondary importance. Such controversies as the one that has raged
\nin Europe over the historicity of Christ, would seem to a spiritually-minded Indian largely a waste of time; he would concede to it a considerable historical, but hardly any religious importance; for what does
\nit matter in the end whether a Jesus son of the carpenter Joseph was
\nactually born in Nazareth or Bethlehem, lived and taught and was
\ndone to death on a real or trumped-up charge of sedition, so long as
\nwe can know by spiritual experience the inner Christ, live uplifted
\nin the light of his teaching and escape from the yoke of the natural
\nLaw by that atonement of man with God of which the crucifixion is
\nthe symbol? If the Christ, God made man, lives within our spiritual
\nbeing, it would seem to matter little whether or not a son of Mary
\nphysically lived and suffered and died in Judea. So too the Krishna
\nwho matters to us is the eternal incarnation of the Divine and not
\nthe historical teacher and leader of men, <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nIn seeking the kernel of the thought of the Gita we need, therefore, only concern ourselves with the spiritual significance of the
\nhuman-divine Krishna of the Mahabharata who is presented to us as
\nthe teacher of Arjuna on the battle-field of Kurukshetra. The historical
\nKrishna, no doubt, existed. We meet the name first in the Chhandogya Upanishad where all we can gather about him is that he was
\nwell-known in spiritual tradition as a knower of the Brahman, so well-known indeed in his personality and the circumstances of his life
\nthat it was sufficient to refer to him by the name of his mother as
\nKrishna son of Devaki for all to understand who was meant. In the
\nsame Upanishad we find mention of King Dhritarashtra son of Vichitravirya, and since tradition associated the two together so closely
\nthat they are both of them leading personages in the action of the
\nMahabharata, we may fairly conclude that they were actually contemporaries and that the epic is to a great extent dealing with historical characters and in the war of Kurukshetra with a historical occurrence imprinted firmly on the memory of the race. We know too
\nthat Krishna and Arjuna were the object of religious worship in the <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-14<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\npre-Christian centuries; and there is some reason to suppose that they
\nwere so in connection with a religious and philosophical tradition
\nfrom which the Gita may have gathered many of its elements and
\neven the foundation of its synthesis of knowledge, devotion and
\nworks, and perhaps also that the human Krishna was the founder, restorer or at the least one of the early teachers of this school. The Gita
\nmay well in spite of its later form represent the outcome in Indian
\nthought of the teaching of Krishna and the connection of that teaching with the historical Krishna, with Arjuna and with the war of
\nKurukshetra may be something more than a dramatic fiction. In the
\nMahabharata Krishna is represented both as the historical character
\nand the Avatar; his worship and Avatarhood must therefore have
\nbeen well established by the time\u2014apparently from the fifth to the
\nfirst centuries B.C.\u2014when the old story and poem or epic tradition of
\nthe Bharatas took its present form. There is a hint also in the poem of
\nthe story or legend of the Avatar’s early life in Vrindavan which, as
\ndeveloped by the Puranas into an intense and powerful spiritual symbol, has exercised so profound an influence on the religious mind of
\nIndia. We have also in the Harivansha an account of the life of
\nKrishna, very evidently full of legends, which perhaps formed the
\nbasis of the Puranic accounts. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nBut all this, though of considerable historical importance, has none
\nwhatever for our present purpose. We are concerned only with the
\nfigure of the divine Teacher as it is presented to us in the Gita and
\nwith the Power for which it there stands in the spiritual illumination
\nof the human being. The Gita accepts the human Avatarhood; for
\nthe Lord speaks of the repeated, the constants manifestation of the
\nDivine in humanity, when He the eternal Unborn assumes by His
\nMaya, by the power of the infinite Consciousness to clothe itself
\napparently in finite forms, the conditions of becoming which we call
\nbirth. But it is not this upon which stress is laid, but on the transcendent, the cosmic and the internal Divine; it is on the Source of all
\nthings and the Master of all and on the Godhead secret in man. It is
\nthis internal divinity who is meant when the Gita speaks of the doer
\nof violent Asuric austerities troubling the God within or of the sin of
\nthose who despise the Divine lodged in the human body or of the same
\nGodhead destroying our ignorance by the blazing lamp of knowledge. <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\n5<\/sup> bahūni me vyatītāni janmāni.<\/i>…. .sambhavāmi yuge yuge,<\/i> <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-15<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nIt is then the eternal Avatar, this God in man, the divine Consciousness always present in the human being who manifested in a visible
\nform speaks to the human soul in the Gita, illumines the meaning
\nof life and the secret of divine action and gives it the light of the
\ndivine knowledge and guidance and the assuring and fortifying word
\nof the Master of existence in the hour when it comes face to face with
\nthe painful mystery of the world. This is what the Indian religious
\nconsciousness seeks to make near to itself in whatever form, whether
\nin the symbolic human image it enshrines in its temples or in the worship of its Avatars or in the devotion to the human Guru through
\nwhom the voice of the one world-Teacher makes itself heard.
\nThrough these it strives to awaken to that inner voice, unveil that
\nform of the Formless and stand face to face with that manifest divine Power, Love and Knowledge. <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nSecondly, there is the typical, almost the symbolic significance or
\nthe human Krishna who stands behind the great action of the Mahabharata, not as its hero, but as its secret centre and hidden guide.
\nThat action is the action of a whole world of men and nations, some
\nof whom have come as helpers of an effort and result by which they
\ndo not personally profit, and to these he is a leader, some as its opponents and to them he also is an opponent, the baffler of their designs
\nand their slayer and he seems even to some of them an instigator of
\nall evil and destroyer of their old order and familiar world and secure conventions of virtue and good; some are representatives of that which
\nhas to be fulfilled and to them he is counsellor, helper, friend. Where
\nthe action pursues its natural course or the doers of the work have to
\nsuffer at the hands of its enemies and undergo the ordeals which
\nprepare them for mastery, the Avatar is unseen or appears only for
\noccasional comfort and aid, but at every crisis his hand is felt, yet in
\nsuch a way that all imagine themselves to be the protagonists and
\neven Arjuna, his nearest friend and chief instrument, does not perceive that he is an instrument and has to confess at last that all the
\nwhile he did not really know his divine Friend. He has received
\ncounsel from his wisdom, help from his power, has loved and been
\nloved, has even adored without understanding his divine nature; but
\nhe has been guided like all others through his own egoism and the
\ncounsel, help and direction have been given in the language and
\nreceived by the thoughts of the Ignorance. Until the moment when <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-16<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nall has been pushed to the terrible issue of the struggle on the field
\nof Kurukshetra and the Avatar stands at last, still not as fighter, but
\nas the charioteer in the battle-car which carries the destiny of the fight,
\nhe has not revealed Himself even to those whom he has chosen. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nThus the figure of Krishna becomes, as it were, the symbol of the
\ndivine dealings with humanity. Through our egoism and ignorance
\nwe are moved, thinking that we are the doers of the work, vaunting
\nof ourselves as the real causes of the result, and that which moves us
\nwe see only occasionally as some vague or even some human and
\nearthly fountain of knowledge, aspiration, force, some Principle or
\nLight or Power which we acknowledge and adore without knowing
\nwhat it is until the occasion arises that forces us to stand arrested
\nbefore the Veil. And the action in which this divine figure moves is
\nthe whole wide action of man in life, not merely the inner life, but
\nall this obscure course of the world which we can judge only by the
\ntwilight of the human reason as it opens up dimly before our uncertain advance the little span in front. This is the distinguishing
\nfeature of the Gita that it is the culmination of such an action which
\ngives rise to its teaching and assigns that prominence and bold relief
\nto the gospel of works which it enunciates with an emphasis and force
\nwe do not find in other Indian Scriptures. Not only in the Gita, but
\nin other passages of the Mahabharata we meet with Krishna declaring
\nemphatically the necessity of action, but it is here that he reveals its
\nsecret and the divinity behind our works. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nThe symbolic companionship of Arjuna and Krishna, the human
\nand the divine soul, is expressed elsewhere in Indian thought, in the
\nheavenward journey of Indra and Kutsa seated in one chariot, in
\nthe figure of the two birds upon one tree in the Upanishad, in the
\ntwin figures of Nara and Narayana, the seers who do tapasyā<\/i> together
\nfor the knowledge. But in all three it is the idea of the divine knowledge in which, as the Gita says, all action culminates that is in view; here it is instead the action which leads to that knowledge and in
\nwhich the divine Knower figures Himself. Arjuna and Krishna, this
\nhuman and this divine, stand together not as seers in the peaceful
\nhermitage of meditation, but as fighter and holder of the reins in the
\nclamourous field, in the midst of the hurtling shafts, in the chariot of
\nbattle. The Teacher of the Gita is therefore not only the God in man
\nwho unveils Himself in the world of knowledge, but the God in man <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-17<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nwho moves our whole world of action, by and for whom all our
\nhumanity exists and struggles and labours, towards whom all human
\nlife travels and progress. He is the secret Master of works and sacrifice and the Friend o\u00a3 the human peoples. <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-18<\/font><\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

II   THE DIVINE TEACHER   THE PECULIARITY of the Gita among the great religious books of the world is that it does not stand…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[90],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3630","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays-on-the-gita-1950-edn","wpcat-90-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3630","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3630"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3630\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}