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Essays on the Gita -Sri Aurobindo
First Series : Chapter 9
Sankhya, Yoga and Vedanta
“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 mightwell include the Upanishads also and seems to include them, for the general term S´ruti 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, gantasi nirvedam˙ srotavyasya srutasya ca. When thy intelligence which is bewildered by the Sruti, ´srutivipratipann ¯a, 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 themeaning is 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, ´sabdabrahmativartate. 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 jnana. 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. |
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