The Gita according to Gandhi 116

The Gita according to Gandhi -Mahadev Desai

THE WORLD AND THE REALITY (Discourses 13-15) Purusha and Prakriti and Knowledge We have already summarized discourses 13 and 14 in the introductory portion preceding this analysis and, hence, need touch on the contents but briefly. The thirteenth discourse puts together the scattered threads of the teaching about the world and the Reality found throughout the other discourses. We have the field of man's activity and the Knower of the Field described in the first six verses, we have them described again by their commonly accepted names as prakriti and purusha, with the Purushottama that pervades and transcends both. Wedged in between these two sets of description is a paradoxical description of the Supreme Spirit, seated in the heart of every being as the Knower of the Field. As Unmanifest It has all the negative attributes if one may indeed call them attributes of the Unmanifest above all the supreme attribute of being without an attribute; and as manifested in the world It seems to possess all the attributes of the manifested world (XIII. 12-17). A knowledge of this Reality is what has been up to now held up before Arjuna as the end and the summum bonum, the goal which leads to immortality, but lest there should be any illusion about it that it was something like an intellectual process, the Gita gives an elaborate definition of knowledge, which in the very nature of things includes the means to the end.