The Gita according to Gandhi 124

The Gita according to Gandhi -Mahadev Desai

ASHVATTHA AND PURUSHOTTAMA (Discourse 15) The process of how the cycle of birth and death goes on is now described i.e. how the tree is planted and kept alive, how a part of the lord embodies himself as jiva (individual soul) and passes from birth to death and death to birth, taking the psychic apparatus of the mind and the senses of perception from everybody he leaves. It is in association with this apparatus that he experiences the sense pbjects, stays in and departs from the body. Him, the Supreme who is untouched by the gunas, only the yogins who have cleansed themselves see with the eye of the spirit, not the intellectual vision, which is, after all, the eye of the flesh (XV. 7-11). The immanence of Him seated in the heart of all is again described (XV. 12-15), and Purushottama is held up as the supreme object of worship, called Purushottama (the Highest Being) inasmuch as He transcends the two beings or aspects of the world the perishable manifest and the comparatively imperishable manifest. Transcending both He yet informs and sustains all. He who worships Him in all His forms is the man who has known all. The knowledge is the fulfillment of man's mission on earth. The supremely mysterious doctrine of which the exposition was begun in discourse 9 really finishes here, for though the description of the path of bhakti was concluded in the twelfth, its basis and background are concluded with this discourse.