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Essays on the Gita -Sri Aurobindo
First Series : Chapter 12
The Significance of Sacrifice
To these passages we shall have to return. They are followed by a perfectly explicit and detailed interpretation of
the meaning of yajn˜ a in the language of the Gita which leaves no
doubt at all about the symbolic use of the words and the psychological
character of the sacrifice enjoined by this teaching. In the
ancient Vedic system there was always a double sense physical
and psychological, outward and symbolic, the exterior form of
the sacrifice and the inner meaning of all its circumstances. But
the secret symbolism of the ancient Vedic mystics, exact, curious,
poetic, psychological, had been long forgotten by this time and
it is now replaced by another, large, general and philosophical in
the spirit of Vedanta and a later Yoga. The fire of sacrifice, agni,
is no material flame, but brahmagni, the fire of the Brahman, or
it is the Brahman-ward energy, inner Agni, priest of the sacrifice,
into which the offering is poured; the fire is self-control or it is a
purified sense-action or it is the vital energy in that discipline of
the control of the vital being through the control of the breath
which is common to Rajayoga and Hathayoga, or it is the fire
of self-knowledge, the flame of the supreme sacrifice. The food
eaten as the leavings of the sacrifice is, it is explained, the nectar of immortality, amr.ta, left over from the offering; and here we
have still something of the old Vedic symbolism in which the
Soma-wine was the physical symbol of the amrta, the immortalising
delight of the divine ecstasy won by the sacrifice, offered
to the gods and drunk by men. The offering itself is whatever
working of his energy, physical or psychological, is consecrated
by him in action of body or action of mind to the gods or God,
to the Self or to the universal powers, to one’s own higher Self or to the Self in mankind and in all existences.
This elaborate explanation of the Yajna sets out with a vast
and comprehensive definition in which it is declared that the
act and energy and materials of the sacrifice, the giver and receiver
of the sacrifice, the goal and object of the sacrifice are
all the one Brahman. “Brahman is the giving, Brahman is the
food-offering, by Brahman it is offered into the Brahman-fire,
Brahman is that which is to be attained by samadhi in Brahmanaction.”
This then is the knowledge in which the liberated man
has to do works of sacrifice. It is the knowledge declared of old
in the great Vedantic utterances, “I am He”, “All this verily is
the Brahman, Brahman is this Self.” It is the knowledge of the
entire unity; it is the One manifest as the doer and the deed and
the object of works, knower and knowledge and the object of knowledge.
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