The Anugita

The kingdom was won and settled, the horse sacrifice was being prepared, and for the first time in a generation there was nothing to survive. Krishna lingered in the Pandava capital through those months as a guest of the family whose whole story he had steered, and he and Arjuna spent their days as they had in the oldest times, before the dice: walking the halls of the great assembly, sitting long over talk, two friends with the war behind them. But rest sat strangely on Krishna, whose work in the north was done, and one day he said plainly that his own people and his father waited for him, and it was time he returned to Dwaraka.

It was then, with the parting suddenly real, that Arjuna made his confession. "Before the battle began," he said, "you spoke to me of things beyond this world. I stood between the armies with my bow fallen and you taught me, and I saw your universal form, which no man had seen. Krishna - I have forgotten it. Peace has scattered it; my mind was churned then and calm now, and the calm has lost what the churning held. And you are leaving. Speak it to me again, all of it, before you go."

Krishna was silent a moment, and when he answered, Arjuna heard something he had never once heard aimed at himself: displeasure. "You did a poor thing, letting that go," Krishna said. "What I spoke to you between the armies, I spoke from the summit of yoga, with my whole being gathered to it, and the eternal itself speaking. That was not a recitation to be repeated on request; it displeases me deeply that you held the supreme secret in your hands and let ease pry it from you. I cannot give you that hour again, friend. It does not come twice. But I will not leave you empty. Sit, and I will teach the same truth another way - as it was once told among the perfected. Hear the Anugita: the Gita after the Gita."

So in a quiet room in a palace at peace - no armies, no conches, no wheeling universe of mouths and suns, only two friends and an afternoon - Krishna taught the second teaching. He told of a perfected Brahmin who had explained liberation to his questioning wife: how the true sacrifice is not poured on any altar but performed inside, the senses offered as oblations into the fire of the restrained mind, the breaths reined like horses, the self the priest and the offering and the flame at once. Every being carries the whole apparatus of the ritual within its own body, he taught, and the wise perform that inner sacrifice in every hour, in company or alone, and need no other.

He taught again, in the calm voice of the lamp rather than the lightning, what the field of battle had heard in glory: that the body is a field and the soul its knower; that the qualities of nature - darkness, passion, and light - bind the embodied one to the wheel of birth after birth, and that the knower, discerned from the field, is not born and does not die. He spoke of the long journey of the soul through wombs and worlds, driven by its own deeds, and of the still point where the journey ends: the self seen in the self, by the self, needing no witness.

And he gave Arjuna, for keeping, one image sized for a lifetime. The world, he said, is a vast tree, sprung from the seed of unmanifest nature: its trunk the understanding, its hollows the senses, its branches the great elements, its leaves the objects of desire, forever green; it bears the sweet and bitter fruits of every deed, and every living being nests and feeds in it, mistaking the tree for all there is. It can be cut. Not with steel - with the sword of knowledge, whetted on discipline, swung by the mind that has turned from the fruits. And he who fells it, said Krishna, finds what stands behind the tree and does not fall with it, and goes to that, and does not return.

Then the teaching was done, and there was nothing left in Indraprastha to hold him. Krishna took leave of Yudhishthira the king, of Kunti who called him the protector of her whole broken and mended family, of Draupadi and Subhadra, and last of Arjuna, who rode with him the first stretch of the road as far as friendship could reasonably stretch it, and then stood in the dust watching the chariot go west.

Neither of them said what both of them knew, that the great days were over and the partings from now on would be long. Arjuna walked back into the palace carrying the second Gita in place of the first - the lamp in place of the lightning - and the tradition preserved them side by side ever after: one scripture for the hour when the world is ending, and one for the harder hour when it is not.