Bhagavad Gita Chapter 7: Knowledge and Realization

The armies waited in their ranks under the climbing sun, but between Arjuna's chariot and Krishna the war itself had receded, as though the two of them stood in a stillness the conches could not reach. Arjuna had listened to the teaching on the imperishable self, on the intellect steadied by devotion, on action offered without craving for its fruit. Now, quieted rather than satisfied, he wanted to know not what he must do but what Krishna was.

"Krishna," he said, "tell me now how, with my mind fixed on you and practicing yoga and taking refuge in you, I may know you completely, without any doubt remaining."

Krishna's answer began gently, almost as a warning against expecting an easy road. "Hear then, Arjuna, how you may know me in full, with mind attached to me, practicing yoga, taking me as your refuge, free of doubt. Among thousands of men, scarcely one strives for perfection, and even among those who strive and attain it, scarcely one knows me in truth."

He let the words settle. It was not spoken to discourage but to measure honestly what was being offered: not a fact to be memorized but a realization that most who set out toward it never complete the journey, and that even success in disciplined striving does not guarantee the deeper knowing. Arjuna, a man who had spent his life mastering what other men only attempted, understood the weight of that distinction. He had drawn the bow better than any archer alive; he had not, until this field, been asked to see through the archer to what moved the arm.

"I will declare to you," Krishna continued, "without reserve, this knowledge together with realization, this jnana joined to vijnana, knowing which nothing further remains to be known in this world." It was a promise, not a boast, and Arjuna felt it land as such, the first thread pulled from a fabric he had always assumed was simply the world, without noticing that a fabric must be woven of something, and held by something, to hang together at all.

"Earth, water, fire, air, ether, mind, intellect, and self-sense, ahamkara," Krishna said, "this is my nature divided eight ways, my lower prakriti. But know that I have another nature, higher than this, the very life-force, the jiva-bhuta, by which this universe is sustained."

Arjuna turned the list over in his mind. It was, on its face, a description of everything: the ground under the chariot wheels, the water in the skins the soldiers carried, the fires already lit in distant camps, the wind moving the banners, the space in which all of it stood, and then the subtler instruments, the thinking mind, the discriminating intellect, and the sense of self that claimed ownership of both. Between them, this eightfold nature accounted for the whole visible and inward world a person could point to.

"Understand that all beings have their source in this," Krishna said. "I am the origin of the whole universe, and also its dissolution. There is nothing higher than me, Arjuna. On me all this is strung, like clusters of pearls on a thread."

He let the image rest between them, deliberately simple. A string of pearls looks, to a careless glance, like pearls alone, each one distinct, touching its neighbors, complete in itself. Only the string keeps them a necklace rather than a scattering. Remove it and there is no falling apart in slow motion; there is instant, total dispersal. So too, Krishna said, the world's things seem to stand each on its own, water beside fire, mind beside body, one event following another by its own logic, and it is easy to forget, or never notice, the single thread without which none of them would hold together as one interrelated whole at all.

"The eightfold nature is what changes and combines and dissolves," he said. "It is my maya, hard to see through precisely because it is so completely convincing. But the thread itself does not change. Know both, the pearls and what strings them, and you will not mistake one for the other again."

Arjuna asked how such a thing, formless and singular, could be found within a world so obviously made of separate and particular things. Krishna answered not with an argument but with a further catalogue, this time not of categories but of qualities, the felt essence hidden inside ordinary experience.

"I am the taste in water, Arjuna, and the light in the moon and the sun. I am the sacred syllable Om in all the Vedas, the sound in ether, and the manhood in men. I am the pure fragrance in the earth, the brightness in fire. I am the life in all beings, and the austerity in those who practice it."

Each example pointed at the same lesson from a different angle. Water can be examined, measured, poured from vessel to vessel, and still none of that touches the taste of it on the tongue, which is at once utterly ordinary and impossible to reduce to anything else. The moon can be charted in its phases, the sun in its arc, and still the light itself, the seeing of it, is not identical with the disc that seems to produce it. Krishna was teaching Arjuna to notice that in every familiar thing there is a quality that cannot be extracted and displayed apart from the thing, and yet is what makes the thing recognizable at all, and that this quality, wherever it is found, is himself.

"Know me as the eternal seed of all beings," he said. "I am the intelligence of the intelligent, the splendor of the splendid. I am the strength of the strong, free from desire and attachment, and in beings I am the desire that does not oppose dharma."

Arjuna heard in that last clause something he had not expected, a refusal to simply condemn desire itself. Not all wanting was to be renounced, only wanting untethered from what was right. Desire in its proper place, bent toward duty rather than against it, was not opposed to Krishna but was one more place where he could be found, hidden in plain sight inside the very cravings a lesser teaching might have told Arjuna to despise outright.

"And further know," Krishna said, "that whatever states of being there are, whether governed by sattva, rajas, or tamas, they proceed from me alone. Yet I am not in them; they are in me." He paused, aware the distinction was subtle enough to need repeating in a different way. "The world, deluded by these three gunas born of my nature, does not recognize me, who am beyond them and imperishable. This divine maya of mine, made of the gunas, is difficult indeed to cross. But those who take refuge in me alone cross over this maya."

Arjuna thought of the field before them, and of how differently each man on it would describe what was happening today. Some saw duty, some saw vengeance, some saw a chance for glory, some saw only fear dressed as strategy. All of it was real experience and none of it, by itself, showed the man having it what stood beneath the experience. That, Krishna said, was the nature of the crossing being described: not an escape from the world of shifting qualities into some other, better world, but a clear seeing straight through the shifting qualities to what does not shift.

"There are those," Krishna continued, "deluded, of evil deeds, the lowest among men, whose knowledge is stolen away by maya, who follow the way of demonic natures and do not take refuge in me. But four kinds of virtuous men worship me, Arjuna: the distressed, artah, the seeker of knowledge, jijnasu, the seeker of wealth or gain, artharthi, and the wise, jnani."

He named each without contempt. The man in danger who cries out for help, the student hungry to understand, the householder praying for prosperity, all of them turned toward Krishna honestly, each according to what he lacked. "Of these, the wise one, ever united with me in single-minded devotion, is the best. I am supremely dear to the wise, and he is dear to me. All these are noble, but the wise one I regard as my very self, for he, steadfast, is established in me alone as the highest goal."

"At the end of many births," Krishna said, "the man of wisdom takes refuge in me, knowing that Vasudeva is all that is. Such a great soul, mahatma, is very rare to find. But those whose discrimination has been carried away by this or that desire go to other gods, following the particular rules of worship demanded by their own nature."

Arjuna asked, gently, why a man devoted to one deity or another should not simply be told he had gone astray. Krishna's answer refused that easy dismissal. "Whatever form any devotee desires to worship with faith, I make that faith of his steady. Endowed with that faith, he seeks the worship of that deity, and obtains from it what he desires, the benefits in truth being granted by me alone. But the fruit gained by these men of small understanding is perishable. Those who worship the gods go to the gods; my devotees come to me."

It was not a claim that other worship was worthless, only that it was aimed at something that itself passed away, while devotion aimed at the imperishable led somewhere that did not. Arjuna, who had grown up among a hundred household rites and a hundred names for the divine, understood this less as a rebuke and more as a clarification of what he was actually choosing when he chose Krishna.

"The unwise think of me, the unmanifest, as having come into manifestation," Krishna said, "not knowing my higher nature, imperishable and supreme. Veiled by my yoga-maya, I am not revealed to all; this deluded world does not know me, the unborn and undying." He looked at Arjuna, and something in his voice softened, as though the whole chapter had been leading to this one assurance. "I know, Arjuna, all beings past, present, and to come, but no one knows me. Those who, at the hour of death, know me as the one reality behind the field of experience, the elements, the divine, and the sacrifice, they, with minds steadied in yoga, know me even at that final moment." The armies still waited. But Arjuna, for the first time that morning, felt he had been shown not a rule to obey but a thread running through everything he was about to do.