Bhagavad Gita Chapter 8: The Imperishable Brahman

The teaching had opened something in Arjuna that could not now be closed, a hunger to understand precisely, rather than approximately, the terms Krishna had been using as though they were self-evident. He had heard of Brahman, of the self, of action, of the elements and the gods and the sacrifice, but each word had arrived wrapped in others, and he wanted them named cleanly, one at a time.

"Krishna," he said, "what is that Brahman? What is the adhyatma, the nature of the individual self? What is karma? What is called adhibhuta, the domain of the elements? And what is said to be adhidaiva, the domain of the gods? Who is the adhiyajna, the lord of sacrifice, here in this body, and how is he present? And at the time of death, how are you to be known by those of steadied minds?"

Six questions folded into that final, most pressing one. Whatever the answers to the others, it was the seventh that had truly prompted the rest, for Arjuna, standing on a field where death was about to arrive in great numbers, wanted to know what death actually asked of a man, and whether anything he learned today could be carried through it.

Krishna did not hurry past the philosophy to reach the practical comfort Arjuna was really seeking. He answered in order, precisely as asked, because the comfort, when it came, would only hold weight if it stood on a clear understanding beneath it.

"Brahman is the imperishable, the supreme," he said. "Adhyatma is called one's own essential nature. The creative impulse that causes beings to come into existence is named karma. Adhibhuta is my perishable nature manifest as all beings; adhidaiva is the cosmic person, the purusha; and I myself, dwelling here in the body, am the adhiyajna, the lord of sacrifice, Arjuna, best of the embodied." He watched Arjuna receive each term, watched the young man set them, one by one, into some order inside himself, before he went on to answer what had truly been asked.

"And at the time of death," Krishna continued, coming now to the seventh question, "whoever leaves the body remembering me alone, goes to my very being. Of this there is no doubt."

He said it plainly, but Arjuna could feel the weight the plainness was carrying. A man's last thought was being named as decisive, not as superstition but as the simple continuation of a law that governed every other moment of a life.

"Whatever state of being one remembers when one finally quits the body," Krishna said, "that alone one attains, Arjuna, being ever absorbed in that state of thought." He let the sentence stand as it was, a law rather than a threat, and then softened it with the assurance that followed from it. "Therefore, at all times, remember me and fight. With mind and intellect fixed on me, you shall come to me without doubt."

Arjuna understood, though it took a moment to arrive fully, that this was not a demand to withdraw from the battle in favor of some private meditation. It was, if anything, the opposite: to fight, yes, but to fight as a man whose deepest attention had already been given elsewhere, so that the doing of the terrible task in front of him would not be able to seize the whole of his mind and leave nothing over for what truly mattered.

"With mind not moving to anything else," Krishna said, "disciplined by the practice of yoga and constantly meditating, one goes to the supreme divine person, Arjuna. Whoever meditates on the ancient seer, the ruler, subtler than the subtle, the supporter of all, of inconceivable form, sun-colored, beyond darkness, with mind unwavering, endowed with devotion, and by the power of yoga fixing the life-breath between the eyebrows, he attains that supreme divine person." It was, Arjuna saw, a description of a discipline that a man could only hope to manage at the last if he had practiced some version of it across the whole of an ordinary life, in the space between one duty and the next.

"I will tell you briefly of that goal which the knowers of the Veda call the imperishable," Krishna said, "which austere sages, free from passion, enter, and desiring which they practice continence. This is that goal, and now I will describe it to you concisely."

"He who, at the final moment, leaving the body, utters the one syllable Om, which is Brahman, remembering me, he goes to the supreme goal. For him who thinks of me always, whose mind does not turn to anything else, for that yogi constantly disciplined, I am easy to attain, Arjuna."

He went further, describing the actual practice a person might carry into that final hour, not as a magic formula but as the natural shape a well-tended life would already have taken. "Having attained me, these great souls do not return to birth, which is the abode of suffering and impermanence, for they have attained the highest perfection. All the worlds, up to and including the realm of Brahma, are subject to return, Arjuna. But having reached me, there is no rebirth."

Arjuna asked what, in practice, this meant for a man closing out his final hour: was there a technique, a posture, a discipline of the body as well as the mind. Krishna answered with what sounded almost like a set of instructions, spare and exact. "Closing all the gates of the senses, confining the mind within the heart, fixing the life-breath in the head, established in concentration through yoga, uttering the single syllable Om, the symbol of Brahman, remembering me as he departs, giving up the body, he who departs thus attains the supreme goal." Arjuna pictured it, an old teaching for a moment none could rehearse twice, and understood why Krishna had insisted, moments before, that the readiness for it had to be built now, today, on the field, and not invented from nothing when the time finally came.

Krishna widened the frame further still, from the single life to the scale of the cosmos, as though to show Arjuna that the pattern he was describing repeated itself at every size. "Those who know a day of Brahma to be of a thousand ages, and a night to be of a thousand ages, they are the knowers of day and night. At the coming of that day, all manifest things spring forth from the unmanifest; at the coming of that night, they dissolve again into that same unmanifest."

"This same multitude of beings, coming into existence again and again, is dissolved at the coming of night, and, powerless, comes forth again at the coming of day, Arjuna. But beyond this unmanifest, there is another unmanifest existence, eternal, which does not perish when all beings perish. It is called the unmanifest, the imperishable; they call it the supreme goal. Having attained it, none return. That is my supreme abode."

Arjuna took in the scale of what he was being told, an ordinary human death set inside a cosmic day and night that dwarfed it, and yet the cosmic pattern itself resolved, in the end, to the same single choice: where does the attention rest, and what does it move toward when everything visible dissolves. Nothing about the cosmic scale made the personal choice smaller; if anything, it made the stakes of that one choice larger, since it was being repeated, Krishna implied, at every scale from a single breath to the life of the universe itself.

"That supreme person, Arjuna, in whom all beings dwell and by whom all this is pervaded, is attainable by unwavering devotion alone." Arjuna heard in this a kind of mercy folded into an otherwise vast and impersonal cosmology: whatever the scale of days and nights and ages, the way through remained something as near and simple as devotion, available to a man standing on a battlefield as much as to a sage in a forest hut.

"Now I will tell you, Arjuna," Krishna said, "of the two paths, the one bright and the one dark, by which those who depart from this world go, in one case never to return, and in the other to return again."

"Fire, light, day, the bright half of the month, the six months of the northern course of the sun, departing by this path, men who know Brahman go to Brahman. Smoke, night, the dark half of the month, the six months of the southern course of the sun, departing by this path, the man of yoga attains the lunar light and returns again."

He was careful to strip the two paths of any suggestion of arbitrary reward or punishment. They were, rather, a description of where different qualities of attention led, worked out with the same impartial precision as the law of remembering he had described earlier. Attention given wholly to what does not pass away arrives somewhere that does not pass away; attention still entangled with what changes returns to a world of change, however refined or fortunate that return might be.

"These two paths, bright and dark, are considered to be eternal in this world," Krishna said. "By the one a man goes to that from which there is no return, by the other he returns again. Knowing these two paths, Arjuna, no yogi is ever deluded. Therefore, at all times, be steadfast in yoga."

He finished the chapter with a promise that gathered the whole of it into a single sentence, plain enough to carry through the noise of the coming battle. "Whatever fruit of merit is declared to accrue from the study of the Vedas, from sacrifices, austerities, and acts of charity, the yogi, having known all this, passes beyond all of it, and attains the supreme and primal abode." Arjuna sat with that, the seven questions now seven answers, and beneath them all, one instruction simple enough to keep hold of even in the middle of a war: remember, and act; let the remembering be steady, and let the acting follow from it, and the final hour, whenever it came, would only be the last small step of a road already long walked.