Bhagavad Gita Chapter 12, Verses 1-12: Personal or Unmanifest

The great form had folded away, and Krishna stood again in the chariot as Arjuna had always known him, reins in hand, dust on his shoulders. What was left in Arjuna after that vision was not terror but a question, and in verse 12.1 he asks it.

Of the devotees who worship you, ever steadfast and full of love, and of those who worship the imperishable and the unmanifest, which are the better knowers of yoga?

It is the question every reader of the Gita eventually asks, and it is worth noticing how honestly Arjuna has framed it. He is not asking which worship is more respectable. He is asking which one works. Two roads had always run side by side in his world. On one walked the ascetics of the forest, who turned away from every name and every image and sat facing that which has no edges, akshara, the imperishable, avyakta, the unmanifest. On the other walked the people who kept a lamp burning before a form, who wept at a story, who sang until their voices failed.

Arjuna knows which of the two he is. He has just been shown the formless totality of things and it nearly unmade him; what steadied him again was a familiar face and a hand on the reins. So there is an anxiety underneath the question. Is a man who needs a face simply a beginner at this work? Is love with an object a cruder instrument than knowledge without one?

The eleven chapters behind him have praised both. The second spoke of the unborn and the unslayable, which no weapon cuts. The seventh told him to take refuge in me. Arjuna is now asking Krishna to rank them, and the answer that follows is careful, because Krishna will neither deny the second road nor pretend that the choice costs a person with a body nothing.

Krishna does not begin with a metaphysical ruling. He begins with what happens to a practitioner.

Verse 12.2: those who fix their mind on me and worship me, ever steadfast, endowed with supreme faith, they in my view are the most united in yoga. That is the plain answer to a plain question, and if the chapter stopped there it would be no more than a preference. It does not stop there.

Verses 12.3 and 12.4 turn at once to the other road and describe it with real respect. Those who worship the imperishable, the undefinable, the unmanifest, the all-pervading, the unthinkable, the unchanging, the immovable and the constant, restraining the whole crowd of the senses, even-minded everywhere, delighting in the welfare of all beings, they also attain me. Not a lesser destination. Me.

Two things in that description deserve a pause. The first is the sheer piling up of negatives. The unmanifest is defined almost entirely by what it is not, because that is the only honest way to point at it. The second is the final clause, sarva bhuta hite ratah, delighting in the welfare of all beings. Krishna slips it in as a condition. A withdrawal from form that also withdraws from the good of others is not the path he has just endorsed. The formless road is open, but it is not open to indifference.

Then 12.5 states the difficulty without softening it. Greater is the toil of those whose minds are set on the unmanifest, for the unmanifest goal is hard for embodied beings to reach.

The reason is not that the goal is far off. The reason is the body. A creature made of eyes and hands and appetites is being asked to travel toward a destination that gives none of those instruments anything to hold. It can be done; Krishna has just said so twice. He is only telling Arjuna the price.

Having conceded that both roads arrive, Krishna describes his own in terms of what it does for the traveller.

Verses 12.6 and 12.7: those who lay all their actions in me, holding me as supreme, and worship me meditating with undivided yoga, for them I become before long the one who lifts them out of the ocean of death and rebirth, since their thought is fixed on me.

The image is worth taking literally for a moment. The ocean of samsara is the standard picture of a life of repeated birth, striving and loss, and the standard advice is that a man must swim it himself. Here the swimmer is not told to swim harder. He is told that someone comes for him. The phrase usually rendered before long, na chirat, does quiet work: this is not a rescue postponed to some distant life.

That is the whole practical difference between the two roads. On the first, the seeker moves toward a goal that, being unmanifest, does nothing to help him; the effort is his alone. On the second, the goal moves. It is a road with a rescuer on it.

Then verse 12.8, in which Krishna states the highest rung before he begins to descend. Fix your mind on me alone, let your understanding enter into me, and thereafter you shall dwell in me. Of this there is no doubt.

It is a complete instruction and a complete promise, and it is also, for almost everybody who hears it, impossible on the first attempt. The mind does not fix. It slides off toward tomorrow's work and yesterday's insult and the ache in a shoulder. Arjuna, standing in a chariot between two armies with a bow he had put down, would have known this better than most. What follows in the chapter is Krishna's answer to exactly that failure, and it is not a rebuke.

Verse 12.9: if you are not able to fix your thought steadily on me, then seek to reach me by abhyasa yoga, the yoga of repeated practice. Not intensity, repetition. The mind wanders and is brought back, wanders and is brought back, the way a herdsman walks the same animal back to the same field without losing his temper about it. This rung asks only for patience spread over years.

Verse 12.10: if you are incapable even of practice, then be intent on doing work for me. Performing actions for my sake, you shall still reach perfection. This is the rung for the person whose inner life is simply not available to him, who cannot sit still and cannot watch his own mind. Very well, says Krishna. Then do the work, and let the deed carry the devotion the mind refuses to carry.

Verse 12.11: if you are unable to do even this, then take refuge in union with me and, self-controlled, give up the fruit of all action. Now not even the dedication is required, only the release of the harvest. Do what your position asks of you and stop demanding that it pay you.

Verse 12.12 then ranks the whole stair from the bottom looking up: better than mere practice is knowledge, better than knowledge is meditation, and better than meditation is the renunciation of the fruit of action, for peace immediately follows renunciation.

It is a startling sentence, because the lowest rung has just been called the best of the four. That is the point of the ladder. It descends to meet a person where he is actually standing, and the last step down is not a consolation prize. Whatever someone can honestly do is the practice; and the one move available to everybody, letting go of what the work owes him, is the one that yields peace at once rather than eventually.

Arjuna had asked which worshippers know yoga best, and he had asked it as a man half afraid of being told that his own way was the second-class one. Twelve verses later he has an answer in two parts, and neither is what a partisan would have written.

The first part: the road he cannot walk is real. Krishna will not say that the seekers of the unmanifest are wasting their lives, and he will not say they arrive somewhere smaller. He says they arrive here, at him, by a harder path. The chapter declines the pleasure of declaring a rival wrong.

The second part is the ladder, and for anyone reading this a long way from a battlefield it is the more useful of the two. What the descending rungs do is take away the excuse. A person who cannot meditate is not thereby excluded, because there is practice. A person who cannot practise is not excluded, because there is work done for something larger than himself. A person who cannot manage even that is not excluded, because there is the quiet dropping of what he is owed for what he does. There is no honest place on the stair where someone can stand and say that nothing at all is available to him.

It is also why the chapter is not a demand for feeling. Nowhere in these twelve verses is anyone instructed to produce love on command. What is asked for is a direction, held with whatever capacity is genuinely in hand this year: attention if there is attention, repetition if there is only repetition, and if there is neither, work with the claim on its results set down.

The plain lies under the same sun as before. Arjuna's actual problem, which is that he still has to fight, has not been solved. But the question of whether his kind of person can travel this road at all has been answered, and the answer is that the road was built with a rung for him.