Bhagavad Gita Chapter 15: The Supreme Person

The armies still waited in their long lines across Kurukshetra, and Krishna, seeing that Arjuna's mind had grown quiet and ready, took up an image as old as the singers who first spoke of it.

"They speak of an eternal ashvattha tree, Arjuna, with its root above and its branches below, whose leaves are the hymns of the Veda. He who knows this tree, knows the Veda entire.

"Its branches spread both below and above, nourished by the gunas, its buds and shoots the objects toward which the senses reach. And its roots stretch downward too, trailing into the world of men, tangled with every action a person performs, every debt taken up and never quite repaid.

"Its true form cannot be seen here as it truly is, Arjuna, not its end, nor its beginning, nor its foundation. One must cut this ashvattha, so firmly rooted, with the strong axe of non-attachment.

"Having cut it, one must then seek that place from which, once reached, none return again, taking refuge in that same Primal Person from whom this ancient outpouring first proceeded.

"Think of it this way, Arjuna. Every family you have ever known, every kingdom you have ever ridden through, is a single leaf trembling somewhere on this tree, fed by roots it cannot see and will never fully trace. The tree looks, from where we stand beneath it, as though it grows only upward out of the soil, gathering height the way an army gathers glory. But its true root is not in the soil at all. It hangs above, in that which gave the whole tree its first breath of life, and the branches we mistake for the world's beginning are only its furthest, most tangled reach."

Arjuna looked out at the ranks before him, the banners and spears like a forest of their own, rooted in old ambition, in old grudges, in love and fear knotted together past any easy unpicking. "Krishna," he said slowly, "I have spent my life pruning branches. Tell me now how a man finds the root.

"Those who are free from pride and delusion, Arjuna, who have conquered the evil of attachment, who dwell always in the truth of the self, whose desires have turned away from what once drove them, released from the pairs of opposites men call pleasure and pain, undeluded, they walk to that eternal place.

"The sun does not illumine that place, Arjuna, nor the moon, nor fire. That is my supreme home, and having gone there, none return. It is not a place you will find at the end of any road across this earth, nor at the end of any conquest, however complete. It is reached only by a mind that has already stopped grasping for what a conquest is meant to give.

"You asked how a man finds the root beneath the tree he has spent his life pruning. Here is the answer, though it will not please a warrior's ear: he does not find it by cutting harder, or by clearing further. He finds it by loosening his hand from the axe itself, by ceasing, at last, to need any particular branch in order to feel that he is alive. Non-attachment is not a blade for hacking at the world, Arjuna. It is the releasing of the grip that made the world seem like something to hack at in the first place.

"An eternal fragment of myself, Arjuna, becomes, in the world of the living, an individual soul, and draws to itself the mind and the five senses that rest in nature. When the lord of the body takes on a body, or leaves it behind, he carries these with him, the way the wind carries fragrance away from the flowers where it first rose, so that the scent travels on long after the bloom is forgotten.

"Presiding over the ear, the eye, the touch, the taste, and the sense of smell, and over the mind as well, he tastes the objects of the senses through them. The deluded do not see him, whether he departs a body or dwells within it or experiences its pleasures and its pains, moved as he seems to be by the gunas working upon him. But those whose eye has been opened by knowledge see him plainly, the way a man who has learned to read finally sees the letters in a page that others take for mere marks.

"Those who strive, who are established in yoga, they too behold him seated in their own self. But those whose minds are not yet purified, whose striving has not yet ripened into stillness, do not see him, even when they look directly at the place where he sits."

Arjuna considered this in silence. He had felt, all his life, the pull of appetite and grief as though they were entirely his own, a private weather with no source beyond his own skin. To hear that a fragrance could travel without the flower ever knowing whose wind carried it was a strange comfort, and a stranger unsettling.

"The radiance in the sun that illumines the whole world, Arjuna, the radiance in the moon, and the radiance in fire, know these to be mine. Entering the earth, I sustain all beings by my energy, and becoming the sap-giving moon, I nourish every plant that grows.

"Becoming the fire of life that dwells in the bodies of all who breathe, joined with the breath that rises and the breath that falls, I digest the four kinds of food a body eats. I dwell in the heart of every creature, Arjuna, and from me come memory and knowledge, and the loss of them as well. I am that which is to be known by all the Vedas; I am the maker of the Vedanta, and I alone am the true knower of the Veda.

"Think of every ordinary act by which you have stayed alive since this war began, Arjuna, the food you have eaten without noticing, the sleep that mended you in the night, the sudden memory of your mother's voice that came unbidden and then slipped away again before you could hold it. None of that was ever as separate from me as it seemed. I am not only in the temple and the mantra, Arjuna. I am in the digesting of a meal, and I am in the forgetting of a name.

"You have looked for me, these many years, in fire lit upon an altar, in verses chanted at dawn, in the far places where hermits sit and wait for a sign. And I have been there, truly. But I have also been nearer than that, nearer than the hand that lifts food to your mouth, nearer than the breath that leaves you sleeping and returns you waking, nearer than the name that hovers just out of reach when an old friend's face appears before you and will not, for one maddening moment, come.

"There are two persons in this world, Arjuna, the perishable and the imperishable. The perishable is all beings, everything that changes and passes away; the imperishable is called kutastha, the unchanging witness that stands behind the change. But there is another, a Supreme Person, called Purushottama, distinct from both of these, who as the imperishable Lord enters the three worlds and sustains them from within.

"Since I transcend the perishable, and am higher even than the imperishable, I am celebrated in the world and in the Veda as Purushottama, the Supreme Person. He who knows me thus, undeluded, as the Supreme Person, Arjuna, he knows all there is to know, and worships me with his whole being, in every act of his life, whether that act is a battle or a breath.

"This is the most secret teaching I have given you, sinless one. Understanding it, a person becomes wise, and has accomplished all that a life is truly for."

Krishna fell silent, and for a long moment neither he nor Arjuna spoke. The armies still waited, unmoved, on either horizon, but something in the space between them had shifted, as though a tree that had stood rooted for ages, branches and roots both, had for one breath let a single ray of sun travel all the way down to the ground it grew from. Arjuna took up the reins his own hands had set down at the discourse's start, and found, for the first time that day, that his grip on them had changed.