Bhagavad Gita Chapter 15, Verses 1-11: The Inverted Tree

By now the field of Kurukshetra had been standing still for a long while, and Krishna had spoken of many things: of action offered rather than owned, of the field and the knower of the field, of the three gunas that bind even the good man with the rope of his own goodness. Now he began again with an image, and it was the strangest image in the whole poem.

They speak of an eternal asvattha tree, he told Arjuna, with its roots above and its branches below, and its leaves are the Vedic hymns; whoever knows this tree knows the Veda. In verse 15.1 the picture is deliberately inverted. The fig tree Arjuna had passed a thousand times on a thousand roads, the pipal whose shade whole villages gathered under, is turned upside down, so that whatever nourishes it lies overhead and out of sight while everything visible hangs downward into the world where he was standing.

The name itself carries part of the argument. Asvattha is read in the tradition as that which will not stand until tomorrow, the thing that does not last through the night. So Krishna's tree is at once enormous and unstable: the whole spread of manifest existence with its seasons and its births and its endless putting out of new growth, rooted in something that never comes into view from below.

Arjuna would have understood the second half of the verse before the first. Leaves of hymns meant a tree wrapped in scripture, ritual and injunction, all the machinery by which his world explained itself and kept itself going. That machinery was not being dismissed. It was being placed on the tree, as foliage: real, beautiful, seasonal, and not the root.

What Krishna had begun was not a hymn but a diagnosis, and the strangeness of the image was the point. A man who has looked at a tree his whole life from the wrong end will not recognize it when it is shown to him correctly, and Krishna was about to say exactly that.

Krishna went on to describe the tree in detail, and every part of the description named something Arjuna could recognize in his own life. In verse 15.2 the branches spread both downward and upward, nourished by the gunas, the three strands of nature whose workings he had already heard about at length; the sense objects are its buds and shoots; and below, running downward into the world of men, stretches a second set of roots, which are karma, action and its binding consequence.

Read as botany the picture is a tangle. Read as a description of a life it is uncomfortably exact. The strands of nature feed the growth, so that a person of one temperament sends out branches of restless energy and appetite while another sends out branches of inertia, and each of them believes the shape of his own tree is simply how things are. The buds are sense objects: the taste, the sound, the touch that appear at the very tip of every branch and invite the hand toward them. And the downward roots are the actions taken in the reaching, each one sinking into the soil of the human world and holding the whole structure a little more firmly in place.

That second root system is the heart of the diagnosis. The tree's true root is above, out of sight; but the roots that actually grip are the ones a person grows himself, day after day, by acting out of desire and then living inside the results. Nobody is bound to the world by the world. He is bound by the strands he has personally sunk into it.

Then Krishna says the plain thing, in verse 15.3: its form is not perceived here as it is, neither its end nor its beginning nor its foundation. Standing inside the tree, under its canopy, with one hand on a branch, no one sees the shape of the thing he is standing in. That is not a failure of intelligence. It is the ordinary condition of anyone living a life from the inside.

Having said that no one sees the tree whole, Krishna does not counsel patience or further study. He counsels an axe.

Cut it, he says in the same verse 15.3, this firmly rooted asvattha, with the strong axe of non-attachment, asanga sastrena drdhena. Then, he continues in verse 15.4, seek out that place from which those who go do not return again, and take refuge in that primal Person from whom the ancient outflow of the world proceeded.

The choice of instrument is worth pausing over. Krishna does not tell Arjuna to cut the tree with ritual, or with force of will, or with contempt for the world, though the tradition around him offered all three. The blade is asanga, non-attachment, and the roots it is aimed at are the downward ones a man grew for himself. Nothing is being destroyed except the grip. The world is not felled; the holding on is.

The word drdhena matters too, strong or firm. The axe has to be at least as firm as the roots are. Half-hearted detachment, the kind that lets go of one branch while quietly gripping three others, will not do the work, because the tree is held in place by exactly the energy that pretends to be releasing it.

Verse 15.5 sketches who actually arrives: those free from pride and delusion, who have conquered the fault of attachment, who dwell constantly in the Self with desires stilled, released from the pairs of opposites, pleasure and pain, that had ruled them until then.

Then comes the destination, and Krishna describes it entirely by subtraction. In verse 15.6 that abode is lit by neither sun nor moon nor fire, and having gone there, none return. Every source of light Arjuna knew, the sun standing over Kurukshetra, the moon over the sleeping camps, the fires of the sacrifice and the fires of the cremation ground, is named and then set aside. Whatever light is there is not borrowed from anything growing on the tree.

Then, having pointed past the tree entirely, Krishna turns back and says something about the one who is standing in it.

In verse 15.7 he says: mamaivamso jiva-loke jiva-bhutah sanatanah. An eternal fragment of my own self, having become a living being in the world of the living, draws to itself the senses, of which the mind is the sixth, abiding in nature.

The claim is deliberately double. The living being is an amsa, a fragment, of Krishna himself, and it is sanatana, eternal, not manufactured at birth and not finished at death. Yet this same eternal fragment is described doing something quite ordinary and quite strenuous: drawing the six, the five senses and the mind, gathering them around itself as it moves through nature. Whatever is highest in a person is not sitting apart from the machinery. It is holding the reins of it.

Then verse 15.8, which carries the finest single image in the poem. When the lord of the body takes up a body, and again when he departs from it, he carries these along with him as the wind carries scents from their resting places.

Arjuna would have known that comparison in his skin. A wind crosses a garden and arrives somewhere else carrying jasmine; the flower stayed where it grew, the fragrance travelled. What moves from one body to the next, in Krishna's picture, is not the body and not even the senses as physical instruments, but the whole accumulated flavour of a life: its tendencies, its habits of attention, what it had trained itself to want.

Set beside the tree, the image reorganizes everything. The downward roots of karma are not arbitrary bonds imposed from outside by an unfriendly power. They are the scent a person has been standing in long enough to carry. And the axe of non-attachment is not an act of self-destruction but the only way a fragment that was always eternal stops mistaking the fragrance for itself.

Krishna finishes the section by describing what this fragment does while it is here, and then by dividing everyone on the field into those who notice and those who do not.

In verse 15.9, presiding over the ear, the eye, touch, taste and smell, and over the mind as well, he experiences the objects of the senses. The lord of the body is not a prisoner inside it and not a spectator standing behind it. He is the one for whom hearing hears and tasting tastes, present in the ordinary traffic of an ordinary day.

Then verse 15.10: the deluded do not perceive him departing, or remaining, or experiencing, joined with the gunas; those who possess the eye of knowledge do. And verse 15.11: yogins who strive see him established in themselves, while those whose minds are unformed do not see him even though they strive.

It is a hard pair of verses and Krishna does not soften them. The difference is not information. Both kinds of people are looking at the same body, the same senses, the same field of Kurukshetra. One of them sees who is doing the looking; the other sees only what is looked at.

For a reader today the section arrives with its edges intact. The inverted tree is a claim that the visible arrangement of a life - the work, the appetites, the explanations, the whole leafy apparatus that insists this is simply how things are - is fed from somewhere that never shows up inside the arrangement, and is held down by roots the person grew himself, by reaching. Krishna's prescription is not withdrawal from the tree, which nobody on that battlefield could have managed anyway, and not contempt for its leaves, which are the hymns.

It is a change in the grip. Loosen the holding, and the same senses go on hearing and tasting; only now something in them is recognized as belonging elsewhere, an eternal fragment that came in on the wind and will leave the same way, carrying whatever it has been standing in.