Sankhya and Yoga As Defined by the Gita

While the essential methodologies and principles of Sankhya and Yoga are maintained in the Gita, it does not accept all of the specific details or conclusions of either path as narrowly defined by either a strict philosophical system in the case of the Sankhya, or a strict inner psychological discipline as found in Patanjali. The Gita also finds a way to reconcile the two paths, apparently so different on the surface.

Sri Aurobindo explains: “Its Sankhya is the catholic and Vedantic Sankhya such as we find it in its first principles and elements in the great Vedantic synthesis of the Upanishads and in the later developments of the Puranas. Its idea of Yoga is that large idea of a principally subjective practice and inner change, necessary for the finding of the Self or the union with God, of which the Rajayoga is only one special application. The Gita insists that Sankhya and Yoga are not two different, incompatible and discordant systems, but one in their principle and aim; they differ only in their method and starting-point. The Sankhya is also a Yoga, but it proceeds by knowledge; it starts, that is to say, by intellectual discrimination and analysis of the principles of our being and attains its aim through the vision and possession of the Truth. Yoga, on the other hand, proceeds by works; it is in its first principle Karmayoga; but it is evident from the whole teaching of the Gita and its later definitions that the word karma is used in a very wide sense and that by Yoga is meant the selfless devotion of all the inner as well as the outer activities as a sacrifice to the Lord of all works, offered to the Eternal as Master of all the soul’s energies and austerities. Yoga is the practice of the Truth of which knowledge gives the vision, and its practice has for its motor-power a spirit of illumined devotion, of calm or fervent consecration to that which knowledge sees to be the Highest.”

Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, First Series, Chapter 8, Sankhya and Yoga, pp. 63-64,

The Gita’s Synthesis of Sankhya Philosophy and Yoga

One of the great strengths of the Bhagavad Gita is its ability to act as a creative synthesis of a number of different streams of philosophy, religion and practical living, providing a new, comprehensive approach that values each one but places it within a larger context and framework within which it obtains new meaning. Two of these paths, Sankhya and Yoga are the subject of this new chapter. Sankhya, which provides an analytical framework for our understanding of the world we live in and its meaning, undergoes some modifications in order to assume its role in the Gita’s practical philosophy. Similarly, the Yoga espoused by the Bhagavad Gita also represents a somewhat different approach to the more traditional forms, such as Patanjali’s Raja Yoga or what we today in the West know as yoga, namely Hatha Yoga. In both cases, central aspects of each system are adopted and adapted to become part of the wider unifying action the Gita envisions.

Sri Aurobindo clarifies the Gita’s direction: “It is in fact primarily a practical system of Yoga that it teaches and it brings in metaphysical ideas only as explanatory of its practical system; nor does it merely declare Vedantic knowledge, but it founds knowledge and devotion upon works, even as it uplifts works to knowledge, their culmination, and informs them with devotion as their very heart and kernel of their spirit. Again its yoga is founded upon the analytical philosophy of the Sankhyas, takes that as a starting-point and always keeps it as a large element of its method and doctrine; but still it proceeds far beyond it, negatives even some of its characteristic tendencies and finds a means of reconciling the lower analytical knowledge of Sankhya with the higher synthetic and Vedantic truth.”

Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, First Series, Chapter 8, Sankhya and Yoga, pp. 62-63,

The Creed of the Aryan Fighter

The Divine Teacher has taken upon himself the effort to address Arjuna’s confusion and depression with a number of different responses which address both the ordinary values found in daily life and society, as well as the higher teaching and spiritual values that he would like Arjuna to adopt.

The Gita addresses itself to all the major aspects of life and motives for action, rather than artificially confining itself to some high spiritual ideal that is not always practical for everyone to accept in their lives.

The teacher’s aim here is to inspire Arjuna to respond, not with tamas and darkness of depression and surrender of his positive life and characteristics, but with sattwa, rising to a higher standard and a higher light as the basis of his action. Arjuna has already indicated that he can no longer rely on the social order and the duties imposed on him, and his wish to renounce all action is clearly a tamasic rebound from the rajasic impulse that fueled his first wish to view the battlefield and inspect those whom he intended to defeat.

Sri Aurobindo describes the essence of Sri Krishna’s message: “Put away all egoism from you, disregard joy and sorrow, disregard gain and loss and all worldly results; look only at the cause you must serve and the work that you must achieve by divine command; ‘so thou shalt not incur sin.’ “

“Know everywhere the one self, know all to be immortal souls and the body to be but dust. Do thy work with a calm, strong and equal spirit; fight and fall nobly or conquer mightily. For this is the work that God and thy nature have given to thee to accomplish.”

Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, First Series, Chapter 7, The Creed of the Aryan Fighter, pp. 60-61,

The Ideals of the Warrior Caste

It is clear to Sri Krishna that Arjuna will not be swayed by philosophical considerations alone, and he therefore next turns his attention to the role and highest ideals of the warrior caste, the kshatriya, to which Arjuna belongs. The principles enunciated here speak to the entire background, training and education that Arjuna has received and if anything, they speak to a deeply-ingrained sense of nobility and chivalry that was the highest ideal of the warrior.

Arjuna should not let the sorrow of the loss of friends, family and loved-ones intervene in the high ideals that he has adopted. Sri Aurobindo explains Sri Krishna’s argument: ” ‘There is no greater good for the Kshatriya than righteous battle, and when such a battle comes to them of itself like the open gate of heaven, happy are the Kshatriyas then. If thou dost not this battle for the right, then has thou abandoned thy duty and virtue and they glory, and sin shall be they portion.’ “

Arjuna’s despair sets forth the sin of undertaking the action. Sri Krishna counters with the sin of failure to act when the cause is just and the situation demands it. “Battle, courage, power, rule, the honour of the brave, the heaven of those who fall nobly, this is the warrior’s ideal. To lower that ideal, to allow a smirch to fall on that honour, to give the example of a hero among heroes whose action lays itself open to the reproach of cowardice and weakness and thus to lower the moral standard of mankind, is to be false to himself and to the demand of the world on its leaders and kings.”

For Arjuna is fixated on his own individual suffering, but he is the representative man of his age, and his actions provide guidance and direction to others. He has a duty to fulfill and a role to play and abandoning that would lead to confusion and a retrograde motion in society.

Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, First Series, Chapter 7, The Creed of the Aryan Fighter, pg. 60,

Arjuna’s Role Requires Him to Fight

If we look at life purely from the standpoint of the individual, and apply the knowledge which the divine Teacher has been providing to Arjuna, we find an evolution to a greater, higher, purer state of consciousness not bound up in the desires and fears of the normal human life. We are therefore beyond attachment to a particular result and we do not yearn for riches, fame or approbation, as we have recognized that these are transitory and not eternal goals. We recognize the unreality of death and the secret thread of an evolution of consciousness through lifetimes punctuated by multiple births and multiple deaths.

And yet, the teacher concludes that Arjuna should therefore stand up and fight! This appears to be a non sequitur and requires further review to be made comprehensible. Sri Aurobindo makes the point that there are multiple interwoven layers of significance, and that in addition to the individual fulfilment there is the collective development of society which also has to be carried out.

“This world, this manifestation of the Self in the material universe is not only a cycle of inner development, but a field in which the external circumstances of life have to be accepted as an environment and an occasion for that development. It is a world of mutual help and struggle; not a serene and peaceful gliding through easy joys is the progress it allows us, but every step has to be gained by heroic effort and through a clash of opposing forces.”

Arjuna’s position, background, training and destiny all point him to be at the center of this struggle. “For there is continually a struggle between right and wrong, justice and injustice, the force that protects and the force that violates and oppresses, and when this has once been brought to the issue of physical strife, the champion and standard-bearer of the Right must not shake and tremble at the violent and terrible nature of the work he has to do; he must not abandon his followers or fellow-fighters, betray his cause and leave the standard of Right and Justice to trail in the dust and be trampled into mire by the blood-stained feet of the oppressor, because of a weak pity for the violent and cruel and a physical horror of the vastness of the destruction decreed. His virtue and his duty lie in battle and not in abstention from battle; it is not slaughter, but non-slaying which would here be the sin.”

Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, First Series, Chapter 7, The Creed of the Aryan Fighter, pp. 58-59,

Birth and Death Are Milestones In the Progress of the Soul’s Development

There is another aspect that can be considered when we accept the fact of the death of the body. Death is not the absolute “ending” that we cry about. We do not come into existence with birth, nor do we go out of existence with death. We move from one state of being to another, from an “unmanifest” to a “manifest’ state, and back again.

Sri Aurobindo states the case made by Sri Krishna: “The to-do made by the physical mind and senses about death and the horror of death whether on the sick-bed or the battlefield, is the most ignorant of nervous clamours. Our sorrow for the death of men is an ignorant grieving for those for whom there is no cause to grieve, since they have neither gone out of existence nor suffered any painful or terrible change of condition, but are beyond death no less in being and no more unhappy in that circumstance than in life.”

The Self, the One, the Divine is the ultimate reality and “…the coming of the soul into physical manifestation and our passing out of it by death is only one of its minor movements.”

When we achieve the standpoint of the Self that is beyond birth and death, we realize “…the Eternal manifesting itself as the soul of man in the great cycle of its pilgrimage with birth and death for milestones, with worlds beyond as resting-places, with all the circumstances of life happy or unhappy as the means of our progress and battle and victory and with immortality as the home to which the soul travels.”

Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, First Series, Chapter 7, The Creed of the Aryan Fighter, pg. 58,

There Is No Death

Most of humanity, living from a basis founded in the material body, treats the phenomenon of death as one of the paramount issues, central to everything else we do, and leading to extraordinary measures both to try to ensure individual survival and prolong life, as well as to religious and philosophical positions that fixate on the resurrection of the body and the reunification with friends and family in some future time. We also see an enormous number of rituals and ceremonies relating to death.

So the idea that “there is no death” is one that, initially, is hard to conceive. Sri Aurobindo makes the case: “There is no such thing as death, for it is the body that dies and the body is not the man. That which really is, cannot go out of existence, though it may change the forms through which it appears, just as that which is non-existent cannot come into being. The soul is and cannot cease to be.”

“Finite bodies have an end, but that which possesses and uses the body is infinite, illimitable, eternal, indestructible. It casts away old and takes up new bodies as a man changes worn-out raiment for new…”

“Who can slay the immortal spirit? Weapons cannot cleave it, nor the fire burn, nor do the waters drench it, nor the wind dry.”

When we are able to move our standpoint to the soul, and from their view life and death, karma and consequence, we recognise that we are not victims of death, but beyond the question of death, as the soul partakes of the transcendence of the Eternal in its essence.

The Katha Upanishad, in the dialogue between the youth Nachiketas and Yama, the Lord of Death, explores in great depth the issue of death and what is beyond death. This famous Upanishad points out the confusion and complexity of the issue, even among the seers and sages.

The teaching of the Bhagavad Gita takes up this question and reframes the viewpoint from which Arjuna needs to understand and act. Throughout human history we see a successive enlightenment that re-shapes the understanding we have about our lives, our role in the world, and the position of the earth in the universe. Initially, all things were focused on our central position in the universe, and our world being the center of creation. Over time we have recognised that the earth is peripheral to the sun, and the sun is part of one solar system, in one galaxy, in a universe that extends far beyond our widest conceptual ability. Each time we have moved away from the physical reality we knew to be true to accept the primacy of a truth that is counter-intuitive to our experience. The question of death follows this same growth of perspective.

Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, First Series, Chapter 7, The Creed of the Aryan Fighter, pg. 57,

The Aryan Path to Immortality

There is a lot of confusion, and many misconceptions, surrounding the concept of “immortality”. The popular conception involves expecting some kind of mysterious process to allow us to “live forever” in the current body. This of course, has no realistic meaning behind it. Many people have explored the variations on this theme over the years and determined that such a persistence would be meaningless and would in fact lead, not to upward progress, but to stagnation. The aspiration to overcome the power of Death is what drives this concept in its various forms.

The Bhagavad Gita, as would be expected from a deep and subtle teaching, takes a different approach to the question of immortality. Sri Aurobindo introduces the Gita’s conception of immortality: “The man who rises above the conception of himself as a life and a body, who does not accept the material and sensational touches of the world at their own value or at the value which the physical man attaches to them, who knows himself and all as souls, learns himself to live in his soul and not in his body and deals with others too as souls and not as mere physical beings. For by immortality is meant not the survival of death,–that is already given to every creature born with a mind,–but the transcendence of life and death.”

This brings us to Arjuna’s situation within the context of the teaching Sri Krishna is providing to him: “Whoever is subject to grief and sorrow, a slave to the sensations and emotions, occupied by the touches of things transient cannot become fit for immortality….To be disturbed by sorrow and horror as Arjuna has been disturbed, to be deflected by them from the path that has to be travelled, to be overcome by self-pity and intolerance of sorrow and recoil from the unavoidable and trivial circumstance of the death of the body, this is un-Aryan ignorance. It is not the way of the Aryan climbing in calm strength towards the immortal life.”

Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, First Series, Chapter 7, The Creed of the Aryan Fighter, pp. 56-57,

The Soul Is Primary, Not the Body

Arjuna’s reaction assumes the primacy and reality of the physical life of the body, and thereby treats the deaths that are about to occur as being a tragedy of the highest order. Sri Krishna needs to both respond to the normal standpoint that accepts this premise, as well as introduce the higher truth of the soul as the controlling fact, and thereby reorient Arjuna’s viewpoint to one that is not based on the illusion of the body.

Just as, in our normal viewpoint, we talk about the sunrise and sunset, when it fact it is the earth moving around the sun, rather than the sun moving around the earth, we need to recognise that our normal view of life and the physical reality of the body is similarly skewed by treating the body as primary and the soul as a consequence, rather than recognising that it is the soul that takes birth in forms, and that it will change forms and take a new birth after the death of the present body.

Sri Aurobindo explains: “The enlightened man does not mourn either for the living or the dead, for he knows that suffering and death are merely incidents in the history of the soul. The soul, not the body, is the reality. All these kings of men for whose approaching death he mourns, have lived before, they will live again in the human body; for as the soul passes physically through childhood and youth and age, so it passes on to the changing of the body.”

“The calm and wise mind, … the thinker who looks upon life steadily….is not deceived by material appearances; he does not allow the clamour of his blood and his nerves and his heart to cloud his judgment or to contradict his knowledge. He looks beyond the apparent facts of the life of the body and senses to the real fact of his being and rises beyond the emotional and physical desires of the ignorant nature to the true and only aim of the human existence.”

Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, First Series, Chapter 7, The Creed of the Aryan Fighter, pp. 55-56,

Arjuna’s Concerns and Justifications of His Refusal to Fight

There are times and circumstances in life that push us to examine who we are, what we are doing, and the basis for our future action. These are many times traumatic events that disrupt our normal steady lives. Arjuna is undergoing just such a traumatic event when he receives the vital shock as he views the upcoming battlefield and sees the reality of the civil war, with respected elders, relatives and friends on both sides of the issue.

During such periods, we frequently find that the habitual answers or responses no longer seem to hold any meaning. If the situation leads to a recoil, a state of despair or depression as we see in Arjuna’s response, the quality of tamas makes it harder for the individual to see a way through the resistance and find a clear path forward.

Sri Aurobindo describes how Arjuna clarifies his objections to Sri Krishna: “It is poorness of spirit, he owns that has smitten away from him his true heroic nature; his whole consciousness is bewildered in its view of right and wrong and he accepts the divine Friend as his teacher; but the emotional and intellectual props on which he had supported his sense of righteousness have been entirely cast down and he cannot accept a command which seems to appeal only to his old standpoint and gives him no new basis for action.”

He “…puts forward …the claim of his nervous and sensational being which shrinks from the slaughter with its sequel of blood-stained enjoyments, the claim of his heart which recoils from the sorrow and emptiness of life that will follow his act, the claim of his customary moral notions which are appalled by the necessity of slaying his Gurus…, the claim of his reason which sees no good but only evil results of the terrible and violent work assigned to him. He is resolved that on the old basis of thought and motive he will not fight….”

We see here all the hallmarks of a tamasic recoil from action. It is up to the divine Teacher to overcome the force of tamas, wipe away the foundations of action based on Arjuna’s past standards of conduct and action, and provide a new basis that opens a way forward from a higher standpoint.

Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, First Series, Chapter 7, The Creed of the Aryan Fighter, pg. 55,