Date: July 1, 2025
Part 8: ज्ञानकर्मसंन्यासयोगः – The Yoga of Knowledge – 1
Continued from Part 7
The fourth chapter of the Bhagavad Gita focuses on Jñāna Yoga, the Yoga of Knowledge. It opens with Sri Krishna telling Arjuna that it was He who had revealed this highest secret, this imperishable Yoga, to the Sun-God Vivasvan in the ancient times, who in turn gave this knowledge to Manu (the father of mankind), and Manu gave it to Ikshvaku (the head of the Solar dynastic line).
Thus, coming down from one royal sage to the next it got lost in the great lapse of Time. The same teaching is being renewed for Arjuna because he is the lover and devotee, friend and comrade of Sri Krishna, the Avatāra.
Arjuna wonders how could Sri Krishna, who was only now born into the world, be the one to give this teaching to Vivasvan, one of the first-borns of beings. Sri Krishna replies that while both of them – Arjuna and Krishna – had had many past lives, only he knows about his previous lives while Arjuna does not.
Speaking of how the Divine descends as an Avatāra, he says, “Though I am the unborn, though I am imperishable in my self-existence, though I am the Lord of all existences, yet I stand upon my own Nature and I come into birth by my self-Maya.” Sri Aurobindo explains:
“The Divine descends by his own Prakriti into birth in its human form and type and brings into it the divine Consciousness and the divine Power, though consenting, though willing to act in the form, type, mould of humanity, and he governs its actions in the body as the indwelling and over-dwelling Soul, adhiṣṭhāya.
“From above he governs always, indeed, for so he governs all nature, the human included; from within also he governs all nature, always, but hidden; the difference here is that he is manifest, that the nature is conscious of the divine Presence as the Lord, the Inhabitant, and it is not by his secret will from above… but by his quite direct and apparent will that he moves the nature.”
~ CWSA, Vol. 19, p. 164
Here we find one of the most famous shlokas from the Gita, which says:
yadā yadā hi dharmasya glānirbhavati bhārata,
abhyutthānamadharmasya tadātmānaṁ sṛjāmyaham
paritrāṇāya sādhūnāṁ vināśāya ca duṣkṛtām,
dharmasaṁsthāpanārthāya sambhavāmi yuge yuge (Ch. IV, Verses 7-8)“Whensoever there is the fading of the Dharma and the uprising of unrighteousness, then I loose myself forth into birth. For the deliverance of the good, for the destruction of the evil-doers, for the enthroning of the Right, I am born from age to age.”
Three key questions emerge here – What is an Avatāra? What is Dharma? And how is the work of an Avatāra related to the “enthroning” of the Dharma? Sri Aurobindo explains all these three ideas remarkably well in his Essays on the Gita.
Avatārhood
India has from ancient times, says Sri Aurobindo, held strongly a belief in the reality of the Avatāra, the descent into form, the revelation of the Godhead in humanity. This belief could never really stamp itself upon the Western mind because it was always presented through exoteric Christianity as a theological dogma without any roots in the reason and general consciousness and attitude towards life.
In India, on the other hand, this concept of Avatārhood grew up and persists as a logical outcome of the Vedantic view of life. As per this view, all existence is a manifestation of the Divine because That, the Divine, is the only existence. And all that exists is either a real figuring or a figment of that One Reality. Therefore, every conscious being is in part or in some way a descent of that Infinite Reality into the apparent finiteness of name and form.
Then what is the difference between an Avatāra and all the other beings? The difference, as Sri Aurobindo explains is the key to understand the concept of Avatāra. A conscious being is a veiled, finite manifestation of the Divine. The partial or whole shrouding or veiling happens because of ignorance of self in this finite form.
Thus there is a gradation between this finite, veiled manifestation and the supreme, infinite being of the Divine. As the conscious embodied soul which is the spark of the divine opens itself to self-knowledge it gradually grows out of ignorance or Avidya and moves gradually towards the knowledge (Vidya) of self. This process of gradual evolution of a mental being can also be understood as the Divine revealing itself in the embodied conscious soul of man in its limited expressions and varying magnitudes of its different powers such as love, knowledge, joy, power, etc.
“But when the divine Consciousness and Power, taking upon itself the human form and the human mode of action, possesses it not only by powers and magnitudes, by degrees and outward faces of itself but out of its eternal self-knowledge, when the Unborn knows itself and acts in the frame of the mental being and the appearance of birth, that is the height of the conditioned manifestation; it is the full and conscious descent of the Godhead, it is the Avatāra.”
~ CWSA, Vol. 19, pp. 13-14
READ: Two-part feature in Renaissance
Avatarhood in ‘Essays on the Gita’
Dharma
Dharma, the uniquely Indian concept, is one of four purusharthas, pursuits of human life as per the Indian view. In simple words, dharma is all that lifts man beyond the essentially animal impulses of his physical and vital being towards his true manhood. Dharma, as Sri Aurobindo summarises perfectly, is that which we hold to and also that which holds together our inner and outer activities. (The Sanskrit word Dharma is derived from the root ‘dhr’ which means ‘to hold’.)
Sri Aurobindo explains the three-fold sense in which we can understand dharma. In its primary sense it means a fundamental law of our nature which secretly conditions all our activities. In this sense of the term we understand that each being, type, species, individual, group has its own dharma.
In its second aspect, dharma is the law of the inner workings by which the higher, divine nature grows in our being and begins to manifest in us. This is the nature that is generally hiding behind the outermost movements of our nature. Thirdly, dharma also refers to the law by which we govern our outgoing thought and action and our relations with each other. This aspect of the dharma helps both our own growth and that of the human race towards the divine ideal.
Sri Aurobindo further explains how one can distinguish between dharma and a-dharma:
“Dharma is all that helps us to grow into the divine purity, largeness, light, freedom, power, strength, joy, love, good, unity, beauty, and against it stands its shadow and denial, all that resists its growth and has not undergone its law, all that has not yielded up and does not will to yield up its secret of divine values, but presents a front of perversion and contradiction, of impurity, narrowness, bondage, darkness, weakness, vileness, discord and suffering and division, and the hideous and the crude, all that man has to leave behind in his progress.
“This is the adharma, not-dharma, which strives with and seeks to overcome the dharma, to draw backward and downward, the reactionary force which makes for evil, ignorance and darkness.”
~ ibid., p. 172