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WorkSri Aurobindo

Essays on the Gita

Written for a Pondicherry monthly during the First World War, against readers who made the Gita a gospel of social service.

by Sri Aurobindo388 passages held

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First published
(aged 50)
Original language
English

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Overview

In May 1908 the British authorities arrested Aurobindo Ghose, a nationalist leader in Calcutta, in the Alipore bomb case, and he spent a year in jail while the trial ran. Acquitted in May 1909, he told an audience at Uttarpara that in his cell he had practised the yoga of the Bhagavad Gita, the dialogue in which the god Krishna urges the warrior Arjuna to fight. In April 1910 he left politics for Pondicherry, then a French enclave, and in 1914 began a philosophical monthly there, the Arya. These essays ran in it from August 1916 to July 1918, during the First World War, and they cover the Gita's first six chapters. Their opponent is a reading common among educated Indians of the day: that the Gita, breaking with India's habit of renouncing the world, preaches disinterested social duty and public service. Aurobindo calls this the modern mind reading itself into an ancient book. The action the Gita asks for, he argues, is not better citizenship but the surrender of every personal standard of duty to a divine will working through one's nature, a surrender grounded in knowledge and devotion. He rejects just as firmly the opposite escape, which turns the battle of Kurukshetra into an allegory of the soul. The war is real, and so is the problem of a good man ordered to kill; history, he observes, shows freed nations becoming conquerors and persecuted churches becoming persecutors. A lightly revised book edition appeared in Madras in 1922. The essays on the remaining twelve chapters followed in 1928, much more heavily reworked, and since 1949 the two series have been printed as one volume.

Key concepts

What are the three gunas, or modes of Nature?

They are the three qualities that make up all of Nature, human character included: sattwa, poise, knowledge and satisfaction; rajas, passion, action and struggle; tamas, ignorance and inertia. Every person is a shifting mixture of the three. Aurobindo's point is that none of them is freedom. A person ruled by sattwa is better than one ruled by tamas, but still acts from Nature, not from the free soul.

What do Purusha and Prakriti mean?

Purusha is the soul as a silent witness, and Prakriti is Nature, the active energy that does all the work, thinking and willing included. The old Sankhya philosophy explained the world by these two alone, the soul merely watching or withholding its consent. Aurobindo shows the Gita taking this picture over and then going past it, because Sankhya has no Lord above both.

Who is the Purushottama in the Gita?

It is the Supreme Being, above both the unchanging Self that does not act and the Nature that does. Krishna declares himself to be this Being: foundation of the one, master of the other. Aurobindo counts it among the Gita's most striking doctrines, because it lets knowledge of the still Self, works done in the world and devotion to a personal God meet in one figure instead of competing.

What does the Gita mean by equality?

It means an even soul that meets pleasure and pain, honour and disgrace, friend and enemy alike, and regards clod, stone and gold the same. The Gita says outright that equality is yoga. Aurobindo distinguishes it from Stoic endurance, which he counts only as a first step: the Gita's equality rests on knowing that these are passing relations, and it leaves the person free to act.

Is the Gita's nirvana the same as the Buddhist one?

No, on Aurobindo's reading. The Gita speaks of nirvana in Brahman, the loss of a partial self in a perfect being, not the extinction of being. And it allows that state together with action: the one who has found it goes on working in the world. Aurobindo gives it a chapter of its own near the end of the first series, because it removes the last reason to think spiritual freedom means leaving work behind.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

A Real War on a Real Field

A good man is ordered to kill his own kin, and the Gita does not let him walk away. Whether a spiritual teaching can face that without turning it into a parable is what is at stake.

Aurobindo refuses the reading that makes Kurukshetra an allegory of the soul's inner battles. The war is real, he argues, because life itself is a field where every body lives by devouring other life, and a teaching that ignored this would be no help to anyone who acts. He is just as hard on gentler hopes: even soul-force destroys when it succeeds, and the martyrs who won for Christianity saw it become a persecuting church. Arjuna's pity is therefore a crisis to be passed through, not a resting place.

  • action
  • duty
  • dharma
  • human nature

Enter a dialogue

Works Offered to the Lord

The educated India of his day read the Gita as a call to disinterested public duty. What the book asks instead, a surrender of every personal standard of right action, is a far stranger demand.

Against the reformers, Aurobindo argues that the Gita teaches not social service but the giving up of all other standards of conduct to a divine will working through one's nature. Its sacrifice runs from the physical offering, the lowest, to the offering of knowledge, the highest, and its sign is equality: the same soul in honour and disgrace, before friend and enemy. Such a rule would never have sent the Buddha home to govern his father's state. Action stays preferred to inaction, but it is action freed from the claim to its fruits.

  • karma yoga
  • sacrifice
  • desire
  • ego
  • renunciation
  • detachment
  • divine action
  • equality
  • equanimity
  • self-mastery

Enter a dialogue

Nature Acts, the Soul Stands Free

If our choices are the play of Nature's forces, who is acting when a person acts? The answer decides whether freedom means stopping work or doing it differently.

From the Sankhya philosophy Aurobindo takes the picture of a silent, watching soul and an active Nature moved by three modes: light and poise, passion and struggle, inertia and ignorance. The ego believes it is the doer, and what we call free will is, seen from higher up, subjection to those modes. Even the purest of them binds, by a nobler desire and a purer ego. Freedom lies not in inaction, which he calls inertia mistaken for liberation, but in a soul that acts while knowing itself above the play.

  • nature
  • gunas
  • sankhya
  • self
  • free will
  • liberation
  • consciousness
  • knowledge
  • self-knowledge
  • vedanta
  • yoga

Enter a dialogue

The God in the Chariot

The teacher of the Gita is God come down as a man, sitting beside a friend in a war chariot. How a divine birth can be both real and human shapes everything the book teaches.

Aurobindo holds that India, unlike the West, kept the belief in the Avatar alive as a living experience rather than a dogma. For him the inner Divinity is the eternal Avatar in every person, and Krishna is its outward sign; such a descent must work by human means, not by nonhuman miracle. He reads the pair Nara and Narayana, the human and the divine seer practising together, as the key to Arjuna and Krishna. Whether a historical Krishna taught on a battlefield matters far less to him than what the figure reveals.

  • avatarhood
  • divine incarnation
  • devotion
  • spiritual development
  • spiritual practice

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Within this work

passages held
388
distinct concepts
442
by passages held, corpus-wide
#191

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “action” and “liberation”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 22 pairings. 85 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
actionliberation22
gunasliberation12
liberationsacrifice12
karma yogaliberation11
desireliberation8
gunasnature8
actiongunas7
actionkarma yoga7
actionsacrifice6
liberationnature6
naturesacrifice6
actiondesire5
actionnature5
karma yogasacrifice5
desiregunas4
desirenature3
desiresacrifice3
gunaskarma yoga3
avatarhoodliberation2
desirekarma yoga2
karma yoganature2
gunassacrifice1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1922 Essays on the Gita you are here EN
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