Chapter 9: The Yoga of Royal Knowledge and Royal Secret

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The gist: the ninth chapter is the most tender stretch of the Gita. Here Krishna opens the highest and best-guarded knowledge of all: that he pervades everything yet is bound by nothing, that a single leaf offered with love is enough to reach him, and that his door recognizes no rank of caste, family, or sex.

Krishna’s voice softens now. Arjuna, he says, you carry no fault-finding in your heart, so we will give you the knowledge that stands highest and stays most hidden. Men call it rajavidya, the king of all knowledge, and rajaguhya, the king of all secrets. It is the purest of the pure. Its fruit shows itself directly, in your own experience, the moment you begin, with nothing left to take on faith. It keeps step with dharma, it never decays, and though it is the loftiest thing a person can know, it asks the least effort to live. Whoever holds it crosses clear of every sorrow of this turning world and comes into a deep and settled peace.

There is a warning folded into that promise. A man who brings no faith to this path, Krishna says, never reaches us; he only circles back, over and over, into birth and death. The gate stands open, and faith is the foot that carries a person through it.

In everything, yet beyond

So what is the secret? This whole universe, Krishna says, is spread out of our unmanifest being, the way ice is only water in another form. Every creature rests in us. And here the paradox turns: we are not held inside any of them. He asks Arjuna to look at the strangeness of it, at the reach of his own divine yoga, the power by which he creates and sustains all beings and stands, even so, apart from them. Think of open space, he says, and of the wind. The wind ranges everywhere, vast and restless, rising in space, moving through space, sinking back into space, never for a moment outside it. Yet space itself stays untouched by the wind and all its wandering, clean and boundless behind it all. Just so, every being rises in Krishna, lives in Krishna, and dissolves again into Krishna, while he remains beyond them, unmarked by any of it.

He opens the secret wider. When a kalpa closes, at the end of one of the world’s vast cycles, all beings come home into our prakriti, our own primordial nature; and when the next kalpa dawns, we send them out once more. Wielding that nature, we release the whole immense multitude of creatures again and again, each one carried helplessly along by the bent of its own making, life after life, world after world.

And none of this labor binds him. He sits through the whole of it like someone seated a little apart, a witness with no stake in the outcome, unattached to the doing and to everything it brings. Nature is the one that spins out the moving and unmoving world; he does no more than preside over her, and it is under that quiet gaze of his that the great wheel keeps turning. Because he claims none of it as his own doing, none of it can hold him. That is the whole secret of acting without being caught by the act.

Then why do so many fail to see this? Krishna gives the reason.

अवजानन्ति मां मूढा मानुषीं तनुमाश्रितम्।
परं भावमजानन्तो मम भूतमहेश्वरम्॥

The deluded think little of us, for we have come before them wearing a human body. They do not know our higher nature, that we are the great lord of all beings. (Gita 9.11)

Outer form deceives people again and again. The charioteer standing in front of you looks so ordinary that the mind balks at taking him for the master of everything, and that very hesitation is what curtains the truth. Those who miss him this way live on empty hopes, pour their effort into things that come to nothing, and let their knowledge rot; they have given themselves over to a nature that is coarse, grasping, and self-deceiving. Those governed by the divine nature follow a different course. Knowing Krishna as the imperishable source from which all beings rise, they hold to the divine nature and worship him with a mind that turns nowhere else. They sing his names and his glory without pause, they bow to him again and again, they strive for his sake under an unbreakable vow, and they keep themselves joined to him through every hour of the day. From devotees like these, he says, we cannot keep ourselves away.

Not everyone comes to him by the same road. Some worship him through the offering of knowledge itself, taking him as the formless absolute, one with their own deepest self. Others worship him spread out as the whole living world, honoring him in the countless forms the universe wears, the many gods who are so many faces of the one.

For he is all of it. We are the rite and the sacrifice, he says, we are the offering laid out for the ancestors and the healing herb and the grain, we are the sacred words, the clarified butter, the fire, and the very act of pouring the oblation into the fire. We are the father of this universe and its mother, the one who holds it up and hands each creature the fruit of its deeds, the grandfather of all. We are what is worth knowing and what makes the seeker clean; we are the sacred syllable Om and the three Vedas. We are the goal and the support, the lord and the silent witness, the home, the refuge, the friend who wants nothing back, the origin and the end, the resting place, the storehouse into which all things are gathered at the last, and the seed that never dies.

We give heat as the sun, he says; we hold back the rain, and we send it pouring down. We are deathlessness, and we are death. We are being and nonbeing both, and the reality that lies past them both.

Even the men who study the three Vedas only for their rewards, who drink the juice of the sacred soma plant and are washed clean of sin, are worshiping him without knowing it when they offer their sacrifices and pray for heaven. They reach it. They climb to the bright world of Indra and taste the pleasures of the gods. But the ledger runs out. When the store of merit is spent, they fall back to the world of men, and so they go up and come down, up and down, chasing pleasures that end. This is where worship for the sake of reward always leaves a person.

The assurance of undivided devotion

Then there are the ones who love him and nothing besides. They lean on no other support, they think of him with an undivided heart, and to them Krishna makes a promise that runs deeper than any other in the Gita: their whole burden is his.

अनन्याश्चिन्तयन्तो मां ये जनाः पर्युपासते।
तेषां नित्याभियुक्तानां योगक्षेमं वहाम्यहम्॥

Those who worship us with an undivided mind, thinking of nothing else, for those who stay ever joined to us we carry the yogakshema ourselves, securing what they lack and guarding what they already hold. (Gita 9.22)

Of all the lines in the Gita, this one carries the most comfort. Hand yourself over completely, and your worries become his. He puts it the way a mother tends an infant. The child never stops to plan which of its needs will be met, or when; it is the mother who sees what is coming, keeps what must be kept, and brings what is wanted at the right moment. So it is, Krishna says, with the one whose whole mind rests in him.

He will not shut anyone out for taking the long way around. Even those who worship other gods in good faith, he says, are really worshiping us, though by a route that misses the mark, since we are the one who receives every sacrifice and the lord standing behind every god. What they cannot see is what carries them off course. Those vowed to the gods go to the gods; those vowed to the ancestors go to the ancestors; those who serve the spirits go to the spirits; and those who worship us come to us. That last road is the only one that does not loop back into another birth.

A leaf, a flower, a fruit, water

Now Krishna shows how short the road to him really is.

पत्रं पुष्पं फलं तोयं यो मे भक्त्या प्रयच्छति।
तदहं भक्त्युपहृतमश्नामि प्रयतात्मनः॥

Whoever offers us a leaf, a flower, a fruit, or water with love, we accept that gift of love from a pure heart, and we come in person to receive it. (Gita 9.26)

He asks for nothing costly. What he weighs is the feeling in the hand that gives; the size of the offering never enters into it. A single leaf pulled from a garden, held out with love, is as dear to him as anything in the world. The one condition is a clean and loving heart. Where that is present he does more than accept the gift. He comes to the giver in person and takes it with delight, the way he once turned from a king’s lavish banquet to eat plain food at the house of a man who loved him, and later relished wild fruit from the hands of a forest woman who had waited her whole life to give it. Bring him love, and he leaves nothing outside his welcome.

And there is a way to make your whole life that offering. Whatever you do, Krishna tells him, whatever you eat, whatever you give away, whatever you offer in the fire, whatever discipline you take on, do it as a gift laid before us. Live like that and the chain of action loosens its grip; its good and bad returns stop binding you, and you come free, and you come to us. The plainest daily act, done for his sake, turns into a form of worship.

A door open to all

समोऽहं सर्वभूतेषु न मे द्वेष्योऽस्ति न प्रियः।
ये भजन्ति तु मां भक्त्या मयि ते तेषु चाप्यहम्॥

We are the same toward all beings; none is hateful to us and none is dear. Yet those who worship us with love live in us, and we in them. (Gita 9.29)

Krishna takes no one’s side. Like the sun, he pours the same light over everyone. Sunlight falls everywhere, and yet it kindles a bright reflection only where it meets a surface clear enough to hold it, a still mirror, a clean pane of glass, and no one calls the sun unfair for that. A heart brimming with love is that clear surface. The one who turns to Krishna of his own accord finds Krishna turned toward him in the same measure. The bond is built from both ends.

He adds one more assurance, and it leaves nobody outside. If even the worst of wrongdoers turns to us with an undivided heart, he says, count him among the righteous already, for his mind has fixed on the right resolve. He soon grows righteous through and through and comes into a peace that lasts. And he gives Arjuna his word on it, a thing to hold onto: our devotee is never lost.

Then he says the thing that throws the chapter open to everyone. Whoever takes refuge in us reaches the highest goal, he says, and he names the ones the world is quick to rank low: women, the trading and farming people, those who labor with their hands, and even those born into the stations counted lowest of all. Every one of them arrives. And if they arrive, how much more surely the devoted sages and the royal seers who have loved him for lifetimes. So, he says, you have been handed this human life, brief and short on real joy; spend it worshiping us.

Fasten your mind on us, he tells Arjuna. Become our devotee, worship us, bow to us, and make an offering of your very self. Join yourself to us this way, lean on us and nothing else, and you will come to us. There is no surer word in the chapter, and none plainer.

Hearing this, a faint ease crosses Arjuna’s face. The supreme reality that had seemed so far out of reach a moment ago has drawn so near that even a leaf, offered with love, can serve as the bridge across.

Source: Srimad Bhagavad Gita

Verse by verse

All 34 verses of this chapter: Devanagari, Roman transliteration, word by word, prose order, and a plain rendering. Every verse has its own link, such as lulla.net/en/bhagwad-gita/9/1/. Read the chapter above first, then come down to the source.

9.1इदं तु ते गुह्यतमं प्रवक्ष्याम्यनसूयवे

श्रीभगवानुवाच

इदं तु ते गुह्यतमं प्रवक्ष्याम्यनसूयवे ।
ज्ञानं विज्ञानसहितं यज्ज्ञात्वा मोक्ष्यसेऽशुभात् ॥1॥

idaṃ tu te guhyatamaṃ pravakṣyāmy anasūyave |
jñānaṃ vijñānasahitaṃ yaj jñātvā mokṣyase ’śubhāt

इदम्: यह
तु: परन्तु
ते: आपको
गुह्यतमम्: अत्यन्त गोपनीय
प्रवक्ष्यामि: मैं कहूँगा
अनसूयवे: दोषदृष्टि से रहित को
ज्ञानम्: ज्ञान
विज्ञानसहितम्: अनुभव सहित
यत्: जिसको
ज्ञात्वा: जानकर
मोक्ष्यसे: आप मुक्त हो जाएँगे
अशुभात्: अशुभ (संसार) से

Prose order: अनसूयवे ते तु इदम् गुह्यतमम् विज्ञानसहितम् ज्ञानम् प्रवक्ष्यामि, यत् ज्ञात्वा अशुभात् मोक्ष्यसे।

anasūyave te tu idam guhyatamam vijñānasahitam jñānam pravakṣyāmi, yat jñātvā aśubhāt mokṣyase|

To you, who do not find fault, I shall declare this most secret knowledge together with its direct realization. Knowing it, you will be freed from what is inauspicious.