Chapter 13: The Field and the Knower of the Field

About 15 minutes

The dust of Kurukshetra had not yet settled, and neither had the war inside Arjuna. Into that unquiet moment Krishna drops a teaching that reaches far past the battlefield. Arjuna, he says, this body you are wearing, the scriptures call it the “field,” a plot of farmland. And the one who sits inside it, knowing it, watching it, they call the “knower of the field.” Inside that one small distinction hides the seed of all knowledge.

The field and its knower

Picture a farmer who knows his field. The soil is there, the seed, the standing crop, the weeds, and the farmer, who can name every one of them, stands apart from them all: the watcher, the plowman, the one in the middle of it who knows each thing for what it is. Krishna says, this body of yours is exactly such a field, and you, the real you, are the knower who watches it from within. Then he goes one level deeper. Bharata, he says, in every field that exists, the knower is I myself. One consciousness, looking out through countless fields, and the knower seated in each body is a spark of that one and never finally apart from it. The seers said as much long before this morning, in hymn after hymn, and again in the spare, reasoned lines of the old aphorisms on Brahman. To see this boundary between the field and its knower, cleanly and exactly, is in his reckoning the whole of knowledge.

What the field holds

Then Krishna spreads out the field’s full map. Five great elements lie in it: earth, water, fire, air, and space. Ego is in it, and intellect, and beneath them the unseen root nature out of which all of this sprouts. Ten senses, and the one mind riding with them. Five objects toward which those senses keep racing. Count them and you reach the twenty-four strands the old teachers named, the whole standing frame of a body. Then he adds what stirs and settles inside that frame: desire, aversion, pleasure, pain, the assembled body itself, the flicker of consciousness, and the quiet grip of endurance that holds it together. Add it all up and you have the field. But run your finger down the list and notice something: the knower appears nowhere on it. Every item here is a crop, sprouting and withering in its season. The knower stands a step behind them all, watching in silence.

What deserves the name of knowledge

Now Krishna does something you might not expect. Asked what knowledge is, he answers with a portrait of character. Listen to the list, he says, twenty marks in the old count. Freedom from pride, freedom from pretense, hurting no one, patience, a straightness of mind, true seva of the guru, cleanliness inside and out, steadiness, and a firm hand on one’s own reins. Dispassion toward the objects of the senses, in this world and in any world to come. The melting away of the ego, and a clear-eyed, repeated look at the pain folded into birth, death, old age, and disease. No entanglement in the pull of house, son, and wife, and no clutch of mineness on them. A mind that holds level through every turn of fortune, and an unbroken, never-wavering love for the supreme Lord. A taste for solitude and holy ground, little relish for the company of worldly crowds, a settled dwelling in one’s own inner truth, and eyes kept on the one Reality that all true knowledge is for. All of this, he says, is knowledge. Everything opposite to it is ignorance. Knowledge, by this measure, has to be lived; reading alone will never produce it.

The thing worth knowing

Then he turns to the reality that, once known, ends the round of death and hands you deathless bliss. Call it existent and the word falls short; call it nonexistent and that word fails too, for it is larger than both. It presides over the two things that themselves never began, matter and the soul, and stands above both. Its hands and feet reach everywhere, its eyes and heads face every direction, its ears listen on every side, because it sits wrapped around all that is. It owns no sense organ of its own, yet nothing a sense could catch escapes it. It clings to nothing, and still it carries everything. It stands past all three strands of nature, and even so it is the one who tastes them. It stands outside everything that moves and everything that stays, and inside them too, and in truth it is the moving and the still; finer than the finest, it slips past the mind that hunts for it, farther than far and nearer than near. It is one, though it looks parceled out among countless beings. It sustains them as Vishnu, dissolves them as Rudra, and raises them into being as Brahma. It is the light behind every light, on the far side of every darkness, and it sits in every heart. Grasp this much, Krishna says, and you, his own, walk straight into his being.

Prakriti and purusha

Now Krishna sets two words before us: prakriti and purusha, nature and the person. Both are without beginning. Every change you can name, every like and dislike, and every object woven from the three strands of nature, all of it is born of prakriti. Prakriti does the doing. She brings forth the body and its instruments, drives the senses, and stages the whole machinery of cause and effect. Purusha sits inside the play and tastes it, pleasure and pain by turns. And here the trap closes: the moment purusha clings to the strands of nature, the wheel begins to turn, birth after birth, into wombs high and low, human and divine at the top, beast and bird and creeper at the bottom. And the spirit seated in this very body, once you see it rightly, is that same Supreme. The scriptures name this one the Witness who watches every deed, the Consenter who permits, the Sustainer who holds all up, the Enjoyer who tastes every experience, the Great Lord, the supreme Self. Whoever comes to know prakriti and purusha rightly, together with the three strands, Krishna says, is never born again, however ordinary his life may look from the outside.

Seeing the one in all

Having climbed this far, Krishna lays out the roads that reach it. One seeker settles into meditation and, with a cleaned and sharpened mind, finds that self seated in the heart. Another arrives by knowledge and discernment. Another comes through action performed with no eye on reward. And another, who has only heard of it from those who know, holds to what he heard with such faith that the hearing alone ferries him over the sea of death. Every one of them lands on the same shore. Then Krishna sets down the ground under all of it: whatever comes into being, moving or still, is born from the meeting of the field and its knower, matter joined to spirit. And once you have grasped that, he gives you the one line of this chapter worth carrying in your pocket forever.

Whoever sees one and the same supreme Lord dwelling equally in all beings, whoever sees that undying one within every perishing form, that one, truly, sees. (Gita 13.27)

One verb lands twice in that line: sees, and sees again. The first seeing is the eyes doing their ordinary work; the second is the self waking up to itself. Whoever catches the one supreme Self in every being stops destroying himself by his own hand, and he reaches the highest goal without a struggle, because he no longer mistakes the death of a body for his own end.

Krishna presses the same eye onto action. Every deed, all of it, is worked by nature alone, and the self does nothing at all. The seeker who sees his own self standing clear of the work, never once the doer, is the one who sees straight. That self has no beginning and not a single quality of its own, so even while it lives inside the body it does nothing there and picks up no stain, the way the wide-open sky reaches into everything and touches nothing. As a single sun lights the whole world, so this knower keeps his entire field lit from within.

And the moment a person sees the whole scattered crowd of beings resting in that one Self, and streaming outward from it, in that very moment he wakes into the boundless. Those who learn to read the line between the field and its knower with this eye of knowledge, and to see their release from nature and every last thing she makes, walk free of her bonds and reach the supreme.

Say this whole chapter in one breath and it comes to this: the body is a field, and its watcher is someone else. To live that one difference is the first ray of knowledge.

Source: Srimad Bhagavad Gita