Chapter 15: The Yoga of the Supreme Person

About 10 minutes

Krishna opens with a very old picture. Look at this world, he says, as an upside-down peepal tree, its roots reaching up and its branches spreading down. That strange tree is the whole of creation. And a single tool exists that can bring it down: the sharpened axe of detachment.

The upside-down tree, roots above

Every tree you have ever seen keeps its roots below, in the soil, and lifts its branches toward the sky. The tree Krishna describes stands inverted. Its root is above, fixed in the supreme being from whom everything flows. From that root the trunk descends: Brahma the creator, who is first to appear when a world begins. From Brahma the branches spread downward into the visible world, and the leaves of the whole tree are the Vedas.

This ashvattha, its root above and its branches below, is called imperishable. Its leaves are the Vedas, and whoever knows this tree for what it is knows the Vedas as well. (Gita 15.1)

Look closer and the branches run in two directions at once, upward toward the worlds of the gods and downward toward humans and every creature below them. The three gunas are the water that feeds it. Its tender shoots are the objects of the senses. And its roots do not stay in one place; they reach into every region, high and low, and one set of them creeps down into human life, where they bind a person to his own actions. Those binding roots have names of their own: the feeling of “I,” the feeling of “mine,” and the buried wants a person carries from one life to the next. They take hold in the human body alone, because only a human being acts with a free hand and reaps exactly what those acts deserve.

Stand beneath this tree and you can make out neither its top nor its end, nor the ground that holds it. It looks solid and permanent, and yet think it through and it will not hold the shape it seems to have. Krishna’s counsel is direct: take the strong axe of detachment and cut the tree at its deep-set root. It is not enough to lop the visible branches, not enough even to sever one’s outward ties to the world. The tree comes down only when a person lets go of “I” and “mine” and the old buried wants, and that is the work the axe is for. Once the root is severed, every branch falls away on its own. Then seek shelter in the primeval person, Narayana, from whom this whole ancient spread has flowed, and having given yourself over to him, dwell on him. Reach that place once and there is no return.

The abode from which there is no return

Krishna gives that abode a description all its own. No light of the sun reaches there, he says, none of the moon, none of fire. It shines by itself, and it is from its light that every other light borrows the power to shine. Whoever arrives there once never falls back into this whirl. That is my supreme abode.

And who arrives? The one who is free of pride and delusion, who has beaten the pull of attachment, who stays settled in the truth within and lets no craving of any kind live on in the mind. Heat and cold, honor and insult, the swing between pleasure and pain, none of these pairs can move such a person. He walks past every one of them untouched and reaches that unshakable home.

Every being a portion of that same one

Now Krishna says something startlingly intimate. The being wandering through this world of the living, he says, is none other than my own eternal portion.

In this world of the living, my own eternal portion lives as the living being. It draws toward itself the five senses that rest in nature, and the mind as the sixth. (Gita 15.7)

Take that in: every creature is a piece of him. A piece only, a small part of the whole, and yet a piece of the same eternal, conscious being, kin to him the way a spark is kin to fire. When this portion takes hold of a body, and again when it lets that body go, it carries the senses and the mind along with it, the way a breeze lifts fragrance from a bed of flowers and sets it down somewhere else. It is the lord of whatever body it wears, master of all its instruments. Through the ears, the eyes, the skin, the tongue, and the nose, this same portion keeps tasting the whole rasa of the world.

Those with delusion’s veil across their eyes never see it arriving, departing, or enjoying, even while it does all three in plain sight of them. Those who open the eye of knowledge recognize it at once. The yogi who works at it, once his mind has been made clean, comes to see this self seated in his own heart. Where the mind stays clouded, effort and years of scripture-reading both fall short, because the self gives itself only to a cleared mind.

Seated in every heart

Then Krishna throws his pervasiveness wide open. The blaze in the sun that lights the entire world, he says, the glow in the moon and in fire, all of it is mine alone. It is I who enter the soil and hold every creature up by my own vital force. I become the moon, full of nectar, and feed every plant and herb that grows. I burn as the digestive fire in every body, joined with the prana and the apana, and I cook the food of all four kinds, whatever a body chews, swallows, licks, or sucks. And the innermost truth he saves for these words.

I am seated in the heart of all. From me alone come memory, knowledge, and the reasoning that clears away doubt. All the Vedas, in the end, are meant for knowing me. I am the source of Vedanta, and the knower of the Vedas too. (Gita 15.15)

The perishable, the imperishable, and the highest person

At the close Krishna opens the distinction that gives this chapter its name. In this world, he says, there are two kinds of person. The first is the kshara, the perishable: the body of every living being, all of matter, everything that keeps changing and dissolving, every name and form. The second is the akshara, the imperishable: the self that dwells inside every body and never alters, that same eternal portion he spoke of before. Beyond both of these stands a third, higher than either, the supreme person, whom people call the supreme self. He has entered all three worlds and holds them up, and he does not perish even when the worlds themselves dissolve.

Because I stand beyond the perishing kshara, Krishna says, and higher even than the undying akshara, the world and the Vedas both know me by the name Purushottama, the highest person. Whoever recognizes me in this form, with a mind cleared of every confusion, has as good as known everything worth knowing, and turns to me with his whole being: his love, his thought, his senses, his work, all of it given over to me.

Then Krishna seals it. This is the most secret teaching I have given you, he tells Arjuna. Take it in to the core, and a person becomes truly wise, and everything a life was meant to accomplish stands accomplished.

Say this chapter in a single breath and it comes to this: the world is an upside-down tree whose true root is above, in that supreme truth, and we are all small portions of that same supreme. Recognize the root, and the tree grows light on its own.

Source: Srimad Bhagavad Gita