On this page
The gist: from here the Gita changes key. The early chapters worked through action and through knowledge; now Krishna begins to say plainly who he is. All of creation, he tells Arjuna, is strung upon him the way beads are strung along one cord, and out of many thousands scarcely one ever comes to know him whole.
The chariot still stands between the two armies. The conches have gone quiet, the dust has settled, and Arjuna’s whole mind is fixed on what the friend in the charioteer’s clothes has just been telling him. Krishna looks at him and lets his voice drop a shade lower, the way a voice drops when it is about to hand over something that has waited a long time behind a curtain.
Partha, he says, we will lay open for you two kinds of knowing that belong together. There is the knowing of what we are in our formless depth, past all shape and all name; and joined to it, the knowing of us as we stand here in form and quality, close enough to touch. Hold both of these at once and you hold us whole, and once you hold us whole there is nothing left anywhere for you to learn. Then he sets the hard part down without softening it. Out of thousands of people, scarcely one even sets out toward us; and of the few who set out, some rare one comes to know us as we truly are.
The two natures
We have two natures, Krishna says, and he lays them side by side. One is the lower, the one we call apara, and it comes in eight parts: earth, water, fire, air, space, and then mind, intellect, and the sense of I. Out of this dense, unfeeling stuff the whole visible world is put together. The other nature is higher, the para: the living, conscious principle, the very life that holds this creation up from inside. Every being that exists is born from these two together. And the whole moving world rises out of us and sinks back into us; we are the spring it flows from and the sea it returns to.
Then he says the thing the whole chapter turns on. Dhananjaya, there is nothing at all that stands higher than us. This entire world is strung upon us the way a run of beads is strung upon a single cord.
मत्तः परतरं नान्यत्किञ्चिदस्ति धनञ्जय।
मयि सर्वमिदं प्रोतं सूत्रे मणिगणा इव॥
Dhananjaya, there is nothing higher than us at all. All of this is strung upon us the way a run of beads is strung along one cord. (Gita 7.7)
Arjuna holds the picture. On such a cord the beads are knots tied from the very yarn the cord itself is made of. The thread runs through them and also composes them; the same yarn is cord and beads at once. The world works the same way. Its countless forms look separate, each with its own color and shape, while one substance runs through every one of them and stands as every one of them. What holds the world up is the same as what the world is made from.
The essence of every thing
So we are not far to seek, he tells Arjuna; look for us in the essence of each thing. We are the taste in water and the light in the moon and the sun. We are the sacred syllable Om sounding through all the Vedas, the sound that travels in open space, the manliness in men. We are the pure fragrance of the earth and the brightness in fire, the life in every living thing, the austerity in those who practice it. Know us as the eternal seed of all beings: the intelligence of the intelligent, the splendor of the splendid, the strength of the strong once it is cleared of craving and heat. Even desire is us, wherever it runs true to dharma and breaks nothing.
Every mode that stirs in the world, he goes on, whatever is born of clarity, of restless drive, or of dull inertia, all of it comes out of us. And still we are not held inside it, and it is not held inside us. Clouds gather in the open sky, drift across it, and thin away back into it; the sky takes no stain from them and is no emptier once they are gone. We stand to the whole of creation the way that sky stands to its clouds.
Then Krishna sets down a hard truth. In a great many people the power to judge has been carried off by wanting, this wanting and that, so they run after small prizes and bow to one lesser power after another, each drawn by the grain of his own nature. Even then, when someone worships any such form with real faith, it is we who steady that faith and hold it firm. But the fruit is measured out by what each one sought. Those who ask small things of small powers get small and passing things, and reach only those powers; the one who turns straight toward us reaches us.
The sheet of maya
So why do people miss something laid out this plainly? Krishna gives the reason. This maya of ours is a power of his own, wonderful and hard, woven from the same three strands, and it lies across people’s sight like a drawn sheet. They see the shifting forms and lose the one who stands behind all three, undying and unchanged. Crossing that sheet comes easily to no one. Only those who take shelter in us pass through it and out the other side. Many never even try. The reckless and the cruel, the ones whose judgment maya has already stolen, keep their backs turned. But others do come.
Then he names the kinds of people who turn to him.
चतुर्विधा भजन्ते मां जनाः सुकृतिनोऽर्जुन।
आर्तो जिज्ञासुरर्थार्थी ज्ञानी च भरतर्षभ॥
Best of the Bharatas, four kinds of virtuous people worship us: the afflicted one sunk in trouble, the seeker who burns to know, the striver after some object he wants, and the wise one who wants us and nothing besides. (Gita 7.16)
Krishna sends none of them away. Come carrying pain, come carrying a question, come carrying a need, or come carrying nothing at all except love; every one of those doors opens onto him. Of the four he holds the wise one dearest, for that one comes wanting him and no reward beyond him. And then he says a thing that closes the last of the distance: the wise one is his own self, the two of them one and the same, with no seam left between.
One in thousands
Here Krishna says something that stops Arjuna where he sits. Out of thousands of people, one here or there struggles toward us; and among those who struggle, some rare one comes at last to know us as we are. To see the single presence living inside everything is given to almost no one. The seeing can take many lives to arrive.
बहूनां जन्मनामन्ते ज्ञानवान्मां प्रपद्यते।
वासुदेवः सर्वमिति स महात्मा सुदुर्लभः॥
At the end of many births the one who has come to know takes shelter in us, seeing that Vasudeva is all there is. So great a soul is very rare. (Gita 7.19)
After long roads and a thousand forms, the secret finally opens in him. The one he kept hunting from place to place, taking it each time for something separate, had been standing in every place all along, one and the same.
And yet, Krishna says, most never see this, even with him standing in plain view. Not knowing his highest nature, undying and past all surpassing, they take him for an ordinary man, born like them and dying like them. He keeps himself veiled behind a power of his own, and untrained sight cannot cut through the veil. He knows every being that has ever lived, every being alive now, every being still to come, across ages beyond counting; and of all of them, the one without faith and love never knows him back.
The reason lies deeper. From the first breath, he says, every creature is torn between what it reaches for and what it pushes away, and the endless war of those opposites, pleasure against pain, drawing-toward against turning-away, fogs the mind over so it cannot see. But some come clean of it. Those whose wrong has worn away, who act without stain and no longer swing between the opposites, worship us whole, with a will that does not waver.
These are the ones who come to know the whole of him: the formless ground of everything, the self seated inside each creature, the entire working of action and its fruit, and behind the field of matter, behind the shining powers men call gods, behind every offering ever poured into fire, the one being who stands under them all. And they keep that knowing steady even at the last, when the breath is going out.
That last phrase is the one that lodges in him. Inside Arjuna a new question has started to rise: at the final hour, when the body is loosening its grip, how is this one to be held in mind? The chariot stands exactly where it stood. Arjuna’s gaze has turned another degree inward.
Source: Srimad Bhagavad Gita