Bhagavad Gītā – Chapter 13 Notes

 

Apart from Chapter 15, the focus now moves away from the nature of God to the nature of the world: how it is constructed, and how a person can disentangle himself/herself from it.

Chapter 13 deals with material nature (prakṛti) and how spirit (puruṣa) interacts with it.  First, Krishnaexplains the difference between the knower (ātman) and the objective field which the knower experiences (13.6).  The yogi can carefully examine each element of the field and systematically detach himself/herself from it.  True knowledge is in fact knowledge of Brahman, and the person who truly knows and understands this will achieve immortality (13.12-13).

Krishna then explains how Brahman interacts with material nature (13.15-18), and explains the interrelationship of prakṛti and puruṣa (13.20-23).  He also speaks about the “Self” in us, which some people come to realise through meditation, some through rationalistic philosophy, and some through karma yoga.  This Self is the same in all of us, as is the way we have become caught up in samsāra – through the union of the field and the knower of the field (i.e. the union of prakṛti and puruṣa (13.25-28).

 

 

 

 

Notes from Radhakrishnan’s commentary on BG

 

1 Prakçti is unconscious activity and puruùa is inactive consciousness.  The body is called the field in which events happen; all growth, decline and death take place in it.  The conscious principle, inactive and detached, which lies behind all active states as witness, is the knower of the field.  This is the familiar distinction between consciousness and the objects which that consciousness observes.  The witness is not the individual embodied mind but the cosmic consciousness for which the whole cosmos is the object.  It is calm and eternal and does not need the use of the senses and the mind for its witnessing.

 

When we try to know the nature of the human soul, we may get to know it from above or from below, from the divine principle or the elemental nature.  Man is a twofold, contradictory being, free and enslaved.  He is godlike, and has in him the signs of his fall, that is, descent into nature.  As a fallen being, man is determined by the forces of prakçti.  He appears to be actuated solely by elemental forces, sensual impulses, fear and anxiety.  But man desires to get the better of his fallen nature.  The man studied by objective sciences as biology, psychology and sociology is a natural being, is the product of the processes which take place in the world.  But man, as a subject, has another origin.  He is not a child of the world.  He is not nature.  He does not belong to the objective hierarchy of nature, as a subordinate part of it.  Puruùa or kùetraj¤a [i.e. “knower of the field”] cannot be recognized as an object among other objects or as a substance.  He can only be recognized as subject, in which is hidden the secret of existence, a complete universe in an individual form.

 

 

5 These are the constituents of the field of Kùetra, the content of experience, the twenty-four principles of the Saükhya system.  The distinction of mental and material belongs to the object side.  They are distinctions within the “field” itself.  The body, the forms of sense with which we identify the subject belong to the object side.

 

The knower is a subject and the turning of it into an object or a thing means ignorance, avidyà….  Nothing in the object world is an authentic reality.  We can realize the subject world in us only by overcoming the enslaving power of the object world, by refusing to be dissolved in it.  This means resistance, suffering.  Acquiescence in the surrounding world and its conventions diminishes suffering; refusal increases it.  Suffering is the process through which we fight for our true nature.

 

11 It is clear from this list of qualities that j¤àna or knowledge includes the practice of the moral virtues.  Mere theoretical learning will not do.  By the development of moral qualities the light of the ever changeless Self witnessing all but attached to none is discriminated from the passing forms and is no more confused with them.