The Spiritual Import of the Mahabharata
and the Bhagavadgita

by Swami Krishnananda

The seventh chapter of the Bhagavadgita concludes with a message that leads on gradually to the commencement of the eighth chapter. This message is that in our devotion to God we have to so tune our consciousness that the various aspects in which God manifests Himself are taken into consideration at one stroke, and God is not conceived partially. Many of the religious attitudes of the devout take God as a transcendent, other-worldly Being, and religion has often been identified with a kind of neglect of the world and apathy towards human society. A religious attitude is made synonymous with an ascetic attitude of a denial of worldly values and all social significance, amounting to the conclusion, almost, that God is not in this world, and to attain God one must reject this world, reject any social concourse. This is the feature into which religions get driven, almost as a universal characteristic. A religious man is not a man of this world; he belongs to another world altogether. This is a commonly accepted definition of a religious devotee, a hermit, a mendicant, etc.

But this is an erroneous attitude, because it does not take God in His Truth. There is a conceptual transcendence attributed to God by the religious devotion. While the materialist denies God and affirms the world, religion affirms God but denies the world. Anyhow there is a kind of denial, which is not the gospel of Bhagavadgita. Any kind of extreme is cautiously avoided, because yoga is samatva, or balance of attitude. It is not a swinging of the balance on one side exclusively. So, towards this end, the last verse of the seventh chapter tells us—sadhibhutadhidaivam mam sadhiyajnam ca ye viduh, prayana-kale’pi ca mam te vidur yukta-cetasah. The Lord of the Gita speaks: “I have to be known as adhibhuta, adhidaiva and adhiyajna, and not merely any one of these to the exclusion of the others.” The whole universe is adhibhuta, and the directing principle hidden beneath all phenomena is adhidaiva. The entire administration of the cosmos in its various facets may be regarded as adhiyajna. We are told in the Puranas that Narayana or Vishnu takes incarnations for the preservation of creation. Vishnu is regarded as yajna itself. It is the highest sacrifice—God sacrificing himself every moment of time for the sustenance of His creation. As adhiyajna He is the administrative power and the methodology of the working of the cosmos. All activity is comprehended under this yajna of the cosmos. Therefore God is present in all activity when it is considered as a passage to God, when it is regarded as a manifestation of God as rays emanating from the sun.

Those wise souls who envisage God as adhibhuta, adhidaiva and adhiyajna, which means to say, who encounter God as a comprehensive Absolute and not merely existing only here or there, such devotees are true knowers. They can entertain or maintain this consciousness even at the time of passing from this world—they are not deprived of this consciousness even when death overtakes them. Generally when a person is at the point of passing away from this body, one is supposed to be in a state of delirium—a kind of swoon, unconscious and a loss of awareness of all things. But those blessed ones who are devoted to this practice of the yoga of devotion to God as a completeness in itself maintain this awareness even at the point of doom, even when they are about to leave this body. Prayana-kale’pi ca mam te vidur yukta-cetasah: “They know Me because they are yukta-cetasah; they have been united with Me perpetually throughout their lives.”

The comprehensive philosophy of the Gita is presented in a single verse here again, as in several other places. We should not be excessively religious, or excessively anything, because any kind of excess, even if it be devotion, so-called, entails a kind of dislike and hatred which unwittingly enters into the field of our consciousness. We are made in such a way that we cannot exist without hating something. We may be high class devotees of God, yogis par excellence, but the mind is made in such a way that it cannot escape this predicament of condemning something, deriding something, looking down upon something and contrasting something with another thing. This attitude is unfortunate and is not a positive component of true yoga. This is a message that is given in a seed form at the end of the seventh chapter, which recounts in passing the cosmology of the Bhagavadgita.

This cosmology is detailed further at the very commencement of the eighth chapter as an answer to the queries raised by Arjuna, the questions that were stirred in his mind by the last verse itself. What is this adhiyajna, what is adhibhuta, what is adhidaiva, and what is this thing that one is expected to enshrine in one’s own mind at the time of passing? These are the questions with which the eighth chapter begins. Kim tad-brahma kim adhyatmam kim karma purusottama, adhibhutam ca kim proktam adhidaivam kim ucyate. Adhiyajnah katham ko’tra dehe’smin madhusudana, prayana-kale ca katham jneyo’si niyatatmabhih. These questions of Arjuna at the beginning of the eighth chapter emanate spontaneously from the words of Sri Krishna at the end of the seventh chapter.

The answer is again a concise statement of cosmology, the whole structure of the universe in its relationship to God. We have been discussing it in some detail in connection with a few of the verses of the seventh chapter. The Supreme Being is the indestructible Absolute; It is the eternal. The language of the Bhagavadgita introduces these technical terms. The supreme Brahman or the Absolute is called the aksharam. It is the imperishable amidst all that is perishable, the eternal among the transient, the changeless among all things that change in this world and the perpetual witness of the varying phenomena of nature. It continuously maintains the awareness of creation, preservation and dissolution of the whole cosmos, and nothing else anywhere can be regarded as eternal or imperishable.

Nowhere in this world do we see anything or come across anything that is imperishable. Whatever we see with our eyes, hear with our ears, or think with our minds is subject to destruction. But there is something on the basis of which even this consciousness of change and destruction can be possible. The very possibility and awareness of change and transience posits a non-transient, imperishable Absolute. The supreme Brahman is the Absolute—that is the imperishable Eternal. The terms that are used further on refer to the other manifestations, or we may say appearances, of the supreme Absolute. The one all-comprehensive Being appears to our visualisation or vision as an objective universe, as subjective individuality, as the cosmic Absolute, and as the force behind the ejection of creation. All these, whatever we can think of in our mind, is the drama played by the Absolute within Its own bosom.

The internal self of man, the hidden soul of all things, is called adhyatma. The deepest essence of anything, for the matter of that, is prakritiatman or adhyatma; the essential nature of a thing is adhyatma. Our essential nature, our irreducible minimum characteristic of Being—that is adhyatma. It is the basic essence of all things, the Selfhood that is at the basis of even phenomena. The individual is not the body; it is not the mind. These cannot be called adhyatma, because they are not svabhava, our essential nature. Our basic characteristic is not exhausted in this bodily manifestation. What we think in our mind is not ourself, because our thoughts vary from day to day, from moment to moment. There is a non-varying, permanent feature in us—that which enables us to identify ourselves as a continuity of individuality. While thoughts change and ideas differ, we do not change. Right from childhood onwards, up to the age we have attained now, we have been maintaining an identity of individuality. This identity of ours is not because of the thoughts that we think, or the body in which we are encased. The bodily self changes, thoughts differ, as I mentioned, but we do not change. Therefore we are the same thing today that we were many years back as a child, for instance.

There is an inherent essentiality, the basic minimum of our being, consciousness in its substance, and that is adhyatma. This svabhava is the determining factor of our character and conduct in life. Our behaviour outwardly is conditioned by what we are inwardly as manifest through the vesture of the various layers, the pancha-koshas, as they are called—the mind and body complex. Bhuta-bhavodbhava-karo visargah karma-samjnitah. This is a very difficult and hard saying. The meaning of karma is defined here, in this half-verse, which gives the definition of a peculiar type of karma—it is called bhuta-bhvodbhava-karo visargah. In the Bhagavadgita, karma has a large dimension and a vast sweep. It is on account of this majestic conception of karma, that karma becomes almost the gospel of the Gita. People wonder many a time whether the Gita can be teaching only action. Yes, we may say it is so, because of a unique concept of action that it teaches, right from the beginning to the end.

Karma or action, according to the Bhagavadgita gospel, is a mysterious, comprehensive law which no doubt includes the ordinary actions that we perform in daily life, but does not exhaust itself merely in these actions. The karmas are actions of the various individuals—psychological as well as physical, and also social. They are the reverberations, sympathetic reactions, as it were, of a cosmic pulsation which has been set into motion by the ideation of the Supreme Being. God’s will is operating behind your activity. Your actions therefore are not your actions. This one sentence can be said to be the whole of the Gita. Your actions are not your actions. They are the actions of that principle which sustains, manifests and withdraws this entire cosmos. This universal impulse towards the creation of this universe is the first karma that you can think of, the great yajna that the purusha performed originally, according to the Purusha-Sukta of the Veda. The original karma is this yajna of God. The act of creation is the first karma; it is the real action, and all other actions are merely replicas—they are only copies, photostats, ramifications, reflections, distortions, vehicles of this original activity which can be called the only activity anywhere. There are not many actions or many activities; there is only one action and one activity. There is only one actor and not many actors; this is another important thing that the Gita tells us. With this tremendous message it strikes at the root of our selfishness and individuality. We cease to be at one stroke. The gospel of the Bhagavadgita melts us completely, and we vanish into thin air, as it were, if we are in a position to absorb into our daily life this life-giving message of the cosmic activity, which is God’s activity.