VERSE NUMBERS 26, 27 AND 28 OF SAMKHYA YOGA OR THE YOGA OF KNOWLEDGE

HOLY GITY

CHAPTER TWO

SAMKHYA YOGA OR THE YOGA OF KNOWLEDGE

VERSE NUMBER 26:

Text in Transliteration:

atha chai ‘nam nityajaatam nityam vaa manyase mrrtam

tathaa ‘pi tvam mahaahaaho nai ‘nam socitum arhasi

Text in English:

   Or, if you conceive of Atman as given to constant births and deaths, even then, O mighty armed, you should not sorrow.

COMMENTARY BY SWAMI CHIDBHAVANANDA:

 That there is nothing permanent is the view of the materialists. The Lord now takes this standpoint for inquiry. Granting that this view is true, even then there is no ground for grieving. A man being given to theism, atheism, agnosticism, materialism or any other belief is not of much consequence. Irrespective of his creed, he must be free from sorrowing. It is despondency that takes away all manliness from man.

COMMENTARY BY SWAMI SIVANANDA:

Lord Krishna here, for the sake of argument, takes up the popular supposition. Granting that the Self is again and again born whenever a body comes into being, and again and again dies whenever the body dies, O mighty-armed (O Arjuna of great valour and strength), thou shoudst not grieve thus, because birth is inevitable to what is dead and death is inevitable for what is born. This is the inexorable or unrelenting law of Nature.

VERSE NUMBER 27:

Text in Transliteration:

jaatasya hi dhruvo mrtyuh dhruvam janma mrtasya cha

tasmaad aparihaarye ‘rthe na tvam socitum arhasi

Text in English:

   Death is certain of that which is born; birth is certain of that which is dead. You should not therefore lament over the inevitable.

COMMENTARY BY SWAMI CHIDBHAVANANDA:

   When a body fails to function properly it disintegrates and undergoes the modification called death. But other bodies crop up from the same modified matter. They contain inherent propelling force called desire, which drives them on to activities of life. Birth and death are thus a matter of course.

   A school of nihilism believes in an individual retaining his individuality as long as the motive power of karma lasts. His individuality continues through births and deaths. The exhausting of his karma is like the end of oil in a burning lamp. The flame then becomes extinct. Even so a man ceases to be when his karma comes to an end.

   Another school of atheism holds on to the view that a man’s assuming a body and then annihilating is a matter of course in nature, even as a lump of clay in a river continues to change its form and shape. Changes of form are called births and deaths. Mourning over this modification is meaningless, according to this school of thought.

COMMENTARY BY DR.S.RADHAKRISHNAN:

Cp. “In this rotating world of becoming, what dead person does not come to life again.” (Hitopadesha). The realization of this fact will induce n us poise and proportion. ( Gautama the Huddha cosoled the mother who lost her only son while yet a child by asking her to go into the town and bring him “a little mustard seed from any house where no man hath et died.” She went and found that there was no family where death had not entered. She discovered that it is the law of all things that they will pass away.

The Buddhist nun Pataachaaraa is represented as cosoling man bereaved mothers in the following words:

Weep not, for such is here the life of man

Unasked he came, unbidden went he hence

Lo! ask thyself again whence came thy son

To bide on earth this little breathing space

By one way come and by another gone.....

So hither and so hence—why should ye weep? )

Dr. S. Radhakrishnan continues:

Our existence is brief and death is certain. Our human dignity requires us to accept pain and suffering for the sake of the right.

The inevitability of death, however, cannot justify murders, suicides of wars. We cannot desire deliberately the death of others, simply because all men are bound to die. It is so that all life ends in death, that all progress is perishable, that nothing is permanent in the temporal sense of the term. But in every perfect realization of life, the eternal becomes actualized and the development in time is only the means to this essential aim. What is subject entirely to the rule of change or time is not of intrinsic importance; the eternal plan is the central truth whether cosmic accidents permit its full realisation on earth or not.

COMMENTARY BY SWAMI SIVANANDA:

Birth is sure to happen to that which is dead: death is sure to happen to that which s born. Birth and death are certainly unavoidable. Therefore, you should not grieve over an inevitable matter.

VERSE NUMBER 28:

Text in Transliteration:

avyaktaadeeni bhootaani vyakta madhyaani bhaarata

avyak tanidhanaany eva tatra kaaa paridevanaa

Text in English:

   Beings are all, O Bharata, unmanifested in their origin, manifested in their mid-state and unmanifested again in their end. What is the point then for anguish?

COMMENTARY BY SWAMI CHIDBHAVANANDA:

   Beings claimed as kith and kin are those that have come into being now. Persons contacted in dream had not been in existence before: they would not be after the dream breaks. Though existing in the mid-state, actually they are not. According to materialism, the so-called relatives have assumed forms in conformity with the law of nature; they will again cease to be; lamenting therefore over the temporarily appearing individuals serves no purpose.

The heterodox points of view are wound up here. The lord now returns to the orthodox ways of enquiry. (The Swamiji refers to the verses to follow from verse number 29 –added by the blogger.)

COMMENTARY BY SWAMI SIVANANDA:

The physical body is a combination of the five elements. It is seen by the physical eyes only after the elements have entered into such combination. After death, the body disintegrates and the five elements go back to their source; it cannot be seen. Therefore, the body can be seen only in the middle state. The relationship as son, friend, teacher, father, mother, wife, brother and sister is formed through the body on account of attachment and Moha (delusion). Just as planks unite and separate in a river, just as pilgrims unite and separate in a public inn, so also fathers, mothers, sons and brothers unite and separate in this world. This world is a very big public inn. People unite and separate.

   There is no pot in the beginning and in the end. Even if you see the pot in the middle, you should think and feel that it is illusory and does not really exist. So also there is no body in the beginning and in the end. That which does not exist in the beginning and in the end must be illusory in the middle also. You must think and feel that the body does not really exist in the middle as well.

He who thus understands the nature of the body and all human relationships based on it, will not grieve.    

Comments by the blogger:

He is the teacher in the full sense of the term who does not shy away from dealing with the unorthodox questions put by the students. If he is strong in the subject, he will not resent the student who asks questions in a so-called unorthodox manner. If a sum in mathematics is possible to be solved in the way the teacher teaches it, if the student raises an unorthodox question as to why the same sum could and should not solved in a different way, if the teacher is sure of his subject and has complete knowledge in the subject he teaches, then he would not resent the student, but show the chivalry and try to solve the same sum in the manner suggested by the student. The answer could be arrived at or not at the way and method suggested by the creative-minded student; but the hesitating teacher or the one without the enough adventurist’s spirit and has incomplete knowledge in the subject, will resent the ‘recalcitrant’ student. But the creative teacher would welcome the question and creative suggestion and come forward to solve the same some in the manner pointed out by the student. If the same answer could be arrived at by following the method suggested by the  student with innovative mind, the gifted teacher would be forthcoming with praise for the intelligence shown by the student. And if the right answer could not be arrived at as suggested by the thinking student, even then the teacher would appreciate him for his far reaching and creative thinking. The teacher, under such circumstances, would not be scoring brownie points, but show his appreciation for the different ways of thinking of the gifted student. Only the incomplete teacher, whose proper vocation is not teaching, would get perturbed by the varying suggestion of the student. For the teacher who considers teaching as his real and wonderful vocation, he would first prove the student that the right answer could not be arrived at by the steps and ways suggested by him; because he knows full well that even the wrong answer brought about by the method suggested by the innovative student is a way of reinforcing his point that his method was the right one.

Here, Sri Krishna is the Teacher of the Four Yoga. He has already stated that He taught the yoga in the beginning to Ishwaku who taught it to Manu, but owing to the efflux of time, the inexorable yoga has been overshadowed. So He is the Perfect Teacher of yoga and the deathlessness of the Atman or Self or Soul. So only, even when the gifted student does not postulate the unorthodox point of view, the Teacher volunteers not just one unorthodox view point, but he plunges into all the existing heterodox types of argument and innovatively argues his case that even if Arjuna thinks that the Atman has several births and deaths, he need not suffer on the score, for whatever is born is certain to die and whatever die is certain to be born again. And he asks Arjuna in verse number 29 “ O , Bharat, Beings are all unmanifested in their origin, manifested in their mid-state and unmanifested again in their end. What is the point then for anguish?”

Sri Krishna is the Complete Teacher who takes up the prevailing heterodox view points and use them to prove his points of teaching! He does not flinch or shrink away from the unorthodox view points about the Atman and the body and their states. He, instead, uses them to reinforce His own points of view!

Lord Krishna deals with theism, atheism, agnosticism, materialism as having been important creeds of heterodox beliefs and understanding. For the atheist, there is no God. Man and nature are the important things. For the agnosticism as founded by Lord Buddha, one need not say there is a God or there is no God. That is , the inquiry into the existence of the Sat-chit-Ananda, All-seeing, All-knowing and Omnipresent Lord of God is immaterial, irrelevant and unimportant. He neither denied nor verified the existence of God, saying he need not bother about God. Among the heterodox beliefs, Gautama, the Buddah’s agnosticism held a sway among the mass. For, he was a great rebel and rose against the crippling superstitions in the Hinduism in the name of God and he was deadly against Castes and segregation of women from studying and teaching the scriptures. Because of agnostic principles, he sought to minimise the hold of Brahminism that had grown much and sought to be wielding unending authority and hegemony. But lord Buddha’s Agnosticism itself has glaring contradictions. For, he accepted the main belief of the individual Self of Dhvaidham and the Nature and rebirths: He taught one should become completely independent of the bondage of the illusory world or Nature or Universe, as we now understand. One should do one’d duty without holding any stack in the fruits thereof. Desire and avarice is at the root of all sorrow and despondency and bondage to the Nature. According to him the Self in Its individuality is real and there are as many Souls as there are human beings. And only when a Self becomes completely free of the bondage-begetting desire, the rebirths and reincarnations stop for the individual Soul. Till then there are umpteen number of rebirths for the individual Self. The Self is permanent and It can become free of the beguiling Nature. Once an individual Self gives up and becomes free of all desires, the bondage stops and one need not be reborn, and that is a state of emancipation. And such Emancipated Souls go to the different Loka or World in the sky with a different form of consciousness. There they exist forever as perfected individual Soul. But Buddhism has no answer for why such immortal Self was tossed in to the beguiling Samsaara or the worldly life constituted of maya or illusion, kama or desire and karma or action. Who created the Self? If It is self-created, then that answers all the attributes of God. And who created this world? But the immortality of the individual Self and the keeping of its identity even after emancipation is a valid argument. 

This argument is very near to the Dhvaidham and Saivait Scriptures. Only there is a marked belief in the existence of God or the Primal Cause of the Universe in them, whereas in Buddhism it is conspicuous by its absence. So, Lord Buddha’s religion is a differently packaged Hinduism only. But it suffered from the main problem of having to accept the created and not accepting the Creator. How can there be Self and the World, the CAUSES, WITHOUT THE EFFECT, THE OMNISCIENT PRESENCE?

NO WONDER, IN INDIA BUDDHISM WAS SOUGHT TO BE DIGESTED SUCCESSFULLY WITH THE LORD BUDDHA HIMSELF HAVING BECOME ( RIGHTLY SO) IN THE PURANAS OF THE VAISHNAVITES AS THE NINTH INCARNATION OF THE LORD, VISHNU. While the ninth reincarnation of Sri Vishnu, is a great Rebel who turned against the false practices and hypocrisy of Hinduism, the Tenth incarnation of God is Kalki, the Great Destroyer!

Sri Ramakrishna says there is an ocean of super intelligent consciousness and a great heaving wave happens on the firmament here, It is called Sri Vishnu or Siva here, and Jesus Christ and Allah, the Great somewhere else!