The Language of the Bhagavadgita: 5. Swami Krishnananda.

 

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Saturday 25, January 2025, 10:00.
Article
Srimad Bhagavad Gita
The Language of the Bhagavadgita: 5. 
Swami Krishnananda.
(Gita Jayanti Message spoken on December 26, 1982)

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Now darshanam is necessary.

” Manyase yadi tac chakyam maya drastum iti prabho, yogesvara tato me tvam darsayatmanam avyayam (B.G. 11.4): “O Lord, if you feel I am fit for this vision, deign, condescend to grant me this vision.”

The vision was granted. The whole sky was lit up with light, and thousands of suns arose, as it were, said the poet. What else can be said? Thousands of suns are nobodies before this light, but we have to say something. What else can we say? We are like frogs in a well and the ocean is so big, but whatever we say, it cannot be equal to the actual ocean. So we may say it is like thousands of suns or millions of suns, but that cannot be an adequate description of God’s glory. We have not seen any light greater than the sun’s light, so we can only multiply the sun’s light arithmetically and imagine that God must have been like that. However, God is more than all He has created, even greater than the sun’s light itself. Well, the vision was granted, but we do not know whether Arjuna actually entered it. Pravesha perhaps was not done. He visualised it, and there the matter ended.

Arjuna said, “Come down. I shall be pleased to see you once again as my comrade, my jolly friend Sri Krishna, not as this mighty terror before me.” It appears that Arjuna did not enter it, because he was still the same Arjuna after the Gita was spoken. He was not a different person. At least this is what we have to believe, as it is told in the Mahabharata itself. It was a sudden injection of a power that was required at that moment, and perhaps when the work was over the power was withdrawn. It was not essential for Arjuna to be always in that condition. It was not necessary, and it would also not have been proper.

However, we are seekers and are humbly trying to tread this path of divine glory though we have not entered it, not visualised it, perhaps not even properly understood it. Our plight is far, far below that unconditional surrender which Arjuna felt necessary when his total personality was tending to melt as a ball of lead melts in furnace fire, or mist melts before the sun.

This glorious advent of the Bhagavadgita is the sacred occasion of our prayers and worships today. As I mentioned, the Gita is not a book. No religion considers its scripture as a mere book, just as you are not a mere body. You know very well you are so-and-so, and are not merely a body, though nothing can be seen about you except your body. The Bhagavadgita is not a book, though it looks like a book and nothing else is seen there. As we have something non-physical within us though only the physical is seen, there is something super-physical and super-linguistic in the Bhagavadgita, apart from its appearing as a Sanskrit text which can be understood by grammatical interpretations and the application of semantics, etc.

The culture of Bharatavarsha does not recognise any object as being purely material, and more so is the case with divine embodiments such as the scriptures. The Veda, the Upanishad, the Bhagavadgita are sacred. The Veda mantras are not some printed characters on pieces of paper, though when we lift the Veda and carry it from one place to another we seem to be carrying only paper and ink. The Veda is not paper and ink. It is something more than what we can touch with our hand or feel as a weight thereof. It is a power, it is a force, it is a vibration, it is an energy, it is a solution, it is a succour, it is divinity that somehow or other has been implanted within this range of linguistic style, whether of the Veda mantras or the verses of the Bhagavadgita.

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Continued

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