Chapter Fifteen:
Yog of the Supreme Divine Personality ( Puruṣhottam Yog)
Weird Trees and Moon Life Juice
Welcome to the next instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts
(Bhagavad Gita).
In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the
Bhagavad Gita, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as
literature and mythology.
For more detail, see the introductory post https://bit.ly/2XAch2A
For the online Bhagavad Gita that I use, see here https://www.holy-bhagavad-gita.org/
And now:
Puruṣhottam
Yog
“The
Supreme Divine Personality said: They speak of an eternal aśhvatth tree with
its roots above and branches below. Its leaves are the Vedic hymns, and one who
knows the secret of this tree is the knower of the Vedas.”
We now get a bit of symbolic cosmology, where the material world
is likened to a very odd kind of (fig) tree, with roots at the top (which
nevertheless hang down to bring the “flow
of karma” to humans). The leaves are the hymns of the Vedas, the buds are
the things perceived by the senses and the branches (which go up and down) are
“nourished by the three gunas”.
Symbolically, one must seek the root (which is Krishna as the
Supreme Divine Personality) and use the “axe
of detachment” to become one with God and free onself from the infinite
branches of the tree of the material world. And, of course, only those devoted
to wisdom are able to comprehend the true nature of the tree; others simply go
through life unaware of this metaphysical construct.
The soul is a portion of the divine enshrined in the body, but
again only the wisest of yogis are able to perceive it. It becomes entrapped by
the physical senses and the mind, and if not freed by devotion to God it passes
on, thoughts and memories intact, in a new incarnation – “As the air carries fragrance from place to place, so does the embodied
soul carry the mind and senses with it, when it leaves an old body and enters a
new one.” And thus a duality exists between the material and the immanent,
or as it’s put here, “There are two kinds
of beings in creation, the kṣhar
(perishable) and the akṣhar (imperishable). The perishable are all beings in the material realm.
The imperishable are the liberated beings.”
That’s really about it for this chapter, it’s pretty short at only
20 verses, but I will just throw in a couple of times when Krishna’s science,
or metaphors for scientific things, is a little shaky, but forgiveable. “Becoming the moon, I nourish all plants with
the juice of life.” Eh? Is that some kind of vague concept related to tides
– the moon regulates tides, therefore the moon regulates all water? (Which it does, but tides in small bodies of water tend
not to get noticed). Also “It is I who
take the form of the fire of digestion in the stomachs of all living beings,
and combine with the incoming and outgoing breaths, to digest and assimilate
the four kinds of foods”. I’d like to know what the “four kinds of foods” are, because if it’s protein, carbohydrate,
fats and vitamins/minerals I’d be very impressed. And the “fire of digestion”,
although not literally true, it’s still a pretty good explanation, with oxygen
from the incoming breath reacting with the hydrocarbons from food in a
heat-generating reaction.
So, well done Krishna.
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