Essays on the Gita — Sri Aurobindo's Reading Explained गीता प्रबन्ध

Who was Sri Aurobindo?

Sri Aurobindo (born Aurobindo Ghose, 15 August 1872 – 5 December 1950) was educated in England, at St Paul's School, London, and King's College, Cambridge. He returned to India in 1893 and served the State of Baroda before plunging into the nationalist movement in Bengal, where he became one of the leading voices calling for complete independence. Arrested in the Alipore Bomb Case in 1908, he was acquitted in 1909 after a year in jail, during which, by his own account, he had decisive spiritual experiences. In 1910 he withdrew to Pondicherry, then a French territory, and devoted the rest of his life to yoga, philosophy and writing. His major works, including The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga and Essays on the Gita, first appeared in the Arya.

When and why it was written

The Arya was a monthly 'review of pure philosophy' that Sri Aurobindo launched in Pondicherry on 15 August 1914 with Paul and Mirra Richard (Mirra later became known as the Mother). Several of his long works ran in it side by side, a few pages each month. According to the Note on the Text in the Complete Works, the first series of Essays on the Gita, covering the first six chapters of the Gita, ran from August 1916 to July 1918; the second series, covering the remaining twelve chapters, ran from August 1918 to July 1920.

The timing matters. The Gita had become the scripture of Indian nationalism: Bankim Chandra Chatterji had read it as a gospel of duty, and Bal Gangadhar Tilak's Gita Rahasya (1915) presented it as a manual of selfless action in the world. Aurobindo, once a nationalist leader himself, wanted to take the Gita beyond politics and ethics. He argued that its call to action could only be understood together with its teaching of knowledge and devotion.

The first series, slightly revised, was published as a book in 1922 by V. Ramaswamy Sastrulu and Sons, Madras. An extensively revised second series followed in 1928 from the Arya Publishing House, Calcutta, and since 1949 the two have been printed as one volume. The standard text today is volume 19 of the Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, checked against his manuscripts.

The essays by series and theme

• First Series, essays I–IV — "Our Demand and Need from the Gita", "The Divine Teacher", "The Human Disciple", "The Core of the Teaching": Aurobindo explains his approach. Every scripture holds something tied to its own age and something eternal, and we should look for the living truth rather than defend every word. Krishna is the divine teacher who also dwells within each person, and Arjuna is the representative human being in crisis. He then rejects the modern habit, which he traces to Bankim Chandra, of reading the Gita mainly as a gospel of duty or social service.
• Essays V–VII — "Kurukshetra", "Man and the Battle of Life", "The Creed of the Aryan Fighter": the battlefield is not just an allegory. Life itself involves struggle and destruction as well as creation, and the Gita faces that fact. Krishna's first arguments, about the warrior's duty and the immortality of the soul, are treated as only a first step.
• Essays VIII–X — "Sankhya and Yoga", "Sankhya, Yoga and Vedanta", "The Yoga of the Intelligent Will": how the Gita uses the older Sankhya picture of Purusha (the witnessing soul) and Prakriti (active nature), and joins it with Yoga and the Vedanta of the Upanishads. The 'yoga of the intelligent will' (buddhi yoga) means action freed from desire and turned towards the Divine.
• Essays XI–XIV — "Works and Sacrifice", "The Significance of Sacrifice", "The Lord of the Sacrifice", "The Principle of Divine Works": yajna (sacrifice) is widened from ritual to all action offered to the Supreme, who is the true 'Lord of the sacrifice'.
• Essays XV–XVIII — "The Possibility and Purpose of Avatarhood", "The Process of Avatarhood", "The Divine Birth and Divine Works", "The Divine Worker": a reading of the fourth chapter of the Gita on the avatar. Aurobindo defends the idea of divine incarnation but also treats it as a model for an inner 'divine birth' in every seeker, who then works as an instrument of the Divine.
• Essays XIX–XXIV — "Equality", "Equality and Knowledge", "The Determinism of Nature", "Beyond the Modes of Nature", "Nirvana and Works in the World", "The Gist of the Karmayoga": equality of mind (samata) in joy and grief; how human action is driven by the three gunas of nature and how one can rise above them; and the claim that liberation in Brahman (nirvana) does not end action but frees it. The last essay sums up the yoga of works.
• Second Series, Part I, "The Synthesis of Works, Love and Knowledge" (essays I–VII) — "The Two Natures", "The Synthesis of Devotion and Knowledge", "The Supreme Divine", "The Secret of Secrets", "The Divine Truth and Way", "Works, Devotion and Knowledge", "The Supreme Word of the Gita": the Gita's distinction between the lower nature and the higher, spiritual nature of the Divine, and how knowledge, devotion and works become a single path towards the Supreme Being, the Purushottama.
• Part I continued (essays VIII–XII) — "God in Power of Becoming", "The Theory of the Vibhuti", "The Vision of the World-Spirit — Time the Destroyer", "The Vision of the World-Spirit — The Double Aspect", "The Way and the Bhakta": the Divine revealed in the world's powers and excellences (vibhutis), the great vision of the cosmic form in the eleventh chapter, and the devotee who embodies the teaching.
• Part II, "The Supreme Secret" (essays XIII–XVII) — "The Field and its Knower", "Above the Gunas", "The Three Purushas", "The Fullness of Spiritual Action", "Deva and Asura": the body and nature as the 'field' and the soul as its knower; rising beyond the three gunas; the three Purushas (the changing, the unchanging and the supreme); and the contrast between divine and demonic natures.
• Essays XVIII–XX — "The Gunas, Faith and Works", "The Gunas, Mind and Works", "Swabhava and Swadharma": the Gita's analysis of faith, food, sacrifice, knowledge and action by the three gunas, and a reading of swabhava (one's inner nature) and swadharma (the law of action that flows from it), including Aurobindo's discussion of the four social orders as types of inner nature.
• Essays XXI–XXIV — "Towards the Supreme Secret", "The Supreme Secret", "The Core of the Gita's Meaning", "The Message of the Gita": the climax in the eighteenth chapter, where Krishna asks for complete surrender to himself, and Aurobindo's closing summary of what he takes the whole Gita to teach.

Key arguments

A synthesis, not a single path. Aurobindo's central claim is that the Gita does not choose between karma (works), jnana (knowledge) and bhakti (devotion). Each leads into the others, and the full yoga needs all three. This is why he resists readings that make the Gita mainly a call to duty.

Read the whole argument. He insists the Gita is a developing argument that must be read to its end. Interpreters who stop at the first three or four chapters, he argues, miss the later teaching on the Purushottama and on surrender, which gives the earlier advice on action its meaning.

Action without ego. The ideal is not to give up action but to give up the ego and desire behind it, offering every act to the Divine. The perfected person acts as an instrument, with equality of mind, beyond the pull of the gunas.

The living truth of scripture. Aurobindo separates what in a scripture belongs to its age from what is permanent. He is less interested in historical scholarship than in what the Gita can do for a seeker now, and he openly reads it in the light of spiritual experience.

A bridge to his own philosophy. Themes such as the Purushottama, the transformation of nature and divine works in the world return in The Life Divine and The Synthesis of Yoga, so readers often treat the book as an introduction to Aurobindo's Integral Yoga as much as to the Gita.

In the author's words

Undoubtedly, the Gita is a Gospel of Works, but of works which culminate in knowledge, that is, in spiritual realisation and quietude, and of works motived by devotion, that is, a conscious surrender of one's whole self first into the hands and then into the being of the Supreme

Life is not for the sake of life alone, but for God, and the living soul of man is an eternal portion of the Godhead. Action is for self-finding, for self-fulfilment, for self-realisation and not only for its own external and apparent fruits of the moment or the future.

Reception and criticism

Essays on the Gita is widely counted among the major modern Indian readings of the Gita, alongside those of Tilak, Gandhi, Vivekananda and Radhakrishnan. The religious studies scholar Robert N. Minor, who edited Modern Indian Interpreters of the Bhagavad Gita (SUNY Press, 1986), contributed its chapter on Aurobindo, "Sri Aurobindo as a Gita-yogin", treating him as an interpreter whose reading grew out of his own yogic practice. Admirers value the book's literary power, its refusal to reduce the Gita to one doctrine, and its attempt to hold together a life of action and a life of the spirit.

There are also objections. Aurobindo himself says his aim is not 'a scholastic or academical scrutiny' of the Gita's thought, and academic readers note that he reads into the Gita ideas, such as the transformation of nature, that belong more to his own system than to the text. Some scholars of religion have also noted that modern Indian interpreters, Aurobindo among them, gave the Gita a more central place in Hinduism than it had always held, and read their own philosophies into it. Readers who follow Tilak's or Gandhi's emphasis on ethical action in society sometimes find Aurobindo's reading too inward and mystical. His defence of the warrior's duty and his account of the four social orders as types of inner nature (swabhava) have also been discussed critically, though he relates the orders chiefly to inner nature and observes that only in the later caste system did birth become the sole rule of status. Supporters answer that Aurobindo is open about his method, and that his aim was always spiritual rather than academic.

Where to read it

The full text is free on the Sri Aurobindo Ashram's websites: as volume 19 of the Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo (CWSA) on sriaurobindoashram.org, and essay by essay on incarnateword.in. Older scans of the Birth Centenary Library edition (volume 13, 1970) are also online. Printed editions are published by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department, Pondicherry, and by Lotus Press in the United States.

Read more on this site

• Bhagavad Gita — all 18 chaptersRead the text Aurobindo is interpreting
• Bhagavad Gita 4.7The avatar verse discussed in the essays on avatarhood
• Bhagavad Gita 18.66The 'supreme secret' of surrender
• Sri AurobindoThinkers
• Gita RahasyaTilak's reading of the Gita as karma yoga

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