The Yoga of Divine Manifestations

Chapter ten is a list, and readers who want argument find it the least rewarding part of the Gita. Read as a method rather than as content it is one of the most practically consequential chapters in the book.

Arjuna's question is specific. He does not ask what God is. He asks how he should think about God while looking at the world, and in what particular things he should contemplate him. The answer is a long series of identifications, each taking the first or best member of a class: of the shining ones the sun, of the stars the moon, of the Vedas the Sama, of the senses the mind, of mountains Meru, of bodies of water the ocean, of rivers the Ganga, of letters the first letter, of seasons the flowering spring, of weapons the thunderbolt, of the immovable the Himalaya.

The device gives an ordinary person a usable practice with no equipment. Whatever is in front of you belongs to some class of things; find the pre-eminent member of that class and you have a foothold. This is why the passage is so often used in teaching, and why so many of its identifications entered general Indian usage as ordinary figures of speech.

Two entries in the list are worth noting because they are not superlatives of the obvious kind. Among cheats, Krishna says, he is the gambling of the dishonest, and he is the rod of those who chastise. The catalogue is not confined to what is admirable. It names the concentrated form of whatever a class contains, including its capacity for harm, which is consistent with the vision that arrives in the next chapter.

The tenth chapter's catalogue does not end; it stops. There is no limit to my divine manifestations, Krishna says, and what has been declared is only an indication given by way of example. Whatever being is glorious, prosperous or powerful, understand it to have arisen from a fragment of my splendour. And then the closing verse: but what is the use of knowing all this in detail, since I stand supporting this entire world with a single fragment of myself.

The breaking off is the chapter's real teaching. A list of divine manifestations that could be completed would define a boundary, and the text refuses to draw one. It gives enough entries to establish the pattern, states explicitly that the pattern is unbounded, and then dismisses the exhaustive version as pointless.

The final image also sets up chapter eleven precisely. A single fragment upholds the world; everything just enumerated is that fragment's work. Arjuna has been given a way of seeing God in things one at a time, and the chapter closes by telling him that this method, however useful, is measuring an ocean with a cup. His response at the start of the next chapter, asking to see the imperishable form directly, follows from that statement rather than from curiosity.

The opening of the chapter is worth reading beside the ending. Arjuna says he accepts all this as true and adds that neither the gods nor the great seers know Krishna's origin, since he is the source of them all. The chapter is framed at both ends by an admission of limit, which is unusual in a passage otherwise devoted to enumeration.