The Yoga of Knowledge and Discernment

From the seventh chapter onward Krishna speaks increasingly about himself, and the seventh sets out the terms. There is a lower nature divided eight ways, earth, water, fire, air, space, mind, understanding and the sense of being a separate self. There is also a higher nature, which is the living principle by which this world is upheld. Both are his. All beings have their origin in these two, and he is the origin and dissolution of the whole world.

The chapter then supplies the image that fixes the relation. There is nothing higher than him, and all this is strung on him as rows of pearls are strung on a thread. The thread is not the pearls, and the pearls are not scattered. It is a careful statement, and every later Vedanta school had to say precisely what kind of relation it was describing, which is a large part of why the commentarial tradition on this text is as vast as it is.

There follows a catalogue of the places where a person actually meets this presence: the taste in water, the light in moon and sun, the sound in space, the fragrance in earth, the intelligence of the intelligent, the strength of the strong when it is free of desire. The move is characteristic. Rather than argue for a divine reality behind the world, the chapter points at ordinary properties of ordinary things and identifies them.

It also concedes a difficulty. The divine power of illusion made of the three strands is hard to get past, and only those who take refuge cross it, which sets up the chapter's closing sorting of who does and does not turn that way.

The seventh chapter contains a small piece of religious sociology that is unusual in a devotional text for its lack of sentimentality. Four kinds of people who have acted well approach God, Krishna says: the distressed, the one who wants to know, the one who wants something, and the one who knows. All four are described as good, which is worth emphasising, since the distressed and the acquisitive are not dismissed.

Of the four, the one who knows is called dearest, on the ground that such a person is constantly disciplined and devoted to one thing only, and that they are, in the chapter's phrase, his very self. The others are not condemned; they are placed. Anyone who has ever prayed in an emergency or asked for a specific outcome is in the list, and the list says they have come to the right address.

The chapter then addresses those who worship other deities. Whatever form a devotee wishes to worship with faith, Krishna says, he makes that faith steady; worshipping accordingly they obtain their desires, which are in fact ordained by him; but the fruit gained by those of small understanding is limited, and those who sacrifice to the gods go to the gods while his devotees come to him.

Commentators have taken that passage in sharply different tones. Read one way it is inclusive, granting that other worship is real, effective and divinely upheld. Read another it is a ranking, with other destinations described as bounded. The verses support both emphases, and the chapter moves on without resolving the tension, leaving the harder statement of the same problem to chapter nine.