The Yoga of the Vision of the Universal Form

Chapter eleven is the only place in the Gita where something happens. Everywhere else two men talk. Here Arjuna asks to see the form that has just been described to him, and Krishna answers that he cannot see it with his own eyes, and gives him a divine eye with which to look.

That detail is doing theological work. The vision is not a matter of paying closer attention or of being unusually perceptive. Ordinary human sight is described as structurally incapable of the object, and the capacity is conferred rather than acquired. Everything Arjuna then reports is reported by a faculty he did not have a moment earlier and does not keep.

What he sees is described in accumulating disorder: countless mouths and eyes, countless marvellous appearances, unnumbered divine ornaments and weapons, wearing garlands and garments, facing everywhere, with no beginning, middle or end. If the light of a thousand suns rose at once in the sky, Sanjaya says, it might resemble the splendour of that great self. Arjuna sees the whole world with its manifold divisions gathered in one place in the body of the god of gods.

His reaction is not devotion but terror. His hair stands on end. He addresses Krishna with formal titles, asks who this is in fierce form, and says he cannot find his bearings and gets no peace. The chapter is careful to make the vision unbearable rather than beautiful, which is why the tradition treats it as revelation rather than as a religious experience of the consoling kind. It ends with Arjuna asking, repeatedly, for it to stop.

Arjuna's question in the middle of the vision is direct: tell me who you are, in this fierce form. The reply is the most famous line in the book. I am time, Krishna says, grown mature, come forth here to destroy the worlds; even without you, none of the warriors arrayed in the opposing ranks will survive. The instruction that follows is that Arjuna should therefore stand up and win glory, since these men have already been struck down, and he should be no more than the instrument.

The Sanskrit word is kala, which means both time and death, and translators have chosen between them for two centuries without settling it. The word carries the sense of duration that consumes what it measures, and the chapter has just shown the warriors of both armies rushing into blazing mouths and being ground between the teeth, which fixes the meaning past argument.

This is where the Gita answers chapter one, and the answer is harsher than the earlier chapters prepared for. Arjuna's objection was that he would be the destroyer of his family. The reply is that the destruction is already accomplished and that his participation changes only whether he acts well within it. Nothing about the deaths is denied or softened. What is denied is his ownership of them.

The passage travelled far beyond its tradition. The physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer recalled it in 1965 when describing what came to mind at the first atomic test, in a rendering, now the world, am become death, that is not quite the sentence the Sanskrit gives but which has been the line's common English form ever since.