The Yoga of the Field and the Knower of the Field

The thirteenth chapter introduces a pair of terms and then spends its length on them. The body is called the field, and the one who is aware of it is the knower of the field. Krishna adds that he is the knower of the field in every field, and that knowing the two together, and their difference, is what he considers to be knowledge.

The field is then itemised, and the list is unexpectedly long: the elements, the sense of self, the understanding, the unmanifest, the eleven senses, the five objects of sense, and then desire, aversion, pleasure, pain, the organism, awareness and firmness. Emotions and states of mind are placed on the field side, among the things observed, rather than on the side of the observer. That single move is what the chapter is for. What most people take to be their inmost self, their wanting and disliking, is being classified with the body.

Knowledge is then defined, and the definition is a surprise. Instead of propositions to be believed it gives a list of qualities: absence of pride and of pretension, non-injury, patience, uprightness, service of a teacher, purity, steadiness, self control, dispassion toward the objects of sense, absence of egotism, the perception of the evils in birth, death, old age and sickness, non-attachment, evenness of mind in the desirable and the undesirable, unswerving devotion, resort to solitary places, and dislike of crowds. Everything else, the chapter says, is ignorance.

Defining knowledge as a character rather than as a content is unusual enough to be worth pausing on, and it explains why the Gita can treat an uneducated devotee as knowing more than a learned one.

This chapter is where the Gita's manuscript history becomes visible to an ordinary reader, because printed editions disagree about how many verses it has, and the disagreement shifts every verse number in the chapter by one.

At issue is a single opening verse in which Arjuna asks about nature and spirit, the field and the knower of the field, and knowledge and what is to be known. The recension followed by Shankara does not include it, and gives the chapter thirty-four verses beginning with Krishna's statement that the body is called the field. The recension followed by Ramanuja includes it, and gives thirty-five. Editions in circulation today follow one or the other, frequently without saying which, so a citation of chapter thirteen verse twenty may point at two different verses depending on the book in the reader's hand.

The atlas records the verse count for this chapter as disputed rather than choosing a number, and the same caution applies to the traditional total of seven hundred verses for the whole Gita. That figure holds on the shorter reckoning of chapter thirteen. It is also worth knowing that a longer recension of the Gita survives from Kashmir, with additional verses elsewhere in the text, so the seven hundred is the count of the widely printed vulgate rather than of every witness.

None of this is a scandal, and none of it is hidden. It is the ordinary condition of a text transmitted by hand for two thousand years inside a much larger epic that was itself transmitted in several forms. What it does mean is that a reader comparing two translations and finding the verse numbers out of step has not made a mistake.