The Yoga of the Supreme Person

Chapter fifteen opens with an image that reverses an old one. The world is a fig tree, imperishable in tradition, with its roots above and its branches below, its leaves the Vedic hymns; the one who knows it knows the Veda. Its branches spread downward and upward, nourished by the strands, and its buds are the objects of sense; below, its roots stretch out into the world of men, binding by action.

The instruction that follows is unusually violent for this book. The tree's form is not perceived here, the chapter says, nor its end, nor its beginning, nor its foundation; having cut this deeply rooted fig tree with the firm axe of non-attachment, that place should be sought from which those who reach it do not return.

The tree is worth pausing on, because it inverts the shape of a living thing. A tree with its roots in the sky draws its life from somewhere other than the ground it appears to stand on. The world of ordinary experience is depicted as growing downward from a source above it, and the leaves, notably, are the sacred hymns themselves, which places even revealed scripture among the tree's foliage rather than outside the whole arrangement.

What the chapter offers instead of the tree is a location. The sun does not illumine that place, nor the moon, nor fire, and those who reach it do not return. Chapter fifteen is short, twenty verses, and it moves faster than any other part of the Gita from image to instruction to goal, which is one reason it has been used liturgically in ways the longer chapters have not.

The second half of chapter fifteen turns from the world tree to the individual, and states the relation in a single verse: an eternal fragment of Krishna himself, having become a living being in the world of living beings, draws to itself the senses, of which the mind is the sixth, and which rest in nature.

The image that follows is one of the most concrete in the book. When the lord of the body takes up a body, and when he leaves it, he carries these along with him as the wind carries scents from their places. Presiding over hearing, sight, touch, taste, smell and the mind, he experiences the objects of sense. The fools do not perceive him as he departs, remains or experiences; those with the eye of knowledge do.

The chapter then gathers a set of identifications that had circulated separately. The light in the sun that illumines the whole world, the light in the moon and in fire, is his. Entering the earth he supports beings with his energy, and having become the sap he nourishes all plants. Having become the digestive fire he dwells in the bodies of living things, and joined with the two breaths he digests food of four kinds. He is seated in the hearts of all, and from him come memory, knowledge and their loss.

It closes with three terms that later schools argued over at length. There are two persons in the world, the perishable and the imperishable; the perishable is all beings, the imperishable is called the unchanging; and there is another, the highest person, called the supreme self, who enters the three worlds and sustains them.