Chapter 7
Gyaan Vigyana Yoga
Self-Knowledge and Enlightenment · 30 verses
This chapter, traditionally treasured as the Yoga of Knowledge and Realization (Jnana-Vijnana Yoga), turns to who Krishna is and how rare it is to truly know Him. Krishna asks the seeker to hold the mind on Him and take Him as the one refuge (7.1), and He notes that out of many who strive, few come to know Him fully (7.3).
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He then lays out two natures: a lower, insentient nature of eight parts, and a higher, living nature, and says all beings arise from these (7.4-7.6). He is the ground and cause of everything, the essence inside ordinary things, the seed of all beings (7.7-7.10). He names maya, His own divine power, which deludes the world and is hard to cross; those who take refuge in Him cross it (7.14-7.15). Four kinds of good people turn to Him, and the knower is ranked highest (7.16-7.18), while others, robbed of discernment by desire, worship lesser gods for finite fruit (7.20-7.24). The schools differ on how maya works and on what refuge finally yields. Advaita Vedanta, Vishishtadvaita, Dvaita, Shuddhadvaita, and Kashmir Shaivism each read it in their own key.
- 1How the worshipper comes to know the Lord fully and without any doubt.
- 2Krishna's pledge: when you truly know him, nothing further is left here to be known.
- 3How rare it is to come to know Krishna as he truly is
- 4Krishna names the eightfold makeup of his lower Nature, the first half of a two-part teaching.
- 5Krishna names a second, higher nature: the conscious life that has become living beings and bears the world.
- 6Every being arises from the Lord's two natures, and he is the world's one source and one end.
- 7Nothing stands higher than Krishna, and the whole world is strung on Him like beads on a single thread.
- 8Not that he tastes the water, but that he is the taste by which water is water.
- 9Krishna names himself as the pure fragrance of earth, the brilliance of fire, the life in beings, the ascetic's austerity.
- 10The eternal seed of all beings, and the intelligence and brilliance in whoever has them.
- 11Not every strength and every desire is God; only the pure strength and the lawful desire are his.
- 12All states, calm or driven or dull, come from the Lord, yet he is not held inside them.
- 13The world cannot see the Lord because it lives inside the guna-made states he stands beyond.
- 14The maya that binds is the Lord's own, and refuge in him alone is the way across.
- 15Why not all take refuge: who turns away from the Lord, and what holds them back.
- 16The four kinds who turn to God, and what sets the knower apart.
- 17Why the knower stands highest among the Lord's four devotees
- 18Why the Lord calls the one who knows Him, and wants nothing else, His very Self.
- 19The rarest seeker, who after many lives sees that all this is Vasudeva, and gives himself wholly to the Lord.
- 20How desire robs the mind of its insight, so a person settles for a lesser god and a smaller fruit.
- 21It is the Lord who steadies the faith you bring to whatever form you worship.
- 22The wish you take to a lesser god is answered, but the giver is the Lord alone.
- 23You reach what you worship, and so the small aim wins a fruit that ends.
- 24What the dull get wrong when the Lord takes a human form.
- 25Why the world looks straight at the Lord and still does not see him
- 26He knows every being across all three times, yet by their own power no one knows him.
- 27Why desire and aversion breed a delusion that keeps every being from knowing the Lord.
- 28The one who breaks free of the pairs of opposites and turns, firm in vow, to worship the Lord.
- 29The seeker who longs to be free of aging and dying, takes refuge, and strives, comes to know in full.
- 30Knowing the Lord as present in beings, in the gods, and in sacrifice, the steady mind holds him even at death.