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.
- 1Hear how you will come to know me whole, and without any doubt left in you.
- 2Krishna promises to hold nothing back, so that knowing this, nothing further is left for you to seek.
- 3How rare it is to come to know Krishna as he truly is.
- 4Before naming the soul, Krishna first counts out everything that is not the soul.
- 5There is a second nature in you, and it is the very knowing by which the world stands.
- 6Every being rises from his two natures, and he alone is the world's source and its end.
- 7Nothing stands higher, and everything that exists is strung on him like beads on one thread.
- 8The taste on your tongue is the very place Krishna names himself.
- 9Krishna names himself as the pure fragrance of earth, the brilliance of fire, the life in every creature, the discipline of the disciplined.
- 10The eternal seed of every being, and the intelligence and brilliance in whoever carries them.
- 11Not every strength is his, and not every wanting; only the kind that needs nothing and stays within what is right.
- 12Every mood you feel has its root in him; none of it holds him.
- 13You live inside weather made of three winds, and mistake the weather for the sky.
- 14The power that deludes you is his own; refuge in him alone is what carries you across it.
- 15The door was never shut; what closes it is your own conduct and delusion.
- 16Four kinds of people turn to God, and all four are welcomed as His own.
- 17Among all who turn to the Lord, the one who wants nothing but the Lord stands nearest.
- 18The one who wants nothing else, the Lord calls His very Self.
- 19Only at the end of many births does a soul come to see that all this is one Lord.
- 20Desire does not just distract you; it steals the insight that would have shown you the true giver.
- 21Whatever form you turn to in trust, it is the Lord within who holds that trust steady.
- 22The prayer you send to a lesser door is answered by the one who was never at that door alone.
- 23The reward you receive shares the nature of what you actually aimed at.
- 24Seeing only the form, the undiscerning miss what never came and never goes.
- 25He stands in front of the whole world, and still only a few see who is standing there.
- 26The one who knows every being completely is the one no being can know by its own power.
- 27Desire and aversion, working together, deceive every being from the moment it is born.
- 28Those whose old wrong has finally worn away turn, unwavering, to worship.
- 29Refuge and striving, held together, ripen into a knowing that leaves nothing out.
- 30Known here, in the world and its worship, the Lord is held by a steady mind even at death.