Chapter 8
Akshara Brahma Yoga
Path of the Eternal God · 28 verses
This chapter is traditionally called Akshara Brahma Yoga, the yoga of the imperishable Brahman, the supreme reality that never decays. At the close of the last chapter Krishna had named several terms without explaining them.
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Arjuna asks what each one means: Brahman, the self, action, and the powers behind the world, sacrifice, and the divine. He also asks how the Lord can be known at the hour of death. Krishna answers in turn. His central teaching is this. Whatever state of being you hold in mind at the moment of death is the state you reach next. That last thought is not random. It is the ripening of a lifelong habit. So the real work is done in living, not in dying. He also names a death-time method, uttering Om while remembering the Lord. Krishna then shows that every world, even Brahma's, is bound by time and must return. He sets this against reaching the Lord, which ends rebirth. The chapter closes with two paths the soul departs by. One is bright and of no return. One is dark and of return. The last word is to stay joined to yoga always. On what is finally reached, the schools differ. Advaita Vedanta, Vishishtadvaita, Dvaita, Shuddhadvaita, Bhakti, Kashmir Shaivism, and Modern readers each read the goal in their own way.
- 1Arjuna asks for the names to be unpacked: what is Brahman, the self, action, and the planes of beings and gods?
- 2Arjuna's last questions: who is the Lord of sacrifice in the body, and how is he known at death?
- 3What Brahman is, what the self-principle is, and what action means.
- 4The perishable world, the cosmic Person, and the Lord of sacrifice in this very body: all of them are His.
- 5What you remember at the last breath is where you arrive.
- 6What you dwell on at the last moment is what you become.
- 7Remember Me at all times, and fight: inner remembrance and outward duty carried together.
- 8What it means to reach the supreme Person by an unwavering practice of remembrance.
- 9A portrait of the one to hold at the end: smaller than the small, supporter of all, beyond darkness.
- 10At the hour of death, devotion and the power of yoga hold the dying mind unmoving and carry it to the supreme Person.
- 11Krishna names the Imperishable goal three ways, then promises to tell its means in brief.
- 12The yoga of dying well: close the senses, still the mind, draw the breath up.
- 13At the last breath, the yogi sounds Om as Brahman and holds the Lord in remembrance.
- 14When you remember the Lord without a break and to the very end, he becomes easy to reach.
- 15Having reached Krishna, the great souls are not born again into this house of sorrow.
- 16Every world returns, even the highest heaven; only reaching the Lord ends the rounds of birth.
- 17Even the longest day in the universe, Brahma's own, is still counted out and still ends.
- 18The world comes and goes on Brahma's clock: it pours out at his dawn and folds back at his night.
- 19When the cosmic day returns, the very same beings are born again, helplessly, into the same round.
- 20Beyond the unmanifest seed of the worlds stands another, of a wholly different order, untouched by every dissolution.
- 21The unmanifest, imperishable goal that one reaches and never returns from, Krishna calls his own abode.
- 22The whole chapter rises to one name: the supreme Person, reached by undivided devotion alone.
- 23The two times of departure: by one route the soul does not return, by the other it comes back.
- 24The bright path of light by which a knower of Brahman departs and does not return.
- 25The dark path: the doer of works rises to the moon-light, and from there returns.
- 26The two paths of departure: the bright way that does not come back, and the dark way that returns.
- 27Knowing where the two paths lead, the yogi is no longer deluded about what to aim for.
- 28The yogi who has known this passes beyond every promised reward and reaches the supreme primal abode.