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528 The Philosophy of the Bhagavad-gitā [CH. God's manifestation. Thus it is said, 'I am the gambling of dice in all deceptive operations, I am victory in all endeavours, heroism of the heroes and the moral qualities (sattva) of all moral men (sattvavatām)”; and after enumerating a number of such instances Kļşņa says that, wherever there are special gifts or powers or excellence of any kind, they are to be regarded as the special manifestation of God". The idea that God holds within Himself the entire manifold universe is graphically emphasized in a fabulous form, when Krsna gives Arjuna the divine eye of wisdom and Arjuna sees Krşņa in his resplendent divine form, shining as thousands of suns burning together, with thousands of eyes, faces and ornaments, pervading the heavens and the earth, with neither beginning nor end, as the great cosmic person into whose mouths all the great heroes of Kuruksetra field had entered, like rivers into the ocean. Krsna, after showing Arjuna his universal form, says, “I am time (kāla), the great destroyer of the world, and I am engaged in collecting the harvest of human lives, and all that will die in this great battle of Kurukşetra have already been killed by me; you will be merely an instrument in this great destruction of the mighty battle of Kuruksetra. So you can fight, destroy your enemies, attain fame and enjoy the sovereignty without any compunction that you have destroyed the lives of your kinsmen.”
The main purport of the Gītā view of God seems to be that ultimately there is no responsibility for good or evil and that good and evil, high and low, great and small have all emerged from God and are upheld in Him. When a man understands the nature and reality of his own self and its agency, and his relation with God, both in his transcendent and cosmic nature, and the universe around him and the guņas of attachment, etc., which bind him to his worldly desires, he is said to have the true knowledge. There is no opposition between the path of this true knowledge (jñānayoga) and the path of duties; for true knowledge supports and is supported by right performance of duties. The path of knowledge is praised in the Gitā in several passages. Thus it is said, that just as fire burns up the wood, so does knowledge reduce all actions to ashes. There is nothing so pure as knowledge. He who has true faith is attached to God, and he who has controlled his senses, attains knowledge, and having attained it, secures peace. He who
1 Gitā, x. 36-41.
