Kshetra Kshetrajna Vibhaga Yoga

Arjuna asks the fundamental questions: What is matter and spirit? What is the field and who knows it? What is knowledge and what should be known?

This body is the field; the one who is aware of it is the knower of the field—this is the fundamental teaching of all wisdom traditions.

The supreme secret: Krishna declares He is the Knower in ALL fields—the one universal consciousness witnessing through every body in existence.

Krishna promises to explain what the field is, its nature, modifications, and source—plus who the knower is and what powers it possesses.

This truth about field and knower isn't Krishna's invention—it has been proclaimed by countless sages through Vedic hymns and established logically in the Brahma-sutras.

The field consists of 24 categories: five elements, ego, intellect, unmanifest prakriti, eleven senses, and five sense objects—everything that can be perceived or conceived.

Desire, aversion, pleasure, pain, the body-aggregate, consciousness reflected in matter, and fortitude—these complete the description of the field with all its modifications.

The first nine qualities of knowledge: humility, honesty, non-violence, patience, simplicity, devotion to the teacher, purity, steadfastness, and self-control—the foundation stones of spiritual life.

Dispassion towards sensory pleasures, freedom from ego, and constantly contemplating the suffering inherent in birth, death, old age, and disease—this clear seeing is knowledge.

Non-attachment to family, home, and possessions, combined with unwavering equanimity when pleasant and unpleasant events occur—this balanced state is knowledge.

Unswerving devotion to Krishna through exclusive union, preference for solitude, and natural disinterest in worldly gatherings—these mark the ripe seeker of knowledge.

Constancy in Self-knowledge and keeping the goal of truth always in view—this is declared as knowledge. Whatever is contrary to this is ignorance.

Krishna now reveals the supreme secret: the Knowable that grants immortality—beginningless Brahman, beyond all categories of being and non-being.

That Brahman has hands and feet everywhere, eyes, heads, and faces everywhere, ears everywhere—pervading and encompassing everything in the universe.

A series of paradoxes: Brahman illuminates all sense functions yet has no senses; unattached yet sustaining all; without qualities yet experiencing all qualities.

Brahman is both inside and outside all beings, both still and moving; too subtle to be known by the mind, yet both infinitely far and intimately near.

Though Brahman is undivided, it appears divided among beings; it is the sustainer, creator, and dissolver of all—the One appearing as many.

Brahman is the Light of all lights, beyond darkness; it is knowledge itself, the object of knowledge, and attainable through knowledge—seated in the heart of all beings.

Both matter and consciousness are eternal; all modifications and qualities arise from nature alone.

Prakriti is the cause of all doing; Purusha is the cause of all experiencing.

The soul seated in nature experiences the gunas; attachment to these gunas causes birth in higher and lower wombs.

Within this body dwells the Supreme—the witness, permitter, sustainer, experiencer, great Lord, the Paramatman.

One who truly knows purusha and prakriti is never reborn, regardless of how they live.

Different seekers reach the Self through different paths—meditation, knowledge, or selfless action.

Even those without direct knowledge, if they hear from others and practice faithfully, cross beyond death.

Every being, moving or unmoving, arises from the union of field (matter) and knower (consciousness).

One who sees the imperishable Lord dwelling equally in all perishable beings—that one truly sees.

Seeing God everywhere, one does not harm the Self by the self, and thus attains the supreme goal.

One who sees all actions performed by prakriti alone, and the Self as the non-doer—that one truly sees.

When one sees the diversity of beings rooted in One, and their expansion from That alone—then one attains Brahman.

Though dwelling in the body, the imperishable Self neither acts nor is tainted—because it is beginningless and beyond the gunas.

As the mighty wind moves everywhere yet rests in space, so all beings rest in the Supreme Self.

Just as all-pervading space remains untainted due to its subtlety, so the Self in the body remains untainted.

As one sun illuminates the entire world, so the one Knower of the field illuminates all fields.

Those who know the difference between field and knower through the eye of wisdom, and know liberation from prakriti—they attain the Supreme.