The Yoga of Royal Knowledge and Royal Secret

The ninth chapter announces itself as the most secret knowledge, the sovereign science, directly perceptible, in accordance with right order, easy to practise and imperishable. That combination is unusual: secret and easy at once, and the chapter earns it by making a very large claim in very plain terms.

The claim is that the whole world is pervaded by Krishna in unmanifest form, that all beings rest in him, and then, in the same breath, that he is not in them, and indeed that beings do not rest in him either. Commentators call this the divine mystery, and no school of Vedanta could avoid taking a position on it. If beings rest in God without God being contained in or exhausted by them, then the relation is neither identity nor separation, and the whole of the later argument between the non-dualist, qualified non-dualist and dualist readings can be traced to how each handles verses like these.

The chapter also supplies the image of the great wind which, though it goes everywhere, always rests in space. Whatever the relation is, it is one in which the greater term is not diminished by containing the lesser and is not confined by it.

At the level of practice the consequences are immediate. Krishna is described as the sacrifice, the offering, the fire, the oblation and the one who receives it, which collapses the whole apparatus of ritual into a single presence. Those who worship other gods with faith do in fact worship him, the chapter says, though not in the proper manner, which is a sharper statement of the position chapter seven approached more gently.

Against the elaborate and expensive sacrificial system the Gita inherits, chapter nine sets a single verse that has probably shaped Hindu devotional practice more than any other line in the book. Whoever offers a leaf, a flower, a fruit or water with devotion, Krishna says, that offering of the pure hearted he accepts. The instruction that follows is broader still: whatever you do, whatever you eat, whatever you offer or give away, whatever discipline you undertake, do it as an offering.

The economics of that verse are the point. A leaf and water are free. A sacrifice requiring priests, fire, animals and land is not. The verse relocates the whole transaction from what is given to the disposition of the giver, and it does so without polemic, simply by naming what is acceptable.

Three verses later comes the chapter's most contested line. Those who take refuge, it says, even if they are of what it calls sinful or lowly birth, and it names women, vaishyas and shudras, reach the highest goal. Devotional movements have read this for a thousand years as an explicit removal of the barriers of birth and sex from the path to liberation, and it was cited in exactly that sense by poets and preachers who had no standing in the Vedic system.

Others have pointed out that the verse achieves its inclusion by grouping those categories together under a phrase that marks them as lowly, so that the sentence both opens the door and restates who was outside it. The atlas records the reading as disputed. Neither camp is a modern invention, and neither is being generous to the other.