The verse and its meaning · Bhagavad Gita · Chapter 4 · The Ancient Teaching

A Teaching Gone Missing

Bhagavad Gita 4.2

एवं परम्पराप्राप्तमिमं राजर्षयो विदुः। स कालेनेह महता योगो नष्टः परन्तप

Meaning · English

Thus received in unbroken succession, the saintly kings knew this science. But with the long passage of time, in this world, that yoga was lost, scorcher of foes.

Three words carry the verse. Parampara is a line of handing on, one person to the next, like buckets passed along a row. Rajarshi means a king who is also a sage: someone who ruled the country and still lived by this knowledge. Yoga here is the science of joining the self to the divine, and it is meant to be lived, not just known. Krishna tells Arjuna that the royal sages understood it because it reached them through that unbroken line. Then time did its work, and the yoga was lost. Nobody destroyed it. The line simply wore thin, and what was not passed on faded. Krishna gives this as the reason he is teaching it again now: a teaching survives only while someone holds it and gives it on. He also calls Arjuna parantapa, scorcher of foes, a warrior's title, which reminds us that this lost knowledge is being offered to a man in armor. On the commentators: Shankara takes the lost yoga to be the discipline of right action joined to knowledge of the Self, which lapsed as people's conduct declined. Ramanuja reads it as the yoga of devotion and selfless action, which fell out of practice as the line of teachers weakened. Madhva also reads it as a break in the line of those who could teach it.

A footpath across a field stays bare only while people keep walking it. Stop for a few seasons and the grass closes over it, though the field never changed. The teaching is the path, and the long line of walkers is what kept it open.

1. Pick one skill, recipe, prayer or habit that someone older in your family has and you have never learned. 2. This week, ask them to show you, in person or by phone, and give it twenty minutes. 3. Write down or record what they do, including the small steps they skip when they talk. 4. Note who you could pass it to, and name that person to yourself.

A woman stands in her late mother's kitchen, trying to make the dal her mother made every Sunday. She has the same lentils and the same pot, but she cannot remember when the cumin went in. Nobody wrote it down. She remembers the smell and almost nothing else. She phones an aunt, who remembers half. A cousin remembers the other half. She writes the steps on the back of an envelope, cooks it with her daughter beside her, and lets her daughter stir. What the verse describes is happening in that kitchen. A way of doing things lasts only while it passes from hands to hands, and it thins out quietly, one generation at a time. Ordinary experience bears this out: skills that nobody practices or teaches fade within a lifetime. The verse does not promise that the dal will taste the same, or that every lost thing can be recovered. It does not ease the grief of losing the person who knew. It only says what happens when a line goes quiet.

अर्थ · हिन्दी

In this book

• Before: Handed Down From the Sun · Bhagavad Gita 4.1
• Next: Ancient Yog, Told to a Friend · Bhagavad Gita 4.3
• All of Bhagavad Gita · Ask Krishna about it

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