Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/288

280 alien law.” What is precisely meant by this Swadharma we-have to wait to see until we get to the more elaborate disquisition in the closing chapters about Purusha and Prakriti and the gunas ; but certainly it does not mean that we are to follow any impulse, even though evil, which what we call our nature dictates to us. For bet- ween these two verses the Gita throws in this further injunction, ‘“In the object of this or that sense liking and disliking are set in ambush ; fall not into their power, for they are the besetters of the soul in its path.” And immediately after this,in answer to Arjuna’s object- ion who asks him, if there is no fault in following our Nature, what are we then to say. of that in us which drives a man to sin, as if by force, even against his own struggling will, the Teacher replies that thisis desire and its companion wrath, children of rajas, the second guna, the principle of passion, and this desire is the soul’s great enemy and has to be slain. Abstention from evildoing it declares to be the first condition for libera- tion, and always it enjoins self-mastery, self-control, sanyama, control of the mind, senses, all the lower being.

There is therefore a distinction to be made between what is essential in the nature, its native and inevitable action, which it avails not to all to repress, suppress, coerce, and what is accidental to it, its wanderings, confusions, perversions, over which we must certainly get control. There is a distinction implied too between coercion and suppression, nigraka, and control with right nse and right gnidance, sanyama, The former is a violence done to the nature by the will, which in the end depresses the natural powers of the being, dtmdnam