Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Himself and the Ashram

The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Volume 35

His Life and Attempts to Write about It
On His Published Prose Writings

Passages from Essays on the Gita [2]

In Essays on the Gita Sri Aurobindo renders the term “Kshara Purusha” as “the universal Soul” [p. 436]. How can the “Kshara” be the universal Soul, if the one is mutable and the other immutable?

This is not my interpretation, it is what the Gita itself plainly says. It explains Kshara as “all existences” and since Purusha is the being which observes and experiences all the movements of Nature, (which is what is meant here by soul) it cannot be anything else than the universal Soul identifying itself with all existences in Nature.

Kindly indicate the relation of the universal Soul to the Divine.

The word क्षर [kṣara] means really mobile as opposed to the immobile immutable Akshara. The Kshara Purusha is that which follows the movement of the universe and seems to move and change, because it identifies itself while the Akshara is not identified and stands apart. The Upanishad makes the same distinction of the two Souls and Prakriti.

I used to take kṣetra and kṣara puruṣa to mean the lower nature.

Nature is Prakriti — Purusha cannot be Prakriti. Neither can Purusha be kṣetra, the field, because Purusha by its very definition is that which is behind Prakriti and its field and observes it — it is the Being not the nature.

28 November 1934