Adhyāya 13 — Kṣetra-Kṣetrajña-Vibhāga Yogaḥ
The Field and the Knower of the Field · 34 verses
Overview
from Q&A with KnAThe Gītā now turns philosophical in the strict sense, drawing the great distinction on which liberation turns: between the field (kṣetra — the body, senses, mind and all that is experienced) and the knower of the field (kṣetrajña — the conscious witness). K declares Himself the knower in every field. He lists the constituents of the field and the marks of true knowledge (humility, non-violence, evenness, unswerving devotion, solitude, constancy in Self-knowledge). He then describes the Knowable — Brahman — only by paradox: with hands and feet everywhere yet without organs, unattached yet all-supporting, beyond the guṇas yet experiencing them, indivisible yet appearing divided. Prakṛti and Puruṣa are set out as the two beginningless principles — Prakṛti the doer, Puruṣa the experiencer — and their entanglement is named as the cause of rebirth. The one who sees the same Lord equally in all, undying amid the dying, and who thus does not injure the Self by the self, reaches the Supreme; and those who discern by the eye of knowledge the field from its knower, and the way out of Prakṛti, go to the Highest.