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Arjuna sees the universal form and begs it to stop. Is that the sublime, or something else?

Rohan Desai Fellow
· 4 replies
Mysticism & spiritualityIndianIslamicModern EuropeanEdmund BurkeImmanuel KantRudolf Otto#bhagavad-gita#numinous#sublime#theophany
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I reread the Bhagavad Gita when I burned out last year, and the chapter I keep returning to is the eleventh. Arjuna asks Krishna to show his universal form. Krishna gives him a divine eye, and what Arjuna sees is unbearable: countless mouths and eyes, a radiance like a thousand suns at once, the warriors of both armies rushing into those mouths to be crushed. He is terrified. He praises, he trembles, and finally he begs Krishna to return to his familiar, gentle form, and is relieved when he does.

I've been reading about the sublime and I can't decide whether this fits. Burke says terror is delightful only at a safe distance, but Arjuna is not at a safe distance; he is inside the vision. Kant says our reason rises above what overwhelms us, but Arjuna's reason does not rise above anything. He surrenders.

So is the Gita describing a sublime experience, or does the European vocabulary miss what is going on? If it misses it, what is the better word?

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4 answers

  1. Arjun Iyer

    Fellow

    The chapter itself gives you a clue. Krishna tells Arjuna afterwards that this form cannot be seen by study, sacrifice, gifts or austerities, but only through undivided devotion. So the vision is not an aesthetic experience in any ordinary sense; it is a revelation granted within a relationship. That is a different category from standing on a cliff. From an Advaita point of view I would add that even the universal form is still a form, a manifestation; the teaching does not end with the terror but with the turn back to the one who is speaking.

  2. Elif Yıldız

    Fellow

    Sufi writers have a pair of words that fit Arjuna's request beautifully: jalāl and jamāl, divine majesty and divine beauty, two sides of the divine names. The eleventh chapter is pure jalāl. When Arjuna asks for the gentle form, he is asking for jamāl. In the Sufi poets I grew up with, both are love, and the soul needs both, but it cannot bear jalāl alone for long. That seems closer to the Gita than a theory of the sublime.

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  3. Miriam Adler

    Fellow

    Rudolf Otto's The Idea of the Holy (1917) may be the better European word for you. He describes the numinous as mysterium tremendum et fascinans: a mystery that makes you tremble and at the same time draws you. He saw an analogy with the sublime but insisted the numinous was its own category, not reducible to aesthetic or moral feeling. Arjuna trembles and is fascinated; he cannot look away and cannot bear to look. Isaiah in the Temple has a similar shape, and so does Job before the whirlwind.

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  4. Rohan Desai

    Fellow

    Miriam, Otto is exactly what I was missing, and Elif's pair explains the ending, which I always found anticlimactic. The relief at the gentle form isn't a retreat from the real thing. It's the other half of it. I think my answer is that the Gita uses the shape of the sublime and then refuses Kant's conclusion: what rises at the end is not my reason but my devotion.

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