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BHAGAVAD GITA As we have seen, the non-Aryan systems (Jainism, Gosāla's teaching, Sarikhya, and Yoga) were characterized by a resolutely logical, theoretical dichotomy, which insisted on a strict distinction between two spheres, that of the life-monad (jīva, purușa) and that of matter ( a-jīva, prakȚti), the pure and crystal-like, immaterial essence of the pristine individual and the polluting, darkening principle of the material world. The process of life was read as an effect of the interpenetration of these polar principles -an everlasting blending of two antagonistic forces, bringing to pass a perpetual procreating and disintegrating of compound, unsubstantial forms. The conjunction was compared to the mingling of fire with iron in a red-hot iron ball; it was a result of proximity and association, not proper to either principle per se. And the two could be understood in their distinct, mutually contrary, intrinsic natures only when separated and allowed to return to their simple, primary states-the corollary of all this in practice being a doctrine of asceticism (or rather, a number of varying doctrines of asceticism) aiming at the separation of the two incompatible principles. The process of life was to be halted. Purification, sterilization, was to be the great ideal of human virtue; and the goal, the attainment of absolute motionlessness in crystal purity-not the dynamism of the incessant processional of life. For the processes of nature (generation, digestion, assimilation, elimination, the dissolution of the dead body as it begets swarming tribes of worms and insects, nietabolism, gestation) are all unclean. The will is to purge the whole thing away. Whether in the microcosmic alchemical retort of the individual, or in the macrocosm of the universal laboratory, the unclean process of elements forever uniting, forever sundering, is equally deplorable, a sort of general orgy of indecencics from which the selfrecollecting spirit can only resign.
Contrast with this the vigorous, tumultuous, and joyous lifeaffirmative of the Vedic Hymn of Food.57 The new thing that the 57 Supra, pp. 345-347.
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