The Gītā's Case for a Self Beyond the Body

The Gītā teaches a self distinct from the body . This paper establishes that thesis from the Gītā's own sentences alone, citing no commentator , so that the result cannot be set aside as belonging to one school. Against the plain reading of dehī, śarīrin, dehabhṛ ̣ t, kṣetrajña and jīvabhūta stands a position current among several modern expositors: that these words denote nothing beyond the ego-process, and that what recurs from birth to birth is the I-sense rather than any individual. The position is reconstructed here at its full strength in six reasons, and each is examined as a f allacious reason in the standard forms. Four instruments are used: the primary sense of the text; the rule restricting secondary signification to cases where the primary sense is obstructed; the six marks by which purport is fixed; and inference in five-membered form. The decisive evidence is grammatical as often as it is doctrinal. The affix matup in dehī expresses relation, and relation needs two terms. The absolutives of 6.41 are ordained only where the agent is one, which binds the self that attains the meritorious worlds, the self that dwells there, and the self later born in the house of the pure into a single agent, across an interval in which there is no body at all. The analogy of 2.13 holds constant a subject that the ego demonstrably is not. And 13.20, whose first half the opponent cites for the agency of prakṛ ̣ ti, assigns experiencership to the puruṣa in its second half . The thesis is deliberately narrow . What is proved is difference from the body , with the body as counter-correlate, and nothing about the jīva's magnitude or its relation to Brahman. The result is therefore independent of the dispute between Advaita,