Page 10 - All India Magazine Aug-2025

come down only in poetry and legend and may even be regarded
as myths; but it is quite immaterial whether we regard them as
myths or historical facts, because their permanent truth and value
lie in their persistence as a spiritual form, presence, influence in
the inner consciousness of the race and the life of the human soul.
Avatarhood is a fact of divine life and consciousness which may
realise itself in an outward action, but must persist, when that
action is over and has done its work, in a spiritual influence; or
may realise itself in a spiritual influence and teaching, but must
then have its permanent effect, even when the new religion or
discipline is exhausted, in the thought, temperament and outward
life of mankind.

CWSA 19: 170-71

Work of the Avatar and dharma
We must then, in order to understand the Gita's description
of the work of the Avatar, take the idea of the Dharma in its full-
est, deepest and largest conception, as the inner and the outer
law by which the divine Will and Wisdom work out the spiritual
evolution of mankind and its circumstances and results in the life
of the race. Dharma in the Indian conception is not merely the
good, the right, morality and justice, ethics; it is the whole govern-
ment of all the relations of man with other beings, with Nature, with
God, considered from the point of view of a divine principle working
itself out in forms and laws of action, forms of the inner and the
outer life, orderings of relations of every kind in the world. Dharma
is both that which we hold to and that which holds together our in-
ner and outer activities. In its primary sense it means a fundamental
law of our nature which secretly conditions all our activities, and in
this sense each being, type, species, individual, group has its own
dharma. Secondly, there is the divine nature which has to develop
and manifest in us, and in this sense dharma is the law of the in-
ner workings by which that grows in our being. Thirdly, there is the

10 All India Magazine, August 2025