section_path: Chapters and content/Chapter 15: Purushottama Yoga (20 verses)
section_name: Chapter 15: Purushottama Yoga (20 verses)
paragraph_text: Chapter 15: Purushottama Yoga (20 verses)
  
  Translators title the chapter as Purushottama yoga, Religion by Attaining the Supreme Krishna, The Supreme Self, or The Yoga of the Supreme Purusha. The fifteenth chapter expounds on Krishna's theology, in the Vaishnava Bhakti tradition of Hinduism. Krishna discusses the nature of God wherein Krishna not only transcends the impermanent body (matter) but also transcends the atman (Self) in every being. The chapter uses the metaphor of the Ashvattha (banyan) tree to illustrate the material world's entanglements, emphasizes detachment as the means to liberation, highlights the importance of true knowledge, and explains that those who realize this knowledge transcend the need for Vedic rituals. It follows an image of an upside tree with roots in the sky, without beginning and without end. It is necessary to cut down its shoots (sense objects), branches and the solid root with the axe of equanimity and detachment and thereby reach the original person (adyam purusham). Later, Krishna says that he is known as Purushottama in both common speech and the Veda, sustaining and governing the entire threefold world, and that he is greater than the kshara (perishable), which includes all living beings, and the akshara (imperishable), which is beyond kshara. Whoever truly recognizes this has reached the ultimate goal. According to Franklin Edgerton, the verses in this chapter, in association with select verses in other chapters, make the metaphysics of the Gita to be dualistic. However, its overall thesis, according to Edgerton, is more complex because other verses teach the Upanishadic doctrines and "through its God the Gita seems after all to arrive at an ultimate monism; the essential part, the fundamental element, in every thing, is after all One — is God."