XI: 5

Chapter 11, Verse 5

Krishna says,

“By the hundreds

And by the thousands

Behold, Arjuna,

My manifold forms

Of innumerable shapes and colors.”

Swami Shivananda:

“Krishna is saying in so many words, ‘Arjuna, I want you to behold my cosmic form.  All beings and entities are there.  The fat and the lean, the short and the tall, the red and the black, the active and the passive, the rich and the poor, the intelligent and the dull, the healthy and the sick, the noisy and the silent, those that are awake and those that are asleep, the beautiful and the ugly, and all other beings with their distinctive marks are included.  The blueness of the sky, the yellowness of silk, the redness of the sunset, the blackness of coal, the whiteness of snow, the greenness of leaves…all these will be seen by you.’ ”

Sri Aurobindo:

“ ‘What you will see,’ replies the Avatar in so many words, ‘the human eye cannot grasp, for the human eye can see only the outward appearances of things.  But there is a divine eye, an inmost seeing, by which the supreme God can be beheld and that eye I now give to you.  You shall see my hundreds and thousands of divine forms.  You will see many wonders.  You will see the whole world related in my body.’ 

This then is the keynote, the central significance:  the one in the many, the many in the one.  Once seen and held, it lays the shining axe of God at the root of all doubts and perplexities, annihilating all denials and oppositions.  It is the vision that reconciles and unifies.”