THE HOLY GITA, CHAPTER 4, JNANA KARMA SANYASA YOGA OR THE YOGA OF RENUNCIATION OF ACTION IN KNOWLEDGE OR THE WAY OF KNOWLEDGE, VERSE NUMBER 14.

THE HOLY GITA

CHAPTER 4

JNANA KARMA SANYASA YOGA OR THE YOGA OF RENUNCIATION OF ACTION IN KNOWLEDGE OR THE WAY OF KNOWLEDGE:

VERSE NUMBER 14

Text in Transliteration:

na maam karmaani limpanti na me karmaphale sprhaa

iti maam yo ‘bhijaanaati karmabhir na sa badhyatc

Text in English:

Nor do actions taint Me, nor is the fruit of action desired by Me. He who thus knows Me is not bound by actions.

COMMENTARY BY SWAMI SIDBHAVANANDA:

Karma produces modifications of the mind in the egoistic man. ‘I do’, ‘I enjoy’—attitudes such as these are the modifications. But the Lord is free from egoism. He is therefore, untainted by actions. It is desire when one seeks a thing not one’s own. The Lord has everything contained in Him and He transcends them all too. Therefore, He has nothing to desire. The spiritual aspirant who comes to know of this glory of the Lord would like to be himself untainted by egoism and free from desire. Emulation of the great is the way of the elite.

COMMENTARY BY SWAMI SIVANANDA:

As i have neither egoism nor desire for fruits, i am not bound by actions. Worldly people think they are the agents and they perform actions. The also expect fruits for their actions. So they take birth again and again. If one works without attachment, without egoism, without expectation of fruits, he too will not be bound by actions. He will be freed from birth and death. (Cf. IX. 9)

Comments by the blogger:

Samsara, that is as we have seen too often, is the worldly life, which is akin to an Ocean. Human beings are tossed into this ocean. Samsara constitutes maya or illusion, kama or desire and karma or action. The illusion takes care of our knowing self and beguiles us. We forget our antiquity. We are individual expressions of the Lord. We are coextensive with the Lord. Because of the illusion we forget our divine antecedents and think we are individual persons. That make us slaves to the desires and we want to become action oriented and always indulge in action and think we are the agents of action. In other words, we indulge in actions for the sake of the fruits of the actions. Once we indulge in action for fruits, we lose our divine powers and become bound by our actions. If the actions are good, we have to enjoy the fruits of the good actions and enjoy life more and more and thus bound more and more by prakriti or Nature. If the actions are bad we incur negative points called sin. Then we have to suffer for that.  Such of the effect of all the good and bad actions are added to our Prarapta karma that determines our next birth. So we have to enjoy and suffer for the remainder of the effects of both the good and bad actions in the next birth. And the chain of birth and death continues.

Whereas if we adopt the ways of Sri Krishna in Mahabharata where he is fully action oriented and whose cumulative actions weighs more than the actions of all the characters of the epic, we will not be bound by our actions. Sri Krishna acts in the epic without any sense of agency or any objective to enjoy the fruits thereof. He has no sense of agency. If we could become like that and shed the ‘I do this, I did that’ consciousness, then we too could shed the sense of agency and be freed from the chain of birth and death.

Sri Krishna wants us to KNOW HIM. If we know Him as the great actor without any sense of doership or agency, then we would regain our original state which is coextensive with the Great Lord Himself!