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 23
Text in Transliteration:
gatasangasya muktasya jnaanaavasthaitacetasah
yajnaayaa ‘caratah karma samagram praviltyate
Text in English:
Of one unattached, liberated, with mind absorbed in knowledge, performing work for Yajna alone, his entire karma melts away.
COMMENTARY BY SWAMI SIDBHAVANANDA:
Bondage and liberation are born of the attitude of the mind. Be performs yajna who engages himself in karma for the glory of God. Any amount of activities cause no harm to the man freed from attachment. All actions melt away even as heaps of salt consigned into the sea get dissolved.
SRI RAMAKRISHNA AS QUOTED BY SWAMI SIDBHAVANANDA:
The palms and the knife have to be besmeared with oil before cutting open the jackfruit and removing the pulp. Otherwise, the gummy juice in it would stick to the fingers and cause hindrance. In that wise protect yourself with self-knowledge before you seek wealth and other worldly things which would otherwise entangle you.
COMMENTARY BY SWAMI SIVANANDA:
One who is free from attachment, who is liberated from the bonds of karma, whose mind is centred and rooted in wisdom, who performs actions for the sake of sacrifice, in order to please the Lord—all his actions with their results melt away. His actions are reduced to nothing. They are, in fact, no actions at all.
Comments by the blogger:
As Swami Sivananda pointed out this is the last sloka or stanza wherein the nuances of carrying out actions with getting involved in them, so that the good or bad profits thereof may not stain the doer of the action. ( It is important to know that good actions with ahankara or egoism bind as well and as strongly as bad actions with egoism; in the sense that while the bad actions bind one badly and bring him back here to suffer the consequences, while the good actions bind in a good manner and bring back the doer to enjoy the good effects of those good actions.)
A person or yogi who is unattached, liberated, with mind absorbed in knowledge, performing work for yagna or sacrifice alone, his entire karma melts away.
Karma is the third factor in the Samsara or worldly life. Illusion and desire are the first two factors. Because of illusion inhering in prakriti or Nature jeevatmas or WE tend to forget our antecedents. We forget we are co-extensive with the Lord. And we become suffused with desire. And desire motivates us to indulge in numberless and non-stop selfish actions which bind us. In the last few stanzas, the Lord took time to show us the way out of not actions but the proper way of indulging in them. Sri Ramakrishna is a great one for giving very apt examples. He talks about the way of extracting the gummy juice with oiled palms and the knife. Likewise, the Jackfruit needs palms and fingers if not the knife to properly cut into the huge fruit with prickly thick outer skin and very sticky interior before we can take out the juicy fruits and eat.
Karma by itself do not bind. As Dr. S. Radhakrishan pointed out earlier, if karma were binding by themselves the whole Universe would be a blunder. Karma by itself remains harmless. A lamp is there. You can use it either to read Gita or Holy Bible or Holy Quran or to prepare forged notes to entangle your cousin in a lawsuit. The light emanating from the lamp is neither good or bad by itself. It is the way we use it that makes it good or bad. Actions by themselves could never be good or bad. It all depends for what purpose we indulge in a particular action. Here the Lord gives the milk of the Upanishads that time and time again want and urge us to turn every outer sacrifice into inner sacrifice and every action as sacrifice to the Lord. There should not be any iota of selfishness in our actions. Then they are turned into sacrifice. The whole world is about sacrifice. The sun shines on good or bad and the Universe exists as much for the good as for the bad. All the today’s good are yester day’s bad. Its all about evolution in our mind. Bodily evolution has come to a Darwinic end. Now the inner evolution is in progress. Sacrifice fetches us nothing but shows us who we are and in that way gives us self-knowledge. Such a person alone can be unattached everywhere and liberated inwardly. That person’s mind is absorbed in knowledge. He performs work, that is, his self-ordained duty, for the sake of Yagna or Sacrifice. Thus his entire bundle of karma just melts away. And we become one with God.
OK, what about us who cannot do any bad act, but doing good acts are only for the self and the family? Well, we get to benefit by studying our Scriptures. For the Hindus and non-Hindus too, Gita is sufficient scripture. But we should read Gita with faith and devotion. Otherwise,there are daring slokas or stanzas as though in Gita as though Lord spoke of them to test our faith and drive away the unfaithful from a regular study of Gita. Have the strength to have a modicum of faith. Don’t question everything arrogantly. Arrogance leads to stout idiocy and it also has idiocy as it mother.
Ok, we are faithful and devout. This site alone has found more than two thousand page views. So many among them would be faithful and devout! But how to turn every damn thing as a sacrifice? I am a chain smoker. Can I make the act into a sacrifice? No. But we can only sacrifice the number of days of our earthly sojourn by lighting up cigarette after cigarette. So where that end up. Well in the early funeral pyre only. But we can stop them and it would be a sacrifice. Any act that satisfies our inner self is a sacrifice. Any act that caters to the Hyde in us is full of pitfalls.
Ok, no problem if we cannot become great saints overnight or overbirth, so to speak. But let us just have faith and devotion to believe that such sainthood is at least theoretically possible for everyone who has vertical backbone. That is the starting point. Then the Lord’s Nature take over and put in your way of life innumerable little acts, like getting up on a bus or train journey for the senior citizens, that are full of simple and small sacrifices. If you are the government servants or work in Nationalized banks to out of your way to help the helpless, and don’t bite your customers. This is for the Indians. And for the Indians and those residing outside India, if you are a doctor, don’t ask for the sky as your fee. If you are advocates or engineers, don’t be coffin chasers or coffin makers respectively. Even a beggar can act as a guide and show the way to the strangers to a place! The world is full of sacrifice and the world is held intact only by the inner sacrifices of too many the world over. We, every one of us can turn some daily acts into sacrifices. Every little thing counts. And by gradation at some time of our rebirth we would become stout devotees who would make lots and lots of sacrifices.
The Tamil Poet Thiruvallurar has said some two thousand years ago that those who have love does not have a claim even to their own body, and the ones who don’t know how to act can’t have enough of anything.
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