HOLY GITA
CHAPTER TWO
SAMKHYA YOGA OR THE YOGA OF KNOWLEDGE
VERSE NUMBER 38:
Text in Transliteration:
sukha dukkhe same krrvaa laabhaalaabhau jayaajayau
tato yudhaaya yujyasva nai ‘vam paapam avaapsyasi
Text in English:
Treating alike pain
and pleasure, gain and loss, victory and defeat, engage yourself in the battle.
Thus you will incur no sin.
COMMENTARY BY SWAMI CHIDBHAVANANDA:
It is the way of the world to view gain and victory with
pleasure and loss and defeat with pain. But different from that should be the
frame of mind of those who take to self-culture. They are to disentangle the
mind from likes and dislikes. All earthly events are fraught with the
consequences which are agreeable and disagreeable. By being favourably affected
by the one and unfavourably by the other, the mind loses its stamina. By
refusing to be tossed about by pain and pleasure the mind becomes steady and
strong. That karma is called sin which brings in misery in its trail. But a man
of strong and balanced mind takes no note of any misery that comes to him. He is
in that way free from sin.
COMMENTARY BY DR.S. RADHAKRISHNAN:
Yet in the previous
verses, Krishna lays stress on sensibility to shame, the gain of heaven and earthly
sovereignty. After urging worldly consideration, he declares that the fight has
to be undertaken in a spirit of equal-mindedness. Without yielding to the restless
desire for change, without being at the mercy of emotional ups and downs, let
us do the work assigned to us in the situation in which we are placed. When we
acquire faith in the External and experience Its reality, the sorrows of the
world do not disturb us. ( Cp. Luther: “And though they take our life, goods,
honour, children, wife, yet is their profit small; these things shall vanish
all, the city of God remaineth.”) He who discovers his true end of life and
yields to it utterly though he has to walk the streets, cold, hungry and alone,
though he may know no human being into whose eyes he can look and find
understanding, he shall yet be able to go his way with a smile on his lips for
he has gained inward freedom.
COMMENTARY BY SWAMI SIVANANDA:
This is the yoga of equanimity or the doctrine of poise in
action. If anyone does any action with the above mental attitude or balanced
state of mind he will not reap the fruits of his action. If anyone does any
action with the above mental attitude or balanced state of mind he will not
reap the fruits of his action. Such an action will lead to the purification of
his heart and freedom from birth and death. One has to develop such a balanced
state of mind through continuous struggle and vigilant efforts.
Comments of the blogger:
First the Lord chided Arjuna for having yielded to the Un-Arian
and heaven-barring and unmanly sentimentality. Then He taught the immortality
of the soul. That Arjuna could only slay the body and not the Self of the
individual beings. Then he took upon the heterogenous arguments for
consideration and held, even if Arujuna believed that the Atman or Soul died
when the body was stain he need not despair, as anything that is born is
certain to die and likewise, anything that is dead is prone to take birth
again. Then he returned to the Self-culture, and then deviated in the last
preceding verses to appeal to the ego sense of Arjuna and argued for someone
who has had unrivalled valour and glory because of that, seeking to forgo the
battle and take up to the wandering monks’ way would mean certain loss of face
and fame and for those high people who suffers such a loss of fame, it is worse
than death, so you the son of a woman fight your fight.
Now the Lord returns to the centrality of the teaching of
the Gita: He wants Arjuna to make pleasure pain, gain and loss, victory and
defeat the same, and having attained
such an inner freedom, He wants and urges Arjuna to fight his own war. This his
war and he cannot escape it. And finally says, if Arjuna indulges in his fight
for the sake of the battle without hatred or pleasure, without having any stake
in the outcome of the battle, he shall not incur sin.
Swami Chidbhavananda defines sin as an act whose outcome is
misery. Dr. S. Radhakrishnan talks about balance of mind and an inward freedom.
Swami Sivananda calls this attitude as urged by the Lord Krishna as the Yoga of
equanimity or the doctrine of poise in action. All are one and the same thing
if we think deeply.
What is sin?
This earth is full of actions and we have the freedom to
choose. This has been repeatedly urged in the Hindu Texts like the Vedas,
Upanishads, and Bhagavat Gita. This world in full of action. The action, any
action, in itself is neither a sin nor a punya or heaven-begetting auspicious
one. It all depends how the individual takes it, views it and how the individual
indulges in it or choose against it. But we can never escape action. This is
the case of most of the human beings. This kind of human beings are broadly
divided into two principal group: one is sentimental and the other is action
oriented. For the sentimental, the Bhagti Yoga or the yoga of devotion as a
means of escaping the good and bad fruits of the ordained action has been recommended.
And for the second type of people who are action oriented, then the yoga or
Karma or the yoga of action as a means of escaping the fruits of action is
recommended. If a person is recommended the way of devotional life, he does
every thing for the sake of the Lord and has intense devotion and faith in God
which are his means of escape of this action-oriented word. And if a person is
recommended the Karma Yoga or the Yoga of action, then he has to indulge in his
self-ordained action or carry out his swadharma in a dispassionate way with no
stake in the outcome of the action indulged in. These are the two yogas or ways
recommended by Gita and the Vedopanishadic saints for the majority of the
worldly people.
Then what is sin?
Sin is any action which increases the number of rebirths and
to that extent proportionally we are set apart from God, our rightful Master’s
society. That act which reduces the number of rebirths is a punya in the sense
that it reduces the duration of our mingling with God’s society.
And we will incur no sin if we do actions self ordained as
our inward self instruct us without any stake in its fruits. And this is the
way Arjuna is urged by the Lord to indulge in Action, the great battle, which
is his battle and from which he cannot escape!
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