कर्मयोगः
karmayogaḥ
The world is woven of giving and receiving; offer your work into that weaving, and the One for whom all sacrifice is made will receive it.
- brāhmī sthiti — the firm standing in the Brahman, where desire falls silent like the filled and motionless sea
- yajña — every work laid upon the altar as an offering to the Lord of works
The soul that has tasted the Brahmic calm stands at the opening of this chapter in a subtle peril. It has understood enough to see that desire is the root of bondage, and it concludes, as the current teaching of renunciation concluded, that works belong to the ignorance and must fall away with it. Arjuna gives voice to the conclusion with the impatience of the practical man: if the intelligence is greater than works, why appoint him to a terrible work (3·1)? why bewilder him with a confused and mingled speech, when he asks only for the one thing by which he may attain his soul’s weal (3·2)? The Teacher does not deny that there are two paths, the Yoga of knowledge and the Yoga of works (3·3); but he refuses to let them become enemies, and he begins by striking at the illusion that inaction is possible at all, for none stands even for a moment not doing work, and everyone is made to act by the modes of Nature (3·5).
Not complete inaction, which is an error, a confusion, a self-delusion, an impossibility, but action full and free done without subjection to sense and passion, desireless and unattached works, are the first secret of perfection.
But how shall a being whose every natural movement springs from desire act without desire? The answer is the great word of this chapter: by doing works for sacrifice. This world of men is in bondage to works only because it acts otherwise than for sacrifice (3·9). The Gita takes up the old Vedic image, the Lord of creatures bringing forth creatures together with sacrifice as their companion (3·10), the gods fostered by sacrifice and giving back their gifts, the one who enjoys without giving as a thief (3·12); and Sri Aurobindo, in The Significance of Sacrifice and The Lord of the Sacrifice, draws out of the ritual figure its universal truth. All life is an interchange, a secret altar on which Nature lays her workings; the egoistic soul takes and does not give, and so misses the meaning of its own existence.
A mutual giving and receiving is the law of Life without which it cannot for one moment endure, and this fact is the stamp of the divine creative Will on the world it has manifested in its being, the proof that with sacrifice as their eternal companion the Lord of creatures has created all these existences.
Then the Teacher lifts the matter higher still. The man whose delight is in the Self has no work that he needs to do (3·17); and yet Janaka and the rest attained perfection by works, and the liberated man should act for lokasaṅgraha, the holding together of the peoples (3·20). Krishna gives himself as the example: “I have no work that I need to do in all the three worlds, I have nothing that I have not gained and have yet to gain, and I abide verily in the paths of action” (3·22). Here, for the first time, the Divine speaks of his own working, and there is a luminous freedom in it, the play of one who needs nothing and yet does not withdraw his hand from the world. The ego that thinks “I am the doer” is bewildered, since all works are done by the modes of Nature (3·27); and out of this knowledge comes the first open call to surrender: “Giving up thy works to Me, with thy consciousness founded in the Self, free from desire and egoism, fight delivered from the fever of thy soul” (3·30).
The chapter ends by naming the enemy. Arjuna asks what drives a man into sin even against his will, and he is told: it is desire and its companion wrath, children of rajas, all-devouring, the soul’s great enemy (3·37), lodged in the senses, the mind and the intelligence, and to be slain by the Self that stands above them. The soul has now learned that works are not to be fled but offered, that the true renunciation is the slaying of ego and desire, and that behind the whole round of sacrifice there is One who receives it. Who that One is, whence he comes, and how works done in his knowledge become divine, the next chapter will begin to reveal; for, in Sri Aurobindo’s phrase, he remains to the end the master of works and the soul of sacrifice.
Essays on the Gita
- Works and Sacrifice
- The Significance of Sacrifice
- The Lord of the Sacrifice
- The Principle of Divine Works
- The Determinism of Nature
Key verses
