कर्मसंन्यासयोगः
karmasaṃnyāsayogaḥ
Renounce not the work but the one who claims it, and the Nirvana you sought beyond the world will be found all around you in the world.
- divyaṃ janma karma — the divine birth and the divine works, known in their truth
- brahmanirvāṇa — the ego extinguished in the Brahman, and the Brahman found all about the soul
Once more Arjuna asks for a decisive word. Thou declarest to me the renunciation of works, and again thou declarest Yoga; which is the better, tell me with a clear decisiveness (5·1). The soul at the opening of this chapter still carries the old opposition within it, the ascetic’s ideal of leaving all action and the worker’s ideal of acting without desire, as if these were two roads that must diverge. Krishna answers that both bring about the soul’s salvation, but that the Yoga of works is distinguished above the renunciation of works (5·2); and at once he gives renunciation a new meaning. He is to be known as always a Sannyasin, even when he is doing action, who neither dislikes nor desires (5·3). Children speak of Sankhya and Yoga apart, not the wise; who sees them as one, he sees (5·4–5).
That equality, impersonality, peace, joy, freedom do not depend on so outward a thing as doing or not doing works.
The inward renunciation is then described from within. The knower of the principles of things, his mind in Yoga, thinks “I am doing nothing,” even while he sees and hears and moves and breathes, for he holds that it is only the senses acting upon their objects (5·8). This is not the abdication of responsibility but the cessation of a false claim, the ego’s claim to be the doer. He who founds his works upon the Brahman, having abandoned attachment, is not stained by sin even as water clings not to the lotus leaf (5·10). The distinction that the Gita presses again and again, as The Divine Worker shows, is between tyāga and sannyāsa, the inner giving up and the outer; and it is the inner that liberates.
From this freedom springs a new way of seeing. Sages look with an equal eye upon the learned and cultured Brahmin, the cow, the elephant, the dog and the outcaste (5·18); even here on earth they have conquered the creation whose mind is established in equality, for the equal Brahman is faultless (5·19). Sri Aurobindo, in the essay on Equality, finds here the nodus of the free spirit’s relations with the world, and he refuses to let it shrink into a mere temper of the mind; it is the manifest sign of the One in the midst of the many.
For an equal and all-equalising spirit is that Oneness in the midst of the million differences and inequalities of the world; and equality of the spirit is the sole real equality.
The chapter rises then to the word Nirvana. The enjoyments born of the touches of things have a beginning and an end and are causes of sorrow, and the awakened man does not place his delight in them (5·22); he who has the inner happiness, the inner ease and the inner light becomes the Brahman and reaches brahmanirvāṇa (5·24). But the sages who win it are those occupied in doing good to all creatures (5·25), and for them, as Nirvana and Works in the World reads the next verse, Nirvana exists all about them; it is not a void into which the world is extinguished, but the Brahman-consciousness in which the soul lives and acts. And at the very summit of this peace the Personal Divine steps forth unexpectedly: when a man has known Me as the Enjoyer of sacrifice and askesis, the mighty Lord of all the worlds, the friend of all creatures, he comes by the peace (5·29). The silence opens upon a Friend. The last verses turn the gaze inward, to the gathering of the senses and the breath (5·27–28), and so hand the soul on to the discipline by which this peace must be made its own.
Essays on the Gita
Key verses
