From Desireful Works to Divine Works

V

जन्म कर्म च मे दिव्यम् एवं यो वेत्ति तत्त्वतः

janma karma ca me divyam evaṃ yo vetti tattvataḥ

To attain to the divine birth, — a divinising new birth of the soul into a higher consciousness, — and to do divine works both as a means towards that before it is attained and as an expression of it after it is attained, is then all the Karmayoga of the Gita.

Between the two armies, at the hour when the greatest archer of his age has let the bow slip from his hand (1·29) and sunk down upon the seat of his chariot (1·46), the Teacher begins to speak; and the poem tells us that Hrishikesha spoke prahasann iva, “smiling as it were” (2·10). It is a small word and easily passed over, yet it holds in germ the whole of what follows. For the one who smiles already sees the end of the road on which the disciple has not yet set his foot. He sees the same hand that has dropped Gandiva lifting it again, the same terrible work accomplished on the same field, and yet the doer of it wholly changed, the source of the act removed from the troubled ego of a man into the calm and the delight of the Divine. The arrow will fly as it would have flown. But everything that made action a bondage will have fallen away from it, and everything that makes it a freedom and a worship will have entered in.

This is the evolution of action which the Gita traces with a patience that is itself a form of compassion. It neither abolishes works, as the ascetic would have it do, nor blesses them as they are, as the practical man would wish; it takes them up stage by stage, from the works of desire through the works of the desireless intelligent will, through the works of sacrifice and the works of the knower, to those divine works which are the Lord’s own movement through a liberated instrument. At every stage the act may look the same to the outward eye. What changes is the fountain from which it springs, and the whole labour of the Teacher is to change the fountain.

kāmya karma

The Flowery Word

The ordinary motive of human action is desire. We act to gain and to keep, to enjoy and to escape suffering, and even our religion, in its first and most natural form, is a commerce of this kind, an offering made in order that something may be returned. The Gita names this movement without contempt and without illusion. It speaks of the kāmātmānaḥ, the souls of desire, who delight in the “flowery word” of the ritualists and turn all works into a means to enjoyment and lordship, so that their intelligence is never established in the self (2·42–44). Their action is kāmya karma, desireful works, works done for the sake of their fruit, and the Teacher’s judgment upon it is unsparing: poor and wretched souls are they who make the fruit of their works the object of their thoughts and activities (2·49).

Yet the Gita does not simply set desire against desirelessness as darkness against light. Even within the life of desire it perceives a gradation, a first stirring of the upward movement, and the commentary draws it out with great clearness.

There are three kinds of works, that done without sacrifice for personal enjoyment which is entirely selfish and egoistic and misses the true law and aim and utility of life, … that done with desire, but with sacrifice and the enjoyment only as a result of sacrifice and therefore to that extent consecrated and sanctified, and that done without desire or attachment of any kind. It is the last which brings the soul of man to the highest

There is the man who seizes for himself alone and gives nothing back; the Gita calls him a thief who enjoys the gifts of the gods and has not given to them (3·12), one who lives in vain (3·16). There is the man who still desires but who has learned to offer, whose enjoyment comes to him as the fruit of a sacrifice; he has begun, however dimly, to feel that his life is not an isolated possession but a portion of a greater interchange. And there is the one who works without desire at all. The first two still belong to the lower nature and move within the play of its three modes; but the second already carries the seed of the whole ascent, for the moment a man offers, he has confessed that his action belongs to something beyond himself.

Arjuna himself does not stand among the gross seekers of enjoyment. His works have been the high works of the Kshatriya, done for honour, for kinship, for the right; but they have still sprung from the ego, from “my” people, “my” honour, “my” sin, and it is precisely this ego-formed will, noble as it is, that breaks when he looks upon his kinsmen arrayed for slaughter. The Gita begins its teaching of works exactly at that breaking, where the old fountain has run dry and a new one has not yet been found.

niṣkāma karma

Thy Right Is to the Work

The first remedy is not a rule of conduct but a change in the seat of the will. Krishna does not tell Arjuna what to do before he has told him from where he must do it. He speaks first of the buddhi, the discerning and deciding intelligence, which in the man of desire runs out in many branches after the objects of the senses, but which may be gathered into a single concentrated will fixed upon the Self. The reason is given with a psychological exactness that goes to the root of the whole matter.

For it is because he acts ignorantly, with a wrong intelligence and therefore a wrong will in these matters, that man is or seems to be bound by his works; otherwise works are no bondage to the free soul.

From this change of seat comes the great formula which every reader of the Gita carries with him, and which must be heard in its own music before it is interpreted.

कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन ।मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर् मा ते संगोऽस्त्वकर्मणि ॥

karmaṇyevādhikāraste mā phaleṣu kadācanamā karmaphalaheturbhūr mā te saṃgo’stvakarmaṇi

The verse is double-edged, and both edges are needed. The fruit is taken away as a motive, and with it the whole anxious traffic of hope and fear; but the refuge of inactivity is closed in the same breath. What remains is action poised in equality, “fixed in Yoga”, done “having abandoned attachment”, for “it is equality that is meant by Yoga” (2·48). Such action is not weakened by its detachment. The Gita dares to say that it is the most effective of all, since it is no longer lamed by the tremors of the personal will: “Yoga is skill in works” (2·50).

Nor can the knot be cut by simply ceasing to act. “None stands even for a moment not doing work”, for the modes of Nature drive every embodied being (3·5); not by abstention from works does a man enjoy actionlessness (3·4). The body that sits motionless is still Nature’s field, and the mind that has withdrawn from the world while it broods upon the objects of sense has gained nothing but a self-deception. Therefore “do thou do controlled action” (3·8), action governed by the intelligent will. This is niṣkāma karma, desireless works, and it is already a great liberation. Yet it is not the end, and the Gita knows well how easily it may be counterfeited.

yajña

The Knot and the Wheel

For there is a subtle difficulty in the idea of desireless works which the ordinary moralist hardly perceives. The human being, nature being what it is, acts from desire; if desire is taken away, what motive is left? The usual answer is duty, the disinterested performance of what is prescribed. But the commentary refuses this too easy peace.

For what we call ordinarily disinterested action is not really desireless; it is simply a replacement of certain smaller personal interests by other larger desires which have only the appearance of being impersonal, virtue, country, mankind.

We cannot become impersonal, the commentary observes, by obeying something outside ourselves, since we cannot so get outside ourselves; we can only do it by rising to the highest within us. Desirelessness is therefore a means and not an end, and the means of reaching the end is given in a single luminous word, yajña, sacrifice.

यज्ञार्थात्कर्मणोऽन्यत्र लोकोऽयं कर्मबन्धनः ।तदर्थं कर्म कौन्तेय मुक्तसङ्गः समाचर ॥

yajñārthātkarmaṇo’nyatra loko’yaṃ karmabandhanaḥtadarthaṃ karma kaunteya muktasaṅgaḥ samācara

Here the ritual word opens out into a universal truth. All works, and not only the ceremonies of the Veda, may be done either for the ego or for the Divine; and the whole difference between bondage and freedom lies in that “for”. The Gita’s reading of this is one of the clearest sentences in the commentary on the third chapter.

Egoism is the knot of the bondage. By acting Godwards, without any thought of ego, we loosen this knot and finally arrive at freedom.

Then the Teacher unveils the wheel of sacrifice which turns through the whole creation (3·14–16): food and rain and work and the creative Brahman all bound together in one great interchange, so that life itself is revealed as an offering which Nature is ever making, willingly or by compulsion. Where man consents to it, the wheel becomes a stair. And at its summit stands the tremendous verse of the fourth chapter in which every element of the rite is seen to be the One: Brahman is the giving, Brahman the offering, by Brahman it is offered into the Brahman-fire (4·24). To act in that knowledge is to find that there is no longer any separate doer to be bound. The sacrifice has its own secret joy, which the Gita does not hide: they who enjoy “the nectar of immortality left over from the sacrifice” attain to the eternal (4·31). What is given up to the Divine is returned as amṛta, and the whole of the work, taken into that fire, culminates in knowledge (4·33).

lokasaṅgraha

The Knower Who Does Not Cease

But now a new question rises, sharper than the first. If works are done as a means to self-knowledge, what becomes of them when self-knowledge is attained? The Gita itself states the case in its strongest form: for the man whose delight is in the Self, who is satisfied in the Self and content in it, “there exists no work that needs to be done” (3·17); he has nothing to gain by action and nothing by inaction (3·18). Here the way of the ascetic would close the book. The liberated soul, having no more need of works, would let them dwindle to the minimum that the body exacts and pass out of the troubled round of life into the Silence.

The Gita turns precisely at this point, and the turn is decisive. Because the knower has nothing to gain by action or inaction, his choice is not governed by any personal object; therefore let him act, without attachment, for the holding together of the peoples, lokasaṅgraha (3·19–20). Janaka and the royal sages attained to perfection by works. And then the Teacher offers, not a precept, but himself: “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). If he ceased, the peoples would sink into confusion (3·24); the one who knows should act as the ignorant act, but without their attachment (3·25).

Outwardly his actions may not seem to differ essentially from theirs; battle and rule as well as teaching and thought, all the various commerce of man with man may fall in his range; but the spirit in which he does them must be very different, and it is that spirit which by its influence shall be the great attraction drawing men upwards to his own level, the great lever lifting the mass of men higher in their ascent.

This is the work of the jñānī, and its inner character is described in paradoxes that are not paradoxes to experience. He sees inaction in action and action in inaction, and is therefore a universal worker in Yoga (4·18); having abandoned attachment to the fruit, ever satisfied, without dependence, he does nothing even while he is engaged in action (4·20). While he sees, hears, touches, eats, moves and breathes, he knows, “I am doing nothing”, only the senses moving among their objects (5·8–9). Founding his works upon the Brahman, he is not stained by them, as water clings not to the lotus-leaf (5·10).

Yet if the account stopped here, a shadow would remain upon it. For the only reason left for works would seem to be the compulsion of Nature on the body, or at best a benevolent example given to others; and the Silent Brahman into which the knower has passed has no need of either. Something more is required to make the works of the liberated soul not merely harmless but divine.

bhoktāraṃ yajñatapasām

The Lord of the Sacrifice

That something is the secret which the Gita, as the commentary is careful to show, only hints at in these early chapters and unfolds fully much later: the Divine is not only the silent immutable Self in which the ego is dissolved, but the Purushottama, the supreme Person who holds both the silence and the movement in himself and is the Lord of all works. On this recognition the whole destiny of action turns.

See the silent Brahman as the goal and the world with all its activities has to be forsaken; see God, the Divine, the Purushottama as the goal, superior to action yet its inner spiritual cause and object and original will, and the world with all its activities is conquered and possessed in a divine transcendence of the world.

Now the sacrifice has a receiver. The Gita names him as the enjoyer of all sacrifice and askesis, the mighty lord of all the worlds, and, with a sudden intimacy, “the friend of all creatures”; and it is by knowing him so that a man “comes by the peace” (5·29). The sacrifice of works is no longer offered into an impersonal void, nor merely into the cosmic fire of Nature; it is given into the hands of a Friend. The commentary, describing this supreme Being, can speak of him as “friend, comrade, lover, playmate, guide, teacher, master”, yet in all relations free; and something of that freedom and that play passes into the works of the one who offers to him.

The Avatar himself is the pattern. He is the doer of the fourfold order of works who is yet the imperishable non-doer; works fix not themselves upon him, nor has he desire for their fruits, and he who knows him thus is not bound by works (4·13–14). This is janma karma ca me divyam, “my divine birth and my divine work”, and whoever knows it in its principles comes not to rebirth but to him (4·9). The divine works are thus not a moral ideal invented by man; they are the manner in which God himself moves in the world, and man is invited to share it.

From this point the offering widens until nothing is left outside it. “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 battle remains, the fever goes. And later, when the heart has been opened, the circle closes round the whole of life: whatever thou doest, whatever thou enjoyest, whatever thou sacrificest, whatever thou givest, whatever energy of the soul thou puttest forth, make it an offering unto Me (9·27). The same God who accepts the leaf, the flower, the cup of water offered with love (9·26) accepts the battle and the kingdom. There is no longer any secular act.

muktasya karma

The Signs of the Divine Worker

How shall such works be known? Not, the Gita answers, by any outward mark; for the question “what is action and what is inaction” perplexes even the sages (4·16), and “thick and tangled is the way of works” (4·17). The commentary insists that the signs of divine works are all inward and invisible, known only by the light of the soul from which they come; and it gathers them from the fourth and fifth chapters with a care that makes them a portrait of the liberated man.

The first sign is that he acts without the personal egoism of the doer, in the knowledge that Nature executes the work and the Divine is its lord, so that his works are burned up in the fire of knowledge (4·19). The second is freedom from desire, which, when the egoism of the doer has gone, is starved out for want of a support; all his undertakings are free from the will of desire. The third is a spiritual impersonality, in which the personality that remains becomes, in the commentary’s words, “a free mould for the Infinite”, “a living mask of the Purushottama”. The fourth is equality, a soul that has passed beyond the dualities (4·22) and meets friend and foe, honour and dishonour, with the same unshaken eye, while it holds for all creatures a universal friendliness and compassion, maitraḥ karuṇa eva ca (12·13). And beneath all these lies a perfect inner joy that depends on nothing outward, a delight that is the very stuff of the soul, together with a calm superiority to the play of the three modes in the nature.

The Divine motives, inspires, determines the entire action; the human soul impersonal in the Brahman is the pure and silent channel of his power; that power in the Nature executes the divine movement. … They rise from a free spirit and disappear without modifying it, like waves that rise and disappear on the surface of conscious, immutable depths.

These are the muktasya karma, the works of the liberated soul. The true Sannyasin, the Gita says, is the one who neither hates nor desires (5·3); the renunciation it asks is not the painful laying down of works but the giving up of their inner claim, not into the inertia of Nature but, in the commentary’s phrase, “to the Lord in sacrifice, into the calm and joy of the Impersonal from whom all action proceeds without disturbing his peace.” Such a soul may do the greatest and most violent works of the world, and they leave on it no more trace than the wave leaves on the depth.

nimittamātra

The Bow of the Divine Archer

One step remains, and the Gita reserves it for the close of its teaching, when the disciple has seen the universal Form and heard the supreme secret. The commentary on the eighteenth chapter gathers the whole evolution of works into three sentences which are, in effect, the history of this essay told from within.

It is done first as a sacrifice with the idea still of our self as the doer. It is done next without that idea and with a perception of the Prakriti as the sole doer. It is done last with the knowledge of that Prakriti as the supreme power of the Divine and a renunciation, a surrender of all our actions to him with the individual as a channel only and an instrument.

The word for this last condition had already been spoken on the field of the Vision, when the Time-Spirit, arisen huge-statured for the destruction of the nations, declared that the warriors ranked against Arjuna were slain already, “even without thee” (11·32). Then comes the command which is at once the hardest and the most liberating in the whole poem.

तस्मात्त्वमुत्तिष्ठ यशो लभस्वजित्वा शत्रून् भुङ्क्ष्व राज्यं समृद्धम् ।मयैवैते निहताः पूर्वमेवनिमित्तमात्रं भव सव्यसाचिन् ॥

tasmāttvamuttiṣṭha yaśo labhasvajitvā śatrūn bhuṅkṣva rājyaṃ samṛddhammayaivaite nihatāḥ pūrvamevanimittamātraṃ bhava savyasācin

This is not fatalism, and it is not passivity. The instrument is not a dead tool; it is a conscious and consenting soul, awake in every part, whose knowledge is a light of the Divine knowledge and whose will is a force of the Divine will. The arrow must still be drawn with all the skill of Savyasachi, the archer who shoots with either hand. But the source of the drawing is no longer in the ego. The Swabhava itself, the inborn nature of the warrior, is taken up and illumined, and remains, in a phrase of the commentary, “the bow of the divine Archer”. The personal will has not been crushed; it has been fulfilled by being given.

So the Gita can promise, in the last movement of its teaching, that by doing all actions always, lodged in the Divine, a man attains by his grace the eternal and imperishable status (18·56). Not by fewer works, but by all works; not by a withdrawal from the field, but by a lodging of the whole being in him (18·57). And when the teaching is ended, Arjuna does not go to the forest. He says only, “Destroyed is my delusion, I have regained memory through Thy grace … I will act according to Thy word” (18·73). The last word of the disciple is a word of action; but it is no longer his action.

The Ascent of Works

We began with a smile between two armies, and we can now see what it meant. The Teacher did not smile at Arjuna’s grief, which he took with the utmost seriousness; he smiled because he knew that the whole labour of human action, with its desire and its fear, its duty and its doubt, its long struggle to be good and its sudden collapse into the sense of sin, was secretly moving towards the moment when it would be taken from the tired hands of the ego and received into his own. That moment does not end action. It turns action into līlā, the free play of the Divine in the world, in which the worker is a comrade of the Lord and the work a form of his delight.

There is behind the conch of Kurukshetra another music, less loud and more intimate, the music of the Friend who draws all creatures to himself. Desireful works hear only the conch; desireless works hear its command and obey it with an equal mind; the works of sacrifice begin to hear the other music beneath it; and divine works are those in which the two have become one sound, the battle-cry and the flute, the terrible and the sweet, the command of the Master and the call of the Lover. To reach that is not to cease from works but to find at last who has been doing them.

The verses of this essay

Chapter 2

1. 10
2. 42
3. 47
4. 48

Chapter 3

1. 5
2. 9
3. 22

Chapter 4

1. 9
2. 18
3. 24

Chapter 5

1. 10
2. 29

Chapter 3

1. 30

Chapter 9

1. 27

Chapter 11

1. 33

Chapter 18

1. 56
2. 73

• The Yoga of the Intelligent Will
• Works and Sacrifice
• The Significance of Sacrifice
• The Lord of the Sacrifice
• The Principle of Divine Works
• The Divine Worker
• Towards the Supreme Secret
• Swabhava and Swadharma