Arjuna seizes at once upon the apparent contradiction. If knowledge is superior and the Self is beyond action, why is he urged into terrible works? Krishna answers by distinguishing two paths, knowledge and works, while refusing to make them enemies. No embodied being can truly remain actionless, for Nature works through the gunas even when the mind pretends to renounce. Outward inaction can mask an inward seething of desire; true renunciation must touch the motive and not merely the visible deed.
The right path, then, is not the abandonment of works but their transformation. Action is to be done without attachment, as yajna, sacrifice. Sri Aurobindo gives this word its largest meaning: it is not only ritual offering but the very law of life, which is everywhere an interchange, a giving and receiving, a circulation of energies. The Gita spiritualises sacrifice by making all works an offering to the Divine, so that the worker no longer acts for personal enjoyment or possession but as a conscious participant in a cosmic and divine order (3·9).
Krishna invokes the ancient law that beings were created together with sacrifice as their companion and means of mutual sustenance. Works performed for desire bind the soul; works offered nourish the right relation between the individual, the world and the Divine. The gods of the old sacrifice are universalised as the powers of Nature and consciousness, to feed which is to uphold the larger order, while egoistic consumption is a kind of theft from the whole. Thus the chapter moves from ritual to spiritual psychology, and from social duty to a cosmic responsibility.
A further principle now appears: lokasangraha, the holding together of the world. The liberated or advanced soul has nothing to gain for itself, yet it continues to act for the guidance and maintenance of the peoples. Krishna himself, having nothing to obtain in all the worlds, nevertheless engages in action, for if the best were to cease from works in a misleading way they would unsettle and confuse mankind (3·22, 3·25). Action is therefore not merely a concession to ignorance; it can be a divine movement performed in perfect freedom.
The chapter closes by naming desire as the one enemy. Desire, when crossed, becomes anger; it veils the knowledge even of the wise and drives the soul into bondage, lurking in the senses, the mind and the intelligence, and it must be slain by the higher self (3·37). This is decisive for Sri Aurobindo’s reading: the Gita does not ask Arjuna to act from rajasic passion, vengeance or ambition. It asks him to act only after desire has been mastered, with equality, as an offering, for the sake of the Divine working itself out in the world.
