The fourth chapter deepens the foundation of Karmayoga by revealing the origin and authority of the teaching. Krishna declares that this Yoga was given in ancient times and lost through the lapse of ages. When Arjuna asks how Krishna, his contemporary, could have spoken it in the beginning, the answer opens the doctrine of Avatarhood. The Divine is unborn and imperishable, yet by his own power he assumes birth through his self-Maya whenever the dharma fades and unrighteousness rises, coming forth from age to age for the deliverance of the good, the destruction of evil and the restoration of the right (4·7, 4·8).
Sri Aurobindo stresses that the Avatar is no mere mythological ornament. The divine Teacher of the Gita is the eternal Godhead present within man, the inner Lord who guides the soul and, at the decisive turns of the world, manifests in a form that can speak, lead and restore. Divine birth differs from human birth because it is not compelled by ignorance; divine works differ from human works because they are not driven by ego, desire or bondage. To know the Divine’s birth and works in their true principle is to be freed from the very mechanism that binds human action (4·9).
The chapter then returns to action and introduces a subtler understanding of action and inaction. The wise see action in inaction and inaction in action: outward stillness may conceal an inner bondage of desire, while outward action may be inwardly free when performed without egoistic initiation (4·18). The liberated worker acts with no personal claim, no hunger for fruit and no dependence on success, and so his works are consumed in the fire of knowledge and leave no binding trace.
Sacrifice is now widened into many forms: the offering of material things, of austerity, of the senses, of the breath, of self-control, of study and of knowledge itself. All are movements of purification when rightly understood, but the sacrifice of knowledge is the highest, for it reveals the very truth into which all other offerings are poured (4·33). The culminating vision is that the act, the instrument, the offering, the fire and the doer are all themselves Brahman, so that the whole of action is founded in and offered to the Divine.
This chapter is essential to Sri Aurobindo’s synthesis because it joins three great ideas: the Divine descends into the world, action can itself be divine, and knowledge transforms works rather than abolishing them. The soul that knows the Lord of works can act without bondage. Faith, humility and a true approach to the knower are required, for doubt cuts at the root of the will and destroys it. The chapter thus prepares the figure of the divine worker, whose action is free because it proceeds from knowledge and from sacrifice.
