Arjuna again asks for clarity: which is the better, the renunciation of works or the Yoga of works? Krishna answers that both lead to the supreme good, but that for the embodied seeker works done in Yoga are the superior path. Sri Aurobindo treats this as one of the Gita’s crucial reconciliations. Renunciation is not rejected but redefined. The true sannyasin is not one who has merely cast off outward acts but one who neither desires nor recoils, who is free from the dualities and therefore free in the very midst of action (5·3).
Sankhya and Yoga, knowledge and works, arrive at one and the same state when each is taken in its fullness. Knowledge without Yoga easily turns sterile or sinks into mere inaction; works without knowledge remain bound to ego and to the desire of fruit. But when the worker knows the Self, sees Nature as the doer of the movements and offers the action without attachment, he wins the freedom that renunciation seeks while still fulfilling the truth of action. The two are not rivals; the one who lives either of them integrally lives both.
Krishna describes the liberated consciousness from within. The knower thinks, “I am doing nothing at all,” even while seeing, hearing, touching, moving, breathing and acting through the instruments of Nature (5·8). This is not irresponsibility; it is the cessation of the ego’s false claim to be the doer. The senses move among their objects, Nature works within Nature, while the soul remains equal, pure and unattached. Works are laid upon Brahman as upon an altar, and their stain no more clings to the soul than water clings to the leaf of a lotus.
The chapter then enlarges equality into the vision of the one Self in all. The wise look with an equal eye upon the learned and gentle Brahmin, the cow, the elephant, the dog and the outcaste, for the one Brahman dwells in every form (5·18). Sri Aurobindo is careful to note that this equality is not a social slogan but a spiritual realisation: the liberated intelligence is no longer deceived by surface distinctions. The pleasures born of contact with objects are seen as transient wombs of pain; the joy the sage seeks is inward, self-existent and Brahmic.
By the close of the chapter renunciation has become inward freedom, equality, universal vision and peace, and the sage attains the Brahman-existence even while living and acting in the world. The final verses, pointing to the control of the senses, the mind and the breath, prepare the discipline of meditation in the sixth chapter. But the essential movement is already clear: the Gita will not let the soul escape the world by a tamasic or merely mental refusal. It asks instead for a greater renunciation, the renunciation of ego, desire and the separative consciousness.
