न बुद्धिभेदं जनयेद् अज्ञानां कर्मसङ्गिनाम् ।जोषयेत्सर्वकर्माणि विद्वान्युक्तः समाचरन् ॥
na buddhibhedaṁ janayed ajñānāṁ karmasaṅgināmjoṣayetsarvakarmāṇi vidvānyuktaḥ samācaran
He should not create a division of their understanding in the ignorant who are attached to their works; he should set them to all actions, doing them himself with knowledge and in Yoga.
Compiled rendering · Anilbaran Roy
His translation
KRISHNA Two are the ways of devotion in this world, already have I declared it to thee, O sinless hero; the devotion of the men of Sankhya is by singleness in knowledge, by singleness in works is the devotion of the men of Yoga. Not by refraining from works shall a man taste actionlessness and not by mere renouncing…Read the whole passage · 1,072 wordsClose the passage
KRISHNA Two are the ways of devotion in this world, already have I declared it to thee, O sinless hero; the devotion of the men of Sankhya is by singleness in knowledge, by singleness in works is the devotion of the men of Yoga. Not by refraining from works shall a man taste actionlessness and not by mere renouncing of the world shall he reach perfection. For verily no man even for a moment remains without doing, since each is made to do whether he will or not by the moods of his essential nature. He who coerceth the organs of action and sitteth remembering in his heart the things in which the senses work, is a man deceived in Spirit, him they call a hypocrite, but he whosoever governeth the senses with his mind, O Urjoona, and entereth on Yoga in works using the organs of action without attachment, is distinguished above all beings. Do thou the works that the law demands of thee, for action is mightier than inaction; yea without works the very maintenance of thy body cannot be. ‘Tis by doing works in other spirit than as a sacrifice that this world of creatures falleth into bondage to its works; but do thou practise works as a Sacrifice, O son of Coonty, with a mind free from the yoke of attachment. For with Sacrifice as their companion the Father, of old, created all these peoples and said unto them, “By Sacrifice shall ye beget offspring; lo the chosen joys of your desire, they shall be to you the milk of her udders. Cherish you the gods with sacrifice and the gods shall cherish you in turn; thus by cherishing each other shall ye attain to your highest welfare. Cherished with sacrifice the gods shall bestow on you the joys you most desire and he is no better than a thief who enjoyeth what they give and giveth not to them again.” The good who eat the remnants of the Sacrifice are delivered from all their transgressions, but those accursed eat and drink sin who cook their food but for their own selfish bellies. From food all creatures are born and from rain is the birth of food; but rain ariseth from the sacrifice and Sacrifice hath its root in works; works know to be born of the Eternal, for by the imperishable word of the Eternal they were brought into being. Therefore is the Eternal everywhere and in all things; yea He hath His home for ever in the heart of the Sacrifice. This is the Wheel that God hath set going and who goeth not with it, whose days are a wickedness, whose delight & ease are in the senses, O son of Pritha, liveth his life in vain. But for the man whose whole pleasure is in the Self and who satisfies his longing with the Self, yea who is content utterly with the Self, for him there is no needful action. For indeed he hath no end at all to gain by doing neither any by not doing, he hath no dependence for end or aim on any or even this whole world of creatures. Therefore without attachment do ever the work before thee, since by doing works without attachment man reacheth the Highest. ‘Twas by works alone that the men of old reached to utter perfection even Junac and the rest. Moreover even if thou lookest to the right government of the world, thou shouldest be doing. What they see their Greatest do, even that the rest of the folk will practise, and the standard that the Best setteth up, the world will surely follow. Behold, O Partha, there is nought at all in the three worlds that I must do, there is nothing I have not or that I yet need to win, and still I move in the path of works. For verily were I not to move sleeplessly in the path of works, lo men follow utterly the way wherein I tread, O son of Pritha, then would all these worlds sink and perish, were I not to do works and I should become the creator of bastard confusion and the slayer of all these creatures. That which the ignorant do with attachment to the work, O Bharata, the wise man should do without attachment, wishing only to keep the world in its traces. Let him not be the cause of division and confusion of mind in the ignorant who are attached to their works, but let him, knowing all, set them to all the works of this world by doing works in Yoga. Lo works are done but by the modes of Nature in her inevitable working, but the Spirit of man is deceived by the sense of separate existence and he sayeth in himself “I, even I am the doer.” But he who knoweth to the core how the workings of the modes are parcelled out, believeth that the modes work in and upon the modes, and suffereth not attachment to seize him. Most men are deceived by the modes of Nature, cling to the workings of these modes; these dull brains, these imperfect knowers, let not the perfect knower cause to swerve and stumble. Repose all thy works upon Me and with thy heart spiritually inclined be desireless, be selfless; then arise, fight, O Urjoona, let the fever of thy soul pass from thee. For men who with faith & without carping follow ever this my Word are released, they also, from bondage to their works, but they who carp at and follow not this my word, know of them that all their knowledge is a delusion; their intellect is nought; they are lost men, Urjoona. Lo even the wise man who knoweth can but act according to his own essential nature; for to their nature all creatures come at last and what shall coercing it avail? Only in the field of each & every sense love and hate are there & ever they lie in ambush; let not the Spirit of man fall into their clutches for they are his adversaries in his great journey. Better is it the rule of thy own life ill done than an alien rule well accomplished, yea death in the path of one’s own nature is better; it is a fearful and perilous thing to follow the law of another’s being.
Essays on the Gita
The works of sacrifice are thus vindicated as a means of liberation and absolute spiritual perfection, saṁsiddhi. So Janaka3·20–22 and other great Karmayogins of the mighty ancient Yoga attained to perfection, by equal and desireless works done as a sacrifice, without the least egoistic aim or attachment — karmaṇaiva hi saṁsiddhim āsthitā janakādayaḥ. So too and with the same desirelessness, after liberation and perfection, works can and have to be continued by us in a large divine spirit, with the calm high nature of a spiritual royalty. “Thou shouldst do works regarding also the holding together of the peoples, lokasaṅgraham evāpi sampaśyan kartum arhasi. Whatsoever the Best doeth, that the lower kind of man puts into practice; the standard he creates, the people follows. O son of Pritha, 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,” varta eva ca karmaṇi, — eva implying, I abide in it and do not leave it as the Sannyasin thinks himself bound to abandon works.3·23–24 “For if I did not abide sleeplessly in the paths of action, men follow in every way my path, these peoples would sink to destruction if I did not work and I should be the creator of confusion and slay these creatures. As those who know not3·25–26 act with attachment to the action, he who knows should act without attachment, having for his motive to hold together the peoples. He should not create a division of their understanding in the ignorant who are attached to their works; he should set them to all actions, doing them himself with knowledge and in Yoga.” There are few more important passages in the Gita than these seven striking couplets.
In order to indicate more perfectly his meaning, the divine Teacher, the Avatar gives his own example, his own standard3·22 to Arjuna. “I abide in the path of action,” he seems to say, “the path that all men follow; thou too must abide in action. In the way I act, in that way thou too must act. I am above the necessity of works, for I have nothing to gain by them; I am the Divine who possess all things and all beings in the world and I am myself beyond the world as well as in it and I do not depend upon anything or anyone in all the three worlds for any object; yet I act. This too must be thy manner and spirit of working. I, the Divine, am the rule and the standard; it is I who make the path in which men tread; I am the way and the goal. But I do all this largely, universally, visibly in part, but far more invisibly; and men do not really know the way of my workings. Thou, when thou knowest and seest, when thou hast become the divinised man, must be the individual power of God, the human yet divine example, even as I am in my avatars. Most men dwell in the ignorance, the God-seer dwells in the knowledge; but let him not confuse the minds of men by a3·26 dangerous example, rejecting in his superiority the works of the world; let him not cut short the thread of action before it is spun out, let him not perplex and falsify the stages and gradations of the ways I have hewn. The whole range of human action has been decreed by me with a view to the progress of man from the lower to the higher nature, from the apparent undivine to the conscious Divine. The whole range of human works must be that in which the God-knower shall move. All individual, all social action, all the works of the intellect, the heart and the body are still his, not any longer for his own separate sake, but for the sake of God in the world, of God in all beings and that all those beings may move forward, as he has moved, by the path of works towards the discovery of the Divine in themselves. 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.”
In tamasic equality by itself there is no real liberation; but it can be made a powerful starting-point, if, as in Indian asceticism, it is turned into the sattwic by the perception of the greater existence, the truer power, the higher delight of the immutable Self above Nature. The natural turn of such a movement, however, is towards Sannyasa, the renunciation of life and works, rather than to that union of inner renunciation of desire with continued activity in the world of Nature which the Gita advocates. The Gita, however, admits and makes room for this movement; it allows as a recoiling starting-point the perception of the defects of the world-existence, birth and disease and death and old age and sorrow, the historic starting-point of the Buddha,13·9 janma-mṛtyu-jarā-vyādhi-duḥkha-doṣānudarśanam, and it accepts the effort of those whose self-discipline is motived by a desire for release, even in this spirit, from the curse of age and death,7·29 jarā-maraṇa-mokṣāya mām āśritya yatanti ye. But that, to be of any profit, must be accompanied by the sattwic perception of a higher state and the taking delight and refuge in the existence of the Divine, mām āśritya. Then the soul by its recoil comes to a greater condition of being, lifted beyond the three gunas and free from birth and death and age and grief, and enjoys the immortality of its self-existence, janma-mṛtyu-jarā-duḥkhair vimukto ‘mṛtam aśnute14·20. The tamasic unwillingness to accept the pain and effort of life is indeed by itself a weakening and degrading thing, and in this lies the danger of preaching to all alike the gospel of asceticism and world-disgust, that it puts the stamp of a tamasic weakness and shrinking on unfit souls, confuses their understanding, buddhibhedaṁ janayet, diminishes the sustained3·26 aspiration, the confidence in living, the power of effort which the soul of man needs for its salutary, its necessary rajasic struggle to master its environment, without really opening to it—for it is yet incapable of that—a higher goal, a greater endeavour, a mightier victory. But in souls that are fit this tamasic recoil may serve a useful spiritual purpose by slaying their rajasic attraction, their eager preoccupation with the lower life which prevents the sattwic awakening to a higher possibility. Seeking then for a refuge in the void they have created, they are able to hear the divine call, “O soul that findest thyself in this transient and9·33 unhappy world, turn and put thy delight in Me,” anityam asukhaṁ lokam imaṁ prāpya bhajasva mām.
Oneness with God, oneness with all beings, the realisation of the eternal divine unity everywhere and the drawing onwards of men towards that oneness are the law of life which arises from the teachings of the Gita. There can be none greater, wider, more profound. Liberated oneself, to live in this oneness, to help mankind on the path that leads towards it and meanwhile to do all works for God and help man also to do with joy and acceptance all the works to which he is called,4·1 kṛtsna-karma-kṛt, sarvakarmāṇi joṣayan, no greater or more liberal rule of divine works can be given. This freedom and this oneness are the secret goal of our human nature and the ultimate will in the existence of the race. It is that to which it must turn for the happiness all mankind is now vainly seeking, when once men lift their eyes and their hearts to see the Divine in them and around, in all and everywhere, sarveṣu, sarvatra, and learn that it is in him they live, while this lower nature of division is only a prison-wall which they must break down or at best an infant-school which they must outgrow, so that they may become adult in nature and free in spirit. To be made one self with God above and God in man and God in the world is the sense of liberation and the secret of perfection.
The Life Divine
Certainly, the practical values given us by our senses and by the dualistic sense-mind must hold good in their field and be accepted as the standard for ordinary life-experience until a larger harmony is ready into which they can enter and transform themselves without losing hold of the realities which they represent. To enlarge the sense-faculties without the knowledge that would give the old sense-values their right interpretation from the new standpoint might lead to serious disorders and incapacities, might unfit for practical life and for the orderly and disciplined use of the reason. Equally, an enlargement of our mental consciousness out of the experience of the egoistic dualities into an unregulated unity with some form of total consciousness might easily bring about a confusion and incapacity for the active life of humanity in the established order of the world’s relativities. This, no doubt, is the root of the injunction imposed in the Gita on the man who has the knowledge not to disturb the life-basis and thought-basis of the ignorant; for, impelled by his example but unable to comprehend the principle of his action, they would lose their own system of values without arriving at a higher foundation.
The Synthesis of Yoga
At the same time the Yogin who knows the Supreme is not subject to any need or compulsion in these activities; for to him they are neither a duty nor a necessary occupation for the mind nor a high amusement, nor imposed even by the loftiest human purpose. He is not attached, bound and limited by any nor has he any personal motive of fame, greatness or personal satisfaction in these works; he can leave or pursue them as the Divine in him wills, but he need not otherwise abandon them in his pursuit of the higher integral knowledge. He will do these things just as the supreme Power acts and creates, for a certain spiritual joy in creation and expression or to help in the holding together and right ordering or leading of this world of God’s workings. The Gita teaches that the man of knowledge shall by his way of life give to those who have not yet the spiritual consciousness, the love and habit of all works and not only of actions recognised as pious, religious or ascetic in their character; he should not draw men away from the world-action by his example. For the world must proceed in its great upward aspiring; men and nations must not be led to fall away from even an ignorant activity into a worse ignorance of inaction or to sink down into that miserable disintegration and tendency of dissolution which comes upon communities and peoples when there predominates the tamasic principle, the principle whether of obscure confusion and error or of weariness and inertia. “For I too,” says the Lord in the Gita, “have no need to do works, since there is nothing I have not or must yet gain for myself; yet I do works in the world: for if I did not do works, all laws would fall into confusion, the worlds would sink towards chaos and I would be the destroyer of these peoples.” The spiritual life does not need, for its purity, to destroy interest in all things except the Inexpressible or to cut at the roots of the Sciences, the Arts and Life. It may well be one of the effects of an integral spiritual knowledge and activity to lift them out of their limitations, substitute for our mind’s ignorant, limited, tepid or trepidant pleasure in them a free, intense and uplifting urge of delight and supply a new source of creative spiritual power and illumination by which they can be carried more swiftly and profoundly towards their absolute light in knowledge and their yet undreamed possibilities and most dynamic energy of content and form and practice. The one thing needful must be pursued first and always; but all things else come with it as its outcome and have not so much to be added to us as recovered and reshaped in its self-light and as portions of its self-expressive force.
Other writings
लोकसंग्रहमेवापि संपश्यन् कर्तुमर्हसि ॥ यद्यदाचरति श्रेष्ठस्तत्तदेवेतरो जनः । स यत्प्रमाणं कुरुते लोकस्तदनुवर्तते ॥ न मे पार्थास्ति कर्तव्यं त्रिषु लोकेषु किञ्चन । नानवाप्तमवाप्तव्यं वर्त एव च कर्मणि ॥ यदि ह्यहं न वर्तेयं जातु कर्मण्यतन्द्रितः । मम वर्त्मानुवर्तन्ते मनुष्याः पार्थ सर्वशः ॥ उत्सीदेयुरिमे लोका न कुर्यां कर्म चेदहम् । सङ्करस्य च कर्ता स्यामुपहन्यामिमाः प्रजाः॥ सक्ताः कर्मण्यविद्वांसो यथा कुर्वन्ति भारत । कुर्याद्विद्वांस्तथासक्तश्चिकीर्षुर्लोकसंग्रहम् ॥ न बुद्धिभेदं जनयेदज्ञानां कर्मसङ्गिनाम् । योजयेत्सर्वकर्माणि विद्वान्युक्तः समाचरन् ॥
“Looking also to the maintenance of order in the world thou shouldest act; for whatever the best practises, that other men practise; for the standard set by him is followed by the whole world. In all the Universe there is for Me no necessary action, for I have nothing I do not possess or wish to possess, and lo I abide always doing. For if I abide not at all doing action vigilantly, men would altogether follow in my path, O son of Pritha; these worlds would sink if I did not actions, and I should be the author of confusion (literally illegitimacy, the worst & primal confusion, for it disorders the family which is the fundamental unit of society) and the destroyer of the peoples. What the ignorant do, O Bharata, with their minds enslaved to the work, that the wise man should do with a free mind to maintain the order of the world; the wise man should not upset the mind of the ignorant who are slaves of their deeds, but should apply himself to all works doing customary things with a mind in Yoga.”
The supreme importance of the question is apparent. If the theory of the Illusionist is true, life is an inexplicable breach of Truth, an unjustifiable disturbance in the silence & stillness of the Eternal. It is a freak to be corrected, a snare to be escaped from, a delusion to be renounced, a mighty cosmic whim &…Read the whole passage · 1,090 wordsClose the passage
The supreme importance of the question is apparent. If the theory of the Illusionist is true, life is an inexplicable breach of Truth, an unjustifiable disturbance in the silence & stillness of the Eternal. It is a freak to be corrected, a snare to be escaped from, a delusion to be renounced, a mighty cosmic whim & blunder. The results upon the nation which produced this tremendous negation, have been prodigious. India has become the land of saints & ascetics, but progressively also of a decaying society and an inert, effete & helpless people. The indignant denunciation of the Vishnu Purana against the certain results to society of the Buddhist heresy has been fulfilled in the fate of our strongly Buddhicised Hindu nation. We see increasing upon it through the centuries the doom announced in the grave warnings of the Gita against the consequences of inaction, “utsideyur ime lokah .. sarirayatrapi akarmanah .. sankarasya cha karta syam upahanyam imah prajah .. buddhibhedam janayed ajnanam karmasanginam” etc. The religious life of this country has divided itself into two distinct & powerful tendencies, the Hinduism of the withdrawal from life which has organised itself in the monastery & the hermitage and the Hinduism of social life which has resolved itself into a mass of minute ceremony & unintelligent social practice. Neither is pure; both are afflicted with sankara, mixture & confusion of dharmas; for the life of the monastery is stricken with the tendency towards a return to the cares & corruptions of life, the life of society sicklied over & rendered impotent by the sense of its own illusion & worthlessness faced with the superiority of the monastic ideal. If a man or a nation becomes profoundly convinced that this phenomenal life is an illusion, its aims & tendencies of a moment & its values all false values, you cannot expect either the man or the nation to flourish here, whatever may be gained in Nirvana. For the nation any sustained & serious greatness of aim & endeavour becomes impossible. To get through the years of life, to maintain the body and propagate the race, since for some unreasonable reason that is demanded of us, but to get done with the business as soon as possible & escape by sannyasa into the unconditioned, this must obviously be the sole preoccupation of man in a society governed by this negative ideal. What is chiefly needed by it is an elaborate set of rules, the more minute & rigid the better, which will determine every action of life both social & religious, so as to save men the labour of thought & action & give them the assurance that they are doing only the nityakarma necessary to life in the body or the shastric karma which creates the least bondage for future lives & are not heaping up on themselves the burden of long continued existence in this terrible & inexplicable nightmare of the phenomenal world. But the attachment to works remains & it tends to satisfy itself by an excessive insistence on the petty field still left to it. We see an exclusive preoccupation with a petty money-getting, with the mere maintenance of a family, with the sordid cares of a narrow personal existence. The great ideals, the universalising & liberating movements which have continually swept rajasic Europe & revivified it, have been more & more unknown to us in the later history of our country. We have had but one world-forgetting impulse & one worldconquering passion,—the impulse of final renunciation & the passion of self-devotion to the Master of all or to a spiritual teacher. It is this habit of bhakti that alone has saved us alive; preserving an imperishable core of strength in the midst of our weakness & darkness it has returned upon us from age to age and poured its revivifying stream always through our inert mass and our petrifying society. But for all that our great fundamental mistake about life has told heavily; it has cursed our rajasic activity with continual inefficiency and our sattwic tendencies with a perpetual weight of return to tamas. Andham tamah pravishanti ye avidyam upasate. Tato bhuya iva te tamo ya u vidyayam ratah. Both these sentences of gloom have weighed upon us; we have divided ourselves into the exclusive seekers after the unconditioned knowledge & the exclusive lingerers in the phenomenal ignorance. We have made the life divine well nigh impossible in the world, possible only in remote hermitage, desolate forest or lonely mountain. We have not known the harmony which the early Vedantins practised; we have given ourselves instead to a great negation which, however inspiring and strength giving by its positive side—for it has its strong positive side—to a few exceptional spirits, cannot be grasped by the ordinary soul even when it is accepted by the ordinary intellect, is not man’s swadharma, and must therefore tend only to destroy his strength & delight in life by imposing upon him an effort beyond our average human capacity, from which it sinks back dispirited, weakened and nerveless. No nation, not even a chosen race, can with impunity build its life on a fundamental error about the meaning of life. We are here to manifest God in our mundane existence; our business is to express & formulate in phenomenal activity such truth as we can command about the Eternal; and in order to do that effectively we must answer the riddle set for us of the coexistence of the eternal & the phenomenal—we must harmonise God & Nature on peril of our destruction. The European nations have invariably decayed after a few centuries of efflorescence because they have persisted in ignorance, & been obstinate in Avidya. We who possess the secret but misunderstand it, have taken two millenniums to decay, but in the end we have decayed & brought ourselves to the verge of actual death & decomposition. We can preserve ourselves only by returning to the full & harmonious truth of our religion, truth of Purana & Tantra which we have mistranslated into a collection of fables and of magic formulae, truth of Veda which we have mistranslated into the idea of vacant & pompous ceremonial & the truth of Vedanta which we have mistranslated into the inexplicable explanation, the baffling mystery of an incomprehensible Maya. Veda & Vedanta are not only the Bible of hermits or the textbook of metaphysicians, but a gospel of life and a guide to life for the individual, for the nation & for all humanity.
