यदृच्छालाभसन्तुष्टो द्वन्द्वातीतो विमत्सरः ।समः सिद्धावसिद्धौ च कृत्वापि न निबध्यते ॥
yadṛcchālābhasantuṣṭo dvandvātīto vimatsaraḥsamaḥ siddhāvasiddhau ca kṛtvāpi na nibadhyate
He who is satisfied with whatever gain comes to him, who has passed beyond the dualities, is jealous of none, is equal in failure and success, he is not bound even when he acts.
Compiled rendering · Anilbaran Roy
His translation
KRISHNA Many are my births that are past and gone and thine also, Urjoona; all of them I know but thou knowest not, O scourge of thy foemen. Yea, though I be unborn and imperishable Spirit, though I be the Lord of all creatures, yet I resort to my own nature and am born by the power of my Self-Illusion. For whenever…Read the whole passage · 585 wordsClose the passage
KRISHNA Many are my births that are past and gone and thine also, Urjoona; all of them I know but thou knowest not, O scourge of thy foemen. Yea, though I be unborn and imperishable Spirit, though I be the Lord of all creatures, yet I resort to my own nature and am born by the power of my Self-Illusion. For whenever and whenever righteousness and justice decline & faint upon the earth, O Bharata, and unrighteousness and injustice arise and flourish, then do I put forth myself; for the salvation of the pure and the destruction of evildoers, to raise up justice and righteousness I am born again from age to age. He who in this sort knoweth aright my divine birth and works, cometh not to rebirth when he leaveth the body, to Me he cometh, Urjoona. Many have sought refuge with me and made themselves full of me, who have risen beyond love and wrath and fear, and they made themselves holy by the austere energisms of knowledge, and became even as Myself. In whatsoever way men come to me, in their own way I accept and love them; utterly do men, O son of Pritha, follow in the path in which I tread. Desiring good success of their works men sacrifice to the gods on earth, for very quickly in the world of men cometh the success that is born of works. By me were the four orders created according unto the division of the workings of the stuff of their nature, know me for their maker and yet neither for doer nor maker who am imperishable. On Me actions leave no stain for I have no craving for their fruit; he who really knows this of me, is not bound by his works. Knowing that in this wise works were done by the ancient seekers after salvation, do thou also do works that were done in old time by the men of old. What is action and what is inaction, as to this the very sages are bewildered; therefore I will declare action unto thee by the knowledge whereof thou shalt be delivered out of evil. For of works thou must understand, of miswork thou must understand, and thou must understand also of inaction; very difficult is the way of works and their mystery. He who in action can see inaction and action in inaction, he is the understanding mind among men; he doeth all works, yet is in Yoga. When the imaginations of desire are shut out from all that a man beginneth & undertaketh, and his works have been burned up in the fires of Knowledge, then it is he that the wise call the truly learned. He hath relinquished attachment to the fruit of his works, is ever satisfied of soul and dependeth not on any outward things; such a man though he engage himself deep in works, yet really doeth nothing:—pure of lusts, he is governed in heart and spirit, he has surrendered all sense of belonging, doing actions only with his body he receives no stain of sin:—well-content with the gains that chance & time may bring him, lifted above the plane of the dualities, void of jealousy, receiving success & failure alike as friends, though he do works, yet is he not bound by them:—leaving all heart clingings behind him, a spirit released, a mind safe in its tower of knowledge, performing works for a sacrifice, all his works are swallowed up & vanish.
Essays on the Gita
That this is the sense of the passage is made clear in what3·20–25 follows, by the affirmation of lokasaṅgraha as the object of works, of Prakriti as the sole doer of works and the divine Purusha as their equal upholder, to whom works have to be3·30 given up even in their doing,—this inner giving up of works and yet physical doing of them is the culmination of sacrifice,—and by the affirmation that the result of such active sacrifice with an equal and desireless mind is liberation from the bondage of4·22–23 works. “He who is satisfied with whatever gain comes to him and equal in failure and success, is not bound even when he acts. When a man liberated, free from attachment, acts for sacrifice, all his action is dissolved,” leaves, that is to say, no result of bondage or after-impression on his free, pure, perfect and equal soul. To these passages we shall have to return. They are followed by a perfectly explicit and detailed interpretation of the meaning of yajña in the language of the Gita which leaves no doubt at all about the symbolic use of the words and the psychological character of the sacrifice enjoined by this teaching. In the ancient Vedic system there was always a double sense physical and psychological, outward and symbolic, the exterior form of the sacrifice and the inner meaning of all its circumstances. But the secret symbolism of the ancient Vedic mystics, exact, curious, poetic, psychological, had been long forgotten by this time and it is now replaced by another, large, general and philosophical in the spirit of Vedanta and a later Yoga. The fire of sacrifice, agni, is no material flame, but brahmāgni, the fire of the Brahman, or it is the Brahman-ward energy, inner Agni, priest of the4·24–31 sacrifice, into which the offering is poured; the fire is self-control or it is a purified sense-action or it is the vital energy in that discipline of the control of the vital being through the control of the breath which is common to Rajayoga and Hathayoga, or it is the fire of self-knowledge, the flame of the supreme sacrifice. The food eaten as the leavings of the sacrifice is, it is explained, the nectar of immortality, amṛta, left over from the offering; and here we have still something of the old Vedic symbolism in which the Soma-wine was the physical symbol of the amṛta, the immortalising delight of the divine ecstasy won by the sacrifice, offered to the gods and drunk by men. The offering itself is whatever working of his energy, physical or psychological, is consecrated by him in action of body or action of mind to the gods or God, to the Self or to the universal powers, to one’s own higher Self or to the Self in mankind and in all existences.
The result of this knowledge, this desirelessness and this impersonality is a perfect equality in the soul and the nature. Equality is the fourth sign of the divine worker. He has, says the4·22 Gita, passed beyond the dualities; he is dvandvātīta. We have seen that he regards with equal eyes, without any disturbance of feeling, failure and success, victory and defeat; but not only these, all dualities are in him surpassed and reconciled. The outward distinctions by which men determine their psychological attitude towards the happenings of the world, have for him only a subordinate and instrumental meaning. He does not ignore them, but he is above them. Good happening and evil happening, so all-important to the human soul subject to desire, are to the desireless divine soul equally welcome since by their mingled strand are worked out the developing forms of the eternal good. He cannot be defeated, since all for him is moving towards the1·1 divine victory in the Kurukshetra of Nature, dharmakṣetre kurukṣetre, the field of doings which is the field of the evolving Dharma, and every turn of the conflict has been designed and mapped by the foreseeing eye of the Master of the battle, the Lord of works and Guide of the dharma. Honour and dishonour from men cannot move him, nor their praise nor their blame; for he has a greater clear-seeing judge and another standard for his action, and his motive admits no dependence upon worldly rewards. Arjuna the Kshatriya prizes naturally honour and reputation and is right in shunning disgrace and the name of coward as worse than death; for to maintain the point of honour and the standard of courage in the world is part of his dharma: but Arjuna the liberated soul need care for none of these things, he has only to know the kartavyaṁ karma, the work which the supreme Self demands from him, and to do that and leave the result to the Lord of his actions. He has passed even beyond that distinction of sin and virtue which is so all-important to the human soul while it is struggling to minimise the hold of its egoism and lighten the heavy and violent yoke of its passions,—the liberated has risen above these struggles and is seated firmly in the purity of the witnessing and enlightened soul. Sin has fallen away from him, and not a virtue acquired and increased by good action and impaired or lost by evil action, but the inalienable and unalterable purity of a divine and selfless nature is the peak to which he has climbed and the seat upon which he is founded. There the sense of sin and the sense of virtue have no starting-point or applicability.
Record of Yoga
There must be no desire, no repining, no rejecting (यदृच्छालाभसन्तोषः), no idea of dwandwa (पापपुण्यमानापमानप्रियाप्रियविवर्जनम्)
