न प्रहृष्येत्प्रियं प्राप्य नोद्विजेत्प्राप्य चाप्रियम् ।स्थिरबुद्धिरसम्मूढो ब्रह्मविद्ब्रह्मणि स्थितः ॥
na prahṛṣyetpriyaṁ prāpya nodvijetprāpya cāpriyamsthirabuddhirasammūḍho brahmavidbrahmaṇi sthitaḥ
With intelligence stable, unbewildered, the knower of Brahman, living in the Brahman, neither rejoices on obtaining what is pleasant, nor sorrows on obtaining what is unpleasant.
Compiled rendering · Anilbaran Roy
AI translation
His translation
KRISHNA Renunciation of works or Yoga in works, both of these make for the soul’s highest welfare, but of these two Yoga in works is distinguished above renunciation of works. Know him for the perpetual Sunnyasin, who neither hates nor desires aught, for the mind that rises above the dualities, O strong of arm, is…Read the whole passage · 966 wordsClose the passage
KRISHNA Renunciation of works or Yoga in works, both of these make for the soul’s highest welfare, but of these two Yoga in works is distinguished above renunciation of works. Know him for the perpetual Sunnyasin, who neither hates nor desires aught, for the mind that rises above the dualities, O strong of arm, is easily and happily released from bondage. It is children who talk of Sankhya & Yoga as distinct & different, not the learned; he who cleaveth wholly to even one of these findeth the fruit of both. To the high heaven whereto the Sankhyas win, the men of Yoga go also, and he who seeth Sankhya and Yoga as one, seeth indeed. But without Yoga, O great of arm, renunciation is very difficult to arrive at and the sage that hath Yoga travelleth very swiftly to God. When a man hath Yoga, the self of him is purified from obscuration, he is master [of] the Self and victor over the senses; he whose Self has become one with the self of all created things, though he do works, can receive no defilement. The Yogin sees the reality of things and thinks “Truly I do nothing at all”; yea when he sees or hears or touches, when he smells and when he tastes, in his going and in his sleeping and in his breathing, whether he talk, whether he put out or take in, whether he close his eyes or open them, still he holds to it, “Lo, ‘tis but the senses that move in the fields of the senses.” When a man doeth, reposing all his works on the Eternal and abandoning attachment, sin cannot stay on his soul even as water on the leaf of a lotus. With their body, mind and understanding self and with the pure and unaffected senses the Yogins relinquishing attachment do works for the cleansing of the Self. The soul that has Yoga abandons the fruit of its works and gains instead a confident and utter peace, but the soul that has not Yoga clings to the fruit of its works and by the working of desire it falls into bondage. When a man is master of his self and has renounced all works in his heart, then the embodied spirit sitteth at ease in his nine-gated city, neither doing nor causing to be done. The Lord createth not works nor the authorship of works for His people neither yoketh He them to the fruits of their works; ‘tis the nature in a man that is busy & taketh its course. The Lord taketh to himself the sin of none neither accepteth He the righteousness of any; but Wisdom is clouded over with Nescience and ‘tis by this that these living beings fall into delusion. But on all of those who by Knowledge have destroyed the nescience of the Self, Wisdom riseth like the sun and lighteth up that Highest Self of All. Then they perceive Him alone and are Self of Him and to Him consecrated in faith and all for Him, and the revolving wheel clutches them not in any more, because wisdom hath washed them pure of all stain. The Brahmin endowed with learning and modest culture, the cow & the elephant and the very dog and the Pariah, all these the wise regard with equal eyes. Even in this human life they have conquered this creation whose minds have taken root in that divine equality, for the Eternal also is without a defect and He looketh on all his creatures with equal eyes; therefore in the Eternal they have their root. He is not overjoyed when he getteth what is pleasant, he groweth not troubled when he tasteth bitterness, whose reason is firm & steadfast and he subjecteth not himself to delusion but knoweth the Eternal and in him abideth. His soul clings not to the touches of outward things but what happiness he finds, he finds in the Self, therefore his Self is made one in Yoga with Eternal Brahman & the happiness he tastes, does not cease or diminish. For the enjoyments that are born of touch and contact are very wombs of misery, they begin and they end; the wise man taketh no delight in these. For he who even on this earth and before his release from this mortal body hath strength to stand up in the speed and rush of wrath and lust, he hath Yoga, he is the happy man. That man is the Yogin whose bliss is within and his delight & ease are inward and an inner light illumines him & not this outer sun; he goeth to cessation in Eternal Brahman, for he becometh Brahman. Cessation in Brahman falleth to those who are Rishis from whom all stain & darkness have faded away, who have cut doubt away from their hearts and are masters of Self, whose whole delight & work is to do good to all created things. Round the strivers after perfection, round the governed souls, who are delivered from the grip of wrath and desire, lo the Paradise of cessation in Brahman liveth all about them, who have got the knowledge of the Self within. He who shuts out the touches of outward things from his soul and concentrates sight between his eyebrows, making equal the outbreath and the inbreath as they move within the nostrils, master of his sense and mind and reason who utterly desireth salvation and desire and wrath and fear have departed from him for ever, verily he is already a released and delivered soul. He knows me for the One that feasteth on man’s sacrifices and austerities, a mighty God who is the friend of every created thing, and knowing he travels to the Peace.
Essays on the Gita
The higher knowledge we then get is that which is to the knower of Brahman his constant vision of things when he lives uninterruptedly in the Brahman, brahmavid brahmaṇi sthitaḥ. That is not a vision or knowledge or consciousness of Brahman to the exclusion of all else, but a seeing of all in Brahman and as the Self. For, it is said, the knowledge by which we rise beyond all relapse back into the bewilderment of our mental4·35 nature, is “that by which thou shalt see all existences without exception in the Self, then in Me.” Elsewhere the Gita puts it more largely, “Equal-visioned everywhere, he sees the Self in all existences and all existences in the Self. He who sees Me everywhere and all and each in Me, is never lost to Me nor I to him. He who has reached oneness and loves Me in all beings, that Yogin, howsoever he lives and acts, is living and acting in Me. O Arjuna, he who sees all equally everywhere as himself, whether it be happiness or suffering, I hold him to be the supreme Yogin.” That is the old Vedantic knowledge of the Upanishads which the Gita holds up constantly before us; but it is its superiority to other later formulations of it that it turns persistently this knowledge into a great practical philosophy of divine living. Always it insists on the relation between this knowledge of oneness and Karmayoga, and therefore on the knowledge of oneness as the basis of a liberated action in the world. Whenever it speaks of knowledge, it turns at once to speak of equality which is its result; whenever it speaks of equality, it turns to speak too of the knowledge which is its basis. The equality it enjoins does not begin and end in a static condition of the soul useful only for self-liberation; it is always a basis of works. The peace of the Brahman in the liberated soul is the foundation; the large, free, equal, worldwide action of the Lord in the liberated nature radiates the power which proceeds from that peace; these two made one synthesise divine works and God-knowledge.
The Gita after speaking of the perfect equality of the Brahman-knower5·20 who has risen into the Brahman-consciousness, brahmavid brahmaṇi sthitaḥ, develops in nine verses that follow its idea of Brahmayoga and of Nirvana in the Brahman. “When the soul is no longer attached to the touches of outward things,” it begins,5·21 “then one finds the happiness that exists in the Self; such a one enjoys an imperishable happiness, because his self is in Yoga, yukta, by Yoga with the Brahman.” The non-attachment is essential, it says, in order to be free from the attacks of desire and wrath and passion, a freedom without which true happiness is not possible. That happiness and that equality are to be gained entirely by man in the body: he is not to suffer any least remnant of the subjection to the troubled lower nature to remain in the idea that the perfect release will come by a putting off of the body; a perfect spiritual freedom is to be won here upon earth and possessed and enjoyed in the human life, prāk śarīra-vimokṣaṇāt. It then continues, “He who has the inner happiness and the5·24 inner ease and repose and the inner light, that Yogin becomes the Brahman and reaches self-extinction in the Brahman, brahma-nirvāṇam.” Here, very clearly, Nirvana means the extinction of the ego in the higher spiritual, inner Self, that which is for ever timeless, spaceless, not bound by the chain of cause and effect and the changes of the world-mutation, self-blissful, self-illumined and for ever at peace. The Yogin ceases to be the ego, the little person limited by the mind and the body; he becomes the Brahman; he is unified in consciousness with the immutable divinity of the eternal Self which is immanent in his natural being.
Other writings
The abandonment of the world which is demanded of the Karmayogin is not necessarily a physical abandonment. You are not asked to give up your house and wealth, your wife, your children, your friends. What you have to give up is your selfish desire for them and your habit of regarding them as your possessions and…Read the whole passage · 855 wordsClose the passage
The abandonment of the world which is demanded of the Karmayogin is not necessarily a physical abandonment. You are not asked to give up your house and wealth, your wife, your children, your friends. What you have to give up is your selfish desire for them and your habit of regarding them as your possessions and chattels who are yours merely in order to give you pleasure. You are not asked to throw away the objects of your desire, but to give them up in your heart. It is the desire you have to part with and not the objects of the desire. The abandonment demanded of you is therefore a spiritual abandonment; the power to enjoy your material possessions in such spirit of detachment that you will not be overjoyed by gain, nor cast down by loss, is the test of its reality,—not the mere flight from their presence, which is simply a flight from temptation. The Karmayogin has to remain in the world & conquer it; he is not allowed to flee from the scene of conflict and shun the battle. His part in life is the part of the hero,—the one quality he must possess, is the lionlike courage that will dare to meet its spiritual enemies in their own country and citadel and tread them down under its heel. A spiritual abandonment then,—for the body only matters as the case of the spirit; it is the spirit on which the Karmayogin must concentrate his effort. To purify the body is well, only because it makes it easier to purify the spirit; in itself it is of no importance; but if the soul is pure, the body cannot be touched by uncleanness. If the spirit itself is not stained by desire, the material enjoyment of the objects of desire cannot stain it. For if my spirit does not lust after new wealth or cling to the wealth I have, then my use of riches must necessarily be selfless and without blame; and having parted with them in spirit and given them into the treasury of God, I can then truly enjoy their possession. That enjoyment is clear, deep and calm; fate cannot break it, robbers cannot take it away, enemies cannot overwhelm it. All other joy of possession is chequered and broken with fear, sorrow, trouble and passion,—the passion for its increase, the trouble of keeping it unimpaired, the sorrow for its diminution, the fear of its utter loss. Passionless enjoyment alone is pure & unmixed delight. If indeed you choose to abandon riches physically as well as in spirit, that too is well, provided you take care that you are not cherishing the thought of them in your mind. There is another curious law of which many who follow the path of spiritual renunciation, have had experience. It is this that such renunciation is often followed by a singular tendency for wealth to seek him who has ceased to seek wealth. A strong capable will bent on money-making, will doubtless win its desire, but at least as often wealth, fame and success flee from the man who longs after them and come to him who has conquered his longing. Their lover perishes without winning them or reaches them through deep mire of sin or a hell of difficulty or over mountains of toil, while the man who has turned his back on them, finds them crowding to lay themselves at his feet. He may then either enjoy or reject them. The latter is a great path and has been the chosen way of innumerable saintly sages. But the Karmayogin may enjoy them, not for his personal pleasure certainly, not for his false self, since that sort of enjoyment he has abandoned in his heart, but God in them and them for God. As a king merely touching the nazzerana passes it on to the public treasury, so shall the Karmayogin, merely touching the wealth that comes to him, pour it out for those around him, for the poor, for the worker, for his country, for humanity because he sees Brahman in all these. Glory, if it comes to him, he will veil in many folds of quiet and unobtrusive humility and use the influence it gives not for his own purposes but to help men more effectively in their needs or to lead them upward to the divine. Such a man will quickly rise above joy and sorrow, success and failure, victory and defeat; for in sorrow as in joy he will feel himself to be near God. That nearness will deepen into continual companionship and by companionship he will grow ever liker God in his spiritual image until he reaches the last summit of complete identity when man, the God who has forgotten his godhead, remembers utterly and becomes the Eternal. Selflessness then is the real & only law of renunciation; in the love of one’s wider self in others, it has its rise; by the feeling of the divine presence in all earthly objects, it becomes rooted & unshakeable; the realization of the Brahman is its completion and goal.
