THIRD CHAPTER

1. WORKS AND SACRIFICE

1. Arjuna said: If thou holdest the intelligence to be greater¹ than works, O Janardana, why then dost thou, O Keshava, appoint me to a terrible work ?

2. Thou seemest to be bewilder my intelligence with a confused and mingled speech; tell me then decisively that one thing by which I may attain to my soul's weal.

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1. The Yoga of the intelligent will and its culmination in the Brahmic status, which occupies all the close of the second chapter, contains the seed of much of the teaching of the Gita, —its doctrine of desireless works, of equality, of the rejection of outward renunciation, of devotion to the Divine; but as yet all this is slight and obscure. What is most strongly emphasised as yet is the withdrawal of the will from the ordinary motive of human activities, desire, from man's normal temperament of sense-seeking thought and will with its passions and ignorance, and from its customary habit of troubled many-branching ideas and wishes to the desireless calm unity and passionless serenity of the Brahmic poise. So much Arjuna has under- stood. He is not unfamiliar with all this; it is the substance of the current teaching which points man to the path of knowledge and to the renunciation of life and works as his way of perfection. Krishna seems quite to admit the orthodox philosophic doctrine (Vedantic Sankhya) when he "says that works are far inferior to the Yoga of the intelligence (Ch. II,

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3. The Blessed Lord said: In this world twofold is the self-application of the soul (by which it enters into the Brahmic condition), as I before said, O sinless one: that of Sankhyas by the Yoga of knowledge, that of the Yogins by the Yoga of works.¹

Sl. 49). And yet works are insisted upon as part of the Yoga so that there seems to be in this teaching a radical inconsistency. It is in answer to this objection that the Gita begins at once to develop more clearly its positive and imperative doctrine of works.

1, The whole object of the first six chapters of the Gita is to synthetise in a large frame of Vedantic truth the two methods, ordinarily supposed to be diverse and even opposite.Whatever the precise distinctions of their metaphysical ideas, the practical difference between Sankhya and Yoga as developed by the Gita is the same as that which now exists between the Vedantic Yogas of knowledge and of works, and the practical results of the difference are also the same. The Sankhya proceeded like, the Vedantic Yoga of knowledge by the Buddhi, by the* discriminating intelligence; it. arrived by reflective thought, vichara, at right discrimination, viveka, of the true nature of the soul and of the imposition on it of the works of Prakrit! through attachment and identification, just as the Vedantic method arrives by the, same means at the right discrimination of the true nature of the Self and of the imposi- tion on it of cosmic appearances by mental illusion which leads to egoistic identification and attachment. In the Vedantic method Maya ceases for the soul by its return to its true and eternal status as the one Self, the Brahman, and the cosmic action disappears ; in the Sankhya method the working of the gunas falls to rest by the return of the soul to its true and eternal status as the inactive Purusha and the cosmic action ends. The Brahman of the Mayavadins is silent, immutable and inactive; so too is the Purusha of the Sankhya; therefore for both ascetic renunciation of life and works is a necessary means of liberation. But for the Yoga of the Gita, as for the Vedantic Yoga of works, action is not only a preparation but itself the. means of liberation; and it is the justice of this view which the Gita seeks to bring out with such an unceasing force and insistence,—an insistence, unfortunately, which could not .prevail in India against the tremendous tide of Buddhism, was lost afterwards in the intensity of ascetic illusionism (made popular by Shankara) and the fervour of world-shunning saints and devotees and is only now beginning to exercise its real and salutary influence on the Indian mind. Renunciation is indispensable, but the true renunciation is the inner rejection of desire and egoism; without that the outer physical abandoning

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4. Not by abstention fro works does a man enjoy actionlessness,¹ nor by mere renunciation ( of works) does he attain to his perfection ( to siddhi, the accomplishment of the aims of his self-discipline by Yoga).

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of works is a thing unreal and ineffective, with it it ceases even to be necessary, although it is not forbidden. Knowledge is essential, there is no higher force for liberation, but works with knowledge are also needed; by the union of knowledge and works the soul dwells entirely in the Brahmic status not only in repose and inactive calm, but in the very midst and stress and violence of action. Devotion is all-important, but works with devotion are also important; by the union of knowledge, devotion and works the soul is taken up into the highest status of the lshwara to dwell there in the Purushottama who is master at once of the eternal spiritual calm and the eternal cosmic activity. This is the synthesis of the Gita.

1 Naishkarmya, a calm voidness from works, is no doubt that to which the soul, the Purusha has to attain; for it is Prakriti which does the work and the soul has to rise above involution in the activities of the being and attain to a free serenity and poise watching over the operations of Prakriti, but not affected by them. That, and not cessation of the work of Prakriti, is what is really meant by the soul's naishkarmya.

But if the works of Prakriti continue, how can the soul help being involved in them ? How can I fight and yet in my soul not think or feel that I the individual am fighting, not desire victory nor be inwardly touched by defeat ? This is the teaching of the Sankhyas that the intelligence of the man who engages in the activities of Nature, is entangled in egoism, ignorance and desire and therefore drawn to action; on the contrary, if the intelligence draws back, then the action must cease with the cessation of the desire and the ignorance. Therefore the giving up of life and works is a necessary part, an inevitable circumstance and an indispensable last means of the movement to liberation. This objection of a current logic, the Teacher immediately anticipates. No, he says, such renunciation, far from being indispensable, is not even possible.

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5. For none stands even for a moment not doing work, everyone is made to do action¹ helplessly by the modes born of Prakriti.

6. Who controls the organs of action, but continues in his mind² to remember and dwell upon the objects of sense, such a man has bewildered himself with false notions of self-discipline.

7. He who controlling the senses by the mind, O Arjuna, without attachment engages with the organs of action in Yoga of action, he excels.

1 The strong perception of the great cosmic action and the eternal activity and power of the cosmic energy which was so much emphasised afterwards by the teaching of the Tantric Shaktas who even made Prakriti or Shakti superior to Purusha, is a very remarkable feature of the Gita. Although here an undertone, it is still strong enough, coupled with what we might call the theistic and devotional elements of its thought, to bring in that activism which so strongly modifies in its scheme of Yoga the quietistic tendencies of the old metaphysical Vedanta. Man embodied in the natural world cannot cease from action, not for a moment, not for a second; his very existence here is an action; the whole universe is an act of God, mere living even is His movement.

2 It is not our physical movements and activities alone which are meant by works, by karma; our mental existence also is a great complex action, it is even the greater and more important part of the works of the unresting energy,-—subjective cause and determinant of the physical. We have gained nothing if we repress the effect but retain the activity of the subjective cause.

Since the mind is the instrumental cause, since inaction is impossible, what is rational, necessary, the right way is a controlled action of the subjective and objective organism.

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8. Do¹ thou do controlled² action, for action is greater than inaction; even the maintenance of thy physical life cannot be effected without action.

9. By doing works otherwise than for sacrifice, this world of men is in bondage to works; for sacrifice³

1 Do action thus self-controlled, says Krishna: I have said that knowledge, the intelligence, is greater than works, jyayasi karmano buddhih, but I did not mean that inaction is greater than action ; the contrary is the truth, karma jyayo akarmanah. For knowledge does not mean renunciation of works, it means equality and non-attachment to desire and the objects of sense; and it means the poise of the intelligent will in the Soul free and high-uplifted above the lower instrumentation of Prakriti and controlling the works of the mind and the senses and body in the power of self-knowledge and the pure objectless self- delight of spiritual realisation, niyatam karma. Buddhiyoga is fulfilled by Karmayoga; the Yoga of the self-liberating intelli- gent will finds its full meaning by the Yoga of desireless works. Thus the Gita founds its teaching of the necessity of desireless works, nishkama karma, and unites the subjective practice of the Sankhyas—rejecting their merely physical rule—with the practice of Yoga.

But still there is an essential difficulty unsolved. How, our nature being what it is and desire the common principle of its action, is it possible to institute a really desireless action ? For what we call ordinarily disinterested action is not really desireless; it is simply replacement of certain smaller perso- nal interests by other large desires which have only the appearance of being impersonal, virtue, country, mankind. How is true desirelessness to be brought about ? By doing all works with sacrifice as the only object, is the reply of the divine Teacher.

2 We cannot accept the current interpretation of niyatam karma as if it meant fixed and formal works and were equivalent to the Vedic nityakarma, the regular works of sacrifice, ceremonial and the daily rule of Vedic living. Surely, niyata, simply takes up the niyamya of the last verse. Not formal works fixed by an external rule, but desireless works controlled by the liberated buddhi, is the Gita's teaching.

3. It is evident that all works and not merely sacrifice and social duties can be done in this spirit; any action may be done either from the ego-sense narrow or enlarged or for the

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practise works, O son of Kunti, becoming free from all attachment.

10. With sacrifice the Lord of creatures of old created creatures and said, By this shall you bring forth ( fruits or offspring), let this be your milker of desires.

11. Foster by this the gods and let the gods foster you; fostering each other, you shall attain to the supreme good.

12. Fostered by sacrifice the gods shall give you desired enjoyments; who enjoys their given enjoyments and has not given to them, he is a thief.

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sake of the Divine. All being and all action of Prakriti exist only for the sake of the Divine; from that it proceeds, by that it endures, to that it is directed. All life, all world-existence is the sacrifice offered by Nature to the Purusha, the one and secret soul in Nature, in whom all her workings take place; but its real sense is obscured in us by ego, by desire, by our limited, active, multiple personality. So long as we are dominated by the ego-sense we cannot perceive or act in the spirit of this truth, but act for the satisfaction of the ego and in the spirit of the ego, otherwise than for sacrifice. Egoism is the knot of the bondage. By acting Godwards, without any thought of ego, we loosen this knot and finally arrive at freedom.

The Gita's theory of sacrifice is stated in two separate passages; one we find here in the third chapter, another in the fourth; the first gives it in language which might, taken by itself, seem to be speaking only of the ceremonial sacrifice ; the second interpreting that into the sense of a large philosophical symbolism, transforms at once its whole significance and raises it to a plane of high psychological and spiritual truth.

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13. The good who eat what is left from the sacrifice, are released from all sin; but evil are they and enjoy sin who cook (the food) for their own sake.

14-15. From food creatures come into being, from rain is the birth of food, from sacrifice comes into being the rain, sacrifice is born of work; work know to be born of Brahman, Brahman is born of the Immutable; therefore is the all-pervading Brahman established in the sacrifice.

16. He who follows not here the wheel thus set in movement, evil is his being, sensual is his delight, in vain, O Partha, that man lives.¹

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1.In the Gita there is very little that is merely local or temporal and its spirit is so large, profound and universal that even this little can easily be universalised without the sense of the teaching suffering any diminution or violation; rather by giving an ampler scope to it than belonged to the country and epoch, the teaching gains in depth, truth and power. Often indeed the Gita itself suggests the wider scope that can in this way be given to an idea in itself local or limited. Thus it dwells on the ancient Indian system and idea of sacrifice as an interchange between gods and men,—a system and idea which have long been practically obsolete in India itself and are no longer real to the general human mind ; but we find here a sense so entirely subtle, figurative and symbolic given to the word " sacrifice " and the conception of the gods is so little local or mythological, so entirely cosmic and philosophical that we can easily accept both as expressive of a practical fact of psychology and general law of Nature and so apply them to the modern conceptions of interchange between life and life and of ethical sacrifice and self-

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17. But the man whose delight is in the Self and who is satisfied with the enjoyment of the Self and in the Self he is content, for him there exists no work that needs to be done.

18. He has no object to be gained by action done and none to be gained by action undone; he has no dependence on all these existences for any object to be gained.¹

19. Therefore without attachment perform ever the work that is to be done (done for the sake of the world, lokasangraha, as is made clear immediately afterwards); for by doing work without attachment man attains to the highest.¹

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giving as to widen and deepen these and cast over them a more spiritual aspect and the light of a profounder and more far-reaching Truth.

Having thus stated the necessity of sacrifice, Krishna .proceeds to state the superiority of the spiritual man to works.

1.Here are the two ideals, Vedist and Vedantist, standing as if in all their sharp original separation and opposition, on one side the active ideal of acquiring enjoyments here and the highest good beyond by sacrifice and the mutual dependence of the human being and the divine powers and on the other, facing it, the austerer ideal of the liberated man who, independent in the Spirit, has nothing to do with enjoyment or works or the human or the divine worlds, but exists only in the peace of the supreme Self, joys only in the calm joy of the Brahman. The next verses create a ground for the reconciliation between the two extremes; the secret is not inaction as soon as one turns towards the higher truth, but desireless action both before and after it is reached. The liberated man has nothing to gain by action, but nothing also to gain by inaction, and it is not at all for any personal object that he has to make his choice.

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20. It was even by works² that Janaka and the rest attained to perfection. Thou shouldst do works regarding also the holding together of the peoples.

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1 It is true that works and sacrifice are a means of arriving at the highest good; but there are three kinds of works, that done without sacrifice for personal enjoyment which is entirely selfish and egoistic and misses the true law and aim and utility of life, mogham parti-id, sa jivati, that done with desire, but with sacrifice and the enjoyment only as a result of sacrifice and therefore to that extent consecrated and sanctified, and that done without desire or attachment of any kind. It is the last which brings the soul of man to the highest.

2 Tlhere are few more important passages in the Gita than these seven striking couplets. But let us clearly understand that they must not be interpreted, as the modern pragmatic tendency concerned much more with the present affairs of the world than with any high and far-off spiritual possibility seeks to interpret them, as no more than a philosophical and religious justification of social service, patriotic, cosmopolitan and humanitarian effort and attachment to the hundred eager social scliemes and dreams which attract the modern intelect. It is not the rule of a large moral and intellectual altruism which is here announced, but that of a spiritual unity with God and with this world of beings who dwell in Him and in whom He dwells. It is not an injunction to subordinate the individual. to society and humanity or immolate egoism on the altar of the' human collectivity, but to fulfil the individual in God and to sacrifice the ego on the one true altar of the all-embracing
Divinity. The Gita moves on a plane of ideas and experiences higher than those of the modern mind which is at the stage indeed of a struggle to shake off the coils of egoism, but is still mundane in its outlook and intellectual and moral rather than spiritual in its temperament. Patriotism, cosmopolitanism, service of society, collectivism, humanitarianism, the ideal or religion of humanity are admirable aids towards our escape from our primary condition of individual, family, social, national egoism into a secondary stage in which the individual realises, as far as it can be done on the intellectual, moral and emotional level,—on that level he cannot do it entirely in the right and perfect way, the way of the integral truth of his being,—the

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21. Whatsoever the Best¹ death, that the lower kind of man puts into practice; the standard he creates, the people follows.

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oneness of his existence with the existence of other beings. But. the thought of the Gita reaches beyond to a tertiary condition of our developing self-consciousness towards which the secondary is only a partial stage of advance.

The rule given here by the Gita is the rule for the master man, the superman, the divinised human being, the Best, not Lin the sense of any Nietzschean, any one-sided and lop-sided, any Olympian, Apollonian or Dionysian, any angelic or demoniac Supermanhood, but in that of the man whose whole personality [has been offered up into the being, nature and consciousness of the one transcendent and universal Divinity and by loss of the smaller self has found its greater self, has been divinised.

To exalt oneself out of the lower imperfect Prakriti, traigunyamayi May a, into unity with the divine, being, consciousness and nature,* madbhavam agatah, is the object of the Yoga. put when this object is fulfilled, when the man is in the Brahmic status and sees no longer with the false egoistic vision himself and the world, but sees all beings in the Self, in God, and the Self in all beings, God in all beings, what shall be the action,— [since action there still is,—which results from that seeing, and .what shall be the cosmic or individual motive of all his works ? It is the question of Arjuna (Ch. II. Sl. 54) but answered from a standpoint other than that from which Arjuna had put it. The motive cannot be personal desire on the intellectual, moral, emotional level, for that has been abandoned,—
even the moral motive has been abandoned, since the liberated man has passed beyond the lower distinction of sin and virtue, lives in a glorified purity beyond good and evil. It cannot be the spiritual call to his perfect self-development by means of disinterested works, for the call. has been answered, the development is perfect and fulfilled. His motive of action can only be the holding together of the peoples, chikirshzir lokasangraham. This great march of the peoples towards a far-off divine ideal has to be held together, prevented from falling into the bewilderment, confusion and utter discord of the understanding which would lead to dissolution and destruction and to which the world moving forward in the night

Sayujya, salokya and sadrishya or sadharmya. Sadharmya is becoming of one law of being and action with the Divine,

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22. O Son of Pritha, I¹ 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 cha karmani,—eva implying, I abide in it and do not leave it as the sannyasin thinks himself bound to abandon works).

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 works and

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.or dark twilight of ignorance would be too easily prone if it were not held together, conducted, kept to the great lines of its discipline by the illumination, by the strength, by the rule and example, by the visible standard and the invisible influence of its Best. But the divinised man is the Best in no ordinary sense of the world and his influence, his example must have a power which that of no ordinary superior man can exercise. In order to indicate more perfectly his meaning, the divine Teacher, the Avatar gives his own example, his own standard to Arjuna.

1.The giving of the example of God himself to the liberated man is profoundly significant; for it reveals the whole basis of'' the Gita's philosophy of divine works. The liberated man is he who has exalted himself into the divine nature and according to that divine nature must be his actions. Neither the dynamism of the kinetic man nor the actionless light of the ascetic or quietist, neither the vehement personality of the man of action nor the indifferent impersonality of the philosophic sage is the complete divine ideal. These are the two conflicting standards of the man of this world and the ascetic or the quietist philosopher, one immersed in the action of the Kshara, the other striving to dwell entirely in the peace of the Akshara; but the complete divine ideal proceeds from the nature of the Purushottama which transcends this conflict and reconciles all divine possibilities.

Physical, vital, mental (including the higher mental worlds).

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I should be the creator of confusion and slay these creatures.

25. As those who know not act with attachment to the action, he who knows should act without attachment to the action, he who knows should act without attachment, having for his motive to hold together the peoples.

26. 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.

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1 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 I 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.

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