52 When your mind has overcome the confusion of duality, you willattain the state of holy indifference to things you hear and things you have heard.
53 When you are unmoved by the confusion of ideas and your mind is completely united in deep samadhi, you will attain the state of perfect yoga.
ARJUNA
54 Tell me of those who live established in wisdom, ever aware of the Self, O Krishna. How do they talk? How sit? How move about?
KRISHNA
55 They live in wisdom who see themselves in all and all in them,who have renounced every selfish desire and sense craving tormenting the heart.
56 Neither agitated by grief nor hankering after pleasure, they live free from lust and fear and anger. Established in meditation, they are truly wise.
57 Fettered no more by selfish attachments, they are neither elated by good fortune nor depressed by bad. Such are the seers.
58 Even as a tortoise draws in its limbs, the wise can draw in their senses at will.
59 Aspirants abstain from sense pleasures, but they still crave for them. These cravings all disappear when they see the highest goal.
60 Even of those who tread the path, the stormy senses can sweep off the mind.
61 They live in wisdom who subdue their senses and keep their minds ever absorbed in me.
62 When you keep thinking about sense objects, attachment comes.
Attachment breeds desire, the lust of possession that burns to anger.
63 Anger clouds the judgment; you can no longer learn from past mistakes. Lost is the power to choose between what is wise and what is unwise, and your life is utter waste.
64 But when you move amidst the world of sense, free from attachment and aversion alike,
65 there comes the peace in which all sorrows end, and you live in the wisdom of the Self.
66 The disunited mind is far from wise; how can it meditate? How be at peace? When you know no peace, how can you know joy?
67 When you let your mind follow the call of the senses, they carry away your better judgment as storms drive a boat off its charted course on the sea.
68 Use all your power to free the senses from attachment and aversion alike, and live in the full wisdom of the Self.
69 Such a sage awakes to light in the night of all creatures. That which the world calls day is the night of ignorance to the wise.
70 As rivers flow into the ocean but cannot make the vast oceanoverflow, so flow the streams of the sense-world into the sea of peace that is the sage. But this is not so with the desirer of desires.
71 They are forever free who renounce all selfish desires and breakaway from the ego-cage of “I,” “me,” and “mine” to be united with the Lord.
72 This is the supreme state. Attain to this, and pass from death to immortality.
Chapter Three, Selfless Service
The title of this chapter in Sanskrit is Karma Yoga, “The Way of Action,” and here we take an apparently sharp turn away from the subject of the previous chapter. In fact, Arjuna changes the subject completely. Krishna has been trying to convince him that he has an immortal soul, but Arjuna continues to worry about his immediate predicament. It is not that he is uninterested in mystical enlightenment, but his main concern at the moment is just what he is supposed to do next.
Or, he asks, perhaps what he does is not so important after all. Has Krishna been telling him to concentrate on acquiring spiritual wisdom and to forget about his apparent duties in the world?
Krishna replies that there is no way Arjuna can avoid the obligation of selfless action, or karma yoga. Arjuna must act selflessly, out of a sense of duty. He must work not for his own sake, but for the welfare of all. Krishna points out that this is a basic law underlying all creation. Each being must do its part in the grand scheme of things, and there is no way to avoid this obligation – except perhaps by the complete enlightenment which loosens all the old bonds of karma.
Here the Gita refers to the doctrine of karma, one of the basic teachings in all Hindu and Buddhist scriptures. Karma literally means deed or action; what is sometimes called the “law of karma” refers to an underlying law of cause and effect that is seen to permeate all existence. The idea is that every action leads to a reasonable result – and, consequently, that everything that happens can be traced to something done in the past.
Actions determine destiny: this is the basic idea of karma. If anything happens to us that is truly good, we must have done something in the past to deserve it; if something ill befalls us, then at some time in the past we did something that was not so meritorious. This is a basic moral law that all great spiritual traditions share: the belief that we reap what we sow.
The Hindu tradition gave a great deal of thought to this problem of moral cause and effect, and generation after generation of spiritual teachers fathomed its depths and implications. One fear that developed over time was that all action was in a sense an open door to bondage: anything a person did would bind him to the endless cycle of cause and effect.
Some “fruits” of action would of course be pleasant – not all karma is painful. But even this pleasure could be a trap, because we would seek it compulsively, tying ourselves tighter and tighter to the responsibilities and opportunities of the worldly life and forgetting our spiritual dimension altogether.
In chapter 3 Krishna begins to tell Arjuna the way out of this maze of cause and effect. It is not to avoid work, especially the duties required by his station in life, but to perform those duties without selfish attachment to their “fruit,” or outcome. If Arjuna follows this path of selfless work, Krishna explains, he will enjoy this world as well as the next. More important, he will gain a spiritual blessing and will be lessening his debt of karma. Only when he is free from every bond of karma – every consequence of past action – can he achieve life’s ultimate goal.
The world is bound in its own activity, for all creatures except the illumined man or woman work for their own pleasure and gain. Because they act selfishly, they are bound by the results, whether good or bad. We must act in a selfless spirit, Krishna says, without ego-involvement and without getting entangled in whether things work out the way we want; only then will we not fall into the terrible net of karma. We cannot hope to escape karma by refraining from our duties: even to survive in the world, we must act.
True, the Hindu scriptures do hold out another path – jnana yoga, the path of wisdom – which does not enjoin action. But Krishna does not really offer this to Arjuna as an alternative; it is acknowledged and then dropped. Perhaps Krishna knows that Arjuna is not the type to disengage himself and go off on a search for the mystical vision. For Arjuna, the active life is essential.
The danger, of course, of a life of active engagement in the world is that Arjuna will get caught up in his actions and begin to act out of selfish motives. If this were to happen, he would be doomed to spiritual failure.
Having a good deal of self-knowledge, Arjuna senses this danger. He asks Krishna a fundamental question: What power binds us to our selfish ways? Even if we wish to act rightly, so often we do the wrong thing. What power moves us?
Krishna replies that anger and selfish desire are our greatest enemies. They are the destructive powers that can compel us to wander away from our purpose, to end up in self-delusion and despair.
Here it is necessary to introduce two technical terms from Hindu philosophy. The Gita is not an academic work of philosophy, but a poetic, practical text. Still, it does refer from time to time to Sankhya, one of the six traditional schools of Indian philosophy. In Sankhya, the phenomenal world of mind and matter is described as having three basic qualities or gunas: sattva– goodness, light, purity; rajas– passion, activity, energy; and tamas– darkness, ignorance, inertia. According to Sankhya, spiritual evolution progresses from tamas to rajas to sattva, and final liberation takes the soul beyond the three gunas altogether.
Here Krishna warns Arjuna to beware the pitfalls of rajas, for it is from rajas that anger and selfish desire arise. Arjuna must realize that his true nature, the Atman, is above entanglement in the gunas. The gunas act and react upon one another, but Arjuna’s inner being is not affected. If he cannot reach this detachment, he will be always caught in the emotional storms of passion (rajas) or the quagmires of inertia (tamas) which alternate in dominating the mind and body.
Krishna offers Arjuna the example of King Janaka, well known from holy legend, as a model for the princely estate. Janaka was a king who ruled well and did not shirk his responsibilities, yet he was detached and worked from a sense of duty, not for personal gain or enjoyment. He was revered as a royal sage who pursued his enlightenment not by renouncing the world, but by working in it and contributing to its welfare, thus enjoying the
