Bhagavad Gita Chapter 4, Verses 16-42: Action in Inaction

Krishna paused, watching the confusion still working across Arjuna's face, and set out, deliberately, to make it worse before he made it better.

'Even the wise are bewildered about what is action and what is inaction,' he said. 'So I will explain karma to you clearly, and knowing it, you will be free from evil.'

'That would help,' Arjuna said, with the faint dryness of a man who has been promised clarity several times already that morning.

'One must understand action properly, and understand wrong action, and understand inaction as well,' Krishna said. 'The true nature of action is difficult to grasp. Whoever can see inaction within action, and action within inaction, is wise among men. Such a person is a yukta, disciplined, even while carrying out every kind of work.'

Arjuna turned the phrase over. 'Inaction within action. You mean a man can be busy, hands moving, orders given, and yet, in the way that matters, be doing nothing at all?'

'Exactly that,' Krishna said. 'And the reverse holds too, a man can sit entirely still, appear to be doing nothing whatsoever, and still be caught in the grip of restless, grasping action, because his mind has not stopped for a moment.'

'Then it was never about the hands,' Arjuna said slowly.

'It was never about the hands,' Krishna agreed. 'The sages call a man wise when all his undertakings are free of desire for a particular outcome and free of any scheme built around it, his actions burnt clean in the fire of knowledge. Action performed like that leaves no residue behind it, Arjuna, whatever it looks like from the outside, and that is the whole riddle, and the whole answer, folded into a single line.'

'Say more about that man,' Arjuna said. 'The one whose work leaves no residue.'

'He has given up attachment to the fruit of his action,' Krishna said, 'always content, dependent on nothing outside himself. Though he is fully engaged in work, in the truest sense he does nothing at all. Gata-sangasya muktasya, for a man whose attachments are gone, whose mind is established in knowledge, who acts purely as an offering, his entire work dissolves, leaves no trace to bind him.'

'That sounds like a man with nothing left to lose,' Arjuna said.

'More that he has stopped counting what he might lose,' Krishna said. 'He expects nothing, keeps his mind and his lower self under his own governance, has let go of every possession he once called his, even while his hands are still doing the work of the world. Acting only with the body, as it were, he incurs no sin by it.'

'No sin, even in war?'

'Satisfied with whatever comes to him without his seeking it,' Krishna went on, not quite answering yet, 'risen above the pairs of opposites, success and failure treated the same, envy set aside, steady in mind whether the outcome favors him or not, such a man is not bound, even when he acts.' He let that stand as the answer it was. 'His work has already been offered before it began. What returns to him afterward, success or failure, is not a verdict on him, because he never staked himself on the verdict to begin with.'

Arjuna thought of his own hands on the bow only a short while before, shaking, and of how much of that shaking had been less about the killing itself than about what killing his teachers and his kinsmen would make of him afterward, in his own eyes and in the world's.

'For a man like that,' Krishna finished, 'the work simply dissolves as it is done, the way salt dissolves in water and leaves no shape behind.'

'You use the word offering,' Arjuna said. 'As if every action could be made into a sacrifice, not only the ones performed at an altar.'

'That is exactly what I mean,' Krishna said. 'Brahmarpanam brahma havir, the act of offering is brahman, the oblation itself is brahman, offered by brahman into the fire that is brahman. Brahman is what is reached by the man who sees brahman in every action he performs. There is no part of the transaction, once seen clearly, that is not the one same reality meeting itself.'

'Then every kind of work can be a yajna. Not only the priest's.'

'There are many kinds,' Krishna said, and began to list them the way a man counts paths up the same mountain. 'Some offer sacrifice to the gods in the old way, with fire and mantra. Others offer the sacrifice itself into the fire of brahman. Some pour their very senses, hearing and the rest, into the fire of restraint. Others pour sound and every other object the senses reach for into the fires their senses have become. Some offer all the workings of their senses and the movements of their own breath into the fire of yoga kindled by knowledge, lit by discipline.'

'And beyond the senses?'

'Some make an offering of their wealth,' Krishna said. 'Others of austerity practiced on the body. Others of the breath itself, restrained and directed, the outgoing breath poured into the incoming, the incoming into the outgoing, until both are held still. Others fast, and offer up their very breath into breath. And every one of these, Arjuna, without exception, understands sacrifice, and through that sacrifice burns away what would otherwise remain to stain them.' He looked at Arjuna directly. 'The form varies enormously. The pattern underneath never does, something is given up, without grasping, to something larger than the hand that gives it.'

'Of all these offerings,' Arjuna asked, 'is any one greater than the rest?'

'The sacrifice of knowledge is better than any sacrifice of mere substance, Arjuna,' Krishna said. 'All action, without exception, finds its consummation in knowledge. Wealth given up is real, and it matters, but knowledge completes what wealth alone cannot.'

'Then how does a man come to it? Not everyone arrives at knowledge on his own.'

'Almost no one does,' Krishna said. 'Learn it through humble reverence, through sincere questioning, and through service, tad viddhi pranipatena pariprasnena sevaya. Those who have realized the truth themselves will instruct you in that knowledge, once they see you have genuinely come for it and not merely to test them.'

Arjuna nodded. It matched, he thought, exactly what this conversation itself had become.

'And once a man has it?' Krishna continued. 'Once he possesses that knowledge, he will not fall again into this kind of confusion, Arjuna. Through it he will see all beings, without exception, within himself, and within me. Even if you were the very worst of sinners among all sinners, this raft of knowledge alone would carry you across the entire ocean of wrongdoing.'

'That is a large claim for anyone to make about a single thing.'

'As a burning fire reduces wood to ashes, Arjuna,' Krishna said, 'so does the fire of knowledge reduce every action to ash. There is nothing in this world as purifying as knowledge. A man who has perfected himself in yoga finds it, in time, within his own self, of its own accord.' He let the image of the fire sit there a moment, not a fire that consumed the man himself, only the accumulated weight he had been dragging behind him, verse after verse, without ever quite noticing how heavy it had become.

'And if a man has heard all of this,' Arjuna said, 'and still cannot quite bring himself to trust it?'

'Faith matters more than you might expect,' Krishna said. 'The man of faith, devoted to this knowledge, his senses mastered, obtains it, and having obtained it, comes swiftly to the highest peace. But the man without knowledge, without faith, whose very self is full of doubt, is lost. There is no happiness for the doubting self, Arjuna, not in this world, not in the next, not anywhere. Samsayatma vinasyati. The doubting self perishes.'

'That sounds harsh, for something as ordinary as doubt.'

'It is not the honest question that ruins a man,' Krishna said. 'You have been asking me honest questions all morning, and I have welcomed every one of them, pariprasnena, remember, is how knowledge is properly learned in the first place. What destroys a man is a different thing: standing forever at the threshold, turning the same doubt over and over, and calling the turning itself a kind of safety, when really it is only delay wearing the costume of caution.'

Arjuna said nothing for a moment, and Krishna let the silence hold.

'So here is what I ask of you now,' Krishna finished. 'Cut through this doubt that has arisen in your own heart with the sword of knowledge, Arjuna. Take refuge in yoga. Stand up.'

It was, in its way, the plainest instruction Krishna had given all morning, after a chapter that had ranged across the birth of gods, the many shapes an offering can take, and the burning of accumulated deeds to ash. Everything he had said about action folding into inaction, about a hundred disciplines resolving into one, about knowledge as a fire, all of it collapsed, in the end, into four words that anyone standing at the edge of a hard decision, on a battlefield or nowhere near one, could still recognize as sound advice. Settle the doubt. Get up.