Bhagavad Gita Chapter 5: The Yoga of Renunciation

Arjuna sat with the reins loose in his hands, turning over everything Krishna had said about knowledge and the fire that burns away the residue of deeds, and found that instead of settling his mind, it had opened a new crack in it.

"Krishna, you praise the renunciation of action, and in the same breath you praise the performance of action," he said. "Tell me clearly which one thing is better, so that I may follow it without this constant turning between the two."

It was not an unreasonable complaint. Krishna had spoken of the sage who acts without craving results as though he were already free, and of the wise man who sees inaction inside action, and Arjuna, practical soldier that he was, wanted a single road, not a description of the landscape.

Krishna considered him with the patient look of a teacher who has heard this exact confusion many times before, in many other lifetimes, from many other students standing at many other crossroads.

"Both renunciation of works and their disciplined performance lead to the highest good, Arjuna," he said. "But of the two, working in the spirit of yoga, without attachment to the fruit, is better than merely giving up action outright."

The distinction was subtle, and Krishna did not rush past it. Renunciation without yoga, he explained, without the steady discipline of an unattached mind, is difficult to achieve and easily becomes another kind of clinging, a pride in having renounced. But the one who works, offering the results without grasping at them, reaches peace swiftly, and reaches it while still standing in the world rather than having fled it.

"He who is skilled in yoga and whose self is purified, who has conquered his own mind and subdued his senses, whose self becomes the self of every being, such a man is not tainted even while performing action," Krishna said. "He who knows the truth thinks, in the midst of seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, eating, moving, sleeping, breathing, speaking, releasing, grasping, even opening and closing his eyes, that it is only the senses moving among the objects of the senses, and that he himself does nothing at all."

Arjuna turned this image over. It sounded, at first, like a kind of trick, a man pretending his hands were not his hands. But Krishna's meaning was different, and he pressed it further.

"The man of discipline who acts, dedicating his actions to the eternal, abandoning attachment, is untouched by wrong, as a lotus leaf is untouched by the water it rests upon," he said. "Yogis perform action only with the body, the mind, the intellect, and even the senses, giving up attachment, for the purification of the self."

"So renunciation and disciplined action are not enemies," Arjuna said slowly, working it out aloud. "They are two names for the same arrival, seen from different roads."

"Just so," Krishna answered. "The disciplined man, having abandoned the fruit of action, attains lasting peace. The undisciplined man, driven by desire, attached to the fruit, is bound. The self-controlled man renounces all actions mentally and dwells at ease in the nine-gated city of the body, neither acting himself nor causing others to act, for it is nature's own qualities that are truly at work, not the self at all."

Krishna's voice grew quieter, but no less firm, as though he were describing something he had watched happen many times and never tired of.

"The wise look with an equal eye on a learned and gentle brahmin, on a cow, on an elephant, and even on a dog, and on an outcaste who eats the flesh of dogs," he said. "Those whose minds rest in this equality have, even here in this life, overcome the whole cycle of birth, for the eternal is flawless and equal in all things, and so their minds rest firmly in the eternal."

Arjuna looked out at the field, at the mingled ranks of kings, charioteers, foot soldiers and camp servants who would all, before this day and the days after it, be reduced to the same dust regardless of the birth each had claimed proudly or endured quietly.

"One should not rejoice on obtaining what is pleasant, nor tremble on encountering what is unpleasant," Krishna continued. "Such a person, firm of understanding, unconfused, knowing the eternal, rests established in the eternal. His self unattached to external contacts, he finds happiness within himself. His self joined to the eternal through yoga, he enjoys happiness that does not perish."

He paused, watching a hawk circle above the two waiting armies, indifferent to their banners.

"Such a man sees the same in all beings, Arjuna, whatever their station, whatever their fortune. He does not measure a life by the accident of its birth, but by the truth that dwells equally inside every birth. This seeing does not come from argument. It comes from stillness, sustained until it becomes the only way one knows how to look at the world."

"The pleasures that are born of contact with the senses, Arjuna, though they seem like sources of happiness to the deluded, are in truth wells of sorrow," Krishna said. "They have a beginning and they have an end, and the wise do not delight in them."

Arjuna, who like most men had known both the sweetness and the after-ache of such pleasures, did not argue the point.

"The man who is able, even here while still living in this body, to withstand the force of desire and anger, before he is released from it, that man is disciplined, that man is happy," Krishna said. "He who finds his happiness within, his joy within, and likewise his light only within, that yogi, being one with the eternal, attains the peace of the eternal."

He spoke then of a state Arjuna had heard named but never understood, brahma-nirvana, the extinguishing of the small, hungry self into something vast and unshaken.

"The sages whose sins are dissolved, whose doubts are cut away, whose minds are disciplined, who delight in the welfare of all beings, attain the peace of the eternal," Krishna said. "For those self-controlled ascetics who are free from desire and anger, who have subdued their minds, who know the self, the peace of the eternal exists on every side, near at hand and always available, not hidden in some distant world."

Arjuna considered his own life, the years of training, the years of exile, the long approach to this single unbearable morning, and wondered whether such nearness to peace had been available to him all along, waiting only for him to stop reaching past it toward the pleasures and griefs that had always, in the end, faded the same way.

"How does one live like this, Krishna," Arjuna asked, "in the world, upon a battlefield even, and still touch this peace you describe?"

"By shutting out external contacts and fixing the gaze between the eyebrows," Krishna said, "by making the incoming and outgoing breaths move evenly within the nostrils, the sage who has controlled the senses, the mind and the intellect, intent on release, free from desire, fear and anger, is forever liberated."

He let the technical instruction settle, then softened it into something more like a description of character than a method.

"Knowing me as the enjoyer of all sacrifice and austerity, the great lord of all worlds, the friend of every being, he attains peace," Krishna said. "This is not a peace bought by withdrawing from your duty on this field, Arjuna. It is a peace that can be carried into the duty itself, the way a strong swimmer carries his breath into deep water without losing it."

Arjuna looked once more at the ranks before him, at the grandsire's white banner and the long shadow it cast across the trampled grass, and found that the question he had asked at the start of this teaching, whether to renounce or to act, no longer felt like a fork in the road at all. It felt, instead, like two words for the same walking.

"Then let me act," Arjuna said, "but let me act as you have described, unattached, seeing the one self in friend and enemy alike, seeking nothing for myself in what follows."

Krishna said nothing further, only nodded, as a teacher does when a student has, for the moment, arrived exactly where he needed to.

The hawk that had circled above the two armies drifted lower, unhurried, indifferent to the choice being settled below it, and for a breath the whole field seemed to hold the same stillness Krishna had described, the stillness of a man untouched by what passes through his hands.