Bhagavad Gita Chapter 6: The Yoga of Meditation

Krishna shifted the thread of the teaching, moving from the equal-sighted sage of the previous discourse toward something more like instruction, as a teacher moves from describing the summit to describing the actual footholds on the climb.

"He who performs his duty without depending on the fruit of action, Arjuna, he is the true sannyasi, the true renunciant, and the true yogi," Krishna said, "not the man who has merely given up lighting the sacrificial fire, and not the man who has abandoned all activity out of laziness dressed up as detachment."

Arjuna considered the many ascetics he had seen in his travels through forest and hermitage, men who had set aside home and fire and family, and wondered how many of them Krishna's distinction would actually spare from criticism.

"Know that what men call renunciation is the same as disciplined action, Arjuna, for no one becomes a yogi who has not renounced his own selfish purpose," Krishna continued. "For the sage who wishes to climb toward yoga, action is said to be the means. For that same person once he has arrived at yoga, stillness is said to be the means."

He let the sequence sit clearly between them, a ladder rather than a contradiction: work first, to purify the restless self, and only then the quiet.

"A man is said to have climbed to yoga when he is no longer attached to the objects of the senses, nor to actions, when he has renounced every selfish intention," Krishna said. "One must lift oneself by one's own self, and not let the self sink down, for the self alone is the friend of the self, and the self alone its own enemy. To the man who has conquered himself by himself, his own self is a true friend, but to the man who has failed to conquer himself, his own self remains hostile, like an enemy."

"Tell me then how a man sits down to this practice," Arjuna said, "not merely what he thinks, but where his body goes and what his eyes do."

Krishna answered with the specificity of someone who had taught this many times before, in ages Arjuna could not remember.

"Let the yogi constantly discipline himself, remaining in a secret place, alone, his mind and body controlled, free from expectation, without possessions," he said. "Let him set up a firm seat for himself in a clean spot, neither too high nor too low, covered with kusha grass, then a deerskin, and then a cloth over that."

He described the posture as a builder describes a foundation, without embellishment.

"Sitting on that seat, making the mind one-pointed, restraining the activity of the thinking mind and the senses, let him practice yoga for the purification of the self. Holding body, head and neck erect and still, steady, gazing at the tip of his own nose, without looking around in any direction, with a tranquil self, free from fear, firm in the vow of a celibate student, his mind restrained, his thoughts fixed on me, let him sit disciplined, given over to me."

Arjuna pictured it, the utter stillness of such a figure against the churn of the world outside, and Krishna gave him the image that would outlast the instruction itself.

"As a lamp sheltered from the wind does not flicker, so is the disciplined mind of the yogi practicing union with the self, likened to that same lamp," Krishna said. "Where the mind, restrained by the practice of yoga, comes to rest, and where, seeing the self by the self, one is satisfied in the self alone, that is the state where one knows the boundless joy that is grasped by pure reason and lies beyond the senses, and knowing it, one never again departs from that truth."

"This does not demand cruelty toward the body, Arjuna," Krishna added, as though anticipating a mistake he had watched sincere seekers make too often. "Yoga is not for one who eats too much, nor for one who eats not at all. It is not for one who sleeps too much, nor for one who is always wakeful."

He described instead a middle discipline, ordinary in its details and demanding only in its consistency.

"For the man moderate in food and recreation, moderate in his exertion in action, moderate in sleep and in waking, yoga becomes the destroyer of suffering," Krishna said. "When the disciplined mind rests in the self alone, freed from longing for every kind of desire, then a man is said to be steadfast, established in yoga."

Arjuna, who had spent thirteen years alternating between austerity in exile and the comforts of court, recognized in this a corrective to both extremes, neither the starved hermit nor the indulgent prince.

"As a lamp in a windless place does not waver, so is the disciplined mind of the yogi practicing this union with the self," Krishna said again, the image returning like a refrain worth repeating until it settled into memory. "Where thought is stilled by the practice of yoga, where seeing the self through the self, one finds contentment in the self, there the mind knows a happiness beyond what any of the senses can offer, and having known it, does not waver from that truth ever again, holding fast to it as to nothing else, undisturbed even by the heaviest sorrow."

"Let this then be known as yoga," Krishna said, "the severing of union with suffering. It must be practiced with resolve, with a mind free of despair."

Arjuna shook his head slowly, and for the first time since Krishna had begun describing the lamp and its stillness, his objection was not confusion but plain doubt.

"This yoga that you have described as evenness of mind, Krishna, I do not see how it can last for long, because the mind is restless," he said. "The mind is turbulent, Krishna, powerful and obstinate. I think it as hard to restrain as the wind."

It was, Arjuna felt, an honest objection, not a debater's trick. He had watched his own mind for years, in exile, on marches, in the quiet hours before dawn, and had never once found it obedient for more than a few breaths at a time.

Krishna did not dismiss the complaint, and that alone told Arjuna he had asked the right question.

"Undoubtedly, mighty-armed Arjuna, the mind is restless and difficult to curb," Krishna agreed. "But it can be restrained, son of Kunti, by practice and by dispassion."

He named the two disciplines plainly, without mystique, as a physician names a remedy.

"Yoga is hard to attain, I agree, for one whose self is uncontrolled," Krishna said, "but it is attainable through the right means by one who strives, whose self is disciplined. Through repeated, patient practice, abhyasa, the mind is gradually drawn back each time it wanders, the way a hand returns a wandering animal to its pasture, gently and without violence. And through vairagya, the loosening of the grip of desire on the things the mind runs after, the wandering itself grows less urgent, until eventually there is less and less need to keep returning it at all."

A new fear surfaced in Arjuna then, one that had perhaps been waiting behind the first question all along.

"But what of a man who fails, Krishna," he asked, "one who has faith but not enough discipline, whose mind wanders away from yoga before he reaches perfection in it? Does he not perish like a torn cloud, fallen from both worlds at once, without support anywhere, deluded on the path toward the eternal?"

Krishna's answer came without hesitation, warm and immediate, as though this exact fear was one he had been waiting to dissolve.

"Arjuna, neither in this world nor in the world beyond is there ever ruin for him. No one who does good, my friend, ever comes to a bad end."

He described the path such a person actually walks, not the cliff Arjuna had imagined.

"The man who has fallen from yoga attains the worlds of those who have done pure deeds, dwells there for countless years, and is then born again into the house of the righteous and the prosperous. Or he may be born into a family of yogis themselves wise in such matters, though a birth like that is harder to obtain in this world. There he regains the understanding that belonged to his former body, and strives once more, further than before, toward perfection."

"Carried forward, in fact, by the very momentum of his former practice, even against his own will," Krishna added, "for by that former effort alone he is drawn onward. Even a man who merely inquires about yoga rises above one who only performs the rituals prescribed in scripture. Struggling with diligence, cleansed of his faults, perfected through many such lives, the yogi at last attains the highest goal."

Arjuna felt something loosen in his chest that he had not realized was tight, the particular fear of trying and failing entirely, replaced now by the sense that effort, once made honestly, could never simply vanish.

"The yogi is greater than the ascetic who performs austerities alone," Krishna said, drawing the teaching now toward its close. "He is thought greater even than the man of scriptural learning, and greater than the man devoted only to ritual action. Therefore, Arjuna, become a yogi."

Arjuna looked down at his own hands, the same hands that had strung the bow Gandiva a thousand times, and tried to imagine them steady in the posture Krishna had described, gazing at nothing, fixed on everything.

"And of all yogis, Arjuna, the one who worships me with unwavering faith, whose inner self has entered into me, him I consider the most completely united in yoga of them all," Krishna said. "He is the dearest to me."

The declaration landed with a different weight than the technical instructions before it, less a method now than an invitation, and Arjuna understood, without being told outright, that everything Krishna had described, the firm seat, the steady gaze, the lamp untouched by wind, the patient return of the wandering mind, all of it pointed finally toward this single devotion rather than toward solitude for its own sake.

"I had thought this discipline meant withdrawing from the world entirely, Krishna," Arjuna said, "a hermit's practice, unsuited to a warrior standing where I stand."

"No path is unsuited to you that you walk with your whole self given over to it," Krishna answered. "The forest ascetic and the man on this field may reach the same stillness, if both hold their minds like a lamp in a windless place, and both let their effort, however small at first, carry them forward without fear of falling short."

The armies still waited, patient as mountains, while between them a warrior sat learning how to be still.