Bhagavad Gita Chapter 6, Verses 1-23: The Seat and the Lamp

Chapter 6 opens without a question from Arjuna, because Krishna is still answering the one asked at the start of Chapter 5. In verse 6.1 he takes the word sannyasi away from the people who usually claim it. He who performs the work that ought to be done without depending on its fruit is the sannyasi and the yogi, not the man who has merely put down his ritual fire and stopped doing anything.

Verse 6.2 makes the identification explicit. Know that what they call sannyasa is yoga, for no one becomes a yogi without renouncing sankalpa, the will behind desire. What is being given up is not activity. It is the small engine of intention that runs ahead of every act saying, and then I will have, and then they will say.

Then 6.3, which may be the most useful sentence in the Gita for anyone taking honest stock of where he stands. For the sage who wishes to climb to yoga, action is said to be the means; for one who has already climbed, quiescence is said to be the means.

Two people, two prescriptions, and taking the wrong one is a common way to waste years. The climber needs work, because work is what wears down the ego's grip. The one who has arrived needs stillness, because for him further work would only be an unnecessary stirring. The trouble begins when a climber, having read about the arrived, adopts stillness early and calls his idleness attainment.

Verse 6.4 supplies the marker that tells a person which of the two he is. When one is not attached to the objects of the senses or to actions, and has renounced all sankalpa, then he is said to have climbed. The test is not how long he can sit. It is whether wanting has actually loosened its hold.

Verse 6.5 is the double line on which everything practical in this chapter rests. Uddhared atmanatmanam: let a man lift himself up by his own self and not degrade himself, for the self alone is the friend of the self, and the self alone is its enemy.

Krishna is standing on a battlefield speaking to a man who has just tried to hand his decision to somebody else, and the verse quietly refuses the transfer. Nobody is coming to do this. The same faculty that can raise a person is the one that drags him down, and it answers to no external appeal.

Verse 6.6 divides the two cases without softening either. For one who has conquered himself by the self, the self is a friend; but for one who has not, the very self remains hostile, like an enemy. Everyone has met both versions on different mornings, the mind that helps and the mind that sabotages, and the verse insists they are one mind under different discipline.

Verse 6.7 describes the settled state. For the one who has conquered himself and is at peace, the supreme self stays steady in cold and heat, in pleasure and pain, in honour and dishonour. Those four pairs cover most of what a life throws.

Verse 6.8 gives an image with an edge on it. Satisfied with knowledge and realization, unshakable, with the senses subdued, the yogi to whom a clod of earth, a stone and gold are alike is said to be joined. Not that gold is worthless. That the mind does not lurch differently at the sight of it.

Then 6.9 extends the evenness from things to people. He stands highest who is equal-minded toward the well-wisher, the friend, the enemy, the neutral, the hateful, the relative, the saint and the sinner. Arjuna, looking at cousins and teachers arrayed against him, is being handed the harder half.

Here the Gita becomes a manual, and it is worth reading as instruction rather than as poetry, because that is how it is written.

Verse 6.10: let the yogi constantly join himself, remaining in a solitary place, alone, with mind and body controlled, without expectation and without possessions. Alone and unwatched. Nothing to protect and nobody to perform for.

Verse 6.11: in a clean place, having established for himself a firm seat, neither too high nor too low, made of cloth, deerskin and kusha grass, one laid over the other. It is a small instruction that says something large. The seat is prepared in advance. It is stable, it insulates, and it is the same each time, so that sitting down on it becomes a signal in itself. Anyone who has kept a practice knows the worth of a place the body recognizes.

Verse 6.12: there, seated upon that seat, making the mind one-pointed, with the activity of mind and senses controlled, let him practise yoga for the purification of the self.

Verse 6.13: holding the body, head and neck erect and still, unmoving, gazing at the tip of his own nose and not looking about him. Erect, because a slumped spine invites drowsiness and an arched one invites strain. Still, because every small adjustment is a small departure. The gaze fixed near, because eyes that rove take the mind along with them.

Verse 6.14: serene, fearless, firm in the vow of celibacy, the mind restrained and the thoughts turned to me, let him sit, joined, holding me as the highest.

Read together, the five verses cover place, seat, posture, gaze and disposition, in that order, and they are notably free of ornament. There is no promise here of visions. There is a clean room, a firm cushion, a straight spine and a steady gaze, and then the instruction to sit.

Verse 6.15 states what the sitting is for. The yogi of restrained mind, ever joining himself in this way, attains the peace that culminates in nirvana and abides in Krishna.

Then 6.16 and 6.17, the verses that keep the practice from becoming one more arena for excess, and they are addressed with unusual directness to the body.

Yoga is not for one who eats too much, Krishna says, nor for one who does not eat at all; not for one given to too much sleep, nor for one who stays awake too long. Four failures, and two of them are the failures of the enthusiast. This is a deliberate correction. The ascetic tradition Arjuna knew was full of men who starved and kept vigil and treated the body as an obstacle to be defeated. Krishna says plainly that this route does not produce yoga either.

Verse 6.17 gives the positive formula: yuktahara-viharasya, for one whose food and recreation are measured, whose effort in actions is measured, whose sleeping and waking are measured, yoga becomes the destroyer of sorrow.

The operative word repeats four times. Measured. Not minimal and not maximal. Food, activity, work and sleep are each to be set at the level that supports the practice, which means the level is discovered rather than decreed, and it differs between people and between seasons of one life.

There is a whole philosophy of the body compressed into these two verses. The body is neither the enemy of the inner work nor its master. It is the instrument the work is performed on, and an instrument that is starved, stuffed, exhausted or overslept will not hold a tune. Anyone who has tried to concentrate after four hours of sleep or a heavy meal already has the evidence. Krishna is not being lenient here. He is being accurate.

Verse 6.18 defines the achieved state. When the disciplined mind rests in the self alone, free of longing for any object of desire, then a man is said to be joined.

And then 6.19, the image by which the chapter is remembered. As a lamp in a windless place does not flicker, so is the yogi of controlled mind, practising union with the self.

It is an image from a world of oil lamps, and its exactness comes from that. Such a flame in a draught is never actually out; it is bent, stretched, thrown against the wall, restored, bent again. A mind in ordinary weather does the same, leaning toward every noise and every remembered grievance. Take away the wind and the flame simply stands, and standing, it gives a light that can be read by. The verse is not describing an extinguished mind. It is describing a mind that has stopped being pushed around, and is therefore, for the first time, useful.

Verses 6.20 to 6.23 finish the definition. Where the mind, restrained by the practice of yoga, comes to rest; where one sees the self by the self and is content in the self; where he knows that infinite happiness which is grasped by the intellect and lies beyond the senses, and standing there does not swerve from the truth; where, having gained it, he counts no other gain greater; and where, established in it, he is not shaken even by heavy sorrow. That, Krishna says in 6.23, should be known as yoga, the disconnection from union with pain, and it is to be practised with determination and with an undespairing heart.

Anirvinna-cetasa, an undespairing heart, is the phrase to carry away. Krishna has just spent fourteen verses describing a standard that almost nobody meets on a given Tuesday, and he ends not by demanding it but by warning against discouragement. The instruction is a clean place, a firm seat, a straight spine, measured food and sleep, and a refusal to quit on the days when the flame bends.