EIGHTEEN
The Divine Worker
TO
ATTAIN to the divine birth, – a divinising new birth of the soul into a higher
consciousness, – and to do divine works both as a means towards that before it
is attained and as an expression of it after it is attained, is then all the
Karmayoga of the Gita. The Gita does not try to define works by any outward
signs through which it can be recognisable to an external gaze, measurable by
the criticism of the world; it deliberately renounces even the ordinary ethical
distinctions by which men seek to guide themselves in the light of the human
reason. The signs by which it distinguishes divine works are all profoundly intimate
and subjective; the stamp by which they are known is invisible, spiritual,
supra-ethical.
They are
recognisable only by the light of the soul from which they come. For, it says,
“what is action and what is inaction, as to this even the sages are perplexed
and deluded,” because, judging by practical, social, ethical, intellectual standards,
they discriminate by accidentals and do not go to the root of the matter; “I
will declare to thee that action by the knowledge of which thou shalt be
released from all ills. One has to understand about action as well as to
understand about wrong action and about inaction one has to understand; thick
and tangled is the way of works.” Action in the world is like a deep forest, gahana, through which man goes stumbling
as best he can, by the light of the ideas of his time, the standards of his
personality, his environment, or rather of many times, many personalities,
layers of thought and ethics from many social stages all inextricably confused
together, temporal and conventional amidst all their claim to absoluteness and
immutable truth, empirical and irrational in spite of their aping of right
reason. And finally the sage seeking in the midst of it all a highest foundation
of fixed law and an original truth finds himself obliged to raise
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the last supreme question,
whether all action and life itself are not a delusion and a snare and whether
cessation from action, akarma, is not
the last resort of the tired and disillusioned human soul. But, says Krishna,
in this matter even the sages are perplexed and deluded. For by action, by
works, not by inaction comes the knowledge and the release.
What then is the
solution? what is that type of works by which we shall be released from the
ills of life, from this doubt, this error, this grief, from this mixed, impure
and baffling result even of our purest and best-intentioned acts, from these million
forms of evil and suffering? No outward distinctions need be made, is the
reply; no work the world needs, be shunned; no limit or hedge set round our
human activities; on the contrary, all actions should be done, but from a soul
in Yoga with the Divine, yuktah
krtsnakarmakrt. Akarma, cessation from action is not the
way; the man who has attained to the insight of the highest reason, perceives
that such inaction is itself a constant action, a state subject to the workings
of Nature and her qualities. The mind that takes refuge in physical inactivity,
is still under the delusion that it and not Nature is the doer of works; it has
mistaken inertia for liberation; it does not see that even in what seems
absolute inertia greater than that of the stone or clod, Nature is at work,
keeps unimpaired her hold. On the contrary in the full flood of action the soul
is free from its works, is not the doer, not bound by what is done, and he who
lives in the freedom of the soul, not in the bondage of the modes of Nature,
alone has release from works. This is what the Gita clearly means when it says
that he who in action can see inaction and can see action still continuing in
cessation from works, is the man of true reason and discernment among men. This
saying hinges upon the Sankhya distinction between Purusha and Prakriti,
between the free inactive soul, eternally calm, pure and unmoved in the midst
of works, and ever active Nature operative as much in inertia and cessation as
in the overt turmoil of her visible hurry of labour. This is the knowledge
which the highest effort of the discriminating reason, the buddhi, gives to us, and therefore whoever possesses it is the
truly rational and discerning man, sa
buddhimān manusyesu, – not the perplexed thinker
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who judges life and works by the
external, uncertain and impermanent distinctions of the lower reason. Therefore
the liberated man is not afraid of action, he is a large and universal doer of
all works, krtsna-karmakrt;
not as others do them in subjection to Nature, but poised in the silent calm of
the soul, tranquilly in Yoga with the Divine. The Divine is the lord of his
works, he is only their channel through the instrumentality of his nature
conscious of and subject to her Lord. By the flaming intensity and purity of
this knowledge all his works are burned up as in a fire and his mind remains
without any stain or disfiguring mark from them, calm, silent, unperturbed,
white and clean and pure. To do all in this liberating knowledge, without the
personal egoism of the doer, is the first sign of the divine worker.
The second sign
is freedom from desire; for where there is not the personal egoism of the doer,
desire becomes impossible; it is starved out, sinks for want of a support, dies
of inanition. Outwardly the liberated man seems to undertake works of all kinds
like other men, on a larger scale perhaps with a more powerful will and
driving-force, for the might of the divine will works in his active nature; but
from all his inceptions and undertakings the inferior concept and nether will
of desire is entirely banished, sarve samārambhāh
kāmasankalpavarjitāh. He has abandoned all attachment to
the fruits of his works, and where one does not work for the fruit, but solely
as an impersonal instrument of the Master of works, desire can find no place, –
not even the desire to serve successfully, for the fruit is the Lord's and
determined by him and not by the personal will and effort, or to serve with
credit and to the Master's satisfaction, for the real doer is the Lord himself
and all glory belongs to a form of his Shakti missioned in the nature and not
to the limited human personality. The human mind and soul of the liberated man
does nothing, na kiñcit karoti; even
though through his nature he engages in action, it is the Nature, the executive
Shakti, it is the conscious Goddess governed by the divine Inhabitant who does
the work.
It does not
follow that the work is not to be done perfectly, with success, with a right
adaptation of means to ends: on the contrary a perfect working is easier to
action done tranquilly
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in Yoga than to action done in
the blindness of hopes and fears, lamed by the judgments of the stumbling
reason, running about amidst the eager trepidations of the hasty human will:
Yoga, says the Gita elsewhere, is the true skill in works, yogah karmasu kauśalam. But all this is done
impersonally by the action of a great universal light and power operating
through the individual nature. The Karmayogin knows that the power given to him
will be adapted to the fruit decreed, the divine thought behind the work
equated with the work he has to do, the will in him, – which will not be wish
or desire, but an impersonal drive of conscious power directed towards an aim
not his own, – subtly regulated in its energy and direction by the divine
wisdom. The result may be success, as the ordinary mind understands it, or it
may seem to that mind to be defeat and failure; but to him it is always the
success intended, not by him, but by the all-wise manipulator of action and
result, because he does not seek for victory, but only for the fulfilment of
the divine will and wisdom which works out its ends through apparent failure as
well as and often with greater force than through apparent triumph. Arjuna, bidden
to fight, is assured of victory; but even if certain defeat were before him, he
must still fight because that is the present work assigned to him as his
immediate share in the great sum of energies by which the divine will is surely
accomplished.
The liberated
man has no personal hopes; he does not seize on things as his personal
possessions; he receives what the divine Will brings him, covets nothing, is
jealous of none: what comes to him he takes without repulsion and without attachment;
what goes from him he allows to depart into the whirl of things without
repining or grief or sense of loss. His heart and self are under perfect
control; they are free from reaction and passion, they make no turbulent
response to the touches of outward things. His action is indeed a purely
physical action, śārīram
kevalam karma; for all else comes
from above, is not generated on the human plane, is only a reflection of the
will, knowledge, joy of the divine Purushottama. Therefore he does not by a
stress on doing and its objects bring about in his mind and heart any of those
reactions which we call passion and sin. For sin consists not at all in the
outward deed, but in an impure
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reaction of the personal will,
mind and heart which accompanies it or causes it; the impersonal, the spiritual
is always pure, apāpaviddham,
and gives to all that it does its own inalienable purity. This spiritual
impersonality is a third sign of the divine worker. All human souls, indeed,
who have attained to a certain greatness and largeness are conscious of an
impersonal Force or Love or Will and Knowledge working through them, but they
are not free from egoistic reactions, sometimes violent enough, of their human
personality. But this freedom the liberated soul has attained; for he has cast
his personality into the impersonal, where it is no longer his, but is taken up
by the divine Person, the Purushottama, who uses all finite qualities
infinitely and freely and is bound by none. He has become a soul and ceased to
be a sum of natural qualities; and such appearance of personality as remains
for the operations of Nature, is something unbound, large, flexible, universal;
it is a free mould for the Infinite, it is a living mask of the Purushottama.
The result of
this knowledge, this desirelessness and this impersonality is a perfect equality
in the soul and the nature. Equality is the fourth sign of the divine worker.
He has, says the Gita, passed beyond the dualities; he is dvandvātīta. We have seen that he regards with equal
eyes, without any disturbance of feeling, failure and success, victory and
defeat; but not only these, all dualities are in him surpassed and reconciled.
The outward distinctions by which men determine their psychological attitude
towards the happenings of the world, have for him only a subordinate and
instrumental meaning. He does not ignore them, but he is above them. Good
happening and evil happening, so all-important to the human soul subject to
desire, are to the desireless divine soul equally welcome since by their
mingled strand are worked out the developing forms of the eternal good. He
cannot be defeated, since all for him is moving towards the divine victory in
the Kurukshetra of Nature, dharmaksetre
kuruksetre, the field of doings which is the field of the evolving
Dharma, and every turn of the conflict has been designed and mapped by the
foreseeing eye of the Master of the battle, the Lord of works and Guide of the
dharma. Honour and dishonour from men cannot move him, nor their praise nor
their blame;
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for he has a greater clear-seeing
judge and another standard for his action, and his motive admits no dependence
upon worldly rewards. Arjuna the Kshatriya prizes naturally honour and
reputation and is right in shunning disgrace and the name of coward as worse
than death; for to maintain the point of honour and the standard of courage in the
world is part of his dharma: but Arjuna the liberated soul need care for none
of these things, he has only to know the kartavyam
karma, the work which the supreme Self demands from him, and to do that and
leave the result to the Lord of his actions. He has passed even beyond that
distinction of sin and virtue which is so all-important to the human soul while
it is struggling to minimise the hold of its egoism and lighten the heavy and
violent yoke of its passions, – the liberated has risen above these struggles
and is seated firmly in the purity of the witnessing and enlightened soul. Sin
has fallen away from him, and not a virtue acquired and increased by good
action and impaired or lost by evil action, but the inalienable and unalterable
purity of a divine and selfless nature is the peak to which he has climbed and
the seat upon which he is founded. There the sense of sin and the sense of
virtue have no starting-point or applicability.
Arjuna, still in
the ignorance, may feel in his heart the call of right and justice and may
argue in his mind that abstention from battle would be a sin entailing responsibility
for all the suffering that injustice and oppression and the evil karma of the triumph
of wrong bring upon men and nations, or he may feel in his heart the recoil
from violence and slaughter and argue in his mind that all shedding of blood is
a sin which nothing can justify. Both of these attitudes would appeal with
equal right to virtue and reason and it would depend upon the man, the
circumstances and the time which of these might prevail in his mind or before
the eyes of the world. Or he might simply feel constrained by his heart and his
honour to support his friends against his enemies, the cause of the good and
just against the cause of the evil and oppressive. The liberated soul looks
beyond these conflicting standards; he sees simply what the supreme Self
demands from him as needful for the maintenance or for the bringing forward of
the evolving Dharma. He has no personal
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ends to serve, no personal loves
and hatreds to satisfy, no rigidly fixed standard of action which opposes its
rock-line to the flexible advancing march of the progress of the human race or
stands up defiant against the call of the Infinite. He has no personal enemies
to be conquered or slain, but sees only men who have been brought up against
him by circumstances and the will in things to help by their opposition the
march of destiny. Against them he can have no wrath or hatred; for wrath and
hatred are foreign to the divine nature. The Asura's desire to break and slay
what opposes him, the Rakshasa's grim lust of slaughter are impossible to his
calm and peace and his all-embracing sympathy and understanding. He has no wish
to injure, but on the contrary a universal friendliness and compassion, maitrah karuna eva ca:
but this compassion is that of a divine soul overlooking men, embracing all
other souls in himself, not the shrinking of the heart and the nerves and the
flesh which is the ordinary human form of pity: nor does he attach a supreme importance
to the life of the body, but looks beyond to the life of the soul and attaches
to the other only an instrumental value. He will not hasten to slaughter and
strife, but if war comes in the wave of the Dharma, he will accept it with a
large equality and a perfect understanding and sympathy for those whose power and
pleasure of domination he has to break and whose joy of triumphant life he has
to destroy.
For
in all he sees two things, the Divine inhabiting every being equally, the
varying manifestation unequal only in its temporary circumstances. In the
animal and man, in the dog, the unclean outcaste and the learned and virtuous
Brahmin, in the saint and the sinner, in the indifferent and the friendly and
the hostile, in those who love him and benefit and those who hate him and
afflict, he sees himself, he sees God and has at heart for all the same equal
kindliness, the same divine affection. Circumstances may determine the outward
clasp or the outward conflict, but can never affect his equal eye, his open
heart, his inner embrace of all. And in all his actions there will be the same
principle of soul, a perfect equality, and the same principle of work, the will
of the Divine in him active for the need of the race in its gradually
developing advance towards the Godhead.
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Again, the sign
of the divine worker is that which is central to the divine consciousness
itself, a perfect inner joy and peace which depends upon nothing in the world
for its source or its continuance; it is innate, it is the very stuff of the
soul's consciousness, it is the very nature of divine being. The ordinary man
depends upon outward things for his happiness; therefore he has desire;
therefore he has anger and passion, pleasure and pain, joy and grief; therefore
he measures all things in the balance of good fortune and evil fortune. None of
these things can affect the divine soul; it is ever satisfied without any kind
of dependence, nityatrpto nirāśrayah;
for its delight, its divine ease, its happiness, its glad light are eternal
within, ingrained in itself, ātmaratih,
antahsukho' ntarārāmas
tathāntarjyotir eva yah. What joy it takes in outward things
is not for their sake, not for things which it seeks in them and can miss, but
for the self in them, for their expression of the Divine, for that which is
eternal in them and which it cannot miss. It is without attachment to their
outward touches, but finds everywhere the same joy that it finds in itself,
because its self is theirs, has become one self with the self of all beings,
because it is united with the one and equal Brahman in them through all their
differences, brahmayogayuktātmā,
sarvabhūtātmabhūtātmā.
It does not rejoice in the touches of the pleasant or feel anguish in the touches
of the unpleasant; neither the wounds of things, nor the wounds of friends, nor
the wounds of enemies can disturb the firmness of its outgazing mind or
bewilder its receiving heart; this soul is in its nature, as the Upanishad puts
it, avranam, without wound or
scar. In all things it has the same imperishable Ananda, sukham aksayam aśnute.
That equality,
impersonality, peace, joy, freedom do not depend on so outward a thing as doing
or not doing works. The Gita insists repeatedly on the difference between the
inward and the outward renunciation, tyāga
and sannyāsa. The latter, it
says, is valueless without the former, hardly possible even to attain without
it, and unnecessary when there is the inward freedom. In fact tyāga itself is the real and
sufficient Sannyasa. “He should be known as the eternal Sannyasin who neither
hates nor desires; free from the dualities he is happily and easily
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released from all bondage.” The
painful process of outward Sannyasa, duhkham
āptum, is an unnecessary process. It is perfectly true that all
actions, as well as the fruit of action, have to be given up, to be renounced,
but inwardly, not outwardly, not into the inertia of Nature, but to the Lord in
sacrifice, into the calm and joy of the Impersonal from whom all action
proceeds without disturbing his peace. The true Sannyasa of action is the
reposing of all works on the Brahman. “He who, having abandoned attachment,
acts reposing (or founding) his works on the Brahman, brahmanyādhāya karmāni, is not stained by sin even as water clings
not to the lotus-leaf.” Therefore the Yogins first “do works with the body,
mind, understanding, or even merely with the organs of action, abandoning
attachment, for self-purification, sangam
tyaktvātmaśuddhaye. By
abandoning attachment to the fruits of works the soul in union with Brahman
attains to peace of rapt foundation in Brahman, but the soul not in union is
attached to the fruit and bound by the action of desire.” The foundation, the
purity, the peace once attained, the embodied soul perfectly controlling its
nature, having renounced all its actions by the mind, inwardly, not outwardly,
“sits in its nine-gated city neither doing nor causing to be done.” For this
soul is the one impersonal Soul in all, the all-pervading Lord, prabhu, vibhu, who, as the impersonal, neither creates the works of the
world, nor the mind's idea of being the doer, na kartrtvam na karmāni, nor the coupling of
works to their fruits, the chain of cause and effect. All that is worked out by
the Nature in the man, svabhāva,
his principle of self-becoming, as the word literally means. The all-pervading
Impersonal accepts neither the sin nor the virtue of any: these are things
created by the ignorance in the creature, by his egoism of the doer, by his
ignorance of his highest self, by his involution in the operations of Nature,
and when the self-knowledge within him is released from this dark envelope,
that knowledge lights up like a sun the real self within him; he knows himself
then to be the soul supreme above the instruments of Nature. Pure, infinite,
inviolable, immutable, he is no longer affected; no longer does he imagine himself
to be modified by her workings. By complete identification with the Impersonal
he can, too, release himself
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from the necessity of returning
by birth into her movement.
And yet this
liberation does not at all prevent him from acting. Only, he knows that it is
not he who is active, but the modes, the qualities of Nature, her triple Gunas.
“The man who knows the principles of things thinks, his mind in Yoga (with the
inactive Impersonal), `I am doing nothing'; when he sees, hears, touches,
smells, eats, moves, sleeps, breathes, speaks, takes, ejects, opens his eyes or
closes them, he holds that it is only the senses acting upon the objects of the
senses.” He himself, safe in the immutable, unmodified soul, is beyond the grip
of the three gunas, trigunātīta;
he is neither sattwic, rajasic nor tamasic; he sees with a clear untroubled
spirit the alternations of the natural modes and qualities in his action, their
rhythmic play of light and happiness, activity and force, rest and inertia.
This superiority of the calm soul observing its action but not involved in it,
this traigunātītya,
is also a high sign of the divine worker. By itself the idea might lead to a doctrine
of the mechanical determinism of Nature and the perfect aloofness and
irresponsibility of the soul; but the Gita effectively avoids this fault of an
insufficient thought by its illumining supertheistic idea of the Purushottama.
It makes it clear that it is not in the end Nature which mechanically
determines its own action; it is the will of the Supreme which inspires her; he
who has already slain the Dhritarashtrians, he of whom Arjuna is only the human
instrument, a universal Soul, a transcendent Godhead is the master of her
labour. The reposing of works in the Impersonal is a means of getting rid of
the personal egoism of the doer, but the end is to give up all our actions to
that great Lord of all, sarvabhūtamaheśvara.
“With a consciousness identified with the Self, renouncing all thy actions into
Me, mayi sarvāni karmān
samnyasyādhyātmacetasā, freed from personal hopes and
desires, from the thought of `I' and `mine', delivered from the fever of the
soul, fight,” work, do my will in the world. The Divine motives, inspires,
determines the entire action; the human soul impersonal in the Brahman is the
pure and silent channel of his power; that power in the Nature executes the
divine movement. Such only are the works of the liberated soul, muktasya karma, for in nothing does he
act from a personal inception; such are
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the actions of the accomplished
Karmayogin. They rise from a free spirit and disappear without modifying it,
like waves that rise and disappear on the surface of conscious, immutable
depths. Gata-sangasya muktasya jñānāvasthita-cetasah,
yajñāyācaratah karma samagram pravilīyate.
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