Chapter 4: The Yoga of Knowledge and the Renunciation of Action

About 15 minutes

The dust of Kurukshetra had not yet settled. Between two armies poised to tear each other apart stood a single chariot, stalled as if it had slipped free of the current of time. Arjuna held the Gandiva, but his mind had snagged somewhere far from the bowstring. And Krishna, seated at the reins in a charioteer’s guise, steered the talk onto new ground. Karma had held the floor until now; the hour of knowledge had arrived. This fourth chapter belongs to that knowledge, how it descends, and who receives it.

The old learning, once more

Krishna said, Partha, this yoga we are placing in your hands is nothing new. It is imperishable, and we taught it long ago, at the dawn of creation, to Vivasvan, the sun god. Vivasvan passed it to his son Manu, and Manu to his own son, King Ikshvaku. Handed down that way from father to son, it stayed alive among the royal sages, kings who were also seers. Then, across a long drift of ages, the teaching slipped from the world and was lost. Today we give that same ancient learning to you, because you are our devotee and our friend, and because this is the supreme secret, not a thing to be opened to just anyone.

The claim was a hard one, and Arjuna put the plain question anyone hearing it would put. Keshava, he asked, your birth came only now, and Vivasvan belonged to the dawn of creation. How am I to believe that you taught him this at the beginning?

The secret of the avatar

Krishna smiled. And here he spoke the words destined to live on millions of lips. Arjuna, he said, many births of ours and of yours have already passed. The difference is a single one: you remember none of them, and we remember every one. We are birthless and deathless, and we are the Lord of all beings, and still we take birth. Ordinary creatures are pulled into the womb by their own past deeds and must take whatever pleasure and pain waits there for them. No such chain binds us. Holding our own nature in check, we step into the world by our own power, the divine potency we call Yogamaya, and we come when we choose, in whatever form the moment asks for.

Bharata, whenever dharma declines and adharma raises its head, we bring ourselves forth. To shelter the good, to destroy the wicked, and to set dharma on its feet again, we take birth age after age.

Srimad Bhagavad Gita 4.7, 4.8

This is the doctrine of the avatar, laid open here for the first time in words this clear. In every age, when truth begins to stagger, the Supreme fashions a form for itself and comes down to restore the balance. The cadence of “we take birth age after age” still rings today alongside the bells of temples. And Krishna joined a promise to it: whoever truly grasps the divine mystery of this birth and this action of ours is never born again after leaving the body; he comes to us. This has happened before, many times over. People emptied of attachment, fear, and anger, their minds sunk in us, leaning on us alone, made pure by the same fire of knowledge, have already come home to us.

Every path leads this way

Then Krishna said something of startling generosity. In whatever spirit a person comes to our shelter, he said, in that very spirit we receive him, and in whatever form a seeker holds us, in that very form we answer. Let anyone walk any road; in the end, every road arrives at us. Most people, hungry for quick returns, carry their offerings to one god or another, since in the world of men success won by action comes fast.

He said too that the four orders of society, the Brahmin, the Kshatriya, the Vaishya, and the Shudra, were shaped by us according to quality and work, and that though we authored them, we remain a non-doer, untouched, since no craving for any fruit can reach us. Whoever understands this much about us is not bound by his own work either. Here was the first sutra of karma: a person can labor and still stand inwardly untouched. The ancient seekers of liberation understood it and acted on it; do the same, Krishna told him, act as they acted long before you.

Action, inaction, and wrong action

Now Krishna reached for the finest knot in all of karma and began to loosen it. He set three words before Arjuna. Karma, right work, the duty the scriptures ask of you. Akarma, inaction, the art of staying desireless inside the work so that it leaves no mark on you. And vikarma, forbidden work, the crooked kind that carries a stain. Even the wise get tangled here, he said, because the ways of action run deep and dark.

Whoever sees inaction within action and action within inaction is the wise one among men. He stands joined in yoga, and though he does all his work, none of it binds him.

Srimad Bhagavad Gita 4.18

The difference is subtle, and most people miss it. A man may labor day and night in full view of the world, yet if he is calm and free of craving within, he rests in akarma the whole time. Another may sit with folded hands while a storm of wanting howls inside him, and he is deep in karma even as he holds still. Watch the mind, then, and whether it has come to rest; the moving of the hands tells you nothing.

Krishna drew the portrait further. The one the wise call a sage sets out on nothing driven by desire or private scheming, and his actions are already burned clean in the fire of knowledge. He has let go of any claim on what his work brings, leans on nothing in the world, wants for nothing, and so, though his hands are full of action, in truth he does nothing at all. He takes whatever comes to him unasked, envies no one, stays level whether he succeeds or fails. For a person like this, free of attachment, his mind settled in knowledge, every act offered up as sacrifice, the whole mass of his karma melts away and binds him no more.

The fire of knowledge

For the close, Krishna turned to sacrifice, yajna. Yajnas come in many kinds, he said. One man offers substance into the fire, another offers austerity, another the restraint of his breath, another the mastery of his senses, and still another pours everything he sees and hears and does into the flame of self-control. Those who live on the nectar left over from sacrifice reach the eternal Brahman; the person who offers nothing at all finds no happiness in this world, and less still in the next. Every one of these offerings is born of action. Above them all stands the sacrifice of knowledge, for all action, without exception, comes to rest at last in knowledge. Just as a blazing fire turns a heap of wood to ash, the fire of knowledge burns every karma to nothing. This is the inner sacrifice, and it rises above every rite performed outside.

Then he handed Arjuna the sutra that belongs to every student who will ever seek a teacher. How does this knowledge come?

Know it through humble prostration, know it through true questioning, and know it through seva. The wise who have seen the truth with their own eyes will give you this knowledge.

Srimad Bhagavad Gita 4.34

Three things, then: the bow of the head, the honest question asked with a clean heart, and seva. Without these three, knowledge neither arrives nor stays. And whoever receives it, Krishna said, is never pulled back into delusion, for in its light he comes to see every being first within his own self, and then within us. Seated on this raft of knowledge, even the worst of sinners is carried across the whole ocean of his sins.

Held in a single breath, the chapter says this. The knowledge is ancient; it is lost again and again, and again and again it returns. Nothing on earth cleanses a person the way it does. The road to it is startlingly plain: humility, a true question, and seva. Whoever comes to it with faith and a steady grip on his own senses reaches it, and reaching it, comes quickly to a deep and unshakable peace. The one who will not trust, who lets doubt gnaw at everything, loses this world and the next and any happiness in either. So Krishna closed with a blade held out between them. Take the sword of knowledge, he said, cut through the doubt still knotted in your heart, plant yourself in yoga, and rise.

Source: Srimad Bhagavad Gita