Chapter 5: The Yoga of Renunciation

About 15 minutes

Arjuna stood at the mouth of the war, and an old knot tightened in his mind again. One moment Krishna seems to say, give up all action; the next, keep acting. How can both hold true at once? This fifth chapter is the calm, measured answer to that tangle. It runs to just twenty-nine verses, and it may be the most tightly packed stretch in the whole Gita.

To give up or to act

Arjuna put it to him straight. Krishna, with one breath you praise the renunciation of action, and with the next, the yoga of action. Of these two, tell us plainly the one that is certainly the better.

Krishna’s answer came steady and unhurried. Both roads, he said, lead to the highest good, yet of the two the yoga of action is the better, because it is the easier path to walk. A man who merely drops his work on the outside can still carry a mind knotted with desire, anger, and longing. The one who renounces from within stays unbound even in the thick of work. Count that man a renouncer for good: he holds no enmity toward anyone and craves nothing, and once he is free of the pairs of opposites, he slips past every bond with ease.

The two ways are not rivals. Only the untaught imagine that knowledge and action lead to different ends; whoever sees that they arrive at the same place has grasped what the clever keep missing. The ground the renouncer reaches through knowledge is reached just as surely by the one who acts. And the man who keeps his mind fixed on God while he works comes to Brahman quickly, where knowledge pursued without that grounding stays a hard and thorny road.

The lotus leaf

Then Krishna offered the image that is the soul of this chapter.

Whoever lets go of attachment and offers all his actions to Brahman remains untouched by sin, just as a lotus leaf lives in water and stays untouched by it.

Srimad Bhagavad Gita 5.10

The lotus is born in water and spends its whole life in water, and still not one drop can settle on it. So it is with the wise: he lives in the very thick of the world, and the world cannot stain him. Whatever the yogi does, he does with body, mind, intellect, and senses alike, claiming none of them as his own, letting attachment drop, working only to make himself clean within. His heart stays clear, his mind and senses his to command, and though his hands are full of work, none of it can stain him. He hands the fruit of every act back to God, and a peace with no end comes to him, the peace of reaching God. The man who instead works for the fruit, roped to it by desire, stays bound to the wheel.

There is a deeper wonder in the one who has truly seen how things stand. He moves through his whole day certain that he himself does nothing at all. He sees, hears, touches, smells, tastes, walks, sleeps, breathes, speaks, lets go and takes hold, opens his eyes and closes them, and under all of it he holds one thing steady: it is only the senses moving among the things of the senses. Self-ruled, he settles at ease inside the city of nine gates, this body he merely seems to inhabit, doing nothing and setting nothing in motion, every action handed over in his mind.

God authors none of this. He lays down no soul’s sense of doing, nor its deeds, nor the meeting of a deed with its reward; all of that runs on its own nature. Present everywhere, the Lord takes on no one’s sin and no one’s merit. What blinds a person is nearer home: knowledge lies buried under ignorance, and beneath that cover the creatures of the world lose their way. But wherever the knowledge of the Self burns that ignorance away, it rises like the sun and lights up the Supreme. Those whose thought and whole being have sunk into that One, who rest there and take it as their only aim, go where there is no returning, every failing washed off them by knowledge.

One in all

After this Krishna lifts the gaze to a very high vision, the one called seeing with an equal eye.

A brahmana rich in learning and humility, a cow, an elephant, a dog, an outcaste: the wise look upon them all with the same, even eye.

Srimad Bhagavad Gita 5.18

Whatever the outward form, name, or rank, the one Self runs beneath them all, and the wise rest their eyes on that alone. A person whose mind has settled into this evenness has already conquered the round of birth and death while still alive; since Brahman carries no flaw and is the same in everything, that person stands established in Brahman. Firm in understanding and free of confusion, he does not leap up when something pleasant arrives, nor flinch when something unwelcome does. He knows Brahman, and in Brahman he stays.

At the root of pleasure, sorrow

Krishna then cut open the secret of outer enjoyments. The pleasures born of the senses’ touch look sweet, he said, yet the root of sorrow lies coiled inside them, and every one of them has a beginning and an end. Whoever keeps chasing this coming-and-going pleasure never comes to rest, and the wise leave that whole rhythm behind. The one whose mind has come unhooked from outer things finds instead a joy that lives inside him, and once his whole being is joined to Brahman, that joy deepens into a bliss that never wears out. So the man who can stand and hold back the surge of desire and anger in this very life, before the body falls away, he is the true yogi, and he is the happy one.

The peace within

The chapter climbs now toward the state Krishna calls Brahman-nirvana, the peace that is Brahman itself. The one who is happy within, who takes his delight within, who is lit from within, becomes Brahman and comes to that peace. The seers reach it too, their failings burned away, their doubts cut through, their minds held steady, their days given over to the good of every living thing. And for those who are free of desire and anger, who have reined in the mind and known the Self, that peace of Brahman lies all around them, on every side.

He describes the way in, briefly. The sage shuts out the pull of the world, rests his gaze between the brows, evens the breath moving in and out through the nostrils, and brings senses, mind, and intellect under his hand. Bent on release, emptied of desire, fear, and anger, that one is free already and for good.

One last thing seals it. When a person knows Krishna for what he truly is, the enjoyer of every sacrifice and austerity, the Lord of all the worlds, the selfless friend of every being, that person comes to rest. This is the peace that is Brahman-nirvana, and it is the door that will open wider still in the meditation of the next chapter.

The gist of this chapter fits in one sentence. Letting work drop from the hands is easy; letting “my work” drop from the mind is the hard labor. The true yogi renounces within, even while his hands keep working without. And whoever sees the One in all lives in the world the way a lotus leaf lives in water, held by it and untouched by it.

Source: Srimad Bhagavad Gita