Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity : 19-1. Swami Krishnananda.

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Tuesday, March 08, 2022. 21:00. 

The First Six Chapters of the Bhagavadgita

Spoken on Bhagavadgita Jayanti).

Chapter-19. Knowledge and Action are One - 1.

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In the Bhagavadgita, the words sankhya and yoga occur a number of times, and these terms have a meaning which is of a crucial nature. Sometimes words which apparently convey an obvious meaning are used in different senses, and two such expressions are sankhya and yoga. Students of philosophy who are versed in Eastern thought would know what the schools of Sankhya and Yoga are. They associate Sankhya with the system attributed to Sage Kapila, and by Yoga they mostly mean the system of Sage Patanjali. The Bhagavadgita does not use these words in this sense. We are not speaking of Kapila's Sankhya or Patanjali's Yoga here, though we can infuse these systems into the wider concept of these terms, in the light of which expressions of this kind are used.

Because of the difficulty in properly deciphering the connotation of these words, questions arise as to the proper relationship between sankhya and yoga. Right at the very beginning of the Bhagavadgita, in the Second Chapter itself, the words sankhya and yoga have been used. “You cannot be a good yogin because you are deprived of the knowledge of sankhya,” says Bhagavan Sri Krishna in his message recorded in the Second Chapter. There, during our discussion of the theme, we found that one cannot be an expert in action unless one is also clear in one's thought.

The concept of any kind of performance determines not only the nature of the performance, but also the result that may follow from it. Bungling in action and getting defeated in one's enterprises, then repenting because of adverse consequences that follow from otherwise well-intentioned actions arise on account of the absence of sankhya buddhi, an improper conceptualisation of the pros and cons of the field of action. Such was what we could make out from the words sankhya and yoga as they occurred in the Second Chapter. The very same thing is said again subsequently.

Is sankhya different from yoga? Is knowledge different from action? We have here again the controversies of the schools of thought, the Purva Mimamsa school of action, which is the traditional protagonist of karma or action, ritual and the like, contradistinguished from schools which emphasise the pre-eminence and the supremacy of knowledge in one's life.

Now, karma as used in the Bhagavadgita is not to be identified with the karma of the ritualistic Purva Mimamsa School, though reference to rituals can be found in the Bhagavadgita also. We will find that the Bhagavadgita uses terms which are used in other schools of thought, yet are not actually meaning what these schools of thought wish to convey through those terms. The intentions of the different schools of thought seem to be familiar to the Bhagavadgita because reference is made to these different opinions of the various schools of thought, and sometimes it looks that terms used by these schools of thought are employed in the Bhagavadgita itself, yet intending something transcendent to the usually well-known concepts of the schools, though including everything that they say.

To be continued ....

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