A Study of the Bhagavadgita :14.1. - Swami Krishnananda.
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Friday, September 02, 2022. 06:30.
Chapter 14: Our Involvement in the Whole Creation -1.
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The Eighteenth Chapter commences with a question in regard to the nature of action, which is a theme that predominates throughout the Gita. "Action binds, and action is unpleasant," is the usual notion that people have regarding any kind of action. Nothing that you call an activity is pleasant and happy in its nature. It binds a person in various ways by anxieties of different types. But the Gita also says that action is a must.
What is it that binds, and what is it that is a must? Questions similar to this were raised by Arjuna at the beginning of this chapter, to which brief answers are given in various ways by Bhagavan Sri Krishna. Tyājyaṁ doṣavad ity eke karma prāhur manīṣiṇaḥ, yaj–adānatapaḥkarma na tyājyam iti cāpare (Gita 18.3). There are people who feel that abandonment of action is not permissible, inasmuch as action is a manifestation of the very structure of the human personality.
The insufficiencies involved in the very makeup of individuality are the reason why nobody can get beyond the impulsion to act. You are limited in a hundred ways – perhaps in every way. Action is an attempt to overcome the consequences of the limitations of personality. If you feel no limitation – you are self-contained, self-sufficient, self-existent – then you need nothing at all from outside. If that were the case, you would not lift a finger; you would not budge an inch. But you feel that there is inadequacy from all sides in the total personality of yours – physically, mentally, socially, in every blessed way. So to make good this defect or deficiency that you are experiencing every day, you do a kind of plastering, as it were, as you plaster a wall that is likely to fall down. You take your meal, you drink water, you take rest, you do this, you do that, but however much you may try to maintain this finitude of personality through efforts of different kinds, you find the next day you are in the same condition. It does not mean that today you have fulfilled all the conditions necessary for overcoming the limitations of personality, and tomorrow you are blessed. Tomorrow you shall be as hungry and fatigued as you are today. You are the same person. This shows that while action is a necessary evil, as it were, which you have to resort to for the sake of getting on and surviving in this world, it is not a cure for the malady of personality defects.
The answer is yaj–adānatapaḥkarma na tyājyam: Action is incumbent upon human individuality as long as individuality continues, and its need diminishes gradually as the individuality also diminishes correspondingly. When your self expands, the consciousness increases in its dimension in the direction of universality. The individuality also withers away gradually, proportionately. This verse that I quoted is a pithy admonition on the obligation of every person to engage in certain performances, and they are mentioned as three important items – yaj–adānatapaḥkarma na tyājyam iti cāpare. Wise people tell us that yajna, dana and tapas are not to be given up, inasmuch as we are connected with our involvements in this world. Yajna is sacrifice, dana is charity, tapas is austerity. These are obligatory, and every day you must be engaged in the performance of these three noble acts which correspond to the transcendent divinities that subject us to their operations, to people outside with whom we are concerned, and to our own self, this psychophysical individuality.
Our life is constituted of basically three involvements: involvement in the transcendent divinities that invisibly control us, involvement in human society with whom we have daily contact, and involvement in the vestures of our personality – the five koshas or sheaths of personality called Annamaya, Pranamaya, Manomaya, Vijnanamaya and Anandamaya. You have to take care of your obligation to the gods in heaven, you have to take care of your relation to society, and you have also to take care of yourself.
Or, to put it more plainly, it is a threefold duty involved in your being an adhyatma and adhibhuta and adhidaiva at the same time. You are connected to the adhidaiva principle, and you are connected to the adhyatma and the adhibhuta every minute of your life. Since you are what you are and you cannot be anything other than what you are, you are adhyatma, the individual psychophysical person, to which aspect you owe an obligation. You have to take care of it, protect it, nurture it, educate it, and enable it to move forward in the direction of the enlargement of its dimension.
This is done by austerity, tapas. If you indulge in objects of sense through the organs of external operations, you will be depleting your energy every day. Therefore, self-control is required of every person. You have to eat, you have to keep yourself fit physically, mentally and socially, but you cannot indulge overmuch in any of these acts that are otherwise regarded as necessary. You must eat for the sake of survival, not for the sake of enjoyment of the taste, says the Upanishad. Aushadham: as a medicine you have to take food, because if you do not take a proportion or quantum of diet which is suitable, the body will vanish into thin air. You will not even survive. Eating is for the sake of living, and living is not for the sake of eating. We do not live to eat, but we eat to live. So to the extent that it is necessary for you to live, to that extent you have to give the necessities or requirements to the body, the mind and the emotions. If you give more, you are indulging. That is called enjoyment.
To be continued ....
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