The Spiritual Import of the Mahabharata and the Bhagavadgita : Ch-5. Part-4.

5: God is Our Eternal Friend -4.


Such is the glorious message that is inherently present in the fourth chapter of the Bhagavadgita. When we are awakened to this fact, we are blessed not merely with knowledge, but also with a power that is not of this world. What are the blessings that this yoga of meditation and awakening into God-consciousness brings us? The blessings are these: equanimity of perception (samatva), dexterity in action (karmasukaushalam) and the capacity to see that which is between us and the world, that which works secretly in the midst of visible things, unknown and undiscovered.


Yoga-sannyasta-karmanam jnana-sanchinna-samsayam, atma-vantam na karmani nibadhnanti dhananajaya. This is the final touchstone of the grand message of the fourth chapter. One who has renounced by yoga and dispelled all doubts by jnana and is possessed of the Self—such a person is not bound by action. This is a difficult passage, but it has a profound meaning. The renunciation that we practice should be an outcome of yoga, and not a result of frustration or weak-heartedness, a cowardly attitude, or the ‘sour grape attitude’, as they call it.


The renunciation that the Bhagavadgita speaks of is an automatic consequence of yoga. That is why a person who is in this state is referred to as yoga sannyasa dharma. Actions are renounced by establishing oneself in yoga. The type of renunciation of action that is referred to here as a result of one’s steadfastness in yoga is not the abandonment of the form of the action as such, but the spirit of the action. Action is an attitude and not the form that the movements of the limbs of our body take. The renunciation of action, as the result of steadfastness in yoga, is nothing but the ability to rise above the very consciousness of one’s doership in anything in this world.


God is the doer of all things. His hands operate through every individual. As we are told again, all heads are His heads, all eyes are His eyes, all hands are His hands. He walks through all the legs, thinks through all the brains, sees through all the eyes and performs actions through all the hands. So to whom does the credit of action go? Who is the agent of action, who is the performer of deeds? Not I, not you, not he, she or it. It is the rumbling of the powers of the whole cosmos that we call a total action.


All action is a total action; there is no such a thing as individual action. When this awakening takes place, there is an automatic renunciation of the attitude of personalistic action, the agency that one feels in regard to oneself in performance of any deed. “I do it and therefore I have to appropriate the fruit thereof.” This is a wrong notion of one’s own self being the sole performer of deeds, contrary to the truth that the whole world is active at the manifestation of any event anywhere. This awakening is yoga-sannyasta-karmanam.

Swami Krishnananda

To be continued  ...