What is so far taught consists of the “Sankhya,” meaning, “the logic of reasoning by which the true nature of the Absolute Reality is comprehended,” which can end for you all sorrows arising from grief, attachment and the like. Krishna promises that hereafter he will try to explain the technique of attaining the wisdom (Buddhi), which is otherwise called Buddhi yoga — “devotion through work.”
FRUITS OF ACTION (Karma-phala) — The Law-of-Karma, which is often misunderstood as the Law-of-Destiny, forms a cardinal creed of the Hindus and a right understanding of it is absolutely essential to all students of the Hindu Way-of-Life. If I am, now, justly punished, in Delhi, for a crime committed last year by Sri Ramana Rao in Madras then, certainly there must be something common between the criminal Ramana Rao THEN in Madras and the saintly Chinmaya NOW in Delhi! The long arm of the law of the country discovering the identity of Ramana Rao in Chinmaya must have slowly crept from Madras to Delhi and ultimately booked the “Swami” for the crime of Rao, that he was!!
Similarly, nature’s justice is always perfect and, therefore, if the Hindu philosophers accept that each of us individually suffers because of our crimes committed in another form, and in a different locality, at a different period of time in the past, certainly, there must be some identity between the SINNER IN THE PAST and the SUFFERER IN THE PRESENT. This identity, the Shastra says, is the mind-and-intellect-equipment in each one of us.
Each act, willfully performed, leaves an impression upon the mind of the actor according to the texture of the motive entertained. In order to work out and remove these impressions — vasanas-catharsis — each individual arrives at his specific field of activity in life. Sin-impressions in the mind can be wiped away only with the waters of tears, acting upon the mind, in an atmosphere of sobs and sighs. Thus, every one gets his quota of chances to weep, which, in many cases, comes to be discovered, later on, as not so sorrowful, after all. A mind which has thus been completely purified, fails to see a situation really worth weeping for. Weeping, in fact, is not ordered by the circumstances, but by the “papa-tendencies” in the mind of the miserable.
Merely because there is a record in my gramophone box, I will have no music. Even when it is placed on its disc and revolved at the required speed, it will not and cannot sing. Music can come out of it only when the needle is in contact with it. The unmanifest music in the disc can be brought to expression only through the sound-box. Similarly, here, the mental impressions cannot in themselves bring either disaster or reward unless they are connected with the external world through the needle-point of our ego-centric self-assertion.
One who lives, as we found in the earlier verse, in perfect equanimity in all conditions, must necessarily come to live in a realm of his own, away from the pleasure and pain of the INTELLECT, the sobs of success and failure of the MIND, and the fears of loss and gain in the FLESH. To the degree an individual detaches himself from his own body, mind and intellect, to that degree his ego is dead, and, therefore, since the “sufferer” is no longer available, there cannot be any more “fruits-of-action” for him to suffer.
Rightly understood, we shall realise, during our discussions on this chapter, how this Theory of Krishna has not the novelty of an original idea. The more intimately we understand it, the more we shall realise that Krishna has but given a new vesture to an ancient idea. But due to this re-statement in the Geeta, of a cardinal truth of ancient Hinduism, a religion that was dying revived itself. And from the days of its origin, five thousand years before Christ was born, it is beckoning us today, even two thousand years after the Nazarene’s death.
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