From the very type of the question with which Arjuna approached Krishna in the opening verse of this chapter, the Lord understood the abject state of ignorance that Arjuna was in. According to Arjuna, Karma Yoga and Karma-Samnyasa-Yoga were two distinct paths which would lead the practitioner to two different goals in life.
Man is essentially prone to be inert. If left to themselves, the majority of men would demand in life only food to eat, with the least amount of exertion and plenty of idle hours. From this unproductive inertia, the first stage of man’s growth is his being awakened to activity, and this is most easily and efficiently done when the individual’s desires are whipped up. Thus, in the first stage of his evolution, desire-prompted activity takes man out of his mental and intellectual inertia to vigorous activity.
In the second stage of his growth, he becomes tired of the desire-motivated activities, and feels energetic when advised to spend at least a few hours in a noble field, with a spirit of dedication and service. Such activities are generally undertaken in the service of others, where the individual works with the least ego. The secret of working in this spirit of self-dedication has been already described in an earlier chapter. When an individual in this second stage of self-development works with his ego subdued, in a spirit of devotion and dedication, he comes to exhaust his vasanas. Thus unloaded, his mind and intellect develop the wings of meditation and become capable of taking longer flights into the subtle realms of joy and peace.
The third stage of development is accomplished through meditation, which will be discussed in Chapter VI. To summarise, we may say that the spiritual processes of self-evolution fall into three stages: (a) desire-prompted activity, (b) self-less dedicated activity and (c) quiet meditation. Of these, the first has already been described in the earlier two chapters. The technique of meditation will be described in the following chapter. Naturally therefore, in this chapter, we are having a discussion on how we can renounce the ego-motivated activities and learn to take to selfless, dedicated activities.
In this stanza Krishna explains that both activity and the renunciation of activity can take the individual to the highest goal. But he warns his disciple that of the two, “participation-in-action” (karma) is any day superior to the “renunciation-of-action” (karma-samnyasa). Here we must understand that Krishna is not, in any sense of the term, decrying renunciation as inferior to vigilant and vigorous activity. To say so would be parading our ignorance, or at least, a lack of understanding of what the Lord has said so far, or the spirit in which he is continuing his discourses hereafter. The Geeta is given out in the form of a conversation between Krishna, the Immortal Teacher, and a particular student facing a given problem and having some definitely known mental weaknesses and intellectual debilities, Arjuna. Essentially, here the Pandava warrior is full of vasanas and for their exhaustion he has to act in the battlefield. To those of us who are psychologically in the state of Arjuna — and almost all of us are in that condition, suffering from the Arjuna-disease — the treatment is activity with the least conscious selfishness. The advice given here that the “performance-of-action” is nobler than the “renunciation-of-action” is therefore to be very carefully understood.
WHO SO?… IT IS SAID:
