Essays on the Gita, First Series (Arya Publishing House, 1922)
The text is shown on its own: no facing layer is held for this issue.
buddhimdn manushyeshu, — not the perplexed thinker who judges life and works by the external, uncertain and impermanent distinctions of the lower reason. fTherefore the liberated man is not afraid of action, he is a large and universal doer of all v^ox\is\krHtsna-karma-kr'it; not as others do them in subjection to Nature, but poised in the silent calm of the soul, tranquilly in Yoga with the Divine. fThe Divine is the lord of his works, he is only their channel through the instrumentality of his nature conscious of and subject to her Lord. By the flaming intensity and purity of this knowledge all his works are burned up as in a fire and his mind remains without any stain or disfiguring mark from them,, calm, silent, un- perturbed, white and clean and pure. To do all in this liberating knowledge, without the personaf • the doer, is the first sign of the divine second sign is freedom from desire ; for where tl^ere is not the personal egoism of the doer, desire becomes impossible j it is starved out, sinks for want of a support, dies of inanition., Outwardly the liberated man seems to undertake works of all kinds like other men, on a larger scale perhaps with a more powerful will and driving-force, for the might of the divine will works in his active nature ; but from all his inceptions and undertakings the inferior concept and nether will of desire is entirely banished, sarve samdrambhdh kdmasankalpavarjitdh. He has abandoned all attachment to the fruits of egoism o worker jl) /The THE DIVINE WORKER his works, and where one does not work for the fruit, but solely as an impersonal instrument of the» Master of works, desire can find no placej^not ever^ the desire to serve successfully, for the fruit is th^ Lord’s and determined by him and not by the® personal will and effort, or to serve with credit and*^ to the Master’s satisfaction, for the real doer is the- Lord himself and all glory belongs to a form of his' Shakti missioned in the nature and not to the limited human personality. \The human mind and soul of the liberated man does nothing, na kinchit karoti ; even though through his nature he engages in action, it is the Nature, the executive Shakti, it is the conscious Goddess governed by the divine Inhabitant who does the work.\
(It does not follow that tlie work is not to be done perfectly, with success, with a right adaptation of means to ends : on the contrary a perfect working is easier to action done tranquilly in Yoga than to action done in the blindness of hopes and fears) lamed by the judgments of the stumbling reason, running about amidst the eager trepidations of the hasty human will: jiYoga, says the Gita elsewhere, is the true skill in works, yogah karmasu kaugalam. But all this is done impersonally by the action of a great universal light and power operating through the individual nature. The Karmayogin knows that the power given to him will be adapted to the fruit decreed,/ the divine thought behind the work equated with the work he has to do, the will in him— which will not be wish or desire, but an
No commentary for this page under the selected tracks.
There is commentary on page 1.