Essays on the Gita, First Series (Arya Publishing House, 1922)
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That equality, impersonality, peace, joy, free- dom do not depend on so outward a thing as doing or not doing works. The Gita insists repeatedly on the difference between the inward and the outward renunciation, tydga and sannydsa. The latter, it says, is valueless without the former, hardly possible even to attain without it, and unnecessary when there is the inward freedom. In fact tydga itself is the real and sufficient Sannyasa. “He should be known as the eternal Sannyasin who neither hates nor desires ; free from the dualities he is happily and easily released from all bondage.” The painful process of outward Sannyasa, duhkham dptum, is an unnecessary process. It is perfectly true that all actions, as well as the fruit of action, have to be given up, to be renounced, but inwardly, not outwardly, not into the inertia of Nature, but to the Lord in sacrifice, into the calm and joy of the Impersonal from whom all action proceeds without disturbing his peace. The true Sannyasa of action is the reposing of all works on the Brahman. ^'He who, having abandoned attachment, acts reposing (or founding) his works on the Brahman, brahmanyddhdya karmdni, is not stained by sin even as water clings not to the lotus-leaf.” Therefore the Ybgins first “do works with the body, mind, under- standing, or even merely with the organs of action, abandoning attachment, for self-purification, sangam tyaktwdtmaguddhaye. By abandoning attachment to the fruits of works the soul in union with Brahman attains to peace of rapt foundation in Brahman, but the soul not in union is attached to the fruit and bound by the action of desire/' The foundation, the purity, the peace once attained, the embodied soul perfectly controlling its nature, having renounced all its actions by the mind, inwardly, not outwardly, ''sits in its nine-gated city neither doing nor causing to be done." For this soul is the one impersonal Soul in all, the all- pervading Lord, prabhu, vibhu, who, as the impersonal, neither creates the works of the world, nor the mind's idea of being the doer, na kartr'itwam na karmdni, nor the coupling of works to their fruits, the chain of cause and effect. All that is worked out by the Nature in the man, swabhdva, his principle of self-becoming, as the word literally means. The all-pervading Impersonal accepts neither the sin nor the virtue of any: these are things created by the ignorance in the creature, by his egoism of the doer, by his ignorance of his highest self, by his involution in the operations of Nature, and when the self-knowledge within him is released from this dark envelope, that knowledge lights up like a sun the real self within him ; he knows himself then to be the soul supreme ^bove the instruments of Nature. Pure, infinite, inviolable, immuuble, he is no longer affected ; no longer does he imagine himself to be modified by her workings. By complete identification with
THE DIVINE WORKER the Impersonal he can, too, release himself from the necessity of returning by birth into her movement.
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