Essays on the Gita, First Series (Arya Publishing House, 1922)

The equality which the Gita preaches is not disinterestedness, — the great command to Arjuna given after the foundation and main structure of the teaching have been laid and built, “Arise, slay thy enisles, enjoy a prosperous kingdom,'* has not the ring/ q£ an uncompromising altruism or of a white, cKspassionate abnegation ; it is a state of inner poise and wideness which is the foundation % of S3 THE CORE OF THE TEACHING

Spiritual freedom. ^With that poise, in that freedom we have to do the ''work that is to be done,” a phrase which the Gita uses with the greatest wideness including in it all works, sarvakarmdni, and which far exceeds, though it may include, social duties or ethical obligations. What is the work to be done is not to be determined by the individual choice ; nor is the right to the action and the rejection of claim to the fruit the great word of the Gita, but only a preliminary word governing the first state of the disciple when he begins ascending the hill of Yoga. It is practically superseded at a subsequent stage. For the Gita goes on to aflârm emphatically that the man is not the doer of the action ; it is Prakriti, it is Nature, it is the great Force with its three modes of action that works through him, and he must learn to see that it is not he who does the work. Therefore the "right to action” is an idea which is only valid so long as we are still under the illusion of being the doer ; it must necessarily disappear from the mind like the claim to the fruit, as soon as we cease to be to our own consciousness the doer of our works. All pragmatic egoism, whether of the claim to fruits or of the right to action, is then at an end.

But the determinism of Prakriti is not the last word of the Gita. The equality of the will and the rejection of fruits are only means for entering with the mind and the heart and the understanding into the divine consciousness and living in it ; and the Gita expressly says that they are to be employed as