Karma yoga

Karma yoga, the discipline of action, is the Bhagavad Gītā’s answer to the question whether the seeker must leave the world. No one can cease from acting, Kṛṣṇa tells Arjuna, even for a moment (III.5); what binds is not action but the desire for its results. The way is to act, and to give up the fruit: you have a right to the work alone, never to its fruits (II.47).

Such action is done as an offering. The Gītā calls yoga evenness of mind (II.48) and skill in action (II.50): the one who works without craving, unmoved by success and failure, does what is to be done and is not bound by it. Later chapters join this way to the others. Action given up to the Lord becomes devotion, and action done without the sense of “I am the doer” becomes knowledge, for the knower sees that the qualities of nature act and the Self does not (III.27–28, V.8–10).

Karma yoga has been read in many ways. For Śaṅkara it purifies the mind and prepares it for knowledge, which alone liberates. For Rāmānuja it is a path in its own right, leading to the vision of the self and to devotion. In modern India it became, through Vivekananda, Tilak and Gandhi, a teaching of selfless service in the world. The Anugītā, in which Kṛṣṇa repeats the teaching after the war, gives the same freedom a king’s form: Janaka searches his whole kingdom and finds nothing in it that is his (Book 14, section 32).