Action Without Attachment

Two armies face each other on the plain of Kurukṣetra. Between them, in a chariot driven by his friend Kṛṣṇa, the archer Arjuna looks across at the men he is about to fight, his teachers, his cousins, his great-uncle, and puts down his bow. He would rather live on alms, he says, than win a kingdom stained with their blood. The Bhagavad Gītā is Kṛṣṇa’s answer, and it is one of the strangest settings any scripture has: the teaching on liberation that India has loved above almost any other is given to a man who wants to stop acting, and it tells him to act.

The setting is not incidental. Arjuna’s question is the one every contemplative tradition meets sooner or later. If the world binds us, should we not leave it? The forest hermit, the monk, the wandering renouncer all answer yes. The Gītā’s answer, karma yoga, the way of action without attachment, is the most developed case in any tradition for saying no: that the bond is not in action but in the one who acts, and that freedom can be found in the middle of the battle.

The one who left, and the one who stayed§

The Mahābhārata, the vast epic that contains the Gītā, does not pretend the question is easy. It gives both answers their heroes. Vyāsa, the sage to whom the epic is ascribed, stays in the world: he fathers the line whose war the epic tells, and he advises, grieves and remembers. His son Śuka is born, the epic says, already free of attachment, and wants only liberation. And yet when Śuka asks his father to teach him, Vyāsa sends him to a king. Go to Janaka, the ruler of Mithilā, he says; the king will tell you everything about liberation.¹1 Vyāsa (traditional), The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, section 12.326.1, translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli: “"'Bhishma said, "Thinking of Emancipation, Suka approached his sire and possessed as he was of humility and desirous of achieving his highest good, he saluted his great preceptor and said,--'Thou art well versed in the religion of Emancipation. Do thou O illustrious one, discourse to me upon it, so that supreme tranquillity of mind, O puissant one, may be mine!'--Hearing …” Read in context

The renouncer learns from the householder. Janaka is the epic’s model of the sage who rules: a king in a palace, with ministers and treasury, who has nonetheless cut the root of possession. He is remembered for a single saying, repeated in several places in the epic: that if all of Mithilā were burnt to ashes, nothing of his would burn.²2 Vyāsa (traditional), The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, section 12.219.3, translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli: “"'Bhishma continued, "Beholding the king enveloped in thick darkness, stupefied by error, and become helpless, the learned Panchasikha tranquillised him by once more addressing him in the following words, 'In this (Emancipation) the consummation is not Extinction. Nor is that consummation any kind of Existence (that one can readily conceive). This that we see is a union of body, senses, …” Read in context Śuka listens, is confirmed in what he knows, and goes on to leave the world entirely. The epic honours both paths. But it makes the teacher of freedom a man who did not leave.

No one can stop acting§

Kṛṣṇa’s first argument is almost logical. No one, he tells Arjuna, can remain even for a moment without acting; the qualities of nature drive every being to act whether it will or not (Vyāsa 1882, III.5). To sit still is to act. To withdraw to the forest is to act. Even the body’s life cannot be kept without action. The one who restrains the organs of action while the mind dwells on their objects is, he says, a hypocrite (Vyāsa 1882, III.6). The question is therefore not whether to act, but how.

The answer is the Gītā’s best-known verse: you have a right to the action alone, never to its fruits; do not let the fruit be your motive, and do not cling to inaction either (Vyāsa 1882, II.47). Arnold, whose verse translation is in the Library’s reader, puts it as a command: let right deeds be the motive, not the fruit that comes from them, and live in action.³3 Vyāsa (traditional), The Song Celestial, chapter 2.12, translated by Edwin Arnold: “Thus far I speak to thee / As from the "Sankhya"--unspiritually-- / Hear now the deeper teaching of the Yog, / Which holding, understanding, thou shalt burst / Thy Karmabandh, the bondage of wrought deeds. / Here shall no end be hindered, no hope marred, / No loss be feared: faith--yea, a little faith-- / Shall save thee from the …” Read in context Arnold does not number the Sanskrit verses; this paragraph of his translation covers verses II.39–48.

This is easily heard as a counsel of indifference, and it is the opposite. The worker who does not care how the work turns out does it badly. What the Gītā asks is harder: to care entirely for the work and not at all for what it will bring the worker. The archer attends to the shot, not to the prize. The physician attends to the patient, not to the fee or the reputation. What is given up is not the aim, which must be clear, but the self’s claim on the result: the hope of reward, the fear of failure, the anxious calculation that turns every act into an investment.

Evenness§

The Gītā calls this state yoga, and defines it twice. Yoga is evenness of mind, the same in success and failure (Vyāsa 1882, II.48); and yoga is skill in action (Vyāsa 1882, II.50). The two definitions belong together. Action done from craving is clumsy because craving distorts: it sees what it wants, not what is there. Action done from evenness can see clearly, and so can act well.

At the end of the second chapter Arjuna asks what such a person is like: how the one of steady wisdom speaks, sits and walks. Kṛṣṇa’s answer is the portrait of the sthitaprajña. This person is not shaken by sorrow nor eager for pleasure, is free of passion, fear and anger, and draws the senses back from their objects as a tortoise draws in its limbs (Vyāsa 1882, II.54–58). Desires enter such a one as rivers enter the ocean, which is filled and does not overflow.⁴4 Vyāsa (traditional), The Song Celestial, chapter 2.18, translated by Edwin Arnold: “So is the perfect one! to his soul's ocean / The world of sense pours streams of witchery; / They leave him as they find, without commotion, / Taking their tribute, but remaining sea.” Read in context The image is precise. The ocean does not refuse the rivers. It receives them all and is not changed. The steady mind is not one that has stopped experiencing the world, but one in which the world no longer produces commotion.

Three ways of letting go§

How is the claim to the fruit given up? The Gītā offers three answers, which are also its three paths, and it does not keep them apart.

The first is sacrifice. In the old Vedic religion, the sacrifice was the act done for the gods, whose fruit was not the sacrificer’s. The Gītā widens it until it covers everything: the world is bound by action, Kṛṣṇa says, except action done as sacrifice (Vyāsa 1882, III.9). Work becomes an offering, and what is offered is no longer one’s own. One verse, recited before meals in many Hindu homes, carries the thought to its end: the offering is Brahman, the oblation is Brahman, it is poured by Brahman into the fire that is Brahman (Vyāsa 1882, IV.24).

The second is devotion. Whatever you do, whatever you eat, whatever you offer or give, Kṛṣṇa says, do it as an offering to me (Vyāsa 1882, IX.27). Here the fruit is given up not to an impersonal order but to a person, and the giving is love. The worker does not stop caring about results. He hands them to the one he loves.

The third is knowledge. All actions, the Gītā says, are done by the qualities of nature; it is only the self deluded by the sense of “I” that thinks, I am the doer (Vyāsa 1882, III.27). The one who knows the truth thinks, I do nothing at all, even while seeing, hearing, eating and walking (Vyāsa 1882, V.8–9). This is the deepest form of non-attachment and the most demanding. It is not that the knower refrains from claiming the fruit. It is that the knower has seen there is no separate self to claim it. The body and mind go on acting. The Self, the witness, was never the actor.

The Anugītā, in which Kṛṣṇa returns to the teaching after the war, gives this knowledge a royal form. Janaka searches for his dominion through the whole earth, then through his city, then among his own children, and cannot find it. Then he understands: nothing is his, or everything is, for he desires nothing for himself.⁵5 Vyāsa (traditional), The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, section 14.32.2, translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli: “"'"'Janaka said, "Although a (large) inhabited tract is subject to me within this ancestral kingdom of mine, yet I fail to find my dominion, searching through the whole Earth. When I failed to find it on the Earth, I then searched Mithila (for it). When I failed to find it in Mithila, I then searched for it among my own …” Read in context This is the condition the Gītā describes. The king still rules, the archer still draws the bow, but the one who said “mine” is gone.

How the teaching is misread§

A teaching this powerful is easily turned. Three misreadings are worth naming, because each takes something true and loses its point.

The first is that it justifies whatever one does, so long as one does it calmly. The Gītā is spoken on a battlefield, and its counsel to fight has been used to excuse violence. But the teaching is not that any act is right when done without desire. It assumes that the act is one’s duty, one’s dharma, and the Mahābhārata spends hundreds of pages showing how hard that is to know. Non-attachment does not tell us what to do. It tells us how to do what is right once we know it, and it removes one great source of wrong action: the craving that makes us choose what serves us. Gandhi, who lived by the Gītā and was committed to non-violence, read the battle as the war within; others have read it literally. Both must reckon with the fact that the poem refuses to make the question simple.

The second is that it is a technique of efficiency: a way to work harder and suffer less. There is truth in this, since evenness does make for better work. But the Gītā’s aim is not productivity. It is liberation. Detachment pursued for the sake of results has smuggled the fruit back in. The teaching works only when the fruit is truly given up, including the fruit of being a calm and effective person.

The third is that it is easy. The Mahābhārata itself knows better. After the war, in the Anugītā, Arjuna confesses that he has forgotten everything Kṛṣṇa taught him on the battlefield, through the fickleness of his mind.⁶6 Vyāsa (traditional), The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, section 14.16.2, translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli: “"Vaisampayana said, 'The son of Pritha (Arjuna), having recovered his own kingdom, joyously spent his time, without doing anything else, in the company of Krishna, his heart filled with delight, in that palace of celestial beauty. One day, those two listlessly proceeded to a particular part of the palace that looked, O king, like a veritable portion of Heaven. Themselves …” Read in context Kṛṣṇa is displeased, and says something more startling still: that he himself cannot now repeat it, for he spoke it absorbed in yoga, and instead he will tell an old story on the same theme.⁷7 Vyāsa (traditional), The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, section 14.16.4, translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli: “"'Vasudeva said, "I made thee listen to truths that are regarded as mysteries. I imparted to thee truths that are eternal. Verily, I discoursed to thee on Religion in its true form and on all the eternal regions. It is exceedingly disagreeable to me to learn that thou didst not, from folly, receive what I imparted. The recollection of all …” Read in context The epic’s greatest hero heard the highest teaching from God himself, and lost it within a few years. The teaching is not a possession. It has to be lived again each day, and it can be forgotten.

Beyond the Gītā§

Other traditions have their own forms of this teaching, and they are close enough to illuminate one another. Laozi’s sage acts without claiming the results as his, and achieves his merit without resting in it.⁸8 Laozi, The Tâo Teh King, chapter 77.4, translated by James Legge: “Therefore the (ruling) sage acts without claiming the results as his; he achieves his merit and does not rest (arrogantly) in it:--he does not wish to display his superiority.” Read in context Marcus Aurelius admired the man who does a good turn as a vine bears grapes, and seeks nothing more, but goes on to bear again in season.⁹9 Marcus Aurelius, The Thoughts of the Emperor M. Aurelius Antoninus, section 5.6, translated by George Long: “One man, when he has done a service to another, is ready to set it down to his account as a favor conferred. Another is not ready to do this, but still in his own mind he thinks of the man as his debtor, and he knows what he has done. A third in a manner does not even know …” Read in context The differences matter, and the Library’s parallels set some of them out. For Laozi, non-claiming is the way of things that the sage follows; for Marcus, it is the nature of a reasoning and social being; for the Gītā, it is a discipline held against desire and, at its height, the recognition that the Self was never the one who acted.

What they share is a refusal of the choice between the world and freedom. The renouncer is right that attachment binds. The Gītā adds that attachment can be renounced without renouncing the work, and that the work, done without attachment, becomes itself the path. Śuka left; Janaka stayed; both, the epic says, were free.