Karma Yoga
(Originally published
by President, Advaita Ashrama, Mayavati, Pithoragarh, Himalayas)
KARMA
IN ITS EFFECT ON CHARACTER
THE word Karma is derived from the Sanskrit
Kri, to do; all action is Karma. Technically, this word also means the effects
of actions. In connection with metaphysics, it sometimes means the effects, of
which our past actions were the causes. But in Karma-Yoga we have simply to do
with the word Karma as meaning work. The goal of mankind is knowledge. That is
the one ideal placed before us by Eastern philosophy. Pleasure is not the goal
of man, but knowledge. Pleasure and happiness come to an end. It is a mistake
to suppose that pleasure is the goal. The cause of all the miseries we have in
the world is that men foolishly think pleasure to be the ideal to strive for.
After a time man finds that it is not happiness, but knowledge, towards which
he is going, and that both pleasure and pain are great teachers; and that he learns
as much from evil as from good. As pleasure and pain pass before his soul, they
leave upon it different pictures, and the result of these combined impressions
is what is called man's "character". If you take the character of any
man, it really is but the aggregate of tendencies, the sum total of the bent of
his mind; you will find that misery and happiness are equal factors in the formation
of that character. Good and evil have an equal share in molding character, and
in some instances misery is a greater teacher than happiness. In studying the
great characters the world has produced, I dare say, in the vast majority of cases
it would be found that it was misery that taught more than happiness, it was poverty
that taught more than wealth, it was blows that brought out their inner fire more
than praise.
Now this knowledge, again, is inherent in man. No knowledge
comes from outside; it is all inside. What we say a man "knows", should,
in strict psychological language, be what he "discovers" or "unveils",
what a man "learns" is really what he "discovers", by taking
the cover off his own soul, which is a mine of infinite knowledge. We say Newton
discovered gravitation. Was it sitting anywhere in a corner waiting for him? It
was in his own mind; the time came and he found it out. All knowledge that the
world has ever received comes from the mind; the infinite library of the universe
is in your own mind. The external world is simply the suggestion, the occasion,
which sets you to study your own mind, but the object of your study is always
your own mind. The falling of an apple gave the suggestion to Newton, and he studied
his own mind. He rearranged all the previous links of thought in his mind and
discovered a new link among them, which we call the law of gravitation. It was
not in the apple nor in anything in the center of the earth. All knowledge, therefore,
secular or spiritual, is in the human mind. In many cases it is not discovered
but remains covered, and when the covering is being slowly taken off we say, "We
are learning", and the advance of knowledge is made by the advance of this
process of uncovering. The man from whom this veil is being lifted is the more
knowing man; the man upon whom it lies thick is ignorant; and the man from whom
it has entirely gone is all-knowing, omniscient. There have been omniscient men,
and, I believe, there will be yet; and that there will be myriads of them in the
cycles to come. Like fire in a piece of flint, knowledge exists in the mind; suggestion
is the friction which brings it out. So with all our feelings and actions--our
tears and our smiles, our joys and our griefs, our weeping and our laughter, our
curses and our blessings, our praises and our blames--every one of these we may
find, if we calmly study our own selves, to have been brought out from within
ourselves by so many blows. The result is what we are. All these blows taken together
are called Karma--work, action. Every mental and physical blow that is given to
the soul, by which, as it were, fire is struck from it, and by which its own power
and knowledge are discovered, is Karma, this word being used in its widest sense;
thus we are all doing Karma all the time. I am talking to you: that is Karma.
You are listening: that is Karma. We breathe: that is Karma. We walk: Karma. Everything
we do, physical or mental, is Karma, and it leaves its marks on us.
There
are certain works which are, as it were, the aggregate, the sum total, of a large
number of smaller works. If we stand near the seashore and hear the waves dashing
against the shingle, we think it is such a great noise; and yet we know that one
wave is really composed of millions and millions of minute waves. Each one of
these is making a noise, and yet we do not catch it; it is only when they become
the big aggregate that we hear. Similarly, every pulsation of the heart is work;
certain kinds of work we feel and they become tangible to us; they are, at the
same time, the aggregate of a number of small works. If you really want to judge
of the character of a man, look not at his great performances. Every fool may
become a hero at one time or another. Watch a man do his most common actions;
those are indeed the things which will tell you the real character of a great
man. Great occasions rouse even the lowest of human beings to some kind of greatness,
but he alone is the really great man whose character is great always, the same
wherever he be.
Karma in its effect on character is the most tremendous
power that man has to deal with. Man is, as it were, a center, and is attracting
all the powers of the universe towards himself, and in this center is fusing them
all and again sending them off in a big current. Such a center is the real man,
the almighty, the omniscient, and he draws the whole universe towards him. Good
and bad, misery and happiness, all are running towards him and clinging round
him; and out of them he fashions the mighty stream of tendency called character
and throws it outwards. As he has the power of drawing in anything, so has he
the power of throwing it out.
All the actions that we see in the world,
all the movements in human society, all the works that we have around us, are
simply the display of thought, the manifestation of the will of man. Machines
or instruments, cities, ships or men-of-war, all these are simply the manifestation
of the will of man; and this will is caused by character and character is manufactured
by Karma. As is Karma, so is the manifestation of the will. The men of mighty
will the world has produced have all been tremendous workers--gigantic souls with
wills powerful enough to overturn worlds, wills they got by persistent work through
ages and ages. Such a gigantic will as that of a Buddha or a Jesus could not be
obtained in one life, for we know who their fathers were. It is not known that
their fathers ever spoke a word for the good of mankind. Millions and millions
of carpenters like Joseph had gone; millions are still living. Millions and millions
of petty kings like Buddha's father had been in the world. If it was only a case
of hereditary transmission, how do you account for this petty prince who was not,
perhaps, obeyed by his own servants, producing this son whom half a world worships?
How do you explain the gulf between the carpenter and his son whom millions of
human beings worship as God? It cannot be solved by the theory of heredity. The
gigantic will which Buddha and Jesus threw over the world, whence did it come?
Whence came this accumulation of power? It must have been there through ages and
ages, continually growing bigger and bigger, until it burst on society in a Buddha
or a Jesus, even rolling down to the present day.
All this is determined
by Karma, work. No one can get anything unless he earns it; this is an eternal
law. We may sometimes think it is not so, but in the long run we become convinced
of it. A man may struggle all his life for riches; he may cheat thousands, but
he finds at last that he did not deserve to become rich, and his life becomes
a trouble and a nuisance to him. We may go on accumulating things for our physical
enjoyment, but only what we earn is really ours. A fool may buy all the books
in the world, and they will be in his library, but he will be able to read only
those that he deserves to; and this deserving is produced by Karma. Our Karma
determines what we deserve and what we can assimilate. We are responsible for
what we are; and whatever we wish ourselves to be, we have the power to make ourselves.
If what we are now has been the result of our own past actions, it certainly follows
that whatever we wish to be in future can be produced by our present actions;
so we have to know how to act. You will say, "What is the use of learning
how to work? Everyone works in some way or other in this world." But there
is such a thing as frittering away our energies. With regard to Karma-Yoga, the
Gita says that it is doing work with cleverness and as a science: by knowing how
to work, one can obtain the greatest results. You must remember that all work
is simply to bring out the power of the mind which is already there, to wake up
the soul. The power is inside every man, so is knowledge; the different works
are like blows to bring them out to cause these giants to wake up.
Man works
with various motives; there cannot be work without motive. Some people want to
get fame, and they work for fame. Others want money, and they work for money.
Others want to have power, and they work for power. Others want to get to heaven,
and they work for the same. Others want to leave a name when they die, as they
do in China where no man gets a title until he is dead; and that is a better way,
after all, than with us. When a man does something very good there, they give
a title of nobility to his father who is dead, or to his grandfather. Some people
work for that. Some of the followers of certain Mohammedan sects work all their
lives to have a big tomb built for them when they die. I know sects among whom,
as soon as a child is born, a tomb is prepared for it; that is among them the
most important work a man has to do, and the bigger and the finer the tomb, the
better off the man is supposed to be. Others work as a penance; do all sorts of
wicked things, then erect a temple, or give something to the priests to buy them
off and obtain from them a passport to heaven. They think that this kind of beneficence
will clear them and they will go scot-free in spite of their sinfulness. Such
are some of the various motives for work.
Work for work's sake. There
are some who are really the salt of the earth in every country and who work for
work's sake, who do not care for name, or fame, or even to go to heaven. They
work just because good will come of it. There are others who do good to the poor
and help mankind from still higher motives, because they believe in doing good
and love good. The motive for name and fame seldom brings immediate results as
a rule; they come to us when we are old and have almost done with life. If a man
works without any selfish motive in view, does he not gain anything? Yes, he gains
the highest. Unselfishness is more paying, only people have not the patience to
practise it. It is more paying from the point of view of health also. Love, truth,
and unselfishness are not merely moral figures of speech, but they form our highest
ideal, because in them lies such a manifestation of power. In the first place,
a man who can work for five days or even for five minutes without any selfish
motive whatever, without thinking of future, of heaven, of punishment, or anything
of the kind, has in him the capacity to become a powerful moral giant. It is hard
to do it, but in the heart of our hearts we know its value, and the good it brings.
It is the greatest manifestation of power--this tremendous restraint; self-restraint
is a manifestation of greater power than all outgoing action. A carriage with
four horses may rush down a hill unrestrained, or the coachman may curb the horses.
Which is the greater manifestation of power, to let them go or to hold them? A
cannon-ball flying through the air goes a long distance and falls. Another is
cut short in its flight by striking against a wall, and the impact generates intense
heat. All outgoing energy following a selfish motive is frittered away; it will
not cause power to return to you; but if restrained, it will result in development
of power. This self-control will tend to produce a mighty will, a character which
makes a Christ or a Buddha. Foolish men do not know this secret; they nevertheless
want to rule mankind. Even a fool may rule the whole world if he works and waits.
Let him wait a few years, restrain that foolish idea of governing; and when that
idea is wholly gone, he will be a power in the world. The majority of us cannot
see beyond a few years, just as some animals cannot see beyond a few steps. Just
a little narrow circle--that is our world. We have not the patience to look beyond,
and thus become immoral and wicked. This is our weakness, our powerlessness.
Even the lowest forms of work are not to be despised. Let the man who knows
no better, work for selfish ends, for name and fame; but everyone should always
try to get towards higher and higher motives and to understand them. "To
work we have the right, but not to the fruits thereof." Leave the fruits
alone. Why care for results? If you wish to help a man, never think what that
man's attitude should be towards you. If you want to do a great or a good work,
do not trouble to think what the result will be.
There arises a difficult
question in this ideal of work. Intense activity is necessary; we must always
work. We cannot live a minute without work. What then becomes of rest? Here is
one side of the life-struggle--work in which we are whirled rapidly round. And
here is the other that of calm, retiring renunciation; everything is peaceful
around, there is very little of noise and show, only nature with her animals and
flowers and mountains. Neither of them is a perfect picture. A man used to solitude,
if brought in contact with the surging whirlpool of the world, will be crushed
by it; just as the fish that lives in the deep sea water, as soon as it is brought
to the surface, breaks into pieces, deprived of the weight of water on it that
had kept it together. Can a man who has been used to the turmoil and the rush
of life live at ease if he comes to a quiet place? He suffers and perchance may
lose his mind. The ideal man is he who in the midst of the greatest silence and
solitude finds the intensest activity, and in the midst of the intensest activity
finds the silence and solitude of the desert. He has learnt the secret of restraint,
he has controlled himself. He goes through the streets of a big city with all
its traffic, and his mind is as calm as if he were in a cave where not a sound
could reach him; and he is intensely working all the time. That is the ideal of
Karma-Yoga; and if you have attained to that, you have really learnt the secret
of work.
But we have to begin from the beginning, to take up the works
as they come to us and slowly make ourselves more unselfish every day. We must
do the work and find out the motive power that prompts us; and, almost without
exception, in the first years we shall find that our motives are always selfish;
but gradually this selfishness will melt by persistence, till at last will come
the time when we shall be able to do really unselfish work. We may all hope that
some day or other, as we struggle through the paths of life, there will come a
time when we shall become perfectly unselfish; and the moment we attain to that,
all our powers will be concentrated, and the knowledge which is ours will be manifest.
EACH IS GREAT IN HIS OWN PLACE
According to the Sânkhya
philosophy, nature is composed of three forces called, in Sanskrit, Sattva, Rajas
and Tamas. These as manifested in the physical world are what we may call equilibrium,
activity, and inertness. Tamas is typified as darkness or inactivity; Rajas is
activity, expressed as attraction or repulsion; and Sattva is the equilibrium
of the two.
In every man there are these three forces. Sometimes Tamas
prevails. We become lazy, we cannot move, we are inactive, bound down by certain
ideas or by mere dullness. At other times activity prevails, and at still other
times that calm balancing of both. Again, in different men, one of these forces
is generally predominant. The characteristic of one man is inactivity, dullness,
and laziness; that of another activity, power, manifestation of energy; and in
still another we find the sweetness, calmness, and gentleness which are due to
the balancing of both action and inaction. So in all creation--in animals, plants,
and men--we find the more or less typical manifestation of all these different
forces.
Karma-Yoga has specially to deal with these three factors. By
teaching what they are and how to employ them, it helps us to do our work better.
Human society is a graded organization. We all know about morality, and we all
know about duty, but at the same time we find that in different countries the
significance of morality varies greatly. What is regarded as moral in one country,
may in another be considered perfectly immoral. For instance, in one country cousins
may marry; in another, it is thought to be very immoral; in one, men may marry
their sisters-in-law; in another, it is regarded as immoral; in one country people
may marry only once; in another, many times; and so forth. Similarly, in all other
departments of morality, we find the standard varies greatly; yet we have the
idea that there must be a universal standard of morality.
So it is with
duty. The idea of duty varies much among different nations. In one country, if
a man does not do certain things, people will say he has acted wrongly; while
if he does those very things in another country, people will say that he did not
act rightly--and yet we know that there must be some universal idea of duty. In
the same way, one class of society thinks that certain things are among its duty,
while another class thinks quite the opposite and would be horrified if it had
to do those things. Two ways are left open to us--the way of the ignorant who
think that there is only one way to truth and that all the rest are wrong, and
the way of the wise who admit that, according to our mental constitution or the
different planes of existence in which we are, duty and morality may vary. The
important thing is to know that there are gradations of duty and of morality--that
the duty of one state of life, in one set of circumstances, will not and cannot
be that of another.
To illustrate: All great teachers have taught, "Resist
not evil", that non-resistance is the highest moral ideal. We all know that
if a certain number of us attempted to put that maxim fully into practice, the
whole social fabric would fall to pieces, the wicked would take possession of
our properties and our lives, and would do whatever they liked with us. Even if
for only one day such non-resistance were practiced, it would lead to disaster.
Yet, intuitively, in our heart of hearts we feel the truth of the teaching, "Resist
not evil". This seems to us to be the highest ideal; yet to teach this doctrine
only would be equivalent to condemning a vast portion of mankind. Not only so,
it would be making men feel that they were always doing wrong and cause in them
scruples of conscience in all their actions; it would weaken them, and that constant
self-disapproval would breed more vice than any other weakness would. To the man
who has begun to hate himself the gate to degeneration has already opened; and
the same is true of a nation.
Our first duty is not to hate ourselves;
because to advance we must have faith in ourselves first and then in God. He who
has no faith in himself can never have faith in God. Therefore the only alternative
remaining to us is to recognize that duty and morality vary under different circumstances;
not that the man who resists evil is doing what is always and in itself wrong,
but that in the different circumstances in which he is placed it may become even
his duty to resist evil.
In reading the Bhagavad-Gita, many of you in
Western countries may have felt astonished at the second chapter, wherein Shri
Krishna calls Arjuna a hypocrite and a coward because of his refusal to fight
or offer resistance on account of his adversaries being his friends and relatives,
making the plea that non-resistance was the highest ideal of love. This is a great
lesson for us all to learn, that in all matters the two extremes are alike; the
extreme positive and the extreme negative are always similar; when the vibrations
of light are too slow we do not see them, nor do we see them when they are too
rapid. So with sound; when very low in pitch we do not hear it, when very high
we do not hear it either. Of like nature is the difference between resistance
and non-resistance. One man does not resist because he is weak, lazy, and cannot,
not because he will not; the other man knows that he can strike an irresistible
blow if he likes; yet he not only does not strike, but blesses his enemies. The
one who from weakness resists not commits a sin, and as such cannot receive any
benefit from the non-resistance; while the other would commit a sin by offering
resistance. Buddha gave up his throne and renounced his position; that was true
renunciation. But there cannot be any question of renunciation in the case of
a beggar who has nothing to renounce. So we must always be careful about what
we really mean when we speak of this non-resistance and ideal love. We must first
take care to understand whether we have the power of resistance or not. Then,
having the power, if we renounce it and do not resist, we are doing a grand act
of love; but if we cannot resist, and yet, at the same time, try to deceive ourselves
into the belief that we are actuated by motives of the highest love, we are doing
the exact opposite. Arjuna became a coward at the sight of the mighty array against
him; his "love" made him forget his duty towards his country and king.
That is why Shri Krishna told him that he was a hypocrite: Thou talkest like a
wise man, but thy actions betray thee to be a coward; therefore stand up and fight!
Such is the central idea of Karma-Yoga. The Karma-Yogi is the man who
understands that the highest ideal is non-resistance, and who also knows that
this non-resistance is the highest manifestation of power in actual possession,
and also what is called the resisting of evil is but a step on the way towards
the manifestation of this highest power, namely, non-resistance. Before reaching
this highest ideal, man's duty is to resist evil; let him work, let him fight,
let him strike straight from the shoulder. Then only, when he has gained the power
to resist, will non-resistance be a virtue.
I once met a man in my country
whom I had known before as a very stupid, dull person, who knew nothing and had
not the desire to know anything, and was living the life of a brute. He asked
me what he should do to know God, how he was to get free. "Can you tell a
lie?" I asked him. "No," he replied. "Then you must learn
to do so. It is better to tell a lie than to be a brute or a log of wood. You
are inactive; you have not certainly reached the highest state, which is beyond
all actions, calm and serene; you are too dull even to do something wicked."
That was an extreme case, of course, and I was joking with him; but what I meant
was that a man must be active in order to pass through activity to perfect calmness.
Inactivity should be avoided by all means. Activity always means resistance.
Resist all evils, mental and physical; and when you have succeeded in resisting,
then will calmness come. It is very easy to say, "Hate nobody, resist not
evil", but we know what that kind of thing generally means in practice. When
the eyes of society are turned towards us, we may make a show of nonresistance,
but in our hearts it is canker all the time. We feel the utter want of the calm
of nonresistance; we feel that it would be better for us to resist. If you desire
wealth, and know at the same time that the whole world regards him who aims at
wealth as a very wicked man, you, perhaps, will not dare to plunge into the struggle
for wealth, yet your mind will be running day and night after money. This is hypocrisy
and will serve no purpose. Plunge into the world, and then, after a time, when
you have suffered and enjoyed all that is in it, will renunciation come; then
will calmness come. So fulfill your desire for power and everything else, and
after you have fulfilled the desire, will come the time when you will know that
they are all very little things; but until you have fulfilled this desire, until
you have passed through that activity, it is impossible for you to come to the
state of calmness, serenity, and self-surrender. These ideas of serenity and renunciation
have been preached for thousands of years; everybody has heard of them from childhood,
and yet we see very few in the world who have really reached that stage. I do
not know if I have seen twenty persons in my life who are really calm and nonresisting,
and I have traveled over half the world.
Every man should take up his
own ideal and endeavor to accomplish it; that is a surer way of progress than
taking up other men's ideals which he can never hope to accomplish. For instance,
we take a child and at once give him the task of walking twenty miles. Either
the little one dies, or one in a thousand crawls the twenty miles to reach the
end exhausted and half-dead. That is like what we generally try to do with the
world. All the men and women in any society are not of the same mind, capacity,
or of the same power to do things; they must have different ideals, and we have
no right to sneer at any ideal. Let everyone do the best he can for realizing
his own ideal. Nor is it right that I should be judged by your standard or you
by mine. The apple tree should not be judged by the standard of the oak, nor the
oak by that of the apple. To judge the apple tree you must take the apple standard,
and for the oak its own standard.
Unity in variety is the plan of creation.
However men and women may vary individually, there is unity in the background.
The different individual characters and classes of men and women are natural variations
in creation. Hence we ought not to judge them by the same standard or put the
same ideal before them. Such a course creates only an unnatural struggle, and
the result is that man begins to hate himself and is hindered from becoming religious
and good. Our duty is to encourage everyone in his struggle to live up to his
own highest ideal, and strive at the same time to make the ideal as near as possible
to the truth.
In the Hindu system of morality we find that this fact
has been recognized from very ancient times and in their scriptures and books
on ethics different rules are laid down for the different classes of men--the
householder, the Sannyâsin (the man who has renounced the world), and the
student.
The life of every individual, according to the Hindu scriptures,
has its peculiar duties apart from what belongs in common to universal humanity.
The Hindu begins life as a student; then he marries and becomes a householder;
in old age he retires, and lastly he gives up the world and becomes a Sannyâsin.
To each of these stages of life certain duties are attached. No one of these stages
is intrinsically superior to another. The life of the married man is quite as
great as that of the celibate who has devoted himself to religious work. The scavenger
in the street is quite as great and glorious as the king on his throne. Take him
off his throne, make him do the work of the scavenger, and see how he fares. Take
up the scavenger and see how he will rule. It is useless to say that the man who
lives out of the world is a greater man than he who lives in the world; it is
much more difficult to live in the world and worship God than to give it up and
live a free and easy life. The four stages of life in India have in later times
been reduced to two--that of the householder and of the monk. The householder
marries and carries on his duties as a citizen, and the duty of the other is to
devote his energies wholly to religion, to preach and to worship God. I shall
read to you a few passages from the Mahâ-Nirvâna Tantra, which treats
of this subject, and you will see that it is a very difficult task for a man to
be a householder, and perform all his duties perfectly.
The householder
should be devoted to God; the knowledge of God should be his goal of life. Yet
he must work constantly, perform all his duties; he must give up the fruits of
his actions to God.
It is the most difficult thing in this world, to
work and not care for the result, to help a man and never think that he ought
to be grateful, to do some good work and at the same time never look to see whether
it brings you name or fame, or nothing at all. Even the most arrant coward becomes
brave when the world praises him. A fool can do heroic deeds when the approbation
of society is upon him, but for a man to constantly do good without caring for
the approbation of his fellowmen is indeed the highest sacrifice man can perform.
The great duty of the householder is to earn a living, but he must take care that
he does not do it by telling lies, or by cheating or by robbing others; and he
must remember that his life is for the service of God and the poor.
Knowing
that mother and father are the visible representatives of God, the householder,
always and by all means, must please them. If the mother is pleased, and the father,
God is pleased with the man. That child is really a good child who never speaks
harsh words to his parents.
Before parents one must not utter jokes,
must not show restlessness, must not show anger or temper before mother or father,
a child must bow down low, and stand up in their presence, and must not take a
seat until they order him to sit.
If the householder has food and drink
and clothes without first seeing that his mother and his father, his children,
his wife, and the poor are supplied, he is committing a sin. The mother and the
father are the causes of this body, so a man must undergo a thousand troubles
in order to do good to them.
Even so is, his duty to his wife; no man
should scold his wife, and he must always maintain her as if she were his own
mother. And even when he is in the greatest difficulties and troubles, he must
not show anger to his wife.
He who thinks of another woman besides his
wife, if he touches her even with his mind--that man goes to dark hell.
Before
women he must not talk improper language, and never brag of his powers. He must
not say, "I have done this, and I have done that."
The householder
must always please his wife with money, clothes, love, faith, and words like nectar,
and never do anything to disturb her. That man who has succeeded in getting the
love of a chaste wife has succeeded in his religion and has all the virtues.
The following are duties towards children:
A son should be lovingly
reared up to his fourth year; he should be educated till he is sixteen. When he
is twenty years of age he should be employed in some work; he should then be treated
affectionately by his father as his equal. Exactly in the same manner the daughter
should be brought up, and should be educated with the greatest care. And when
she marries, the father ought to give her jewels and wealth.
Then the
duty of the man is towards his brothers and sisters, and towards the children
of his brothers and sisters, if they are poor, and towards his other relatives,
his friends, and his servants. Then his duties are towards the people of the same
village, and the poor, and anyone that comes to him for help. Having sufficient
means, if the householder does not take care to give to his relatives and to the
poor, know him to be only a brute; he is not a human being.
Excessive
attachment to food, clothes, and the tending of the body, and dressing of the
hair should he avoided. The householder must be pure in heart and clean in body,
always active and always ready for work.
To his enemies the householder
must be a hero. Them he must resist. That is the duty of the householder. He must
not sit down in a corner and weep, and talk nonsense about nonresistance. If he
does not show himself a hero to his enemies he has not done his duty. And to his
friends and relatives he must be as gentle as a lamb.
It is the duty
of the householder not to pay reverence to the wicked; because, if he reverences
the wicked people of the world, he patronizes wickedness; and it will be a great
mistake if he disregards those who are worthy of respect, the good people. He
must not be gushing in his friendship; he must not go out of the way making friends
everywhere; he must watch the actions of the men he wants to make friends with,
and their dealings with other men, reason upon them, and then make friends.
These three things be must not talk of. He must not talk in public of his
own fame; he must not preach his own name or his own powers; he must not talk
of his wealth, or of anything that has been told to him privately.
A
man must not say he is poor, or that he is wealthy--he must not brag of his wealth.
Let him keep his own counsel; this is his religious duty. This is not mere worldly
wisdom; if a man does not do so, he may be held to be immoral.
The householder
is the basis, the prop of the whole society; he is the principal earner. The poor,
the weak, the children, and the women who do not work--all live upon the householder;
so there must be certain duties that he has to perform, and these duties must
make him feel strong to perform them, and not make him think that he is doing
things beneath his ideal. Therefore, if he has done something weak or has made
some mistake, he must not say so in public; and if he is engaged in some enterprise
and knows he is sure to fail in it, he must not speak of it. Such self-exposure
is not only uncalled for, but also unnerves the man and makes him unfit for the
performance of his legitimate duties in life. At the same time, he must struggle
hard to acquire these things--first, knowledge, and secondly, wealth. It is his
duty; and if he does not do his duty, he is nobody. A householder who does not
struggle to get wealth is immoral. If he is lazy and content to lead an idle life,
he is immoral, because upon him depend hundreds. If he gets riches, hundreds of
others will be thereby supported.
If there were not in this city hundreds
who had striven to become rich, and who had acquired wealth, where would all this
civilization, and these alms-houses and great houses be?
Going after
wealth in such a case is not bad, because that wealth is for distribution. The
householder is the center of life and society. It is a worship for him to acquire
and spend wealth nobly, for the householder who struggles to become rich by good
means and for good purposes is doing practically the same thing for the attainment
of salvation as the anchorite does in his cell when he is praying, for in them
we see only the different aspects of the same virtue of self-surrender and self-sacrifice
prompted by the feeling of devotion to God and to all that is His.
He
must struggle to acquire a good name by all means. He must not gamble, he must
not move in the company of the wicked, he must not tell lies, and must not be
the cause of trouble to others.
Often people enter into things they have
not the means to accomplish, with the result that they cheat others to attain
their own ends. Then there is in all things the time factor to be taken into consideration;
what at one time might be a failure, would perhaps at another time be a very great
success.
The householder must speak the truth and speak gently, using
words which people like, which will do good to others; nor should he talk of the
business of other men.
The householder by digging tanks, by planting
trees on the roadsides, by establishing rest-houses for men and animals, by making
roads and building bridges, goes towards the same goal as the greatest Yogi.
This is one part of the doctrine of Karma-Yoga--activity, the duty of the
householder. There is a passage later on, where it says that "if the householder
dies in battle fighting for his country or his religion, he comes to the same
goal as the Yogi by meditation," showing thereby that what is duty for one
is not duty for another. At the same time, it does not say that this duty is lowering
and the other elevating. Each duty has its own place, and according to the circumstances
in which we are placed, must we perform our duties.
One idea comes out
of all this, the condemnation of all weakness. This is a particular idea in all
our teachings which I like, either in philosophy, or in religion, or in work.
If you read the Vedas, you will find this word always repeated--"fearlessness"--fear
nothing. Fear is a sign of weakness. A man must go about his duties without taking
notice of the sneers and the ridicule of the world.
If a man retires
from the world to worship God, he must not think that those who live in the world
and work for the good of the world are not worshipping God; neither must those
who live in the world for wife and children think that those who give up the world
are low vagabonds. Each is great in his own place. This thought I will illustrate
by a story.
A certain king used to inquire of all the Sannyâsins
that came to his country, "Which is the greater man--he who gives up the
world and becomes a Sannyâsin, or he who lives in the world and performs
his duties as a householder?" Many wise men sought to solve the problem.
Some asserted that the Sannyâsin was the greater, upon which the king demanded
that they should prove their assertion. When they could not, he ordered them to
marry and become householders. Then others came and said, "The householder
who performs his duties is the greater man." Of them, too, the king demanded
proofs. When they could not give them, he made them also settle down as householders.
At last there came a young Sannyâsin, and the king similarly inquired
of him also. He answered, "Each, O king, is equally great in his place."
"Prove this to me," asked the king. "I will prove it to you,"
said the Sannyâsin, "but you must first come and live as I do for a
few days, that I may be able to prove to you what I say." The king consented
and followed the Sannyâsin out of his own territory and passed through many
other countries until they came to a great kingdom. In the capital of that kingdom
a great ceremony was going on. The king and the Sannyâsin heard the noise
of drums and music, and heard also the criers; the people were assembled in the
streets in gala dress, and a great proclamation was being made. The king and the
Sannyâsin stood there to see what was going on. The crier was proclaiming
loudly that the princess, daughter of the king of that country, was about to choose
a husband from among those assembled before her.
It was an old custom
in India for princesses to choose husbands in this way. Each princess had certain
ideas of the sort of man she wanted for a husband; some would have the handsomest
man; others would have only the most learned; others again the richest, and so
on. All the princes of the neighborhood put on their bravest attire and presented
themselves before her. Sometimes they too had their own criers to enumerate their
advantages and the reasons why they hoped the princess would choose them. The
princess was taken round on a throne in the most splendid array and looked at
and heard about them. If she was not pleased with what she saw and heard, she
said to her bearers, "Move on," and no more notice was taken of the
rejected suitors. If, however, the princess was pleased with any one of them,
she threw a garland of flowers over him, and he became her husband.
The
princess of the country to which our king and the Sannyâsin had come was
having one of these interesting ceremonies. She was the most beautiful princess
in the world, and the husband of the princess would be ruler of the kingdom after
her father's death. The idea of this princess was to marry the handsomest man,
but she could not find the right one to please her. Several times these meetings
had taken place, but the princess could not select a husband. This meeting was
the most splendid of all; more people than ever had come to it. The princess came
in on a throne, and the bearers carried her from place to place. She did not seem
to care for anyone, and everyone became disappointed that this meeting also was
going to be a failure. Just then came a young man, a Sannyâsin, handsome
as if the sun had come down to the earth, and stood in one corner of the assembly
watching what was going on. The throne with the princess came near him, and as
soon as she saw the beautiful Sannyâsin, she stopped and threw the garland
over him. The young Sannyâsin seized the garland and threw it off, exclaiming,
"What nonsense is this? I am a Sannyâsin. What is marriage to me?"
The king of that country thought that perhaps this man was poor and so dared not
marry the princess, and said to him, "With my daughter goes half my kingdom
now, and the whole kingdom after my death!" and put the garland again on
the Sannyâsin. The young man threw it off once more, saying, "Nonsense
! I do not want to marry," and walked quickly away from the assembly.
Now the princess had fallen so much in love with this young man that she said,
"I must marry this man or I shall die." And she went after him to bring
him back. Then our other Sannyâsin, who had brought the king there said
to him, "King, let us follow this pair." So they walked after them but
at a good distance behind. The young Sannyâsin who had refused to marry
the princess walked out into the country for several miles. When he came to a
forest and entered into it, the princess followed him, and the other two followed
them. Now this young Sannyâsin was well acquainted with that forest and
knew all the intricate paths in it. He suddenly passed into one of these and disappeared,
and the princess could not discover him. After trying for a long time to find
him, she sat down under a tree and began to weep, for she did not know the way
out. Then our king and the other Sannyâsin came up to her and said, "Do
not weep; we will show you the way out of this forest, but it is too dark for
us to find it now. Here is a big tree; let us rest under it, and in the morning
we will go early and show you the road."
Now a little bird and his
wife and their three little ones lived on that tree in a nest. This little bird
looked down and saw the three people under the tree and said to his wife, "My
dear, what shall we do? Here are some guests in the house, and it is winter, and
we have no fire." So he flew away and got a bit of burning firewood in his
beak and dropped it before the guests, to which they added fuel and made a blazing
fire. But the little bird was not satisfied. He said again to his wife, "My
dear, what shall we do? There is nothing to give these people to eat, and they
are hungry. We are householders; it is our duty to feed anyone who comes to the
house. I must do what I can, I will give them my body." So he plunged into
the midst of the fire and perished. The guests saw him falling and tried to save
him, but he was too quick for them.
The little bird's wife saw what her
husband did, and she said, "Here are three persons and only one little bird
for them to eat. It is not enough; it is my duty as a wife not to let my husband's
effort go in vain; let them have my body also." Then she fell into the fire
and was burned to death.
Then the three baby-birds, when they saw what
was done and that there was still not enough food for the three guests, said,
"Our parents have done what they could and still it is not enough. It is
our duty to carry on the work of our parents; let our bodies go too." And
they all dashed down into the fire also.
Amazed at what they saw, the
three people could not of course eat these birds. They passed the night without
food, and in the morning the king and the Sannyâsin showed the princess
the way, and she went back to her father.
Then the Sannyâsin said
to the king, "King, you have seen that each is great in his own place. If
you want to live in the world, live like those birds, ready at any moment to sacrifice
yourself for others. If you want to renounce the world, be like that young man
to whom the most beautiful woman and a kingdom were as nothing. If you want to
be householder, hold your life a sacrifice for the welfare of others; and if you
choose the life of renunciation, do not even look at beauty, and money, and power.
Each is great in his own place, but the duty of the one is not the duty of the
other."
THE SECRET OF WORK
Helping others physically, by
removing their physical needs, is indeed great; but the help is greater according
as the need is greater and according as the help is far-reaching. If a man's wants
can be removed for an hour, it is helping him indeed; if his wants can be removed
for a year, it will be more help to him; but if his wants can be removed for ever,
it is surely the greatest help that can be given him. Spiritual knowledge is the
only thing that can destroy our miseries for ever; any other knowledge satisfies
wants only for a time. It is only with the knowledge of the spirit that the faculty
of want is annihilated for ever; so helping man spiritually is the highest help
that can be given him. He who gives man spiritual knowledge is the greatest benefactor
of mankind, and as such we always find that those were the most powerful of men
who helped man in his spiritual needs, because spirituality is the true basis
of all our activities in life. A spiritually strong and sound man will be strong
in every other respect, if he so wishes; until there is spiritual strength in
man even physical needs cannot be well satisfied. Next to spiritual comes intellectual
help; the gift of knowledge is a far higher gift than that of food and clothes:
it is even higher than giving life to a man, because the real life of man consists
of knowledge. Ignorance is death, knowledge is life. Life is of very little value,
if it is a life in the dark, groping through ignorance and misery. Next in order
comes, of course, helping a man physically. Therefore, in considering the question
of helping others, we must always strive not to commit the mistake of thinking
that physical help is the only help that can be given. It is not only the last
but the least, because it cannot bring about permanent satisfaction. The misery
that I feel when I am hungry is satisfied by eating, but hunger returns; my misery
can cease only when I am satisfied beyond all want. Then hunger will not make
me miserable; no distress, no sorrow will be able to move me. So that help which
tends to make us strong spiritually is the highest, next to it comes intellectual
help, and after that physical help.
The miseries of the world cannot
be cured by physical help only. Until man's nature changes, these physical needs
will always arise, and miseries will always be felt, and no amount of physical
help will cure them completely. The only solution of this problem is to make mankind
pure. Ignorance is the mother of all the evil and all the misery we see. Let men
have light, let them be pure and spiritually strong and educated, then alone will
misery cease in the world, not before. We may convert every house in the country
into a charity asylum; we may fill the land with hospitals, but the misery of
man will still continue to exist until man's character changes.
We read
in the Bhagavad-Gita again and again that we must all work incessantly. All work
is by nature composed of good and evil. We cannot do any work which will not do
some good somewhere; there cannot be any work which will not cause some harm somewhere.
Every work must necessarily be a mixture of good and evil; yet we are commanded
to work incessantly. Good and evil will both have their results, will produce
their Karma. Good action will entail upon us good effect; bad action, bad. But
good and bad are both bondages of the soul. The solution reached in the Gita in
regard to this bondage-producing nature of work is, that if we do not attach ourselves
to the work we do, it will not have any binding effect on our soul. We shall try
to understand what is meant by this "non-attachment" to work.
This
is the one central idea in the Gita: Work incessantly, but be not attached to
it. "Samskâra" can be translated very nearly by inherent tendency.
Using the simile of a lake for the mind. every ripple, every wave that rises in
the mind, when it subsides, does not die out entirely, but leaves a mark and a
future possibility of that wave coming out again. This mark, with the possibility
of the wave reappearing, is what is called Samskâra. Every work that we
do, every movement of the body, every thought that we think, leaves such an impression
on the mind-stuff, and even when such impressions are not obvious on the surface,
they are sufficiently strong to work beneath the surface subconsciously. What
we are every moment is determined by the sum total of these impressions on the
mind. What I am just at this moment is the effect of the sum total of all the
impressions of my past life. This is really what is meant by character; each man's
character is determined by the sum total of these impressions. If good impressions
prevail, the character becomes good; if bad, it becomes bad. If a man continuously
hears bad words, thinks bad thoughts, does bad actions, his mind will be full
of bad impressions; and they will influence his thought and work without his being
conscious of the fact. In fact, these bad impressions are always working, and
their resultant must be evil; and that man will be a bad man, he cannot help it.
The sum total of these impressions in him will create the strong motive power
for doing bad actions. He will be like a machine in the hands of his impressions,
and they will force him to do evil. Similarly, if a man thinks good thoughts and
does good works, the sum total of these impressions will be good; and they, in
a similar manner, will force him to do good even in spite of himself. When a man
has done so much good work and thought so many good thoughts that there is an
irresistible tendency in him to do good, in spite of himself and even if he wishes
to do evil, his mind, as the sum total of his tendencies, will not allow him to
do so; the tendencies will turn him back; he is completely under the influence
of the good tendencies. When such is the case, a man's good character is said
to be established.
As the tortoise tucks its feet and head inside the
shell, and you may kill it and break it in pieces, and yet it will not come out,
even so the character of that man who has control over his motives-and organs
is unchangeably established. He controls his own inner forces, and nothing can
draw them out against his will. By this continuous reflex of good thoughts, good
impressions moving over the surface of the mind, the tendency for doing good becomes
strong, and as the result we feel able to control the Indriyas (the sense-organs,
the nerve-centers). Thus alone will character be established, then alone a man
gets to truth. Such a man is safe for ever; he cannot do any evil. You may place
him in any company, there will be no danger for him. There is a still higher state
than having this good tendency, and that is the desire for liberation. You must
remember that freedom of the soul is the goal of all Yogas, and each one equally
leads to the same result. By work alone men may get to where Buddha got largely
by meditation or Christ by prayer. Buddha was a working Jnani [one who attains
liberation through intellectual realization]; Christ was a Bhakta [one who achieves
liberation through faith and devotion]. But the same goal was reached by both
of them. The difficulty is here. Liberation means entire freedom--freedom from
the bondage of good, as well as from the bondage of evil. A golden chain is as
much a chain as an iron one. There is a thorn in my finger, and I use another
to take the first one out; and when I have taken it out, I throw both of them
aside; I have no necessity for keeping the second thorn, because both are thorns
after all. So the had tendencies are to be counteracted by the good ones, and
the bad impressions on the mind should be removed by the fresh waves of good ones,
until all that is evil almost disappears, or is subdued and held in control in
a corner of the mind; but after that, the good tendencies have also to be conquered.
Thus the "attached" becomes the "unattached". Work, but let
not the action or the thought produce a deep impression on the mind; let the ripples
come and go; let huge actions proceed from the muscles and The whole gist of this
teaching is that you should work like a master and not as a slave; work incessantly,
but do not do slave's work. Do you not see how everybody works? Nobody can be
altogether at rest; ninety-nine per cent of mankind work like slaves, and the
result is misery; it is all selfish work. Work through freedom! Work through love!
The word "love" is very difficult to understand; love never comes until
there is freedom. There is no true love possible in the slave. If you buy a slave
and tie him down in chains and make him work for you, he will work like a drudge,
but there will be no love in him. So when we ourselves work for the things of
the world as slaves, there can be no love in us, and our work is not true work.
This is true of work done for relatives and friends, and is true of work done
for our own selves. Selfish work is slave's work; and here is a test. Every act
of love brings happiness; there is no act of love which does not bring peace and
blessedness as its reaction. Real existence, real knowledge, and real love are
eternally connected with one another, the three in one: where one of them is,
the others also must be; they are the three aspects of the One without a second--the
Existence-Knowledge-Bliss [Tat, Tvam, Asi]. When that existence becomes relative,
we see it as the world; that knowledge becomes in its turn modified into the knowledge
of the things of the world; and that bliss forms the foundation of all true love
known to the heart of man. Therefore true love can never react so as to cause
pain either to the lover or to the beloved. Suppose a man loves a woman; he wishes
to have her all to himself and feels extremely jealous about her every movement;
he wants her to sit near him, to stand near him, and to eat and move at his bidding.
He is a slave to her and wishes to have her as his slave. That is not love; it
is a kind of morbid affection of the slave, insinuating itself as love. It cannot
be love, because it is painful; if she does not do what he wants, it brings him
pain. With love there is no painful reaction; love only brings a reaction of bliss;
if it does not, it is not love; it is mistaking something else for love. When
you have succeeded in loving your husband, your wife, your children, the whole
world, the universe in such a manner that there is no reaction of pain or jealousy,
no selfish feeling, then you are in a fit state to be unattached.
Krishna
says, "Look at Me, Arjuna! If I stop from work for one moment, the whole
universe will die. I have nothing to gain from work; I am the one Lord, but why
do I work? Because I love the world." God is unattached because He loves;
that real love makes us unattached. Wherever there is attachment, the clinging
to the things of the world, you must know that it is all physical attraction between
sets of particles of matter; something that attracts two bodies nearer and nearer
all the time and, if they cannot get near enough, produces pain; but where there
is real love, it does not rest on physical attachment at all. Such lovers may
be a thousand miles away from one another, but their love will be all the same;
it does not die, and will never produce any painful reaction.
To attain
this non-attachment is almost a lifework. But as soon as we have reached this
point, we have attained the goal of love and become free; the bondage of nature
falls from us, and we see nature as she is; she forges no more chains for us;
we stand entirely free and take not the results of work into consideration; who
then cares for what the results may be?
Do you ask anything from your
children in return for what you have given them? It is your duty to work for them,
and there the matter ends. In whatever you do for a particular person, a city,
or a state, assume the same attitude towards it as you have towards your children--expect
nothing in return. If you can invariably take the position of a giver, in which
everything given by you is a free offering to the world without any thought of
return, then will your work bring you no attachment. Attachment comes only where
we expect a return.
If working like slaves results in selfishness and
attachment, working as masters of our own mind gives rise to the bliss of non-attachment.
We often talk of right and justice, but we find that in the world right and justice
are mere baby's talk. There are two things which guide the conduct of men: might
and mercy. The exercise of might is invariably the exercise of selfishness. All
men and women try to make the most of whatever power or advantage they have. Mercy
is heaven itself; to be good we have all to be merciful. Even justice and right
should stand on mercy. All thought of obtaining return for the work we do hinders
our spiritual progress; nay, in the end it brings misery. There is another way
in which this idea of mercy and selfless charity can be put into practice; that
is, by looking upon work as "worship" in case we believe in a Personal
God. Here we give up all the fruits of our work unto the Lord, and worshipping
Him thus, we have no right to expect anything from mankind for the work we do.
The Lord Himself works incessantly and is ever without attachment. Just as water
cannot wet the lotus leaf, so work cannot bind the unselfish man by giving rise
to attachment to results. The selfless and unattached man may live in the very
heart of a crowded and sinful city; he will not be touched by sin.
This
idea of complete self-sacrifice is illustrated in the following story: After the
battle of Kurukshetra the five Pândava brothers performed a great sacrifice
and made very large gifts to the poor. All people expressed amazement at the greatness
and richness of the sacrifice, and said that such a sacrifice the world had never
seen before. But, after the ceremony, there came a little mongoose; half his body
was golden, and the other half was brown; and he began to roll on the floor of
the sacrificial hall. He said to those around, "You are all liars; this is
no sacrifice." "What!" they exclaimed, "you say this is no
sacrifice; do you not know how money and jewels were poured out to the poor and
everyone became rich and happy? This was the most wonderful sacrifice any man
ever performed." But the mongoose said, "There was once a little village,
and in it there dwelt a poor Brahmin with his wife, his son, and his son's wife.
They were very poor and lived on small gifts made to them for preaching and teaching.
There came in that land a three years' famine, and the poor Brahmin suffered more
than ever. At last when the family had starved for days, the father brought home
one morning a little barley flour, which he had been fortunate enough to obtain,
and he divided it into four parts, one for each member of the family. They prepared
it for their meal, and just as they were about to eat there was a knock at the
door. The father opened it, and there stood a guest. Now in India a guest is a
sacred person; he is as a god for the time being, and must be treated as such.
So the poor Brahmin said, 'Come in, sir, you are welcome.' He set before the guest
his own portion of the food, which the guest quickly ate and said, 'Oh, sir, you
have killed me; I have been starving for ten days, and this little bit has but
increased my hunger.' Then the wife said to her husband, 'Give him my share';
but the husband said, 'Not so.' The wife however insisted, saying, 'Here is a
poor man, and it is our duty as householders to see that he is fed, and it is
my duty as a wife to give him my portion, seeing that you have no more to offer
him.' Then she gave her share to the guest, which he ate, and said he was still
burning with hunger. So the son said, 'Take my portion also; it is the duty of
a son to help his father to fulfill his obligations.' The guest ate that, but
remained still unsatisfied; so the son's wife gave him her portion also. That
was sufficient, and the guest departed, blessing them. That night those four people
died of starvation. A few granules of that flour had fallen on the floor, and
when I rolled my body on them, half of it became golden, as you see. Since then
I have been traveling all over the world, hoping to find another sacrifice like
that, but nowhere have I found one; nowhere else has the other half of my body
been turned into gold. That is why I say this is no sacrifice."
This
idea of charity is going out of India; great men are becoming fewer and fewer.
When I was first learning English, I read an English story book in which there
was a story about a dutiful boy who had gone out to work and had given some of
his money to his old mother; and this was praised in three or four pages. What
was that? No Hindu boy can ever understand the moral of that story. Now I understand
it when I hear the Western idea--every man for himself. And some men take everything
for themselves, and fathers and mothers and wives and children go to the wall.
That should never and nowhere be the ideal of the householder.
Now you
see what Karma-Yoga means; even at the point of death to help anyone, without
asking questions. Be cheated millions of times and never ask a question, and never
think of what you are doing. Never vaunt of your gifts to the poor or expect their
gratitude, but rather be grateful to them for giving you the occasion of practicing
charity to them. Thus it is plain that to be an ideal householder is a much more
difficult task than to be an ideal Sannyâsin; the true life of work is indeed
as hard as, if not harder than, the equally true life of renunciation.
WHAT
IS DUTY?
It is necessary in the study of Karma-Yoga to know what duty
is. If I have to do something I must first know that it is my duty, and then I
can do it. The idea of duty, again, is different in different nations. The Mohammedan
says what is written in his book, the Koran, is his duty; the Hindu says what
is in the Vedas is his duty; and the Christian says what is in the Bible is his
duty. We find that there are varied ideas of duty, differing according to different
states in life, different historical periods and different nations. The term "duty"
like every other universal abstract term, is impossible clearly to define; we
can only get an idea of it by knowing its practical operations and results. When
certain things occur before us we have all a natural or trained impulse to act
in a certain manner towards them; when this impulse comes, the mind begins to
think about the situation. Sometimes it thinks that it is good to act in a particular
manner under the given conditions, at other times it thinks that it is wrong to
act in the same manner even in the very same circumstances. The ordinary idea
of duty everywhere is that every good man follows the dictates of his conscience.
But what is it that makes an act a duty? If a Christian finds a piece of beef
before him and does not eat it to save his own life or will not give it to save
the life of another man, he is sure to feel that he has not done his duty. But
if a Hindu dares to eat that piece of beef or to give it to another Hindu, he
is equally sure to feel that he too has not done his duty; the Hindu's training
and education make him feel that way. In the last century there were notorious
bands of robbers in India called thugs; they thought it their duty to kill any
man they could and take away his money; the larger the number of men they killed,
the better they thought they were. Ordinarily if a man goes out into the street
and shoots down another man, he is apt to feel sorry for it, thinking that he
has done wrong. But if the very same man, as a soldier in his regiment, kills
not one but twenty, he is certain to feel glad and think that he has done his
duty remarkably well. Therefore we see that it is not the thing done that defines
a duty. To give an objective definition of duty is thus entirely impossible. Yet
there is duty from the subjective side. Any action that makes us go Godward is
a good action, and is our duty; any action that makes us go downward is evil and
is not our duty. From the subjective standpoint we may see that certain acts have
a tendency to exalt and ennoble us, while certain other acts have a tendency to
degrade and to brutalize us. But it is not possible to make out with certainty
which acts have which kind of tendency in relation to all persons of all sorts
and conditions. There is, however, only one idea of duty which has been universally
accepted by all mankind of all ages and sects and countries, and that has been
summed up in a Sanskrit aphorism thus: "Do not injure any being; not injuring
any being is virtue, injuring any being is sin."
The Bhagavad-Gita
frequently alludes to duties dependent upon birth and position in life. Birth
and position in life and in society largely determine the mental and moral attitude
of individuals towards the various activities of life. It is therefore our duty
to do that work which will exalt and ennoble us in accordance with the ideals
and activities of the society in which we are born. But it must be particularly
remembered that the same ideals and activities do not prevail in all societies
and countries; our ignorance of this is the main cause of much of the hatred of
one nation towards another. An American thinks that whatever an American does
in accordance with the custom of his country is the best thing to do, and that
whoever does not follow his custom must be a very wicked man. A Hindu thinks that
his customs are the only right ones and are the best in the world, and that whosoever
does not obey them must be the most wicked man living. This is quite a natural
mistake which all of us are apt to make. But it is very harmful; it is the cause
of half the uncharitableness found in the world. When I came to this country and
was going through the Chicago Fair, a man from behind pulled at my turban. I looked
back and saw that he was a very gentlemanly-looking man, neatly dressed. I spoke
to him, and when he found that I knew English, he became very much abashed. On
another occasion in the same Fair another man gave me a push. When I asked him
the reason, he also was ashamed and stammered out an apology saying, "Why
do you dress that way!" The sympathies of these men were limited within the
range of their own language and their own fashion of dress. Much of the oppression
of powerful nations on weaker ones is caused by this prejudice. It dries up their
fellow-feeling for fellow-men. That very man who asked me why I did not dress
as he did and wanted to ill-treat me because of my dress, may have been a very
good man, a good father, and a good citizen; but the kindness of his nature died
out as soon as he saw a man in a different dress. Strangers are exploited in all
countries, because they do not know how to defend themselves; thus they carry
home false impressions of the peoples they have seen. Sailors, soldiers, and traders
behave in foreign lands in very queer ways, although they would not dream of doing
so in their own country; perhaps this is why the Chinese call Europeans and Americans
"foreign devils". They could not have done this if they had met the
good, the kindly sides of Western life.
Therefore the one point we ought
to remember is that we should always try to see the duty of others through their
own eyes and never judge the customs of other peoples by our own standard. I am
not the standard of the universe. I have to accommodate myself to the world, and
not the world to me. So we see that environments change the nature of our duties,
and doing the duty which is ours at any particular time is the best thing we can
do in this world. Let us do that duty which is ours by birth; and when we have
done that, let us do the duty which is ours by our position in life and in society.
There is, however, one great danger in human nature, viz. that man never examines
himself. He thinks he is quite as fit to be on the throne as the king. Even if
he is, he must first show that he has done the duty of his own position; and then
higher duties will come to him. When we begin to work earnestly in the world,
nature gives us blows right and left and soon enables us to find out our position.
No man can long occupy satisfactorily a position for which he is not fit. There
is no use in grumbling against nature's adjustment. He who does the lower work
is not therefore a lower man. No man is to be judged by the mere nature of his
duties, but all should be judged by the manner and the spirit in which they perform
them.
Later on we shall find that even this idea of duty undergoes change,
and that the greatest work is done only when there is no selfish motive to prompt
it. Yet it is work through the sense of duty that leads us to work without any
idea of duty; when work will become worship--nay, something higher--then avid
work be done for its own sake. We shall find that the philosophy of duty, whether
it be in the form of ethics or of love, is the same as in every other Yoga--the
object being the attenuating of the lower self so that the real higher Self may
shine forth, the lessening of the frittering away of energies on the lower plane
of existence so that the soul may manifest itself on the higher ones. This is
accomplished by the continuous denial of low desires, which duty rigorously requires.
The whole organization of society has thus been developed consciously or unconsciously
in the realms of action and experience where, by limiting selfishness, we open
the way to an unlimited expansion of the real nature of man.
Duty is
seldom sweet. It is only when love greases its wheels that it runs smoothly; it
is a continuous friction otherwise. How else could parents do their duties to
their children, husbands to their wives and vice versa? Do we not meet with cases
of friction every day in our lives? Duty is sweet only through love, and love
shines in freedom alone. Yet is it freedom to be a slave to the senses, to anger,
to jealousies, and a hundred other petty things that must occur every day in human
life? In all these little roughnesses that we meet with in life, the highest expression
of freedom is to forbear. Women, slaves to their own irritable, jealous tempers,
are apt to blame their husbands and assert their own "freedom", as they
think, not knowing that thereby they only prove that they are slaves. So it is
with husbands who eternally find fault with their wives.
Chastity is
the first virtue in man or woman, and the man who, however he may have strayed
away, cannot be brought to the right path by a gentle and loving and chaste wife,
is indeed very rare. The world is not yet as bad as that. We hear much about brutal
husbands all over the world and about the impurity of men, but is it not true
that there are quite as many brutal and impure women as men? If all women were
as good and pure as their own constant assertions would lead one to believe, I
am perfectly satisfied that there would not be one impure man in the world. What
brutality is there which purity and chastity cannot conquer? A good, chaste wife,
who thinks of every other man except her own husband as her child and has the
attitude of a mother towards all men, will grow so great in the power of her purity
that there cannot be a single man, however brutal, who will not breathe an atmosphere
of holiness in her presence. Similarly every husband must look upon all women,
except his own wife, in the light of his own mother or daughter or sister. That
man, again, who wants to be a teacher of religion must look upon every woman as
his mother and always behave towards her as such. The position of the mother is
the highest in the world, as it is the one place in which to learn and exercise
the greatest unselfishness. The love of God is the only love that is higher than
a mother's love; all others are lower. It is the duty of the mother to think of
her children first and then of herself. But, instead of that, if the parents are
always thinking of themselves first, the result is that the relation between parents
and children becomes the same as that between birds and their offspring which,
as soon as they are fledged, do not recognize any parents. Blessed indeed is the
man who is able to look upon woman as the representative of the motherhood of
God. Blessed indeed is the woman to whom man represents the fatherhood of God.
Blessed are the children who look upon their parents as Divinity manifested on
earth.
The only way to rise is by doing the duty next to us, and thus
we go on gathering strength until we reach the highest state. A young Sannyâsin
went to a forest; there he meditated, worshipped, and practiced Yoga for a long
time. After years of hard work and practice, he was one day sitting under a tree,
when some dry leaves fell upon his head. He looked up and saw a crow and a crane
fighting on the top of the tree, which made him very angry. He said, "What!
Dare you throw these dry leaves upon my head!" As with these words he angrily
glanced at them, a flash of fire went out of his head--such was the Yogi's power--and
burnt the birds to ashes. He was very glad, almost overjoyed at this development
of power--he could burn the crow and the crane by a look. After a time he had
to go to the town to beg his bread. He went, stood at a door, and said, "Mother,
give me food." A voice came from inside the house: "Wait a little, my
son." The young man thought: "You wretched woman how dare you make me
wait! You do not know my power yet." While he was thinking thus the voice
came again: "Boy, don't be thinking too much of yourself. Here is neither
crow nor crane." He was astonished, still he had to wait. At last (the) woman
came, and he fell at her feet and said, "Mother, how did you know that?"
She said, "My boy, I do not know your Yoga or your practices. I am a common
everyday woman. I made you wait because my husband was ill, and I was nursing
him. All my life I have struggled to do my duty. When I was unmarried, I did my
duty to my parents; now that I am married, I do my duty to my husband; that is
all the Yoga I practice. But by doing my duty I have become illumined; thus I
could read your thoughts and know what you had done in the forest. If you want
to know something higher than this, go to the market of such and such a town where
you will find a Vyadha* who will tell you something that you will be very glad
to learn." The Sannyâsin thought:
*The lowest class of people
in India, who used to live as hunters and butchers.
"Why should
I go to that town and to a Vyadha!" But after what he had seen, his mind
opened a little, so he went. When he came near the town, he found that market
and there saw at a distance a big fat Vyadha cutting meat with big knives, talking
and bargaining with different people. The young man said, "Lord help me!
Is this the man from whom I am going to learn? He is the incarnation of a demon,
if he is anything." In the meantime this man looked up and said, "O
Swami, did that lady send you here? Take a seat until I have done my business."
The Sannyâsin thought, "What comes to me here?" He took his seat;
the man went on with his work, and after he had finished, he took his money and
said to the Sannyâsin, "Come, sir, come to my home." On reaching
home the Vyadha gave him a seat, saying "Wait here," and went into the
house. He then washed his old father and mother, fed them, and did all he could
to please them, after which he came to the Sannyâsin and said, "Now,
sir, you have come here to see me; what can I do for you?" The Sannyâsin
asked him a few questions about soul and about God, and the Vyadha gave him a
lecture which forms a part of the Mahâbhârata, called the Vyâdha-Gita.
It contains one of the highest flights of the Vedanta. When the Vyadha finished
his teaching, the Sannyâsin felt astonished. He said, "Why are you
in that body? With such knowledge as yours why are you in a Vyadha's body, and
doing such filthy, ugly work?" "My son," replied the Vyadha, "no
duty is ugly, no duty is impure. My birth placed me in these circumstances and
environments. In my boyhood I learnt the trade; I am unattached and I try to do
my duty well. I try to do my duty as a householder, and I try to do all I can
to make my father and mother happy. I neither know your Yoga, nor have I become
a Sannyâsin, nor did I go out of the world into a forest; nevertheless,
all that you have heard and seen has come to me through the unattached doing of
the duty which belongs to my positions
There is a sage in India, a great
Yogi, one of the most wonderful men I have ever seen in my life. He is a peculiar
man, he will not teach anyone; if you ask him a question he will not answer. It
is too much for him to take up the position of a teacher, he will not do it. If
you ask a question, and wait for some days, in the course of conversation he will
bring up the subject, and wonderful light will he throw on it. He told me once
the secret of work, "Let the end and the means be joined into one."
When you are doing any work, do not think of anything beyond. Do it as worship,
as the highest worship, and devote your whole life to it for the time being. Thus,
in the story, the Vyadha and the woman did their duty with cheerfulness and wholeheartedness;
and the result was that they became illuminated; clearly showing that the right
performance of the duties of any station in life, without attachment to results,
leads us to the highest realization of the Perfection of the soul.
It
is the worker who is attached to results that grumbles about the nature of the
duty which has fallen to his lot; to the unattached worker all duties are equally
good and form efficient instruments with which selfishness and sensuality may
be killed and the freedom of the soul secured. We are all apt to think too highly
of ourselves. Our duties are determined by our deserts to a much larger extent
than we are willing to grant. Competition rouses envy, and it kills the kindliness
of the heart. To the grumbler all duties are distasteful, nothing will satisfy
him, and his whole life is doomed to failure. Let us work on, doing as we go whatever
happens to be our duty and being ever ready to put our shoulders to the wheel.
Then surely shall we see the Light!
WE HELP OURSELVES, NOT THE WORLD
Before considering further how devotion to duty helps us in our spiritual
progress, let me place before you in a brief compass another aspect of what we
in India mean by Karma. In every religion there are three parts: philosophy, mythology,
and ritual. Philosophy of course is the essence of every religion; mythology explains
and illustrates it by means of the more or less legendary lives of great men,
stories, and fables of wonderful things and so on; ritual gives to that philosophy
a still more concrete form so that everyone may grasp it--ritual is, in fact,
concretized philosophy. This ritual is Karma; it is necessary in every religion,
because most of us cannot understand abstract spiritual things until we grow much
spiritually. It is easy for men to think that they can understand anything, but
when it comes to practical experience, they find that abstract ideas are often
very hard to comprehend. Therefore symbols are of great help, and we cannot dispense
with the symbolical method of putting things before us. From time immemorial symbols
have been used by all kinds of religions. In one sense we cannot think but in
symbols; words themselves are symbols of thought. In another sense everything
in the universe may be looked upon as a symbol. The whole universe is a symbol,
and God is the essence behind. This kind of symbology is not simply the creation
of man; it is not that certain people belonging to a religion sit down together
and think out certain symbols, and bring them into existence out of their own
minds. The symbols of religion have a natural growth. Otherwise, why is it that
certain symbols are associated with certain ideas in the mind of almost everyone?
Certain symbols are universally prevalent. Many of you may think that the cross
first came into existence as a symbol in connection with the Christian religion;
but as a matter of fact, it existed before Christianity was, before Moses was
born, before the Vedas were given out, before there was any human record of human
things. The cross may be found to have been in existence among the Aztecs and
the Phoenicians: every race seems to have had the cross. Again, the symbol of
the crucified Savior, of a man crucified upon a cross, appears to have been known
to almost every nation. The circle has been a great symbol throughout the world.
Then there is the most universal of all symbols, the Swastika. At one time it
was thought that the Buddhists carried it all over the world with them, but it
has been found out that ages before Buddhism it was used among nations. In old
Babylon and in Egypt it was to be found. What does this show? All these symbols
could not have been purely conventional. There must be some reason for them, some
natural association between them and the human mind. Language is not the result
of convention; it is not that people ever agreed to represent certain ideas by
certain words; there never was an idea without a corresponding word or a word
without a corresponding idea; ideas and words are in their nature inseparable.
The symbols to represent ideas may be sound symbols or color symbols. Deaf and
dumb people have to think with other than sound symbols. Every thought in the
mind has a form as its counterpart. This is called in Sanskrit philosophy Nâma-Rupa--name
and form. It is as impossible to create by convention a system of symbols as it
is to create a language. In the world's ritualistic symbols we have an expression
of the religious thought of humanity. It is easy to say that there is no use of
rituals and temples and all such paraphernalia; every baby says that in modern
times. But it must be easy for all to see that those who worship inside a temple
are in many respects different from those who will not worship there. Therefore
the association of particular temples, rituals, and other concrete forms with
particular religions has a tendency to bring into the mind of the followers of
those religions the thoughts for which those concrete things stand as symbols;
and it is not wise to ignore rituals and symbology altogether. The study and practice
of these things form naturally a part of Karma-Yoga.
There are many other
aspects of this science of work. One among them is to know the relation between
thought and word and what can be achieved by the power of the word. In every religion
the power of the word is recognized, so much so that in some of them creation
itself is said to have come out of the word. The external aspect of the thought
of God is the word, and as God thought and willed before He created, creation
came out of the word. In this stress and hurry of our materialistic life our nerves
lose sensibility and become hardened. The older we grow, the longer we are knocked
about in the world, the more callous we become; and we are apt to neglect things
that even happen persistently and prominently around us. Human nature, however,
asserts itself sometimes, and we are led to inquire into and wonder at some of
these common occurrences; wondering thus is the first step in the acquisition
of light. Apart from the higher philosophic and religious value of the word, we
may see that sound symbols play a prominent part in the drama of human life. I
am talking to you. I am not touching you; the pulsations of the air caused by
my speaking go into your ear, they touch your nerves and produce effects in your
minds. You cannot resist this. What can be more wonderful than this? One man calls
another a fool, and at this the other stands up and clenches his fist and lands
a blow on his nose. Look at the power of the word! There is a woman weeping and
miserable; another woman comes along and speaks to her a few gentle words; the
doubled up frame of the weeping woman becomes straightened at once, her sorrow
is gone and she already begins to smile. Think of the power of words! They are
a great force in higher philosophy as well as in common life. Day and night we
manipulate this force without thought and without inquiry. To know the nature
of this force and to use it well is also a part of Karma-Yoga.
Our duty
to others means helping others, doing good to the world. Why should we do good
to the world? Apparently to help the world, but really to help ourselves. We should
always try to help the world, that should be the highest motive in us; but if
we consider well, we find that the world does not require our help at all. This
world was not made that you or I should come and help it. I once read a sermon
in which it was said: "All this beautiful world is very good, because it
gives us time and opportunity to help others." Apparently this is a very
beautiful sentiment, but is it not a blasphemy to say that the world needs our
help? We cannot deny that there is much misery in it; to go out and help others
is, therefore, the best thing we can do, although in the long run we shall find
that helping others is only helping ourselves. As a boy I had some white mice.
They were kept in a little box in which there were little wheels, and when the
mice tried to cross the wheels, the wheels turned and turned, and the mice never
got anywhere. So it is with the world and our helping it. The only help is that
we get moral exercise. This world is neither good nor evil; each man manufactures
a world for himself. If a blind man begins to think of the world, it is either
as soft or hard, or as cold or hot. We are a mass of happiness or misery; we have
seen that hundreds of times in our lives. As a rule the young are optimistic and
the old pessimistic. The young have life before them; the old complain their day
is gone; hundreds of desires, which they cannot fulfill, struggle in their hearts.
Both are foolish nevertheless. Life is good or evil according to the state of
mind in which we look at it, it is neither by itself. Fire, by itself, is neither
good nor evil. When it keeps us warm, we say "How beautiful is fire!"
When it burns our fingers, we blame it. Still, in itself it is neither good nor
bad. According as we use it, it produces in us the feeling of good or bad; so
also is this world. It is perfect. By perfection is meant that it is perfectly
fitted to meet its ends. We may all be perfectly sure that it will go on beautifully
well without us, and we need not bother our heads wishing to help it.
Yet
we must do good; the desire to do good is the highest motive power we have, if
we know all the time that it is a privilege to help others. Do not stand on a
high pedestal and take five cents in your hand and say, "Here, my poor man,"
but be grateful that the poor man is there so that by making a gift to him you
are able to help yourself. It is not the receiver that is blessed, but it is the
giver. Be thankful that you are allowed to exercise your power of benevolence
and mercy in the world, and thus become pure and perfect. All good acts tend to
make us pure and perfect. What can we do at best? Build a hospital, make roads,
or erect charity asylums! We may organize a charity and collect two or three millions
of dollars, build a hospital with one million, with the second give balls and
drink champagne, and of the third let the officers steal half, and leave the rest
finally to reach the poor; but what are all these? One mighty wind in five minutes
can break all your buildings up. What shall we do then? One volcanic eruption
may sweep away all our roads and hospitals and cities and buildings. Let us give
up all this foolish talk of doing good to the world. It is not waiting for your
or my help; yet we must work and constantly do good, because it is a blessing
to ourselves. That is the only way we can become perfect. No beggar whom we have
helped has ever owed a single cent to us; we owe everything to him, because he
has allowed us to exercise our charity on him. It is entirely wrong to think that
we have done or can do good to the world, or to think that we have helped such
and such people. It is a foolish thought, and all foolish thoughts bring misery.
We think that we have helped some man and expect him to thank us; and because
he does not, unhappiness comes to us. Why should we expect anything in return
for what we do? Be grateful to the man you help, think of him as God. Is it not
a great privilege to be allowed to worship God by helping our fellow-men? If we
were really unattached, we should escape all this pain of vain expectation, and
could cheerfully do good work in the world. Never will unhappiness or misery come
through work done without attachment. The world will go on with its happiness
and misery through eternity.
There was a poor man who wanted some money;
and somehow he had heard that if he could get hold of a ghost, he might command
him to bring money or anything else he liked; so he was very anxious to get hold
of a ghost. He went about searching for a man who would give him a ghost; and
at last he found a sage, with great powers, and besought his help. The sage asked
him what he would do with a ghost. "I want a ghost to work for me; teach
me how to get hold of one, sir; I desire it very much," replied the man.
But the sage said, "Don't disturb yourself, go home." The next day the
man went again to the sage and began to weep and pray, "Give me a ghost;
I must have a ghost, sir, to help me." At last the sage was disgusted, and
said, "Take this charm, repeat this magic word, and a ghost will come, and
whatever you say to him he will do. But beware; they are terrible beings, and
must be kept continually busy. If you fail to give him work, he will take your
life." The man replied, "That is easy; I can give him work for all his
life." Then he went to a forest; and after long repetition of the magic word,
a huge ghost appeared before him, and said, "I am a ghost. I have been conquered
by your magic; but you must keep me constantly employed. The moment you fail to
give me work I will kill you." The man said, "Build me a palace,"
and the ghost said, "It is done; the palace is built." "Bring me
money," said the man. "Here is your money," said the ghost. "Cut
this forest down, and build a city in its place." "That is done,"
said the ghost, "anything more?" Now the man began to be frightened
and thought, "I can give him nothing more to do; he does everything in a
trice." The ghost said, "Give me something to do or I will eat you up."
The poor man could find no further occupation for him and was frightened. So he
ran and ran and at last reached the sage and said, "O sir, protect my life!"
The sage asked him what the matter was, and the man replied, "I have nothing
to give the ghost to do. Everything I tell him to do he does in a moment, and
he threatens to eat me up if I do not give him work." Just then the ghost
arrived, saying, "Ill eat you up." And he would have swallowed the man.
The man began to shake and begged the sage to save his life. The sage said, "I
will find you a way out. Look at that dog with a curly tail. Draw your sword quickly
and cut the tail off and give it to the ghost to straighten out." The man
cut off the dog's tail and gave it to the ghost saying, "Straighten that
out for me." The ghost took it and slowly and carefully straightened it out,
but as soon as he let it go, it instantly curled up again. Once more he laboriously
straightened it out, only to find it again curled up as soon as he attempted to
let go of it. Again he patiently straightened it out, but as soon as he let it
go, it curled up again. So he went on for days and days, until he was exhausted
and said, "I was never in such trouble before in my life. I am an old veteran
ghost, but never before was I in such trouble." "I will make a compromise
with you," he said to the man, "you let me off, and I will let you keep
all I have given you and will promise not to harm you." The man was much
pleased and accepted the offer gladly.
This world is like a dog's curly
tail, and people have been striving to straighten it out for hundreds of years;
but when they let it go, it has curled up again. How could it be otherwise? One
must first know how to work without attachment, then one will not be a fanatic.
When we know that this world is like a dog's curly tail and will never get straightened,
we shall not become fanatics. If there were no fanaticism in the world, it would
make much more progress than it does now. It is a mistake to think that fanaticism
can make for the progress of mankind. On the contrary, it is a retarding element
creating hatred and anger, and causing people to fight each other, and making
them unsympathetic. We think that whatever we do or possess is the best in the
world, and what we do not do or possess is of no value. So always remember the
instance of the curly tail of the dog whenever you have a tendency to become a
fanatic. You need not worry or make yourself sleepless about the world; it will
go on without you. When you have avoided fanaticism, then alone will you work
well. It is the level-headed man, the calm man, of good judgment and cool nerves,
of great sympathy and love, who does good work and so does good to himself. The
fanatic is foolish and has no sympathy; he can never straighten the world nor
himself become pure and perfect.
To recapitulate the chief points in
today's lecture: First, we have to bear in mind that we are all debtors to the
world, and the world does not owe us anything. It is a great privilege for all
of us to be allowed to do anything for the world. In helping the world we really
help ourselves. The second point is that there is a God in this universe. It is
not true that this universe is drifting and stands in need of help from you and
me. God is ever present therein. He is undying and eternally active and infinitely
watchful. When the whole universe sleeps, He sleeps not; He is working incessantly;
all the changes and manifestations of the world are His. Thirdly, we ought not
to hate anyone. This world will always continue to be a mixture of good and evil.
Our duty is to sympathize with the weak and to love even the wrong-doer. The world
is a grand moral gymnasium wherein we have all to take exercise so as to become
stronger and stronger spiritually. Fourthly, we ought not to be fanatics of any
kind, because fanaticism is opposed to love. You hear fanatics glibly saying,
"I do not hate the sinner, I hate the sin"; but I am prepared to go
any distance to see the face of that man who can really make a distinction between
the sin and the sinner. It is easy to say so. If we can distinguish well between
quality and substance, we may become perfect men. It is not easy to do this. And
further, the calmer we are and the less disturbed our nerves, the more shall we
love and the better will our work lie.
NON-ATTACHMENT IS COMPLETE SELF-ABNEGATION
Just as every action that emanates from us comes back to us as reaction,
even so our actions may act on other people and theirs on us. Perhaps all of you
have observed it as a fact that when persons do evil actions, they become more
and more evil, and when they begin to do good, they become stronger and stronger
and learn to do good at all times. This intensification of the influence of action
cannot be explained on any other ground than that we can act and react upon each
other. To take an illustration from physical science, when I am doing a certain
action, my mind may be said to be in a certain state of vibration; all minds which
are in similar circumstances will have the tendency to be affected by my mind.
If there are different musical instruments tuned alike in one room, all of you
may have noticed that when one is struck, the others have the tendency to vibrate
so as to give the same note. So all minds that have the same tension, so to say,
will be equally affected by the same thought. Of course this influence of thought
on mind will vary according to distance and other causes, but the mind is always
open to affection. Suppose I am doing an evil act, my mind is in a certain state
of vibration, and all minds in the universe, which are in a similar state, have
the possibility of being affected by the vibration of my mind. So when I am doing
a good action, my mind is in another state of vibration; and all minds similarly
strung have the possibility of being affected by my mind; and this power of mind
upon mind is more or less according as the force of the tension is greater or
less. Following this simile further, it is quite possible that, just as light
waves may travel for millions of years before they reach any object, so thought
waves may also travel hundreds of years before they meet an object with which
they vibrate in unison. It is quite possible, therefore, that this atmosphere
of ours is full of such thought pulsations, both good and evil. Every thought
projected from every brain goes on pulsating, as it were, until it meets a fit
object that will receive it. Any mind which is open to receive some of these impulses
will take them immediately. So when a man is doing evil actions, he has brought
his mind to a certain state of tension, and all the waves which correspond to
that state of tension and which may be said to be already in the atmosphere, will
struggle to enter into his mind. That is why an evil-doer generally goes on doing
more and more evil. His actions become intensified. Such also will be the case
with the doer of good; he will open himself to all the good waves that are in
the atmosphere, and his good actions also will become intensified. We run, therefore,
a twofold danger in doing evil: first, we open ourselves to all the evil influences
surrounding us; secondly, we create evil which affects others, maybe hundreds
of years hence. In doing evil we injure ourselves and others also. In doing good
we do good to ourselves and to others as well; and like all other forces in man,
these forces of good and evil also gather strength from outside.
According
to Karma-Yoga, the action one has done cannot be destroyed until it has borne
its fruit; no power in nature can stop it from yielding its results. If I do an
evil action, I must suffer for it; there is no power in this universe to stop
or stay it. Similarly if I do a good action, there is no power in the universe
which can stop its bearing good results. The cause must have its effect; nothing
can prevent or restrain this. Now comes a very fine and serious question about
Karma-Yoga--namely, that these actions of ours, both good and evil, are intimately
connected with each other. We cannot put a line of demarcation, and say this action
is entirely good and this entirely evil. There is no action which does not bear
good and evil fruits at the same time. To take the nearest example: I am talking
to you, and some of you, perhaps, think I am doing good and at the same time I
am, perhaps, killing thousands of microbes in the atmosphere; I am thus doing
evil to something else. When it is very near to us and affects those we know,
we say that it is very good action if it affects them in a good manner. For instance,
you may call my speaking to you very good, but the microbes will not; the microbes
you do not see, but yourselves you do see. The way in which my talk affects you
is obvious to you, but how it affects the microbes is not so obvious. And so,
if we analyze our evil actions also, we may find that some good possibly results
from them somewhere. He who in good action sees that there is something evil in
it, and in the midst of evil sees that there is something good in it somewhere--has
known the secret of work.
But what follows from it? That, howsoever we
may try, there cannot be any action which is perfectly pure or any which is perfectly
impure, taking purity and impurity in the sense of injury and non-injury. We cannot
breathe or live without injuring others, and every bit of the food we eat is taken
away from another's mouth. Our very lives are crowding out other lives. It may
be men or animals or small microbes, but some one or other of these we have to
crowd out. That being the case, it naturally follows that perfection can never
be attained by work. We may work through all eternity, but there will be no way
out of this intricate maze; you may work on, and on, and on; there will be no
end to this inevitable association of good and evil in the results of work.
The second point to consider is, what is the end of work? We find the vast
majority of people in every country believing that there will be a time when this
world will become perfect, when there will be no disease, nor death nor unhappiness
nor wickedness. That is a very good idea, a very good motive power to inspire
and uplift the ignorant; but if we think for a moment, we shall find on the very
face of it that it cannot be so. How can it be, seeing that good and evil are
the obverse and reverse of the same coin? How can you have good without evil at
the same time? What is meant by perfection? A perfect life is a contradiction
in terms. Life itself is a state of continuous struggle between ourselves and
everything outside. Every moment we are fighting actually with external nature,
and if we are defeated, our life has to go. It is, for instance, a continuous
struggle for food and air. If food or air fails, we die. Life is not a simple
and smoothly flowing thing, but it is a compound effect. This complex struggle
between something inside and the external world is what we call life. So it is
clear that when this struggle ceases, there will be an end of life.
What
is meant by ideal happiness is the cessation of this struggle. But then life will
cease, for the struggle can only cease when life itself has ceased. We have seen
already that in helping the world we help ourselves. The main effect of work done
for others is to purify ourselves. By means of the constant effort to do good
to others we are trying to forget ourselves; this forgetfulness of self is the
one great lesson we have to learn in life. Man thinks foolishly that he can make
himself happy, and after years of struggle finds out at last that true happiness
consists in killing selfishness and that no one can make him happy except himself.
Every act of charity, every thought of sympathy, every action of help, every good
deed, is taking so much of self-importance away from our little selves and making
us think of ourselves as the lowest and the least; and, therefore, it is all good.
Here we find that Jnana, Bhakti, and Karma all come to one point. The highest
ideal is eternal and entire self-abnegation, where there is no "If, but all
is "Thou"; and whether he is conscious or unconscious of it, Karma-Yoga
leads man to that end. A religious preacher may become horrified at the idea of
an Impersonal God; he may insist on a Personal God and wish to keep up his own
identity and individuality, whatever he may mean by that. But his ideas of ethics,
if they are really good cannot but be based on the highest self-abnegation. It
is the basis of all morality; you may extend it to men or animals or angels, it
is the one basic idea, the one fundamental principle running through all ethical
systems.
You will find various classes of men in this world. First, there
are the God-men whose self-abnegation is complete and who do only good to others
even at the sacrifice of their own lives. These are the highest of men. If there
are a hundred of such in any country, that country need never despair. But they
are unfortunately too few. Then there are the good men who do good to others so
long as it does not injure themselves. And there is a third class who, to do good
to themselves, injure others. It is said by a Sanskrit poet that there is a fourth
unnamable class of people who injure others merely for injury's sake. Just as
there are at one pole of existence the highest good men who do good for the sake
of doing good, so at the other pole, there are others who injure others just for
the sake of the injury. They do not gain anything thereby, but it is their nature
to do evil.
Here are two Sanskrit words. The one is Pravritti which means
revolving towards, and the other is Nivritti which means revolving away. The "revolving
towards" is what we call the world, the "I and mine"; it includes
all those things which are always enriching that "me" by wealth and
money and power, and name and fame, and which are of a grasping nature, always
tending to accumulate everything in one center, that center being "myself".
That is the Pravritti, the natural tendency of every human being; taking everything
from everywhere and heaping it around one center, that center being man's own
sweet self. When this tendency begins to break, when it is Nivritti or going away
from, then begin morality and religion. Both Pravritti and Nivritti are of the
nature of work; the former is evil work, and the latter is good work. This Nivritti
is the fundamental basis of all morality and all religion, and the very perfection
of it is entire self-abnegation, readiness to sacrifice mind and body and everything
for another being. When a man has reached that state, he has attained to the perfection
of Karma-Yoga. This is the highest result of good works. Although a man has not
studied a single system of philosophy, although he does not believe in any God
and never has believed, although he has not prayed even once in his whole life,
if the simple power of good actions has brought him to that state where he is
ready to give up his life and all else for others, he has arrived at the same
point to which the religious man will come through his prayers and the philosopher
through his knowledge; and so you may find that the philosopher, the worker, and
the devotee, all meet at one point, that one point being self-abnegation. However
much their systems of philosophy and religion may differ, all mankind stand in
reverence and awe before the man who is ready to sacrifice himself for others.
Here it is not at all any question of creed or doctrine--even men who are very
much opposed to all religious ideas, when they see one of these acts of complete
self-sacrifice, feel that they must revere it. Have you not seen even a most bigoted
Christian, when he reads Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia, stand in reverence of Buddha
who preached no God, preached nothing but self-sacrifice? The only thing is that
the bigot does not know that his own end and aim in life is exactly the same as
that of those from whom he differs. The worshipper, by keeping constantly before
him the idea of God and a surrounding of good, comes to the same point at last
and says, "Thy will be done", and keeps nothing to himself. That is
self-abnegation. The philosopher, with his knowledge, sees that the seeming self
is a delusion and easily gives it up. It is self-abnegation. So Karma, Bhakti,
and Jnana all meet here; and this is what was meant by all the great preachers
of ancient times when they taught that God is not the world. There is one thing
which is the world and another which is God; and this distinction is very true;
what they mean by world is selfishness. Unselfishness is God. One may live on
a throne in a golden palace and be perfectly unselfish; and then he is in God.
Another may live in a hut and wear rags and have nothing in the world; yet, if
he is selfish, he is intensely merged in the world.
To come back to one
of our main points, we say that we cannot do good without at the same time doing
some evil, or do evil without doing some good. Knowing this, how can we work?
There have, therefore, been sects in this world who have in an astoundingly preposterous
way preached slow suicide as the only means to get out of the world because, if
a man lives, he has to kill poor little animals and plants or do injury to something
or some one. So, according to them, the only way out of the world is to die. The
Jainas have preached this doctrine as their highest ideal. This teaching seems
to be very logical. But the true solution is found in the Gita. It is the theory
of non-attachment, to be attached to nothing while doing our work of life. Know
that you are separated entirely from the world though you are in the world, and
that whatever you may be doing in it, you are not doing that for your own sake.
Any action that you do for yourself will bring its effect to bear upon you. If
it is a good action, you will have to take the good effect, and if bad, you will
have to take the bad effect; but any action that is not done for your own sake,
whatever it be, will have no effect on you. There is to be found a very expressive
sentence in our scriptures embodying this idea: "Even if he kill the whole
universe (or be himself killed), he is neither the killer nor the killed, when
he knows that he is not acting for himself at all" Therefore Karma-Yoga teaches,
"Do not give up the world; live in the world, imbibe its influences as much
as you can; but if it be for your own enjoyment's sake, work not at all."
Enjoyment should not be the goal. First kill your self and then take the whole
world as yourself; as the old Christians used to say, "The old man must die."
This old man is the selfish idea that the whole world is made for our enjoyment.
Foolish parents teach their children to pray, "O Lord, Thou hast created
this sun for me and this moon for me," as if the Lord has had nothing else
to do than to create everything for these babies. Do not teach your children such
nonsense. Then again, there are people who are foolish in another way; they teach
us that all these animals were created for us to kill and eat, and that this universe
is for the enjoyment of men. That is all foolishness. A tiger may say, "Man
was created for me," and pray "O Lord, how wicked are these men who
do not come and place themselves before me to be eaten; they are breaking Your
law." If the world is created for us, we are also created for the world.
That this world is created for our enjoyment is the most wicked idea that holds
us down. This world is not for our sake. Millions pass out of it every year; the
world does not feel it; millions of others are supplied in their place. Just as
much as the world is for us, so we also are for the world.
To work properly,
therefore, you have first to give up the idea of attachment. Secondly, do not
mix in the fray, hold yourself as a witness and go on working. My Master used
to say, "Look upon your children as a nurse does." The nurse will take
your baby and fondle it and play with it and behave towards it as gently as if
it were her own child; but as soon as you give her notice to quit, she is ready
to start off bag and baggage from the house. Everything in the shape of attachment
is forgotten; it will not give the ordinary nurse the least pang to leave your
children and take up other children. Even so are you to be with all that you consider
your own. You are the nurse, and if you believe in God, believe that all these
things which you consider yours are really His. The greatest weakness often insinuates
itself as the greatest good and strength. It is a weakness to think that anyone
is dependent on me, and that I can do good to another. This belief is the mother
of all our attachment, and through this attachment comes all our pain. We must
inform our minds that no one in this universe depends upon us; not one beggar
depends on our charity; not one soul on our kindness; not one living thing on
our help. All are helped on by nature, and will be so helped even though millions
of us were not here. The course of nature will not stop for such as you and me;
it is, as already pointed out, only a blessed privilege to you and to me that
we are allowed, in the way of helping others, to educate ourselves. This is a
great lesson to learn in life; and when we have learnt it fully, we shall never
be unhappy; we can go and mix without harm in society anywhere and everywhere.
You may have wives and husbands, and regiments of servants, and kingdoms to govern;
if only you act on the principle that the world is not for you and does not inevitably
need you, they can do you no harm. This very year some of your friends may have
died. Is the world waiting without going on for them to come again? Is its current
stopped? No, it goes on. So drive out of your mind the idea that you have to do
something for the world; the world does not require any help from you. It is sheer
nonsense on the part of any man to think that he is born to help the world; it
is simply pride, it is selfishness insinuating itself in the form of virtue. When
you have trained your mind and your nerves to realize this idea of the world's
non-dependence on you or on anybody, there will then be no reaction in the form
of pain resulting from work. When you give something to a man and expect nothing--do
not even expect the man to be grateful--his ingratitude will not tell upon you,
because you never expected anything, never thought you had any right to anything
in the way of a return; you gave him what he deserved; his own Karma got it for
him; your Karma made you the carrier thereof. Why should you be proud of having
given away something? You are the porter that carried the money or other kind
of gift, and the world deserved it by its own Karma. Where is then the reason
for pride in you? There is nothing very great in what you give to the world. When
you have acquired the feeling of non-attachment, there will then be neither good
nor evil for you. It is only selfishness that causes the difference between good
and evil. It is a very hard thing to understand, but you will come to learn in
time that nothing in the universe has power over you until you allow it to exercise
such a power. Nothing has power over the Self of man, until the Self becomes a
fool and loses independence. So by non-attachment you overcome and deny the power
of anything to act upon you. It is very easy to say that nothing has the right
to act upon you until you allow it to do so; but what is the true sign of the
man who really does not allow anything to work upon him, who is neither happy
nor unhappy when acted upon by the external world? The sign is that good or ill
fortune causes no change in his mind; in all conditions he continues to remain
the same. There was a great sage in India called Vyâsa. This Vyâsa
is known as the author of the Vedanta aphorisms, and was a holy man. His father
had tried to become a very perfect man and had failed. His grandfather had also
tried and failed. His great-grandfather had similarly tried and failed. He himself
did not succeed perfectly, but his son, Shuka, was born perfect. Vyâsa taught
his son wisdom; and after teaching him the knowledge of truth himself, he sent
him to the court of King Janaka. He was a great king and was called Janaka Videha.
Videha means "without a body." Although a king, he had entirely forgotten
that he was a body; he felt that he was a spirit all the time. This boy Shuka
was sent to be taught by him. The king knew that Vyâsa's son was coming
to him to learn wisdom; so he made certain arrangements beforehand; and when the
boy presented himself at the gates of the palace, the guards took no notice of
him whatsoever. They only gave him a seat, and he sat there for three days and
nights, nobody speaking to him, nobody asking him who he was or whence he was.
He was the son of a very great sage; his father was honored by the whole country,
and he himself was a most respectable person; yet the low, vulgar guards of the
palace would take no notice of him. After that, suddenly, the ministers of the
king and all the big officials came there and received him with the greatest honors.
They conducted him in and showed him into splendid rooms, gave him the most fragrant
baths and wonderful dresses, and for eight days they kept him there in all kinds
of luxury. That solemnly serene face of Shuka did not change even to the smallest
extent by the change in the treatment accorded to him; he was the same in the
midst of this luxury as when waiting at the door. Then he was brought before the
king. The king was on his throne, music was playing, and dancing and other amusements
were going on. The king then gave him a cup of milk, full to the brim, and asked
him to go seven times round the hall without spilling even a drop. The boy took
the cup and proceeded in the midst of the music and the attraction of the beautiful
faces. As desired by the king, seven times did he go round, and not a drop of
the milk was spilt. The boy's mind could not be attracted by anything in the world,
unless he allowed it to affect him. And when he brought the cup to the king, the
king said to him, "What your father has taught you and what you have learnt
yourself, I can only repeat; you have known the truth; go home."
Thus
the man that has practiced control over himself cannot be acted upon by anything
outside; there is no more slavery for him. His mind has become free; such a man
alone is fit to live well in the world. We generally find men holding two opinions
regarding the world. Some are pessimists and say, "How horrible this world
is, how wicked!" Some others are optimists and say, "How beautiful this
world is, how wonderful!" To those who have not controlled their own minds,
the world is either full of evil or at best a mixture of good and evil. This very
world will become to us an optimistic world when we become masters of our own
minds. Nothing will then work upon us as good or evil; we shall find everything
to be in its proper place, to be harmonious. Some men, who begin by saying that
the world is a hell, often end by saying that it is a heaven when they succeed
in the practice of self-control. If we are genuine Karma-Yogis and wish to train
ourselves to the attainment of this state, wherever we may begin we are sure to
end in perfect self-abnegation; and as soon as this seeming self has gone, the
whole world, which at first appears to us to be filled with evil, will appear
to be heaven itself and full of blessedness. Its very atmosphere will be blessed;
every human face there will be good. Such is the end and aim of Karma-Yoga, and
such is its perfection in practical life.
Our various Yogas do not conflict
with each other; each of them leads us to the same goal and makes us perfect;
only each has to be strenuously practiced. The whole secret is in practicing.
First you have to hear, then think, and then practice. This is true of every Yoga.
You have first to hear about it and understand what it is; and many things which
you do not understand will be made clear to you by constant hearing and thinking.
It is hard to understand everything at once. The explanation of everything is
after all in yourself. No one was ever really taught by another; each of us has
to teach himself. The external teacher offers only the suggestion which rouses
the internal teacher to work to understand things. Then things will be made clearer
to us by our own power of perception and thought, and we shall realize them in
our own souls; and that realization will grow into the intense power of will.
First it is feeling, then it becomes willing, and out of that willing comes the
tremendous force for work that will go through every vein and nerve and muscle,
until the whole mass of your body is changed into an instrument of the unselfish
Yoga of work, and the desired result of perfect self-abnegation and utter unselfishness
is duly attained. This attainment does not depend on any dogma or doctrine or
belief. Whether one is Christian or Jew or Gentile, it does not matter. Are you
unselfish? That is the question. If you are, you will be perfect without reading
a single religious book, without going into a single church or temple. Each one
of our Yogas is fitted to make man perfect even without the help of the others,
because they have all the same goal in view. The Yogas of work, of wisdom, and
of devotion are all capable of serving as direct and independent means for the
attainment of Moksha [liberation]. "Fools alone say that work and philosophy
are different, not the learned." The learned know that, though apparently
different from each other, they at last lead to the same goal of human perfection.
FREEDOM
In addition to meaning work, we have stated that psychologically
the word Karma also implies causation. Any work, any action, any thought that
produces an effect is called a Karma. Thus the law of Karma means the law of causation,
of inevitable cause and sequence. Wheresoever there is a cause, there an effect
must be produced; this necessity cannot be resisted, and this law of Karma, according
to our philosophy, is true throughout the whole universe. Whatever we see or feel
or do, whatever action there is anywhere in the universe, while being the effect
of past work on the one hand, becomes, on the other, a cause in its turn and produces
its own effect. It is necessary, together with this, to consider what is meant
by the word "law". By law is meant the tendency of a series to repeat
itself. When we see one event followed by another, or sometimes happening simultaneously
with another, we expect this sequence or co-existence to recur. Our old logicians
and philosophers of the Nyaya school call this law by the name of Vyâpti.
According to them all our ideas of law are due to association. A series of phenomena
becomes associated with things in our mind in a sort of invariable order, so that
whatever we perceive at any time is immediately referred to other facts in the
mind. Any one idea or, according to our psychology, any one wave that is produced
in the mind-stuff, Chitta, must always give rise to many similar waves. This is
the psychological idea of association, and causation is only an aspect of this
grand, pervasive principle of association. This pervasiveness of association is
what is called, in Sanskrit, Vyâpti. In the external world the idea of law
is the same as in the internal--the expectation that a particular phenomenon will
be followed by another, and that the series will repeat itself. Really speaking,
therefore, law does not exist in nature. Practically it is an error to say that
gravitation exists in the earth, or that there is any law existing objectively
anywhere in nature. Law is the method, the manner in which our mind grasps a series
of phenomena; it is all in the mind. Certain phenomena, happening one after another
or together, and followed by the conviction of the regularity of their recurrence,
thus enabling our minds to grasp the method of the whole series, constitute what
we call law.
The next question for consideration is what we mean by law
being universal. Our universe is that portion of existence which is characterized
by what the Sanskrit psychologists call Desha-Kâla-Nimitta, or what is known
to European psychology as space, time, and causation. This universe is only a
part of infinite existence thrown into a peculiar mold, composed of space, time,
and causation. It necessarily follows that law is possible only within this conditioned
universe; beyond it there cannot be any law. When we speak of the universe, we
only mean that portion of existence which is limited by our mind--the universe
of the senses, which we can see, feel, touch, hear, think of, imagine. This alone
is under law; but beyond it, existence cannot be subject to law, because causation
does not extend beyond the world of our minds. Anything beyond the range of our
mind and our senses is not bound by the law of causation, as there is no mental
association of things in the region beyond the senses, and no causation without
association of ideas. It is only when "being" or existence gets molded
into name and form that it obeys the law of causation and is said to be under
law, because all law has its essence in causation. Therefore we see at once that
there cannot be any such thing as free will; the very words are a contradiction,
because will is what we know, and everything that we know is within our universe,
and everything within our universe is molded by the conditions of space, time,
and causation. Everything that we know, or can possibly know, must be subject
to causation, and that which obeys the law of causation cannot be free. It is
acted upon by other agents and becomes a cause in its turn. But that which has
become converted into the will, which was not the will before, but which, when
it fell into this mold of space, time, and causation; became converted into the
human will, is free; and when this will gets out of this mold of space, time,
and causation, it will be free again. From freedom it comes and becomes molded
into this bondage, and it gets out and goes back to freedom again.
The
question has been raised as to from whom this universe comes, in whom it rests,
and to whom it goes; and the answer has been given that from freedom it comes,
in bondage it rests, and goes back into that freedom again. So when we speak of
man as no other than that infinite being which is manifesting itself, we mean
that only one very small part thereof is man; this body and this mind which we
see are only one part of the whole, only one spot of the infinite being. This
whole universe is only one speck of the infinite being; and all our laws, our
bondages, our joys and our sorrows, our happinesses and our expectations, are
only within this small universe; all our progression and digression are within
its small compass. So you see how childish it is to expect a continuation of this
universe--the creation of our minds--and to expect to go to heaven, which after
all must mean only a repetition of this world that we know. You see at once that
it is an impossible and childish desire to make the whole of infinite existence
conform to the limited and conditioned existence which we know. When a man says
that he will have again and again this same thing which he is having now, or,
as I sometimes put it, when he asks for a comfortable religion, you may know that
he has become so degenerate that he cannot think of anything higher than what
he is now; he is just his little present surroundings and nothing more. He has
forgotten his infinite nature, and his whole idea is confined to these little
joys and sorrows and heart-jealousies of the moment. He thinks that this finite
thing is the infinite; and not only so, he will not let this foolishness go. He
clings on desperately unto Trishnâ, the thirst after life, what the Buddhists
call Tanhâ and Trissâ. There may be millions of kinds of happiness
and beings and laws and progress and causation, all acting outside the little
universe that we know, and, after all, the whole of this comprises but one section
of our infinite nature.
To acquire freedom we have to get beyond the
limitations of this universe; it cannot be found here. Perfect equilibrium, or
what the Christians call the peace that passeth all understanding, cannot be had
in this universe, nor in heaven, nor in any place where our mind and thoughts
can go, where the senses can feel, or which the imagination can conceive. No such
place can give us that freedom, because all such places would be within our universe,
and it is limited by space, time, and causation. There may be places that are
more ethereal than this earth of ours, where enjoyments may be keener, but even
those places must be in the universe and, therefore, in bondage to law; so we
have to go beyond, and real religion begins where this little universe ends. These
little joys and sorrows and knowledge of things end there, and the reality begins.
Until we give up the thirst after life, the strong attachment to this our transient,
conditioned existence, we have no hope of catching even a glimpse of that infinite
freedom beyond. It stands to reason then that there is only one way to attain
to the freedom which is the goal of all the noblest aspirations of mankind, and
that is by giving up this little life, giving up this little universe, giving
up this earth, giving up heaven, giving up the body, giving up the mind, giving
up everything that is limited and conditioned. If we give up our attachment to
this little universe of the senses or of the mind, we shall be free immediately.
The only way to come out of bondage is to go beyond the limitations of law, to
go beyond causation.
But it is a most difficult thing to give up the
clinging to this universe; few ever attain to that. These are two ways to do that,
mentioned in our books. One is called the "Neti, Neti" (not this, not
this), the other is called the "Iti" (this); the former is the negative,
and the latter is the positive way. The negative way is the most difficult. It
is only possible to the men of the very highest, exceptional minds and gigantic
wills who simply stand up and say, "No, I will not have this", and the
mind and body obey their will, and they come out successful. But such people are
very rare. The vast majority of mankind choose the positive way, the way through
the world, making use of all the bondages themselves to break those very bondages.
This is also a kind of giving up; only it is done slowly and gradually, by knowing
things, enjoying things, and thus obtaining experience, and knowing the nature
of things until the mind lets them all go at last and becomes unattached. The
former way of obtaining non-attachment is by reasoning, and the latter way is
through work and experience. The first is the path of Jnana-Yoga and is characterized
by the refusal to do any work; the second is that of Karma-Yoga in which there
is no cessation from work. Everyone must work in the universe. Only those who
are perfectly satisfied with the Self, whose desires do not go beyond the Self,
whose mind never strays out of the Self, to whom the Self is all in all, only
those do not work. The rest must work. A current rushing down of its own nature
falls into a hollow and makes a whirlpool, and after running a little in that
whirlpool, it emerges again in the form of the free current to go on unchecked.
Each human life is like that current. It gets into the whirl, gets involved in
this world of space, time, and causation, whirls round a little, crying out "my
father, my brother, my name, my fame," and so on, and at last emerges out
of it and regains its original freedom. The whole universe is doing that. Whether
we know it or not, whether we are conscious or unconscious of it, we are all working
to get out of the dream of the world of work. Man's experience in the world is
to enable him to get out of its whirlpool.
What is Karma-Yoga? The knowledge
of the secret of work. We see that the whole universe is working. For what? For
salvation, for liberty; from the atom to the highest being working for the one
end--liberty for the mind, for the body for the spirit. All things are always
trying to get freedom, flying away from bondage. The sun, the moon, the earth,
the planets, all are trying to fly away from bondage. The centrifugal and the
centripetal forces of nature are indeed typical of our universe. Instead of being
knocked about in this universe, and after long delay and thrashing, getting to
know things as they are, we learn from Karma-Yoga the secret of work, the method
of work, the organizing power of work. A vast mass of energy may be spent in vain
if we do not know how to utilize it. Karma-Yoga makes a science of work; you learn
by it how best to utilize all the workings of this world. Work is inevitable,
it must be so; but we should work to the highest purpose. Karma-Yoga makes us
admit that this world is a world of five minutes; that it is a something we have
to pass through; and that freedom is not here, but is only to be found beyond.
To find the way out of the bondages of the world we have to go through it slowly
and surely. There may be those exceptional persons about whom I just spoke, those
who can stand aside and give up the world as a snake casts off its skin and stands
aside and looks at it There are no doubt these exceptional beings; but the rest
of mankind have to go slowly through the world of work. Karma-Yoga shows the process,
the secret, and the method of doing it to the best advantage.
What does
it say? "Work incessantly, but give up all attachment to work." [Also:
"Kill out all ambition, but work like those do who are ambitious."]
Do not identify yourself with anything. Hold your mind free. All this that you
see, the pains and the miseries, are but the necessary conditions if this world;
poverty and wealth and happiness are but momentary; they do not belong to our
real nature at all. Our nature is far beyond misery and happiness, beyond every
object of the senses, beyond the imagination; and yet we must go on working all
the time. "Misery comes through attachment, not through work." As soon
as we identify ourselves with the work we do, we feel miserable; but if we do
not identify ourselves with it, we do not feel that misery. If a beautiful picture
belonging to another is burnt, a man does not generally become miserable, but
when his own picture is burnt, how miserable he feels! Why? Both were beautiful
pictures, perhaps copies of the same original; but in one case very much more
misery is felt than in the other. It is because in one case he identifies himself
with the picture, and not in the other. This "I and mine" causes the
whole misery. With the sense of possession comes selfishness, and selfishness,
brings on misery. Every act of selfishness or thought of selfishness makes us
attached to something, and immediately we are made slaves. Each wave in the Chitta
that says "I and mine" immediately puts a chain round us and makes us
slaves; and the more we say "I and mine," the more slavery grows, the
more misery increases. Therefore Karma-Yoga tells us to enjoy the beauty of all
the pictures in the world, but not to identify ourselves with any of them. Never
say "mine". Whenever we say a thing is mine, misery will immediately
come. Do not even say "my child" in your mind. Possess the child, but
do not say "mine." If you do, then will come the misery. Do not say
"my house," do not say "my body." The whole difficulty is
there. The body is neither yours nor mine, nor anybody's. These bodies are coming
and going by the laws of nature, but we are free, standing as witness. This body
is no more free than a picture or a wall. Why should we be attached so much to
a body? If somebody paints a picture, he does it and passes on. Do not project
that tentacle of selfishness, "I must possess it." As soon as that is
projected, misery will begin.
So Karma-Yoga says, first destroy the tendency
to project this tentacle of selfishness; and when you have the power of checking
it, hold it in and do not allow the mind to get into the ways of selfishness.
Then you may go out into the world and work as much you can. Mix everywhere, go
where you please; you will never be contaminated with evil. There is the lotus
leaf in the water; the water cannot touch and adhere to it; so will you be in
the world. This is called Vairâgya, dispassion or non-attachment. I believe
I have told you that without non-attachment there cannot be any kind of Yoga.
Non-attachment is the basis of all the Yogas. The man who gives up living in houses,
wearing fine clothes, and eating good food, and goes into the desert, may be a
most attached person. His only possession, his own body, may become everything
to him; and as he lives he will be simply struggling for the sake of his body.
Non-attachment does not mean anything that we may do in relation to our external
body, it is all in the mind. The binding link of "I and mine" is in
the mind. If we have not this link with the body and with the things of the senses,
we are non-attached, wherever and whatever we may be. A man may be on a throne
and perfectly non-attached; another man may be in rags and still very much attached.
First we have to attain this state of non-attachment, and then to work incessantly.
Karma-Yoga gives us the method that will help us in giving up all attachment,
though it is indeed very hard.
Here are the two ways of giving up all
attachment. The one is for those who do not believe in God, or in any outside
help. They are left to their own devices; they have simply to work with their
own will, with the powers of their mind and discrimination, saying, "I must
be non-attached." For those who believe in God there is another way, which
is much less difficult. They give up the fruits of work unto the Lord, they work
and are never attached to the results. Whatever they see, feel, hear, or do, is
for Him. For whatever good work we may do, let us not claim any praise or benefit.
It is the Lord's; give up the fruits unto Him. Let us stand aside and think that
we are only servants obeying the Lord, our Master, and that every impulse for
action comes from Him every moment. Whatever thou worshippest, whatever thou perceivest,
whatever thou doest, give up all unto Him and be at rest. Let us be at peace,
perfect peace, with ourselves, and give up our whole body and mind and everything
as an eternal sacrifice unto the Lord. Instead of the sacrifice of pouring oblations
into the fire, perform this one great sacrifice day and night--the sacrifice of
your little self. "In search of wealth in this world, Thou art the only wealth
I have found; I sacrifice myself unto Thee. In search of some one to be loved,
Thou art the only one beloved I have found; I sacrifice myself unto Thee."
Let us repeat this day and night, and say, "Nothing for me; no matter whether
the thing is good, bad or indifferent; I do not care for it; I sacrifice all unto
Thee." Day and night let us renounce our seeming self until it becomes a
habit with us to do so, until it gets into the blood, the nerves, and the brain,
and the whole body is every moment obedient to this idea of self-renunciation.
Go then into the midst of the battlefield, with the roaring cannon and the din
of war, and you will find yourself to be free and at peace.
Karma-Yoga
teaches us that the ordinary idea of duty is on the lower plane; nevertheless,
all of us have to do our duty. Yet we may see that this peculiar sense of duty
is very often a great cause of misery. Duty becomes a disease with us; it drags
us ever forward. It catches hold of us and makes our whole life miserable. It
is the bane of human life. This duty, this idea of duty is the midday summer sun
which scorches the innermost soul of mankind. Look at those poor slaves to duty!
Duty leaves them no time to say prayers, no time to bathe. Duty is ever on them.
They go out and work. Duty is on them! They come home and think of the work for
the next day. Duty is on them! It is living a slave's life, at last dropping down
in the street and dying in harness like a horse. This is duty as it is understood.
The only true duty is to be unattached and to work as free beings, to give up
all work unto God. All our duties are His. Blessed are we that we are ordered
out here. We serve our time; whether we do it ill or well, who knows? If we do
it well, we do not get the fruits. If we do it ill, neither do we get the care.
Be at rest, be free, and work. This kind of freedom is a very hard thing to attain.
How easy it is to interpret slavery as duty--the morbid attachment of flesh for
flesh as duty! Men go out into the world and struggle and fight for money or for
any other thing to which they get attached. Ask them why they do it. They say,
"It is a duty." It is the absurd greed for gold and gain, and they try
to cover it with a few flowers.
What is duty after all? It is really
the impulsion of the flesh, of our attachment; and when an attachment has become
established, we call it duty. For instance, in countries where there is no marriage,
there is no duty between husband and wife, when marriage comes, husband and wife
live together on account of attachment; and that kind of living together becomes
settled after generations; and when it becomes so settled, it becomes a duty.
It is, so to say, a sort of chronic disease. When it is acute, we call it disease,
when it is chronic, we call it nature. It is a disease. So when attachment becomes
chronic, we baptize it with the high-sounding name of duty. We strew flowers upon
it, trumpets sound for it, sacred texts are said over it, and then the whole world
fights, and men earnestly rob each other for this duty's sake. Duty is good to
the extent that it checks brutality. To the lowest kinds of men, who cannot have
any other ideal, it is of some good; but those who want to be Karma-Yogis must
throw this idea of duty overboard. There is no duty for you and me. Whatever you
have to give to the world, do give by all means, but not as a duty. Do not take
any thought of that. Be not compelled. Why should you be compelled? Everything
that you do under compulsion goes to build up attachment. Why should you have
any duty?
Resign everything unto God. In this tremendous fiery furnace
where the fire of duty scorches everybody, drink this cup of nectar and be happy.
We are all simply working out His will, and have nothing to do with rewards and
punishments. If you want the reward, you must also have the punishment; the only
way to get out of the punishment is to give up the reward. The only way of getting
out of misery is by giving up the idea of happiness, because these two are linked
to each other. On one side there is happiness, on the other there is misery. On
one side there is life, on the other there is death. The only way to get beyond
death is to give up the love of life. Life and death are the same thing, looked
at from different points. So the idea of happiness without misery or of life without
death is very good for schoolboys and children; but the thinker sees that it is
all a contradiction in terms and gives up both. Seek no praise, no reward for
anything you do. No sooner do we perform a good action than we begin to desire
credit for it. No sooner do we give money to some charity than we want to see
our names blazoned in the papers. Misery must come as the result of such desires.
The greatest men in the world have passed away unknown. The Buddhas and the Christs
that we know are but second-rate heroes in comparison with the greatest men of
whom the world knows nothing. Hundreds of these unknown heroes have lived in every
country working silently. Silently they live and silently they pass away; and
in time their thoughts find expression in Buddhas or Christs, and it is these
latter that become known to us. The highest men do not seek to get any name or
fame from their knowledge. They leave their ideas to the world; they put forth
no claims for themselves and establish no schools or systems in their name. Their
whole nature shrinks from such a thing. They are the pure Sâttvikas, who
can never make any stir, but only melt down in love. I have seen one such Yogi
who lives in a cave in India. He is one of the most wonderful men I have ever
seen. He has so completely lost the sense of his own individuality that we may
say that the man in him is completely gone, leaving behind only the all-comprehending
sense of the divine. If an animal bites one of his arms, he is ready to give it
his other arm also, and say that it is the Lord's will. Everything that comes
to him is from the Lord. He does not show himself to men, and yet he is a magazine
of love and of true and sweet ideas.
Next in order come the men with
more Rajas or activity, combative natures who take up the ideas of the perfect
ones and preach them to the world. The highest kind of men silently collect true
and noble ideas, and others--the Buddhas and Christs--go from place to place preaching
them and working for them. In the life of Gautama Buddha we notice him constantly
saying that he is the twenty-fifth Buddha. The twenty-four before him are unknown
to history, although the Buddha known to history must have built upon foundations
laid by them. The highest men are calm, silent, and unknown. They are the men
who really know the power of thought; they are sure that, even if they go into
a cave and close the door and simply think five true thoughts and then pass away,
these five thoughts of theirs will live through eternity. Indeed such thoughts
will penetrate through the mountains, cross the oceans, and travel through the
world. They will enter deep into human hearts and brains and raise up men and
women who will give them practical expression in the workings of human life. These
Sâttvika men are too near the Lord to be active and to fight, to be working,
struggling, preaching, and doing good, as they say, here on earth to humanity.
The active workers, however good, have still a little remnant of ignorance left
in them. When our nature has yet some impurities left in it, then alone can we
work. It is in the nature of work to be impelled ordinarily by motive and by attachment.
In the presence of an ever-active Providence who notes even the sparrow's fall,
how can man attach any importance to his own work? Will it not be a blasphemy
to do so when we know that He is taking care of the minutest things in the world?
We have only to stand in awe and reverence before Him saying, "Thy will be
done." The highest men cannot work, for in them there is no attachment. Those
whose whole soul is gone into the Self, those whose desires are confined in the
Self, who have become ever associated with the Self, for them there is no work.
Such are indeed the highest of mankind; but apart from them everyone else has
to work. In so working we should never think that we can help on even the least
thing in this universe. We cannot. We only help ourselves in this gymnasium of
the world. This is the proper attitude of work. If we work in this way, if we
always remember that our present opportunity to work thus is a privilege which
has been given to us, we shall never be attached to anything. Millions like you
and me think that we are great people in the world; but we all die, and in five
minutes the world forgets us. But the life of God is infinite. "Who can live
a moment, breathe a moment, if this all-powerful One does not will it?" He
is the ever-active Providence. All power is His and within His command. Through
His command the winds blow, the sun shines, the earth lives, and death stalks
upon the earth. He is the all in all; He is all and in all. We can only worship
Him. Give up all fruits of work; do good for its own sake, then alone will come
perfect non-attachment. The bonds of the heart will thus break, and we shall reap
perfect freedom. This Freedom is indeed the goal of Karma-Yoga.
THE IDEAL
OF KARMA-YOGA
The grandest idea in the religion of the Vedanta is that
we may reach the same goal by different paths; and these paths I have generalized
into four--viz. those of work, love, psychology, and knowledge. But you must,
at the same time, remember that these divisions are not very marked and quite
exclusive of each other. Each blends into the other. But according to the type
which prevails, we name the divisions. It is not that you can find men who have
no other faculty than that of work, nor that you can find men who are no more
than devoted worshippers only, nor that there are men who have no more than mere
knowledge. These divisions are made in accordance with the type or the tendency
that may be seen to prevail in a man. We have found that, in the end, all these
four paths converge and become one. All religions and all methods of work and
worship lead us to one and the same goal.
I have already tried to point
out that goal. It is freedom as I understand it. Everything that we perceive around
us is struggling towards freedom, from the atom to the man, from the insentient,
lifeless particle of matter to the highest existence on earth, the human soul.
The whole universe is in fact the result of this struggle for freedom. In all
combinations every particle is trying to go on its own way, to fly from the other
particles; but the others are holding it in check. Our earth is trying to fly
away from the sun, and the moon from the earth. Everything has a tendency to infinite
dispersion. All that we see in the universe has for its basis this one struggle
towards freedom; it is under the impulse of this tendency that the saint prays
and the robber robs. When the line of action taken is not a proper one, we call
it evil; and when the manifestation of it is proper and high, we call it good.
But the impulse is the same, the struggle towards freedom. The saint is oppressed
with the knowledge of his condition of bondage, and he wants to get rid of it;
so he worships God. The thief is oppressed with the idea that he does not possess
certain things, and he tries to get rid of that want, to obtain freedom from it;
so he steals. Freedom is the one goal of all nature, sentient or insentient; and,
consciously or unconsciously, everything is struggling towards that goal. The
freedom which the saint seeks is very different from that which the robber seeks;
the freedom loved by the saint leads him to the enjoyment of infinite, unspeakable
bliss, while that on which the robber has set his heart only forges other bonds
for his soul.
There is to be found in every religion the manifestation
of this struggle towards freedom. It is the groundwork of all morality, of unselfishness,
which means getting rid of the idea that men are the same as their little body.
When we see a man doing good work, helping others, it means that he cannot be
confined within the limited circle of "me and mine." There is no limit
to this getting out of selfishness. All the great systems of ethics preach absolute
unselfishness as the goal. Supposing this absolute unselfishness can be reached
by a man, what becomes of him? He is no more the little Mr. So-and-so; he has
acquired infinite expansion. That little personality which he had before is now
lost to him for ever; he has become infinite, and the attainment of this infinite
expansion is indeed the goal of all religions and of all moral and philosophical
teachings. The personalist, when he hears this idea philosophically put, gets
frightened. At the same time, if he preaches morality, he after all teaches the
very same idea himself. He puts no limit to the unselfishness of man. Suppose
a man becomes perfectly unselfish under the personalistic system, how are we to
distinguish him from the perfected ones in other systems? He has become one with
the universe and to become that is the goal of all; only the poor personalist
has not the courage to follow out his own reasoning to its right conclusion. Karma-Yoga
is the attaining through unselfish work of that freedom which is the goal of all
human nature. Every selfish action, therefore, retards our reaching the goal,
and every unselfish action takes us towards the goal; that is why the only definition
that can be given of morality is this: That which is selfish is immoral, and that
which is unselfish is moral.
But if you come to details, the matter will
not be seen to be quite so simple. For instance, environment often makes the details
different as I have already mentioned. The same action under one set of circumstances
may be unselfish, and under another set quite selfish. So we can give only a general
definition, and leave the details to be worked out by taking into consideration
the differences in time, place, and circumstances. In one country one kind of
conduct is considered moral, and in another the very same is immoral, because
the circumstances differ. The goal of all nature is freedom, and freedom is to
be attained only by perfect unselfishness; every thought, word, or deed that is
unselfish takes us towards the goal and, as such, is called moral. That definition,
you will find, holds good in every religion and every system of ethics. In some
systems of thought morality is derived from a Superior Being--God. If you ask
why a man ought to do this and not that, their answer is: "Because such is
the command of God." But whatever be the source from which it is derived,
their code of ethics also has the same central idea--not to think of self but
to give up self. And yet some persons, in spite of this high ethical idea, are
frightened at the thought of having to give up their little personalities. We
may ask the man who clings to the idea of little personalities to consider the
case of a person who has become perfectly unselfish, who has no thought for himself,
who does no deed for himself, who speaks no word for himself, and then say where
his "himself" is. That "himself" is known to him only so long
as he thinks, acts, or speaks for himself. If he is only conscious of others,
of the universe, and of the all, where is his "himself?" It is gone
for ever.
Karma-Yoga, therefore, is a system of ethics and religion intended
to attain freedom through unselfishness and by good works. The Karma-yogi need
not believe in any doctrine whatever. He may not believe even in God, may not
ask what his soul is, nor think of any metaphysical speculation. He has got his
own special aim of realizing selflessness; and he has to work it out himself.
Every moment of his life must be realization, because he has to solve by mere
work, without the help of doctrine or theory, the very same problem to which the
Jnâni applies his reason and inspiration and the Bhakta his love.
Now
comes the next question: What is this work? What is this doing good to the world?
Can we do good to the world? In an absolute sense, no; in a relative sense, yes.
No permanent or everlasting good can be done to the world; if it could be done,
the world would not be this world. We may satisfy the hunger of a man for five
minutes, but he will be hungry again. Every pleasure with which we supply a man
may be seen to be momentary. No one can permanently cure this ever-recurring fever
of pleasure and pain. Can any permanent happiness be given to the world? In the
ocean we cannot raise a wave without causing a hollow somewhere else. The sum
total of the good things in the world has been the same throughout in its relation
to man's need and greed. It cannot be increased or decreased. Take the history
of the human race as we know today. Do we not find the same miseries and the same
happiness, the same pleasures and pains, the same differences in position? Are
not some rich, some poor, some high, some low, some healthy, some unhealthy? All
this was just the same with the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans in ancient
times as it is with the Americans today. So far as history is known, it has always
been the same; yet at the same time we find that running along with all these
incurable differences of pleasure and pain, there has ever been the struggle to
alleviate them. Every period of history has given birth to thousands of men and
women who have worked hard to smooth the passage of life for others. And how far
have they succeeded? We can only play at driving the ball from one place to another.
We take away pain from the physical plane, and it goes to the mental one. It is
like that picture in Dante's hell where the misers were given a mass of gold to
roll up a hill. Every time they rolled it up a little, it again rolled down. All
our talks about the millennium are very nice as schoolboy's stories, but they
are no better than that. All nations that dream of the millennium also think that,
of all peoples in the world, they will have the best of it then for themselves.
This is the wonderfully unselfish idea of the millennium!
We cannot add
happiness to this world; similarly we cannot add pain to it either. The sum total
of the energies of pleasure and pain displayed here on earth will be the same
throughout. We just push it from this side to the other side, and from that side
to this; but it will remain the same, because to remain so is its very nature.
This ebb and flow, this rising and falling is in the world's very nature; it would
be as logical to hold otherwise as to say that we may have life without death.
This is complete nonsense, because the very idea of life implies death, and the
very idea of pleasure implies pain. The lamp is constantly burning out, and that
is its life. If you want to have life, you have to die every moment for it. Life
and death are only different expressions of the same thing looked at from different
standpoints; they are the falling and rising of the same wave, and the two form
one whole. One looks at the "fall" side and becomes a pessimist, another
looks at the "rise" side and becomes an optimist. When a boy is going
to school and his father and mother are taking care of him, everything seems blessed
to him; his wants are simple, he is a great optimist. But the old man, with his
varied experience, becomes calmer and is sure to have his warmth considerably
cooled down. So old nations, with signs of decay all around them, are apt to be
less hopeful than new nations. There is a proverb in India, "A thousand years
a city, and a thousand years a forest." This change of city into forest and
vice versa is going on everywhere, and it makes people optimists or pessimists
according to the side they see of it.
The next idea we take up is the
idea of equality. These millennium ideas have been great motive powers to work.
Many religions preach this as an element in them--that God is coming to rule the
universe, and that then there will be no difference at all in conditions. The
people who preach this doctrine are mere fanatics, and fanatics are indeed the
sincerest of mankind. Christianity was preached just on the basis of the fascination
of this fanaticism, and that is what made it so attractive to the Greek and the
Roman slaves. They believed that under the millennial religion there would be
no more slavery, that there would be plenty to eat and drink; and therefore they
flocked round the Christian standard. Those who preached the idea first were of
course ignorant fanatics, but very sincere. In modern times this millennial aspiration
takes the form of equality--of liberty, equality, and fraternity. This is also
fanaticism. True equality has never been and never can be on earth. How can we
all be equal here? This impossible kind of equality implies total death. What
makes this world what it is? Lost balance. In the primal state, which is called
chaos, there is perfect balance. How do all the formative forces of the universe
come then? By struggling, competition, conflict. Suppose that all the particles
of matter were held in equilibrium, would there be then any process of creation?
We know from science that it is impossible. Disturb a sheet of water, and there
you find every particle of the water trying to become calm again, one rushing
against the other; and in the same way all the phenomena which we call the universe---all
things therein--are struggling to get back to the state of perfect balance. Again
a disturbance comes, and again we have combination and creation. Inequality is
the very basis of creation. At the same time the forces struggling to obtain equality
are as much a Necessity of creation as those which destroy it.
Absolute
equality, that which means a perfect balance of all the struggling forces in all
the planes, can never be in this world. Before you attain that state, the world
will have become quite unfit for any kind of life, and no one will be there. We
find, therefore, that all these ideas of the millennium and of absolute equality
are not only impossible but also that, if we try to carry them out, they will
lead us surely enough to the day of destruction. What makes the difference between
man and man? It is largely the difference in the brain. Nowadays no one but a
lunatic will say that we are all born with the same brain power. We come into
the world with unequal endowments; we come as greater men or as lesser men, and
there is no getting away from that pre-natally determined condition, The American
Indians were in this country for thousands of years, and a few handfuls of your
ancestors came to their land. What difference have they caused in the appearance
of the country! Why did not the Indians make improvements and build cities, if
all were equal? With your ancestors a different sort of brain power came into
the land, different bundles of past impressions came, and they worked out and
manifested themselves. Absolute non-differentiation is death. So long as this
world lasts, differentiation there will and must be, and the millennium of perfect
equality will come only when a cycle of creation comes to its end. Before that,
equality cannot be. Yet this idea of realizing the millennium is a great motive
power. Just as inequality is necessary for creation itself so the struggle to
limit it is also necessary. If there were no struggle to become free and get back
to God, there would be no creation either. It is the difference between these
two forces that determines the nature of the motives of men. There will always
be these motives to work, some tending towards bondage and others towards freedom.
This world's wheel within wheel is a terrible mechanism; if we put our
hands in it, as soon as we are caught we are gone. We all think that when we have
done a certain duty, we shall be at rest; but before we have done a part of that
duty, another is already in waiting. We are all being dragged along by this mighty,
complex world-machine. There are only two ways out of it; one is to give up all
concern with the machine, to let it go and stand aside, to give up our desires.
That is very easy to say, but is almost impossible to do. I do not know whether
in twenty millions of men one can do that. The other way is to plunge into the
world and learn the secret of work, and that is the way of Karma-Yoga. Do not
fly away from the wheels of the world-machine, but stand inside it and learn the
secret of work. Through proper work done inside, it is also possible to come out.
Through this machinery itself is the way out.
We have now seen what work
is. It is a part of nature's foundation and goes on always. Those that believe
in God understand this better, because they know that God is not such an incapable
being as will need our help. Although this universe will go on always, our goal
is freedom, our goal is unselfishness; and according to Karma-Yoga, that goal
is to be reached through work. All ideas of making the world perfectly happy may
be good as motive powers for fanatics; but we must know that fanaticism brings
forth as much evil as good. The Karma-Yogi asks why you require any motive to
work other than the inborn love of freedom. Be beyond the common worldly motives.
"To work you have the right, but not to the fruits thereof." Man can
train himself to know and to practice that, says the Karma-Yogi. When the idea
of doing good becomes a part of his very being, then he will not seek for any
motive outside. Let us do good because it is good to do good; he who does good
work even in order to get to heaven binds himself down, says the Karma-Yogi. Any
work that is done with any the least selfish motive, instead of making us free,
forges one more chain for our feet.
So the only way is to give up all
the fruits of work, to be unattached to them. Know that this world is not we,
nor are we this world; that we are really not the body; that we really do not
work. We are the Self, eternally at rest and at peace. Why should we be bound
by anything? It is very good to say that we should be perfectly non-attached,
but what is the way to do it? Every good work we do without any ulterior motive,
instead of forging a new chain, will break one of the links in the existing chains.
Every good thought that we send to the world without thinking of any return, will
be stored up there and break one link in the chain and make us purer and purer,
until we become the purest of mortals. Yet all this may seem to be rather quixotic
and too philosophical, more theoretical than practical. I have read many arguments
against the Bhagavad-Gita, and many have said that without motives you cannot
work. They have never seen unselfish work except under the influence of fanaticism,
and therefore they speak in that way.
Let me tell you in conclusion a
few words about one man who actually carried this teaching of Karma-Yoga into
practice. That man is Buddha. He is the one man who ever carried this into perfect
practice. All the prophets of the world, except Buddha, had external motives to
move them to unselfish action. The prophets of the world, with this single exception,
may be divided into two sets--one set holding that they are incarnations of God
come down on earth, and the other holding that they are only messengers from God;
and both draw their impetus for work from outside, expect reward from outside,
however highly spiritual may be the language they use. But Buddha is the only
prophet who said, "I do not care to know your various theories about God.
What is the use of discussing all the subtle doctrines about the soul? Do good
and be good. And this will take you to freedom and to whatever truth there is."
He was, in the conduct of his life, absolutely without personal motives; and what
man worked more than he? Show me in history one character who has soared so high
above all. The whole human race has produced but one such character, such high
philosophy, such wide sympathy. This great philosopher, preaching the highest
philosophy, yet has the deepest sympathy for the lowest of animals, and never
puts forth any claims for himself. He is the ideal Karma-Yogi, acting entirely
without motive, and the history of humanity shows him to have been the greatest
man ever born; beyond compare the greatest combination of heart and brain that
ever existed, the greatest soul-power that has ever been manifested. He is the
first great reformer the world has seen. He is the first who dared to say, "Believe
not because some old manuscripts are produced, believe not because it is your
national belief, because you have been made to believe it from your childhood;
but reason it all out, and after you have analyzed it, then, if you find that
it will do good to one and all, believe it, live up to it, and help others to
live up to it." He works best who works without any motive, neither for money,
nor for fame, nor for anything else; and when a man can do that, he will be a
Buddha, and out of him will come the power to work in such a manner as will transform
the world This man represents the very highest ideal of Karma-Yoga.
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