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14. The right spirit to act in
47
You have control over action only, not even a little on its fruit. Do not act for the sake of fruit which may not come; neither let there be attachment to inaction. 48Established in yoga, perform actions having abandoned attachment, winner of wealth. Being equanimous in success and failure is called yoga.
One of the most-quoted verses of the Bhagavad Geeta is also the most misunderstood! "karmanyevaadhikaraste ma phaleshu kadachana, ma karmaphalaheturbhur ma te sangostvakarmani", which so many people quote glibly, is generally translated as "You have a right over action only, not even a little on its fruit. Do not act for the sake of fruit which may not come; neither let there be attachment to action." It is made out as if you don’t have a right to enjoy the fruit of your action! Well, if you don’t, then who has? If you have worked for a month in a company, then who has the right to the salary? Obviously you, and no one else! Sometimes it is made out that you should not work towards getting results. Well, if you don’t work towards getting results, what do you work towards? If Arjuna was not to work towards a result of victory, what was he to work towards? Defeat? The problem comes because of the way "adhikara" is translated to mean "right". But here it means "control" and the meaning of the verse is a very plain, simple, commonsense one: "You have control over action only, not even a little on its fruit. Do not act for the sake of fruit which may not come; neither let there be attachment to action." It is commonsense to know what is in our hands and what is not. To act is the only thing in our control, in our hands. Its results are not; the action’s results depend on a hundred-and-one other factors! There may be a delay in the salary payments, the company may go bust a day before salary-date, riots may break out (or Mumbai may get flooded) and the city may come to a standstill for a week; anything can happen. These things are not in your control. The only thing in your hands is to do your work properly for the month. If the salary comes on time, well and good. If it doesn’t, what can you do? That’s why the latter part of the verse says, "Do not act for the sake of fruit which may not come." If you act for the sake of the fruit, you may get worked up if it doesn’t come. Verse 5:12 says the same thing, "He who is united (with God), having abandoned the fruit of action, attains peace. He who is not united (with God), who lives for sense gratification, being attached to the fruit of actions, is bound."
This is also the source of many family problems. "I do so much for him, and he doesn’t even notice it" says the wife in self-pity. Expectations are the biggest killjoys of life. If you get this one fact right, that only the doing of actions is in your hands, and the results are not, then your life will become bliss! You simply do your best in every situation and leave the results to God. If the results come, fine. If they don’t, it’s God’s problem, not yours. You are free. Doing the right actions because it is right to do them and leaving the results to God brings tremendous freedom in your spirit. You are no longer responsible for the results! The results may come or they may not come. They are dependent on a hundred-and-one other factors that are not under your control anyway. You have done what was in your hands. If the results don’t come because of factors not in your hands, what can you do? Sit crying? Of course not! But that’s exactly what most people do! "Oh, I am such a failure; I tried so hard, I did everything right, I did everything I could yet I failed." If you have really tried your best, if you really did everything right, and yet if you failed for reasons beyond your control then how are you a failure? People make their self-worth so much dependent on their external success or failure, that they miss out on the joy and freedom of doing the right thing and leaving the result to God.
"Doing the right thing and leaving the results to God, not bothering about the results" is the only right spirit to act in. Let’s take another example – that of facing corruption, so rampant in a country like India. When you are in a situation in which your work is going to get done if you pay a bribe, what are you to do? You know that the righteous thing to do is to not pay the bribe. But there are two big temptations that show you their face immediately. First is the feeling that you are not going to get anything out of being righteous. What will you gain? Somebody else, who is willing to pay the bribe, will get the benefit, and you will only miss out. What will you be getting? Answer: Something far more precious! You will be strengthening your relationship with God, because you will be doing what God wants you to in that situation!
The second temptation is the feeling that if you choose to not give the bribe, you are only fighting a lonely and loosing battle against corruption. You will get the feeling that one person alone cannot battle the entire system. Which is true; one person surely cannot alone battle the entire system. But what if thousands of other people are obeying God in their small, little way as you are?
This is exactly where God and your relationship with him comes into the picture. Atheists can’t enjoy this. Neither can the common men and superficial religionists who pay lip-service to God but practically live their lives as if He doesn’t exist. It is "established in yoga" that we are to perform actions. "Yoga" as we have seen before, is "Union with God." If you are not "established in yoga," if you don’t have "union with God," if your relationship with God is not well established, then you can’t enjoy this freedom. What then would you be acting for in this world? You would necessarily be acting for the sake of something in this world. And that necessarily brings "attachment." You can’t enjoy freedom in action if you are attached to anything in this world. Your happiness is far too dependent, far too determined by what happens in the world, whether things go according to your desires or they don’t, whether you are "successful" or whether you are not. "Being equanimous in success and failure is called yoga." When you, in the right sense, have stopped caring whether you are successful or not, when you are "the same" in success and failure, when you are "detached" from success and failure in this world, only then are you truly free.
But how can this "detachment" to be achieved? You can’t operate in a vacuum. How can you "detach" yourself from the world while still acting in it? The easiest and simplest and most effective way to do it is to transfer that attachment to God! The more you get attached to God, the more you automatically get detached from the world! This "attachment to God" is "Yoga," hence it is "Established in yoga, perform actions having abandoned attachment." In other words "Being attached to God, perform actions in this world having abandoned attachment to success and failure in this world." That’s the right spirit to act in, if you are to enjoy real freedom in this world.
Krishna had told Arjuna in verse 45 to "be without the three gunas," as a result of which he would come to "know Brahman", the one thing worth knowing; and then in verse 47a he had said, "Do not act for the sake of fruit which may not come." That may give the impression that you don’t have to act in this world. Hence Krishna immediately says in verse 47, "neither let there be attachment to inaction." Inaction is either laziness, or fear! Just as wrong action, and action done for the wrong reason (for the sake of fruits) binds, laziness and fear also bind! "Tamo-guna (darkness), produced by ignorance, know to be the spell of all the embodied. Madness, laziness, and sleep it binds to," says 14:8. In fact laziness and madness go together – an idle mind is the devil’s workshop! Verses 45 to 47a do not mean that a student is not to study, but leave the results "Ram Bharose." Fatalism has been the bane of Hinduism for centuries. Thinking that to desire and to aspire will not lead to peace, people have abstained from enterprise. A right understanding of verses like 2:47 can go a long way in removing the bane of fatalism.
If a student thinks the whole time about the results of the examination, his study will be hampered. It would be much better for him if he were to concentrate on his studies. And not only that, study in such a way as to get good results. The verse does not mean that he is not to study in a way to get good results. That’s silly. He is very much to study in a way as to get good results. But the verse says that only the studying is in his hands, the results are not. The results may not come as expected, for a variety of reasons that are not in his hands. But he has to do what is in his hands, he has to do what is under his control, and do it to his best ability and with the maximum effort, and then leave the results to God.
Verse 48a is a very important verse, and can be looked at as a summary statement of the entire message of the Bhagavad Geeta: "Established in yoga, perform actions having abandoned attachment" There are three parts here:
We have already seen that "yoga" as used in the Bhagavad Geeta, means the connection, the union, the joining between God and man, between the Atman (soul or self) with the Param-atman (super-soul or super-self). The word "yoga" is derived from the Sanskrit "yuj" which means "to join" or "to engage" or "to unite." This then is the first step. Most people plunge into action in this world without getting into union with God and having abandoned attachment; and the result as we have seen before, is nothing but frustration at the meaninglessness of the work they are doing (if they are thoughtful people). Since we have seen this in detail before, we won’t spend much time on it here.
The word that we are coming across for the first time here in verses 47 and 48, is "attachment." This, and its opposite ("detachment") are extremely important words in the Bhagavad Geeta, and we need to spend some time in understanding them. Many people confuse attachment with love, and detachment with lack of love, and consider detachment a negative thing. Whereas actually, only detachment can make one love truly and freely; attachment only leads to bondage. Let me clarify this by giving two pairs of extreme and opposite examples, to illustrate what I mean by attached love and detached love. Attached love, which has been glorified so much in the modern world, is nothing more than emotional infatuation. The perfect examples of such attached love are the famous "love stories" – Romeo and Juliet, Laila-Majnu, Heer-Ranjha, Shireen-Farhad, Devdas-Paro. The fact that most of such "love stories" have tragic endings is not coincidental! They have tragic endings because that kind of love weakens the two and leaves them good for nothing else, and they soon wilt and perish when the pressures of the world come on them. Consider the two in college who have "fallen" deeply in love with each other. They can’t concentrate on their studies, they can’t concentrate on any other work. They are always thinking about each other only. They are good for nothing else. On the other extreme is unattached love, shown by people like Mother Teresa. If she would have let her emotions get entangled (either in compassion or in repulsion) with every person she helped, she would have gone mad!* The kind of love she had, unattached love, does not emotionally drain, because emotions are not involved. Whereas attached love drains you out since emotions are involved and the emotional graph resembles a roller-coaster! Unattached love strengthens those who show it, because the person has to necessarily draw such kind of love from God since such love is beyond the scope of human emotions. Such love is also freeing, since it gives without expecting anything in return. And such love releases you and helps you to do what is right and necessary in an efficient and effective manner, because your actions are not entangled by your emotions.
(* I remember a beautiful Hindi movie of the olden days by the name of "Khamoshi" starring Rajesh Khanna and Waheeda Rehman which perfectly illustrates this. The man is a person needing psychiatric care and the lady is a nurse who takes up his case. Initially, while she is in an unattached state, she does a very good job and helps him recover. However in the process, she herself falls in love with him i.e. lets her emotions get entangled with him, so much so, that finally she herself goes mad!)
Any love that is dependent on anything in this world, including other people, is attached love. Any loving done with any expectation is attached love. Love that is not dependent on others, on their behaving in any particular way, and done without expectation, is detached love. Such love frees the other person to be whatever he wants to be. On the other hand, since attached love is dependent on the other person, is binding; the very word "attachment" also means "binding". This kind of love binds the person exercising it with the person towards whom it is expressed or even held in the spirit. It makes one dependent on the other person. This is the kind of love that causes most family problems today. How many times do we hear sentences like "I do so much for him (/her) and he (/she) doesn’t even notice it", "How much have we done for our children and now they don’t even bother about us", "I slog the whole day to provide for you kids and these are the kind of marks you bring!", "Why did he say that? It hurt me so much." "He shouldn’t have done that", "She shouldn’t have said that" and on and on and on. Another terrible kind of binding statements are of the kind "If you love me, you would…" (fill in the blanks yourself). This kind of conditional love is attached love and binds the other person. Detached love frees the other person. When the movie Devdas was released, a question was asked to respondents, "Was Devdas a lover or a loser?" My answer would have been, "He was both a lover and a loser. He was a lover because only a lover could go to such extremes of depression as he did. But he was also a loser. A true winner would have said to her, ‘Okay madam, I love you and love you truly and deeply. I would have liked to have you as my wife for the rest of my life. But if I can’t, then I am not going to sit crying about it. Life is too big to be wasted over one girl. If you can’t be my wife, then I wish you all the best in your life with whomever you marry. May God bless the two of you.’" Those are the words of a winner, an unattached lover. Those words would have freed her. But more importantly and more surely, it would have freed him! If you don’t overcome attached love, it definitely binds you, regardless of whether it binds the other person. We don’t know how she would have responded over time, may be she would have freed herself of any emotional bondage with him as time went by. But we do know how it affected Devdas since he didn’t break that bondage: it messed up the rest of his life! The main reason for the messed up lives today, fueled by the silly love-films and emotional tear-jerker TV-serials, is this wrong idea of love; where emotional infatuation (or attached love) is misunderstood for true love. True love frees a person, attached love binds a person. As the saying goes, "If you want to find whether he truly loves you, set him free. If he truly loves you, he will come back. If not, his love was not true anyway."
How does one develop such detachment? Such detachment can be easily developed by transferring the sense of attachment to God and doing away with the feeling of ownership. The word used in the Geeta is "nirmamah" in verses like 3:30, 12:13, and 18:53, a word that has unfortunately picked up a negative connotation over time to mean "without feeling." But that’s not its real meaning. "Nir" means without, "mamah" means "mine," so "nirmamah" means "without a sense of being mine" or "without a sense of ownership". I love my children dearly, but I am also keenly aware that they are not mine, I don’t own them. They are God’s, and God has only given them to me for a period of time to love them and bring them up properly. God has created them unique persons, giving them unique strengths and weaknesses, unique likes and dislikes, unique inclinations, disinclinations and predilections. They don’t have to fit my ideas and they don’t have to be like me or like any idea of a perfect person that I may have. I look after them for a time, but when they are of age, I am to let them choose their own paths. Hopefully by then, I would have imparted some useful things to them that will help them in their lives. I try my best to do so, but I am keenly aware of the fact that no matter how much I do, it may not be enough, and no matter how good a father I am, they may still go awry. I rest in the knowledge that more than me, they belong to God, and ultimately they have to follow God and not me. If necessary to follow their own convictions, they may even have to go against me, as I had to go against my own father. I am at rest with all these possibilities because I am "nirmamah", aware that I don’t own them, that God owns them, that ultimately they belong to God. That attitude sets them free, but as importantly, it sets me free now!
That’s detached love, and in a sense it comes by transferring your attachment to God. Attachment to God i.e. "yoga" automatically brings detachment with the things and the people on earth. That does not mean you don’t love the people around you or don’t carry out your duties and responsibilities towards them. In fact you do them better, because you are no longer emotionally attached to them. It is well known in the medical profession that surgeons are not allowed to operate on their own near-and-dear ones. Even if he is the best surgeon in the world, if an operation is to be performed on his own wife or children, some other surgeon has to do it. Why? Because due to his emotional attachment with them, he may make some silly mistake that he would have never made otherwise, and mess up the operation. When you are emotionally detached from a situation, you naturally do a better job.
The best and easiest way to get emotionally detached from the things and people of this world is to transfer that attachment to God. That’s the "yoga" the Bhagavad Geeta is talking about. Once you have got into that state, then you perform actions in this world from the state of detachment.
Verse 48b rounds it off by saying, "Being equanimous in success and failure is called yoga." The natural result of detachment is equanimity in results. It now makes little difference whether your effort ends in success or failure. You have done the right actions, you have done what needs to be done and left the results to God. Acting in that spirit, tremendous freedom is obtained by the giving up of wrong imaginations, false expectations, daydreams about the fruits of actions, anxieties for results, and unknown fears. All these belong to the ego, the bundle of past memories and hopes and expectations for the future. Both of these are tremendous energy-drainers, making people lose the present, the only thing there is. When we "established in yoga, perform actions having abandoned attachment," our efficiency increases tremendously. "Yoga is skill in action" as verse 50 will soon say.
But then the big question sooner or later arises, "What is right? And what is wrong? What should I do? And what should I not do?" Actually the only worthwhile reason why you should be doing something is that God wants you to do it. Any other reason is just not worth it. Why it is so, we see in the next section.