The Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity

An Exposition of the First Six Chapters of the Bhagavadgita

by Swami Krishnananda

Discourse 19: Knowledge and Action are One

In the Bhagavadgita, the words sankhya and yoga occur a number of times, and these terms have a meaning which is of a crucial nature. Sometimes words which apparently convey an obvious meaning are used in different senses, and two such expressions are sankhya and yoga. Students of philosophy who are versed in Eastern thought would know what the schools of Sankhya and Yoga are. They associate Sankhya with the system attributed to Sage Kapila, and by Yoga they mostly mean the system of Sage Patanjali. The Bhagavadgita does not use these words in this sense. We are not speaking of Kapila's Sankhya or Patanjali's Yoga here, though we can infuse these systems into the wider concept of these terms, in the light of which expressions of this kind are used.

Because of the difficulty in properly deciphering the connotation of these words, questions arise as to the proper relationship between sankhya and yoga. Right at the very beginning of the Bhagavadgita, in the Second Chapter itself, the words sankhya and yoga have been used. “You cannot be a good yogin because you are deprived of the knowledge of sankhya,” says Bhagavan Sri Krishna in his message recorded in the Second Chapter. There, during our discussion of the theme, we found that one cannot be an expert in action unless one is also clear in one's thought.

The concept of any kind of performance determines not only the nature of the performance, but also the result that may follow from it. Bungling in action and getting defeated in one's enterprises, then repenting because of adverse consequences that follow from otherwise well-intentioned actions arise on account of the absence of sankhya buddhi, an improper conceptualisation of the pros and cons of the field of action. Such was what we could make out from the words sankhya and yoga as they occurred in the Second Chapter. The very same thing is said again subsequently.

Is sankhya different from yoga? Is knowledge different from action? We have here again the controversies of the schools of thought, the Purva Mimamsa school of action, which is the traditional protagonist of karma or action, ritual and the like, contradistinguished from schools which emphasise the pre-eminence and the supremacy of knowledge in one's life.

Now, karma as used in the Bhagavadgita is not to be identified with the karma of the ritualistic Purva Mimamsa School, though reference to rituals can be found in the Bhagavadgita also. We will find that the Bhagavadgita uses terms which are used in other schools of thought, yet are not actually meaning what these schools of thought wish to convey through those terms. The intentions of the different schools of thought seem to be familiar to the Bhagavadgita because reference is made to these different opinions of the various schools of thought, and sometimes it looks that terms used by these schools of thought are employed in the Bhagavadgita itself, yet intending something transcendent to the usually well-known concepts of the schools, though including everything that they say.

Knowledge and action are usually contradistinguished, and even in our own minds just now these things do not seem to be properly clear. We have had occasion to analyse the concepts involved in the terms sankhya and yoga, and it was found that in one condition, one circumstance, at one level or degree of expression it appeared that knowledge and action are indistinguishable. But the particular level where it appeared to be like that was so lofty and so far removed from our normal thinking that often we find that this teaching of the Bhagavadgita is not a proper daily guide for us in our workaday existence. It is not humanly possible for our brains to conceive that fine, ethereal, rarefied state where it is possible for knowledge to be indistinguishable from action, because we live a life where knowledge is not action. I mentioned briefly yesterday that a person with knowledge need not be an active person, and an active person need not be a learned or knowledgeable person, taking knowledge and action in the usual sense. But the usual sense is one thing, and the proper sense is another thing.

Arjuna also thought like every one of us. It was understood by him in the usual sense only, that knowledge and action do not seem to be the same. When I understand a thing, I do not at the same time act. I may understand; I may not act. But the Bhagavadgita is of the opinion that there is a specific type of understanding which is necessary for a safe and meaningful life in the world, which cannot be separated from action. Knowing and acting are one and the same thing. They are not two different things. In fact, the more we know, the more is our capacity to act, and here we would agree that knowing is not academic learning. A person who has vast academic knowledge or acumen need not be endowed with a correspondingly wide capacity to work. There are handicaps in doing anything even in the case of a very learned person, a master of the sciences and the arts from a theoretical and academic point of view. He will be suffering in the world due to problems of a practical nature, though his theoretical acumen is superb. So academic learning is not what is intended here by sankhya, because it is said that sankhya and yoga are not two different things. Knowledge and action are not to be distinguished.

Now here we have to ponder awhile before we proceed further. Under what circumstances can we say that knowledge and action are the same, and what are those circumstances which compel us to feel that they cannot be reconciled? We know very well the conditions which compel us to feel that they are two different things. What are those circumstances? They are the circumstances in which we are living today. We have the problem of means and ends, so to say – the difficulty of bringing together causes and effects, means and ends. Is action a means to an end, or is it an end in itself? You have to open your eyes and open your ears to contemplate this problem. Do you do anything because it will bring something else other than itself, or do you believe that the work that you do is itself your satisfaction? Here is a doctor in front of me who seems to be doing work merely because the work itself brings some satisfaction. He does not do it because it brings something else. Nothing comes to him through that action. It is itself a satisfaction. The performance itself is an end; it is not a means to an ulterior end. But in our case, we find that such a thing is difficult to conceive. How could you do something imagining that the doing itself is the purpose of doing it? Who can be so foolish as to imagine that?

Now, it is difficult for us to understand this circumstance of action because we live in a world of duality where means and ends are cut off. The process is not the same as the end result. Walking is not the same as reaching the destination. But here, there is a condition in the mind of the author of the Bhagavadgita where the movement and the destination are the same. How could man conceive this state? The path and the goal are identical. How can human minds, which know that the path is different from the destination, ever except that the movement towards a destination is itself the destination? Then only one can know that action is the end.

The problem arises due to the relationship that obtains between the universal and the particular. There is what is called universal action and particular action. We are used to particular, individual, sophisticated, egoistic action, and we are not acquainted with universal action. We are not universal persons. The whole problem here hinges on that. We are so-called particular individuals. We are this, and not more than this. That which is this cannot be that. Hence, we cannot absorb into our localised individuality circumstances which are transcendent to the individuality, which is another way of saying that we cannot be really friends of anybody in the world. No man can be a real friend of another person as long as that person ceases to be endowed with an element of universality and is shackled within the shell of bodily individuality only.

So as long as one thinks in terms of a physical individuality or even a psychic individuality, action will look like a process that is directed towards an exterior end in space and time. This is the reason why we are after the fruits of action. No one can think of an action which will not bring any fruit. Why should I do anything if it will not bring any advantage to me? This is how we generally think. We think in terms of advantage, profit and loss. A commercial attitude is employed by us even in our activities which are otherwise good, noble and sublime. A work, a karma yoga, a sacrifice, a sacrament, a dedication can be divine only to the extent of the universal present in it. You are a good man only to the extent you are impersonal and universal. You are a bad man to the extent you are a particular, individual, localised ego. So the goodness and the badness of a situation can be judged from the magnitude of the inclusiveness or exclusiveness of the universal principle in any particular event, location or circumstance. Now, this is how we may try to solve the problem of sankhya and yoga, knowledge and action – whether they are really capable of relation, or they are totally exclusive.

There is a marked difference in God's action and man's action. Though the author of the Bhagavadgita does not expect every person to be God at the very outset, the intention is to make man into God Himself, finally. Man has to become a superman. Sri Krishna himself was the ideal superman who spoke this ideal gospel for the supremely ideal situation of life in the world. The intention of the Bhagavadgita is to make every man a superman, which means to say, to pave the path to God for every particular individual in the world. The Bhagavadgita does not expect every person to be capable of this attainment at once. Every saint and sage and prophet and teacher is aware of this difficulty. But every teacher, every Incarnation, every sage expects that the teaching has relevance to that apparently remote expectation of the ideality of human existence in supreme divinity, because the Bhagavadgita is a gospel of freedom. It tells us how we can be free from the bondage of reactions of actions. The whole of the message is only this much. It is the philosophy, the gospel and teaching of freedom, ultimate freedom, unshackled, untrammelled, unlimited freedom. But such a freedom is not possible except in the universal. And what is limitation to freedom? It is the presence and the operation of something outside. Any person outside you is a limitation upon you, and anything that is taking place external to you puts a barrier on your operation. The operation of B is a limitation on the operation of A.

Now, in that sense, there cannot be freedom in this world if freedom is to be untrammelled, unlimited and supreme. Inasmuch as our intention is to be supremely free, which is called moksha, liberation from every kind of limitation, it follows that establishment in a universal inclusiveness alone can bequeath to us this kind of freedom. Every step that we take in the direction of this achievement also can be said to be a movement towards freedom. The more you are approximate to the solar orb, the more is the heat that you will receive from it. The more you are juxtaposed to the Universal, the more you are free. It is not only the more you are free, but the more you are strong and powerful, the more you are good, the more you are righteous, the more you are capable, the more you are free from the fears of life, the more you are free from death itself. But no one can be free from death as long as one is limited and is located in a finite position in space and time. Birth and death are processes of the reshuffling of the finitude of individuals for the purpose of enhancing their dimension of being; therefore, birth and death will never cease until the Universal is attained, as the writhing and the wriggling and the roaring of the rivers cannot cease until they reach the ocean.

So in that state where freedom is complete and unlimited, you cannot imagine action which is towards some other end. The Universal is a name that we give to that condition of inclusiveness where ends and means are identical, work is worship, action is existence, the means is the same as the end, and the performance is the same as the result.

Now, the satisfaction of having understood this doctrine in our daily life will be also to the extent of our having made that doctrine a part of our daily life. To the extent we are ego-ridden individuals, and in the magnitude of our affirmation of our bodily individuality, we cannot but think in terms of actions bringing some results from somewhere else. The fruit comes from outside because there is something called 'outside' to an action that we perform.

Yesterday we briefly thought that in our actions we do not actually enter wholly into it. We do not melt into the action; we do not become the action. Our soul is not in the action; therefore, it cannot be called an unselfish action. And therefore, it brings a result which is extraneous in its nature. Work can be a satisfaction by itself only if it is the expression of yourself, if it is not a commercial dealing. You do not expect anything from your own self. You may expect something from outside, but an unselfish action is not action done by outside means and ends; rather, it is a movement of yourself, so that you expand your dimension. The field of activity is the area covered by your own larger self, so that you are moving within yourself, as it were, in performance of unselfish action. “See yourself in the deed, see the Self in people, see the Atman in the whole atmosphere of action.” This is what the Bhagavadgita tells us, and in that sense you see yourself in the deeds that you perform. You are happy because you are there in what you do. Therefore, you do not want anything else from the action that you perform, in the same way as you do not expect anything from your own self. How hard is this doctrine, hard because we have never seen what universality is. We can never conceive what it can be because we cannot believe there is any reality outside the body. “All reality is within me, in this little body only; I am what I am as this little puny individual, and every satisfaction of this localised bodily individuality is all that matters for me. Let the world go to hell.” This is what any man would think when he is driven into a corner. But the Bhagavadgita is a solacing message of healthy living, not this morbid existence of a bodily individuality.

So here again we come to this point of sankhya and yoga. It is knowledge, and that knowledge is the same as action. Sankhya is not different from yoga. Sāṁkhyayogau pṛthag bālāḥ pravadanti na paṇḍitāḥ (BG 5.4): Only unlettered, untutored, illiterate persons speak of sankhya and yoga as two different things. Wise ones do not say that. But who are the wise ones? Those who are established in the Universal. And here we may be charitable enough to accept that all those may be said to be also in the Universal even when they are moving towards the Universal, just as we say a person is educated whatever be the state of his education, whatever be the degree of his enlightenment. Whatever be the class he is studying in, he is in the process of education. Likewise, you may say you are living a spiritual life whatever be the degree of the universality that has become part of your daily life.

But to the extent it has not become part of your being, action looks like something different from knowledge. Therefore, knowledge and action are different in one state of consciousness, but they are not different in another state of consciousness. Where are they not different? They are not different where knowledge includes the field of action, where knowledge is not merely an acquaintance with facts as a sort of information but the imbibing of the very substance of the content of knowledge, where knowledge is Being and not merely knowing something outside, where Chit is the same as Sat, to put it in a more technical way. Chit is Sat, Sat is Chit. Ananda is said to be the name of perfection. That means to say, Chit is Sat. Consciousness is Being; knowing is the same as Existence; to be aware is to possess.

But in our daily existence we find awareness is not possession. If we are aware that we have a hundred dollars, we do not possess a hundred dollars. This is the case because of the isolation of our awareness from the content of awareness. But here is a meditation taking place simultaneously with action, and karma yoga is at once meditation. It is contemplation and action combined. It is the soul operating when karma yoga is being performed, and the soul is the greatest satisfaction. All satisfaction is the operation of the soul from inside. The more is the soul active, the more are you happy. But most of our souls are dead, or they are asleep at least. They are not working at all, and hence, we are never happy. We are scrambling for a little bit of satisfaction in the darkness of ignorance where we grope for satisfaction but we cannot find it because the souls are asleep. Why are they asleep? Because they are shrouded by the thick clouds of unfulfilled longings – the karmas, as they are called, sanchita, etc., unfulfilled longings lying embedded as thick layers of the psychic accumulations we call in the language of psychology the unconscious, and so on. These act like thick curtains over the radiance of the soul, and it does not appear to operate at all.

All joy is the manifestation of the Atman from inside. Joy, satisfaction, does not come from material objects. Even when we seem to be possessed of a satisfaction in terms of a material possession, it is actually the soul that is operating from inside. We have the old example of a dog licking a bone with some splinters, which cause a wound in the tongue of the dog, and blood oozes from the wound. It licks the blood more and more, thinking that it is coming from the bone and not from its own tongue. That is how we feel attracted to objects outside, imagining that the satisfaction is in the objects though it has actually emanated from our own selves, as a dog imagines the blood to be oozing from a bone while it is dripping from its own tongue that is torn by the splinter. These are difficult things to imagine for a consciousness, a state of mind, which is embodied in this physical tabernacle.

So sankhya and yoga are not two different things where yoga is karma yoga, and not merely ordinary action. The ordinary action that is of a binding nature is that which has a result outside it. The karma yoga is that kind of action which has the result inside it, so that there is no question of the karma yogin expecting a result coming from outside. The moment the concept of outside arises, exclusiveness takes place in consciousness instead of inclusiveness. The universal element is cut off from that concept of action where the end result is outside the action. There is exclusiveness of the result of the action in ordinary binding action, whereas in liberating action, which is karma yoga, the result is included in the action itself.

However much we think this, we will find it is hard for us to imagine. How could I be in my action? We have to be in the action in order that it may give meaning. The painter has to be in the painting in order that it may look beautiful. The poet has to be in his poem in order that it may be meaningful, significant, absorbing. Even in architecture and sculpture, the artist is wholly present in his soul, and that is why it gives beauty. If niggardly, half-heartedly, cursingly we do an action, it produces no good result. Even charity done niggardly is no charity. Our soul is outside the action, so the action is dead action; therefore, a living result cannot follow from it.

Hence, sankhya and yoga are identical in one sense of the spiritual concept of the Universal being present in karma yoga, divinised action, but in other actions which are of an embodied nature, they are two different things. So Arjuna's question has a point, and Sri Krishna's answer also has a point.

Yogayukto viśuddhātmā vijitātmā jitendriyaḥ, sarvabhūtātmabhūtātmā kurvann api na lipyate (BG 5.7). We are afraid of the binding effect of action. Karma binds, we say, and the world binds, and everything we do seems to be a limitation to our freedom because we neither know the meaning of yoga, which is liberating action, nor do we know the meaning of knowledge, which is inclusive awareness.

A person who is endowed with the consciousness of right action is yogasamyukta, the word used at the end of the Fourth Chapter. He is also one who has removed every kind of doubt from his mind: jñānasaṁchinnasaṁśaya (BG 4.41). Because of freedom from every kind of doubt, having been jñānasaṁchinnasaṁśaya, and having freed himself from every kind of attachment because he is yogasaṁnyastakarma, he is established in the true Self: ātmavan. Such a person is not bound: ātmavantaṁ na karmāṇi nibadhnanti. It is only the soul that cannot be bound; everything else is subject to bondage. Now, to the extent we are a soul, to that extent we are free. Each one of us should know how far we are souls, and to what extent we are not souls. We are every blessed thing other than a soul; therefore, we seem to be enmeshed in bondage of every kind. There is trouble, trouble, trouble, everywhere; there is nothing but that because we are phenomenal beings more than noumenals. We are involved in externality more than in universality. We are not ātmavans, not jñānasaṁchinnasaṁśaya or yogasaṁnyastakarma; therefore, knowledge and action are totally different things. We are more traders, commercial beings even in the performance of our actions, rather than souls operating for our own freedom.

Yogayukta is one who is united with the principle of yoga. The word yoga is again used in many senses in the Bhagavadgita. We shall now conceive of it in one sense: the unitedness of the performer with the performance. The other senses we shall think of later on. The harmony that is there between the performer of the action and the action itself, that is yoga. Such a person is purified: viśuddhātmā. Such a person is automatically self-controlled: vijitātmā. His self is controlled by the Self and his sense organs are restrained by the mind: jitendriyaḥ. Such a person sees himself in every other soul: sarvabhūtātmabhūtātmā. His soul has become the soul of all beings. That is because the soul cannot be in one particular place. One who works through the soul works through the universal principle in all things. He is established in God-consciousness in one degree, and so he is the only person who can do real good to people; otherwise, it will be ordinary, fragile action which will bring fragile results. Many have come in the world, and many have gone. So many things have been done, yet the world is the same. It is not changing because brittle action produces brittle results. Living action produces living results. Life is only in the soul, and in the non-soul there is no life.

Hence, the Bhagavadgita exhorts us to act on the basis of the soul within us, whose consciousness is called sankhya, and it is at the same time an establishment in the Universal because the soul is universal. In that state, knowledge and action are the same. Everything that you do is a joyous self-expression, a liberating performance. You are ever in a state of bliss.