The Steady Sage

Introduction — The Battlefield Is Your Life

You are not this body. Begin from this point, otherwise nothing in the Bhagavad-gītā will be understood. Arjuna was lamenting on the battlefield of Kurukṣetra, thinking, "How shall I kill my grandfather, my teacher, my cousins?" His problem was not military. His problem was ignorance — the bodily conception of life. And Kṛṣṇa did not begin by teaching him strategy. Kṛṣṇa began by teaching him what he is: eternal soul, ātmā, indestructible, unborn, undying.

Now, in these verses — from the forty-seventh to the seventy-second — the Lord gives the whole substance of practical spiritual life. First He teaches how to work. Then He describes the person who has perfected that work: the sthita-prajña, the man of steady wisdom. This is not philosophy for the forest only. You are also standing on a battlefield. Your office is Kurukṣetra. Your family duties, your losses, your anxieties — this is your Kurukṣetra. The question is not whether you will fight. You must fight; nobody can remain without action even for a moment. The question is in what consciousness you will fight.

From Part One — The Secret of Work

karmaṇy evādhikāras te mā phaleṣu kadācana
mā karma-phala-hetur bhūr mā te saṅgo 'stv akarmaṇi (2.47)

Translation: You have a right to perform your prescribed duty, but you are not entitled to the fruits of action. Never consider yourself the cause of the results of your activities, and never be attached to not doing your duty.

This is the most famous verse of the Gītā, and the most misunderstood. People say, "Work without desire." That is impossible. A living being cannot be desireless; desire is the symptom of the soul. The instruction is to purify desire, not to kill it. Work belongs to you; the result belongs to Kṛṣṇa. The moment you claim the fruit, you are bound by the fruit, good or bad. And note the last line: this verse is not a license for laziness. Attachment to inaction is also condemned.

Inside the full e-book, the discourse continues through all twenty-six verses: the definition of yoga as equanimity, Arjuna's question that changes everything, the marks of the sage, the eight-step ladder of falling down that begins not with sin but with contemplation of sin, the ocean that is never disturbed, and the final word — eṣā brāhmī sthitiḥ, the spiritual situation attaining which one is never bewildered again.