मोक्षसंन्यासयोग
Chapter 18
Moksha Sanyaas Yoga
Yoga through the Perfection of Renunciation and Surrender · 78 verses
Chapter 18 is the Gita's last and longest chapter, traditionally treasured as Moksha-Sannyasa Yoga, the yoga of liberation through letting go. Arjuna asks Krishna to tell two words apart: sannyasa, renouncing action, and tyaga, renouncing the fruit, the reward, of action.
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Krishna answers that sacrifice, giving, and austerity should not be dropped; they purify the mind. What you give up is the attachment and the craving for results, not the work itself. While you have a body, some action always goes on, so real renunciation is inner. Krishna then sorts many things by the three gunas, the basic qualities of nature called sattva (clarity), rajas (restlessness), and tamas (dullness): renunciation, knowledge, action, the doer, the intellect, firmness, and happiness. He names five causes behind every action, so the seeker stops laying sole doership on the self. He maps the four classes and their natural work, and teaches that doing your own duty, offered to the Lord, purifies you and leads toward Brahman, the absolute. The chapter closes with surrender: take refuge in Krishna alone. Here the schools differ on how much agency the self keeps and what surrender means.
Contentsश्लोकाः
- 1Arjuna asks for the truth of renunciation and relinquishment, each one told apart.
- 2Two words for letting go are not one word: renouncing the deed, and releasing its fruit.
- 3Before Krishna answers, he first shows you both sides of the argument.
- 4Hear my own judgment now: giving up is not one thing, but three.
- 5Sacrifice, giving, and austerity are not to be set aside, for they purify the wise.
- 6Keep the deed; release only the grip that claims it and the craving for what it yields.
- 7The duty you are bound to do purifies you; to drop it in confusion is renunciation only in name.
- 8Setting a duty down from fear of bodily strain is a counterfeit of renunciation, and it bears no fruit.
- 9Keep the duty. Release only the clinging and the craving for what it brings.
- 10The true relinquisher meets hard work and easy work with the same steady mind.
- 11No one in a body can lay action down; the true renouncer lets go of the fruit instead.
- 12The harvest waits for the one who has not let go; it finds nothing to land on in the one who has.
- 13No action is done by one hand alone; five causes carry every deed.
- 14Any action rests on five things together, and you are only one of them.
- 15Right or wrong, bodily, spoken, or thought, every action answers to the same five causes.
- 16Seeing the Self alone as the doer is the mark of an untrained mind.
- 17The doer vanishes from the deed, and with it, the deed's power to bind.
- 18Every action rests on six factors, and Krishna names them before he sorts them.
- 19Before the sorting comes, Krishna names exactly what will be sorted, and closes the count at three.
- 20One imperishable being runs through every divided form, and seeing it is the highest knowledge.
- 21A knowledge that sees only the many has mistaken the surface for the whole.
- 22Knowing that fastens on a fragment and calls it the whole is the darkest kind of knowing.
- 23The duty that is yours, done without clinging, without liking or aversion, and with no eye on its fruit.
- 24Not the toil, but what is craved and who is claiming it, marks action as rajasic.
- 25The deed that never once looked ahead is the darkest kind, whatever it costs.
- 26The best worker has let go of credit and craving, never of effort.
- 27One craving, seven faces: the portrait of the doer ruled by passion.
- 28Eight marks name the doer shaped entirely by darkness, and not one of them is a virtue in disguise.
- 29Before naming the kinds, Krishna names exactly what will be sorted: the deciding mind and the power that holds it steady.
- 30The clear intellect tells six things apart, and bondage or freedom is what finally hangs on it.
- 31A judgment can sound settled and still be bent; that is the mark of the passion-bound intellect.
- 32The intellect wrapped in darkness does not merely miss the truth; it holds its exact opposite.
- 33Sattvic firmness does not force the mind still; it holds it steady by being joined to something worth staying joined to.
- 34A real, tenacious steadiness, fixed only on what the world can give.
- 35The dark firmness is real firmness, only gripping sleep, fear, grief, and pride instead of letting them go.
- 36The happiness worth keeping is not the one that arrives first, but the one that finally ends your sorrow.
- 37This happiness tastes like poison at the start and like nectar only once it ripens.
- 38Sweet at the touch, bitter in the ripening: that is the mark of rajasic joy.
- 39There is a happiness that fogs you from the first moment to the last, and it is genuinely enjoyed, not merely endured.
- 40Nothing anywhere, in any world, stands free of the three qualities born of nature.
- 41The work is sorted by what you already are, not by a label placed on you.
- 42Nine marks of an inward life: a quieted mind, mastered senses, and settled faith, named as the brahmin's nature-born work.
- 43Seven marks of a warrior's temper, born of nature before they are ever a duty.
- 44The trader's and the servant's work, each born of what the doer already is.
- 45Devoted to the work that is already yours, you reach a success whose manner is still to be told.
- 46Worship him through the work already yours, and perfection follows.
- 47Your own duty, done poorly, still outranks another's done well, because it alone is genuinely yours.
- 48Every fire trails smoke; do not refuse the fire on that account.
- 49Three inner traits, not an outward act, are what finally carry you past where action can bind you.
- 50A promise, in brief: the one who has reached perfection is about to be shown the way to Brahman.
- 51A purified intellect, held firm, releases what merely serves pleasure and lets go of liking and disliking.
- 52Solitude, light eating, stillness, and dispassion are scaffolding for a mind not yet steady enough to know itself.
- 53Six faults set down, and what is left is not emptiness but a mind finally fit to see.
- 54The settled self, no longer grieving or grasping, comes at last to the highest love.
- 55Devotion ripened into knowing does not travel toward Krishna; it arrives already there.
- 56Every action may continue; only your refuge has to change, and grace does the rest.
- 57Hand the doing over in your mind; keep working exactly as before.
- 58Fix your mind on him, and his grace carries you across; lean on your own ego, and you fall.
- 59A resolve made from ego cannot hold, because your own nature will carry you past it.
- 60You are already bound by the very nature you are trying to argue your way out of.
- 61The Lord seated in your own heart turns you, as if mounted on a machine, by his maya.
- 62Go to him alone, with your whole being, and let the peace that follows be his gift, not your wage.
- 63The whole teaching is given; now the choice, weighed fully, is yours.
- 64Before the last word is given, Krishna names the only reason he is giving it: love.
- 65Turn your whole self toward him in four small ways, and he swears you will arrive.
- 66Give up every ground you have leaned on, and take the Lord alone as your refuge.
- 67This teaching is not for everyone, and that is its own kind of care.
- 68To hand this teaching to those ready for it, in love, is itself the way home.
- 69No one on earth does me a dearer act than this.
- 70To say these words is, Krishna tells you, already to have worshipped him.
- 71Even the one who only listens, with faith and no fault-finding, is not left without fruit.
- 72Has this landed, and is the old confusion gone? Krishna simply asks.
- 73The delusion is destroyed; by grace, the memory of who he is has returned.
- 74Sanjaya closes the Gita not with a lesson but with his own plain wonder at what he has heard.
- 75Sanjaya explains how the whole teaching reached him: by grace, and directly.
- 76Sanjaya, the narrator and not the disciple, closes the Gita drowning in joy at the mere memory of it.
- 77The vision was seen once; the wonder keeps returning.
- 78Sanjaya's last word: where the Lord of yoga and the surrendered archer stand together, fortune does not need to be hoped for.