Chapter 5
Karma Sanyasa Yoga
Path of Renunciation · 29 verses
Chapter 5 is traditionally called Karma Sanyasa Yoga, the yoga of renouncing action. It opens with Arjuna's plain question: which is better, giving up action or doing action? Krishna answers that both work.
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Sannyasa, the formal renunciation of works, and karma-yoga, doing your duty as a discipline without attachment to results, lead to the same goal. He calls it childish to treat them as opposed, and says karma-yoga is the easier road. The chapter then describes the person who acts this way. Such a one offers each action to the divine, drops the claim "I am the doer," and so stays untouched by sin. The senses keep working while the inner self rests unmoved. From here the verses turn to the marks of the freed person: even regard toward all beings, calm in pleasure and pain, happiness found within rather than in passing sense-contact, and freedom from desire and anger. The last verses point ahead to meditation and name the divine as the enjoyer of all sacrifice and austerity. Throughout, the schools agree on the path but read the doer differently. Advaita Vedanta stresses that the true Self never acts, while theistic and devotional schools such as Vishishtadvaita, Dvaita, and Bhakti keep the personal Lord central.
- 1Arjuna asks for one settled path: the renunciation of action, or the yoga of action.
- 2Both paths reach the highest good, yet of the two the yoga of action is the better.
- 3The true renouncer is the one who neither hates nor desires, even while fully at work.
- 4Knowledge and action are not two roads with two destinations; whoever walks one truly reaches both.
- 5The knower and the doer arrive at one and the same place; to see this is to see truly.
- 6Renunciation cannot be grabbed at directly; the yoga of action carries the sage home before long.
- 7The one who acts from a settled, purified self, seeing the Self in all, is not stained by the deed.
- 8Why the knower of truth can act all day and still hold, "I do nothing at all."
- 9Even as he sees, eats, and moves, the knower holds that it is the senses working among their objects.
- 10It is not the action that stains you, but the grasping and the sense of "mine" wrapped around it.
- 11Acting with body, mind, intellect and senses, the yogi works only to make himself clean.
- 12Two people do the same work; one lets the fruit go and finds peace, one clings and is bound.
- 13Renouncing every action in the mind, you rest at ease in the body's city of nine gates.
- 14Three things the Lord does not make in you: the sense of being the doer, the deeds, and the link to their fruit.
- 15The Lord gathers up no one's sin or merit; what binds you is your own knowing, veiled.
- 16When knowledge destroys ignorance, the supreme reality it had hidden stands revealed, the way the sun lights what was already there.
- 17When every faculty turns toward the one reality, the intellect, the sense of self, the abiding, and the final refuge.
- 18The wise look with one same eye on the learned and the lowest, the brahmin and the dog-eater alike.
- 19An even mind, settled in the one faultless reality present in all, conquers birth and death here in this life.
- 20The knower of Brahman is neither lifted by what is pleasant nor sunk by what is unpleasant.
- 21The happiness that was always within you, uncovered as the mind lets go of its grip on outer things.
- 22Why the pleasures of sense-contact are sources of pain, and why the wise take no delight in them
- 23Bearing the surge of desire and anger, here in this body, before it falls away.
- 24His happiness, his delight, his very light are within: the freed one rests in Brahman.
- 25What the true seer leaves behind, and what arrives: release in Brahman.
- 26Who liberation is assured for, and how near at hand it stands
- 27Where the meditator's real work lies, and how the bodily instructions are meant.
- 28The forever-free sage: three faculties gathered in, and liberation already an accomplished fact.
- 29Knowing the Lord as the receiver of every offering, the ruler of all worlds, and the friend of all beings, you come to peace.