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, not two praised things left standing side by side.
- 2Both paths reach the same freedom; of the two, the doing is named the gentler road.
- 3The true renouncer is not the one who lays down work, but the one within whom hatred and longing have already died.
- 4Knowledge and action are not two roads to two prizes; stand rightly in either and you hold both.
- 5The knower and the doer are walking toward the very same place.
- 6Renunciation is not seized directly; it is reached by acting rightly first.
- 7The doing continues; only the false claim to be the doer falls away.
- 8Even in the thick of seeing, hearing, and breathing, the knower holds: I do nothing at all.
- 9Speaking, releasing, grasping, opening the eyes: still, only the senses are moving.
- 10Lay the deed in Brahman, release the fruit, and no stain finds anywhere left to land.
- 11The same hands do the same work; only the claim of ownership is gone.
- 12The same deed, done two ways, ends in peace or in bondage.
- 13The hands keep working; only the claim of being the one who works falls away.
- 14The Lord makes none of it: not the doer in you, not the deed, not the fruit that follows.
- 15The Lord gathers up no one's sin or merit; the covering of your own knowledge is what actually binds you.
- 16Knowledge does not build the supreme reality; like the sun, it only ends the dark that hid it.
- 17When intellect, self, abiding, and refuge all rest on one reality, the stains fall away at the root.
- 18The wise rest the same eye on the learned and the lowest alike.
- 19A mind at rest in sameness has already won, here, the whole round of birth and death.
- 20Gain does not lift him, and loss does not sink him, because nothing separate remains to be lifted or sunk.
- 21The happiness you seek in things was already inside you, and it deepens into the undying once the mind settles in Brahman.
- 22Every contact-born pleasure is a womb of pain, because it begins and ends.
- 23The one who holds steady against the rush of desire and anger, here and now, is the truly happy one.
- 24His happiness, his delight, his very light are within: the freed one rests in Brahman.
- 25The true seer arrives clear: taint worn away, doubt cut, and care for every being flowing on its own.
- 26Freed of desire and anger, this peace stands close on every side.
- 27Put the world outside, still the gaze, even the breath: the mind's real work begins.
- 28Senses, mind, and intellect gathered as one; freedom already accomplished, not still owed.
- 29Peace is not one more fact learned about God; it is what happens once these three are actually seen.