Chapter 6
Dhyana Yoga
Path of Meditation · 47 verses
Chapter 6 is traditionally called Dhyana Yoga, the yoga of meditation. It opens by joining two words people treat as opposites: Krishna says the true renouncer (sannyasi) and the true yogi are the same person, the one who does his duty without leaning on its fruit.
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The test is inward, not the kind of work. He names a ladder: for the seeker still climbing, action is the means; for the one established, stillness is. The chapter then gives plain instructions for sitting meditation: a clean, firm seat, an erect body, a steady inward gaze, and measure in food, sleep, and work, never harsh extremes. The settled mind is likened to a lamp that does not flicker where no wind reaches. Such a yogi sees the same Self in all beings and meets pleasure and pain alike. When Arjuna objects that the mind is restless as wind, Krishna grants this and answers with practice (abhyasa) and dispassion (vairagya). He closes by promising that no sincere effort is lost: the one who falls from the path is reborn well and takes it up again. The schools differ on what is finally reached and on what the Self is. Advaita Vedanta, Vishishtadvaita, Dvaita, Shuddhadvaita, Bhakti, and Kashmir Shaivism each read it in their own way.
- 1The true renouncer keeps working; only his leaning on the fruit is gone.
- 2Renunciation and yoga are one inward act wearing two names.
- 3Two stages, one traveler: action lifts the climber, stillness holds the one who has arrived.
- 4You have climbed to yoga the moment the inner grip on objects and actions falls away.
- 5No one else can lift you, and no one else can drown you either.
- 6You are not fighting a stranger. You are deciding which version of yourself gets to run the house.
- 7Master yourself, and what is highest stands still within you, through cold and heat alike.
- 8Filled by what he has learned and what he has lived, the yogi finds gold and dirt weigh the same.
- 9One steady regard, for the well-wisher and the one who wishes you harm alike.
- 10Gather the mind on one ground, and let solitude be the room that steadiness needs.
- 11Before the mind can grow still, the body is given a place to rest.
- 12Sit down, gather the scattered mind to one point, and let the gathering itself begin to clean the instrument.
- 13Before the mind can be still, teach the body to stop moving.
- 14Sit with the mind emptied of everything else, then set on the one thing that is also your highest aim.
- 15The held mind opens onto a peace that rests, at last, in Krishna himself.
- 16Before the mind can be steadied, the body has to be brought to its own middle.
- 17Measure kept across an ordinary day is what lets yoga destroy sorrow at its root.
- 18Two marks, held together, are the whole of the test: a mind at rest in the Self, and no craving left at all.
- 19A lamp does not flicker where no wind reaches; such is the mind made still.
- 20A mind gone quiet enough to finally see itself, and want nothing further.
- 21A happiness past every limit waits within, and once known, it does not let go.
- 22The gain past which nothing is worth wanting, and the pain that cannot move it.
- 23What Krishna calls yoga here is the parting from every union with pain.
- 24Undo the desire at its root, the mind's own resolve, and gather the senses home from every side.
- 25Bring the mind to rest by patient degrees, until it wants for nothing further.
- 26Wherever the mind runs, draw it back from that exact point, and set it in the Self alone.
- 27When the mind is finally still, the highest happiness simply arrives.
- 28The long discipline ripens into ease, and ease opens onto the touch of Brahman.
- 29The steadied mind sees one Self standing in all beings, and all beings resting in that Self.
- 30See the Lord in all, and all in the Lord, and that seeing is never lost.
- 31The one who worships God present in all beings abides in Him, however he lives.
- 32Measuring every being by himself, the highest yogi finds no one whose joy or pain outweighs his own.
- 33Arjuna names the one honest obstacle: a mind too restless to hold the evenness he has just been shown.
- 34Arjuna calls his own mind as uncatchable as the wind, and the teacher agrees.
- 35Hard to hold, yet held: practice and dispassion together do it.
- 36Yoga is hard for the unrestrained mind, but reachable for the one who keeps striving.
- 37Arjuna asks what becomes of the sincere seeker whose faith outran his effort.
- 38Arjuna asks the question every seeker dreads: fallen from both, does he simply come apart?
- 39Arjuna lays his whole doubt before the one knower who does not have to reason his way to an answer.
- 40No one who has genuinely done good is ever lost, in this world or beyond it.
- 41The practice you began still carries you, even through the fall.
- 42A fall from practice does not erase it; it can open into the very household where practice is already at home.
- 43Nothing you have honestly practiced is erased by death; you simply resume from there.
- 44What you once practiced has not forgotten you.
- 45The one who falls is not lost; effort renewed across many births still reaches the goal.
- 46The yogin stands above the ascetic, the merely learned, and the ritualist alike.
- 47Of every kind of yogi, the one whose inner self has gone to the Lord in faith is held the most fully joined.