Tilak's karma-yoga reading, through the Gītā
The Gītā is heard here as a śāstra of right action. Its question is Arjuna's question: what should I do, here, where my duty is terrible. The answer running through all eighteen chapters is one answer. Act, because the embodied being cannot help acting. Act without desire for the fruit, because attachment, not action, is what binds. Act for the holding together of the world, as Janaka acted, as Kṛṣṇa himself acts though he needs nothing. Equanimity of mind joined to energetic work in the world: that is the secret the title promises.
Supplies military and historical background; the Pandavas drew up the Vajra array.
Tilak: arrays were changed daily during the war.
Aparyāptam must mean 'unlimited, innumerable': Duryodhana is rallying confidently, not confessing weakness.
Argues from grammar and the epic's narrative that he was joyful, not frightened.
Sitting down shows lost desire to fight; the colophon names the Gita as Karma-Yoga, so it teaches action, not renunciation.
Turns the chapter colophon into a doctrinal argument against renunciation.
The epithet Parantapa carries no hidden argument; such names were chosen to fit the metre, so it means only the plain literal scorcher of foes.
On the closing epithet, openly breaking with commentators who read intent into names.
It describes the elders, abashed and bound to the Kauravas by money, who said man is the slave of wealth.
Reads gurūn as elders not preceptors, on the ground that only Drona taught martial arts.
The smile opens a teaching about worldly duty: since the Self is indestructible, Arjuna's anguish over killing is empty talk, and Karma-Yoga is the superior path.
On the duty the teaching will defend.
Lament means to mind or feel glad or sorry; the knower sees the dead and not-dead as one and the same.
Tilak; he refuses the fine debate over grieving the not-yet-dead.
The real never lapses and the unreal never gains true being; this is not the doctrine that an effect pre-exists in its cause.
Activity belongs to prakriti; the Lord as Time has already slain them, so Arjuna is only the nominal instrument.
Non-agency through prakriti plus the later devotional key of Time or Death as the real agent.
The verse describes the qualityless (nirguna) Self of the Upanishads, since such terms cannot fit a Self with attributes.
On Tilak's reading.
This is a reply to an assumed proposition, not the Gita's own teaching that the self is unborn.
Argued on the Samkhya basis that the body is non-permanent.
The verse marks the turn from Samkhya to the path of action, since renunciation alone cannot answer why Arjuna should fight his own caste's duty.
Reading the verse against two whole ways of living.
Sankhya means the Path of Renunciation and yoga means Karma-Yoga; the Gita henceforth supports lifelong disinterested action.
The two paths are independent; renunciation does not answer Arjuna.
The gain of this path is carried across lifetimes, so action not perfected in one life proves useful in later births and brings release.
Tilak's drawing-out of a cross-life consequence the others leave implicit.
For the enlightened brahmana the ritual portion of the Vedas is simply superfluous, useless as a well in a flood.
Superfluity of fruit only; the duty to sacrifice desirelessly remains.
The yoga is Equable Reason, an even balanced intellect, gained by ceasing to dwell on Vedic promises of particular fruits.
Tilak reads the verse as acquiring the steady reason that makes right, sinless action possible, not absorption into the absolute.
The verse rejects body-weakening fasting as a path to sense-mastery; enforced weakness does not reduce desire, so acquire knowledge of Brahman instead, with moderate food.
Cross-referencing Gita 6.16-17 and 3.6-7 on moderation.
The senses carry the mind in a wrong direction; effort merely to control them is not yet enough.
Highlights the direction of the harm.
It pictures a person who acts and takes part in worldly affairs, since the Gita nowhere asks the sage to become a mendicant.
Rejecting 'goes about begging' for charati; the same word earlier meant moving among sense-objects with senses controlled.
The Gita teaches two genuinely independent roads to release, renunciation and action, each created by the Lord and able to reach liberation on its own.
Tilak.
Brahman here means Prakriti, the world-substance sprung from the Imperishable Lord; reading it as the Veda cannot explain how the all-pervading Brahman is in the sacrifice.
Tilak, following the Vishishtadvaita line.
To read this as pretending to act so the ignorant stay ignorant is a perversion; universal welfare means enlightening people, and the wise stay active to give a living example of desireless action.
Against reading it as deception.
The Gita wants proper control, not forced destruction of natural tendencies; turn them to universal welfare, and note that pain and pleasure are two independent emotions.
Tilak on 'vyavasthita'.
The one word yoga across these verses means Karma-Yoga specifically, desireless action with balanced reason, the Bhagavata path given to Manu for the world's welfare.
Tilak: identifies the ancient yoga as Karma-Yoga, not general mysticism.
An act's binding force, not its outward nature, decides: unattached action giving up the fruit becomes dead 'akarma,' while sitting idle out of ignorance is really wrong-action.
Read as the science of the desireless karma-yogin, since total inaction is impossible.
Totally destroyed means the deed does not even bear heaven but leads to Release; and the heart of any sacrifice is the selfless 'this is not mine,' lived in every act for universal welfare.
On how high the dissolving reaches and what 'sacrifice' means.
Stillness never means stopping work; calm itself becomes the means for action, and the perfected sage works on for the world's welfare.
Read as a figure reversing cause and effect: first action wins calm, then calm serves action.
Renouncing sankalpa means renouncing the hope of fruit, not action itself; act desirelessly, and this is within every man's power.
Reading 'sannyasa of sankalpa' narrowly as karma-yoga.
The yogi throughout is the Karma-Yogi, and the verse plainly ranks action done in yoga above the knowledge-path that abandons action.
Reads jnani as the Samkhya renouncer; rejects the merely book-learned reading as doctrine-driven.
Arjuna asks something fresh here beyond repeating the old terms, including the principle pertaining to the body, which makes the coming answer easier to follow.
Flags the new item to keep in view.
The ever-yoked one is the Karma-Yogin, steeped in action joined to constant remembrance, who, thinking there is none other than Kṛṣṇa, becomes merged in him.
Tilak.
The 'former four' are not sages or Manus but the four cosmic emanations, Vāsudeva, Saṃkarṣaṇa, Pradyumna, and Aniruddha, all states of the one supreme Lord.
On the reading that the Gītā leans toward the Bhāgavata tradition.
The glories are asked for so that each one may be seen as the one all-pervading Supreme, never as separate gods.
For the seeker learning how to receive the chapter's coming list of glories.
The vision confirms in sight what was once said in words: these warriors are already ripe for death, so the one who kills them is only a nominal cause and not to blame.
Read as the working out of the warriors' own ripening.
The third clause is not a comparison at all but the real situation: the marker 'iva' appears only with father and friend, so the verse gives two analogies and then states plainly that you who love me should bear with me whom you love.
On the grammatical reading that rejects the amorous simile.
Doer of My work is set first so that freedom from enmity can never be misread as sitting idle; devotion means doing every act desirelessly and wholeheartedly, holding the Lord as the true doer.
Read against those who would take the path of devotion as actionless.
Homelessness means a mind not engrossed in home and family, since the Gita asks you to renounce only the desire for the fruit of action, never action itself.
On the reading that giving up the longing, not the dwelling, is what the whole teaching intends.
On the alternate division this means single-focused devotion to the Lord together with remaining in a chosen, solitary spot, with no liking for the gathering-places of ordinary people.
Read as devotion paired with deliberate solitude.
The verse only defines what knowledge is, namely inward detachment, and cannot be used to prove the Gita asks the knower to withdraw from the world.
For the question of whether the knower must then leave society.
The same teaching stands behind Samkhya: the clear, being religious and doing good, gain heaven, and the dull, doing wrong, fall, yet heaven won by clear action is not lasting and is not the highest goal. Release asks more than a clear nature; it asks the knowledge of what stands beyond the three constituents. But the Gita does not accept the Samkhya split of Nature from the conscious self, and recasts that state as realizing the single Self-formed Supreme, beyond both Nature and the conscious self, as the qualityless Brahman.
Read against the Samkhya background of the Karika and the Anugita.
It means only that desire-driven activity has ended, since he has seen that nature does everything; he keeps acting selflessly.
On the reading that no one can ever cease desireless action.
It opens onto the austerity the next verses take up, which is not to be narrowed to forest penance; austerity means sacrifice, study, and one's own proper work, the warrior's fighting or the merchant's trade.
Read as a bridge into the wide sense of austerity the following verses carry.
The study here means attending to and discharging one's own appointed duty rather than reciting the Veda, though the four marks of painless, true, likeable, and beneficial speech still stand.
On the reading that takes svādhyāya as fidelity to one's own task.
The failure is the narrowest rung of vision: counting only one's own wife and children as the whole world, with no sense yet of the one Self present in all beings that fuller knowledge reaches.
Read as the lowest step on an ascending ladder of widening vision.
The word means meditates on, so what is reckoned as worship is inward, reflective dwelling on the dialogue, not only its verbal repetition.
On the reading that takes adhyeshyate as inward meditation rather than recitation.
What Arjuna lost and regained was the memory of his duty; since the whole dialogue was spoken to move him to fight, his words can only mean he will now fight.
Read against those who claim the Gita advises abandoning active duty.
The Yoga he names is the yoga of action, the Gita's own subject, distinct from the wider power named in Lord of Yoga.
Read with each chapter's colophon, which calls the text a teaching of yoga.