Vinoba's talks
Vinoba Bhave · talks given to fellow prisoners at Dhule jail, 1932 · Paunar Ashram, Wardha · Gandhian Sarvodaya, raised on Varkari soil
This reading begins where the Gītā first met Vinoba: as a mother's request. The Gītā is not a treatise to be conquered but a mother who feeds each child what it can digest; even the poorest prisoner may sit at her table. Outward duty, svadharma, lies near at hand; what changes a life is vikarma, the inner work of motive and attention that ignites duty into desireless action. Practiced together, work and devotion ripen into the sthitaprajña, the person of steady wisdom whose portrait closes the second chapter and quietly governs the whole book. The seeker is asked for nothing exotic: do the work in front of you, and let the heart burn within it.
Vinoba Bhave, born in 1895 in coastal Maharashtra, abandoned his studies in 1916 to join Gandhi at Sabarmati, and Gandhi later chose him as the first individual satyāgrahī against British rule. Years earlier his mother, unable to follow scholarly Gītā lectures in Baroda, had asked him for a Gītā she could read; at Wardha in the winter of 1930 to 1931 he composed the Gītāī, the mother Gītā, in plain Marathi verse. It was published in July 1932 while he sat in Dhule jail as a political prisoner. There, from February to June of that year, he gave one Sunday talk on each of the Gītā's eighteen chapters to his fellow prisoners, and Sane Guruji took the talks down verbatim. The book that resulted, Gītā Pravachane, spread from Marathi into most of India's languages.
The talks answered a question Gandhi's movement was living out behind those same walls: how ordinary people, farmers, weavers, prisoners, are to make daily work a path to God. In this Vinoba stood consciously in the line of Jñāneśvar and the Varkari saints of his Maharashtra, who had already carried the Gītā into the village tongue and into the lives of the unlettered. After independence he carried the same reading onto the road: the Bhoodan movement, begun at Pochampally in 1951, walked from village to village asking landowners to give land to the poor, and in 1959 he founded the Brahma Vidya Mandir community at Paunar, where the sthitaprajña verses were daily food. He regarded the Gītāī itself as his message, and he died at Paunar in 1982.
Vinoba's endorsement of the 1975 Emergency, which he characterized as a time for discipline, drew sharp criticism from Jayaprakash Narayan and others, and how far it stains or stands apart from his Gītā teaching is still argued.
Whether he is best read as Gandhi's spiritual successor, as the press named him, or as an independent Gītā teacher in the Varkari devotional line is weighed differently by different students of his work.
Vinoba's move is to teach the Gītā as a mother teaches: chapter by chapter, in the language of the kitchen, to whoever is in the room, which in 1932 meant fellow prisoners at Dhule. Inside that frame he sets a triad. Karma is the outward duty of svadharma, lying near at hand and never to be abandoned for something grander. Vikarma is the inner action that must accompany it, the purifying of motive and the pouring of the whole heart into the work, the flame that ignites the gunpowder of duty. Where the two meet, action burns down into akarma, work that no longer binds, and the worker matures into the sthitaprajña of chapter two, even-minded in success and failure. He was answering the suspicion that scripture belongs to pundits and renouncers; he shows the Gītā belonging first to mothers, farmers, and prisoners.
The Gītā speaks so that the one who cannot read may still live it. Its heart is the closing portrait of the second chapter: the sthitaprajña, whose wisdom stands firm, who gathers in the senses as a tortoise gathers in its limbs and moves through gain and loss with an even mind. Everything else in the book teaches the way there. Take up the duty that lies before you, however plain. Pour the inner act of vikarma into it until self-interest burns away. Let devotion and work become one motion. The Lord does not call Arjuna out of the world, and a mother does not send her child away from the kitchen; she teaches him to work there, freely.