The three kinds of action
By the direct knowledge 'I am Brahman alone,' one is freed from the whole bondage of action. And how many kinds of action are there? By the division into the coming, the stored, and the begun, they are of three kinds.
By the direct knowledge 'I alone am Brahman,' one is freed from the entire bondage of karma. How many kinds of karma are there? Three: āgāmi (coming), sañcita (stored), and prārabdha (begun).
- karma
The passage opens by saying knowledge frees one from the entire bondage of karma, then divides karma into three. What does sorting it into three prepare you to see?
- That knowledge ends the stored and the coming karma, while the begun karma is left to be lived out
- That all three kinds are destroyed at the same moment knowledge dawns
- That careful action, not knowledge, is what slowly wears the three kinds away
- That the three kinds must each be exhausted by being experienced in turn
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The three kinds of action
By the direct knowledge I am Brahman alone, one is freed from the whole bondage of action. Plainly said, and at the root: not freed by a better action, not by piling merit against demerit until the scales tip, but by knowing. The knowing reaches what no deed can reach, the very self that was thought to be a doer, and once that is seen rightly there is no doer left for action to bind.
But a careful student does not let the claim pass unexamined. If knowledge undoes the bondage of action, then what is action, that knowledge should undo it? And so the teaching sorts it into three. There is the action already stored, the long heap of past deeds lying ready as the seed of births without number. There is the action still coming, the fresh deeds the body of the knower goes on doing once knowing has dawned. And there is the action already begun, the deeds that brought this present body into the world and now deal out its days of pleasure and pain.
The reason for the three names is what follows them. They do not all meet the same end. The stored seed and the coming deed are burned in the knowing, the one because its ground, the sense of being a separate doer, is gone, the other because it never finds a doer to cling to, as water finds no hold on a lotus leaf. The begun action is different. It is the arrow already loosed from the bow. Knowing cannot call it back; it must fly to its mark. This body, having been started by it, lives out its measure, and the begun action is spent only in the living of it.
This is why liberation while living is no contradiction. The knower is free, the bondage cut at its root, and the body still walks its allotted course to the end. The freedom is now; the finishing of the begun is in time. To hold both at once, without making the body's continuance into a doubt about the freedom, is exactly what these three names are given to help the student see.
If your freedom would not wait for the body to be finished, how would you meet the pleasure and pain still loosed from deeds already begun?
In the commentaries
The freedom named here is not earned by acting but by knowing: the direct, immediate knowing that I am Brahman alone, and nothing this knowing does is a deed that binds. So the question that follows is not idle. If knowledge cuts the whole bondage of action, the student must see what action is, and the teaching answers by sorting it into three. Sancita is the heaped store of past deeds still waiting to ripen, the seed of countless births. Agami is the fresh deed the knower's body goes on doing after knowing has dawned. Prarabdha is the portion already loosed, the deeds that brought this very body forth and now hand it its pleasure and pain. The division matters because the three do not meet the same end at the rise of knowledge: two are burned, one is left to finish its course.