The Yoga of Analysis

The second chapter answers Arjuna twice, and the two answers rest on incompatible foundations. The first is metaphysical. The self is not born and does not die; it is not cut, burnt, wetted or dried; it discards worn bodies as a person changes worn clothes. If that is so, grief for the men opposite is a category error, since what Arjuna thinks he would be destroying is not destructible and what is destructible was going to end anyway. The second is social. Arjuna is a warrior, this is a just fight that has come to him unsought, and to withdraw would earn a dishonour worse to a man of his standing than death.

Neither argument satisfies Arjuna and neither is meant to be the book's conclusion. The first proves too much, since it would equally excuse any killing. The second is an appeal to reputation, which the rest of the Gita will spend seventeen chapters undercutting. Read as a sequence they look like a teacher trying the available moves before making the one that matters.

That move arrives in the second half, and it changes the subject. Krishna introduces action performed with the mind fixed on the doing rather than on what the doing will yield. A person has a claim on the work and no claim at all on its fruit, and should not therefore make the fruit the motive, nor should they take refuge in not acting. This is the hinge of the whole book. It does not tell Arjuna what to do. It tells him what to want while doing it, and by doing so it dissolves the collision of duties that paralysed him in chapter one.

The last eighteen verses of chapter two answer a question Arjuna asks almost as an aside: what does such a person look like, how do they speak, sit and walk? The reply is one of the most quoted passages in Indian literature and is recited daily in many households, often by people who could not summarise the philosophy that produces it.

The description is negative more often than positive. The person of settled understanding has put away the desires that arise in the mind and is satisfied in the self by the self. They are not agitated in trouble and not eager in pleasure. They draw the senses back from their objects as a tortoise draws in its limbs. They are awake in what is night for others, and what keeps others awake is night to them. Desires enter such a person as rivers enter the sea, which is filled and stays still, and not as rivers enter a pool, which floods.

What makes the passage durable is that none of it describes an achievement anyone can display. There is no posture, no rank, no visible mark. The chapter has just spent forty verses arguing that action cannot be avoided, and it closes by insisting that the difference between one actor and another is entirely interior. The final verses trace the opposite course with the same care, from dwelling on objects to attachment, from attachment to desire, from desire to anger, from anger to confusion, and from confusion to the loss of everything, which is the clearest short account of how a mind comes apart that the book contains.