The Yoga of the Renunciation of Action

Arjuna begins the fifth chapter by asking Krishna to stop praising two things at once. You commend renouncing actions, he says, and you also commend disciplined action; tell me definitely which one is better. It is the complaint of someone trying to get a straight instruction out of a teacher who keeps widening the frame.

The reply concedes that both lead to the highest good and then declines the choice anyway: of the two, action performed with discipline is the better. The reason given is not that renunciation is wrong but that it is harder to reach without the other. Renunciation is difficult to attain without disciplined action, and the person who is disciplined in action comes to the goal before long.

What the chapter then does is dissolve the distinction it was asked to adjudicate. The true renouncer is defined as the one who neither hates nor craves, and such a person is free whether or not they have left their household. Someone who acts having given over their actions and abandoned attachment is untouched by wrongdoing as a lotus leaf is untouched by water. The body, the senses and the mind go on working, but the doer has stopped claiming the work.

The chapter also contains the image of the embodied self dwelling at ease in a city of nine gates, neither acting nor causing action, and the reminder that it is nature that acts throughout. Read alongside chapter three, this is the Gita's consistent position: the argument is never about whether to be busy or idle, but about whether the person doing the work believes themselves to be its owner.

Eighteen verses into the fifth chapter comes a line that has travelled further in modern India than most of the Gita. The wise, it says, look with an equal eye on a brahmin endowed with learning and good conduct, on a cow, on an elephant, and on a dog and one who eats the flesh of dogs.

Read in its immediate setting, the verse is epistemological before it is ethical. The chapter is arguing that someone who has seen what the self is sees the same self everywhere, and therefore cannot rank its bearers by the bodies they happen to inhabit. The list is deliberately graded from the top of the social order to a category placed outside it altogether, and then flattened in a single clause.

The verse was cited constantly in the anti-untouchability arguments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by reformers who wanted a scriptural warrant that their opponents would have to answer. It was also cited by their opponents, who read equal vision as a description of the liberated sage's inner state rather than as a rule for social arrangement, and who pointed out that the same book elsewhere upholds duty according to station.

Both readings have textual support, and the atlas is not in a position to resolve a dispute that has run for two centuries in the courts of a living tradition. What can be said plainly is that the verse exists, that it says what it says, and that its history of use is part of what it now means. A reader who meets it only as philosophy is missing half of it.