Your Duty is to Do Duty Only

Divine Life Society Publication: Chapter 8 – A Study of The Bhagavadgita by Sri Swami Krishnananda

As we are living in a world of causes and effects which are separated from each other, the cause produces the effect; therefore, the effect is a future event that follows from the present context of the cause. We are bound by this causal relation in a whirl of space and time, and we cannot understand what duty for duty’s sake can be. You may go on scratching your head one thousand times to understand how it is possible for you to work only for the sake of work, expecting nothing from it. Your mind will be telling you again and again that you are a foolish person. Who will do work for no purpose? Purposeless action is meaningless action. The moment you introduce a purpose into it, somehow or other you bring into it the futurity of its purposiveness. You distinguish between the present and the future, and you are not in the place where you are working – you are in some other place which is yet to be – and your work does not become a cosmic participation; it becomes an expectation of what is not yet present.

This is the difficulty that we face in understanding this pithy statement that your duty is to do duty only: karmaṇy evā ’dhikāras te mā phaleṣu kadācana. Mā karmaphalahetur bhūr. Do not be attached to the fruit of your action. Mā te saṅgo 'stv akarmaṇi. Then you may say, “Why this problem? I don’t want to do anything at all, because if I do something you cause trouble to me by saying that ‘You are not working properly. You have some eye to the fruit’; and so I will do nothing.”

Attachment to the fruit of action and attachment to non-action are equally bad. Do not have an eye on what is to follow from your action and the fruit thereof, and do not sit quiet because you are afraid of being entangled in some mistake that you may commit in the performance of duty. Fear of mistake in the performance of duty is not to be regarded as inaction. It is also an action. Fear should not be the ground for your attitude toward anything. Right action is not what you do out of your own agency consciousness, but out of your expanded feeling of a sense of belonging to the cosmic whole. Tasmād asaktaḥ satataṁ kāryaṁ karma samācara, asakto hy ācaran karma param āpnoti pūruṣaḥ (Gita 3.19): Unattached, therefore, do your work.

The sense of being unattached is also to be understood properly. You are told again and again: be not attached. From what are you going to be detached? You are going to be detached from your concept of the nature of work itself. Work is a mental operation, basically; it is not a physical action. That has been told in the Third Chapter. The movement of the body cannot be regarded as work. The association of the mind to the work of the body is actually work. Therefore, participation in the cosmic process being the real nature of unselfish action, this has to be hammered into your mind again and again. Finally, you will realise that you cannot do anything worthwhile in this world without entertaining in yourself an element of God-consciousness. That is why until the Vishvarupa-darshan was shown in the Eleventh Chapter, Arjuna had doubts and more doubts, endlessly. The doubts ceased only when the Visvarupa was shown. Unless cosmic consciousness enters into you, you will never be able to understand what actually is happening to you.

So there is a gradational ascent of the teaching of the Gita right up to the Eleventh Chapter, which is the apotheosis of the teaching. Yogasaṁnyastakarmāṇaṁ jñānasaṁchinnasaṁśayam, ātmavantaṁ na karmāṇi nibadhnanti dhanaṁjaya (Gita 4.41). Yogasaṁnyastakarmāṇaṁ: having renounced attachment to the fruit of the action by the Yoga of the consciousness of universal participation. Yoga is the consciousness of your participation in the universal process. Having entertained this consciousness, having established yourself in this consciousness of your being only an instrument or a participant in the cosmic process, renounce any kind of isolation of your work from the fruit that may follow.

Excerpts from: Your Duty is to Do Duty Only - Chapter 8 – A Study of The Bhagavadgita by Sri Swami Krishnananda