15Karma-Yoga
Swami Vivekananda, Karma-Yoga, eight lectures given in New York, 1896
Linked to 26 chapters: supports 7 · contradicts 7 · mechanism 8 · same claim 10 · pairing 8
Vivekananda gave these eight talks to small audiences in New York in the winter of 1895 and 1896, and they were printed from a stenographer's notes. They are the first sustained statement in English of an idea the Bhagavad Gita states in a verse: that a person has a right to work but no right to its results. Vivekananda's version starts from a plain fact. Work cannot be avoided, and it cannot be made to succeed. Every action mixes good with evil, every life is lived at the expense of other lives, and the total of happiness in the world, he argues, cannot be raised. What work can change is the worker. Actions leave impressions, impressions become character, and character becomes will. What binds a person is not the action but the attachment to its fruit, the sense of I and mine. So the instruction is to work incessantly and to give up the result, to help others knowing that the helper is the one helped, to do the duty of one's own station until the idea of duty itself falls away, and to arrive at a self-forgetting so complete that it is the same place the philosopher and the devotee reach by other roads. He calls that place freedom. The lectures do not hold still. The goal is knowledge in the first talk and freedom in the last; duty is the ladder in the fourth and a disease in the seventh; the world is perfect in the fifth and a whirlpool to escape in the seventh. He signals some of the reversals in advance and leaves the rest standing, which is part of why the book has been read continuously for a century and a quarter.
Karma and character
The Sanskrit karma comes from a root meaning to do. Technically it also means the effect of an action, but in karma-yoga, Vivekananda says, it means work, and the goal of work is not pleasure but knowledge. Pleasure ends. Pleasure and pain both teach, and pain often teaches more; the strongest characters he knows were made by poverty and blows rather than praise. Each experience leaves an impression, and the aggregate of impressions is character. Knowledge, he argues, is never acquired from outside. Newton did not find gravitation in the apple; he found it in his own mind, and the apple was the suggestion. Knowledge lies in the mind as fire lies in flint, and each blow that strikes fire from the soul is karma.
He then scales the idea down. The roar of the sea is millions of small waves, none of them audible alone, and a person's character shows in ordinary actions, not in great performances, since any fool can act the hero once. From character he goes to will. Every human work is a display of will, will comes from character, and character is made from work, which is why, he says, heredity cannot account for a Buddha born to a petty prince or a Jesus born to a carpenter; the will behind them was built over ages. It follows that nobody gets what they have not earned. A fool may buy every book in the world, but can read only those he deserves to. Since present work makes future being, the question becomes how to work, and he gives the Gita's answer: karma-yoga is working with skill, as a science. He lists the motives people work for, fame, money, power, heaven, a title for one's dead father, a fine tomb, a temple built as penance, and argues that work for its own sake is more effective as well as higher, because self-restraint stores power that selfish action spends. The coachman who holds four horses on a downhill road shows more power than the horses. The cannonball that flies far and falls has spent itself; the one stopped short by a wall gives off heat. The lecture ends on the ideal, a person who finds the intensest activity in the deepest silence, and on a concession: we start selfish and grow out of it slowly.
Each is great in his own place
The second lecture starts from the Sāṃkhya account of nature as three forces, sattva, rajas and tamas, equilibrium, activity and inertia, present in everyone in different proportions, and argues that morality and duty vary in the same way. What is moral in one country is immoral in the next. Faced with that, the ignorant say there is one road and all others are wrong; the wise see gradations of duty. His test case is the command to resist not evil. He calls it the highest moral ideal, and says that if everyone practised it society would dissolve in a day, and if everyone were told to practise it most people would feel themselves failures, which is worse, because self-hatred is the gate to degeneration, for nations as much as for individuals.
That is why, in the Gita's second chapter, Krishna calls the non-resisting Arjuna a hypocrite and a coward. The two extremes resemble each other, as light too dim and light too bright are both invisible. Non-resistance from inability is a sin; non-resistance from power is love. Buddha giving up a throne is renunciation; a beggar giving up nothing is self-deception. So resisting evil is a step towards the higher non-resistance, and inactivity is worse than wickedness. He tells of advising a dull, inert man to learn to lie, since lying would at least be doing something, and calls it a joke with a point: one must pass through activity to reach calm, and the calm before action is not the calm beyond it.
From this he argues that each person must pursue their own ideal and not another's. A child ordered to walk twenty miles dies on the road, or arrives half dead. The apple tree is not judged by the oak. He then sets out the four stages of Hindu life, reduced in later times to two, householder and monk, and insists neither is higher. Take the king off his throne and make him sweep the street, and put the scavenger on the throne, and see how each does. A long passage from the Mahānirvāṇa Tantra lays out the householder's duties: parents honoured as visible gods, the wife maintained, the son educated to sixteen and treated as an equal after twenty, the daughter educated with equal care, wealth sought without shame, since a householder who does not struggle to get it is immoral, and public works, wells, roads and rest-houses, counted as reaching the same goal as the greatest yogi's meditation. The lecture closes with a frame story. A king who examined every wandering monk on whether the monk or the householder was greater, and forced into marriage any who could not prove their answer, was answered by a sannyasin with two examples. A young monk garlanded by the most beautiful princess in the world threw the garland off, refused half a kingdom, threw it off again and walked away: that is the monk. A bird whose nest could not feed the travellers sheltering under it flew into their fire to give his body, and his wife and three nestlings followed so that his effort would not be wasted: that is the householder, whose life is a sacrifice for others. Each is great in his own place, and the duty of one is not the duty of the other.
The secret of work
The third lecture ranks help by how long it lasts. Help that removes a need for an hour is real; help that removes it for a year is greater; help that removes it forever is greatest, and only spiritual knowledge does that. Intellectual help comes next, physical help last, and he adds that filling a country with hospitals and asylums will not end misery while character stays the same. He then takes up the Gita's command to work incessantly and the problem it raises: all work mixes good and evil and both bind. The Gita's answer is non-attachment, and to explain what attachment is he introduces the saṃskāra. A wave rising in the lake of the mind leaves a mark and a tendency to return, and the sum of those marks is character. A person whose good tendencies are settled is like a tortoise whose head and feet will not come out even if the shell is broken. But above good tendency stands the desire for liberation, which requires giving up the bondage of good as well as evil. "A golden chain is as much a chain as an iron one." One thorn is used to draw out another and then both are thrown away.
How does one become unattached? By seeing what makes the impression. Of the hundreds of faces seen in a day only the loved one leaves a mark, though every face fell on the retina alike; it is attachment, not perception, that cuts deep. So work as a stranger and a sojourner in the land. Nature exists for the soul, not the soul for nature. Then the reframing on which the lecture turns: work as a master, not as a slave. Ninety-nine in a hundred work as slaves, and slaves cannot love; the mark of love is that it brings no painful reaction. A jealous lover who wants the beloved to sit and stand at his bidding is her slave and wants her as his, and that is not love. Krishna tells Arjuna that the universe would stop if he stopped working, and that he works because he loves the world. From this follows the posture of the giver: expect nothing, as from one's children. Work done for its own sake is worship, and as water cannot wet a lotus leaf, such work cannot bind the person who does it, who may live untouched in the heart of a crowded and sinful city.
The lecture ends with the story of the mongoose. After the Pāṇḍavas' great sacrifice a mongoose, half gold and half brown, rolled on the floor of the hall and declared the famous sacrifice no sacrifice at all. A starving Brahmin family, he said, had given a guest all four portions of their last barley flour, father, wife, son and daughter-in-law each in turn, and died that night; a few grains left on their floor had turned half his body to gold, and no sacrifice since, this one included, had turned the other half. Vivekananda's closing charge is to help anyone, even at the point of death, without asking questions, to be cheated a million times and never ask, and to be grateful to the people one helps. He adds, for the second time in the book, that the ideal householder's task is harder than the monk's.
What is duty?
Before doing a duty one must know that it is one's own, and the fourth lecture begins by showing that no definition of duty by the act survives. The Christian and the Hindu, facing a piece of beef, each fails his duty by doing what the other must do. The Thugs counted killing as duty. A man who shoots one person in the street is ashamed; the same man in a regiment who kills twenty is proud. Duty can be defined only by direction: whatever takes a person towards God is duty, and whatever takes them downward is not, with one maxim accepted everywhere, the Sanskrit rule that not injuring any living being is virtue and injuring is sin. He tells two stories from the Chicago fair, a well-dressed man pulling his turban from behind and another stammering out the question of why he dressed that way, to show how sympathy dries up beyond one's own clothes and language, and how national hatreds are fed by ignorance of other people's standards. The rule is to see others' duty through their own eyes; no one is the standard of the universe.
Do the duty of your birth, then of your position, and no one holds for long a post they are unfit for. Judge people by the manner and spirit of their duties, never by their nature. Then he warns that the idea will change: work done through duty leads to work done without any idea of duty, and there work becomes worship. Duty is seldom sweet; it runs smoothly only when love greases the wheels, and love shines only in freedom. The lecture's long story is of a young monk who, after years of practice in the forest, looked up in anger at two birds fighting above him and burned them to ash with a glance, and was pleased with his power. Begging in a town, he was told to wait by a housewife, thought contemptuously of her, and heard her say that here was neither crow nor crane. She was nursing a sick husband and knew no yoga; duty to her parents and then to her husband was the whole of her practice, and by it she had become illumined. She sent him to a butcher in the market, a man he took for a demon, who finished his business, bathed, fed his old parents and then delivered what the Mahābhārata calls the Vyādha Gītā: that no duty is ugly or impure, that his birth had placed him where he was, and that everything he knew had come through the unattached doing of the work in front of him. The only way to grow, Vivekananda concludes, is to do the duty near at hand. A footnote names the teacher who gave him the secret of work in five words: let the end and the means be one.
We help ourselves, not the world
The fifth lecture begins with an anatomy of religion. Philosophy is the essence, mythology illustrates it through lives and fables, and ritual gives it a concrete form that anyone can grasp, and ritual is karma. Symbols, he argues, are not conventions but natural growths: the cross was among the Aztecs and Phoenicians before Christianity, and the swastika in Babylon and Egypt before Buddhism, as language was never agreed upon by anyone yet is inseparable from thought. Words carry force; one word lands a blow on a nose, and a few gentle words straighten a weeping woman. So temples and rituals are not to be dismissed and their study belongs to karma-yoga.
Then the turn that names the lecture. Our duty to others is to help them, but the real beneficiary is the helper. The world does not need our help, and to say it does is close to blasphemy. As a boy he kept white mice in a box with wheels; they ran all day and got nowhere, and so with our helping the world, whose only gain is moral exercise. The world is neither good nor evil, like fire, which warms and burns and is neither; it is perfect in being perfectly fitted to its ends. We must still do good, because it is a privilege and the only way to become pure, and it is the giver who is blessed, not the receiver. He mocks the charity that gives five cents from a pedestal, and the fund of three million of which one million builds a hospital, one goes on balls and champagne, half of the third is stolen and the rest reaches the poor, and observes that one wind can flatten the buildings in five minutes. Then the story of the man who was given a ghost on condition of keeping it busy, and who, when the ghost had built a palace and cleared a forest and demanded more work or his life, was told by a sage to set it straightening a dog's curly tail. It straightened; the tail curled back; and after days the ghost sued for peace. The world is that tail, and people have been trying to straighten it for centuries. The moral is against fanaticism: the calm, level-headed worker does good; the fanatic can neither straighten the world nor become pure. He ends by refusing the distinction between hating the sin and loving the sinner, and offering to travel any distance to meet the person who can really make it.
Non-attachment is complete self-abnegation
The sixth lecture opens with action and reaction between minds. Instruments tuned alike sound together when one is struck, and thought, like light, may travel for centuries before it meets a mind that answers it, so the person who does evil draws in the evil already in the air and intensifies it, and the good person likewise. A karma once done cannot be stopped from bearing fruit. Then the entanglement: his own speaking, he notes, kills thousands of microbes, and whoever sees some evil in every good act and some good in every evil one has learned the secret of work. From this he draws a hard conclusion. No action is pure. We live by crowding out other lives, so perfection can never be reached by work, and a perfect life is a contradiction in terms, since life is struggle and the end of struggle would be the end of life.
If work cannot perfect the world, its effect is on the worker: it purifies, and it teaches forgetting of the self, and here the three yogas of knowledge, love and work converge. He sorts people into four kinds: the godly, whose self-abnegation is complete; the good, who help while it costs nothing; those who injure others for their own gain; and a poet's fourth kind who injure for injury's sake. Two Sanskrit words hold the scheme. Pravṛtti is revolving towards, heaping the world round the I; nivṛtti is revolving away, and it is where morality and religion begin and self-abnegation is its end, a state with no I in it, only Thou, reachable, he insists, without doctrine, prayer or God. The Jains, he says, reasoned that since living means killing the only exit is death, and he rejects the conclusion for the Gita's: be in the world and not of it. Hold yourself as a witness and go on working. His master's image is the nurse, who loves and fondles the baby as her own and, given notice, leaves with her bags and no pang. Nobody, he adds, depends on us. Not one beggar depends on our charity, and to think one can do good to another is a weakness.
The lecture's story is of Śuka, the son of Vyāsa, born perfect where his father and grandfathers had failed. Sent to King Janaka to be tested, he was ignored by the palace guards for three days, then given eight days of baths and luxury, and his face did not change in either. Janaka had him carry a brimful cup of milk seven times round a hall of music and dancing without spilling a drop, and sent him home: he already knew the truth. Vivekananda ends by saying that the yogas do not conflict, that only fools call work and philosophy different, and that no one is ever really taught by another; each teaches himself.
Freedom
The seventh lecture takes the third sense of karma, causation. Any word, act or thought that produces an effect is karma, and the law of karma is the law of cause and effect throughout the universe. He asks what a law is and answers, with the Nyāya logicians, that it is the mind's way of holding a series that repeats, so that strictly speaking law does not exist in nature and it is an error to say that gravitation exists in the earth. The universe is existence conditioned by space, time and causation, and law reaches no further. From this he denies free will: the will is known, therefore conditioned, therefore not free; but what became will came from freedom, rests in bondage and returns to freedom. The wish for heaven is a childish request for this world again, and real religion begins where this little universe ends. There are two ways out, the negative neti, neti, not this, not this, for rare and gigantic wills, and the positive way through the world, which is karma-yoga. A current falling into a hollow becomes a whirlpool that cries my father, my name, my fame for a while and then flows out free; each life is that whirlpool.
The practical core follows. Misery comes through attachment, not through work. A stranger's burnt photograph leaves one unmoved; one's own is a disaster, though both are copies of a single original. Non-attachment is in the mind, not in circumstances: a man who has given up houses, clothes and food in the desert may become entirely attached to his own body. There are two ways to give up attachment, the will alone for those without God, and the surrender of every fruit to the Lord for those with one, which he calls the easier. Then he attacks duty. The slave of duty has no time to pray or bathe, works at work and at home and drops in the street like a horse in harness. Husband and wife live together from attachment, generations accept it, and the acceptance is baptised with the name of duty, strewn with flowers and blessed with sacred texts. "There is no duty for you and me." Give what you have to the world, but not as a duty, and allow duty only the credit of checking brutality. The highest people, he ends, are unknown: the twenty-four Buddhas before the one we know, the man in a cave who offers the other arm to the animal that bit the first, whose five true thoughts cross oceans without his leaving. Buddhas and Christs are second-rate heroes beside them, and the highest cannot work at all, for in them there is no attachment.
The ideal of karma-yoga
The last lecture opens with the four paths, work, love, psychology and knowledge, which blend and converge on one goal, freedom. Everything strains towards it, particles flying apart, the earth from the sun, the moon from the earth, and the same impulse makes the saint pray and the robber rob; only the line of action differs, and the saint's freedom brings bliss where the robber's forges new bonds. Freedom is therefore the ground of morality, and unselfishness means infinite expansion, which frightens the person who wants to remain Mr So-and-so forever though his own ethics imply it. Selfish is immoral and unselfish is moral, with the details left to time and place, and the karma-yogi need believe in no doctrine and not even in God.
Can we do good to the world? Absolutely no, relatively yes. The sum of good is fixed; a wave cannot rise without a hollow. Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and Americans show the same distribution of misery, and reform only drives the ball from place to place, taking pain off the physical plane and putting it on the mental, like Dante's misers rolling gold uphill. Life implies death as a lamp's burning is its life; to live is to die every moment. Optimism and pessimism are two vantage points on one wave, the schoolboy's and the old man's. He attacks the millennium and equality together: Greek and Roman slaves flocked to Christianity because it promised no more slavery and plenty to eat, liberty, equality and fraternity are the modern form, and true equality would be total death, since inequality is the basis of creation and perfect balance was the primal chaos. He concedes in the next breath that the struggle to limit inequality is as necessary as inequality itself.
The world is a machine of wheels within wheels; put a hand in and you are caught. There are two exits, to give up all desire, or to plunge in, and the way out for most people is through the machine itself, standing inside it and learning the secret of work. The one motive left is the inborn love of freedom, and the best worker works for no motive at all. He closes on Buddha, the one prophet who claimed neither incarnation nor mission, refused to discuss God or the soul, said do good and be good, told his hearers to believe nothing because a manuscript said it or a nation believed it or a childhood taught it, and practised karma-yoga without any external motive. This, he says, was the greatest combination of heart and brain that ever existed, and the ideal of karma-yoga.
Since 1896
The book is the most read of Vivekananda's works and the one through which the Gita's teaching on action entered English. Its reading of the second chapter, action without claim on the fruit, became Gandhi's, who later gave the Gita the title of the yoga of non-attachment, and it is the source of the phrase, now ordinary, that one should work without attachment to results. Its psychology has aged well and badly at once. The account of habit, that repeated action lays down a tendency that later action follows, is close to what a later century measured; the account of thought travelling through the air like light, and of minds tuned to one another, is not. Several claims a reader should weigh are set out as facts. That the total of happiness in the world is fixed has been contradicted by the fall of famine and infant death since he spoke. The passage on why the American settlers built cities where the Indians had not, which attributes the difference to brain-power and inherited impressions, is a hereditarian argument that ignores conquest and disease. The householder's code he quotes places wives and daughters under a husband's and father's care, and the butcher's contentment with the station of his birth is offered as a resolution rather than a problem. The swastika he cites as an ancient and shared symbol has acquired a history he could not foresee. What has held up is the structure. The two conditions the lectures set, that work is unavoidable and that its results are not ours, still describe the situation of anyone whose work is judged by outcomes they do not control, and the instruction that follows, to work as a master and not a slave, is the one readers have kept.