32श्रीमद्भगवद्गीता शाङ्करभाष्यम् · The Gita with Shankara's Commentary

Śaṅkarācārya, c. 800 · Swami Gambhirananda, translator, Bhagavad Gītā with the Commentary of Śaṅkarācārya, Advaita Ashrama, 1984

Linked to 18 chapters: supports 3 · contradicts 6 · mechanism 4 · same claim 7 · pairing 3

The Bhagavad Gita is a conversation of seven hundred verses between a soldier who will not fight and the charioteer who tells him to. Around the year 800 a monk took those verses and argued, at five times their length, that the poem is not about fighting and not about duty but about knowing, and that its last word to Arjuna is to give up every duty he has. Shankara states the thesis in his third paragraph and never moves from it: the highest purpose of the Gita is liberation, which is the complete cessation of transmigration together with its causes, and that follows from steady adherence to knowledge of the Self, preceded by renunciation of all rites and duties. The difficulty in holding such a reading against such a text is obvious, and he does not hide it. He makes it the work of the commentary. He explains why he is writing at all in the same breath: the words, the meanings of words, the meanings of sentences and the arguments of the Gita have been expounded by many, and because the expositions are so numerous and so contradictory, people do not understand it. The recension he read carries the seven hundred verses everyone now reads, and his witness to the text is older than any manuscript that survives. The verses given below are in Sanskrit with plain renderings made from it; Gambhirananda's English, which follows the commentary word by word, is the one to set beside them.

The two dharmas

The commentary does not begin at the first verse. It begins with a page of cosmology whose only purpose is to install a distinction. Narayana, higher than the unmanifest, projects the world; wanting it to stand, he first creates Marici and the other progenitors and sets them to the dharma characterised by action, meaning the rites and duties the Vedas reveal; then he creates Sanaka, Sanandana and their kind, and sets them to the dharma characterised by renunciation, marked by knowledge and detachment. The Vedic dharma, Shankara writes, is of two kinds. Everything in the next seven hundred pages rests on that sentence.

The story continues in the way such stories do. Dharma was in time overpowered by its opposite, because desire rose in the minds of those who followed it and their power of discrimination decayed; Vishnu was born as Krishna, son of Devaki, for the protection of brahminhood and the steadying of the world; and, needing nothing for himself, he taught that same two-fold dharma to Arjuna, who had sunk into a sea of sorrow and delusion, on the calculation that a teaching adopted by a man of many good qualities will spread. Vyasa set it down in seven hundred verses. Then Shankara states the purpose, and the purpose is one half of the pair only. Liberation comes from adherence to knowledge of the Self, preceded by the renunciation of all rites and duties. He supports it from outside the poem, with a line from the Anugita that the same path suffices for reaching the state of Brahman, and from inside it, with the poem's own last instruction: abandon all rites and duties and take refuge in me alone.

He is careful, in the next sentence, not to throw away the other half. The dharma of action, laid on the castes and the stages of life and aimed at prosperity and heaven, does something else when it is performed as a dedication to God and without hankering after results: it purifies the internal organ, and in a man whose internal organ has been purified it becomes a cause even of liberation, by making him fit for steadfastness in knowledge. He points forward to two verses of the fifth chapter for this, and he will spend a great deal of the commentary defending the difference between a cause of fitness and a cause of liberation. It is the hinge on which his whole reading turns.

Of the man who wrote this, the commentary itself says almost nothing. The tradition puts him in a short line: Gaudapada, whose verses on the Mandukya Upanishad he treats as authoritative and whom he knows as his teacher's teacher, then Govinda, whom he salutes as his own. His dates are not settled and the disagreement is wide.

Where the commentary begins

On the first chapter of the Gita, Shankara writes nothing. Not a line on Duryodhana counting the armies, not a line on the conches, not a line on Arjuna's collapse; the notes a reader finds under those verses in a modern edition come from later hands. He is silent through the first nine verses of the second chapter as well. The commentary opens at the tenth, where Sanjaya says that Krishna, before answering, smiled.

The first thing Shankara does is diagnose. Everything from the second verse of the first chapter to Arjuna's "I shall not fight" is to be read, he says, as showing the origin of the defect that takes the form of sorrow and delusion, and sorrow and delusion are the source of the cycles of birth and death of every creature. Arjuna's grief came from a false belief, I belong to these, these belong to me, applied to a kingdom, to elders, to sons and to friends. Having been overwhelmed by it, he abandoned his own duty and reached for another man's, living on alms. That is what always happens, Shankara writes: when sorrow and delusion get hold of a mind, a man gives up his own work and takes up what is forbidden, and even when he does keep to his own work he does it out of hankering for a reward and full of the sense of himself. The wheel then turns without end. Their cessation comes from nothing whatever except knowledge of the Self, and that knowledge is preceded by the renunciation of all duties. It is for the sake of imparting it that the Lord begins to speak at the eleventh verse.

And then, before the eleventh verse, comes the argument that occupies most of the commentary's energy for the next four chapters. Shankara raises it himself, in the mouth of an opponent who is not invented. Some say: liberation certainly cannot be had from steady adherence to knowledge alone, standing on its own and needing nothing else. The well-settled conclusion of the whole Gita is that liberation comes from knowledge joined to the rites and duties the Vedas and the codes prescribe, the daily fire-offering and the rest. And they quote the poem against him: if you will not fight this righteous battle; your right is to action alone; therefore undertake action itself. The opponent is the author of a lost gloss on the Gita whom the tradition calls the Vṛttikāra, and whom Shankara's annotator identifies with Bodhāyana; his position was that neither knowledge nor action can liberate on its own and that the two must be combined.

The reply is not a reading of any one verse. It is a claim about what kind of thing a conviction is. In the verses from the eleventh to the thirtieth the Lord determines the nature of the Self, and the conviction that arises from them, that the Self is not an agent because the six changes beginning with birth are absent from it, is what the poem calls Sankhya. Before that conviction arises, a man reckons what to do on the assumption that he is different from the body and is an agent and an enjoyer, and that reckoning is what the poem calls yoga. The two are announced as two in the thirty-ninth verse of the second chapter and named as two at the opening of the third: for the Sankhyas the steadfastness of the yoga of knowledge, for the yogis the steadfastness of the yoga of action. Agent and non-agent, one and many: the two convictions contradict each other, and no person holds both.

Three further arguments follow from the shape of the dialogue rather than from doctrine, and they are the best of him. If the Lord had meant a combination, his separating the two at the opening of the third chapter would make no sense. If he had never taught that knowledge was higher than action, Arjuna's protest there — if you hold that wisdom is better than action, why do you push me to this horrible work — would be an accusation about something never said. And Arjuna's request in the next verse, tell me for certain one of these by which I may reach the highest good, would be as odd as a patient asking which of two things to take when the physician has prescribed food that is both sweet and soothing. Shankara adds a fourth: if a combination had been taught, the Lord would have answered the protest by correcting it, and instead he answered by naming two paths.

Then the verses themselves. The instruction begins with a rebuke.

Bhishma and Drona are not to be grieved for, Shankara says, on two grounds: they are of noble character, and in their real nature they are eternal. Arjuna is showing at once foolishness and learning, which contradict each other, like a madman. The word for the learned he takes apart: paṇḍā is the wisdom that concerns the Self, and those who have it are the paṇḍitas.

This verse draws out the longest piece of straight philosophy in the chapter, and it turns on an observation about ordinary speech. In every experience there are two awarenesses, Shankara says, an awareness of the thing and an awareness of its being real. The pot is real. The cloth is real. The elephant is real. The first term changes from case to case; the second does not. What the awareness does not change with respect to is real, and what it changes with respect to is unreal. Pot-awareness fails when the pot breaks; being-awareness does not fail, because it belongs to the adjective and not to the noun, and it goes on attaching itself elsewhere. He works through half a dozen objections to this, including the awkward case of the man who says this water exists while looking at a mirage, and answers that even there two things are held together of which one does not exist.

Shankara counts. Birth, existence, growth, change, decay and destruction are the six changes that anything material undergoes, and this one verse denies all six. Birthless denies the first, eternal the last, everlasting the decay, ancient the growth. The middle terms are not redundant, he insists; they are there because the two extremes alone would leave the middle unspoken. And when the Gita then repeats itself over several verses about the same thing, that is not carelessness either. The object is hard to catch, and so the Lord takes it up again and again and says it in other words, in the hope that the unmanifest Self may somehow come within the reach of the intellect of transmigrating people.

Here is the verse on which the whole commentary turns, and Shankara does not use it modestly. The question is rhetorical and its force is a denial, and the denial is not confined to killing. Killing is merely the example. The reason given, the immutability of the Self, holds for every action whatever, and so what the verse denies of the man who knows is action of every kind, done or caused to be done. From this it follows, and Shankara draws the inference in one sentence, that the actions the scriptures enjoin are prescribed for the unenlightened.

An objection arrives immediately, and it is a good one: is not enlightenment also enjoined on the ignorant? If it is, then the distinction collapses, since both knowledge and rites would be prescribed to the same person. His answer distinguishes two kinds of injunction by what is left to do afterwards. When a man learns the meaning of the injunction about the fire-offering he must still go and collect the accessories and perform it, thinking I am the agent, this is my duty. When a man learns the meaning of the injunction about the nature of the Self, from a sentence like never is this one born, nothing whatever remains to be done. Only an idea arises, and the idea is that he is not an agent and not an enjoyer. Whoever knows himself as an agent will always find that a duty follows; that man is eligible, and he is, by the poem's own words at the nineteenth verse, one of those who do not know.

The instruction then turns. Everything from the thirty-first verse to the thirty-eighth argues from Arjuna's caste and his reputation rather than from the Self, and Shankara is careful to say that this is not the real teaching but a generally accepted argument offered by the way. Even the famous instruction to fight he refuses to read as a command. Arjuna had already decided on the battle and had stopped only because sorrow overcame him, so all the Lord does is remove the obstruction to a duty already undertaken. The scripture called the Gita, Shankara writes, is intended for the eradication of sorrow and delusion, which are the causes of the cycle of birth and death; it is not intended to enjoin action.

The flood is the verse Shankara returns to more than any other. The well has a use, and so do the rites; the use is real, limited and superseded. He glosses the brahmin as a monk, and takes the whole verse to say that the entire result of everything the Vedas prescribe is contained in the result that comes to a man who has known the supreme goal. But he refuses to let the comparison be used to abolish the well. Before a man attains fitness for steadfastness in knowledge, he writes in the next breath, rites and duties, though their use is that of a pond or a well, have to be undertaken by the man who is fit for them.

The most quoted line in the Gita gets from Shankara a gloss of four words that changes the sentence: your right is to action alone, not to steadfastness in knowledge. He is not softening the verse. He is placing it. It is spoken to a man who is not yet eligible for anything else, and the reason the last clause is there at all is that such a man, told he may not have the fruit, will ask what the point of the work is.

Skill, on his reading, is the trick by which actions that bind by their very nature are made to give up their nature. Then Arjuna asks what a man of steady wisdom looks like, and the last eighteen verses of the chapter answer him. Shankara says at the start of them that the answer is addressed to two men at once: to one who took up steadfastness in the yoga of knowledge directly, having renounced rites from the beginning, and to one who arrived there through the path of action. And he states the rule that governs every such passage in every scripture: what are given as the characteristics of the man who has arrived are at the same time the disciplines of the man on the way, because the characteristics are the product of effort.

He is alert to a practical difficulty in the fifty-fifth verse and says so: a man who has given up every desire while still having a body to keep alive might, with nothing left to satisfy him, behave like a lunatic or a drunkard. The verse forestalls it with its second half, content in the Self by the Self. He is equally alert to the difference between abstinence and freedom. A sick man's organs also stop working and withdraw like a tortoise's limbs; what does not withdraw is the taste, and the taste goes only on seeing the Absolute.

This verse gives Shankara his sharpest formulation, and he states it without qualification: rites and duties are enjoined only in the state of ignorance, not in the state of enlightenment, because when knowledge dawns ignorance is wiped out like the dark of night after sunrise. Ignorance, taken for a valid means of knowledge, presents itself as actions and accessories and results, and that is what starts a man performing. Once a man understands that all of it is ignorance, like the night, nothing is left to start him.

The state of Brahman, Shankara glosses, is continuing in life in identity with Brahman after renouncing all actions. The chapter ends with a remark whose confidence is characteristic. If a man who reaches it only in his last years attains Brahman, what need is there to say anything about one who has stood in it his whole life, having espoused the monk's life from the student stage onward.

The two steadfastnesses

Arjuna's objection

The third chapter opens with the reader's own question, and Shankara says as much. Arjuna had been told that the conviction about reality is the direct cause of liberation, and then told to fight. He puts to Krishna what anyone would put.

Shankara reads the first of these as very nearly a rebuke, and the second as a complaint with an apology folded into it: the Lord speaks clearly enough, but to a dull man the utterance sounds like a contradiction, and you undertook to clear my confusion, so why do you increase it? Then he turns and spends nine pages on the combinationists. Their position is that the Gita teaches knowledge joined with action for men in every stage of life and denies liberation from knowledge alone. His first move is not to quote scripture at them but to catch them in their own book: they themselves concede, when they reach this chapter, that the stages of life are distinct, and conceding that is conceding the abandonment of the very lifelong rites they said could never be abandoned. He follows them through every retreat. Restrict the claim to householders, and it contradicts the introduction you wrote. Restrict it to the codes rather than the Vedas, and the householder alone has a mountain of painful work put on his head. He ends with an argument that owes nothing to texts: liberation is not a result produced by anything, so actions are of no use to a man who wants it.

This is his proof text and he treats it as decisive. Two steadfastnesses are named, and they are named for two different sets of people, each qualified for his own. If a combination had been meant, why tell his own friend and supplicant that the two belong separately to those who are separately fit? And if the Lord had secretly meant Arjuna to combine them while telling the world they were separate, he would be an unreliable teacher, one with favourites.

Shankara will not let this verse become a defence of ritual. Freedom from works, he says, is the state of abiding in one's own actionless Self, and this verse says that action is the means to it: actions wear away the sins that darken the mind, and a mind so cleaned produces knowledge, as a polished mirror produces a face. There is no reaching an end without its means. But a means is what it is. The steadfastness of action reaches the goal only by producing the steadfastness of knowledge; the steadfastness of knowledge reaches it on its own, waiting for nothing.

Here he inserts a word the verse does not contain and admits that he is inserting it. Unenlightened has to be supplied, he writes, and he defends the insertion from a later verse about the man who is not shaken by the strands. What follows is the sentence that governs the chapter: the yoga of action is meant only for the unenlightened, not for men of knowledge. Everything from here to the sixteenth verse — the wheel of sacrifice and rain and food, the man who eats without offering and is called a thief, the man who does not turn the wheel and lives in vain — he marks off with a summary that leaves no ambiguity: all of it concerns one who is qualified for action and does not know the Self.

Then let him at least incur some sin by not acting, says the objector. There is no such sin, Shankara answers, and no self-destruction either; the man has no dependence on any being from Brahma down to a blade of grass, so nothing can be got by his acting or lost by his not acting. And having said it he turns to Arjuna with the line that assigns the whole chapter: you are not established in that fullness which is like a flood all around.

The verse about Janaka is the combinationists' best evidence and Shankara handles it by refusing to decide. Either Janaka and Ashvapati had full realisation, in which case they went on acting from momentum and to keep the world from going astray; or they did not, in which case action purified them and they became established by stages. The verse cannot be made to prove that an enlightened man must act for his own sake, because on the first reading he did not act for his own sake and on the second he was not enlightened.

The sense of I, Shankara defines flatly, is identifying oneself with the aggregate of body and organs. The sentence he draws out of the twenty-eighth verse — the strands in the form of organs, not the Self, act on the strands in the form of objects — he will quote back a dozen times in the chapters that follow, as the exact content of what the knower thinks while his hands are moving.

One more thing is worth carrying away from the third chapter, because it is Shankara at his least doctrinal. On the verse that says even a wise man acts according to his own nature, he concedes the point and widens it: even a man of wisdom, so what is one to say of a fool. But then he sees the danger, states it himself, and answers it. If everyone simply follows his nature the scriptures have nothing to work on. The next verse supplies the answer: liking and loathing are fixed at the contact of every organ with every object, and that is exactly where effort applies. A man who will not come under them ceases to be led by his nature. They are, he says, like robbers who put obstacles on the road.

Action in inaction

The fourth chapter, on Shankara's telling, is about the steadfastness of knowledge itself, the thing the third chapter was a means to. Its opening verses give the teaching a lineage — the Lord to Vivasvan, Vivasvan to Manu, Manu to Ikshvaku, then the royal seers, and then it is lost — and Shankara says plainly what that genealogy is doing: it is praise.

The verse gives him both his sociology and his metaphysics in one line. The four orders are sorted by which strand predominates and which is secondary, and their duties follow: restraint and austerity for the first, courage for the second, husbandry and trade for the third, service for the fourth. He adds, in passing, that these four do not obtain in the other worlds, and that the writ of scripture runs only in the human one. Then the objection: if you made it, you incur what follows from making it, and you are neither eternally free nor eternally lord. The answer is the double standpoint in its barest form. From the standpoint of the appearance, the agent; from the highest standpoint, no agent at all, and therefore not subject to birth and death.

And here the third chapter's confidence is deliberately reversed. There, the difference between action and inaction was obvious in this world, which was the reason to send the unenlightened man to work. Here the same difference is called inscrutable. Shankara anticipates the reader who thinks action just means moving the body and inaction just means sitting still, and says: that is precisely the mistake.

The objection he stages against himself is the flat one. Action cannot become inaction, nor inaction action; how can anyone see what is not there? His answer is that the error is already in place before the verse arrives. What is in reality inaction appears to the ordinary observer as action, and what is action appears as inaction, and the verse corrects a standing misperception rather than asserting a contradiction. It is not, he adds, that inaction sits inside action like a plum in a bowl. The two errors run in opposite directions and both have everyday analogues: from a moving boat the still trees on the bank run backwards, and something moving far off looks fixed.

The second half of that is the ingenious part, and it is his own. Everyone sees how action gets laid on the actionless Self, producing the three thoughts I am the agent, this is my work, its result is mine. He points out that the same superimposition works in reverse. A man thinks: I shall stop, and then I shall be free of exertion and happy. There the ego has not gone anywhere; it has simply moved into the stillness. I am sitting quietly, without doing anything, and I am happy about it is a sentence with a doer in it.

He then reports a rival reading, and it is the only place where his patience visibly fails. The ritualists, he says, take inaction in action to mean that daily obligatory rites yield no result and so are called inaction figuratively, as a cow that gives no milk is called not a cow. He gives eight reasons against it. The one that lands is short. False perception is itself an obvious form of evil; how should it free a man from another evil; darkness does not become the remover of darkness. And he adds the accusation he thinks the reading implies: on that account the Lord's ambiguous sentence was designed to mislead people.

The word for fault, he insists, covers merit as well: to a man who wants liberation even righteousness is an evil, because it binds. Then a small point of grammar that he takes several paragraphs over, and which shows what kind of reader he is. Does bodily action mean action done by the body, or action done merely to keep the body alive? It must be the second, because the first would have the Lord saying that nothing done with the body ever incurs sin, which contradicts every rule there is.

Shankara refuses to read this verse as devotion. The words are not a compound, he says: it does not mean offering to Brahman, it means the ladle is Brahman. The knower sees the instrument with which he pours as Brahman, not as a thing existing separately from himself, the way a man sees the non-existence of silver in nacre. And that is why the action is destroyed without producing anything. A sacrifice is never found apart from the ideas of its parts — this god, this agent, this desired result — and when those go, the act goes with them, however much the body continues to move. Others say that the ladle stays a ladle and the idea of Brahman is put on it, as the idea of Vishnu is put on an image. He rejects it in a line: knowledge in the form of superimposing an idea does not liberate anybody.

His reason for the ranking is exact and is the whole of his position in one sentence. A sacrifice made of materials originates a result; knowledge taken as a sacrifice originates nothing. That is why it is greater. Liberation is not a thing produced, so the discipline that produces things cannot deliver it.

He will not let the image stand as an image. The fire of knowledge cannot burn actions as it burns wood; what it does is make them ineffective. Knowledge destroys ignorance, ignorance destroyed takes agency with it, and without agency action is impossible. Nor are all actions burnt. The one whose fruit has already begun to ripen, and which produced this present body, is exhausted only by being lived through. His annotator supplies the practical reason with some dryness: if the body fell away the moment knowledge arose, there would be no teachers.

The city of nine gates

Shankara opens the fifth chapter by building the contradiction himself. He stacks up seven quotations from the fourth — the fire of wisdom, the ladle that is Brahman, actions ending in knowledge — to establish that renunciation of all action has just been taught, and then sets beside them the last verse of that same chapter, which tells Arjuna to take up yoga, meaning the performance of actions. Between the two there is opposition, he writes, as between rest and motion, and one person cannot undertake them together. Nor has anyone said they may be done at different times. So one of the two has to be chosen, and Arjuna asks which.

The answer looks like a defeat for him and he does not pretend otherwise. His handling has two moves. First, neither of the two is said to cause liberation directly: both are called causes of the arising of knowledge, and that is what both bring the highest good amounts to. Second, the renunciation that loses the comparison is bare renunciation, giving up action without knowledge, which is a real and unpromising thing and not what he means by the word. He has the Lord say so in his own voice a few verses later: renunciation that rests on knowledge is what the poem is calling Sankhya, and that is yoga in the highest sense, while the Vedic yoga of action is called yoga figuratively, because it leads there.

Shankara runs the whole list and insists that every one of the participles is governed by the same denial — including sleeping and breathing, which nobody supposes he chose to do. The conclusion he draws is the one he has been driving at since the second chapter: such a man has competence only for the giving up of all actions, because he has seen that there are none. And the simile explains why that is not an act of will. A man who walked towards a mirage to drink does not, on learning there is no water, go there anyway to not drink.

Seven gates in the head for his own use and two below: Shankara counts them. The body is like a town with a single master, inhabited by the organs and the mind and the intellect as its citizens. Then the objection which shows how fine his ear is. Everybody lives in a body, monk or not; why does the verse bother to say it? Because only the man who knows can truly be said to be in one. A man who takes the body itself for himself can no more be in it than he can be in himself; it is the man who has seen that he is distinct who can say, as one says of a house, that he is inside. And the reason he is still inside is momentum: the actions that made this body have not finished playing out.

The field and its knower

The thirteenth chapter opens the last third of the poem, and Shankara tells the reader why it is where it is. At the end of the twelfth the Lord had described the man who is dear to him, the one who hates no creature, who is homeless and content with anything. What, Shankara asks, does that man know, such that practising those virtues makes him dear? The chapter answers by dividing everything in two.

He offers three derivations of kṣetra, field, and refuses to choose among them: because it is guarded against injury, because it wastes away, or because the results of actions ripen in it as a crop ripens in a field. The knower is defined not by what he is but by what he does: he makes the body, from head to foot, an object of knowledge, a separate thing, either spontaneously or by instruction.

The second half-verse provokes the longest argument anywhere in the commentary, because it appears to say that God is the being who suffers. If the Lord alone stands in every field as the one who enjoys, the objector says, then either God is a transmigrating creature, or else there is no transmigrating creature at all and the scriptures on bondage and release become useless. Both are absurd, and both contradict what anybody can see. Shankara's answer occupies a dozen pages and rests on a single distinction: the difference between knowledge and ignorance. The Lord in a field has not become a sufferer; a sufferer has been superimposed on him, in the way a man is superimposed on a stump seen in the dark. When that happens the qualities of the man do not enter the stump, and the qualities of the stump do not enter the man.

The objector will not let it go, and the exchange that follows is the liveliest writing in the book. Perhaps, he says, the two are unlike: stump and man are both objects, but body and Self are object and knower, and a knower might genuinely have the properties of what he knows. Then, Shankara answers, tell me why some of them attach and not others. Pleasure, pain, delusion and desire are supposed to be the Self's, and old age and death are not. There is no principle that sorts them, so they stand or fall together, and they fall. To whom, then, does ignorance belong? To the one who experiences it. In whom is it seen? The question is pointless: when the owner of the cattle is standing there, asking whose the cattle are means nothing. And when the objector says that he himself has the ignorance and would like to be rid of it, the reply is four words long: he to whom ignorance belongs will get rid of it.

Something more important than a debating victory comes out of the argument. Pressed at the end, the objector says: if action and agency are not in the Self by nature but laid on it by ignorance, then it follows that actions are for the ignorant to do and not the enlightened. Shankara agrees flatly. It is true, he says, that it comes to this. It is the thesis of the whole commentary, conceded as though it were a concession.

The objector's protest here deserves quoting for its theatre: after girding up his loins and announcing in a loud voice that he will speak of what is to be known, is it not out of place for the Lord to say that it is called neither being nor not-being? Shankara's answer is that the Upanishads never say what Brahman is, only what it is not, and that this is forced by the way words work. A word reaches its object through one of four routes: a class, an action, a quality, or a relation. Brahman is in no class, does nothing, has no qualities and, being one and without a second, stands in no relation. So it cannot be reached by a word, and the method of teaching it is to lend it attributes and then take them back. The verses that follow do exactly that, giving it hands and feet everywhere and then denying that it has organs at all.

What kind of joining? Not contact, since the knower has no parts; not inherence, since the two are not cause and effect. It is the laying of each on the other, and of the qualities of each on the other, for want of discrimination: a snake laid on a rope, silver laid on nacre. That laying-over, Shankara writes, is what is meant by false knowledge. The remedy is to draw the one out of the other as the soft stalk is drawn from a blade of munja grass, and to see the field as one sees an elephant conjured by a magician, a thing in a dream, a city in the clouds.

Here the objector makes his last stand, and Shankara lets him land a blow before answering. Who acts, then, and who is affected? If it is some embodied being other than the supreme Self, the second verse of the chapter was false. If there is nobody, name the agent, or else admit there is no supreme Self. And, the objector adds, the Upanishadic philosophy you are defending is hard to understand and hard to explain in every way, which is why the Vaisheshikas, the Sankhyas, the Jainas and the Buddhists have all abandoned it. The reply is one sentence borrowed from the fifth chapter: it is nature that acts. Nature, which is nothing but ignorance, acts and is affected; in the one supreme Self it does not happen at all. And from that, he says, it has been shown in many places that those who hold to this discrimination have no duty left to perform.

Shankara pauses to say why this comparison and not another. The sun is chosen because it does two jobs at once: it is one across everything it lights, and it is not soiled by anything it falls on.

The eye of knowledge is the realisation that comes of following the instruction of the scriptures and of teachers. The matrix of beings is what he has been calling ignorance. The meaning of the last words, he says, is that they do not take a body again.

Renunciation and relinquishment

The eighteenth chapter, Shankara says at its head, is begun in order to state by summary the message of the whole Gita and the entire purport of the Vedas, since the teaching of all the earlier chapters is met with again here. Arjuna asks for a distinction between two words.

Whichever of the two meanings is taken, Shankara observes, both come to giving up; the words do not name two different things as pot and cloth do. An objector catches at the second half: the daily obligatory rites are supposed to have no result, so speaking of giving up their result is like speaking of abandoning the son of a barren woman. Shankara's reply is one he has to defend all the way to the end of the chapter. The obligatory rites do have results. He proves it from the poem itself: the twelfth verse says the threefold fruit falls to those who do not relinquish and never to those who renounce, which would say nothing at all if the rites yielded nothing to begin with.

Then, before the classification starts, he draws a line around it. These alternatives concern only those who are qualified for action. They are not about the monks steadfast in knowledge, who have gone beyond the stages of life, and for a reason that is a point of psychology rather than doctrine: it is not possible that such a man's renunciation should come out of delusion or sorrow, and the classification that follows sorts men by exactly those motives. He does not perceive sorrows in the Self, so he does not give up work from fear of bodily trouble; he does not perceive actions in the Self, so he does not give up his duties out of confusion. He renounces in the conviction that action belongs to the organs and that he does nothing whatever. That man is outside the discussion entirely.

An objector notices that the third item does not belong to the same list as the first two. The first two are renunciations of action; the third is a renunciation of attachment while the action goes on. It is like saying three brahmins have arrived, two of them versed in the Vedas and the third a warrior. Shankara concedes the form of the complaint and says what the list is doing: it is praise by resemblance. The two things share the fact of giving something up, and by condemning the giving up of action when it comes from passion or darkness, the giving up of the fruit is being commended.

This is the verse the other side has always used against him, and he meets it twice. First on the words: one who holds a body means one who identifies himself with a body, and a man of discrimination has already been excluded from agency by the second chapter. Second on the function: the sentence is there to praise, as the twelfth chapter's line about peace following immediately on renunciation is there to praise, and a sentence written to commend the lesser thing cannot be used to abolish the greater. Nobody, he adds, can point to an exception to the rule laid down in the fifth chapter, that a man who has mentally given up all actions continues without doing or causing anything to be done.

He takes the negative half as evidence rather than consolation. Since results never accrue to those who renounce, and results do accrue to everyone else, the difference between the two classes is real, and it is the difference he has been asserting since the second chapter. He even pauses to take the word for fruit apart: because it is got through external means, and is an effect of ignorance, and is like a charm cast by a conjuror, and only appears to lie close to the Self, it is insubstantial, and being insubstantial it disappears.

The verses on the five factors of action then let him restate the position in the language of the whole poem. The body, the agent, the organs, the various movements and the presiding deities are what accomplish anything that is done; the man who sees the absolute Self as the agent does not see, and has a corrupted understanding, like a man with an eye disease who sees several moons, or a man in a palanquin who thinks he is the one moving. And of the man whose intellect is not stained, the poem says that even in killing he does not kill and is not bound. Is that not a contradiction, the objector says. No, Shankara answers, because the two halves are spoken from two places: from where a man says I am the slayer, the poem says even in killing; from the standpoint of the truth, it says he does not kill.

The word success is where he plants the discount, and he plants it in two words. Full success means the fitness for steadfastness in knowledge, which follows from the clearing away of the impurities of body and mind. Does that success come merely from doing your own work? No. It comes from worshipping, by means of that work, the one from whom creatures come.

There are two successes in the chapter, therefore, and the second is not the first. One is the fitness for knowledge that arises out of action; the other is the state of a man from whom duties have departed because he has found that his Self is the actionless Brahman. The word for it means being free of works, and it is reached, the verse says, by renunciation.

Here an objector raises the hardest question that can be put to him, and the answer is the best philosophy in the commentary. Knowledge takes the form of its object, he says; but the Self is nobody's object and has no form; so there can be no knowledge of it, and nothing for steadfastness to be steadfast in. Shankara does not defend the possibility of grasping the Self. He denies that anything has to be grasped. What has to be undertaken, he writes, is only the removal of the laying of name and form over Brahman, and no effort at all is needed for knowing Brahman, because it is self-evident. The intellect is distracted by the particular appearances that ignorance imagines, and so the thing that is nearest, plainest, easiest and identical with oneself comes to look hidden, difficult, remote and other. To a mind emptied of those appearances there is nothing more manifest, more familiar, more easily reached and closer than this. He adds, of those who say the Self cannot be comprehended and so steadfastness is impossible, that this is quite true for men who have not sat with a line of teachers and have not heard the Upanishads.

The devotion in these two verses he glosses as knowledge, the fourth and highest of the four kinds of worshipper the seventh chapter named. An objector asks, reasonably, how one can know by way of steadfastness, since knowing is instantaneous and steadfastness is a repetition. His answer defines the word he has been using for eighteen chapters. Steadfastness is what knowledge becomes when it continues as the settled conviction that one's own Self has been realised, and it comes with the renunciation of all actions built into it, since those actions arise from seeing distinctions among agents and instruments. Being what it is, it cannot coexist with duties, any more than a man can walk to the eastern sea and the western at once. Those who know the means of knowledge, he says, hold the difference between the two to be as wide as that between a mountain and a mustard seed.

Duties, he notes first, must here include their opposite, since what is intended is the giving up of every action whatever. Then, on the last verse of the teaching, he sets out the question the whole commentary has been an answer to, and states it as a question rather than a conclusion: in this scripture, has knowledge been established as the means to liberation, or action, or both? He gives the reason the doubt arises, quoting the verses on each side honestly. Then he answers. Knowledge of the Self alone is the cause of the highest good, because by removing the idea of difference it ends in liberation. Liberation is not something produced, so it cannot have action for its means; nothing eternal is made by action or by knowledge either. Knowledge is not therefore useless, because being the destroyer of ignorance it ends in liberation as a lamp ends in the sight of a rope where a snake had been. And the two cannot be combined, because knowledge removes ignorance and is opposed to it, and darkness cannot be the dispeller of darkness.

He then does something that is worth pausing on. He gathers, in a single paragraph, every verse in the poem on which his reading has stood: neither killer nor killed; how should the man who knows kill; the two steadfastnesses; the ignorant are attached to work; the strands act among the strands; the man of self-control who has given up all actions mentally; the knower who thinks he does nothing; the sage for whom inaction becomes the means once he has climbed; the man of knowledge who is the Self itself; the ritualists who go and return. It is a list, offered as proof, and it is the closest thing in Indian philosophy to a citation of the record.

What follows is the longest and driest passage in the book, a defence against the one objection that could still undo him: that omitting the obligatory rites incurs sin, so liberation cannot come from knowledge. The ritualist's answer had been that liberation is eternal and needs no cause, and that by doing the daily rites and avoiding the forbidden ones a man simply runs out of karma. Shankara pulls it apart on its own ground, argues that the daily rites must have unseen results of their own, that the pain of performing them cannot be the ripening of old sin, and that merits not yet ripened have as much claim to persist as sins not yet ripened, so that on the ritualist's account nobody is ever free. His conclusion is one sentence: knowledge alone is the means to the highest good.

The teaching ends and the Lord asks whether it has been heard. Arjuna answers that his delusion is gone and his memory regained. Shankara takes the exchange as the poem's own account of what it has accomplished: from understanding the whole scripture the fruit derived is this much alone, the destruction of delusion born of ignorance and the regaining of the memory of the Self. He glosses Arjuna's last words, I shall do as you say, with a sentence that would end the Gita very differently from the way most readers end it. By your grace I have achieved the goal of life; the idea is that there is no duty, as such, for me.

Since the ninth century

Three things about the commentary held, and they are not the things Shankara was arguing for. The seven hundred verses he read became the seven hundred everybody reads; older manuscripts with forty-five more have not survived his authority, and his witness to the text is earlier than any copy that has. The Gita became one of the three foundations of Vedanta, along with the Upanishads and the Brahma Sutras, largely because he treated it as one, with the result that no later school could claim a hearing until it had written its own commentary on the same three books. And the form he used became the form: the prefatory statement of purpose, the word-by-word gloss, the objector given his best sentence before being answered.

What did not hold was the argument itself. Rāmānuja, in the eleventh century, wrote a commentary on the same verses in which the individual self is not an appearance of God but a real and permanently distinct mode of him, so that knowing the truth does not dissolve the one who knows it, and there is nothing for action to be cancelled by. Devotion, on his reading, is the means and not a lower rung, and the poem's last instruction is about giving up the sense that the works are one's own rather than giving up the works. Madhva, in the thirteenth century, went further and made the difference between the soul and God permanent and real in both directions. Vallabha, a follower of Nimbārka, Vijñānabhikṣu, and the Marathi poets Jñāneśvar and Tukārām each added their own, and the position Shankara had spent four chapters demolishing, that liberation needs knowledge and works together, was held again by people who had read every word of his refutation.

The sharpest reversal came much later and came from readers with a political interest in the answer. Bal Gangadhar Tilak wrote his commentary in a prison cell in Mandalay in 1910 and 1911 and published it in 1915, and its argument is that the Gita is a book about doing things, that its final counsel is work and not withdrawal, and that the monastic reading had been imposed on a text whose own conclusion is the opposite. Gandhi translated the poem into Gujarati in 1929 under a title made from the Gita's own word for it, non-attachment, and then turned the word to the reverse purpose: the point is not that the enlightened man has no duties but that a man with duties can do them without wanting anything from them, and the test of any reading is what happens when somebody tries to live by it.

The part of the commentary that the modern readers set aside without argument is the part Shankara thought least controversial. The duties he distributes in the fourth chapter and again in the eighteenth are distributed by birth; the four orders are sorted by which strand of nature predominates in them; service is named as the only duty of the fourth, and he remarks in passing that its members have no right to study the Vedas. He is not defending these arrangements, which is worse: he is assuming them, as the given furniture of a world in which the interesting question is who may renounce. Gandhi read the fourth chapter's verse on the four orders as a statement about aptitude rather than descent. It is possible to take the whole of Shankara's argument about knowledge and action and leave that behind, and most readers now do, which is a way of reading he would not have recognised and which his own method makes available: he was, after all, the man who insisted that a sentence in a scripture must be read for what it is doing, and that what it is doing is not always what it says.