Life is unending responsibilities. Life is hard.
That isn’t a harsh teaching. It’s a liberating one. Other spiritualities have said it in other ways, and psychology has a plethora of variants, but the fact is life is hard. First off, we are mortal. Secondly, we are social. And finally, we are complicated individuals with sometimes conflicting needs.
Krishna reminds Arjuna of this in book three, and cautions him not to make life any harder than it has to be. The old saw about there always being some pain, but we do not have to contribute suffering into the deal. Without mortality, other people, and individuality there could be no love. No freedom. No hope.
If we feel life should be other than it is, we’re creating our own suffering. If we want to bend life or other people to our will, we’re authoring hell. If we simply roll over and feel victimized by it all, we’re making the biggest suffering yet: denying the soul and abandoning hope.
Life isn’t ONLY suffering. Love is real, too. Given these two truths, our actions matter. Our orientation makes a difference. We’re either helping or we’re not.
This is largely the teaching of book three. With several philosophically dense forays into psychology and a smattering of poetic stunners.
Karma, SPIRITUALITY, and Dharma: This Sacred Life
In book one, we are given a visceral telling of the suffering heart. We either take too much responsibility, in an enmeshed way, or deny our responsibility in a disengaged way. Either way, we set up an inner conflict and banish our better nature to the wilds. This causes a physical upset and churning. Eventually, the churning confuses our minds and leaves us with delusion. (Ragas (desire) leads to shoka (grief) ends in moha (deluded intellect), in which we confuse right and wrong. Then we are spiritually lost.
In Book Two, thankfully, our delusion recognizes itself and asks for help. And god smiles.
Then basic yoga philosophy/spirituality/psychology is laid down. (Only our most superficial layer is mind, under that a tangled and turbulent ocean of stories and habits, archetypes and beliefs. These are constantly framing our every thought and perception though we’re unaware of this happening. We don’t see what we’re doing but blame outsides. Under even that there is enlightened awareness, and under even that you have a soul. To navigate your way out of worldly suffering, then, you actually have to pause and about face. Rather than staying in the superficial, realize what you are doing to yourself. Go even further and realize you have a soul and this is all a spiritual question.)
Good. But what are we actually supposed to DO? The wave is coming! The world is on fire! I am sad and confused!
Ah, says the teacher. Philosophy by itself is nothing. What you really need is not so much philosophy as yoga. Yoga is philosophy in action. Specifically, skillful action. Not flailing, not giving in, but following some well designed according to human anatomy and perennially proven steps: swimming is one kick and alternate arm stroking, then the other, over and over again. There is a world of difference between pity and compassion. This is obvious if you compare self pity and self compassion. Yoga is the skillful move from futile pity to real and active compassion.
Now here we are in book three. Heart is beginning to swim along, one stroke at a time. Like the karate kid, waxing on and off, he’s doing the thing but can’t help asking: what does this have to do with actual fighting? When do I get to the real thing?
Transmission and Translation
Us modern western folk stumble across yoga and pick it up. Oh! What a pretty thing, we think, holding it like a shiny rock. I want this, we think.
“āchāryāt pādamādatte, pādam śişyah swamedhayā | pādam sabrahmachāribhyah, pādam kālakrameṇa ca”
Much of my mentorship with Michael Stone boiled down to talking about transmission and translation. Us modern yogis wouldn’t realize these are important things unless we were explicitly told so: after all, this pretty gee-gaw was right here in front of us. It’s human nature to want it for our own. It’s natural to assume, having read a word, that we understood the meaning. Some of us even learn Sanskrit, and then think for sure we know. Others of us ritualize forms to an acuteness, thinking we’re doing the same thing the ancients did.
Transmission is how spiritual teaching and philosophy are done. Yoga, Buddhism, and Vedanta all have a rich lexicon and lineage here, but transmission is part of all spiritualities and philosophies. It’s the socratic method. It’s students and teachers. It’s curricula, time, and pedagogy. It’s sacred texts but also the cultural practices surrounding the texts. It is exegesis of sacred texts, and a community of people who have more information and experience than you do. We can also see the idea of transmission in things like therapy, twelve step programs, and craft or apprenticeship.
Transmission suggests that there is a vastness behind the words and provides access to the vastness. There is an unspoken (but assumed) difference between karma kanda - the bare on the page things - and jñāna kanda, the unexplicit, subtle, symbolic and personally relevant meaning of things.
The synthesis of karma kanda and jñāna kanda unfolds in the context of teachers, having a personal practice that is guided or mentored by those teachers, and ongoing community and experiences that provide us with the good of sangha, mirrors, examples, and support. The unspoken reality of transmission is the fact that no ‘thing’ is actually being handed on at all: this process evokes direct personal insight in the student, rather than handing on a secret wisdom that has been unchanged for millennia and is available only through initiation. The understood consequence is an actual regard for handed on technologies, artifacts, symbols and cultural wealth.
All this is assumed in the context of transmission. But since we are reading in translation, not only across cultures but across time, these things need to be made explicit.
If then, we’re starting to play with transmission, we next have to realize we are dealing with translation. Often, in translation, literalness kills the meaning. We need to develop a dialectical approach, an exploratory and inquisitive open earring. But we also need to understand that translation works in two directions: to merely look for meaning quickly leads to spiritual consumerism and escapism (aka cultural appropriation) or unexamined false equivalency and reductive thought: saying something like the Gita is Vedanta’s ‘bible’, or that śāntiḥ means ‘inner peace’. Coming to understand, through translations, has to do with examining our own projections as it much as it does grasping something outside our current referents.
"Selfless Service”
In all the English translations of the Gita, book three is titled 'karma yoga’ or ‘selfless service’. This is where translation and transmission are important. It isn’t that this translation is wrong, but “selfless service” requires teaching, practice, and self realization to hold up. Without these, it is prone to valorizing meekness. As meekness and self abnegation have been used against people for centuries, this is a real danger.
Karma yoga means much more than selfless service.
Karma means action, and refers to the underlying or background (implicit, not explicit, transmitted not read) philosophy of sankhya. In Sankhya, ‘things’ are not fixed; existence itself is constant change. We too are constantly changing. Life is a verb. Hope is a verb. Suffering is a verb. Self is a verb. Love is a verb. As modern prophet Octavia Butler says, “god is change”.
Change means possibility. Change is not pure chaos. It isn’t moral relativity. Change unfolds according to natural laws. We can influence, but not control. We can participate, but we are not god and cannot save the world. We are not totally free, but we are never absolute victims.
How change unfolds evokes the gunas: rajas is frantic, tamas is thick and clingy or resistant, sattva is a goldilocks just right.
Karma means more than Sankhya-n change, though. Also referent here is the background vision of the Veda and the revelation of the Upanisads.
Both take the bare fact of life and render it sacred. They posit an understanding of religion or spirituality that is ultimate and personal. This is it. Bless. Both the Veda and the Upanisads suggest that a practice of seeing ordinary, often painful life as sacred transforms suffering and liberates the individual. But this requires effort. There are thousands of mantras and teachings here, and it takes a body ten thousand attempts, but the basic idea is that life can become a spiritual journey, the body mind itself can be seen as a temple, ordinary human spirit can overcome all conceivable obstacles.
Given all of that, karma does not mean self-abnegation or saccharine charity. We cannot ever fully believe nor live in any ethos that requires one’s own diminishment.
The vision of the Veda and the unfoldment of the Upanisads posit: every moment as sacred, the mundane as potentially holy, the smallest actions as being the only true path.
Dharma
If we look at the world, or into our hearts, we see: change is real and constant but so too are connections. Every action has consequences.
Trying to control or feeling helpless have consequences.
Doing your best also has consequences.
Dharma - in this context - means recognizing all of that as true and putting your feet on the ground, your shoulder to the dharma wheel, and prayer on your lips. A slight variance between being alive and living our lives: to love what is mortal, to engage with humanity, and to believe in oneself. Dharma also means recognizing we’ll have to keep doing this, over and over again. Every day. For the rest of our lives. It means renouncing fantasy while adhering to hope, realizing this isn’t a contradiction. Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water, goes the saying: after enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.
There is something to human mind (sankhya, the Veda, and the Upanishads all have their gems to give narrative and reveal what it is, but I’ll just say that it is) that balks against reality. We aren’t good at it. Dharma is, in a sense, highly unnatural.
Each of us has a life to live, a role to play, and we shimmer all the way into the galaxy. This is one of the ways I was taught dharma is: every individual has both rights and responsibilities/dharma to self, to society, and to the cosmos. These are not opposite pulls. There is only one gravity. None of that, if sincerely done, is a contradiction.
We heal ourselves and the world through small, intimate, personal actions. This can seem impossible or contradictory, but isn’t. Unfortunately it is the grasping or understanding this that stands in the way of experiencing it. This is one step at a time philosophy, or one day at a time or just for today understanding of our human capacities. It baffles, but it also works.
It works because the karmic truth of world suffering is that it happened one moment, one action, one person at a time. Trauma happens relationally, so healing must also be relational. Ideas are not the same as being. We can talk, hope, wish, pray, or debate what needs to be done endlessly, but everything begins with a single immediate step. We do not have to have all the answers or be perfect; we only have to be ourselves and answer the moment best we can.
Two Objections
In good practice, objections are vital. They are wonderful. They are food and safety and lead us somewhere. Let’s consider two big ones.
1) Living my own life and meeting my personal responsibilities isn’t enough (because of suffering in the world).
True. You will never save the world. But it is an underestimation of the world to think you could or should save it. There is no contradiction between your own fulfillment and contributing to the welfare of humanity. Not so long as you see your own fulfillment as inclusive of love.
2) “unending responsibilities” sounds exhausting! Productivity culture is killing us and is oppressive.
True. But conflating karmic responsibilities with some kind of marxist capitalism is the confusion here. Dehumanizing ourselves isn’t the point of karmic responsibilities. This objection isn’t a mistake or a problem; it gives us something to start working with. Everybody’s got some serious prior patterning and unexamined potentials as regards “responsibility”. Unraveling the pattern and realizing the potential - personally - is the way. This ends being an enrichment and truth discovery, rather than a goad over the head.
In the Beginning/In conclusion
Book Three suggests that we challenge the separation between spiritual life and ordinary life. Dharma isn’t something you have to seek; it’s who you already are and the life you have been given.
Our heartfelt and bodied responses to this teaching are not a problem; they are clues. Do you object with number one, “this isn’t enough!” or number two, “it’s all too much!”?
The very first thing Krishna says in this book is that understanding is hard, but doing one right thing is easy. He appears to be contrasting understanding (jñāna) and action (karma). That apparent contradiction will be taken up later. For now, I just say he isn’t contradicting: understanding is not separate from doing, it simply takes a long time and direct experience. Knowing comes from doing, not vice versa.
Two śastras come up in discussion:
Venerable Samu Sunim “The Dharma is intimate, immediate, spontaneous, and obvious”
and poet Mary Oliver’s
The Buddha’s Last Instruction
“Make of yourself a light,”
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal — a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire —
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.