Gita Rahasya -Tilak 480

Srimad Bhagavadgita-Rahasya OR Karma-Yoga-Sastra -Bal Gangadhar Tilak

CHAPTER XIII THE PATH OF DEVOTION He (Ramadasa) has said, that ordinary people should learn to perform their own Actions, by seeing how the Siddhas, who have become perfect by realising the pure form of the Paramesvara, keep performing their own Actions, desirelessly, according to their own qualifications, and in order to " make many persons wise " ; and after repeating several times that "unless a man does something, nothing happens" , he has said as follows in the last diiaine, in order to establish a complete harmony between the power of Karma and the redeeming power of Devotion : Strength lies in activity i the strength will be his who is active I But in such a man there must be I the seat of the Blessed Lord II The same meaning is conveyed by the words: "mam anusmara yudhya ca " , i. e., "always remember me and fight"; or, by the statement at the end of the sixth chapter that, "even among the Karma-yogins, the Devotee is the most excellent"; and, there is also a statement in the eighteenth chapter that:   yatah pravrttir bhutanam yena sarvam idam tatam I svakarmana tam abhyarcya siddhim vindati manavah II that is, "man attains perfection (siddhi) by worshipping by Desire less Actions, proper to his status in life (and not by flowers, or by words merely) that Paramesvara, Who has created the whole of this world". Nay; the meaning of this stanza and even of the entire Gita, is that by performing Actions desirelessly, according to one 's own status in life, a man performs a sort of worship, devotion, or prayer of that Virata-formed Paramesvara. Who is inside all created beings. When the Gita asks a person to perform the worship of the Paramesvara by Actions proper to his status in life, it is not to be understood as saying that the nine kinds of Devotion, such as, "sravanam kirtanam visnoh", ( i. e., "saying or hearing the praise of the Lord Visnu" — Trans.) are not acceptable to it. But the Gita says, that (i) it is not proper to abandon Action as being inferior, and to remain steeped only in this nine-fold form of Devotion; (ii) that one must perform all the various Actions, which have befallen one, according to the injunctions of the Sastras, and that (iii) "these Actions should not be performed, as pertaining to oneself, but with the idea of the Paramesvara in the Mind, and with a mine-less (nirmama) frame of mind, believing that they are the Actions of the Paramesvara, and for the benefit of the world created by Him; so that, the Karma is not wasted, but on the other hand, these Actions amount to the service or worship of, or the Devotion to the Paramesvara : and instead of one's acquiring the sin or merit of the Action, one attains a blissful state".