Srimad Bhagavadgita-Rahasya OR Karma-Yoga-Sastra -Bal Gangadhar Tilak
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CHAPTER XV
The religion of the Gita, which is a combination of Spiritual Knowledge, Devotion, and Action, which is in all respects undauntable and comprehensive, and is further perfectly equable, that is, which does not maintain any distinction between classes, castes, countries, or any other distinction, but gives Release to everyone in the same measure, and at the same time shows proper forbrearance towards other religions, is thus seen to be the sweetest and immortal fruit of the tree of the Vedic Religion. In the Vedic Religion, higher importance was given in the beginning principally to the sacrifice of wealth or of animals, that is to say, principally to Action in the shape of ritual ; but, when the Knowledge expounded in the Upanisads taught later on that this ritualistic religion of the Srutis was inferior, Samkhya philosophy came into existence out of it. But as this Knowledge was unintelligible to ordinary people, and as it was specially inclined towards Abandonment of Action, it was not possible for ordinary people to be satisfied merely by the religion of the Upanisads, or by the unification of the Upanisads and the Samkhya philosophy in the Smrtis. Therefore, the Gita religion fuses the Knowledge of the Brahman contained in the Upanisads, which is cognoscible only to the Intelligence, with the ' king of mysticisms' (raja-guhya) of the worship of the Perceptible which is accessible to Love, and consistently with the ancient tradition of ritualistic religion, it proclaims to everybody, though nominally to Arjuna, that, "perform lifelong your several worldly duties according to your respective positions in life, desirelessly, for the universal good, with a Self -Identifying vision, and enthusiastically, and thereby perpetually worship 'the deity in the shape of the Paramatman (the Highest Atman), Which is Eternal, and Which uniformly pervades the Body of all created things as also the Cosmos ; because, therein lies your happiness in this world and in the next" ; and on that account, the mutual conflict between Action, Spiritual Knowledge (Jnana), and Love (Devotion) is done away with, and the single Gita religion, which preaches that the whole of one's life should be turned into a Sacrifice (Yajna), contains 'the essence of the entire Vedic religion.
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