Srimad Bhagavad Gita: True Renunciation (Chapter 5)

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The fifth chapter of the Bhagavad-gita, the Yoga of True Renunciation, is essentially a bridge between Karma-yoga (dealt in Chapter 3 & 4) and the Yoga of Meditation (dealt in Chapter 6).

Sri Krana starts by explaining that the attainment of the goal can be achieved through both action as well as renunciation of action as each method is effective in accordance with the aptitude of the secker. He then proceeds to explain and demystify the very nature of renunciation. He urges us to be 'Realised in the world of action and to work with detachment. He goes on to explain that the Realised seeker is aware that it is not the body that acts, and thus ignorance of this fact prevents us from realising the Truth. He ends by illustrating the different methods of renunciation, hinting at meditation as it brings about the right state to achieve Liberation.

This chapter opens with a doubt raised by Arjuna. It is almost similar, but not the same as that which he asked in the beginning of the third chapter. At the end of Krsna's discourses in Gita-2nd chapter, the disturbed mind of Arjuna could not definitely come to a decision whether action had any place at all in the life of spiritual seeking. Here, in this chapter, the Pandava prince only asks which of the two, renunciation of action' or 'participation in action', is the nobler and the greater. The very construction of the question indicates how far Arjuna had come to be persuaded rightly by Krsna's advocacy for 'right action and conscious resistance to all positive evil'. The great Acarya had, to a large extent, hauled Arjuna out of his inward psychological disaster. He had regained a certain amount of equilibrium and had understood and accepted that action intelligently pursued, was the right way for progress and self-development.

Arjuna had very carefully listened to Krsna. In the last chapter no doubt Krsna had very efficiently and exhaustively argued at length and had finally established an irrevocable case for karma. But all along in the Lord's championing of the path of activity he had been giving indications that there is a greater state which is to be attained. These prescriptions such as 'come to feel satisfied in the Self alone, by the Self, or dedicate all actions to Me', or 'sit, all attention focused on Me that lie scattered all through Krsna's song, produce in Arjuna a type of vague doubt as to what they actually mean. To Partha, who is directly a child of the decadent Vedism which was prevalent at that time, there was much misunderstanding regarding the meaning of the term sannyasa.

To Arjuna, karma meant Vaidika ritualism such as yajnas, yagas, homas, and so on, and sannyasa meant renunciation of everything and a total retirement to a quiet Himalayan jungle and living therein in constant activity, a strange life of self-denial and perhaps, conscious self- persecution. When this was the type of misunderstanding in the mind of an educated, intelligent royal member of that time, we can easily imagine how much more pathetic must have been the general condition of desperate ignorance into which the Hindus of that age had sunk.