Translation by Winthrop Sargeant
Captures
happiness and unhappiness are the same, is ready for immortality.
if you will not undertake this righteous war, thereupon, having avoided your own duty and glory, you shall incur evil.
Holding pleasure and pain to be alike, likewise gain and loss, victory and defeat then engage in battle! Thus you shall not incur evil.
be free from those three qualities, Arjuna, indifferent towards the pairs of opposites, eternally fixed in truth, free from thoughts of acquisition and comfort, and possessed of the Self.
- Never should the fruits of action be your motive; never let there be attachment to inaction in you.
- When he leaves behind all desires emerging from the mind, Arjuna, and is contented in the Self by the Self, then he is said to be one whose wisdom is steady.
- He whose mind is not agitated in misfortune, whose desire for pleasures has disappeared, whose passion, fear, and anger have departed, and whose meditation is steady, is said to be a sage.
Sense objects turn away from the abstinent man, but the taste for them remains; but the taste also turns away from him who has seen the Supreme.
- For a man dwelling on the objects of the senses, an attachment to them is born; from attachment, desire is born; from desire, anger is born;
- Example could be taste (senses)?
- From anger arises delusion; from delusion, loss of the memory; from loss of the memory, destruction of discrimination; from destruction of discrimination one is lost.
There is no wisdom in him who is uncontrolled, and there is likewise no concentration in him who is uncontrolled, and in him who does not concentrate, there is no peace. How can there be happiness for him who is not peaceful?
The man who abandons all desires acts free from longing. Indifferent to possessions, free from egotism, he attains peace.
Not by abstention from actions does a man attain the state beyond karma, and not by renunciation alone does he approach perfection.
- But he who undertakes the control of the senses by the mind, Arjuna, and, without attachment, engages the organs of action in the yoga of action, is superior.
- He whose delight is only in the Self, whose satisfaction is in the Self, and who is content only in the Self; for him the need to act does not exist.
He has no purpose at all in action, or in non-action, and he has no need of any being for any purpose whatsoever.
While those who are unwise act from attachment to action, O Arjuna, so the wise should act without attachment, intending to maintain the welfare of the world.
- One should not unsettle the minds of the ignorant who are attached to action; the wise one should cause them to enjoy all actions, while himself performing actions in a disciplined manner.
Those deluded by the qualities of material nature are attached to the actions of the qualities. The perfect knower should not disturb the foolish men of incomplete knowledge.
- Passion and hatred are seated in the senses in relation to their objects. One should not come under the power of these two; they are indeed one's enemies.
- Passion is enemy?
As fire is obscured by smoke, and a mirror by dust, as the embryo is enveloped by the membrane, so the intellect is obscured by passion.
He who has abandoned all attachment to the fruits of action, always content, not dependent, even when performing action, does, in effect, nothing at all.
Content with whatever comes to him, transcending the dualities (i.e. pleasure, pain, etc.), free from envy, constant in mind whether in success or in failure, even though he acts, he is not bound.
The work of one who is free from attachment, who is liberated, whose thought is established in knowledge, who does work only as a sacrifice, is wholly dissolved.
sacrifice.
- What is sacrifice?
- The man who is ignorant, and does not have faith, who is of a doubting nature, is destroyed. Neither this world nor that beyond, not happiness, is for him who doubts.
He who is disciplined in yoga, having abandoned the fruit of action, attains steady peace; the undisciplined one, attached to fruit, is bound by actions prompted by desire.
- discipline, without thinking about the fruit
Renouncing all actions with the mind, the embodied one sits happily, as the ruler within the city of nine gates, not acting at all, nor causing action.
agency
Knowledge is enveloped by ignorance. By it (ignorance) people are deluded.
He whose self is unattached to external sensations, who finds happiness in the Self, whose Self is united with Brahman through yoga, reaches imperishable happiness.
Pleasures born of contact, indeed, are wombs (i.e. sources) of pain, since they have a beginning and an end (i.e. are not eternal), Arjuna. The wise man is not content with them.
To those ascetics who have cast aside desire and anger, whose thought is controlled, who are knowers of the Self, the bliss of Brahman exists everywhere.
- The sage whose highest aim is release; whose senses, mind and intellect are controlled; from whom desire, fear and anger have departed, is forever liberated.