Karma

Actions do not taint Me, nor do I have longing for the fruit of action. One who understands Me thus is not bound by actions.

You have the right to action alone, never to its fruits at any time. Let not the fruit of action be your motive, nor let attachment to inaction take hold in you.

Perform your prescribed duty; action is certainly superior to inaction. Even the maintenance of your body would not be possible through inaction.

Indeed, no one can remain even for a single moment without doing some action; everyone is driven helplessly to act by the qualities born of nature.

A person does not achieve freedom from action by not beginning actions, nor does one attain perfection simply by renunciation alone.

For those who do not renounce, the threefold fruit of action — the undesired, the desired, and the mixed — accrues after death; but for those who renounce, it accrues never.

And one who sees that actions are in every way performed by prakriti alone, and that the Self is thus truly a non-doer — that one truly sees.

Yet those acts do not bind Me, O Dhananjaya — for I remain as one who is indifferent, unattached to those actions.

As a blazing fire reduces kindling to ash, O Arjuna, so the fire of knowledge reduces all karma to ash.

Those human beings who always follow this teaching of Mine with faith and without envy — they too are released from the bondage of actions.

One endowed with discernment casts off both merit and demerit in this very life. Therefore, apply yourself to yoga — yoga is skill in action.

Its branches spread below and above, nourished by the qualities, with sense objects as their shoots. Below, its roots stretch down into the human world, bound to action.

Know rajas to be passion-natured, born of craving and clinging. O son of Kunti, it binds the embodied soul through attachment to action.

The purusha, dwelling within prakriti, experiences the qualities born of prakriti. Attachment to these qualities is the cause of its births in good and evil wombs.

Prakriti is said to be the cause in respect of the production of effects and their instruments; purusha is said to be the cause in respect of the experience of pleasure and pain.

The Blessed Lord said: The Supreme Imperishable is Brahman; the adhyatma is called one's own intrinsic being. The offering that generates the arising of beings is named karma.

Those established in sattva rise upward; those in rajas remain in the middle; and those in tamas, being of the lowest quality, sink downward.

The fruit of virtuous action is said to be sattvic — pure and untainted. The fruit of rajas is pain, and the fruit of tamas is ignorance.

By this you shall be freed from the bonds of action, from both auspicious and inauspicious fruits; with the self united in the yoga of renunciation, liberated, you shall come to Me.

Having reached the realms of the meritorious and dwelling there for countless ages, the one who has fallen from yoga is reborn into the home of the pure and the prosperous.