Text VIII
kriya sarirodbhavaheturadrta priyapriyau tau bhavatah suraginah dharmetarau tatra punah sarirakam punah kriya cakravadiryate bhavah.
Action is considered to be the cause for the manifested body. He who is extremely attached to the body performs both desirable and undesirable actions, which create dharma and adharma (that produce joy and sorrow), giving rise to another body by which more actions are performed. Thus, like a wheel, nonstop runs the procession of briths and deaths – samsara.
Rama is not going to mince words, because the disciple in front of him is fully matured. The teacher in Rama ruthlessly dissects the nature of work and convincingly points out that through work we can never reach the absolute state of inner poise, the Self. Work can only produce yet another lease in the world, with the body as the harvester of the experience in duality. Confrontation of the body, mind, and intellect with the world of objects, emotions, and thoughts is called work. All such physical, mental, and intellectual encounters leave tendencies, called vasanas, as their end result in the doer’s personality. These tendencies try to express and exhaust themselves in similar actions.
Those who are striving in the outer world, prompted by their own desire to fulfill their likes and dislikes, come to experience ephemeral moments of exciting pleasure and flashes of painful sorrow.
Righteous actions are those in which our selfishness is at a bare minimum; unrighteous actions are those prompted largely by blind selfishness. These good and bad action necessarily create moments of joy and regrettable moments of tearful sorrow. The good and bad karmas generate positive and negative tendencies (vasanas). In order to work them out of our system, we have to take an appropriate body-form and manifest ourselves in a conducive environment.
In short, the present is a product of the past, with past karmas providing the blueprint for the present. The future is never a mere continuum of the past; the past is remolded under the pressure of present activities and thoughts.
Thus, work can only guarantee continuation in the field of plurality in an endless array of lives, with different forms functioning in different environments. Actions create vasanas; vasnas mature and become impatient to express and exhaust themselves; and, for this, new forms and new environments may be needed. Work, however sacred and noble it may be, can only yield for us relatively good and bad experiences, never total liberation from the realm of time and space to reach the timeless Essence divine.
Text IX
ajnanamevasya hi mulakaranam tadhanamevatra vidhau vidhiyate vidyaiva tannasavidhau patiyasi na karma tajjam savirodhamiritam
The root cause for this samasara is ignorance; naturally, its destruction here is the sole remedy prescribed by scriptural injunction or teaching. Knowledge alone is efficient in destroying that ignorance, never karma (work); for work is said to be the product of ignorance and hence not opposed to it.
The nonapprehension of Reality creates the misapprehension in us that we are limited entities, helplessly panting to seek our fulfillment and total satisfaction from the world of plurality; hence our exhausting and fatiguing work – sweating labor whipped up by our desires, anxieties, and worries.
Apprehension of Reality, knowledge, alone can be the efficient antidote to remove our misapprehensions, ignorance. When the individual awakens to the higher state of Consciousness, the sense of individuality and its world of experience, physical, mental, and intellectual, roll away, just as a dream rolls away on awakening. Karma (work), however noble, cannot end this subjective ignorance, because all actions are undertaken by the individual in the context of his or her misapprehensions. In short, work is a product of ignorance, and it cannot destroy its own cause. Symptoms cannot destroy the disease :
Text X
najnanahanirna ca ragasanksayo bhavettatah karma sadosamudhavet tatah punah samsrtirapyavarita tasmadbudho jnanavicaravanbhavet.
English Meaning:
Work cannot end ignorance nor reduce one’s attachment to the fruits of action; on the other hand, from such karmas new, evil (binding) karmas arise, because of which samsara also becomes unavoidable. Therefore, a wise seeker should inquire into and contemplate upon the nature of Knowledge – Reality.
Karma cannot ever destroy spiritual ignorance. Here, ignorance may be considered as the product of ignorance, the ego the sense of limited individuality (the perceiver-feeler-thinker). The sense of doership cannot be totally eliminated from the field of work. In fact, no matter how alert we may be in our work can only fatten the sense of doership in us.
So long as the individual functions with a arrogant conviction of doership, he cannot stand divorced from the desire to enjoy the fruits of his actions. Doership and enjoyership go together, and this is called the ego. Both these misapprehensions cannot be ended through work. Work can only produce its reward, which is to open up for us fresh fields of undertaking and to provide the appropriate equipment to function in those fields. Work creates tendencies, vasanas, which seek their exhaustion through further work, for which, unavoidably, we will have to move from one field of work to another within the span of this life, and move from one body to another after death. Sir Rama therefore concludes with the idea that the wise seeker, after purifying his or her vasanas through selfless work, undertaken in a loving spirit of dedication, “must begin to contemplate upon the nature of Reality.” To analyze and to deeply and consistently ponder over the great statements such as “That thou art” is the way of knowledge, the path of jnana, which is to be diligently pursued.
