Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/148

140 us then interpret the niyata karma of the Gita as the mitya-karma of the Vedic rule, its kartavya kavma or work that has to be done as the Aryan rule of social duty and let us take too its work done as a sacrifice to mean simply these Vedic sacrifices and this fixed social duty performed disinterestedly and without any personal object. This is how the Gita’s doctrine of desireless work is often interpreted. But it seems to me that the Gita’s teaching is not so crude and simple, not so local and temporal and narrow as all that. It is large, free, subtle and profound ; it is for all time and for all men, not for a particular age and country. Especially, it is always breaking frce from external forms, details, dogmatic notions and going back to principles and the great facts of our nature and our being. It is a work of large philesophic truth and spiritual practicality, not of con- strained religious and philosophical formulas and stereotyped dogmas.

The difficulty is this, how, our nature being what it is and desire the common principle of its action, is it possible to institute a really desireless action ? For what we call ordinarily disinterested action is not really desireless ; it is simply a replacement of certain smaller personal interests by other larger desires which have only the appearance of being impersonal, virtue, country, mankind. All action, moreover, as Krishna insists, is done by the gunas of Prakriti, by our nature ; in acting according to the Shastra we are still acting according to our nature,—even if this Shastraic action is not, as it usually is, a mere cover for our desires, pre- judices, passions, egoisms, our personal, national, sec- tarian vanities, sentiments and preferences; but even