Date: June 17, 2025
Part 7: On Disinterested Duty and Divine Obligation to Act
Continued from Part 6
In continuation of what was discussed in the previous part, it is important to reflect a little on why Sri Aurobindo cautions that it is a mistake to interpret the Gita from the standpoint of today’s mentality. Such a mentality forces the scripture to teach us the disinterested performance of duty as the highest and all-sufficient law.
“In human life some sort of a clash arises fairly often, as for instance between domestic duties and the call of the country or the cause, or between the claim of the country and the good of humanity or some larger religious or moral principle. An inner situation may even arise, as with the Buddha, in which all duties have to be abandoned, trampled on, flung aside in order to follow the call of the Divine within.
“I cannot think that the Gita would solve such an inner situation by sending Buddha back to his wife and father and the government of the Sakya State, or would direct a Ramakrishna to become a Pundit in a vernacular school and disinterestedly teach little boys their lessons, or bind down a Vivekananda to support his family and for that to follow dispassionately the law or medicine or journalism.
“The Gita does not teach the disinterested performance of duties but the following of the divine life, the abandonment of all dharmas, sarvadharmān, to take refuge in the Supreme alone, and the divine activity of a Buddha, a Ramakrishna, a Vivekananda is perfectly in consonance with this teaching.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, CWSA, Vol. 19, pp. 32-33
As an idea, duty rests upon social conceptions in practice, reminds Sri Aurobindo. Also, duty is a relative term and depends upon our relation to others.
We speak of a mother’s duty to nurture her child or a father’s duty to provide for his family. Or of “a lawyer’s duty to do his best for the client even if he knows him to be guilty and his defence to be a lie; a soldier’s to fight and shoot to order even if he kill his own kin and countrymen; a judge’s to send the guilty to prison and hang the murderer” (CWSA, Vol. 19, p. 34).
So long as one accepts these positions, one’s duty remains clear. It is more or less a practical matter for the individual when asked to discharge his or her duty in a disinterested manner. Even when one’s duty overrides the absolute religious or moral law, as long as an inner acceptance is there, there is no crisis.
“But what if the inner view is changed, if the lawyer is awakened to the absolute sinfulness of falsehood, the judge becomes convinced that capital punishment is a crime against humanity, the man called upon to the battlefield feels, like the conscientious objector of today or as a Tolstoy would feel, that in no circumstances is it permissible to take human life any more than to eat human flesh?
“It is obvious that here the moral law which is above all relative duties must prevail; and that law depends on no social relation or conception of duty but on the awakened inner perception of man, the moral being.”
~ ibid., pp. 34-35
This is where Sri Aurobindo helps us understand an important aspect of the Gita’s teaching of Karmayoga. He describes two different laws or rules of conduct which are valid on two different planes. The first is “the rule principally dependent on external status” and the second and higher one, is “independent of status and entirely dependent on the thought and conscience.”
“The Gita does not teach us to subordinate the higher plane to the lower; it does not ask the awakened moral consciousness to slay itself on the altar of duty as a sacrifice and victim to the law of the social status. It calls us higher and not lower; from the conflict of the two planes it bids us ascend to a supreme poise above the mainly practical, above the purely ethical, to the Brahmic consciousness.”
~ ibid., p. 35
The Gita emphasises that a liberated person, being free from the will of desire and knowing that the Divine is the lord of all his works. He undertakes all types of works but his works are burned up by the fire of knowledge.
His mind remains without any stain from action, calm, silent, unperturbed, clean and pure. Having abandoned all attachment to the fruits of his works, ever satisfied and without any kind of dependence, he continues to engage in action as per his nature.
He is a many-sided universal worker and works for the good of the world, for God in the world. With no personal hopes, he does not seize on things as his personal possessions. He has his heart and self under perfect control. He performs action as an instrument alone, and therefore, does not commit sin (correct meaning of sin is the misapplication of natural faculties, not any externally imposed moralistic notion).
For a yogin who is above the dualities, is equal in failure and success, has no envy, has his mind, heart and spirit firmly founded in self-knowledge, and is free from attachment, all works are dissolved and thus do not bind him.
The liberated man has the knowledge of entire unity of the Brahman. He knows that the Brahman is the manifest doer, the deed and the object of works. Brahman indeed is also the knower, the knowledge and the object of knowledge.
Brahman is the universal energy into which all the action is poured. The consecrated energy of the giving is also Brahman. And whatever is offered is only some form of the Brahman, and the giver of the offering is the Brahman himself in man.
The action, the work, the sacrifice is itself the Brahman in movement, in activity. And the goal to be reached by sacrifice is also Brahman. It is with this knowledge the liberated man engages in action as sacrifice.
“The Gita replaces the conception of social duty by a divine obligation. The subjection to external law gives place to a certain principle of inner self-determination of action proceeding by the soul’s freedom from the tangled law of works.
“And this, …the Brahmic consciousness, the soul’s freedom from works and the determination of works in the nature by the Lord within and above us,—is the kernel of the Gita’s teaching with regard to action.”
~ ibid., p. 35