February 13, 2025
karmajaṁ buddhiyuktᾱ hi phalaṁ tyaktvᾱ manīṣiṇaḥ
janmabandhavinirmuktᾱḥ padaṁ gacchanty anᾱmayaṁ (II-51)
II/51. The wise, possessed of knowledge, having abandoned
the fruits of their actions and being freed from the fetters of
birth, go to the place which is beyond all evil.
Swamiji's Commentary
In this and the last few verses has been compressed food for years of contemplation. Yoga is balanced state of mind; yoga is skill in action; yoga is renunciation of the fruits of action; yoga is uniting the buddhi with God. A one-sided approach lands a pseudo-yogi in a ditch. To justify his failure in the daily battle of life, he invents a fictitious line of demarcation between mundane life and divine life! Krishna’s promise is not of a distant paradise to be reached through vales of tears, but freedom from grief here and now.
The yogi must be discriminative and wise. He must be calm and clever. He must be desire-less and dexterous. He must be selfless and sensible. He must be a practical idealist! He must be a blend of the best of both the worlds! For it is the omniscient, omnipotent God whose will works through him; and even as every cell in our body shares the life of the whole body, the little finite man lives in tune with the infinite, happy and blissful here, now and forever.
The fetters were forged by ignorance. Buddhi yoga loosens them. The free yogi soars into the region of eternal light. Evil, pain, grief, delusion and all the negative fancies of his world-dreaming life disappear. To the enlightened, there is no evil; to even the smallest candle there is no darkness. The enlightened one is totally free from evil in himself; and he does not see evil in others – the ‘others’ are his own self! He is no longer bound by birth, even if he, to fulfill the Lord’s mission, is reborn here. He is never tainted by sin nor is he harassed by rain; they do not exist for him. He is a step higher than the yogi mentioned under verse sixteen.