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BHAGAVADGITA
121
them, preserving the excellence of both. Karma-yoga is such a mean. While it does not abandon activity, it preserves the spirit of renunciation. It commends a strenuous life, and yet gives no room for the play of selfish impulses. Thus it discards neither ideal, but by combining them refines, and ennobles both. That particular attitude of the soul which renunciation signifies still remains; only it ceases to look askance at action. In other words the Gītā teaching stands
of action, but for renunciation.in action. Arjuna who at the outset undertook to fight under the influence of one of these old ideals has, as we see him portrayed at the beginning of the work, come to be influenced by the other. He has resolved on a sudden to renounce the world and withdraw from the contest. But he forgets that the advocates of that ideal require, as a condition of adopting it, real detachment in the would-be disciple. Arjuna is but slenderly equipped for it, and yet he thinks of giving up the world. That he has not really risen above the common level in this respect is clear from the fact that his vairāgya does not spring from true enlightenment, but from narrowmindedness, viz. the love of kith and kin. He continues to make a distinction between his own people and others; and his excuse for inaction, as set forth in the beginning of the poem, leaves the impression that his interest even in his subjects, as distinguished from his kinsmen, is after all secondary. His detachment, or rather his disinclination to fight, is in a large measure due to the uncommon situation in which he finds himself somewhat suddenly. It is not, therefore, his considered view of the universe or of the life that he has to lead in it which prompts him to this indifference. It is the result of weakness-surrendering to the power of the moment. Arjuna's vairāgya is also in a subtle and unconscious manner due to the diffidence and fear that he might not after all win the battle, so that it is at bottom faint-heartedness (hệdaya-daurbalyam) as Sri Krşņa characterizes it and eventually rāga, not virāga.3 He is still worldlyminded, and it is on empirical, not on ultimate, grounds that he adopts an attitude of inaction. He fails to realize that 1 Cf. i. 31; ii. 6. 1 Cf. i. 33.
3 ii. 3.
