World of Philosophy

Author(s): Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan

Page 78

This very powerful line brings us once more into the precognition of the Gita's idea of doing works without suffering its consequences. This relates to one of the core connotations of the Indian conception of Karma. Work as a facile English translation of karma misses this essential dimension of the Indian understanding. The notion of work in India is related from early teachings with subjective cosmic determinism, a psychic law of causation. This Upanishad is making an assertion here that Karma does not cleave to a man, ie. action does not leave any marks of consequence on the doer. And it makes this assertion without condition. It is not providing conditions under which we will suffer the consequences of our actions and conditions under which we will be free from such consequences.
Once again, many layers of meaning seem condensed in this fragment of a couplet. Firstly, there is something in us which is untouched by work or any action, -- that is the dimension of the Lord, the Infinite potential which remains Infinite within the finitude of becoming. This remains untouched, irrespective of how much of it appears or is mobilized in the becoming. Even if an infinity of it appears, an infinity remains unmanifest. We hear here once more the echo of the purnam verses of this Upanishad. This is the unborn dimension of being within us, an inexhaustible potency that each of us carries. The entire universe carries this at its center, and each entity in the universe carries it. This is the true "man" in each person, the nara. This dweller within (dehin) is the soul or psychic being, anataratman. Yet, in each individual, it is always coupled with the Lord who inhabits the universe at its center and in each nameable instance within it (Isha). This coupling of the "man" and the "Lord" is developed in later Indian literature as the divine couple nara-narayana. "Nara" literally means "man" and refers to the psychic sonship of each individual. "Narayana" literally means "the way of Man" and is the Lord seated in the heart of all things, the possessor of the unified and harmonized Will (Isha) which is The Way. This coupled psychic center of our existence is untouched by action, action does not cleave to this psychic essence of our being, this central Purusha. Therefore, even if Prakriti desires in our instrumental nature and interferes in the truth of the will of God, enters the crooked ways in the saying of the ancients, then too the Purusha in us is not touched. That inner essence is not subject to the law of Karma.
This is the primary understanding of the assertion of that verse, its unconditional understanding. Sri Aurobindo has a similar epigrammatic assertion at the head of his treatise of Yoga, The Synthesis of Yoga. Here he writes: "All life is yoga." It is an unconditional statement and like the assertion of the Isha Upanishad, it needs first to be understood unconditionally; only then can one understand it conditionally. In both cases, these two forms of understanding belong to Purusha and Prakriti. To the Purusha the assertions are unconditional, to Prakriti they are conditional.
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