Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy - Osho - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 14. ACTION, INACTION AND NON-ACTION
and evening meals in Arjuna’s hands. It is for this reason that the GEETA runs into eighteen long
chapters. Time and again Krishna changes his offers. Now he persuades him to take up devotion,
and if Arjuna does not agree he persuades him to take up yoga. He gives him a wide range of
choices from yoga to knowledge to action to devotion. But in every case the total number of breads
remains seven. And it is towards the end of the GEETA that Arjuna comes to know the truth, that
in every case the number of breads is the same and Krishna is not going to budge from this fixed
number.
Now I come to the other part of the question. Shankara’s definition of action is a partisan’s definition.
He makes a choice that agrees with him. He is against action; he believes that action binds. He
says action is ignorance, it stems from ignorance. To attain to knowledge, to know the truth there
is no way but to renounce action. He interprets Krishna’s non action as renunciation of action. For
him, action belongs to the world of the doers, the worldly people, and a seeker has to run away from
the relationships that action entails. His emphasis is on renunciation of the world of action.
It is true that for one established in wisdom there is no action, he does not do a thing. But Shankara’s
interpretation is partial and wrong. There is no action for a wise man because he has ceased to be a
doer, an ego. Krishna’s emphasis is on the absence of the doer, not on the absence of action itself.
Shankara changes the emphasis from the non-doer to non-doing. And his emphasis on inaction is
wrong.
There are two sides of action one is the doer and the other the deed. Krishna wants to emphasize
that the doer should go and only doing remain. We cannot do away with action. Never mind the
doer, the ignorant worldly person – even God cannot do without action. This universe is his work,
his handicraft. Without God working on it this universe would not survive for a split second. How
does the universe keep going? The energy behind it keeps it going. So let alone the wise, even God
cannot give up action. Krishna’s whole emphasis is on the cessation of the doer. But an escapist
sannyasin, one who runs away from the world emphasizes inaction.
This is the reason Shankara has to declare the world to be maya, an illusion. He means to say that
the world is not real, not the work of God; it is an illusion, it does not really exist. It is difficult for
Shankara to accept the world as real. If all these suns and stars, mountains and rivers, trees and
flowers, animals and insects, are His handiwork then He is also a workman, and not a renunciate.
Then why ask human beings alone to take sannyas? And Shankara is a sannyasini he does not
want to get embroiled in the validity of action.
In fact, logic has its own difficulty. If you get hold of a particular line of argument, then you have
to pursue it to its logical end. And it has its corollaries which cannot be bypassed. Logic is a hard
taskmaster; once you get involved in it you have to follow it to its end. Having once accepted that
action is ignorance and bondage and that there is no action for a wise man, Shankara has no choice
but to declare the world an illusion, a dream. Because there is an immense world of action all around
us; it is action and action all down the road. So to escape it Shankara calls it maya, an appearance
which is not real. He says the world is magic, magical. It is like a magician sows a mango seed and
instantly it grows into a mango tree with branches and foliage. In fact it only appears to be there,
there is neither seed nor tree, it is just a hypnotic trick. But the irony is that even if the tree is a
magical phenomenon for the spectators, it is real work for the magician. It is through his concrete
action that the tree takes on an appearance. After all, hypnotizing the spectators is an act in itself.
Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy 268 Osho