Karma Yoga by Swami Vivekananda

Excerpts from the book

 

The word Karma is derived from the Sanskrit Kri, to do; all action is Karma.

The goal of mankind is knowledge. That is the one ideal placed before us by Eastern philosophy.

Now this knowledge, again, is inherent in man. No knowledge comes from outside; it is all inside.

The man from whom this veil is being lifted is the more knowing man, the man upon whom it lies thick is ignorant, and the man from whom it has entirely gone is all-knowing, omniscient. There have been omniscient men, and, I believe, there will be yet; and that there will be myriads of them in the cycles to come. Like fire in a piece of flint, knowledge exists in the mind; suggestion is the friction which brings it out. So with all our feelings and action — our tears and our smiles, our joys and our griefs, our weeping and our laughter, our curses and our blessings, our praises and our blames — every one of these we may find, if we calmly study our own selves, to have been brought out from within ourselves by so many blows. The result is what we are. All these blows taken together are called Karma — work, action. Every mental and physical blow that is given to the soul, by which, as it were, fire is struck from it, and by which its own power and knowledge are discovered, is Karma, this word being used in its widest sense. Thus we are all doing Karma all the time. I am talking to you: that is Karma. You are listening: that is Karma. We breathe: that is Karma. We walk: Karma. Everything we do, physical or mental, is Karma, and it leaves its marks on us.

Great occasions rouse even the lowest of human beings to some kind of greatness, but he alone is the really great man whose character is great always, the same wherever he be.

No one can get anything unless he earns it. This is an eternal law.

Our Karma determines what we deserve and what we can assimilate. We are responsible for what we are; and whatever we wish ourselves to be, we have the power to make ourselves. If what we are now has been the result of our own past actions, it certainly follows that whatever we wish to be in future can be produced by our present actions; so we have to know how to act.

Unselfishness is more paying, only people have not the patience to practice it.

Love, truth, and unselfishness are not merely moral figures of speech, but they form our highest ideal, because in them lies such a manifestation of power.

We have not the patience to look beyond, and thus become immoral and wicked. This is our weakness, our powerlessness.

The ideal man is he who, in the midst of the greatest silence and solitude, finds the intensest activity, and in the midst of the intensest activity finds the silence and solitude of the desert. He has learnt the secret of restraint, he has controlled himself. He goes through the streets of a big city with all its traffic, and his mind is as calm as if he were in a cave, where not a sound could reach him; and he is intensely working all the time. That is the ideal of Karma-Yoga, and if you have attained to that you have really learnt the secret of work.

A man must be active in order to pass through activity to perfect calmness.

Inactivity should be avoided by all means. Activity always means resistance. Resist all evils, mental and physical; and when you have succeeded in resisting, then will calmness come.

Plunge into the world, and then, after a time, when you have suffered and enjoyed all that is in it, will renunciation come; then will calmness come.

I do not know if I have seen twenty persons in my life who are really calm and non-resisting, and I have traveled over half the world.

All the men and women, in any society, are not of the same mind, capacity, or of the same power to do things; they must have different ideals, and we have no right to sneer at any ideal.

The apple tree should not be judged by the standard of the oak, nor the oak by that of the apple. To judge the apple tree you must take the apple standard, and for the oak, its own standard.

Unity in variety is the plan of creation. However men and women may vary individually, there is unity in the background. The different individual characters and classes of men and women are natural variations in creation.

Fear is a sign of weakness.

Each is great in his own place.

If you want to renounce the world, be like that young man to whom the most beautiful woman and a kingdom were as nothing. If you want to be a householder, hold your life a sacrifice for the welfare of others; and if you choose the life of renunciation, do not even look at beauty and money and power. Each is great in his own place, but the duty of the one is not the duty of the other.

Spiritual knowledge is the only thing that can destroy our miseries for ever; any other knowledge satisfies wants only for a time.

A spiritually strong and sound man will be strong in every other respect, if he so wishes.

Next to spiritual comes intellectual help. The gift of knowledge is a far higher gift than that of food and clothes; it is even higher than giving life to a man, because the real life of man consists of knowledge.

Ignorance is death, knowledge is life.

Let men have light, let them be pure and spiritually strong and educated, then alone will misery cease in the world, not before.

Good and evil will both have their results, will produce their Karma. Good action will entail upon us good effect; bad action, bad. But good and bad are both bondages of the soul.

By this continuous reflex of good thoughts, good impressions moving over the surface of the mind, the tendency for doing good becomes strong, and as the result we feel able to control the Indriyas (the sense-organs, the nerve-centres).

Liberation means entire freedom — freedom from the bondage of good, as well as from the bondage of evil.

The whole gist of this teaching is that you should work like a master and not as a slave; work incessantly, but do not do slave's work.

Work through freedom! Work through love!

The word "love" is very difficult to understand; love never comes until there is freedom. There is no true love possible in the slave.

Every act of love brings happiness; there is no act of love which does not bring peace and blessedness as its reaction.

Real existence, real knowledge, and real love are eternally connected with one another, the three in one: where one of them is, the others also must be; they are the three aspects of the One without a second — the Existence - Knowledge - Bliss.

When you have succeeded in loving your husband, your wife, your children, the whole world, the universe, in such a manner that there is no reaction of pain or jealousy, no selfish feeling, then you are in a fit state to be unattached.

Attachment comes only where we expect a return. 

If working like slaves results in selfishness and attachment, working as master of our own mind gives rise to the bliss of non-attachment.

The ordinary idea of duty everywhere is that every good man follows the dictates of his conscience.

Any action that makes us go Godward is a good action, and is our duty; any action that makes us go downward is evil, and is not our duty.

it must be particularly remembered that the same ideals and activities do not prevail in all societies and countries; our ignorance of this is the main cause of much of the hatred of one nation towards another.

We should always try to see the duty of others through their own eyes, and never judge the customs of other peoples by our own standard.

The whole organisation of society has thus been developed, consciously or unconsciously, in the realms of action and experience, where, by limiting selfishness, we open the way to an unlimited expansion of the real nature of man.

In all these little roughnesses that we meet with in life, the highest expression of freedom is to forbear.

Let us work on, doing as we go whatever happens to be our duty, and being ever ready to put our shoulders to the wheel. Then surely shall we see the Light!

In one sense we cannot think but in symbols; words themselves are symbols of thought.

In another sense everything in the universe may be looked upon as a symbol. The whole universe is a symbol, and God is the essence behind.

There never was an idea without a corresponding word or a word without a corresponding idea; ideas and words are in their nature inseparable.

This world is neither good nor evil; each man manufactures a world for himself.

First, we have to bear in mind that we are all debtors to the world and the world does not owe us anything.

It is a great privilege for all of us to be allowed to do anything for the world. In helping the world we really help ourselves.

The second point is that there is a God in this universe.

God is ever present therein, He is undying and eternally active and infinitely watchful.

Thirdly, we ought not to hate anyone. This world will always continue to be a mixture of good and evil. Our duty is to sympathise with the weak and to love even the wrongdoer.

Fourthly, we ought not to be fanatics of any kind, because fanaticism is opposed to love.

If we can distinguish well between quality and substance, we may become perfect men.

The calmer we are and the less disturbed our nerves, the more shall we love and the better will our work be.

According to Karma-Yoga, the action one has done cannot be destroyed until it has borne its fruit; no power in nature can stop it from yielding its results. If I do an evil action, I must suffer for it; there is no power in this universe to stop or stay it.

Similarly, if I do a good action, there is no power in the universe which can stop its bearing good results.

There is no action which does not bear good and evil fruits at the same time.

A perfect life is a contradiction in terms. Life itself is a state of continuous struggle between ourselves and everything outside.

There are the good men who do good to others so long as it does not injure themselves. And there is a third class who, to do good to themselves, injure others.

There are at one pole of existence the highest good men, who do good for the sake of doing good, so, at the other pole, there are others who injure others just for the sake of the injury. They do not gain anything thereby, but it is their nature to do evil.

If it is a good action, you will have to take the good effect, and if bad, you will have to take the bad effect; but any action that is not done for your own sake, whatever it be, will have no effect on you.

When you have trained your mind and your nerves to realise this idea of the world's non-dependence on you or on anybody, there will then be no reaction in the form of pain resulting from work.

Nothing has power over the Self of man, until the Self becomes a fool and loses independence.

The sign is that good or ill fortune causes no change in his mind: in all conditions he continues to remain the same.

The man that has practiced control over himself cannot be acted upon by anything outside; there is no more slavery for him. His mind has become free. Such a man alone is fit to live well in the world.

The whole secret is in practicing. First you have to hear, then think, and then practice. This is true of every Yoga.

No one was ever really taught by another; each of us has to teach himself. The external teacher offers only the suggestion which rouses the internal teacher to work to understand things.

"Fools alone say that work and philosophy are different, not the learned.” The learned know that, though apparently different from each other, they at last lead to the same goal of human perfection.

Any work, any action, any thought that produces an effect is called a Karma. Thus the law of Karma means the law of causation,

When we speak of the universe, we only mean that portion of existence which is limited by our mind — the universe of the senses, which we can see, feel, touch, hear, think of, imagine.

Anything beyond the range of our mind and our senses is not bound by the law of causation, as there is no mental association of things in the region beyond the senses, and no causation without association of ideas.

The body is neither yours, nor mine, nor anybody's. These bodies are coming and going by the laws of nature, but we are free, standing as witness.

There is the lotus leaf in the water; the water cannot touch and adhere to it; so will you be in the world. This is called "Vairâgya", dispassion or non-attachment.

Without non-attachment there cannot be any kind of Yoga. Non-attachment is the basis of all the Yogas.

Non-attachment does not mean anything that we may do in relation to our external body, it is all in the mind. The  binding link of "I and mine" is in the mind. If we have not this link with the body and with the things of the senses, we are non-attached, wherever and whatever we may be.

Everything that you do under compulsion goes to build up attachment.

The highest men do not seek to get any name or fame from their knowledge. They leave their ideas to the world; they put forth no claims for themselves and establish no schools or systems in their name. Their whole nature shrinks from such a thing. They are the pure Sâttvikas, who can never make any stir, but only melt down in love.

The highest men are calm, silent, and unknown. They are the men who really know the power of thought;

They are sure that, even if they go into a cave and close the door and simply think five true thoughts and then pass away, these five thoughts of theirs will live through eternity.

The grandest idea in the religion of the Vedanta is that we may reach the same goal by different paths; and these paths I have generalised into four, viz those of work, love, psychology, and knowledge.

We have found that, in the end, all these four paths converge and become one. All religions and all methods of work and worship lead us to one and the same goal.

That which is selfish is immoral, and that which is unselfish is moral.

Karma-Yoga, therefore, is a system of ethics and religion intended to attain freedom through unselfishness, and by good works.

There will always be these motives to work, some tending towards bondage and others towards freedom.

"To work you have the right, but not to the fruits thereof."

He works best who works without any motive, neither for money, nor for fame, nor for anything else; and when a man can do that, he will be a Buddha, and out of him will come the power to work in such a manner as will transform the world. This man represents the very highest ideal of Karma-Yoga.