Almost everyone knows the first half of this verse. It is on posters. The half that does the real work comes immediately after it and almost nobody quotes it, which is a pity, because the famous half on its own is easy to agree with and hard to be caught by.
“Thy right is to work only; but never to the fruits thereof. Be thou not the producer of the fruits of (thy) actions; neither let thy attachment be towards inaction.”
“Being steadfast in Yoga, Dhananjaya, perform actions, abandoning attachment, remaining unconcerned as regards success and failure. This evenness of mind (in regard to success and failure) is known as Yoga.”
“Endued with this evenness of mind, one frees oneself in this life, alike from vice and virtue. Devote thyself, therefore, to this Yoga. Yoga is the very dexterity of work.”
trans. Swami Swarupananda
The guard clause is the sentence to sit with: neither let thy attachment be towards inaction. Krsna has just said do not work for the result, and then immediately closes the exit that opens up the moment you hear it.
Working for the result has a cost everybody already knows. The thing is never finished, only submitted, and you spend the hours afterwards waiting to hear how it landed.
Not working has a cost that hides better, because it looks like the cure. If you drop the thing before it can own you, the thing still decided your move — you simply let it decide in the other direction. And this version is harder to catch, because it arrives wearing the costume of renunciation and it is quiet and it looks like wisdom.
Arjuna’s whole position in chapter 2 is exactly this. He wants to put the bow down. His reasons are good ones, and they are sincere, and Krsna does not tell him he has detached well. He tells him to fight.
So what are we aiming at. We want to be able to do the thing all the way through and not take delivery of the result. Both halves. Full effort with the hands open at the end — which is different from a smaller effort that cannot disappoint anybody, including you.
The test that separates them is not how it looks from outside, because they look identical. It is whether the work that position was doing is still being done at full quality, by anyone. If the work got thinner when you stepped back, what was dropped was the work, and what was kept was the comfort.
Let us see where this shows up in an ordinary day. Three places.
- The thing you could take on and are about to let pass.
- The task you are doing at ninety percent because ninety percent cannot be held against you.
- The opinion you have and are not going to say.
In all three the thing to watch is the same — whether the holding back is about the work or about you. Both feel like good judgement from the inside. Only one of them leaves the work intact.
You are not deciding anything, and you do not have to take anything on today. Watch which of the two is running, and leave it as it is.