out proudly, “Done! And no drop wasted!” The Lord then asked him, “And how often did you think about me? That peasant has to toil all day to extract from the soil a meager life for his family. But however hard his day is, he never fails to remember me just before he falls asleep in exhaustion.” Narada realized that his devotion had caused him to be prideful, a potent danger on the Bhakti path.
One of the great advantages of Bhakti Yoga is that it generally enables one to continue with most of everyday life; it changes only one’s focus. After choosing the Bhakti path you no longer perform your daily duties striving for gain or advantage; instead, you surrender or offer all your actions, including their results, to your chosen image of the Divine.
Generally all forms of yoga contain a Bhakti component, emphasizing service to the Supreme Being. Patanjali states, “samadhi siddhi ishvara pranidhanat,” or, “The power of samadhi can be obtained by surrendering to the Supreme Being.”5
Karma Yoga
The term karma comes from the verb root kru, “to do,” and Karma Yoga in the original Vedic sense means simply “path of action.” The Karma Kanda of the Veda, which probably goes back more than ten thousand years, contains instructions for actions and rituals that one can perform with a particular goal in mind, such as obtaining wealth or the object of one’s passion, becoming a good person, or achieving spiritual goals.
Approximately five thousand years ago, the Lord Krishna introduced a new form of Karma Yoga to Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra.6 He described it as surrendering the fruit of one’s actions to the Supreme Being. Note the difference between this definition of Karma Yoga and the idea of karma presented in the Karma Kanda. Krishna tells us not to be interested in the result of our actions but instead to “surrender the fruit of your action to me.” In the Vedas, on the other hand, action (karma) is always used to achieve a particular effect. Lord Krishna actually criticizes the stance of the Vedas when he says, “traigunya vishaya veda nistraygunyo bhavarjuna,” which loosely translates as “The Vedas deal with accumulation only; be you without desire for gain.”7 Today, following on this idea, the term Karma Yoga is commonly used to refer to selfless service to others, such as going to an ashrama and chopping the veggies without pay.8 In this book I will use the term Karma Yoga only in its original Vedic sense and not in its more recent meaning as taught by the Lord Krishna.
An important difference between Karma Yoga and the other two forms of yoga revolves around this issue of renouncing gain. The path of Jnana Yoga is traditionally taught only to those who have renounced the desire for any form of gain or success. Similarly, Bhakti Yoga requires one to internally renounce any gain that may accidentally come one’s way and surrender it to one’s chosen divine form. Karma Yoga, in contrast, requires its followers to give up the idea of gain and success only once the state of “discriminative knowledge” or “knowledge of the difference between self and nonself” is attained. This state is reached only after approximately 95 percent of the journey has been completed.9 Although many of its higher techniques are difficult and demanding, in this regard Karma Yoga is a more “novice” type of yoga; it has lower entry requirements than Jnana and Bhakti Yoga and addresses those who are not yet ready to give up the pursuit of gain for themselves. (It is important here to remember that spiritual gain stands in the traditional Indian view on the same level as material gain; it is still just an attempt to get ahead.)
Seen from the lofty heights of Jnana or Bhakti Yoga, which aim at recognizing the infinite Brahman either with or without form, Karma Yoga is a modest path dealing with modest achievements in the relative world, such as acquiring a healthy body, a steady mind, and a luminous intellect — all with the goal of gradually removing the barriers to spiritual liberation. Practitioners achieve these aims by performing the eight limbs of Patanjali’s Ashtanga Yoga. Ashtanga Yoga, then, is the underlying structure or architecture of Karma Yoga.
Although Karma Yoga is a practical, mundane approach to realizing liberation, the concepts essential to Jnana and Bhakti Yoga lie at its core. When practicing the many elaborate techniques of Karma or Ashtanga Yoga, we need to remember that we do this only because we are in essence both infinite consciousness (the heart of Jnana Yoga) and children of God (the essence of Bhakti Yoga). These three paths are, after all, different routes to the same destination.
The Many Modes of Karma Yoga
Whereas there is only one type of Jnana Yoga and one type of Bhakti Yoga, Karma Yoga has differentiated into many different modes with different names, according to precisely what actions and techniques are suggested. Kriya Yoga, Kundalini Yoga, Hatha Yoga, Mantra Yoga, Tantra Yoga, Laya Yoga, Dhyana Yoga, Samadhi Yoga, and Raja Yoga are all different modes of Karma Yoga. In all these modes of yoga, the practitioner performs certain yogic actions intending to derive a direct benefit, such as a stronger, healthier body, a longer life, a smooth flow of prana (and eventually its arrest in the central energy channel), a powerful intellect that can concentrate at will, a penetrating insight that can be directed at objects normally hidden, the ability to know whatever one wishes — and the list goes on.
Western students are often confused by this apparent multiplicity of yogic teachings, which is replicated in the multiplicity of India’s many divine forms and images. We may understand this fact by likening yoga to medicine — as, for example, the Rishi Vyasa did in his commentary on the Yoga Sutra. In medicine we have many different remedies addressing the various ailments that patients can develop. In a similar way, the many different forms of Karma Yoga have developed to address different problems.
Although all people are essentially the same at their divine cores, they vary greatly in their outer layers: the body, mind, ego, and intellect. Because people have very different bodies and minds, different approaches have been developed to remove the different obstacles located therein. Karma Yoga has developed its many modes because it targets these variable aspects of human individuals. Jnana and Bhakti Yoga, in contrast, have not had to differentiate because they address the divine consciousness or true self, which does not vary among individuals.
Ashtanga Yoga: The Architecture of Karma Yoga
The universally accepted form and structure that Karma Yoga takes is the eight-limbed yoga of Patanjali called Ashtanga Yoga. All of the eight limbs are in one form or another represented in all modes of Karma Yoga. The reason for using eight sequential steps may be understood through the following metaphor: Let’s assume for a moment that the goal of yoga, called liberation, is located on the moon and its opposite, the state called bhoga (bondage) is here on Earth. Jnana and Bhakti Yoga hold out the possibility — not a realistic one for most people — of reaching your goal with one giant step. Eight-limbed Karma Yoga, on the other hand, provides you with a spacecraft that you can use to reach your destination, a spacecraft similar to the Saturn V rocket that powered the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. The Saturn V had several stages. The first stage lifted the spacecraft to a certain height, and once its fuel had been exhausted the next stage was fired up. With the final stage the spacecraft had reached a distance far enough from the Earth that it could now “fall” toward the moon, attracted by the moon’s gravitational field. In a similar way, Karma Yoga offers eight successive stages, each one carrying you successively higher toward the natural state of yoga (freedom) and away from the gravitation of bhoga (bondage).
Karma/Ashtanga
