The Yoga of Devotion

Chapter twelve begins with a straightforward comparative question. Some worship a God who has taken form and are constantly devoted; others worship the imperishable and unmanifest. Which of them, Arjuna asks, knows yoga better?

Krishna answers that those who fix their minds on him and worship with constant discipline and supreme faith are, in his view, the most disciplined. Those who worship the imperishable, indefinable, unmanifest, all pervading, unthinkable and unmoving also reach him, provided they have restrained the senses and are engaged in the welfare of all beings. But the trouble is greater for those whose minds are set on the unmanifest, because the unmanifest goal is difficult for embodied beings to attain.

What makes the chapter useful is what comes next: a descending sequence of alternatives, each offered to whoever cannot manage the one above. Fix your mind on me. If you cannot do that, seek to reach me by repeated practice. If you are unable to practise, be intent on doing work for my sake, since by doing work for my sake you will reach perfection. And if you cannot even do that, then take refuge in discipline and give up the fruit of all action, exercising self control.

Very few religious texts build failure into the structure of their instruction in this way, and fewer still put the concession in the teacher's own mouth four times in a row. The chapter treats inability as ordinary rather than shameful, and it arranges its demands so that everyone reading is somewhere on the ladder rather than off it.

The last two thirds of chapter twelve describe the person who is dear to God, and the description is almost entirely about disposition. Such a person hates no being, is friendly and compassionate, is free of the sense of mine and of the sense of I, is even in pleasure and pain, is patient, content, self controlled and firm in resolve. They do not agitate the world and are not agitated by it. They are free of elation, envy, fear and anxiety.

The list continues: indifferent to whether things go well, pure, capable, impartial, free of distress, having given up every undertaking; neither rejoicing nor hating nor grieving nor craving; the same to friend and enemy, in honour and dishonour, in cold and heat, in pleasure and pain, free of attachment; unmoved by blame and praise, silent, content with anything, without a fixed home, of steady mind.

What is striking about the passage is what is absent from it. No doctrine is required. No ritual is named. No membership of any group is mentioned. The qualities are all observable in ordinary conduct, and most of them are about how a person is with other people rather than about what happens inside them in private.

That is why the chapter has been so widely used outside its own tradition, and why it is often the first passage handed to someone reading the Gita for the first time. It also sits oddly beside the chapters on caste duty and on the ranking of worshippers, and readers have been noticing the tension for a very long time. The Gita is not a systematic treatise, and chapter twelve is one of the places where that shows most clearly.