Action Without Attachment
The Teaching
You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions. Never consider yourself the cause of the results of your activities, and never be attached to not doing your duty.
Commentary
Krishna’s central teaching to Arjuna, act fully in the world, fulfill your obligations, but without clinging to outcomes. This is the Householder’s path: the person with family, duty, and work.
The lilies of the field do not ‘spin’, they act according to their nature without grasping at results. This is the teaching for the person who cannot renounce the world, the action itself becomes the practice; the ego’s claim on the outcome is what must be released.
The Stoics called this the distinction between what is ‘up to us’ and what is not. Epictetus: control intention and effort, release outcomes. Same teaching, two cultures, separated by centuries.