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.
Themes
Connections 24
Arose apart
No known transmission between Christianity and Hinduism while these teachings took shape. Christians lived in Kerala from early centuries, but exchange of ideas begins only with the Jesuits: Akbar’s court debates (from 1580), Roberto de Nobili writing on Hindu doctrine in Tamil (from 1606), then Wilkins’s English Gita (1785), the Upanishads in Latin (1801–02) and Vivekananda (1893). All long after either’s formative teachings.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Hinduism and Christianity while these teachings took shape. Christians lived in Kerala from early centuries, but exchange of ideas begins only with the Jesuits: Akbar’s court debates (from 1580), Roberto de Nobili writing on Hindu doctrine in Tamil (from 1606), then Wilkins’s English Gita (1785), the Upanishads in Latin (1801–02) and Vivekananda (1893). All long after either’s formative teachings.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Hinduism and Taoism while these teachings took shape.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Hinduism and Stoicism while these teachings took shape.
Travelled
Buddhism reached Hinduism by 500 BCE. The same Indian world. The Buddha taught among Brahmanical and ascetic schools, and the two argued and borrowed for centuries.
Unsure
Sustained exchange between Hindu and Sufi thought is documented in South Asia (al-Biruni, the Chishti order, Dara Shikoh), not for Sufis elsewhere. Any line to this teaching is unknown.
Travelled
Alan Watts read and drew on Hinduism.
Travelled
Alan Watts read and drew on Hinduism.
Travelled
Ram Dass read and drew on Hinduism.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Hinduism and Taoism while these teachings took shape.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Hinduism and Christianity while these teachings took shape. Christians lived in Kerala from early centuries, but exchange of ideas begins only with the Jesuits: Akbar’s court debates (from 1580), Roberto de Nobili writing on Hindu doctrine in Tamil (from 1606), then Wilkins’s English Gita (1785), the Upanishads in Latin (1801–02) and Vivekananda (1893). All long after either’s formative teachings.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Hinduism and Christianity while these teachings took shape. Christians lived in Kerala from early centuries, but exchange of ideas begins only with the Jesuits: Akbar’s court debates (from 1580), Roberto de Nobili writing on Hindu doctrine in Tamil (from 1606), then Wilkins’s English Gita (1785), the Upanishads in Latin (1801–02) and Vivekananda (1893). All long after either’s formative teachings.
Unsure
Hindu deities reached Japan inside Buddhism (Benzaiten is Sarasvatī). There was no direct exchange.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Hinduism and Stoicism while these teachings took shape.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Hinduism and Taoism while these teachings took shape.
Travelled
Ram Dass read and drew on Hinduism.
Unsure
Greeks and Indians met under Persia and after Alexander (326 BCE). Megasthenes wrote an Indica, a Greek envoy, Heliodorus, raised a pillar to Vasudeva (c. 113 BCE), and Greek astral science reached India (Yavanajātaka, 149/150 CE). Indian influence on Greek philosophy (Pyrrho, Plotinus) is argued, not documented.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Hinduism and Taoism while these teachings took shape.
Unsure
No documented reading of Hinduism by John Vervaeke.