Krsna begins his sermon on the doctrine of action. He addresses Arjuna as Anagha – one without sin, pure. Arjuna is not a perfect person. He has many faults. Yet Krsna sees only virtue and purity in him, indicative of His love for Arjuna. A child may be mischievous and rebellious but the mother sees goodness alone because of her love for the child. Knowledge is best taken in an environment of affection and oneness.
Krsna speaks of a dual path. There are three aspects of our interactions in life. The world enters us as stimuli through the five sense organs. These stimuli then react with desires in the mind and intellect. The reactions are expressed as responses through the organs of action. This constitutes the traffic of life.
There are two types of people – those with many desires or vasanas and the few who have a handful of high quality vasanas. The ones with many desires react to almost every stimulus that enters them and therefore tend to be active. When such people take to the spiritual life they need to convert actions to worship – Karma Yoga or the Path of Action. The other category has already followed Karma Yoga and reduced their stock of vasanas. They are contemplative by nature, disinterested in the happenings of the world. The stimuli of the world enter them but there are almost no reactions or responses. Such people convert perception to worship – Jnana Yoga or the Path of Knowledge.
Arjuna, though unselfish, is replete with vasanas and hence not qualified for Jnana Yoga. He needs to wade through action and divest his personality of desires before taking to the path of renunciation and meditation. Hence Krsna’s message is – act! If one follows neither path it is suicidal, as the Isavasya Upanisad says.
Karma Yoga is the unique technique by which one uses action to get to the state of inaction! Keep the mind in lofty thought while the body acts dynamically in the world.