Practical Vedanta

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

nanda chandran <vpcnk at HOTMAIL.COM>
wrote:

>But if you're not a samnyAsin and cannot sit in meditation the whole day and
>have to attend to secular duties, then karma is inevitable. When you perform
>duties without any attachment, then it is karma yoga.

Sitting in meditation is still "doing" something,
and jnAnayoga is not about doing anything.
Equating jnAnayoga with sitting in meditation is
based on a total misunderstanding of the whole
thing. Anand's reply is quite appropriate and I
second it.

Still, sitting in meditation is a good thing for an
aspirant. However, how many samnyAsins do
you know, who do sit in meditation or who have
sat in meditation all day? Nowadays,
samnyAsins seem to be very busy doing various
other things, whether it is organizing
conferences or giving interviews to the press or
participating in Indian politics and setting up
alliances between various parties. Some are even
members of our parliament, and they go begging
not for alms but for votes. And it is not as if
these people are doing action in the sense of
nishkAmya karma, beccause there are very many
obviously selfish motives at work. So, what
does one call the samnyAsin who is only a bhogi
and neither a karmayogi nor a jnAnayogi?

Vidyasankar