Karma Yoga

Of Vivekananda's four yoga books, Karma Yoga is the shortest and the most accessible — eight lectures, delivered in New York in 1895–96, on the spiritual significance of action. It is the book for people who can't sit still. The argument is that the path to liberation does not require renunciation of the world; it requires a particular relation to work.

Vivekananda's account of karma is both philosophically careful and bracingly practical. He distinguishes the way an action shapes the actor from the way it shapes the world. He explains why "non-attachment" is not indifference. He defends the householder's life against the monastic life with surprising vigour, given the source. He insists, with a kind of unfailing good humour, that the small unglamorous duties of an ordinary day — care of family, honesty in business, treatment of subordinates — are not preliminaries to spiritual life but the very material out of which spiritual life is made.

There are passages here that have become almost proverbial in modern India: "Each is great in his own place," "We help ourselves, not the world," "Non-attachment is complete self-abnegation." Their reputation does not diminish their force on re-reading. The book belongs on the shelf of any thinking person who has wondered whether spiritual practice is something other than the work in front of them. Vivekananda's answer is that it is the work in front of them, attempted in a particular spirit.