In the Bhagavadgītā, Kṛṣṇa’s injunction is to act without desire in many verses. Many modern scholars have criticized and tried to reinterpret Kṛṣṇa’s injunction in the Bhagavadgītā to perform action abandoning all kāma “desire.” These modern scholars have tried to re-understand Kṛṣṇa’s injunction for desireless action assuming the modern dogma that intentional action entails desire. The aim of the present essay is to examine the cogency of the advocacy of desireless action by understanding how the desireless action is performed.

This paper identifies the different normative ethical arguments stated and suggested by Arjuna and Krishna in the Gītā , analyzes those arguments, examines the interrelations between those arguments, and demonstrates that, contrary to a common view, both Arjuna and Krishna advance ethical theories of a broad consequentialist nature. It is shown that Krishna’s ethical theory, in particular, is a distinctive kind of rule-consequentialism that takes as intrinsically valuable the twin consequences of mokṣa and lokasaṃgraha . It is also argued that (...) Krishna’s teachings in the Gītā gain in depth, coherence, and critical relevance what they lose in simplicity when the ethical theory underlying those teachings is understood as a consequentialism of this kind rather than as a deontology. (shrink)

Classical Sāṃkhya has usually been interpreted as an intellectualist school. Its presumed method for the attainment of liberation is essentially characterized by rational inquiry into reality, which involves the intellectual understanding of the distinction between two principles: the conscious and the material. Some have argued that this liberating process is not only theoretical, but that it entails yogic practice, or that it is the natural outcome of existential forces that tend toward freedom. However, recent studies in Sāṃkhya involving detailed analysis (...) of an anonymous commentary of the Sāṃkhyakārikā, the Yuktidīpikā, suggest a more complex picture. The external functions of the five vital winds in relation to the sources of action and dispositions of being seem to play an important role in the liberating path. In this paper, I review the relation between bhāvas, karmayonis, and the five prāṇas by considering the social, moral, and interpersonal aspects of the five vital winds as described in the Yuktidīpikā. It will be shown how the external functions of prāṇa are related to the moral cultivation of vitality, leading to the enactment and manifestation of dispositions of being that bring about the realization of oneself as a knower in the ethical engagement with others. It is this unique way of understanding prāṇa in the Yuktidīpikā that makes the Sāṃkhya path for liberation something more than a theoretical cognitive method or a spontaneous and predetermined realization of one’s self. (shrink)