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TEXT 8 niyatam kuru karma tvam
SYNONYMS  niyatam--prescribed;
kuru--do;
karma--duties; tvam--you; karma--work;
jyayah--better;
hi--than; akarmanah--without work;
sarira--bodily;
yatra--maintenance; api--even; ca--also;
te--your;
na--never; prasiddhyet--effected; akarmanah--without
work.
TRANSLATION Perform your
prescribed duty, for action is better than inaction. A man cannot even
maintain his physical body without work.
PURPORT There are many
pseudo-meditators who misrepresent themselves as belonging to high parentage,
and great professional men who falsely pose that they have sacrificed everything
for the sake of advancement in spiritual life. Lord Krsna did not want
Arjuna to become a pretender, but that he perform his prescribed duties
as set forth for ksatriyas. Arjuna was a householder and a military
general, and therefore it was better for him to remain as such and perform
his religious duties as prescribed for the householder ksatriya.
Such activities gradually cleanse the heart of a mundane man and free him
from material contamination. So-called renunciation for the purpose of
maintenance is never approved by the Lord, nor by any religious scripture.
After all, one has to maintain one's body and soul together by some work.
Work should not be given up capriciously, without purification of materialistic
propensities. Anyone who is in the material world is certainly possessed
of the impure propensity for lording it over material nature, or, in other
words, for sense gratification. Such polluted propensities have to be cleared.
Without doing so, through prescribed duties, one should never attempt to
become a so-called transcendentalist, renouncing work and living at the
cost of others.
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