Religious texts often use underdefined language. Take this bit from the Bhagavad Gita in J. D. Salinger’s Franny & Zooey (which we discussed earlier):
You have the right to work, but for the work's sake only. You have no right to the fruits of work. Desire for the fruits of work must never be your motive in working. Never give way to laziness, either.
Perform every action with your heart fixed on the Supreme Lord. Renounce attachment to the fruits. Be even-tempered [underlined by one of the calligraphers] in success and failure; for it is this evenness of temper which is meant by yoga.
Work done with anxiety about results is far inferior to work done without such anxiety, in the calm of self-surrender. Seek refuge in the knowledge of Brahman. They who work selfishly for results are miserable.
Compare it with the first four lines of Psalm 128 from the King James Bible:
Blessed is every one that feareth the Lord; that walketh in his ways.
For thou shalt eat the labour of thine hands: happy shalt thou be, and it shall be well with thee.
Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine by the sides of thine house: thy children like olive plants round about thy table.
Behold, that thus shall the man be blessed that feareth the Lord.
The passages seem to offer contradicting advice. We have “no right to the fruits of work” according to the Bhagavad Gita—in fact, they “must never be your motive in working”. In the Psalter, however, those who walk God’s way are promised to rejoice in the outcome, and “happy shalt thou be, and it shall be well with thee”.
The apparent contradiction stems from the use of the same idiom—the fruits of one’s labour—to mean different things in the two scriptures. The Bhagavad Gita, I think, alludes to a kind of greed or vanity—one could say bramosìa—directed at the superficial bounties of work. For Franny and Zooey, two actors, it’s about hunger for applause. Letch for wealth, status, or critical recognition also fit the bill.
The Bible speaks of simpler rewards: fruitful wives and “children like olive plants.” We get to “eat the labour” of the hand that produced it. Each word in the passage invokes abundance and a sense of fertile bonhomie, nudging the mind towards the more tender wages of everyday toil. These aren’t the spoils and riches the Gita warns us against.
This sort of vagueness is characteristic of holy texts, and it’s hard to tell whether the resulting confusion is a feature or a bug. Some information could have been lost in translation, and the original wording might have been clearer. Perhaps brevity carries with it a debt of clarity—there are only so many ways to express contiguous ideas. And maybe some degree of ambiguity doesn’t hurt a religious work either.
Interestingly enough, both passages agree on one thing—that work should be done with God in mind. The Greek root of the word enthusiasm, enthousiasmos, means possessed or inspired by a god—or, more literally: full of God.