Old Arjun would have panicked, torn between protecting his saplings and finishing his canal. But now, he remembered the teaching: Do your best, without anxiety. He calmly handed his shovel to his son, went to fix the fence, saved his saplings, and returned to the canal. He did not waste energy on anger or regret. He simply did the next right thing.
Halfway through his work, a neighbor came running. “Arjun! A herd of wild goats has broken through the fence on the north side. Your young saplings are being destroyed!” bhagavad gita quotes on karma
Vikram smiled gently. “Brother, I did not dig for the spring. I dug because it was the right action to take. The Gita teaches us: ‘Karmanye vadhikaraste, ma phaleshu kadachana’ — You have a right to your action, but never to its fruits.” Old Arjun would have panicked, torn between protecting
Arjun picked up his shovel, but his mind was already calculating. “If I dig,” he thought, “and the rains still don’t come, my effort will be wasted. But if I don’t dig, and the rains come, the water will flow to Vikram’s field first. I will only dig if I am certain my field will be saved.” He spent three days measuring the distance, calculating the odds, and waiting for a guarantee. He did not dig. He did not waste energy on anger or regret
He continued, “Look at your thinking. You wanted to control the result—the rain, the flood, the harvest. But those things belong to the river, to the sky, to time itself. By refusing to act without a guarantee, you lost the only thing that was truly yours: the chance to do the work. My hands are sore, but my heart is light. Because I gave my best to the action, and let go of the outcome.”
Vikram, however, simply picked up his shovel and walked to the riverbank. His neighbor asked, “Why are you digging? You don’t know if the rains will come. You don’t know if the canal will work. You might fail.”
Arjun rushed to his own shovel, but it was too late. The spring had found its path through Vikram’s canal. Arjun’s field, which he had refused to work on without a guarantee, remained dry.