I was wandering aimlessly through an art gallery in New York City several years ago when I was stopped in my tracks by a stunning Japanese print. It was Katsushika Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa—a stylized print of a mammoth and looming wave framing a distant mountain. I vaguely remembered studying this picture in a college art course. Wasn’t there something about the “innovative artistic tension-arc” created by the moving wave in the foreground and the small-but-unmoving presence of the mountain anchoring the distance? Yes, I could see it now. More than that, I could feel it. In person—at midlife—the print had an energy and power of which I had been oblivious as a college sophomore.

Even more than the print itself, however, I was captivated by the artist’s words about his work—posted on a small ivory card next to the print: “From around the age of six,” the artist began, “I had the habit of sketching from life.” He continues:

“I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one-hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie.”

Every dot and stroke I paint will be alive!

Here was a man who was on fire for his work. I wanted to know more: Did he indeed live to be a hundred and forty? What did those later dots and strokes look like?”

I sat down on the bench in front of the print and made some notes. “Katsushika Hokusai. 1760–1849. Japanese printmaker. Leading Japanese expert on Chinese painting. Master of the Ukiyo-e form. Nichiren Buddhist.”

Later, at home, I Googled Hokusai. He died at eighty-nine, and sure enough, on his deathbed—still looking to penetrate deeper into his art—he had exclaimed, “If only heaven will give me just another ten years!… Just another five more years, then I could become a real painter.”

Hokusai was a man who saw his work as a means to “penetrate to the essential nature” of things. And he appears to have succeeded. His work, a hundred and fifty years after his death, could reach right off a gallery wall and grab me in the gut.

More than anything, I was intrigued by the quality of Hokusai’s passion for his work. He helped me see that a life devoted to dharma can be a deeply ardent life.

2

In the first part of “the wondrous dialogue,” Krishna and Arjuna speak of dharma—its nature, and its role on the path of the fully alive human being. We have spoken so far of what we might call the discernment phase of dharma—the process of sniffing out dharma at every turn. Now comes a new phase: Having found your dharma, embrace it fully and passionately. Bring everything you’ve got to it. Do it full out!

“Considering your dharma, you should not vacillate,” Krishna instructed Arjuna. The vacillating mind is the split mind. The vacillating mind is the doubting mind—the mind at war with itself. “The ignorant, indecisive and lacking in faith, waste their lives,” says Krishna. “They can never be happy in this world or any other.” Ouch.

Well, this Hokusai character was a guy who had not dithered on the path, and had clearly not wasted his life. In fact, he doesn’t seem to have wasted an instant. An interesting aspect of fulfilled lives is that the people who are living them seem to have learned how to gather their energy, how to focus—how to, as we might say these days, “bring it.” Like Hokusai, their lives begin to look like guided missiles.

How exactly do they accomplish this? How do you get from where most of us live—the run-of-the-mill split mind—to the gathered mind of a Hokusai?

Krishna articulates the principle succinctly: Acting in unity with your purpose itself creates unification. Actions that consciously support dharma have the power to begin to gather our energy. These outward actions, step-by-step, shape us inwardly. Find your dharma and do it. And in the process of doing it, energy begins to gather itself into a laser beam of effectiveness.

Krishna quickly adds: Do not worry about the outcome. Success or failure are not your concern. It is better to fail at your own dharma than to succeed at the dharma of another. Your task is only to bring as much life force as you can muster to the execution of your dharma. In this spirit, Chinese Master Guan Yin Tzu wrote: “Don’t waste time calculating your chances of success and failure. Just fix your aim and begin.”

Krishna now begins the task of teaching Arjuna the Doctrine of Unified Action, which explicitly lays out the case for focus. The Doctrine of Unified Action is a pillar of the yoga tradition. The word yoga, in all its various iterations, always and everywhere means “to yoke.” In the case of the yoga of action, it means to yoke all of one’s being to dharma. To bring every action into alignment with your highest purpose. To bring everything you’ve got to the task.

American writer Annie Dillard stumbled onto this principle early on in her writing career. She declares it in her book The Writing Life. “One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. The impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.”

Give freely and abundantly! Abundance is a central aspect of this principle. When you commit fully to the task at hand, the abundance of your commitment itself has magic in it. It draws your energies together. It calls up energies you didn’t know you had. As some have said, under these conditions the universe comes to your aid.

Naturally, there is an obstacle to all this wonderment. Alas, it turns out that the process of unification requires saying “no” to actions that do not support dharma—saying “no” to detours, and to side channels of all kinds, even to some pretty terrific side channels. It requires snipping off all manner of “other options.” The root of the word “decide” means, literally, “to cut off.” To decide for something means at times to decide against something else.

This is, of course, why those infernal crossroads are so difficult. Cutting off options is hard work. And it is risky. But the alternative is even riskier. Those who cannot commit, those who cannot say “no,” are doomed to everlasting conflict. They may sit for a lifetime at the crossroads, dithering. Krishna nails this principle: “Those who follow this path, resolving deep within themselves to see Me alone, attain singleness of purpose. For those who lack resolution, the decisions of life are many-branched and endless.” Many-branched and endless. How well we know.

Because this principle is so important, and because Arjuna is so very likely to lose his tenuous grasp on it, Krishna reminds him over and over again throughout their dialogue. “The disunited mind is far from wise,” he nudges. The mind “must overcome the confusion of duality.”

If we have been paying the slightest attention to decades of self-help literature, we will not have failed to have heard this same cry. I particularly like American writer Elbert Hubbard’s hefty jab for unification: “The difference in men does not lie in the size of their hands, nor in the perfection of their bodies, but in this one sublime ability of concentration: to throw the weight in one blow, to live eternity in an hour.”

We derive the greatest pleasure and fulfillment when all our faculties are drawn together into our life’s work. In this state of absorption, we experience extraordinary satisfaction. We human beings are attracted to the experience of intense involvement. The outcome of this involvement, says Hokusai, is sublime. “By ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature.” Hokusai’s lesson, finally, is that a life of passion for dharma is a fulfilled life.

In Part III, then, we will explore the Second Pillar of Dharma, “Do It Full Out!” And we’ll look at three principles of the Doctrine of Unified Action.

    1. Find out who you are and do it on purpose.

    2. Unify!

    3. Practice deliberately.

In Chapter Five, we will examine the early life of the American poet Robert Frost, looking closely at the way he made decisions in support of dharma. In Chapter Six, we will examine the surprising life of Susan B. Anthony, and the many ways in which she systematically unified her energy, becoming, finally, an authentic force of nature. And in Chapter Seven, we will look at one of the world’s greatest landscape painters, the nineteenth-century French master Camille Corot, and examine closely our growing understanding of the concept of “deliberate practice” and its intriguing relationship to dharma. Along the way, we’ll look, too, at two ordinary lives—those of my friends Ethan and Lonny—and the ways in which they do or do not manage to grasp the full import of unified action.