Verses 9:26-27
If you offer me with love and devotion a leaf, a flower, fruit or water, I will accept it.
Whatever you do, eat, offer or give away, and whatever hardship you suffer—offer it to me.
In Chapter 9 of Bhagavad-gītā, Kṛṣṇa shares with Arjuna ever deeper knowledge about himself and the nature of the universe. Then in verses 26-27 Kṛṣṇa describes how best to please and honour him.
He says that not only should we offer to Kṛṣṇa the things we cherish in life. We should also offer him what we do in life. We should give not only our possessions but our actions.
Among the many things we do in our lives is to suffer through difficult experiences. To suffer is not to feel something painful or difficult for one moment. It is to live in an experience of pain or difficulty. Suffering is an action—of perseverance, patience, resolve, courage, maybe obstinacy.
In verse 9:27 the expression ‘hardship you suffer’ translates (tapasyāsi), which some commentators render as ‘austerities’. It is something we do mindful of its seriousness, its meaningfulness. It is suffering that is done because it has a meaning, even if we cannot know what that meaning is.
In the Christian worldview, the answer to suffering is forgiveness. This idea has powerful practical use: Where there is conflict that causes suffering, when a person has caused us to suffer, whether by accident or with intention, we forgive.
In Bhakti we can go deeper than the ethics of forgiveness.
In Bhakti, the root of all being is loving devotion. Reality itself is love. God is love. And the core of every human soul is love. At the heart of all things is a fundamental generosity of loving.
In the abstract, this is difficult to grasp. But when we look at ourselves deeply and sincerely, we discover that there is no action that is not energised by a simple desire to love.
To practice Bhakti in its simplest form is to act in full awareness of this reality: that love is the only thing that is real.
This means that the phenomena we often consider to cause suffering—injustice, harm, fear, evil—are in the end not real.
They are symptoms of a passing, erroneous belief that what makes us suffer has some transcendental reality, that it originates in some absolute suffering and has as its goal only to cause suffering. In other words, it is the belief that suffering is everywhere and eternally real.
But suffering is not real. And our greatest suffering stems from the belief that it is. The only thing that is real, in the strongest sense of the word, is love.
The greatest harm in life is done by someone who mistakes the soul for harmful. The greatest fear comes from someone who mistakes the soul for fearful. And the greatest evil comes from someone who mistakes the soul for evil.
But love, unlike harm and fear and evil, can ever be threatened, can never disappear. It is all that is real.
Look deep into the eyes of the one who makes you suffer and you will see a soul that wishes nothing more than to love and be loved, a soul that is your sister, a heart that is part and parcel of God’s own heart.
So, offering our actions to Krsna is indeed a kind of giving, but not in the sense we are accustomed to.
It is, rather, the realisation that our actions already belong to God. It is the understanding that our actions, all of our actions, are only possible, only meaningful if we see them as the expression of the divine love in us.