No Doership in Jnani

Sri Ramana Maharshi

There are various controversies or schools of thought as to whether a jnani can continue to live in his physical body after realization. Some hold that one who dies cannot be a jnani, because his body must vanish into air, or some such thing. They put forward all sorts of funny notions. If a man must at once leave his body when he realises the Self, I wonder how any knowledge of the Self or the state of realisation can come down to other men. And that would mean that all those who have given us the fruits of their Self-realisation in books cannot be considered jnanis because they went on living after realisation. And if it is held that a man cannot be considered a jnani so long as he performs actions in the world (and action is impossible without the mind), then not only the great Sages who carried on various kinds of work after attaining jnana must not be considered jnanis, but the gods also, and Ishwara Himself, since He continues looking after the world. The fact is that any amount of action can be performed, and performed quite well, by the jnani without his identifying himself  with it in any way or ever imagining that he is the doer. Some power acts through his body and uses his body to get the work done.