In plain words
Surrender is the giving over of one's own will to God, to ultimate reality or to the way things are. It means letting go of the effort to control outcomes, to defend a separate self and to bargain with life, and then acting from whatever remains. Many traditions treat it as the hinge of the spiritual path, the point where striving gives way to trust.
Surrender is not the same as resignation or indifference. Its teachers went on preaching, cooking, governing and singing. What changes, in their accounts, is who is understood to be doing the work. Devotional traditions speak of surrender to a personal God. Contemplative and philosophical traditions speak of yielding to a reality from which the self was never truly separate.
Across the traditions
Islam and Sufism: islam and tawakkul
The name of the faith itself, islam (Arabic), means "submission," the giving of oneself to God, and comes from the same root as salaam, "peace." Sufis deepened it as tawakkul, trust that leaves every outcome in God's hands. Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, the twelfth-century Baghdad preacher for whom the Qadiriyya order is named, gave discourses in his Futuh al-Ghaib to submission and to trust and its stages. In the Tenth Discourse he compares the servant who no longer resists God's decree to an infant in a nurse's care, a body in the hands of the washer before burial and a patient lying still before a physician. He limits this to matters outside God's commands and prohibitions, which remain to be obeyed.
Hinduism: prapatti and sharanagati
In the bhakti, or devotional, traditions of India, sharanagati (Sanskrit, "going for refuge") and prapatti ("approaching for refuge") name complete self-offering to God. Sri Vaishnava teachers in the line of Ramanuja developed prapatti into a formal doctrine, and poet-saints sang the same surrender in everyday languages. Tukaram, a seventeenth-century Marathi poet devoted to Vitthala of Pandharpur, asked to be taken without conditions: "I am a mass of sin; thou art all purity; yet thou must take me as I am and bear my load for me" (trans. Nicol Macnicol, 1919).
Christianity: self-abandonment
Christian writers speak of self-abandonment, or abandonment to divine providence: placing life, work and future entirely in God's care. Brother Lawrence, a lay brother who spent decades in the kitchen of a Carmelite priory in seventeenth-century Paris, practiced it through ordinary tasks rather than one great renunciation. He is reported as saying, "We ought not to be weary of doing little things for the love of God, who regards not the greatness of the work, but the love with which it is performed" (The Practice of the Presence of God, Fourth Conversation, 1895 translation). Three centuries earlier, Julian of Norwich had given the same trust its best-known words: "all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well" (ed. Grace Warrack).
Taoism: wu wei
Wu wei (Chinese, "non-action" or "not forcing") is the Taoist form of surrender: acting without struggling against the way things move, as water yields and still overcomes what is hard. Here the surrender is not to a personal God but to the Tao, the way of things itself. The Tao Te Ching, credited by tradition to Laozi, says, "The Tao in its regular course does nothing (for the sake of doing it), and so there is nothing which it does not do" (ch. 37, trans. James Legge, 1891).
