Chapter 10 · Verse 34·Spoken by Krishna
मृत्युः सर्वहरश्चाहमुद्भवश्च भविष्यताम्। कीर्तिः श्रीर्वाक्च नारीणां स्मृतिर्मेधा धृतिः क्षमा
mṛityuḥ sarva-haraśh chāham udbhavaśh cha bhaviṣhyatām kīrtiḥ śhrīr vāk cha nārīṇāṁ smṛitir medhā dhṛitiḥ kṣhamā
I am death, who carries off all. I am the birth of all that is yet to be. And among feminine qualities, I am fame, prosperity, speech, memory, discernment, steadfastness, and forgiveness.
Word by Word
Saved for this reading session
Three movements · tap a label to switch
Sanskrit recitation by Swami Brahmānanda
Audio from the Gītā Supersite, IIT Kanpur
Synthesis · a glossed leaf
machine-assisted draft, pending review
Convergence
rishna first names himself as death, and specifically as the death that carries off everything. The Sanskrit phrase is 'mrityuh sarva-harah,' which means 'all-snatching death.' Several commentators explain there are two kinds of loss called death: the kind that strips away wealth and possessions, and the kind that takes away life itself. Of these, it is the death that takes life that is the true 'all-snatcher,' because when life goes, everything a person had goes with it. Krishna says this most total form of death is himself.
Braided from 9 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Dhanapati Sūri · Swami Sivananda · Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Sant Jñāneśvar · Swami Ramsukhdas
Krishna next names himself as 'udbhava,' the arising or origination, of those who are yet to come into being. The word means rising-up, coming-forth, the start of existence. So in a single verse he claims both ends of every embodied life: he is the death that ends it and he is the birth that begins it. Many read 'udbhava' not only as the bare fact of birth but as auspicious upliftment and prosperity, the flourishing of those whose future is good fortune. Krishna is thus the source both of beings appearing and of their thriving.
Braided from 12 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Dhanapati Sūri · Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar · Swami Sivananda · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha
Krishna then names seven feminine excellences as his manifestations among women: kirti (fame or good renown), shri (fortune, prosperity, also read as beauty or radiance), vak (speech, identified with the goddess Sarasvati), smriti (memory, the power to recall what was once experienced), medha (intelligence, the power to grasp and hold the meaning of many texts), dhriti (steadiness or fortitude, the power to hold oneself firm amid suffering and to check fickleness), and kshama (forbearance or patience, the unshaken state of mind in joy and sorrow). The commentators give precise definitions for each, treating them as a coherent set of seven.
Braided from 12 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar · Swami Sivananda · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri
These seven feminine qualities are so potent that even the slightest touch of them lifts a person. Multiple commentators say that by even a faint trace, shadow, or semblance of contact with these excellences, a human being becomes praiseworthy and counts himself fulfilled. The point is the immense value packed into each quality: a little fame, a little steadiness, a little forbearance already makes a person feel they have arrived, and that elevating power is Krishna's own presence in them.
Braided from 7 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Dhanapati Sūri · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Baladeva · Swami Sivananda
Divergence
Advaita Vedānta
These commentators offer a second, higher reading of 'all-snatching death.' Beyond ordinary death that takes a single life, they say Krishna is the supreme Lord who, at the time of cosmic dissolution (pralaya), withdraws and carries off the entire universe. On this reading 'sarva-hara' points past individual mortality to the final reabsorption of all things into the Lord at the end of a world-cycle. They present both meanings, the everyday and the cosmic, as available.
Śaṅkarācārya · Swami Sivananda · Dhanapati Sūri
Advaita Vedānta
This source adds a specific lineage detail for the seven feminine excellences: fame, fortune, memory, intelligence, and firmness are the daughters of Daksha, who were given in marriage to Dharma, and so they are all called Dharmapatnis, the lawful consorts of Dharma. The seven are thus understood as named goddesses with a place in the divine genealogy, not as bare abstractions.
Swami Sivananda
Bhakti
These commentators read death through memory rather than through the breath of life. They gloss 'sarva-hara' as the death that carries off all memory, citing the saying that 'death is utter forgetfulness.' They also include, by the connecting word 'ca' (and), Murti and the other lawful consorts (dharmapatnis) within the feminine excellences, treating the seven as a circle of divine wives rather than a closed list.
Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva
Bhakti
This commentator stresses that the seven feminine excellences are not mere allegories or personified abstractions but living presiding goddesses (devis): Kirti and the rest are actual deities under whose lightest touch a human being becomes worthy of praise. The emphasis is devotional and concrete, the qualities are persons one can revere.
Śrīdhara Svāmī
Śuddhādvaita
These commentators read the verse through the Lord's own household and through pure devotion. Vallabha glosses death as the destroyer specifically of the folk who oppose Bhagavan, and reads 'kirti' as Kirti the wife of Vrishabhanu, with Sarasvati as her attendant, so the enumeration is the Lord's own household-circle rather than a bare list of qualities. Purushottama redefines each excellence devotionally: smriti is the remembrance of Bhagavan, medha is intelligence fixed singly on Bhagavan's qualities, dhriti is standing firm in dharma during calamity, and kshama is bearing every transgression. The feminine excellences become postures of the soul turned toward the Lord.
Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama
Viśiṣṭādvaita
These commentators read the verse cleanly as the Lord's vibhuti, his glory pervading the world. They draw out that death and the rising of those to be name the Lord as the two end-points of every embodied career, birth and death, and that the inner field of human flourishing in its feminine principle is the Lord. The accent is on God as the indwelling reality of both the boundaries and the goods of embodied life, with no second cosmic-dissolution reading or genealogical apparatus.
Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika
Modern
This commentator turns the verse into a meditation on the mercy hidden in death's forgetting. He observes that after death not even the memory of what was here remains, and insists this taking-away power is not death's own but Paramatma's, the Supreme's. He reasons that if the memory of all past births stayed, a person's worry (cinta) and delusion (moha) about the relations and possessions of countless former lives would never end. The forgetting that death brings wipes out that accumulated anxiety, so death's capacity to erase worry and delusion is wholly God's gift.
Swami Ramsukhdas
A Seeker Asks
How can the same Krishna be both the death that strips everything away and the birth and prosperity that give everything, and why would death belong among his divine glories at all?
The verse deliberately holds both ends of life together: Krishna names himself as death, the all-snatcher, and in the same breath as 'udbhava,' the arising of those yet to come. He is the boundary at which a life ends and the boundary at which a life begins. Several commentators read this as God being the indwelling reality of both end-points of every embodied career, so there is no contradiction; the one Lord stands at birth and at death alike.
Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika · Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
Death belongs among the glories because of its sheer completeness of power. It is the 'all-snatcher,' the supreme thief that takes not just wealth but life and with it everything. On the highest reading it is the Lord who at cosmic dissolution withdraws the entire universe into himself. A power that total is precisely the kind of thing this chapter points to as a window onto God's greatness.
Śaṅkarācārya · Swami Sivananda · Dhanapati Sūri
And death is not only a power to fear but a hidden mercy. The forgetting it brings erases the worry and delusion that would otherwise pile up across countless births, and that erasing power is wholly God's. Seen this way, death is not God's cruelty but God's compassion, which is why it can stand beside fame, fortune, and forbearance as one of his glories.
Swami Ramsukhdas
Contemplation
Consider death not as theft but as mercy. Ramsukhdas asks you to notice that you have been born countless times, and to imagine carrying the full memory of every one of those lives into this one. Every relationship, every possession, every loss from numberless past births would still be pressing on your mind, and your worry and delusion would have no end. The forgetting that death brings is what spares you this. It quietly wipes the slate so that no anxiety carries over from the family or wealth of a former life. And this erasing power, he insists, is not death's own; it is the Supreme's gift working through death. So when you fear death as the great taker, you can also see in it the hand that lifts an unbearable weight of remembered sorrow, and recognize that very mercy as God himself.
Sit with this · Swami Ramsukhdas
Pull up a chair.
You have come to sit with this verse. When you are ready to hear the translators and the commentators in full, tap a name in The seating.