Chapter 12 · Verse 18·Spoken by Krishna
समः शत्रौ च मित्रे च तथा मानापमानयोः।शीतोष्णसुखदुःखेषु समः सङ्गविवर्जितः
samaḥ śhatrau cha mitre cha tathā mānāpamānayoḥ śhītoṣhṇa-sukha-duḥkheṣhu samaḥ saṅga-vivarjitaḥ
He is the same toward friend and foe, the same in honor and dishonor. He is the same in cold and heat, in happiness and sorrow. He is free from attachment.
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Sanskrit recitation by Swami Brahmānanda
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Convergence
his verse continues Krishna's portrait of the devotee He holds dear by listing the pairs of opposites in which such a person stays even-minded. He is the same toward an enemy and toward a friend, the same in honor and dishonor, the same in cold and heat, and the same in pleasure and pain. The pairs are deliberately spread across different parts of life: the relational (enemy and friend), the social (honor and dishonor), and the bodily or sensory (cold and heat, pleasure and pain). The point is not one isolated kind of calm but an evenness that holds across every front on which a person is normally pulled this way and that.
Braided from 14 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Dhanapati Sūri · Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika · Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar · Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas
Several commentators are careful to define who the foe and the friend are, and to locate the equality on the devotee's own side rather than in the world's behavior. A foe is one who does harm or shows hatred; a friend is one who does good or shows affection. The devotee does not deny that people act toward him as enemies or friends; he simply does not let their disposition produce hatred or favoritism in his own heart. From his own side he is empty of both hatred and partiality, of one face toward all. Equality here means the inner mind stays unchanged, free of elation and despondency, whatever others bring.
Śrī Ānandagiri · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas
Honor and dishonor, and likewise praise that may come with them, are treated as things done to the body and the name from outside. Because the devotee carries no sense of I and mine in this body or this reputation, the world's worship or contempt makes no dent in his inner instrument, his antahkarana. He neither swells with elation when honored nor sinks with despondency when slighted. The same logic runs through cold and heat and through pleasure and pain: when the senses meet their objects, or when wealth and the things people want are gained or lost, no wave of joy or grief rises in him.
Braided from 6 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas · Dhanapati Sūri
The closing mark, sanga-vivarjitah, free of attachment, is read as the inner ground that makes all the foregoing evenness possible. Attachment is the clinging or the false overlay of attractiveness that the mind throws onto objects, both the sentient, such as people, and the insentient, such as fragrant sandalwood. To be free of attachment is to cling nowhere, to stop superimposing desirability onto things. Where there is no such clinging, the pairs of opposites lose their grip; the attached person suffers, the one who has let go does not. This is why the verse ends here: non-attachment is the root, and the equanimity in all the pairs is its fruit.
Braided from 9 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrī Puruṣottama · Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas
Divergence
Viśiṣṭādvaita
These commentators read the verse not as a fresh teaching but as a deepening of the earlier marks already given (hating no being, and the rest). The earlier verses told of the absence of hatred toward foe and friend; this verse adds that the devotee keeps an even mind even when foe and friend are actually present, and then adds a further specific quality on top. They place this within the larger argument that the one who is settled in the self, unattached to dwellings and the like, becomes the same in honor and dishonor, and that such a person, when also full of devotion, is dear to the Lord. One of them reads this verse together with the next as a single unit, a final catalogue in which the equalities cover the relational, the social, the bodily, and the verbal, with non-attachment as the inner ground and the Lord's response, dear to Me, as the constant refrain that crowns the discipline.
Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika
Śuddhādvaita
This reading agrees that the devotee is the same toward foe and friend, in honor and dishonor, and in cold and heat as they touch himself, but it draws a sharp distinction the others do not. The very evenness the devotee keeps for his own person he does not extend to the Lord whom he serves. Toward the served Bhagavan he should cultivate cold, heat, and the other conditions with love, and render whatever service each condition calls for. So equality is for the self, but loving, condition-sensitive service is for the Lord. It also stresses that the devotee stands wholly apart from the company of those not of this kind, and should instead keep company with fellow devotees who cultivate the Lord in this same way.
Vallabhācārya
Bhakti
This stream reads the verse as part of a sequence of seven verses listing the devotee's qualities, and explains the repetition itself: the qualities are named again and again to show how exceedingly rare they are, and they are to be applied by the wise in their proper gradation across devotees of higher and lower steadfastness, just as they actually occur. It also glosses freedom from attachment as the absence of bad company. Alongside this, one voice in this stream pours the verse into a stream of vivid images for the even-minded devotee: a lamp that does not light only its own household, a tree that gives equal shade to the man who fells it and the man who planted it, sugarcane that is not sweet only to the one who waters it, moonlight equally pleasing to king and pauper, the sky unstained by clouds, the sea that does not dry up when the rains fail, and the wind confined to no single place. The teaching is that the devotee treats all beings evenly and, above all, that the Lord prizes such a one beyond words and holds him as a crown upon His head.
Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar
A Seeker Asks
If being equal toward enemy and friend means feeling the same about both, does this verse ask me to stop loving the people close to me and grow cold to everyone alike?
The equality the verse asks for is not a flattening of warmth into indifference; it is the absence of hatred and partiality in your own heart. The foe is one who does you harm, the friend one who does you good, and the teaching is that neither should be allowed to produce hatred or favoritism in you. You are asked to be of one face from your own side, not to deny that people relate to you differently.
Śrī Ānandagiri · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Swami Sivananda · Śrī Puruṣottama
One commentator gives a concrete picture that dissolves the worry. Imagine an enemy and a friend bring a property dispute to the even-minded devotee to judge. He may even award a little more to the one who treats him as an enemy and a little less to the friend; to the eye this looks like unfairness, yet because he divides without bias, the very seeming inequality is itself true equality. So evenness shows up not as cold sameness but as freedom from taking sides. It does not switch off care; it switches off the distortions of liking and disliking.
Swami Ramsukhdas
What actually steadies underneath is non-attachment, the end of clinging and of throwing a false glamour onto people and things. When that clinging loosens, the pairs of opposites lose their grip and the heart stops swinging between elation and despondency. In one devotional reading this is not a draining of love at all but its purification: as worldly attachment recedes, the native love for the Lord rises and overflows toward all beings, like a lamp that refuses to light only its own household or a tree that shades equally the one who fells it and the one who planted it.
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Swami Ramsukhdas · Sant Jñāneśvar
Contemplation
Notice where the binding really happens. It is not the things outside you, the home you keep, the wealth you hold, the body you carry, that chain you; it is the attachment in your own heart. A dying person gives up even his body, yet that is no freedom, because the clinging in the heart was never let go. So the work is not mainly to push objects away but to uproot attachment itself. Watch how this plays out: praise and blame land on the name, honor and insult land on the body, but if you carry no sense of I and mine in name or body, they leave no mark; you feel no pull toward the one who praises and no push against the one who blames. And here is the quiet promise: in every living being there is by nature an underlying love for God that the false sense of mine-ness in the world keeps hidden as worldly attachment. The moment that love appears, attachment vanishes the way darkness vanishes when the sun rises. You do not have to manufacture equanimity by force. As clinging to the world recedes, your native love for the Lord rises on its own, and from there flows an unbroken, ever-deepening exchange of love between you and Him.
Sit with this · Swami Ramsukhdas
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