Chapter 13 · Verse 7·Spoken by Arjuna
इच्छा द्वेषः सुखं दुःखं सङ्घातश्चेतनाधृतिः।एतत्क्षेत्रं समासेन सविकारमुदाहृतम्
ichchhā dveṣhaḥ sukhaṁ duḥkhaṁ saṅghātaśh chetanā dhṛitiḥ etat kṣhetraṁ samāsena sa-vikāram udāhṛitam
Desire and aversion, pleasure and pain, the aggregate of the body, sentience, and fortitude. This is the field, briefly described, along with its changes.
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Sanskrit recitation by Swami Brahmānanda
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Convergence
his verse finishes the inventory of the kshetra, the 'field', which is Krishna's word for the whole apparatus of body and mind that a person mistakenly calls 'I'. The earlier verses listed the outer building-blocks (the great elements, the senses, and so on); now Krishna adds the inner conditions that complete the field: desire (iccha), aversion (dvesha), pleasure (sukha), pain (duhkha), the aggregate (sanghata), consciousness (chetana), and steadiness (dhriti). The verse then closes the whole survey: 'this is the field, briefly stated, together with its modifications.' So these seven inner items are not a new subject; they are the last entries in one continuous list, and the verse is a summing-up.
Braided from 8 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Vedānta Deśika · Śrī Jayatīrtha · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Swami Ramsukhdas · Swami Sivananda
The heart of the verse is a correction. A natural mistake, and one several philosophical schools actually made, is to treat desire, aversion, pleasure, pain, knowing, and resolve as qualities of the Self, marks of what we truly are. Krishna places them firmly on the field side instead. They are objects of awareness, things that are seen, and whatever is seen cannot be the seer. So they belong to the mind and body, not to the conscious witness. The point of saying so is liberating: when these inner states are recognized as 'the field's', not 'mine in my deepest nature', the false identification that binds a person begins to loosen.
Braided from 8 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri · Vedānta Deśika · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas
The commentators unpack the seven terms with care. Desire is the mind's reaching out, 'let this be mine', toward what once gave pleasure; aversion is its opposite recoil, 'let this not be mine', toward what once gave pain. Pleasure is the agreeable, serene, sattvic state of mind, and pain its disagreeable contrary. The aggregate is the body-and-senses taken as one bundled unit. Consciousness (chetana) is the mind's knowing-function, often pictured as the intellect catching the light of the Self the way a heated iron ball seems to become fire, or a clean mirror takes a reflection: itself insentient, it appears sentient by borrowed light. Steadiness (dhriti) is the holding-power that props up body, senses, and mind when they sink into weariness. The list is meant as a sample, not a complete catalogue; naming desire 'and the rest' stands for all the states of the inner instrument, which scripture sums up as 'desire, resolve, doubt, faith, lack of faith, steadiness, unsteadiness, shame, intelligence, fear: all this is mind alone'.
Braided from 7 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas
The decisive word is 'with-modification' (savikaram). 'Modification' means change: arising, lasting, and passing away. Everything in the list, from the elements through steadiness, is subject to this change, and that very changefulness is the mark that identifies it as field rather than Self. The witness, by contrast, must be free of modification, for a thing that itself arose and perished could not steadily witness arising and perishing; only the unchanging can register all change. So it is the quality of being-with-modification, not merely the length of the list, that pins these items down as the field.
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Swami Ramsukhdas
Divergence
Advaita Vedānta
These commentators read the verse as a direct refutation of rival accounts of the self. They name the targets: the materialists who say the body-and-sense aggregate is itself the conscious knower; the momentariness theorists who say a flickering stream of knowing is the self; and above all the logicians and atomists (Vaisheshika, Nyaya, Kanada) who treat desire, aversion, effort, pleasure, pain, and knowledge as 'qualities of the Self'. To all of these Krishna answers: no, these are field-modifications, properties of the inner instrument and ultimately of mind, illumined by the witness but not belonging to it. The witness is changeless and unattached; the apparent 'I' that owns desires is itself something superimposed on pure consciousness, so nothing real is lost when it is reassigned to the field. Consciousness in the list (chetana) is therefore not the true Self but the intellect lit up like fire in an iron ball, a borrowed glow.
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri
Viśiṣṭādvaita
This reading agrees that desire, aversion, pleasure, pain, consciousness-as-mark, and steadiness belong to the field and not to the knower, but it draws the line with its own precision. The kshetrajna is the witness of these inner states, not their owner; the candidate's task is to hear that they are his body's modifications, which he merely watches. Special weight falls on chetana: it is named here deliberately as a field-modification to be 'heard carefully'. This chetana, the body's consciousness-mark, is the operation of the intellect (buddhi) lighting up the field; it is distinct from the knower's own consciousness, for the knower is conscious in his very nature, whereas the body's chetana is the buddhi's lighting-up, which is itself part of the changing field.
Vedānta Deśika
Dvaita
This reading is brief and structural. Its concern is to settle which items in the long preceding list are 'the field' and which are 'its modifications', since the earlier summary verse had left that ambiguous. The answer: 'desire and the rest' are the modifications, and what came before them is the field proper. So the verse functions chiefly as a labeling key for the inventory, sorting the catalogue into base and changes.
Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha
Śuddhādvaita
These commentators accept that desire, aversion, pleasure, and pain are spoken of as field-borne, but they refuse to brand them as alien intruders forced onto the self. Desire and the rest belong by nature to the self; they are called field-borne only because they arise when the consciousness-portion of the self comes into contact with the field. Read in this devotional key, the whole field takes on a positive purpose. The body, with its modifications, is given by the Lord himself for the sake of devotion (bhakti); it is fashioned by his will and is the very stuff out of which he works his play (lila). The inquiry into the field is set under the heading 'made manifest for the sake of his play', and for the devotee the field of the affections becomes a play-field of the Lord, so that the very modifications that look like bondage are the means by which the loving soul is brought to the love that frees.
Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama
Bhakti
Among the devotional commentators, this voice stays close to the Advaita-style reading of the verse's own content: desire and the rest are objects of awareness (drishya), therefore not properties of the Self but of the mind, and so they fall within the field. The list is a sample standing for resolve and the other mental states, confirmed by the same scripture that 'all this is mind alone'. The note adds only that by this list the earlier promise to show the 'what-kind-of-thing' nature of the field is fulfilled, and that this concludes the field-section. The other named devotional commentators on file here do not gloss the iccha-dvesha list itself; their text treats the next theme, the means to knowledge.
Śrīdhara Svāmī
Modern
The modern commentators take the verse practically and psychologically. One traces the life-cycle of desire in detail: an object is enjoyed, an impression is stored, memory revives it, hope feeds it, and desire flares again like fire fed with fuel; withdraw the fuel and the fire of thought goes out. The same applies to the rest: aversion is the mind's recoil when desire is thwarted, steadiness is the harmonizing power that holds even the mutually hostile elements together in one body, and consciousness is intelligence appearing in the aggregate like fire in iron. The other modern voice makes the verse a map of bondage: desire is named first because it is the root modification, the source of all wrongdoing and sorrow; aversion is the subtle residue of thwarted desire turned to anger; the body, the life-force, and the holding-power are all in ceaseless change. The seeker is shown the seven 'knots' that the knower mistakes for himself; each is really an 'it' wearing the dress of 'I', and once seen as an 'it', the knot loosens and the false bond falls away.
Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas
A Seeker Asks
If my desires, feelings, and even my knowing are not really me but only my field's changing states, then what or where am I in all this?
The verse does not erase you; it relocates you. Everything it lists, desire, aversion, pleasure, pain, the body, consciousness-as-function, and steadiness, is marked 'with modification', meaning it arises, lasts a while, and passes away. That changefulness is exactly the clue: you are not any of these passing states, because you are the one to whom they appear, the steady awareness in which they come and go.
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Swami Ramsukhdas
The reasoning is that whatever is seen cannot be the seer. Desire, feeling, and even the mind's knowing-function are objects of your awareness; they are 'the field'. The witness that knows them must be other than them and must be unchanging, since only what does not itself arise and perish can register the arising and perishing of everything else. So you are that witness, not the contents it watches.
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Swami Sivananda
This is good news, not loss. What you are reassigning to the field is only the anxious, owning 'I' that clutches its desires and moods; your real nature is unattached and was never bound by them. Some devotional readings add that the field is not your enemy at all: the body and its very modifications are given for the sake of love and become the means by which the soul is drawn to what frees it. Either way, seeing these states as the field's, and not as your deepest self, is the very loosening the verse is built to give.
Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Vallabhācārya · Swami Ramsukhdas
Contemplation
Take this verse as a quiet self-inquiry rather than a doctrine to memorize. Sit with the seven items it lists, desire, aversion, pleasure, pain, the body-bundle, the life-force, and the holding-power, and watch how each one keeps changing: a wish rises and passes, a mood comes and goes, the breath quickens and calms, courage is held one moment and dropped the next. These are the seven knots that you habitually take as 'I', but each is really an 'it', an object that you are noticing, merely wearing the dress of 'I'. The practice is simple and gentle: the moment you can see a state as an 'it' that is appearing to you, the grip of 'this is me' begins to loosen, and the false bond quietly falls away. You do not have to fight the states or suppress them; you only have to see them clearly as the field's changing weather, and let the seeing do its work.
Sit with this · Swami Ramsukhdas
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