Chapter 14 · Verse 4·Spoken by Arjuna
सर्वयोनिषु कौन्तेय मूर्तयः सम्भवन्ति याः।तासां ब्रह्म महद्योनिरहं बीजप्रदः पिता
sarva-yoniṣhu kaunteya mūrtayaḥ sambhavanti yāḥ tāsāṁ brahma mahad yonir ahaṁ bīja-pradaḥ pitā
Whatever forms are born from any womb, Arjuna, the great Brahman is their womb, and I am the father who gives the seed.
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Sanskrit recitation by Swami Brahmānanda
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Convergence
his verse names the two parents of every living thing that is ever born. Krishna is answering a hidden objection: if he is the source of all beings, what about the many particular causes we see in the world, the specific wombs of gods, ancestors, humans, animals, birds and the rest? His reply is that all those particular wombs are gathered up under one cosmic womb and one cosmic father. 'Sarva-yonishu' means 'in all wombs', covering every class of being. 'Murtayah' means the forms, the actual shaped bodies with their limbs and parts, that come to be in those wombs. Whatever forms arise anywhere, of all of them the 'mahad-brahma', the great Brahman, is the womb, and Krishna himself is the seed-giving father.
Braided from 12 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas
The 'mahad-brahma', the great Brahman of this verse, is read as primal material nature, prakriti, taking the place of the mother. It is the great matrix out of which all bodies come, the field in which forms grow as plants grow in earth. Several commentators name it explicitly as prakriti or pradhana or mula-prakriti, and a few add that it is the same as maya. It is called 'great' because it is the one vast source standing behind the countless particular wombs; those proximate wombs are only its further differentiations, so the great Brahman itself has become the several causes we see at every level.
Braided from 9 commentators
Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri · Rāmānujācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
Krishna's own role is that of the father who gives the seed, the 'bija-prada'. He is the one who performs the depositing of the seed, the act that quickens the womb. The whole manifested world is then the child born of nature in union with him. This grows directly from the previous verse, where the great Brahman was his womb and he placed the seed in it; here the same relation is generalized to every birth without exception, so that every embodied being in every kind of body is the joint work of nature as mother and the Lord as father.
Braided from 12 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama
This fathering is not a single event at the dawn of creation but the perpetual texture of all becoming. Several commentators stress the word 'always': not only when the worlds first appear, but at every moment a being comes into being, the same two causes are at work. So in every instance of birth, in every womb, the Lord is the inseminator and nature the womb. This is why the earlier statement that the birth of all beings is from him holds true without strain.
Dhanapati Sūri · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha
Divergence
Advaita Vedānta
On this reading the great Brahman is the cosmic material cause that is present in every state and has itself become the several particular causes, so that the many distinct wombs are not rivals to the one source but only forms the great Brahman has taken. One source spells out the four modes of birth, womb-born, egg-born, sweat-born and sprout-born, and explains that the particular states of the great Brahman are exactly those 'other causes' an objector might point to, which is why all beings can be said to come from that one source. One voice in this school goes further and treats the great Brahman as maya, drawing out the seed-giving with a striking image: as a man pours seed mixed with his own impressions into the wife, so that from the wife the body arises and from the seed-portion the consciousness arises, just so the Lord is father of the consciousness and maya the mother of the body, and he places his own reflection in each being.
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha
Viśiṣṭādvaita
Here the great Brahman is nature in its full unfolding, from the great principle down to the particular elements, and the host of conscious beings is joined to that insentient nature by the Lord. The Lord's fathering is specifically the joining of these conscious selves to bodies here and there in keeping with each one's karma; at the start of creation, under the sway of earlier deeds, he places them in the wombs of gods and the rest. So the cosmic relation holds at every level: every birth is the Lord's seed in the womb of cosmic nature, shown through the nearer, proximate wombs.
Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika
Śuddhādvaita
On this reading the whole effect-world of conscious and unconscious nature is the Lord's own work, and the seeming pair of nature and person that worldly thinkers take as two separate principles is in truth the Lord's own twofold self-positing: his power is the womb and he himself is the seed. The seed is described as made of his own will and knowledge, and the great Brahman becomes the manifold womb by his will and shines forth as the many. As standing witness to this single-source doctrine, these commentators point to the woman-and-man pairs of the Puranas, such as the divine consort-and-Lord forms, set everywhere in their feminine-and-masculine natures.
Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama
Kashmir Shaivism
Here the mother is the growth-causing power of the Blessed One, the first cause whose very nature is to generate the whole round of transmigration. The father is the Lord who holds that power and who cannot himself be pointed out or singled out. The accent falls on the inseparable power-and-holder relation: the generating power that brings the worlds round and round is his own, and he who wields it stands beyond all indication.
Ācārya Abhinavagupta
Bhakti
These devotional commentators read the verse as the perpetual, personal fathering of all beings by the Lord together with nature as mother, covering every form from the gods down to a tuft of grass or an unmoving thing, moving and unmoving alike. One source identifies the seed-giving as the Lord's joining of the aggregate of atomic conscious beings to bodies in accordance with karma. The fullest devotional voice presses the unity behind the diversity: the Lord is the father, the great Brahman or maya the mother, and the whole universe the offspring; the seeker should not be confounded by the diverse bodies, for as different organs belong to one body, or many waves to one sea, or pot to clay and cloth to cotton, so the one Lord stands to the entire universe, present in and through all of it without being diminished by the show, as gold is not lost in the ornament nor a ruby in its own lustre.
Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Sant Jñāneśvar
Modern
These modern commentators keep the plain teaching that the Lord is the father, primordial nature is the mother, and the manifested world is their child. One develops the verse at length: the four wombs, womb-born, egg-born, sweat-born and earth-splitting, branch out into the eighty-four lakh species, and even within one species no two forms are exactly alike, yet into all of them the Lord places his own conscious portion as seed. The point drawn is that the one supreme Self appears different only because the bodies differ; finely seen, one and the same Self pervades all bodies, like a single water that fills both the threads and the tiny holes of a soaked cloth, where the cloth is nature, the holes are the bodies, and the water is the supreme reality.
Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas
A Seeker Asks
If every being has the same cosmic womb and the same cosmic father, why is the world so full of different bodies and lives, and does that one source mean we are ultimately one?
The single source does not flatten the variety; it is precisely what produces it. The great Brahman, primal nature, is the one vast womb, but it differentiates itself into the countless particular wombs and the four modes of birth, so that the many distinct kinds of body are simply the forms the one nature has taken. The endless difference of bodies is the unfolding of one matrix, not a crowd of unrelated origins.
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Rāmānujācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Swami Ramsukhdas
The difference lies in the bodies, not in what is seated within them. The Lord places his own conscious portion as the seed into bodies of every kind and shape; coarsely seen this seems to differ from body to body, but finely seen it is one and the same reality pervading all of them, as one water fills both the threads and the holes of a soaked cloth. So beneath the diversity there is genuine unity of source and of the indwelling Self.
Swami Ramsukhdas · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha
And this unity does not erase the show or shrink the source. The one reality stands to the whole universe as the sea to its waves or as gold to its ornaments, present in everything yet undiminished by becoming the many. To grasp this is to stop being bewildered by the diverse bodies and to see the entire universe, inside and out, as the one Self's own being.
Sant Jñāneśvar
Contemplation
When the sheer variety of the world tempts you to feel scattered and lost among countless separate bodies, hold this steadily in mind: do not be confounded at seeing the diverse forms, for in principle they are one and the same. As different organs belong to one body, as high and low branches grow from one seed, as pot is the child of clay and cloth of cotton, as many waves are the offspring of one sea, so the one source stands to this entire universe. And that source is not diminished by appearing as the many. Does gold lose its gold-nature by becoming an ornament? Does a ruby vanish into its own lustre? Does the lotus lose itself by opening fully? In the same way the whole universe, inside and out, is the one Self's own being. Keep this pure and definite knowledge firmly fixed, and the diversity that once bewildered you becomes the very glory by which the one reality shines.
Sit with this · Sant Jñāneśvar
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