Chapter 16 · Verse 12·Spoken by Krishna
आशापाशशतैर्बद्धाः कामक्रोधपरायणाः।ईहन्ते कामभोगार्थमन्यायेनार्थसञ्चयान्
āśhā-pāśha-śhatair baddhāḥ kāma-krodha-parāyaṇāḥ īhante kāma-bhogārtham anyāyenārtha-sañchayān
Bound by hundreds of ties of hope, given over to desire and anger, they strive to amass wealth by unjust means for the gratification of their desires.
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 pictures the demoniac person as someone tied up. The image is aasha-paasha, the noose of hope or expectation: aasha means hope or craving expectation, and paasha means a rope, snare, or noose. The commentators read the line tightly, saying the hopes themselves are the ropes. There are hundreds of them. So the person is not loosely held but bound on every side and dragged about by his own wantings. Several add that this craving is endless: even when one hope is satisfied, more spring up, so the wealth he gathers never quiets the thirst but feeds it. Sivananda and Madhusudana both stress that the thirst grows with each gain, and Ramsukhdas presses the point that worldly hope is never finally filled, while even when it is, the object perishes or the seeker does, so it brings no lasting good.
Braided from 11 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Dhanapati Sūri · Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Sant Jñāneśvar · Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas
Such a person has made desire and anger his highest resort. The Sanskrit is kaama-krodha-paraayana: kaama is desire or lust, krodha is anger, and paraayana means one's supreme refuge or the thing one is wholly given over to. The commentators say these two have become the very axis of his life. Ramsukhdas unpacks the inner conviction behind this: in such a person's settled view, a man without desire is reduced to a stone, and a man without anger loses his force, since anger is what makes others obey. So desire and anger are not lapses for him; they are his chosen footing, the resort he runs back to.
Braided from 10 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Dhanapati Sūri · Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Sant Jñāneśvar · Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas
From this inner state comes the outward act named in the verse: he strains to pile up wealth by unjust means, and he does it for the enjoyment of desires, not for dharma. The verb iihante means they strive or exert themselves, and the commentators are clear that the goal is kaama-bhoga, the enjoyment of cravings, while the method is anyaaya, injustice. They spell out what injustice means concretely: seizing what belongs to others, theft, robbery, cheating, fraud, even killing. Shankara and Madhusudana mark the contrast sharply, saying the effort is for enjoyment and not for the sake of dharma, righteousness. Ramsukhdas lists the modern forms this takes, from fraud and tax evasion to dipping into the funds of temples, children, and widows.
Braided from 12 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri · Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Sant Jñāneśvar · Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas
Several commentators draw out the deeper irony hidden in the verse: this person is not actually free or in command, even though he imagines himself a doer who grasps and takes. His own hopes have become his ropes. He is whirled and dragged by them rather than wielding them. Sridhara ties the line back to the anxiety of the previous verse, saying the demoniac is not free even amid his demoniac fortune; his very hopes have turned into the cords that drag him to and fro. The picture is one of bondage masquerading as power.
Śaṅkarācārya · Dhanapati Sūri · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Swami Ramsukhdas
Divergence
Advaita Vedānta
These commentators read the verse as a precise diagnosis of bondage by craving and give the noose-image its sharpest analytic edge. They define the hopes that bind as expectations fixed on ends or means that are impossible or unknown, so the very structure of the craving guarantees frustration. Madhusudana works out the psychology of greed: the plural in heaps of wealth shows a thirst that keeps growing even as wealth is gained, so the craving never closes. The accent throughout falls on the contrast between effort spent for enjoyment and effort spent for dharma, and on how these hopes dislodge a person from the good and lead him astray.
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Dhanapati Sūri
Viśiṣṭādvaita
These commentators give a clean structural reading of the verse, naming its three parts in order: the expectation-snares that bind, the desire-anger pair that guides or directs the person, and the unjust gathering of wealth that serves as the means. The verse is read as laying out, almost like a diagram, what holds the demoniac, what steers him, and how he acts. The emphasis stays on the lawless or unlawful character of the wealth-gathering.
Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika
Śuddhādvaita
This commentator reads the verse through the lens of refuge and shelter. The hundredfold hope-snares are not just a moralist's list of bad desires; they are the binding of the person into taking refuge in many petty deities and lesser supports, an alternative shelter that stands in the very place where refuge in the Lord, Bhagavan, should have stood. On this reading the person's root-refuge, paramaayana, has become desire and anger alone. The unjust grasping for wealth is only the outward symptom; the inward fact is the loss of the one true shelter for which the divine endowment had been preparing him.
Śrī Puruṣottama
Bhakti
These commentators bring the verse vividly to life as a portrait. Sridhara reads it as the close of the twelve-verse demonic portrait, tying the anxiety of the prior verse to the noose of this one and stressing that the person is dragged by his hopes rather than wielding them. Jnaneshwar expands the verse into a chain of images: the person is like a fish that swallows the baited hook, like a cocoon insect spinning a web around itself with futile hopes, like a sentry who paces by day and stays awake by night and never rests; ungratified desire curdles into hatred, and the hunt for wealth becomes a literal hunt in which they kill, rob, and torture. Baladeva uses the verse as the doorway into the demoniac's boastful daydreams that follow, where he credits every gain to his own strength alone and not to the unseen or the grace of the Lord.
Śrīdhara Svāmī · Sant Jñāneśvar · Śrīla Baladeva
Modern
These commentators read the verse as a direct mirror for present-day life. Sivananda underlines that such people murder and rob purely for sense-pleasure, never for righteous action, and that hope itself is what binds a person to the wheel of samsara, the round of birth and death, so it is rightly likened to a rope. Ramsukhdas gives the fullest practical unfolding: he catalogues the endless objects the craving reaches toward, including saints, the Lord, fellow men, and even animals, birds, trees, mountains, and the sea; he names the demoniac's inner premises that no one grows rich today by honest means and that to be honest is to court suffering; and he contrasts the restlessness of one bound by hope with the contentment of one freed from it, who sits at peace just as he is.
Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas
A Seeker Asks
If hope and ambition are what bind, is every hope a trap, or only the unjust grasping that this verse actually condemns?
The verse does not condemn effort or desire as such; it condemns a specific configuration. What it names is striving for the enjoyment of cravings and not for dharma, righteousness, and doing it by anyaaya, unjust means like seizing what belongs to others. The fault is in the lawless method and the self-enclosed aim, not in wanting anything at all.
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika · Swami Ramsukhdas
The deeper mark of the trap is endlessness and slavery. The hope that binds is the one that keeps growing with every gain so that it never quiets, and the one that turns you from a person who holds his wishes into a person dragged about by them. When a hope has become your supreme resort, taking the place of desire and anger as the axis you run back to, that is when it has become a noose.
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Dhanapati Sūri · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas
One commentator locates the real loss precisely: the hundred hope-snares matter because they install a false shelter where true refuge should stand. The danger is not having hopes but letting them become your root-refuge, the place that the Lord, or the good itself, was meant to occupy.
Śrī Puruṣottama
Contemplation
Notice the difference the verse is pointing at. The one bound by hope cannot rest peacefully in one place, because there is always something more he is reaching for: more wealth, more honor, more from other people, more even from the world around him. His hunger never closes. The one freed from hope sits content exactly as he is. The practical turn is not to despise every wish, but to watch the place where a wish has hardened into a rope you no longer hold but that holds you, where it drives you toward gaining at another's expense and convinces you that honesty is for fools. Ask of your own hopes whether you are wielding them or being dragged by them. The peace this verse quietly promises is on the side of the one who can put the rope down.
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.