Chapter 17 · Verse 6·Spoken by Krishna
कर्षयन्तः शरीरस्थं भूतग्राममचेतसः।मां चैवान्तःशरीरस्थं तान्विद्ध्यासुरनिश्चयान्
karṣhayantaḥ śharīra-sthaṁ bhūta-grāmam achetasaḥ māṁ chaivāntaḥ śharīra-sthaṁ tān viddhy āsura-niśhchayān
Without discernment, they torment the elements that form the body, and they torment Me, who dwell within the body. Know them to be set on a demonic course.
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Sanskrit recitation by Swami Brahmānanda
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Convergence
he verse describes false ascetics who, through their harsh and unscriptural austerity, wear down and weaken the body. The word translated 'tormenting' or 'emaciating' (karshayantah) means making thin or wasting away. What they waste is the 'bhuta-grama', the assembly of elements that make up the body: earth and the other primordial elements, together with the whole group of organs. These people are called 'achetasah', which means lacking discrimination, senseless, deluded, devoid of wisdom. The point is that this is not skillful self-discipline but a witless coercion of the body, an austerity emptied of understanding.
Braided from 11 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri · Rāmānujācārya · Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas · Sant Jñāneśvar
The decisive turn of the verse is that this self-torture does not stop at the body. By wearing down the body, these ascetics torment Me, says Krishna, for I dwell within the body. The commentators identify this indweller as the inner Lord, the witness of every thought and deed, present within as Narayana, Vasudeva, or the antaryamin, the one who governs from within. So to mortify the body is to strike at the very dwelling place of the Lord. The body is not an enemy to be punished; it is the seat of the indwelling divine, and harsh austerity reaches through the body to wound the One who lives there.
Braided from 10 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri · Rāmānujācārya · Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Swami Sivananda · Sant Jñāneśvar · Swami Ramsukhdas
Several commentators add a second sense in which the Lord is tormented: by transgressing His command (ajna). Such austerity, undertaken against scripture, is itself a defiance of what the Lord has ordained; and to disregard His command is itself to do Him violence. So the offense is twofold. There is the wearing down of the body that houses the Lord, and there is the breaking of the Lord's own instruction, which scripture gives as the measure of right practice. The false ascetic injures the indweller both by the act and by the disobedience the act represents.
Braided from 6 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri · Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīdhara Svāmī
Krishna therefore tells Arjuna to know such people as 'asura-nishchayan', those of demonic resolve, whose settled conviction is demonic. This 'nishchaya' is not a passing mood but a fixed inner stand: a determination set against the Lord and His command. And the reason Krishna names them at all is practical and protective. He points them out, the commentators stress, not to dwell on them but so that Arjuna may recognize them and keep clear of them. The warning closes by showing where such resolve leads and equipping the seeker to avoid that company.
Braided from 11 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Dhanapati Sūri · Rāmānujācārya · Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas · Sant Jñāneśvar · Madhvācārya
The verse also serves as a hinge. Having finished the account of demonic austerity, Krishna now opens the long teaching on the threefold ordering of life by the three qualities (gunas): sattva (clarity and goodness), rajas (passion and restlessness), and tamas (darkness and inertia). He begins with food, because the growth of the qualities has food for its root, and the food one is drawn to reveals one's own quality. By noticing which foods one craves, one can recognize whether one is sattvic, rajasic, or tamasic, and then turn from the lower foods to the sattvic. The same threefold division will then be applied to sacrifice, austerity, and giving.
Śaṅkarācārya · Rāmānujācārya · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas · Sant Jñāneśvar
Divergence
Advaita Vedānta
On this reading the indweller who is tormented is the supreme Lord present as the witness (Narayana, the witness of every act and thought) and as the inner controller within the body. The tormenting is understood chiefly as the disregard of His command: to set aside what the Lord has ordained is itself to do Him violence. The harsh austerity is thus read as a transgression of the divine instruction, and the demonic resolve is the fixed conviction that flouts it. The practical aim is to recognize such people and keep clear of them.
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri
Advaita Vedānta
This voice raises and resolves the puzzle directly. How can the Lord, the witness of the body, be emaciated by creatures at all? The answer offered is that the tormenting works through the transgression of His command, and that He points out these people of perverse certainty for a definite use: for the sake of warding them off. So the naming is not condemnation for its own sake but a protective instruction to the seeker.
Śrī Ānandagiri
Dvaita
This school insists that the Lord is changeless and so cannot literally be made thin. The 'tormenting' of the Lord is therefore explained, on the strength of cited scripture, as a defective seeing of Him: he who fails to see the great supreme Person rightly is called a tormentor and an exceeding sinner. Notably this source sets aside two other explanations: that the indweller is the Lord present in the form of the individual soul (jiva), and that the tormenting is merely the non-carrying-out of His command, holding the latter unwarranted by the words. It also addresses why, though the context is about the dark quality (tamas), the verse says 'demonic' rather than 'tamasic': citing scripture, the sattvic are the gods and the rajasic and tamasic are the daityas (demons), so the two terms answer to one another.
Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha
Viśiṣṭādvaita
Here the verse is read with a distinctive double object of injury. The false ascetics, joined with pretence and egotism and driven by desire and passion, wither both the assembly of elements present in the body and also the soul, which is described as a portion of Mine, present within the body. The austerity is unscriptural, terrible, and full of toil, and 'austerity' here stands by way of indication for unscriptural sacrifice and the rest as well. The demonic resolve is defined by opposition to the Lord's command: because demons do what is contrary to His command, they gain no particle of happiness and fall into an impure hell. The transition to food is grounded in scripture: the mind is made of food, and on purity of food follows purity of being.
Rāmānujācārya
Śuddhādvaita
This school reads the verse from the centre of the path of grace (Pushtimarga). The body is the dwelling place that the Lord, the inner controller (antaryami-svarupa), has settled within for His own play (lila); it is not to be tortured as if it were an enemy. The false ascetic, by useless fasts and the like that bring no delight to the Lord and are cut off from devotion to Him, wears down the elements of the body and so wears down the very Lord who stands within, even casting Him far off. The demonic resolve is therefore named not as mere thinness of body but as a structural inversion of nourishment and flourishing (pushti): the giving of pain to the divine portion within, by an austerity severed from the devotional disposition that alone makes austerity coherent. By this it is signified that austerities and duties undertaken without relation to the Lord are themselves to be abandoned.
Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama
Bhakti
This devotional reading sets the verse against any doctrine that would mortify the body, because the body is the temple of the inner controller. To torture the body is to defy the command of the Lord within it; the false ascetic punishes the very dwelling place of the Lord, and so all the afflictions he causes, to his own body or to others, cause exhaustion to the indwelling soul. One source goes further with applied counsel: such sinners are named only so that they may be avoided, and when the seeker meets them he should remember the Lord in his mind, for there is no other expiation; he should keep company that strengthens clarity (sattva) and take food that fosters it, since food shapes the bodily fluids and the fluids shape the emotions, as heat passes from a pot into the water it holds.
Śrīdhara Svāmī · Sant Jñāneśvar
Modern
These voices keep the plain ethical and diagnostic sense. The undiscriminating person oppresses not only the group of elements in the body but also the Lord who saturates that body; the indweller is Vasudeva, the witness of their thoughts and deeds, and to torture Him is to disregard His teaching entirely. One source stresses that a merely sattvic, rajasic, or tamasic faith does not by itself make a person demonic; what makes them demonic is that they pride themselves on their evil nature and flout scripture instead of using freedom of will to improve. Another underscores that 'demonic resolve' marks a fixed inner conviction, not a passing drift, which holds scripture to be a contrivance, the Lord to be absent, and the body to be mere material to be coerced, and so places them at the lowest rung; it then frames the coming teaching on food as a diagnostic instrument, since the food a man delights in is a window into his inner makeup, and food belongs to every person of whatever tradition because the body must be fed. (One modern essayist has no commentary specific to this chapter.)
Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas · Swami Sivananda · Sri Aurobindo
A Seeker Asks
If disciplining the body is the heart of so much spiritual practice, how do I tell honest self-discipline from the demonic self-torture this verse condemns?
The verse does not condemn discipline as such; it condemns austerity that is 'achetasah', without discrimination, and undertaken against scripture rather than according to it. The fault is not effort but witlessness and self-will, pride in one's own harsh nature in place of guidance. The remedy is to bring practice back under the measure that scripture and the Lord's command provide, instead of making one's own coercion the standard.
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Lokmanya Tilak · Rāmānujācārya
The deciding test is the body's true status. The body is the dwelling place of the indwelling Lord, the witness within, the seat the antaryamin has settled into. So self-discipline that honors and tends that dwelling is one thing; austerity that treats the body as an enemy to be punished is another, for it strikes at the One who lives within. Ask whether your practice cares for the temple or attacks it.
Śaṅkarācārya · Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīdhara Svāmī
A further test is whether the practice is joined to devotion or severed from it. Austerity cut off from any relation to the Lord, empty of the disposition that gives it meaning, is a hollow mortification and is itself to be abandoned. Genuine discipline is woven into remembrance of the Lord and the love of Him; that is what keeps it coherent and keeps it from curdling into self-torture.
Śrī Puruṣottama · Swami Ramsukhdas
Finally, watch where the practice tends. The fixed conviction that scripture is a mere contrivance, that the Lord is absent, and that the body is only material to be coerced is exactly the 'demonic resolve' the verse names, and it leads downward, not upward. By contrast, the seeker is meant to use freedom of will to improve his nature gradually, in step with scripture, which is the opposite movement.
Swami Ramsukhdas · Lokmanya Tilak
Contemplation
When you come across people who punish the body in the name of religion, or feel the pull to do so yourself, do not meet it with contempt or with imitation. The counsel here is gentle and concrete: remember the Lord in your mind, for that remembrance is itself the remedy. Then tend the conditions that grow clarity. Keep company that strengthens a sattvic, settled disposition, and take food that fosters it, because food is not a small thing. As heat passes from a heated pot into the water it holds, so the food you take forms the body's fluids, and those fluids in turn color the emotions that rise in the mind. There is no remedy more powerful for steadying the inner life than the food you choose. So the path away from self-violence is not more violence against the body but a quiet, attentive care for what you take in, in company and at the table alike.
Sit with this · Sant Jñāneśvar
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