Chapter 2 · Verse 20·Spoken by Krishna
न जायते म्रियते वा कदाचि न्नायं भूत्वा भविता वा न भूयः। अजो नित्यः शाश्वतोऽयं पुराणो न हन्यते हन्यमाने शरीरे
na jāyate mriyate vā kadāchin nāyaṁ bhūtvā bhavitā vā na bhūyaḥ ajo nityaḥ śhāśhvato ’yaṁ purāṇo na hanyate hanyamāne śharīre
The Self is never born and never dies. Having once existed, it never ceases to be. Unborn, eternal, everlasting, and ancient, it is not killed when the body is killed.
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Sanskrit recitation by Swami Brahmānanda
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Convergence
rishna gives the reason for what he just claimed in the previous verse, that the Self neither slays nor is slain. The reason is that the Self never changes. To make this concrete the commentators reach for an old grammarian's list: the etymologist Yaska names six 'modifications of being' (bhava-vikaras) that every worldly thing passes through. They are usually given as: it is born, it exists, it grows, it transforms (changes), it decays (wastes), and it dies (perishes). This single verse, the commentators agree, denies all six of these of the Self. So the verse is not a vague poem about immortality. It is a careful, point-by-point demonstration that none of the marks of a changing thing belongs to the Self.
Braided from 12 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Baladeva · Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas · Śrī Bhāskara · Rāmānujācārya · Śrīla Viśvanātha
The verse names only the first and last of the six modifications outright, birth and death, because denying these two already reaches the ones in the middle. The reasoning is precise. 'It is not born' (na jayate) means the Self never comes to be after not having been; a thing is called 'born' only when it begins to exist after previously not existing, and the Self always already exists, so it is unborn (aja). 'It does not die' (na mriyate) means the Self, having been, never afterward ceases to be; a thing is said to 'die' only when, having existed, it later is not, and the Self is after as it was before, so it is eternal (nitya). The little word 'va', usually 'or', is here read as 'and' by most commentators, so the line reads 'it is neither born and nor dies.'
Braided from 7 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Baladeva · Dhanapati Sūri · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha
The other terms in the verse are not idle repetition; each one shuts a specific door, which is why the commentators take pains to remove the appearance of redundancy. 'Eternal' or 'everlasting' (shashvata) denies decay or wasting: what always is does not wear away, because the Self has no parts to lose and no qualities to shed. 'Ancient' (purana) is read as 'old yet ever fresh' and denies growth: a thing grows by adding parts and is then called new, but the partless Self is 'new' even when old, so it never increases. Existence-after-birth and transformation, the two remaining modifications, are folded into birth and death and so need no separate word. Thus the four terms aja, nitya, shashvata, purana together cover the full sweep of change, and the verse is shown to be exact rather than wordy.
Braided from 8 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Baladeva · Dhanapati Sūri · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Śrīla Viśvanātha
The verse closes by returning to its purpose. 'It is not slain when the body is slain' (na hanyate hanyamane sharire) draws the practical conclusion from everything just argued. Because the Self is free of every modification, the slaying of the body does not touch it. Several commentators note that the verb here, normally 'slain', is best taken in the wider sense of 'transformed', so that the line denies not just killing but any alteration of the Self even as the body is altered and destroyed. This is the thread back to the preceding verse: since the Self cannot be changed or destroyed, the man who thinks himself a slayer and the man who thinks himself slain are both mistaken about who the Self really is.
Braided from 11 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Baladeva · Dhanapati Sūri · Rāmānujācārya · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrī Puruṣottama · Swami Sivananda · Śrī Bhāskara
Divergence
Advaita Vedānta
These commentators ground the Self's changelessness in its having no parts and no qualities. Decay cannot touch it because it neither declines in its own form, being partless, nor by losing qualities, being free of qualities; growth cannot touch it because nothing can be added to what has no parts. So the Self is 'new even when old.' One of these voices presses the point against rival philosophies. The Self cannot be a momentary stream of consciousness, as some Buddhist thinkers held, since the verse denies any arising-and-ceasing in any series whatever, and the plain fact 'I who was a child now experience my great-grandsons' shows one stable knower across all the stages of life, which a mere succession of momentary cognitions could never supply. It cannot be a body-sized soul that swells and shrinks across different bodies, from mosquito to elephant, as the Jainas held, for whatever grows and shrinks cannot be eternal. Nor can pleasure and pain be real new properties arising in the Self, for any real bearer of pain would, like a pot whose form perishes, have to be destructible. The terms unbornness, eternity, and constancy belong primarily to the Self alone; even space, which seems partless and lasting, holds these marks only in a secondary way.
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri
Viśiṣṭādvaita
Here birth and death are read as properties that belong to the insentient body, never to the self that dwells in it. These commentators address a sharp objection: scripture does speak of certain beings, such as Prajapati, being born at the start of a cosmic age (kalpa) and ceasing at its end, so does the self not then have a birth and a death? The answer is that what arises at the beginning of an age and dissolves at its end is the body, not the self's own nature; at the world's dawn and dusk there is only the contraction and expansion of the body the self wears, not any coming-to-be or passing-away of the self itself. The present-tense verbs 'is born, dies' are read as covering all times. So the self is unborn, and unlike primal matter (prakriti) it is not even subject to the subtler, ceaseless unmanifest transformations that matter undergoes; the word 'everlasting' is taken to rule out even those. 'Ancient yet ever new' means the self is to be experienced always as if fresh, never stale.
Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika
Dvaita
These commentators first stress that the line 'it is not born' is not Krishna's own new claim but a Vedic verse he cites as a confirming authority, since it agrees with what he has already taught. Their distinctive move is to explain the self's unbornness by its likeness to the Lord. Just as the Lord's knowledge, established by scripture and tradition (for instance 'He saw', Chandogya 6.2.3), is free of increase and decrease and yet, by an inconceivable power, can be the basis for speaking of it as 'having come to be', so the self too is not born in the ordinary sense, for it shares the Lord's form, which is marked by being unborn and the rest. 'Everlasting' (shashvata) is glossed as having a single, constant being. They give 'ancient' (purana) a striking etymology: the self is purana because it moves through the 'city' (pura), that is, the body. And just as the destruction of a mirror need not destroy the reflection, the destruction of the body that the self inhabits does not destroy the self.
Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha
Bhedabheda
This reading leans on the comparison with space (akasha): the Self cannot be destroyed by an act of slaying for the same reason space cannot, namely that it has no parts. Destruction can only be supposed of what has parts, through their separation and the like. Having established this, the commentator draws the same conclusion as the others, that both the one who thinks 'I am the slayer' and the one who thinks 'I am slain' are ignorant, because the partless Self admits of no destruction at all.
Śrī Bhāskara
Śuddhādvaita
These commentators read the verse through the relation of the jiva (the individual living being) to the Lord. The self is unborn (aja) because it is a portion of the Lord; it abides eternally in him with a continuous nature, and is 'ancient yet ever fresh' as the Lord's servant. One of them draws an unusually practical lesson from 'having been, he does not come to be again': the soul was first brought forth in a particular mode for the Lord's play (lila) in creation, so it should carry out whatever it was made for, for the Lord's pleasure, lest its birth be wasted. And since the body that the jiva has tenanted is slain only according to its appointed term while the inner self merely entered it for the Lord's purpose, no fault attaches to one who acts by the Lord's will, even in great confusion.
Śrī Puruṣottama · Vallabhācārya
Bhakti
These commentators give an especially careful temporal analysis: 'it is not born, does not die' denies birth and death in the present; 'it does not, having been, come not to be again' denies the self's having been in the past and its coming-to-be in the future; so in all three times the self has neither prior non-existence nor future annihilation. They also close a subtle gap that the others leave open. Granting that the self is not literally born or destroyed, might death still belong to it at least figuratively, since the body it occupies does die? The answer is no: because there is no real connection between the self and the body, death cannot even be ascribed to the self in a figurative or borrowed sense. One of these voices adds the direct application to Arjuna, that he should therefore not fear the ignorant world's charge of being a slayer of teachers, but should wage the righteous war.
Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva
Modern
These commentators state the teaching in plain modern terms: the Self is free of all six modifications, it does not grow or decline, it is ever the same, and birth and death belong to the physical body alone and cannot touch the immortal, all-pervading Self. One of them anchors the verse's word for 'ever-existing' to a later verse where Krishna calls the embodied self his own eternal portion (amsha), 'a fragment of My own self, eternal' (15.7), so that the Self's being 'from ever' is understood as its being an everlasting part of the Lord.
Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas
A Seeker Asks
If my real Self was never born and never dies, why does it feel so completely true that I came into being, that I am aging, and that I will die?
The commentators would say you are reading the marks of the body onto the Self. Birth, growth, decay, and death are real, but they are the six modifications of a changing thing, and they belong to the body, not to the one who is aware of the body. Birth and death are properties present in every body and experienced by everyone, yet they never touch the self that dwells within. So the feeling that 'I' am aging is accurate about the body and mistaken only about which 'I' it points to.
Rāmānujācārya · Swami Sivananda · Śaṅkarācārya
The reason the Self cannot share in birth or death is structural, not merely asserted. A thing is 'born' only if it begins after not having existed, and is said to 'die' only if, having existed, it later ceases; but the Self always already exists, before and after alike, so neither word can fasten onto it. Further, the Self has no parts and no qualities, and destruction can only be supposed of what has parts, through their separation, the way a pot can break. Like space, the partless cannot be cut or destroyed.
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Bhāskara
There is even a test you can run on the feeling itself. Across childhood and old age the bodies and experiences change utterly, yet a single knower remains who registers all the change; that abiding 'I' is what does not grow, decline, or die. The conviction that you came to be and will perish attaches to what passes through stages, while the one aware of every stage stands outside them, ancient yet ever fresh.
Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Śrīla Viśvanātha
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