Chapter 2 · Verse 58·Spoken by Krishna
यदा संहरते चायं कूर्मोऽङ्गानीव सर्वशः। इन्द्रियाणीन्द्रियार्थेभ्यस्तस्य प्रज्ञा प्रतिष्ठिता
yadā sanharate chāyaṁ kūrmo ’ṅgānīva sarvaśhaḥ indriyāṇīndriyārthebhyas tasya prajñā pratiṣhṭhitā
When a person draws the senses back from their objects on every side, as a tortoise draws in its limbs, then their wisdom is firmly set.
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
his verse answers the third of the questions Arjuna asked about the person of steady wisdom: how does such a one sit, or remain, in the world? Krishna gives the answer through a single picture. The mark of established wisdom is that the sage draws his senses back from the objects they reach for. 'Senses' (indriya) means the powers of hearing, seeing, touching, tasting, and smelling; 'sense-objects' (indriya-artha) are the sounds, sights, and other things those powers grasp. When the sage pulls the senses in from these objects, then, and the verse says only then, his insight (prajna) is firmly established (pratishthita). Several commentators note that this restates a point already made about the steady sage, now sharpened into a working answer to the practical question of how he lives.
Braided from 15 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri · Rāmānujācārya · Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrī Bhāskara · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas
The whole teaching turns on one image: the tortoise. As a tortoise draws in its limbs from every side, so the sage draws in his senses from their objects. The picture does two jobs at once. It shows completeness, since the tortoise pulls in on all sides and leaves nothing exposed, just as the sage withdraws every sense from every object. And it shows that the withdrawal is a folding-in, not a destruction; the limbs are not cut off, only retracted, and can be put out again. So the senses are not killed but governed. The withdrawal is a contraction, not a dissolution.
Braided from 14 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Dhanapati Sūri · Rāmānujācārya · Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrī Bhāskara · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas
Many commentators dwell on the quality of this withdrawal: it is at will and without strain. The tortoise pulls in its limbs by its own nature, easily, even in a relaxed and joyous mood, and puts them out again whenever it chooses. In the same way the mature sage has the senses fully under his control, like obedient servants, and moves them in or out as he pleases. This is the figure of ripe pratyahara, the unstrained drawing-in of the senses; the effortlessness is itself the sign that the discipline has matured. The senses are not wrestled down by force each time; they answer at once to the sage's will.
Braided from 6 commentators
Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar · Swami Sivananda
When the senses are drawn in, the sage does not fall into a blank; he settles the mind inward and rests in the Self. Withdrawal from the outer is the same movement as fixing the mind within, in stillness, on the Self. So this is the sage's true 'sitting': forbidding the senses to wander among external objects and holding them gathered within. Read this way, the verse is not only about shutting out the world but about where the attention then abides.
Rāmānujācārya · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Swami Sivananda · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha
Divergence
Advaita Vedānta
These commentators read the verse as more than a picture of sense-control: they ask what exactly is withdrawn. The point is pressed that even a sick man, or one who simply stops feeding his senses, has his senses fall quiet like the tortoise's limbs; but that alone is not the sage's state, because in such a person the passion (raga) toward objects has not been withdrawn. True steadiness withdraws the senses and the craving behind them. One of these voices also turns the verse into a duty for the seeker: since the senses' turning-away from objects is the very cause of steady wisdom, the seeker who longs for the wisdom that frees should make all the senses averse to all objects, and should practise this from the very outset. So the verse describes the accomplished sage and prescribes the path to become one.
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri
Advaita Vedānta
This strand reads the verse through samadhi, absorption in the Self. The 'sitting' of the steady sage is sitting for the sake of samadhi. Even after liberation, by the force of operative karma (prarabdha) the senses still scatter outward and the sage is troubled by the double vision of the world; but, held by the deep impression of restraint, he again and again lovingly draws the senses back and abides in absorption. Where earlier verses showed that the deluding changes of mind are absent even when the senses are active, this verse is taken to show the absence of all mental change in the state of full absorption. The tortoise's drawing-in is thus a return into samadhi.
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha
Viśiṣṭādvaita
This reading places the verse inside a larger ladder. The standing in knowledge is fourfold, and each higher stage is reached only by the one below it; the sense-withdrawal described here is one such rung, and the sage who draws his mind back from the objects and sets it 'in the Self alone' is also counted among the steady-wise. Having shown this, the commentator reads the verse as opening onto what follows: the Lord is about to say how very hard this standing in knowledge is to attain, and the means by which it is reached. So the verse is a hinge between describing the goal and teaching the difficulty and method of the climb.
Rāmānujācārya
Kashmir Shaivism
This voice does not comment on the tortoise or the mechanics of pulling in the senses at all. It locates the sage's steadiness elsewhere: in his bearing toward pleasure and pain. The one whose disposition in pleasure and in pain is free of passion and aversion, he alone is the sage (muni) of established wisdom, and no other. Steadiness is read here as inner freedom from attraction and repulsion in the face of what comes, rather than as the act of sense-withdrawal that the other commentators foreground.
Ācārya Abhinavagupta
Modern
This commentator draws out two distinctive points. First, the tortoise has six visible parts in motion (four feet, tail, head) and pulls them all in until only its shell shows; just so the sage draws in the six, the five senses and the mind, from their objects, so that even by the mind he does no dwelling on objects. If the least mental tie to the senses remains, he is not yet a steady sage. Second, and more striking, the verse says 'when' (yada) but withholds the matching 'then' (tada). This is read as deliberate. The experience that dawns when the senses are wholly withdrawn is the self-established reality (svatahsiddha tattva), and that is not bound by time, not a fruit produced by any act or renunciation, not something that arises and so could be marked by a 'then.' The reality was always present, as the sun stays in the sky whether the eyes are open or shut; closing the eyes does not unmake the sun, it only hides it from us. So too this reality is unchanged even while one is amid enjoyments; only the curtain of attachment to enjoyments keeps its experience from us, and the moment that curtain lifts, the experience is simply there.
Swami Ramsukhdas
A Seeker Asks
Does steady wisdom mean cutting off my senses and shutting out the world, or can I remain fully in life and still be unshaken?
The tortoise image is the answer, and it is deliberately not an image of amputation. The tortoise folds its limbs in and can extend them again at will; nothing is destroyed. So the verse asks for the senses to be governed, not killed. The withdrawal is a contraction, a drawing-in under your control, not a permanent shutting-down.
Braided from 7 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Rāmānujācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar
What truly has to be let go is not perception but the craving behind it. Even a sick or indifferent person has quiet senses, yet that is not the sage's state, because the passion toward objects has not gone. Steadiness is the withdrawal of that inner pull, so the difference you are asking about is exactly the point of the verse.
Śaṅkarācārya
And the goal is not a blank absence but a resting-place: when the senses are gathered in, the mind is set within, on the Self, in stillness. That is the sage's real 'sitting.' When this matures, you can keep your center even amid noise and crowds, present to life yet no longer dragged about by it.
Rāmānujācārya · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Swami Sivananda
Contemplation
The withdrawal taught here has a name: pratyahara, the gathering-in of the senses. Start with one honest observation, that the mind has a natural pull outward, running again and again toward whatever the senses offer. The practice is not to fight that pull once and win, but to bring the mind back from the objects and rest it on the Self, again and again, patiently. As this ripens, something quietly changes: the senses become obedient instruments rather than masters, and you can draw them in by mere willing, in the twinkling of an eye. Then steadiness no longer depends on quiet surroundings. One who has this can settle into the center, the Self, even in a crowded place, undisturbed by noise and tumult of any kind, dead to the outer vibrations not because the world has gone silent but because the senses answer to him and not the world to them.
Sit with this · Swami Sivananda
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.