Chapter 3 · Verse 12·Spoken by Krishna
इष्टान्भोगान्हि वो देवा दास्यन्ते यज्ञभाविताः। तैर्दत्तानप्रदायैभ्यो यो भुङ्क्ते स्तेन एव सः
iṣhṭān bhogān hi vo devā dāsyante yajña-bhāvitāḥ tair dattān apradāyaibhyo yo bhuṅkte stena eva saḥ
Nourished by sacrifice, the gods will give you the enjoyments you desire. One who enjoys their gifts without offering anything to them in return is a thief.
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Sanskrit recitation by Swami Brahmānanda
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Convergence
rishna is making a promise and stating a consequence. The promise: the gods (devas), strengthened and gladdened by sacrifice (yajna), will give you the enjoyments you wish for. The commentators fill in concretely what those enjoyments are. They name food, rain, cattle, sons, wives, gold, and property. The picture is of a give-and-take: you feed the gods through sacrifice, and they feed you in return through nature's bounty, chiefly through rain that yields grain. This continues the previous verse, where the gods and humans are told to nourish one another.
Braided from 16 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri · Rāmānujācārya · Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrī Bhāskara · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar · Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas
The heart of the verse is its sharp word: thief (stena). One who takes the enjoyments the gods have given but never offers anything back to them is a thief. Many commentators sharpen the image. He robs what belongs to the gods. He is a robber of the gods' own property. Some make the penalty explicit: such a person not only fails to reach the highest human goal but is liable to punishment, even punishment in hell or at the hand of Yama, the lord of death.
Braided from 10 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Dhanapati Sūri · Rāmānujācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Swami Sivananda · Sant Jñāneśvar · Lokmanya Tilak
Several commentators ground the charge of theft in the idea of debt (rna). A person is born already owing the gods, and the enjoyments he receives are, in effect, loaned to him. To take the loan and never repay it is theft. One source quotes the scriptural verse that a person is born with three debts and discharges them by three acts: studentship to the sages, sacrifice to the gods, and offspring to the fathers. The deeper point is that the worshipper lives inside a circuit of giving and receiving; to keep everything for oneself is to break that circuit, and breaking it is the real fault.
Braided from 8 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Dhanapati Sūri · Rāmānujācārya · Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama · Swami Ramsukhdas
The form of giving back is concrete, not vague. The way one repays the gods is through sacrifice and offering. Several commentators specify the daily and occasional rites: the five great sacrifices (panca-yajna), the vaishvadeva offering, the agnihotra fire-offering, and the like. To eat one's food without first offering through these rites is precisely the omission the verse condemns. The verse is therefore not abstract piety but a call to perform the prescribed offerings before taking enjoyment for oneself.
Braided from 6 commentators
Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Rāmānujācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar
Divergence
Viśiṣṭādvaita
These commentators read the enjoyments not as ends in themselves but as resources for further worship. The one who pursues liberation does not desire enjoyments to fill his belly; he desires them so that each gift becomes the means of the next act of worship. They press a careful definition of theft itself: theft is taking what was set apart for another's purpose and treating it as one's own, nourishing oneself with it. One source draws an analogy of kings who grant land to those who serve them in return for a share of the produce; tenants who pay no tax are liable to punishment, just as one who takes the gods' gifts and renders nothing is. Distinctively, these sources hold that the gods themselves have the Lord as their inner self, so worship offered to them reaches the Lord. The same source notes that the gods give fruit only in order to receive the offering, so failing to offer is failing to repay a giver who gave for that very return.
Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika
Śuddhādvaita
These commentators read the whole exchange as the Lord's order. The enjoyments are given so they may serve Bhagavan; the food the gods arrange through rain is meant for the service of the Lord. To take and not return is therefore theft against the order set up for the Lord's own enjoyment, indeed theft from the Supreme Person himself. One source frames the worshipper's whole life as a circuit of giving and receiving from the Lord and his hosts, and breaking that circuit by enjoying for oneself alone is the theft. The other adds that if the gods are the ones who give food, the very purpose of offering sacrifice to them is to keep this circuit, set up for the Lord's enjoyment, unbroken.
Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama
Bhakti
These devotional commentators keep the plain ritual sense and stress the failure to offer through the five great sacrifices before eating. One sharpens the penalty vividly: such a person, like a thief deserving punishment from a king, deserves punishment from Yama, the lord of death, and is unworthy of the goals of human life; the god could take those very things back and nourish himself with them. The Marathi commentator expands the verse into a long warning placed in the mouth of Brahma: one who, drunk on the wealth and glory the gods have given, abandons his own religious duty and gives himself wholly to pleasure will lose all that glory, be deprived of his possessions, and be enveloped by sins and miseries; as a fish dies the moment it leaves water, one who leaves his own dharma is utterly destroyed, so never abandon your duty and never let the senses run unruly.
Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar
Kashmir Shaivism
This commentator reads the verse inwardly, as a teaching about the senses rather than only the outer gods. The senses, gladdened by sacrifice, steady the mind on whatever it meditates upon, and through memory, intention, and meditation they present their objects. If one does not give the objects to the very senses for their proper enjoyment, that itself is theftlike behavior, a kind of acting under disguise, recalling the earlier verse that calls such a person one of deluded conduct. So the practitioner who seeks perfection or release should serve the enjoyments as they arise, but with a precise aim: their fruit is merely the stilling of the senses' craving, not indulgence.
Ācārya Abhinavagupta
Modern
These modern commentators widen or qualify the meaning. One reads the gods of verses 11 and 12 as the whole creation of God, so that the service of all created beings is itself the service of the gods and itself the sacrifice. Another places the verse in a cosmological frame: after Brahma created the worlds and worried how they would be sustained, the Lord created the cycle of sacrifices for mutual protection of gods and humans, and yajna here means all the prescribed duties, which must be kept going for the maintenance of society; this same source traces how animal sacrifice gave way to sacrifice of wealth and finally to sacrifice by prayer and by knowledge as the highest. A third insists firmly that the desired enjoyment here cannot mean objects sought for one's own pleasure, since the previous verse spoke of the supreme welfare and while desire for enjoyment remains that welfare can never come; the enjoyment means the rightful supply of materials by which one's prescribed duties can be carried out, and the thief is one who has cut himself off from the cosmic cycle of giving and become a mere extractor.
Mahatma Gandhi · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas
A Seeker Asks
If the gods are the ones who supply everything anyway, why is keeping some of it for myself called theft rather than simply living on what I was freely given?
Because the commentators say the gifts were never simply free; they were given for a return. Like debtors who give expecting repayment, the gods give the enjoyments in order to receive offering back, so taking them and rendering nothing is failing to repay a giver who gave for that very purpose.
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika
The precise definition of theft makes this clear. Theft is taking what was set apart for another's purpose and treating it as your own, nourishing yourself with it; the enjoyments were constituted for the gods' worship, so claiming sole ownership of them is exactly that. One source likens it to a king's tenant who farms granted land but pays no share: not a free tenant but a punishable one.
Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika
The frame underneath is debt. A person is born already owing the gods, the sages, and the fathers, and the enjoyments come as a kind of loan; to take the loan and never repay it through sacrifice, study, and progeny is to keep what is not finally yours. You live inside a circuit of giving and receiving, and cutting yourself off from that circuit to become a mere extractor is the very thing the verse condemns.
Śaṅkarācārya · Vallabhācārya · Swami Ramsukhdas
Contemplation
Carry the verse into how you sit down to your own table. The teaching asks you to notice that what sustains you, the food, the rain that grew it, the resources of your day, was given, not generated by you alone. Before you take, give back. In its plainest form this means offering first, through the prescribed daily rites, the five great sacrifices, before eating for yourself. The point underneath the ritual is a posture of the heart: live as one inside a circuit of giving and receiving, never as a sole owner who only extracts. To break that circuit by hoarding enjoyment for yourself alone is what the verse names theft. So let your enjoyment be repayment-shaped: receive, and let the receiving move you to return.
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