Chapter 3 · Verse 34·Spoken by Krishna
इन्द्रियस्येन्द्रियस्यार्थे रागद्वेषौ व्यवस्थितौ। तयोर्न वशमागच्छेत्तौ ह्यस्य परिपन्थिनौ
indriyasyendriyasyārthe rāga-dveṣhau vyavasthitau tayor na vaśham āgachchhet tau hyasya paripanthinau
Attraction and aversion are seated in the senses toward their objects. One should not fall under their sway, for they are one's foes.
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Sanskrit recitation by Swami Brahmānanda
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Convergence
or each and every sense, in its own object, there is raga (attraction toward what is liked or favorable) and dvesha (aversion toward what is disliked or unfavorable). The verse repeats the word for sense, 'indriyasya indriyasya', and the commentators read this doubling as a distributive: it means 'of each and every sense, one by one'. So the eye has its pull and push toward forms, the ear toward sound, the tongue toward taste, and so on for every sense. Krishna calls these two 'vyavasthitau', which the commentators take as 'fixed, settled, arranged, unavoidable': raga and dvesha are not random but lie set in place toward each sense-object, attraction toward the agreeable and aversion toward the disagreeable. Several commentators extend the reach beyond the five knowing-senses to the organs of action and their objects, such as speech and speaking.
Braided from 15 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri · Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrī Bhāskara · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar · Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas
This verse answers a worry left by the previous one. Verse 3.33 said that even the wise person follows his own nature, and beings simply act out their nature, so what use is restraint? The objection that follows is: if every being is wholly in the grip of prakriti (nature), then injunction and prohibition, the whole scripture of 'do this, do not do that', would be pointless, with no one free enough to be addressed by it. The commentators agree that 3.34 is Krishna's reply. It marks out exactly where human effort (purushartha) and scripture do have scope. Nature throws up raga and dvesha automatically; but whether a person then surrenders to them is not fixed. That gap is the field of free effort. So scripture is not useless after all: it addresses precisely the point where a person can still choose not to be ruled by attraction and aversion.
Braided from 11 commentators
Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri · Śrī Puruṣottama · Vallabhācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Swami Sivananda · Śrī Jayatīrtha
Krishna's instruction is 'tayoh na vasham agachchhet': one should not come under the sway of these two. The commentators stress that the remedy is not to stop the senses from ever meeting their objects, which is impossible while the body lasts. Contact will happen; the eye will see, the tongue will taste. What can be governed is whether one falls under the dominion of the raga and dvesha that arise from that contact. This is the exact location of human freedom and of religious practice: not in destroying the senses by force, but in not letting attraction and aversion become one's master. When a person is governed by raga and dvesha, nature drives him into action of its own kind, so the forbidden gets done and the enjoined gets neglected. When he refuses their rule, scripture and discrimination can guide him instead.
Braided from 15 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri · Rāmānujācārya · Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrī Bhāskara · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Swami Sivananda · Mahatma Gandhi · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas · Sant Jñāneśvar · Śrīla Baladeva
The closing line gives the reason: 'tau hi asya paripanthinau', for these two are this person's waylayers, his foes. The commentators almost unanimously take 'paripanthin' in its literal sense of highway-robbers, bandits who lie in wait on a road and ambush the traveler. Raga and dvesha are robbers on the path to the highest good; they make obstacles for the one who walks toward welfare. Because of this, they are to be guarded against from the very first, before they harden. Several commentators add vivid images of the same danger: a fish lured by bait that hides a fatal hook, food sweet with honey but mixed with poison, a man swept into a deep current, a hunter cornering his prey. The point is that these two seem to promise pleasure but actually destroy the seeker's good.
Braided from 14 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri · Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika · Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Sant Jñāneśvar · Śrīla Baladeva · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas
Several commentators trace the mechanism by which raga and dvesha do their damage and how scripture undoes it. When sense meets object, knowledge of the object arises; from a wrong or incomplete knowledge in it, attraction or aversion springs up, and then nature, headed by attachment, forcibly drives the person to act, even toward what is forbidden, while turning him from what is enjoined. The cure is prior, right knowledge. When scripture makes known that a forbidden thing, however pleasant, is bound to a strong unwanted result, the mere sense that it is pleasant can no longer produce attraction; and when it shows that an enjoined thing, however unpleasant, leads to a strong wanted result, mere distaste can no longer produce aversion. So discriminating knowledge breaks the root of natural raga and dvesha, deprives nature of its accomplice, and lets scripture, unobstructed, guide a person to the enjoined and away from the forbidden.
Braided from 6 commentators
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Dhanapati Sūri · Śrīla Baladeva · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Swami Sivananda · Śrī Ānandagiri
Divergence
Advaita Vedānta
This commentator adds a theological safeguard that the others do not press: when the verse calls raga and dvesha the person's enemies, it is careful to say that the Lord is not the enemy, even though the Lord follows out a person's prarabdha (the karma that has begun to bear fruit), for otherwise inequality and cruelty would attach to God. The image given is of a king who, angered by yesterday's offense, sets his servants to fetter the offender, yet today, pleased by gift and honor, makes that same man lord over those servants. So the Lord, who through prarabdha troubles a person with raga and the rest, is won over by the person's following of scripture, by devotion, meditation, and surrender, and then appoints him to the very conquest of raga. Hence scripture is not pointless, the person has freedom, and there is no inequality in the Lord, since the Lord acts dependent on creatures' karma.
Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha
Śuddhādvaita
These commentators add that injunction and prohibition do not address either the knower of truth at one extreme or the wholly ignorant at the other; they are meant for the middle person, the one who still has a taste for the senses and so is a fit candidate for instruction. One commentator further frames the danger in terms of grace: because grace itself can be deflected by indulgence of raga and dvesha, the seeker who would receive pushti (divine nourishing grace) must guard the door of the senses with special care. The other reads the verse against the larger picture of maya: the bewildering power was granted by Bhagavan to maya for herself and her dependents, so the jiva, the 'purusha-portion', must not come under the sway of the senses if delusion is not to take hold; he notes that the verse shifts from neuter forms used earlier to the masculine 'asya' here, because attachment to objects is itself the very form of delusion.
Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama
Dvaita
These commentators read the verse as teaching that restraint is to be done to the measure of one's power, and that effort genuinely matters. The formative tendency (the deep impression that drives a person) is strong, so strong that even Brahma and the other high beings are in its power; yet it can be made otherwise through utmost effort. Even where restraint brings no immediate visible result, it does come about through such effort. One of them connects the verse back to the earlier teaching that all actions are to be cast on the Lord (3.30) and its promised fruit, showing that this verse keeps that promise from being purposeless: if nature simply overrode everything, that earlier injunction and its fruit would be empty, so this verse secures the place of effort and of scriptural agreement.
Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha
Viśiṣṭādvaita
These commentators read the verse specifically within the context of jnana-yoga, the discipline of knowledge of the self. The raga here is an unavoidable wish to experience sense-objects, born of earlier impression (vasana); when that experience is checked, an unavoidable dvesha stands fixed. The special danger is that even one who is striving for the discipline of knowledge, who has restrained all his senses by a short closure of them, can still be seized by these two and forcibly set to their tasks, so that he is turned away from the experience of the self's own nature and is ruined. The obstruction these two cause is precisely the warding off of the practice of self-knowledge (atma-jnana-abhyasa); they are foes hard to conquer, and the warning here prepares for the coming verses on kama and krodha as the great enemy.
Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika
Kashmir Shaivism
This commentator frames the verse as the answer to 'how then does bondage come about?'. The person caught in transmigration takes up attraction and aversion toward each object because, through utter delusion, he conceives actions to be done by the self alone. This is the dividing line: the man of knowledge and the man of transmigration may both perform the same dealings of eating and the rest, yet one is bound and the other is not. His settled conclusion is that for one whose attachment is in every way gone, who walks in his own dharma, there is no bondage at all, no binding made of merit and sin. He adds a distinctive note about one's own dharma: it does not depart from the heart, it is rooted in one's own savor, and no creature is ever born empty of it, so one's own dharma is never to be given up.
Ācārya Abhinavagupta
Bhakti
This Gaudiya commentator gives the moral content of raga and dvesha unusually concrete, scripture-keyed examples and offers several readings of the verse side by side. On the first reading, attraction is toward what scripture forbids, such as the mere seeing or touching of another's wife, and aversion is toward what scripture enjoins, such as the seeing, touching, and serving of the guru, the brahmana, the holy place, and the guest, and giving wealth to them; these two abide as the qualifications to be guarded against. He then records alternative explanations others give: that attraction is toward seeing a woman and aversion arises when this is thwarted; or that attraction is toward agreeable, well-flavored, rich food and aversion toward disagreeable, dry food, and likewise attraction toward seeing one's own son and aversion toward an enemy's son. The framing reason is that scripture has no power over people of evil disposition, so one must not let the senses range at will before that evil disposition takes hold.
Śrīla Viśvanātha
Modern
This modern commentator draws two distinctive points from the word 'vyavasthita'. First, he reads the previous verse's 'nigraha' not as mere control but as coercion or forcible insistence; the Gita favors proper control of the senses, not the useless attempt to totally destroy their natural tendencies by force, since as long as the body exists even a wise person must, for instance, leave home to beg when hungry, because hunger and thirst are natural. The wise person's duty is to keep the senses in control by samyamana (concentration) and turn natural tendencies to universal welfare. Second, he argues that 'vyavasthita' shows pain and happiness to be two independent emotions, so that one is not merely the absence of the other. He also notes that in the ceaseless activity of nature we must often do things we do not wish to do; the wise person does them with a desireless mind, purely as duty, and remains untouched by sin or merit, while the ignorant become attached and suffer.
Lokmanya Tilak
A Seeker Asks
If attraction and aversion arise automatically the moment any sense touches its object, where exactly is my freedom, and what is left for me to actually do?
The arising of raga and dvesha is indeed automatic and not your fault. Nature sets them in place, fixed toward each sense-object, attraction toward the agreeable and aversion toward the disagreeable, and contact will keep happening as long as you have a body. That part is not where your freedom lives, so do not exhaust yourself trying to prevent the senses from ever meeting their objects.
Swami Ramsukhdas · Śaṅkarācārya · Dhanapati Sūri · Lokmanya Tilak
Your freedom lives in the next step: whether you come under their sway. This verse exists precisely to mark out that gap as the field of human effort and of scripture. Nature throws up the impulse, but it does not force you to obey it; refusing to be ruled by attraction and aversion is the one thing genuinely in your hands, and it is the whole scope of practice.
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri · Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas
There is also a concrete way to weaken their grip rather than just resisting in the moment. Raga and dvesha feed on wrong or incomplete knowledge of where a thing actually leads. When right knowledge shows you beforehand that a tempting thing is bound to a harmful result, or that an unpleasant duty leads to real good, the pull and the push lose their root, and nature is deprived of its accomplice. So discrimination, used early, is what restores your power to choose.
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Dhanapati Sūri · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Baladeva
Contemplation
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