Chapter 5 · Verse 15·Spoken by Krishna
नादत्ते कस्यचित्पापं न चैव सुकृतं विभुः। अज्ञानेनावृतं ज्ञानं तेन मुह्यन्ति जन्तवः
nādatte kasyachit pāpaṁ na chaiva sukṛitaṁ vibhuḥ ajñānenāvṛitaṁ jñānaṁ tena muhyanti jantavaḥ
The all-pervading Self takes on no one's sin and no one's merit. Knowledge is covered by ignorance, and so beings are deluded.
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Sanskrit recitation by Swami Brahmānanda
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Convergence
he first half of the verse makes a single firm claim: the Lord does not take on anyone's sin (papa) or merit (sukrita). The word for the Lord here is vibhu, which means the all-pervading one. Most commentators stress that this is the very reason He stays untouched. Because He is everywhere and confined to no single place or body, He is no one's special kinsman and no one's enemy, so there is nothing in Him that would gather up another's good or bad deeds. Several read vibhu more strongly still as 'action-less': only a being who acts can set another in motion and thereby earn sin or merit, and the Lord does not act in that sense at all.
Braided from 15 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Rāmānujācārya · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri · Vedānta Deśika · Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas · Sant Jñāneśvar · Ācārya Abhinavagupta
A favorite image carries the point: the Lord works like the sun. The sun gives light to the whole world, and under that light people do good and bad deeds, yet the sun is not stained or connected by any of it. In the same way the Lord lends being and presence to everything, and actions go on under that presence, but He picks up none of them. Some add the parallel of the lotus leaf that water cannot wet, and the image of fragrance or of space and time that 'cause' a thing only by being near it, not by doing anything to it. The Lord moves things, if at all, by His mere being and not by hands-on agency.
Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Swami Ramsukhdas · Dhanapati Sūri · Śrīla Baladeva
The verse then answers a pressing worry that the commentators raise as an objection. Scripture itself says the Lord 'makes a man do good action whom He would raise up, and bad action whom He would cast down,' which sounds as if He prompts our deeds and so would share their sin and merit. The verse replies that in truth He is not the prompter; the apparent agency lies elsewhere. The deeper resolution of this tension is what the second half of the verse supplies.
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīla Baladeva · Śrīdhara Svāmī
The second half names the real cause of our bondage: knowledge (jnana) is veiled by ignorance (ajnana), and by that veiling creatures are deluded. Knowledge here is the soul's own true self-awareness, which is natural to every being. Ignorance covers it like a screen, and once it is covered a person mistakes himself, thinking 'I do, I cause, I enjoy, I will reap such-and-such fruit.' This false sense of being the doer and enjoyer is what binds. The Lord does not impose this; the delusion is the work of ignorance, not of Him.
Braided from 17 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri · Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika · Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama · Ācārya Abhinavagupta · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar · Swami Sivananda · Mahatma Gandhi · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas
From this follows the verse's practical teaching about freedom and bondage. A person is bound exactly when he identifies with nature and its products, the body, mind, life-force and senses, and arrogates the authorship of action to himself. He is freed when he sees that the real self is changeless and not the doer. The scriptures that speak of the Lord 'making' us act are read by the commentators as describing the dealings of the already-deluded; they restate how things look to the bewildered, and are not the final word about how the Lord actually relates to our deeds.
Braided from 8 commentators
Swami Sivananda · Mahatma Gandhi · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīla Baladeva · Swami Ramsukhdas · Śaṅkarācārya
Divergence
Advaita Vedānta
These commentators read the verse as a statement of non-dual reality. The 'knowledge' that is veiled is not just self-awareness but the one self-luminous being-consciousness-bliss (sat-cit-ananda) Brahman, which is the very ground on which the seeming difference of soul, Lord and world appears. Ignorance is named maya, an untrue darkness with two powers, one that veils the truth and one that projects the false. When it veils, beings fail to see their own nature and so the whole spread of transmigration arises: the split into knower and known, agent and object, enjoyer and enjoyed. Because in supreme truth the soul has no real agency and the Lord no real prompter-hood, there is finally no sin or merit clinging to either. A vivid example is offered of a king who, overcome by sleep, dreams he is poor and suffering though he is in fact the lord at peace; just so, the self that is really Brahman dreams itself a separate, suffering doer. The scriptures that speak of the Lord prompting our acts are taken as subsidiary, restating the deluded man's view and pointing finally to the one non-dual reality.
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri
Viśiṣṭādvaita
Here the self is real and many, and the verse is read through the working of latent impressions (vasana). The Lord does not take on or take away the suffering of one held dear, like a son, nor the happiness of one held hostile; being all-pervading and confined to no place, He is by nature no one's kinsman and no one's foe. So why does a soul feel itself a partial, bound agent at all? Because earlier and earlier action, contrary to knowledge, has veiled and contracted the soul's own knowledge so that it becomes fit to taste that action's fruit. From this veiling come the link to a particular body, the conceit 'I am this,' the latent impressions of that conceit, and then fresh action in the same key, a self-feeding cycle. The point one of these commentators presses is that the self does not even take on its own apparent sin and merit, since the agency that would ground them belongs to the running impressions, not to the self. The cure named is knowledge, recalling the Gita's earlier promises that the boat of knowledge carries one across all wrong and the fire of knowledge reduces all action to ashes.
Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika
Śuddhādvaita
These commentators read the verse as the very pillar of their doctrine of the soul's purity and the Lord's sovereign play (leela). The soul is a portion of the Lord and by its own nature beyond merit and demerit; these cling only through false identification with the prakriti-bound self and its deeds, never by any transfer or sharing of substance. The Lord, the supremely capable vibhu who could grant any fruit by His wish alone, does not 'appropriate' a soul's deed in the way of moral book-keeping. When He gives hell or heaven, this is a stroke of His own play, not an effect mechanically called forth by the act. One of them stresses that the ignorance veiling the soul is itself set in being by the Lord's own play, and that His grace alone can lift it; what the Lord truly 'takes on' is the burden of that gracious play, by which He draws the soul out of ignorance into knowledge of itself as His portion. The scriptures that speak of the Lord causing each work are saved from sounding like karmic machinery: what shows in every gift of fruit is the Lord's varied will, not the soul's deed.
Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama
Dvaita
On this reading the self and the Lord are permanently distinct, and the Lord's role as instigator is fully affirmed rather than dissolved. The Supreme Self, full of endless power and relishing His own bliss alone, does cast primal nature upon the soul and cause the embodied soul, bound by a beginningless latent disposition and desirous of enjoyment, to act in accordance with that soul's own dispositions. He does this by His mere proximity, as fragrance stirs the mind by nearness without acting upon it, and as space and time 'cause' a tree by being present, the Lord being the cause of all without Himself undergoing any change. Yet, doing all this, He does not receive any soul's sin or merit. The scriptures saying He makes us act are upheld as literally true, not explained away. Why then do souls call Him partial or cruel? Because ignorance, here a beginningless aversion toward Him, covers their eternal knowledge; the deluded call Him partial, the wise do not. Scripture itself answers the charge by noting that the Lord acts in dependence on the soul's beginningless prior disposition, so partiality and cruelty do not attach to Him.
Śrīla Baladeva
Kashmir Shaivism
This reading is terse and pointed: since action and its fruit do not truly exist, there is no hidden unseen force producing the result of any ritual injunction either. Sins and the like are not done by this self at all; they are done by one's own ignorance. The image given is that of fearing poison in nectar on a mere suspicion. The deeds we dread we never truly committed; the whole apparatus of sin is a false alarm raised by ignorance over what was always pure.
Ācārya Abhinavagupta
Bhakti
These devotional commentators stress that the Lord, though He may be called the one who sets things in motion (prayojaka), takes no share in anyone's sin or merit because He is wholly full and perfect, with every desire already attained (apta-kama). Having no self-interest, He has no reason to gather punya or papa; His setting-in-motion proceeds by His own inconceivable power (maya) in accordance with each one's prior karma. One meets the charge that His favoring of devotees and chastising of non-devotees looks like partiality by answering that even His chastisement, even in the form of the rod, is in truth a grace, so He is everywhere equal; only the souls whose knowledge is covered suppose otherwise. Ignorance is here His own veiling power that covers the living being's knowledge, which is naturally its own. One among them paints the Lord wearing personal forms and living the personal, sportive life of manifested being while His formless, quality-less nature never changes at all, so that it is mere idle talk to say He literally creates, maintains and dissolves the world.
Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar
Modern
The modern commentators draw out the moral and existential edge. The delusion, one says plainly, lies in a man claiming the authorship of action for himself while pinning the consequences, reward or punishment, on God. Bondage comes from identifying with nature and its effects, body, mind, life-force and senses, and freedom comes from identifying with the deathless, action-less Self in the heart; when the 'I' does not really act, God can accept neither its good nor its evil. One traces the verse's principle to the Samkhya teaching that nature (prakriti) is the agent and the spirit (purusha) is inactive, noting that Vedantins extend this to the supreme Lord as a quality-less non-doer, with all activity belonging to maya or prakriti. One develops the picture of the sun and of the freedom God has given each person: a man may take himself as the bearer of his deeds' fruit and so fall into bondage, or offer his deeds to God and so become free, and God 'does not receive' the deeds of the self-asserting man while He does accept those offered in devotion. The same voice reads 'ajnana' not as the absence of knowledge but as partial knowledge, the limited knowing of the senses and intellect that cannot reach the self beyond nature, and hears in the word jantavah ('creatures,' literally beasts) a gentle scolding: a person who gives no weight to his own power of discernment is no better than a beast, for the goal of human life is to reach the reality beyond pleasure and pain.
Swami Sivananda · Mahatma Gandhi · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas
A Seeker Asks
If the Lord neither prompts my deeds nor takes on my sin and merit, then why do the scriptures plainly say He makes me act, and what is actually responsible for my bondage?
Start with what the verse positively denies: the all-pervading Lord (vibhu) does not pick up anyone's sin or merit. Because He pervades everything and is fixed to no one place or body, He is by nature no one's special friend and no one's foe, so there is nothing in Him to collect your good or bad deeds. He relates to the world as the sun does to what happens under its light, giving being and presence to all while being stained by none of it.
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Rāmānujācārya · Swami Ramsukhdas · Dhanapati Sūri
What actually binds you is named in the second half: knowledge is veiled by ignorance. Your own true self-awareness, which is natural to you, gets covered, and the moment it is covered you mistake yourself for the doer and enjoyer, thinking 'I act, I cause, I will reap this fruit.' That false sense of authorship, not the Lord, is the root of bondage. The freeing move is to see that the real self is changeless and not the agent at all, and to stop identifying with the body, mind and senses that do the changing.
Braided from 6 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas · Mahatma Gandhi
As for the scriptures that say the Lord 'makes' you act, the commentators take these as describing the world as it appears to one already deluded, restating the bewildered person's own view rather than the final truth of how the Lord relates to your deeds. Some explain that He sets things in motion only by His mere being and inconceivable power, in step with your own prior tendencies, the way the sun lights the scene without doing the deeds, so that even where He is called the prompter He remains unstained and impartial; what looks like His partiality is only how things appear through the screen of ignorance.
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Swami Ramsukhdas
Contemplation
Here is something you can actually live by. Notice that the knowledge of your own true self is already present in you; it has simply been covered over by ignorance, which Ramsukhdas describes not as a total blank but as partial knowing, the limited knowledge of the senses and intellect that never reaches past nature. The way through is to watch what is changing. Body, mind, senses and circumstances are in constant change, while the one who notices the change does not himself change. No one ever actually experiences his own self changing. So practice seeing your separateness from all that shifts, in the simple form 'I am not the one who changes.' As that recognition settles, the false sense 'I am the doer, I am the one made happy and unhappy by my deeds' loosens its grip, and true knowledge shines of itself. And give weight to your power of discernment (viveka), for that is what God gave you to break this delusion; to ignore it is to live, as the verse's word jantavah hints, no better than a beast, when the real aim of a human life is to reach the reality that is free of pleasure and pain.
Sit with this · Swami Ramsukhdas
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