Chapter 8 · Verse 20·Spoken by Krishna
परस्तस्मात्तु भावोऽन्योऽव्यक्तोऽव्यक्तात्सनातनः। यः स सर्वेषु भूतेषु नश्यत्सु न विनश्यति
paras tasmāt tu bhāvo ’nyo ’vyakto ’vyaktāt sanātanaḥ yaḥ sa sarveṣhu bhūteṣhu naśhyatsu na vinaśhyati
But beyond that unmanifest is another, eternal and unmanifest. It does not perish when all beings perish.
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
he verse points past the unmanifest source of the cosmos to something still higher. Krishna says paras tasmat, 'higher than that': higher than the avyakta, the 'unmanifest', a word for the subtle, unseen cause from which the visible worlds pour out and into which they dissolve. The verse marks a step up. Whatever that unmanifest was, this is beyond it, more excellent, the topmost. Several commentators read the verse as the precise answer to a question raised at the start of the chapter, namely what the supreme imperishable Brahman is and how it differs from everything that comes and goes.
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 little word tu, 'but', is doing real work, and the commentators stress it. It marks a difference, a contrast. The unmanifest spoken of just before is the seed of beings, bound up with the cosmic cycle of day and night, of projection and collapse. This higher reality is set apart from it. The point is not that there are two unmanifests of the same kind, one merely older or larger than the other; the point is a difference of order. The lower unmanifest belongs to the field of arising and dissolution; this one stands outside that field altogether.
Braided from 9 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri · Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Swami Ramsukhdas
The word anya, 'another', adds a second guard. Even granting that this is higher, one might still imagine it shares the same nature as the lower unmanifest, only ranked above it. The commentators say anya rules that out: it is another, of a wholly different kind. Scripture is invoked here, 'there is no likeness of it'. So the verse first says higher, then says distinct, then says of a different nature, each word closing off a way the mind might collapse the supreme back into the cosmic process it is meant to transcend.
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Rāmānujācārya
This higher reality is itself called avyakta, 'unmanifest', but in a sense opposite to the lower one. It is unmanifest not because it is a dark seed waiting to sprout, but because no instrument of knowing can lay hold of it; it lies beyond the eye and the other senses, has no form, and is known only by direct self-experience. It is sanatana, 'everlasting, beginningless, age-old', because it is by its very nature unfit for birth or death; it has no cause that could destroy it and no origin from which it arose. So it is eternal not as a long duration but as standing outside time entirely.
Braided from 11 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Rāmānujācārya · Śrī Bhāskara · Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Sant Jñāneśvar · Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas
The verse closes with its decisive claim: yah sa sarveshu bhuteshu nashyatsu na vinashyati, 'which, when all beings perish, does not perish'. When everything goes down, from the highest creator Brahma to the smallest blade of grass or ant, including the elements like space, this does not go down. The commentators explain why. Beings perish because they are effects, identified with form and modification; what arises and what changes can also be destroyed. But this is no effect; it does not enter into form or modification at all, so there is simply no handle by which destruction could take it. Its non-perishing is its very nature. This is what the verse establishes: a reality that the universal dissolution cannot touch.
Braided from 15 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri · Rāmānujācārya · Śrī Bhāskara · Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar · Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas
Divergence
Advaita Vedānta
These commentators read the higher reality as the supreme Brahman, the Imperishable, an impersonal absolute pure being. The lower unmanifest is the seed of all beings, marked by ignorance (nescience), and on one reading it is identified with Hiranyagarbha, the cosmic creative intelligence and cause of the gross display of moving and unmoving things. Brahman runs as pure 'being' (sat-ta) through every imagined effect while remaining untouched by them; its difference from the lower unmanifest is the difference between the unchanging witness-ground and the whole field of modification. One source frames the contrast sharply: the prior unmanifest is the source of samsara, this is moksha itself, the supreme bliss, sat-cit-ananda. Another stresses that the verse establishes Brahman's un-sublatability across the three times, past, present and future, which is what 'eternal' here truly means.
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri
Viśiṣṭādvaita
Here the higher reality is a distinct 'state of being' (bhava) whose single defining form is knowledge or consciousness, set against the lower unmanifest which is insentient matter (prakriti). The contrast is conscious versus unconscious. It is unmanifest precisely because no ordinary means of knowledge can make it manifest; it is of a form to be known only by self-experience and shared with nothing else. It is everlasting because it is unfit for origination and destruction, and though it is present within each perishing being, it itself does not perish when they do. Read together with the following verse, this marks the Lord's own supreme abode (dhama), final and not circular like the worlds; the words 'unmanifest' and 'imperishable' used of it mark its incomprehensibility to the creaturely mind and its imperishability, and must not be misheard as any doctrine of non-being.
Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika
Bhedabheda
This reading takes the higher reality as the conscious Supreme Self set over against the unconscious unmanifest spoken of earlier. The lower unmanifest is the omniscient yet unconscious one, called unmanifest because it lies beyond the reach of the instruments of perception; higher than it is this conscious Lord, everlasting, eternal, supreme. The proof offered is the same as elsewhere: when all things perish, this does not itself perish, and by that mark the Lord is to be understood.
Śrī Bhāskara
Dvaita
These commentators identify the unmanifest directly and personally with the Lord, Vishnu, on reaching whom there is no return. The identification is not a matter of inference alone; the word 'unmanifest' actually denotes Him, supported by scriptural usage such as the Garuda text 'the unmanifest, the supreme Vishnu', and by the back-reference to the earlier 'having come to Me'. The 'abode' (dhaman) in the companion verse means the Lord's own form, of the nature of splendour, as the lexicon defines dhaman: what is of the nature of splendour and is a dwelling. So the higher reality is the personal Lord and His own luminous form, not an impersonal ground.
Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha
Śuddhādvaita
These read a careful two-tier discrimination of the unmanifest. The lower avyakta is the one that out-projected the manifestations in the earlier verse; it sits at the creator (paramesthin) level and is the root of the cosmic aggregate, yet it is still within the conditioned field where day and night, projection and dissolution have their play. The higher avyakta now named is the very root and ground of that lower one, its further cause, wholly outside that field, beyond the gunas (the three strands of nature), and beyond every perishing. What is named is neither the individual self (jiva) nor nature (prakriti) but the aksara, the Lord's own unmanifest abode (dhama). This is what the devotee on the path of knowledge actually reaches, and not the unmanifest into which the worlds merely collapse at Brahma's night; non-destruction belongs to its very nature.
Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama
Kashmir Shaivism
This reading takes the higher reality as the truth of Vasudeva, wholly free of any reckoning by time. It holds together what the other schools tend to separate: this truth is manifest, since it runs through all things, and yet unmanifest, since it is hard to reach; it is the very reality, and the whole universe rests in it, has an imperishable form through it, and is at all times just so. Because His nature is the freedom of supreme awareness, which transcends the everlasting universe and yet is not separate from it but is the very ground in which it stands, the words 'again' and 'return' lose their footing for one who has reached Him; for each of those words presupposes a breaking-off of one's own nature in the middle, and in the supreme Lord no such breaking-off could ever be supposed. This is offered as the deepest sense of 'but having reached Me', and the means to win it is said to be devotion.
Ācārya Abhinavagupta
Bhakti
These read the higher reality as a being of an entirely different order, the Lord, who is the further cause even of the unmanifest source of moving and unmoving things, and on most of these readings the cause of Hiranyagarbha himself. He is not merely a longer-lived cause of the same kind but never enters the round of arising and dissolution at all; the whole kalpa-cycle apparatus stops at His feet, laying the groundwork for the chapter's destination in Vishnu's supreme abode (parama pada). One source adds that this Lord is the inner Self, the inward one (pratyak), and so unseen; yet when propitiated by the worshipper He also becomes directly perceptible. The Marathi voice dwells on the deeper paradox: in the supreme state, distinctions like great and small, this and that, lose meaning the way milk loses its name once it becomes curds, or silver while passing through bar and ornament remains silver throughout; the Supreme Brahman is in truth neither manifest nor unmanifest, neither eternal nor perishable in the ordinary sense, but self-same pure being beyond all change. As letters wiped away leave their meaning, as waves rise and fall yet abide as water, as gold persists through every melting of the ornament, so when beings perish that from which they come abides in the immortal state.
Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar
Modern
These keep close to the plain sense. One renders it directly: another, eternal, of quite a different nature, the supreme Para Brahman, superior to and the cause of both the cosmic creative intelligence (Hiranyagarbha) and unmanifested nature, not destroyed even when all beings from Brahma down to the ant or blade of grass are destroyed. Another simply states it as the other eternal Imperceptible, beyond the Imperceptible already mentioned, which does not end even if all created things end. The most analytic of these distinguishes the levels with care: here 'tasmat' and 'avyakta' point only to the creator's subtle body (the cosmic mind, intellect and ego, from which beings appeared at the start of creation and into which they dissolve), while the supreme reality (paramatma) named here is utterly distinct (vilakshana) even from that, and also beyond the creator's causal body, the root nature (mula prakriti). Of the two realities beyond the creator's subtle body, root nature and the supreme Self, this verse speaks of the supreme Self alone, naming it para and shreshtha, the most excellent. Whether its true nature be called manifest or unmanifest, it is being-itself (bhava-rupa): at no time has its non-being been, will be, or can be; it simply is, from always and forever; therefore nothing can be greater than it. This voice is non-sectarian devotional Vedanta and does not press a school doctrine.
Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas
A Seeker Asks
If the deathless ground is called 'unmanifest' with the very same word used for the cosmic seed that dissolves at the end of each cycle, how do I tell the two apart?
The single word avyakta is doing two opposite jobs, and the verse itself flags the difference with the small word tu, 'but'. The lower unmanifest is unmanifest because it is a hidden seed of beings, still folded into the cosmic cycle of projection and collapse; it is the source of samsara. The higher one is unmanifest in the opposite sense: not because it is waiting to sprout, but because no eye, no sense, no ordinary means of knowing can reach it; it is formless and known only by direct self-experience.
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Rāmānujācārya · Dhanapati Sūri
The verse gives you a practical test, not a hairsplitting one. Watch what perishes. The lower unmanifest belongs to the field where everything arises and dissolves, from the highest creator down to the smallest creature and even space itself. The higher reality is precisely the one that does not perish when all of that perishes. So you tell them apart by their fate at the dissolution: whatever goes down is the perishable source; what stays is the deathless ground.
Braided from 6 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Rāmānujācārya · Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak
The reason behind the test is that the two are of a different order, not the same kind ranked differently. Beings and the lower unmanifest perish because they are effects, tied to form and modification, so destruction has a handle on them. The higher reality is no effect; it does not enter form or change at all, so there is simply nothing in it for destruction to grip. Its not-perishing is its very nature, which is why the commentators add the word anya, 'another, of a wholly different kind', to keep you from quietly collapsing it back into the cosmic process.
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Vallabhācārya · Swami Ramsukhdas
Contemplation
Let the verse settle one fear at the root. Everything you can name or picture belongs to the field that perishes: the body, the mind, the worlds, even the highest creator and the elements like space. The supreme reality is not one more item in that field, however grand. It is utterly distinct from all of it. So do not look for it as a thing among things, brighter or larger than the rest; it is being itself, that which simply is. Rest in this assurance: at no moment has its non-being ever been, will be, or could be. It is from always and will be always, and nothing can be greater than it. When you feel the ground giving way, when all the perishable things you leaned on fall, you can turn toward the one that the universal dissolution cannot touch. That is the supreme, the most excellent; reaching it, nothing of you is broken off, and there is no falling back.
Sit with this · Swami Ramsukhdas
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.