The Swan Chooses Milk
Bala Kanda, Doha 6
Doha 6 · Movement 2 of 2
Keep this contemplation
Preserve, print, or share
The Creator's world lies before the saint like a vessel in which milk and water have been mingled beyond ordinary separation. The conscious and the inert, virtue and fault, clarity and confusion move together through every place and life.
Across the surface glides the hamsa, the sacred swan of discernment. Its beak enters the mixture and takes the milk, leaving the water behind. The saint does not require a faultless world before goodness can be loved. Nor does the saint become blind to impurity. The gift is the power to receive what nourishes without drinking what corrupts.
The vessel remains mixed. The swan continues across it, white wings reflected in troubled water, choosing at every movement.
Milk is taken, water is left, and the swan passes on without contempt.
Read the passage from the Manas
AI-created devotional illustration · Doha 6
A white swan beside cream and pale-blue ribbons symbolizing the discerning acceptance of good qualities.
Source reference and artistic choices
Gita Press code81 undated · PDF pages 28 · printed pages 26. Reader passage: bala-kanda-doha-007. Printed numbering may differ.
Source facts
- Created world of animate and inanimate things contains qualities and faults
- Saints compared to swans selecting milk and leaving water associated with faults
Artistic choices
- One swan, pose, pond and leaves are a symbolic scene, not an actual episode
- Cream and blue flowing ribbons evoke milk/water comparison; no literal separation action or biological ability claimed
- Distant unnamed temple silhouette is an imagined devotional setting detail
An imaginative interpretation, not a historical portrait or documentary evidence.
जड़ चेतन गुन दोषमय बिस्व कीन्ह करतार। संत हंस गुन गहहिं पय परिहरि बारि बिकार।।6।।
The Creator made this world of the conscious and the inert, filled with both virtue and fault. But the saints are like the hamsa, who drinks only the milk of virtue and leaves aside the water of impurity.