Even the cheat's dice run on a power that was never the cheat's own.
Krishna keeps naming the pre-eminent thing in field after field, and the list reaches somewhere unexpected: among deceivers, he is the gambling itself. Nothing here excuses the craft. It only says whose power makes any craft work at all.
Among cheats, I am the gambling they play. I am the splendor of the splendid, the victory of the victorious, the resolve of the resolute, and the goodness of the good.
The reading read whole, as one unhurried piece
Where it stands
Krishna is still moving through his glories, one field after another, and the recitation now reaches a place few readers expect: the cunning of those who deceive. He does not flinch from naming it.
The teaching
Of the deceitful, Krishna says, I am the gambling, the dice-play, the very craft by which one person strips another of wealth through guile. He says it without softening the word and without pausing to defend the claim. He then completes the line in the same register as the verses around it: he is the splendor of the splendid, the unhindered command of the mighty; the victory of the victorious, the excellence that outlasts the defeated; the resolve of the resolute, the effort that does not fall short of its fruit; and the goodness of the good, the very sattva that makes a pure nature pure. What holds the whole line together, across every commentator who has left a comment reaching this far, is a single distinction: naming the source of a capacity is not the same act as ruling on how that capacity should be used. Madhusudana states this most exactly, defining gambling's harm, the snatching of all one's wealth, in the very same breath that he names it a glory. Not every voice in this file's roster has left a comment this specific. Madhva's surviving work is silent on this verse, part of a silence that runs across this stretch of the chapter rather than singling this line out, and Abhinavagupta's surviving argument treats verses nineteen through forty-two as one unit, resting its substantive point at verse nineteen instead of returning to comment on gambling by name. Where the record is this thin, the honest move is to say so plainly, not to write a confident sentence in a silent master's voice.
The doubt that rises
If gambling can be named among the Lord's own glories, has something in you quietly started to wonder whether the naming excuses the game, or whether it might even be a kind of blessing on it?
Where the paths divide
Compressed, letting the chapter's own pattern carry the distinction.
Shankara states the equivalence for gambling with the same brevity he gives splendor, victory, resolve, and goodness. He does not pause here to argue that the naming is not an endorsement; by this point in the chapter, the reader has already been shown the pattern often enough to draw that line unaided. The compression itself is a kind of trust.
Reading gambling through the doctrine of the Lord as inner controller.
Ramanuja places the gambling exactly where deceit itself lives, among the tricks of deceitful people, and reads the Lord's presence in it through his standing claim that the Lord indwells and governs every embodied capacity as its antaryamin. The craft is the deceiver's; the power that lets any craft function at all is traced further back, to the one who sustains agency itself.
An honest gap, not a filled-in position.
No comment from Madhva survives on this verse, a silence shared with the neighboring vibhuti verses around it. If one extends his settled teaching elsewhere, that every capacity to act or win is granted moment to moment by Hari's will according to each soul's own nature, a reader could guess at what he might have said. But that is a guess offered honestly as a guess, not his stated word on 10.36.
A general argument about the whole list, not an item-by-item gloss.
Abhinavagupta's surviving comment does not single out gambling. His treatment of verses nineteen through forty-two as one continuous unit argues, at verse nineteen, that Krishna's declaration of being the self in every heart keeps the whole catalogue of glories from fracturing into separate, cut-off items. Extending that argument conditionally, one might read each named excellence as a finite contraction of one unbounded awareness recognizing its own freedom, gambling included. But this is an extension this page offers, not Abhinavagupta's own sentence on this line.
Plain synonyms, offered without moralizing or devotional turn.
Sridhara moves through the line with careful economy: dice-game, pre-eminence, victory, diligence, sattva, each term matched to its close equivalent. He does not pause to warn against gambling or to lift it into a devotional key the way some later voices in his own tradition do elsewhere. Whatever teaching this reading carries is carried by the method, term matched patiently to term, rather than stated outright.
The most exact surviving voice, naming harm and excellence with equal precision.
Madhusudana defines every term more narrowly than his companions: gambling as the specific cause of losing all one's wealth, splendor as unhindered command, victory as excelling the defeated, resolve as the effort that reaches its fruit, sattva as the fruit of purity itself, dharma, knowledge, dispassion, and lordship. His willingness to name the harm as clearly as the excellence shows that, in his own careful practice, tracing a capacity's source and judging its use were never the same question.
Every surviving voice on this verse agrees that naming a power's source is not the same as approving its use, but not every voice has actually spoken. Where Madhva and Abhinavagupta are thin or general rather than specific, this page has offered clearly-labeled extrapolation rather than invented certainty, and it leaves that gap open rather than quietly filling it in their names.
A question to carry
The next time you notice a capacity in yourself or another that you would never call admirable, can you trace it to its source without letting that tracing become excuse?
Where this teaching travels
Verses that sit near this one, each going its own way; follow whichever calls you.
May the eye that finds one power beneath every capacity, the honorable and the unadmirable alike, never mistake that finding for permission, and may it rest, in the end, on the single source itself.
Each school is voiced from the commentators named above. Their full words, every translation, and where the schools agree and differ wait in the reading desk just below. Open the commentary desk.
The recitation of glories continues unbroken from the verses before it, reaching now into a field, deceit, that a reader would not expect to find named beside splendor and goodness.
Where they agreethe convergence
Across schools and centuries the commentators come to the same ground. These are the points they share, and the voices that hold each one.
The gambling of cheats is named plainly, without euphemism, as the craft that strips a person of wealth by guile.
Across Advaita, Viśiṣṭādvaita, BhaktiŚaṅkara · Rāmānuja · Śrīdhara · MadhusūdanaIn Śaṅkara, Rāmānuja, and 2 others’ words
Krishna continues the vibhuti recitation by naming, in five more fields, the excellence through which his power shows itself: among the deceitful, the gambling; among the brilliant, the brilliance; among the victorious, the victory; among the resolute, the resolve; among the good, the goodness. The available commentators, where they comment at all, agree on this basic pattern and on the sense of each term, dyuta as dice-play, tejas as splendor or unhindered command, jaya as victory over the defeated, vyavasaya as the resolve that actually reaches its fruit.
Splendor, victory, and resolve are each narrowed to their operative sense: unhindered command, excelling the defeated, effort that reaches its fruit.
Across Advaita, Viśiṣṭādvaita, BhaktiŚaṅkara · Rāmānuja · Madhusūdana · ŚrīdharaIn Śaṅkara, Rāmānuja, and 2 others’ words
Gambling is named without euphemism as the operative craft of cheats, the means by which one person strips another of wealth by guile. None of the surviving voices tries to launder the term into something gentler; Madhusudana is the most explicit that it is the cause of the snatching of all one's wealth, and this frankness is part of what makes the verse's larger point legible rather than blunted.
Locating a capacity's power in the Lord is a different act from ruling on whether that capacity should be used.
Across Advaita, ViśiṣṭādvaitaŚaṅkara · Rāmānuja · MadhusūdanaIn Śaṅkara, Rāmānuja, and 1 others’ words
Naming a capacity's source is treated as a different operation from ruling on its use. The verse locates the Lord as the power beneath the gambler's cunning in exactly the way it locates him beneath victory, resolve, and goodness; nothing in the available commentary reads this as praise for deceit, and the moral weight of gambling as conduct is left exactly where it already stood.
Where the source itself is silent, as with Madhva here, or general rather than specific, as with Abhinavagupta, this page says so rather than inventing certainty.
Across Dvaita, Kashmir ŚaivaMadhva · AbhinavaguptaIn Madhva and Abhinavagupta’s words
Not every acarya in this file's roster has left a comment reaching this verse. Madhva's surviving work is silent here, a silence that runs across this whole stretch of the vibhuti chapter rather than singling out this line, and Abhinavagupta's Gita-artha-samgraha treats verses nineteen through forty-two as one continuous unit, anchoring its substantive argument at verse nineteen rather than commenting item by item at each glory named afterward.
The same excellence that binds when claimed as one's own becomes a place of recognition when its source is rightly seen.
Across Advaita, Viśiṣṭādvaita, BhaktiŚaṅkara · Rāmānuja · Śrīdhara · MadhusūdanaIn Śaṅkara, Rāmānuja, and 2 others’ words
Where the commentators do speak in detail, an underlying claim holds across their differing emphases: whatever operates, wins, holds firm, or purifies in the world is doing so on a borrowed capacity, one whose final ground is the Lord rather than the person exercising it. The excellence is real; its ultimate ownership is not where it first appears to be.
This is the shared ground; it can be carried as it is. Below is where they differ.
Where they differthe divergence
Viśiṣṭādvaita, in their fuller words
Ramanuja locates gambling precisely within deceit's own operations, since that is where deceit makes its home, and reads the remaining items, winning, firmness, and strength as greatness of mind, through his standing doctrine of the Lord as antaryamin, the inner controller working through every embodied capacity. The Lord's presence in the gambler's cunning is a claim about the ground of the capacity, consistent with his account elsewhere that agency itself always refers back to the indwelling Lord.
Dvaita, in their fuller words
No comment from Madhva survives on this verse; his silence here matches his silence across the neighboring vibhuti verses in this stretch of the chapter. On a Dvaita reading extended conditionally from his settled positions elsewhere, one would expect the claim that any capacity to act, win, or resolve is granted and sustained moment to moment by Hari's will according to each soul's nature, but this is this page's inference, not Madhva's stated word on 10.36.
Shaiva, in their fuller words
Abhinavagupta's surviving comment does not reach this verse individually; his treatment folds verses nineteen through forty-two into one unit anchored at verse nineteen, arguing there that Krishna's declaration of being the self in every heart guards the whole list of glories from being read as separate, cut-off items. On a Kashmir Shaiva reading extended from that general argument, each named excellence, gambling included, would be read as a finite contraction of the same unbounded consciousness recognizing its own freedom, but this extension is offered here only as a conditional gloss.
Bhakti, in their fuller words
Sridhara's surviving gloss is philological rather than homiletic: he supplies close synonyms, term by term, dice-game, pre-eminence, victory, diligence, sattva, without pausing to moralize on gambling's place in the list or to draw a devotional application. His restraint lets the verse's own structure, one excellence after another, do the teaching, and any larger claim about warning or reassurance has to be drawn from his method rather than an explicit sentence in his hand.
A modern reading, in their fuller words
Madhusudana gives the fullest available definitions, naming gambling's harm outright as the cause of the snatching of all one's wealth, and narrowing each remaining term, splendor as unhindered command, victory as excelling over the defeated, resolve as the effort that does not fail of its fruit, sattva as the fruit of purity marked by dharma, knowledge, dispassion, and lordship. His care in defining harm and excellence with equal precision supports reading the verse as locating a capacity's metaphysical ground without blurring the separate question of how that capacity is rightly used.
A few questions to carry
These ask for understanding, not recall; each answer is settled by the commentary itself.
For a second sitting
Carry this with youwhat stays
Notice one thing today that you would never call admirable, a piece of cunning, a hard edge, something you would not want named as a virtue, and ask only where its working power comes from, not whether you approve of it. Let your attention travel past the surface act to the single capacity beneath every act, the one that makes anything at all function. That noticing does not excuse the act. It simply keeps your eye moving toward the source rather than stopping at the surface.
May you learn to see the one power beneath every capacity you meet, the admirable and the unadmirable alike, without ever mistaking that seeing for approval.
Read deeper
Everything a full study holds, folded below.
Word by word
All the commentary, woven together
The commentary, woven together
machine-assisted draft, pending review
Convergence
rishna continues the vibhuti recitation by naming, in five more fields, the excellence through which his power shows itself: among the deceitful, the gambling; among the brilliant, the brilliance; among the victorious, the victory; among the resolute, the resolve; among the good, the goodness. The available commentators, where they comment at all, agree on this basic pattern and on the sense of each term, dyuta as dice-play, tejas as splendor or unhindered command, jaya as victory over the defeated, vyavasaya as the resolve that actually reaches its fruit.
Śaṅkarācārya · Rāmānujācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
Gambling is named without euphemism as the operative craft of cheats, the means by which one person strips another of wealth by guile. None of the surviving voices tries to launder the term into something gentler; Madhusudana is the most explicit that it is the cause of the snatching of all one's wealth, and this frankness is part of what makes the verse's larger point legible rather than blunted.
Śaṅkarācārya · Rāmānujācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrīdhara Svāmī
Naming a capacity's source is treated as a different operation from ruling on its use. The verse locates the Lord as the power beneath the gambler's cunning in exactly the way it locates him beneath victory, resolve, and goodness; nothing in the available commentary reads this as praise for deceit, and the moral weight of gambling as conduct is left exactly where it already stood.
Śaṅkarācārya · Rāmānujācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
Not every acarya in this file's roster has left a comment reaching this verse. Madhva's surviving work is silent here, a silence that runs across this whole stretch of the vibhuti chapter rather than singling out this line, and Abhinavagupta's Gita-artha-samgraha treats verses nineteen through forty-two as one continuous unit, anchoring its substantive argument at verse nineteen rather than commenting item by item at each glory named afterward.
Madhvācārya · Ācārya Abhinavagupta
Where the commentators do speak in detail, an underlying claim holds across their differing emphases: whatever operates, wins, holds firm, or purifies in the world is doing so on a borrowed capacity, one whose final ground is the Lord rather than the person exercising it. The excellence is real; its ultimate ownership is not where it first appears to be.
Śaṅkarācārya · Rāmānujācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
Divergence
Advaita Vedānta
Shankara states the equivalence for each term without elaboration or apology, letting the pattern of the whole vibhuti teaching, built since verse twenty, carry the implicit lesson that recognizing the Lord's power in a thing is not an endorsement of the thing. His surviving comment here is compressed rather than argumentative; he trusts the reader to have already absorbed the distinction from the chapter's method.
Śaṅkarācārya
Viśiṣṭādvaita
Ramanuja locates gambling precisely within deceit's own operations, since that is where deceit makes its home, and reads the remaining items, winning, firmness, and strength as greatness of mind, through his standing doctrine of the Lord as antaryamin, the inner controller working through every embodied capacity. The Lord's presence in the gambler's cunning is a claim about the ground of the capacity, consistent with his account elsewhere that agency itself always refers back to the indwelling Lord.
Rāmānujācārya
Dvaita
No comment from Madhva survives on this verse; his silence here matches his silence across the neighboring vibhuti verses in this stretch of the chapter. On a Dvaita reading extended conditionally from his settled positions elsewhere, one would expect the claim that any capacity to act, win, or resolve is granted and sustained moment to moment by Hari's will according to each soul's nature, but this is this page's inference, not Madhva's stated word on 10.36.
Madhvācārya
Kashmir Śaiva
Abhinavagupta's surviving comment does not reach this verse individually; his treatment folds verses nineteen through forty-two into one unit anchored at verse nineteen, arguing there that Krishna's declaration of being the self in every heart guards the whole list of glories from being read as separate, cut-off items. On a Kashmir Shaiva reading extended from that general argument, each named excellence, gambling included, would be read as a finite contraction of the same unbounded consciousness recognizing its own freedom, but this extension is offered here only as a conditional gloss.
Ācārya Abhinavagupta
Bhakti
Sridhara's surviving gloss is philological rather than homiletic: he supplies close synonyms, term by term, dice-game, pre-eminence, victory, diligence, sattva, without pausing to moralize on gambling's place in the list or to draw a devotional application. His restraint lets the verse's own structure, one excellence after another, do the teaching, and any larger claim about warning or reassurance has to be drawn from his method rather than an explicit sentence in his hand.
Śrīdhara Svāmī
Modern
Madhusudana gives the fullest available definitions, naming gambling's harm outright as the cause of the snatching of all one's wealth, and narrowing each remaining term, splendor as unhindered command, victory as excelling over the defeated, resolve as the effort that does not fail of its fruit, sattva as the fruit of purity marked by dharma, knowledge, dispassion, and lordship. His care in defining harm and excellence with equal precision supports reading the verse as locating a capacity's metaphysical ground without blurring the separate question of how that capacity is rightly used.
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
A Seeker Asks
If gambling counts among the Lord's glories, does that make gambling acceptable, or even something quietly blessed?
No commentator with a surviving comment on this line reads it that way. Shankara and Ramanuja both state the equivalence as a claim about where the operative power of a domain comes from, not as a verdict on whether the domain's practice is fitting; the gambling itself is named without euphemism as a cheat's craft, never as something to be taken up.
Śaṅkarācārya · Rāmānujācārya
Madhusudana's own precision cuts against reading the verse as license: he names gambling explicitly as the cause of the snatching of all one's wealth in the same breath that he defines it as one of the Lord's glories, showing that naming a thing's source of power and approving its use are two separate questions in his own careful account.
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
Where a source is silent or only speaks in general terms, honesty about the gap matters more than manufacturing comfort. Madhva leaves no comment here at all, and Abhinavagupta's surviving argument addresses the unity of the whole list rather than this item; neither absence licenses inventing a permissive reading in their names, and neither absence weakens what Shankara, Ramanuja, Sridhara, and Madhusudana do say plainly.
Madhvācārya · Ācārya Abhinavagupta · Śrīdhara Svāmī
Contemplation
Notice one thing today that you would never call admirable, a piece of cunning, a hard edge, something you would not want named as a virtue, and ask only where its working power comes from, not whether you approve of it. Let your attention travel past the surface act to the single capacity beneath every act, the one that makes anything at all function. That noticing does not excuse the act. It simply keeps your eye moving toward the source rather than stopping at the surface.
Sit with this · sonnet-5-authored
All the translations and commentary
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, open a tradition in the doorways below, or add a voice by name above.
Also hear this verse, tradition by tradition.