Every disposition in you, welcome or not, has one source: the Lord alone.
The list Krishna began a moment ago keeps unfolding here, non-violence, contentment, austerity, fame and its opposite, and each one, he says, comes back to him and to nothing else.
Non-violence, an even mind, contentment, austerity, giving, and both good name and bad name: these many and varied dispositions of living beings arise from Me, and from no one else.
The reading read whole, as one unhurried piece
Where it stands
Krishna is still inside the catalogue of inner states he opened in the verse before this one. This line adds more names to it, non-violence, an even mind, contentment, austerity, giving, fame and its opposite, and then closes, as before, on the same single claim.
The teaching
Non-violence is simply the refusal to harm any living thing. An even mind meets what is welcome and what is not without being lifted by one or lowered by the other. Contentment is the quiet sense that what has already come to you is enough. Austerity is a chastening of the body joined to restraint of the senses, and giving is the sharing of rightly earned means with someone who deserves it. Fame and ill fame close the list, and they are defined by their cause more than their feeling: a good name follows right action, a bad name follows wrong action. Then the verse turns, as the one before it turned, on its single claim: all of this, however many the kinds and however different they look from one another, arises from the Lord alone. The variety is real, but it is explained by each being's own past action, not by many sources competing with the one.
The doubt that rises
If even my non-violence, my contentment, and my good name all trace back to the Lord as their one source, what is actually left for me to claim as my own doing, and what am I responsible for shaping?
Where the paths divide
Read where the source is full: the list closes on one cause, many effects.
Every state named, from non-violence through ill fame, is a particular effect of one cause, distributed to beings in their many differing kinds strictly according to each one's own past deeds. The Lord is constant; the variety belongs entirely to what beings themselves have done.
Read honestly, where the record itself is silent.
No independent comment on this exact verse survives in what is available; Ramanuja's remarks on 10.4 and 10.5 are given together, attached to the verse before this one. Rather than invent a separate reading he did not give here, this entry simply names the gap.
Read at the scale the source actually offers: one word, closely defined.
What survives here is narrow and precise: a single gloss on tushti, contentment, fixed by dictionary authority as the sense of having enough. The wider claim about the Lord as sole source is left to stand as already covered by the verse just before, rather than restated.
Read with the gap named first, then a clearly flagged extension.
No independent comment on this verse survives from Abhinavagupta; his treatment of this stretch, verses 10.1 through 10.5, is attached to its opening line. On a Kashmir Shaiva reading, one would extend that broader frame by taking each named state as a contraction or expression of consciousness's own recognized freedom, but this is offered here as an extrapolation, not as his own words on this particular verse.
Read for what the second half of the list is doing.
Notice that the catalogue's dark half, ill fame among it, completes rather than merely follows its bright half. The Lord owns both, since the ground of the whole world cannot lean only toward what is pleasant. If he is the source of everything, that sourcing has to reach the difficult qualities as fully as the desired ones.
Read for where the emphasis of the verse actually falls.
The weight of the line sits less on the mere fact that these states exist and more on its exclusivity: from Me alone. States differ because their causes, right and wrong action among them, differ; the one Lord behind every state does not.
All the sources that speak fully here agree the one ground behind these states is the Lord alone, and that the variety among beings tracks their own past deeds. What is left open, and what the thin or missing record for three of the six acaryas only sharpens, is exactly how much of a being's own agency survives once every disposition it carries is traced back to a single source beyond itself.
A question to carry
Of everything you would call your own disposition, your patience, your contentment, your good name, how much would you still call yours if you traced each one back to where it actually came from?
Where this teaching travels
Verses that sit near this one, each going its own way; follow whichever calls you.
So let the list rest where it lands: notice what has already arisen in you, without needing to have earned it alone, and let that noticing be enough for now.
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.
This continues the catalogue of inner states opened in the previous verse, still inside Krishna's larger unveiling of his own manifold presence in chapter ten.
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 list keeps going: non-violence, an even mind, contentment, austerity, giving, and both fame and ill fame.
Across Advaita, BhaktiŚaṅkara · Madhusūdana · ŚrīdharaIn Śaṅkara, Madhusūdana, and 1 others’ words
This verse continues the catalogue Krishna began in the line before it, adding non-violence, an even mind, contentment, austerity, giving, and both fame and ill fame to the list of inner states that mark living beings. Where the sources are full enough to gloss each term, they read this as one unbroken enumeration rather than a fresh start.
Each state is defined by its cause, not just its feeling: fame from right action, ill fame from wrong action.
Across Advaita, BhaktiŚaṅkara · Madhusūdana · ŚrīdharaIn Śaṅkara, Madhusūdana, and 1 others’ words
Each state is defined with care rather than left vague: non-violence as the simple withholding of harm, equanimity as a mind untouched by liking and aversion so that friend and foe, gain and loss, are met the same way, contentment as the settled sense that what has come is enough, austerity as bodily discipline joined to restraint of the senses, and giving as rightly earned wealth shared with someone worthy of it.
One ground, many kinds: the source is single, but each being receives according to its own past deeds.
Across Advaita, BhaktiŚaṅkara · Madhusūdana · ŚrīdharaIn Śaṅkara, Madhusūdana, and 1 others’ words
Fame and ill fame are traced to their cause rather than merely their feel: good name follows right action, bad name follows wrong action. Naming both together, and not only the pleasant half, matters to how the closing claim gets read.
Sridhara's turn: the Lord owns the dark qualities as fully as the bright ones, since the world's ground cannot play favorites.
Across AdvaitaŚaṅkara · MadhusūdanaIn Śaṅkara and Madhusūdana’s words
The pivot of the verse is its final claim: all these dispositions, however many and however varied, arise from the Lord alone. Where sources address it, the variety among beings is explained not by many sources but by one source distributed differently, each being receiving according to its own past action.
Where the record itself falls silent, as it does for three of the six acaryas here, that silence is named rather than filled.
Across Advaita, BhaktiŚaṅkara · Śrīdhara · MadhusūdanaIn Śaṅkara, Śrīdhara, and 1 others’ words
Two of the six acaryas on file here, Ramanuja and Abhinavagupta, left no independent comment keyed to this specific verse in what survives; their remarks are folded into neighboring verses instead. A third, Madhva, is recorded only on a single word. The convergence above rests, honestly, on the three acaryas whose comment on this particular line is substantial: Shankara, Sridhara, and Madhusudana.
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
No independent comment on this specific verse survives from Ramanuja; his remarks on 10.4 and 10.5 are treated as one passage in the source, attached to 10.4. Rather than construct a reading he did not separately give for this line, this entry notes the gap honestly and leaves the position unfilled here.
Dvaita, in their fuller words
What is recorded of Madhva here is narrow by design: a single lexical gloss fixing tushti, contentment, as the sense of having enough, anchored to dictionary authority. He does not, in what survives, take up the rest of the list or restate the verse's claim about the Lord as sole source, evidently treating that ground as already settled by his comment on the verse just before.
Bhakti, in their fuller words
Sridhara glosses the full list as carefully as Shankara, then adds a distinctive turn: he hears the catalogue's second half as completing its first, and reads the Lord's sole sourcing of these states as reaching the dark qualities too, not only the bright ones. Ill fame, on his reading, is owned by the Lord as fully as fame is, because the ground of the whole world cannot be partial to only its agreeable half.
A modern reading, in their fuller words
Reading Madhusudana's own emphasis forward into a more contemporary register: what he stresses is the exclusivity of the source, from Me alone, over and above the mere fact that such states exist. The states differ in kind only because their causes, dharma and adharma among them, differ in kind; the single Lord behind them does not.
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
Sit for a moment with contentment alone, the one term every available source pauses over. Notice what you already have and ask honestly whether it is enough. Not because wanting more is forbidden, but because the restlessness that keeps reaching past what has already arrived rarely brings the peace it promises. Let this much is enough be a sentence you can actually rest in, at least for the length of one quiet breath.
So notice what has already arisen in you, the ease and the difficulty both, and let the noticing rest, for a moment, on the one ground beneath them both.
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
his verse continues the catalogue Krishna began in the line before it, adding non-violence, an even mind, contentment, austerity, giving, and both fame and ill fame to the list of inner states that mark living beings. Where the sources are full enough to gloss each term, they read this as one unbroken enumeration rather than a fresh start.
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrīdhara Svāmī
Each state is defined with care rather than left vague: non-violence as the simple withholding of harm, equanimity as a mind untouched by liking and aversion so that friend and foe, gain and loss, are met the same way, contentment as the settled sense that what has come is enough, austerity as bodily discipline joined to restraint of the senses, and giving as rightly earned wealth shared with someone worthy of it.
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrīdhara Svāmī
Fame and ill fame are traced to their cause rather than merely their feel: good name follows right action, bad name follows wrong action. Naming both together, and not only the pleasant half, matters to how the closing claim gets read.
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrīdhara Svāmī
The pivot of the verse is its final claim: all these dispositions, however many and however varied, arise from the Lord alone. Where sources address it, the variety among beings is explained not by many sources but by one source distributed differently, each being receiving according to its own past action.
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
Two of the six acaryas on file here, Ramanuja and Abhinavagupta, left no independent comment keyed to this specific verse in what survives; their remarks are folded into neighboring verses instead. A third, Madhva, is recorded only on a single word. The convergence above rests, honestly, on the three acaryas whose comment on this particular line is substantial: Shankara, Sridhara, and Madhusudana.
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
Divergence
Advaita Vedānta
Shankara and Madhusudana both work through the full list with matched precision, then rest the whole catalogue on one ground: intelligence and everything named alongside it are particular effects arising from the Lord alone, distributed to beings in their many kinds according to each one's own past deeds. Madhusudana sharpens this by noting the emphasis falls on the word alone as much as on the states themselves, since the Lord's exclusive sourcing of these dispositions is the entire point being made.
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
Viśiṣṭādvaita
No independent comment on this specific verse survives from Ramanuja; his remarks on 10.4 and 10.5 are treated as one passage in the source, attached to 10.4. Rather than construct a reading he did not separately give for this line, this entry notes the gap honestly and leaves the position unfilled here.
Rāmānujācārya
Dvaita
What is recorded of Madhva here is narrow by design: a single lexical gloss fixing tushti, contentment, as the sense of having enough, anchored to dictionary authority. He does not, in what survives, take up the rest of the list or restate the verse's claim about the Lord as sole source, evidently treating that ground as already settled by his comment on the verse just before.
Madhvācārya
Kashmir Śaiva
No independent comment on this verse survives from Abhinavagupta either; his remarks on 10.1 through 10.5 are folded into one passage attached to 10.1. On a Kashmir Shaiva reading, one would extend that broader treatment by reading each state, non-violence, contentment, even fame and its opposite, as so many contractions or expressions of the one recognized freedom of consciousness, but this is flagged here as an extrapolation, not as his own words on this verse.
Ācārya Abhinavagupta
Bhakti
Sridhara glosses the full list as carefully as Shankara, then adds a distinctive turn: he hears the catalogue's second half as completing its first, and reads the Lord's sole sourcing of these states as reaching the dark qualities too, not only the bright ones. Ill fame, on his reading, is owned by the Lord as fully as fame is, because the ground of the whole world cannot be partial to only its agreeable half.
Śrīdhara Svāmī
Modern
Reading Madhusudana's own emphasis forward into a more contemporary register: what he stresses is the exclusivity of the source, from Me alone, over and above the mere fact that such states exist. The states differ in kind only because their causes, dharma and adharma among them, differ in kind; the single Lord behind them does not.
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
A Seeker Asks
If even my non-violence, my contentment, and my good name all come from the Lord, what is actually mine here, and what am I responsible for?
The verse does not erase the difference between beings; it explains it. Every source that addresses the point agrees the one ground is constant while the many kinds of disposition track each being's own past action. Your part is real: it is what shapes which of these states arises in you.
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
Sridhara's point sharpens the question rather than softening it. If even the dark states, ill fame among them, trace back to the same one source, the verse is not sorting the world into what you may take credit for and what you may blame elsewhere. It is naming a single ground under the whole range.
Śrīdhara Svāmī
Where the sources fall silent, as they do here for Ramanuja, Madhva beyond one word, and Abhinavagupta, the honest answer is that the tradition itself has left this particular verse thinly worked. That gap is worth naming rather than papering over with invented certainty.
Madhvācārya
Contemplation
Sit for a moment with contentment alone, the one term every available source pauses over. Notice what you already have and ask honestly whether it is enough. Not because wanting more is forbidden, but because the restlessness that keeps reaching past what has already arrived rarely brings the peace it promises. Let this much is enough be a sentence you can actually rest in, at least for the length of one quiet breath.
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.