The clear intellect tells six things apart, and bondage or freedom is what finally hangs on it.
This is not one insight but a working discrimination across three pairs, when to engage and when to withdraw, what to do and what to leave undone, what to fear and what not to fear, resting on the deepest pair of all: what binds and what frees.
The intellect that correctly tells apart engagement from withdrawal, duty from what is not duty, real fear from false fear, and what binds from what frees, that intellect, Arjuna, is sattvic.
The reading read whole, as one unhurried piece
Where it stands
Krishna has just finished sorting knowledge into three kinds, and now turns to the intellect itself, buddhi, the faculty that decides and discriminates. This verse opens a matching three-verse set on the sattvic, rajasic, and tamasic intellect, and names the clear, sattva-colored one first, by everything it is able to tell apart.
The teaching
The sattvic intellect, on this account, discriminates correctly among six things arranged as three pairs. It knows when to engage and when to withdraw. It knows what should be done and what should not. It knows what is genuinely to be feared and what only looks that way. And beneath all three pairs sits the deepest one: what binds you and what frees you. That closing pair is not incidental. Because bondage and freedom are named in the very same breath as engagement and withdrawal, the commentators on file read the opening pair as two whole paths rather than a bare command to act here and stop there. Engagement is the path of ordinary, sanctioned action, and it tends toward bondage. Withdrawal is the path of renunciation, and it tends toward freedom. Everything the verse says afterward is read in light of this deepest pair. The discrimination this verse describes is never a fixed rulebook applied the same way regardless of circumstance. Shankara and Ramanuja both insist it answers to the particular case, to place, time, and person, resting on trustworthy guidance rather than reflex, since one and the same act may be right for one person and wrong for another. And at least one reading on file treats this capacity as something trained rather than simply defined: performing the duties naturally yours, with full attention and without craving their fruit, is what teaches the intellect to recoil on its own from what would harm you. Not every source speaks with equal fullness here, and this page says so plainly rather than smoothing the record over. Madhva's extant work offers no comment on this verse, a gap shared with the ones immediately around it. Abhinavagupta's surviving comment is a single sentence, explicitly given as covering this verse together with the two that follow it as one passage. Where the record is thin, this page marks the gap rather than inventing a fuller voice to fill it.
The doubt that rises
If this discrimination can, in principle, be known with such precision, engagement from withdrawal, real fear from imagined fear, what binds from what frees, why does it so rarely feel settled in practice, and what actually closes the gap between hearing the definition and living inside it?
Where the paths divide
Read through action and renunciation as the actual causes of bondage and release.
Bondage is the conceit of being the doer, produced by false knowledge along the path of activity. Freedom is that same ignorance undone by the knowledge of reality along the path of renunciation. On this reading the sattvic intellect's certainty is never mere opinion or habit; it is conviction born of a genuine means of knowledge, and bondage and liberation, named last, are the deepest ground in relation to which every earlier pair, engagement, duty, fear, finally makes sense.
Read with both paths as kinds of duty and fear placed in one's relation to scripture.
Engagement is the duty that is the means to worldly flourishing; withdrawal is the duty that is the means to liberation, each proper to a person settled in it by station and nature. The sattvic intellect knows both exactly as they are, and, case by case, what should be done under the particular conditions of place, time, and state. Fear and fearlessness sit squarely in scripture: turning away from it is the place of fear, keeping to it the place of safety.
Read honestly as a gap in the record, extended only conditionally.
No comment from Madhva survives on this verse in the sources available here, the same gap found in the verses immediately around it. Extended conditionally from his wider system, one might expect correct discernment itself to be read as a dependent competence, granted according to a soul's own graded fitness and sustained by the Lord's will, never an achievement the intellect reaches by its own resource. This remains a labeled inference, not his recorded reading.
Read from the single sentence that survives, shared across three verses.
What survives of Abhinavagupta's comment here is one sentence, explicitly covering this verse together with the two that follow as a single passage: the recurring phrase 'not as it truly is' means simply 'wrongly'. His preserved comment treats correctness of discernment as the one axis distinguishing the three kinds of intellect. Any fuller connection to recognition and self-forgetting would be an extension of his system, not his recorded word on this verse.
Read as discrimination trained by desireless duty, not only defined.
Sridhara keeps the definition close to the shared reading, but is distinctive in treating it as something cultivated: performing the duties that have naturally fallen to you, with full attention on the Self and without craving their fruit, is what teaches the intellect to recoil, unbidden, from harmful, fear-laden action, the way one recoils from a hissing cobra or a red-hot iron bar.
Read as one recurring test applied through six concrete pairs.
Following Madhusudana's architecture forward, the six paired terms can be read less as a finished inventory and more as one deeper question surfacing in six places: does this choice, in this case, tend toward the false sense of being the doer, or toward the clarity that undoes it. Engagement, duty, and fear are simply where that single test keeps showing up in ordinary life.
Every reading on file agrees the sattvic intellect discriminates rightly among these six things, and every reading agrees bondage and freedom are the deepest of the pairs. What stays open is how that clarity is actually reached: as a conviction already secured by knowledge of reality, as an intellect rightly attuned to scriptural duty, as a competence granted case by case, or as a discernment slowly trained by desireless action. The verse names the destination with some precision. It does not, by itself, settle the single road that gets you there, and this page leaves that open rather than choosing for you.
A question to carry
Think of one choice in front of you right now that feels genuinely unclear. Run it through the verse's own terms, engagement or withdrawal, duty or its absence, real fear or borrowed fear, and then ask last whether either answer would bind you tighter or loosen your grip. Which question, asked in which order, actually moves you closer to seeing clearly?
Where this teaching travels
Verses that sit near this one, each going its own way; follow whichever calls you.
So take the discrimination this verse describes as work still underway rather than a finished possession. Weigh what is in front of you honestly, lean on whatever guidance you trust, and let the question of bondage or freedom be the one that finally decides.
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.
Having just sorted knowledge into its three kinds, Krishna turns to the intellect itself and opens a matching three-verse set, naming the sattvic intellect first by everything it can rightly tell apart.
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.
Six things, three pairs, one deepest pair beneath them: bondage and freedom fix the sense of everything named before them in the verse.
Across Advaita, Viśiṣṭādvaita, BhaktiŚaṅkara · Rāmānuja · Śrīdhara · MadhusūdanaIn Śaṅkara, Rāmānuja, and 2 others’ words
All the acaryas on file agree that this verse defines the sattvic intellect by its power to discriminate correctly among six things arranged as three pairs: engagement and withdrawal, what should and should not be done, and what should and should not be feared. Beneath these three pairs stands the deepest one, bondage and liberation, and an intellect that knows all of this rightly is, on every reading, the intellect colored by sattva.
Engagement and withdrawal are read as whole paths, action that tends to bind and renunciation that tends to free, not a bare command to act here and stop there.
Across Advaita, BhaktiŚaṅkara · Madhusūdana · ŚrīdharaIn Śaṅkara, Madhusūdana, and 1 others’ words
Because bondage and freedom are named at the very end of the sentence, in the same breath as engagement and withdrawal, the commentators read the opening pair not as a bare instruction to act here and refrain there, but as two whole paths: engagement as the path of ordinary, scripturally sanctioned action, and withdrawal as the path of renunciation, one tending toward bondage and the other toward freedom.
This discrimination is never mechanical. It weighs the particular place, time, and person, leaning on trustworthy guidance, since the same act can be right here and wrong there.
Across Advaita, ViśiṣṭādvaitaŚaṅkara · RāmānujaIn Śaṅkara and Rāmānuja’s words
The discrimination this verse describes is never treated as a fixed rulebook applied the same way in every case. Both Shankara and Ramanuja insist that what should and should not be done answers to the particular conditions of place, time, and person, resting on scriptural guidance, since a single act may be right for one person or occasion and wrong for another.
Where a source is thin or silent, honesty about the gap matters more than a confident voice: Madhva's comment does not survive here, and Abhinavagupta's one sentence covers three verses at once.
Across Advaita, BhaktiMadhusūdana · ŚrīdharaIn Madhusūdana and Śrīdhara’s words
Where the sources speak to it, this verse is read as opening a matched, deliberate set: a three-verse treatment of the intellect's three kinds, sattvic, rajasic, and tamasic, following directly on the three-verse treatment of knowledge just completed. The sattvic intellect named here is thus the first and clearest term of a comparison the following two verses will complete.
Definition becomes practice in at least one reading: doing the duties naturally yours, without craving their fruit, is what trains this very discrimination over time.
Across Advaita, BhaktiŚaṅkara · ŚrīdharaIn Śaṅkara and Śrīdhara’s words
Shankara and Sridhara both note the same point of grammar: strictly it is a person who knows, not the intellect, yet the verse gives the knowing to the intellect itself, the way ordinary speech says the firewood cooks. Knowing is treated as a particular working of the intellect, so that the constancy or firmness described two verses later is, on this reading, only another working of that same faculty.
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 frames the opening pair as two kinds of duty rather than action against inaction: engagement is the duty that brings worldly flourishing, withdrawal the duty that brings liberation, each proper to a person settled in it by station and nature. His most distinctive move is placing fear and fearlessness in one's relation to scripture itself, turning away from it as the place of fear, keeping to it as the place of fearlessness, with bondage and freedom simply the truth of transmigration and its ending.
Dvaita, in their fuller words
No comment from Madhva survives on this verse in the sources available to this edition; the same gap appears in the neighboring verses of this three-verse set. Extended conditionally from his broader system, one might expect the very capacity for correct discernment to be read as a dependent competence, granted according to each soul's graded fitness and sustained by the Lord's will, rather than an achievement the intellect reaches on its own resource. This is offered as a labeled extrapolation, not as Madhva's recorded reading.
Shaiva, in their fuller words
Only a single sentence survives, explicitly covering this verse together with the two that follow as one passage: the recurring phrase 'not as it truly is' means simply 'wrongly'. His preserved comment treats correctness of discernment as the one axis distinguishing the three kinds of intellect, without a separate extant gloss on bondage, fear, or duty specifically. Any fuller reading connecting this to recognition (pratyabhijna) and self-forgetting would be a clearly-labeled conditional extension, not his recorded word.
Bhakti, in their fuller words
Sridhara keeps the definition close to the shared reading, knowing pravritti in dharma and nivritti in its absence, knowing what suits this place and time, this fear and this safety, this gain and this loss. He is distinctive in stressing that this same discrimination is trained, not merely defined: performing the duties naturally yours, with full attention on the Self and without craving their fruit, is what teaches the intellect to recoil on its own from what is harmful, the way one recoils from a hissing cobra.
A modern reading, in their fuller words
Read forward into a modern-facing register, Madhusudana's architecture suggests treating the six items less as a static definition and more as one working test applied to any choice: does this action tend, in this case, toward the false sense of being the doer, or toward the clarity that a right means of knowledge secures? The pairs of engagement, duty, and fear are, on this reading, simply the concrete places where that single deeper question keeps showing up.
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
Take one choice in front of you today and run it through the six terms in order: is this engagement or withdrawal, for me, now? Is it something to be done or something to be left undone? Is the fear I feel about it a real one or a borrowed one? Whichever way it settles, ask last whether the choice, made either way, tends to bind you tighter to a small, anxious self or to loosen that grip a little. Let that last question, not the first five, be the one that finally decides.
So take up whatever choice is in front of you, weigh it honestly against these three pairs, and let the question of bondage or freedom, not comfort or fear, be the one that finally decides it.
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
ll the acaryas on file agree that this verse defines the sattvic intellect by its power to discriminate correctly among six things arranged as three pairs: engagement and withdrawal, what should and should not be done, and what should and should not be feared. Beneath these three pairs stands the deepest one, bondage and liberation, and an intellect that knows all of this rightly is, on every reading, the intellect colored by sattva.
Śaṅkarācārya · Rāmānujācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
Because bondage and freedom are named at the very end of the sentence, in the same breath as engagement and withdrawal, the commentators read the opening pair not as a bare instruction to act here and refrain there, but as two whole paths: engagement as the path of ordinary, scripturally sanctioned action, and withdrawal as the path of renunciation, one tending toward bondage and the other toward freedom.
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrīdhara Svāmī
The discrimination this verse describes is never treated as a fixed rulebook applied the same way in every case. Both Shankara and Ramanuja insist that what should and should not be done answers to the particular conditions of place, time, and person, resting on scriptural guidance, since a single act may be right for one person or occasion and wrong for another.
Śaṅkarācārya · Rāmānujācārya
Where the sources speak to it, this verse is read as opening a matched, deliberate set: a three-verse treatment of the intellect's three kinds, sattvic, rajasic, and tamasic, following directly on the three-verse treatment of knowledge just completed. The sattvic intellect named here is thus the first and clearest term of a comparison the following two verses will complete.
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrīdhara Svāmī
Shankara and Sridhara both note the same point of grammar: strictly it is a person who knows, not the intellect, yet the verse gives the knowing to the intellect itself, the way ordinary speech says the firewood cooks. Knowing is treated as a particular working of the intellect, so that the constancy or firmness described two verses later is, on this reading, only another working of that same faculty.
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī
Divergence
Advaita Vedānta
Shankara and Madhusudana read the pairs squarely through the causal roles of action and renunciation. Bondage is the conceit of being the doer, produced by false knowledge along the path of activity; liberation is the removal of ignorance and its effects by the knowledge of reality along the path of renunciation. Madhusudana sharpens the architecture further: bondage and liberation are named last in the verse because every earlier pair is explained by its bearing on this deepest one, and the sattvic intellect's certainty is conviction born of a genuine means of knowledge, not habit or opinion.
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
Viśiṣṭādvaita
Ramanuja frames the opening pair as two kinds of duty rather than action against inaction: engagement is the duty that brings worldly flourishing, withdrawal the duty that brings liberation, each proper to a person settled in it by station and nature. His most distinctive move is placing fear and fearlessness in one's relation to scripture itself, turning away from it as the place of fear, keeping to it as the place of fearlessness, with bondage and freedom simply the truth of transmigration and its ending.
Rāmānujācārya
Dvaita
No comment from Madhva survives on this verse in the sources available to this edition; the same gap appears in the neighboring verses of this three-verse set. Extended conditionally from his broader system, one might expect the very capacity for correct discernment to be read as a dependent competence, granted according to each soul's graded fitness and sustained by the Lord's will, rather than an achievement the intellect reaches on its own resource. This is offered as a labeled extrapolation, not as Madhva's recorded reading.
Madhvācārya
Kashmir Śaiva
Only a single sentence survives, explicitly covering this verse together with the two that follow as one passage: the recurring phrase 'not as it truly is' means simply 'wrongly'. His preserved comment treats correctness of discernment as the one axis distinguishing the three kinds of intellect, without a separate extant gloss on bondage, fear, or duty specifically. Any fuller reading connecting this to recognition (pratyabhijna) and self-forgetting would be a clearly-labeled conditional extension, not his recorded word.
Ācārya Abhinavagupta
Bhakti
Sridhara keeps the definition close to the shared reading, knowing pravritti in dharma and nivritti in its absence, knowing what suits this place and time, this fear and this safety, this gain and this loss. He is distinctive in stressing that this same discrimination is trained, not merely defined: performing the duties naturally yours, with full attention on the Self and without craving their fruit, is what teaches the intellect to recoil on its own from what is harmful, the way one recoils from a hissing cobra.
Śrīdhara Svāmī
Modern
Read forward into a modern-facing register, Madhusudana's architecture suggests treating the six items less as a static definition and more as one working test applied to any choice: does this action tend, in this case, toward the false sense of being the doer, or toward the clarity that a right means of knowledge secures? The pairs of engagement, duty, and fear are, on this reading, simply the concrete places where that single deeper question keeps showing up.
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
A Seeker Asks
If the sattvic intellect can supposedly know all this with certainty, why does my own discrimination feel so uneven, clear about some things and utterly confused about others?
Because the verse never claims this clarity arrives all at once or by nature. Shankara and Ramanuja both stress that the discrimination is answerable to particular place, time, and person, weighed case by case against scriptural guidance, not a single fixed insight you either have or lack. Unevenness is simply what practice at this looks like before it is complete.
Śaṅkarācārya · Rāmānujācārya
Sridhara's answer is practical rather than theoretical: this discrimination is trained by doing, specifically by performing the duties that are naturally yours with full attention and without grasping their fruit. On this reading your unevenness is not a flaw to be diagnosed but simply the current edge of a capacity that grows through exactly the practice the verse is describing.
Śrīdhara Svāmī
Madhusudana's structure offers a place to stand while that unevenness persists: whatever else is unclear, keep asking whether a given choice tends toward the false sense of being the doer or toward the knowledge that undoes it. That single deeper question, applied patiently across every uneven case, is itself the sattvic intellect in the process of becoming clear.
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
Contemplation
Take one choice in front of you today and run it through the six terms in order: is this engagement or withdrawal, for me, now? Is it something to be done or something to be left undone? Is the fear I feel about it a real one or a borrowed one? Whichever way it settles, ask last whether the choice, made either way, tends to bind you tighter to a small, anxious self or to loosen that grip a little. Let that last question, not the first five, be the one that finally decides.
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.