No clinging is left in him for fortune, good or bad, to grip.
It is tempting to hear this as a call to feel less. It is closer to a call to feel from a different root, one that fortune's rise and fall can no longer shake loose.
One who is without clinging fondness anywhere, who meets good fortune and bad alike without rejoicing or hating, has wisdom that stands firm.
The reading read whole, as one unhurried piece
Where it stands
Krishna is still describing the sthita-prajna, the person of settled wisdom, and answering the very question Arjuna opened with: how does such a person speak, sit, and move through the world? Two verses ago it was fear and anger that could no longer touch him. Here it is something wider still, the clinging fondness that makes every gain feel like proof of your worth and every loss feel like an injury to your very self.
The teaching
The word used here, anabhisneha, is total: no clinging fondness anywhere, not toward wealth or reputation, not even toward the body and the life a person defends before everything else. This is not the absence of feeling; it is the absence of one particular feeling, the sticky kind that superimposes an outcome onto who you take yourself to be. Because that clinging is gone, good and bad fortune do not stop coming. They keep arriving, as they do for everyone who still lives in a body and a world of causes. What changes is only the reception. He does not rejoice when it favors him, and he does not hate when it turns against him. Several old readers notice this first in his speech: no rush of praise when things go well, no curse or complaint when they do not. He is known as much by what he does not say as by what he does. And underneath the calm sits something more settled than restraint. He is not holding himself back from rejoicing through sheer effort; he simply no longer identifies with the thing that would have rejoiced. His wisdom stands established because it no longer depends on how the day happens to turn out.
The doubt that rises
If the clinging is truly gone, does any warmth survive in him at all, and toward what, or whom, does it now turn?
Where the paths divide
Read as affection relocated, not extinguished.
Sneha is defined precisely: a clouded modification of mind by which another's loss and gain get laid over you as your own. The sage is free of this toward everything that is not the Self. But toward the Self, the one reality, he remains full of love; he sets aside the lesser attachment for the sake of the one that is not lesser at all. Praise and blame do not arise in him for the same reason a clear mind does not manufacture confusion where there is nothing left to confuse.
Read as trust in the Lord who allots both fortunes.
The good and bad named here are, concretely, union with what is dear and separation from what is dear, the two events that shake an ordinary heart hardest. His evenness toward both rests on a settled trust that the Lord who indwells him governs what comes and what goes. This is a real station on the path, though not its summit; a lower state is described just after, and fuller devotion still lies ahead.
Read through the single word 'everywhere.'
The claim here is wider than the freedom from anger just described; the word sarvatra makes it total, covering every direction and every object, not one disturbance among others. Both the joy fondness would have produced and the hatred its loss would have produced come from one root: forgetting that all fortune is dispensed by a will greater than one's own, to which a dependent soul owes trust rather than protest.
Read as freedom rather than restraint.
Sneha names the very mechanism by which boundless awareness contracts around an object, taking its rise and fall as a measure of its own fullness. When this contraction is absent everywhere, the good and bad that still appear to the body find nothing left standing ready to be gripped by them. The not-rejoicing is not suppression; it is simply what an unbound freedom looks like from the outside.
Read as a heart already full, not a heart made empty.
Meeting good fortune, he does not break into praise; meeting bad, he does not break into blame; and this stillness is not achieved but discovered, in a heart already occupied by its true attachment. A slight, unconditioned warmth remains even at the summit, a compassion owing nothing to circumstance, falling on the virtuous and the wrongdoer the way moonlight falls without preference on both.
Read as an absence of fuel, not an ongoing act of will.
The delusions that produce gushing praise and bitter censure are, in an unpurified mind, driven by real psychological needs: to be seen as fortunate, to be spared blame. In a mind grown clear, those needs have simply stopped generating their usual output. What looks like extraordinary restraint from outside is, from inside, the plain absence of anything left demanding to be restrained.
All six readings agree the clinging is gone and something warmer survives it. They do not agree on where that warmth now lives: wholly transferred to the Self, held in trust toward a governing Lord, dissolved into a freedom with nothing left to contract, or kept as an ordinary, unconditioned kindness toward whoever is in front of you. The verse names only the absence. What fills the space it leaves behind is left, deliberately, for the reader to discover rather than be told.
A question to carry
The next time fortune turns for you, sharply either way, what in you reaches first: the story about what it means for you, or the plain fact of what has happened?
Where this teaching travels
Verses that sit near this one, each going its own way; follow whichever calls you.
So meet what comes, whichever way it comes, without letting a story about yourself attach itself to it, and let your wisdom rest on ground that fortune was never able to reach.
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.
Krishna continues drawing the portrait of the sthita-prajna he began two verses back, now answering how such a person meets the world's good and bad turns.
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 word everywhere is total: not toward wealth, not toward kin, not even toward one's own body and life, the two things clung to first.
Across Advaita, Viśiṣṭādvaita, DvaitaŚaṅkara · Rāmānuja · Madhva · MadhusūdanaIn Śaṅkara, Rāmānuja, and 2 others’ words
All six readings anchor the verse in one word, anabhisneha, the total absence of clinging fondness. This is read as reaching to the very root: not merely toward wealth or reputation, but toward the things a person defends before all else, the body and life itself. The steady one is not described as lacking feeling in general, only as lacking this particular sticky, self-implicating attachment.
Good and bad fortune keep arriving; what has changed is only that neither produces rejoicing nor hatred within him any longer.
Across Advaita, Viśiṣṭādvaita, Dvaita, BhaktiŚaṅkara · Rāmānuja · Madhva · Śrīdhara · MadhusūdanaIn Śaṅkara, Rāmānuja, and 3 others’ words
Because that clinging is absent, good and bad fortune still arrive, since none of the commentators claim the sage is shielded from the world's ordinary traffic of gain and loss. What has changed is only the reception: he neither rejoices at the favorable nor recoils at the unfavorable, and this evenness is read as the visible fruit of an inward change rather than a discipline of forced restraint.
This shows up first in speech: no gushing praise when fortune favors him, no curse or censure when it turns against him.
Across Kashmir Śaiva, Bhakti, AdvaitaAbhinavagupta · Śrīdhara · MadhusūdanaIn Abhinavagupta, Śrīdhara, and 1 others’ words
Several readings connect this evenness specifically to speech, treating the verse as Krishna's answer to Arjuna's question about how the settled one talks. He does not gush into praise when fortune favors him and does not break into censure or curse when it turns against him. He is known, in this reading, as much by what he withholds from saying as by what he feels.
The steadiness rests on being rooted in the Self, not on willpower clamped moment to moment over a restless mind.
Across Advaita, Kashmir ŚaivaŚaṅkara · AbhinavaguptaIn Śaṅkara and Abhinavagupta’s words
The steadiness is not read as willpower clamped over a restless mind, but as resting on a settled ground beneath the calm: identification with the Self rather than with the body and its shifting fortunes. Once that root is firm, the mind's habitual reaching toward objects has simply turned back, and the discerning insight, prajna, stands fixed rather than propped up moment to moment.
Nothing warm is lost in this evenness; it survives, redirected toward the Self, the Lord, or as an unconditioned compassion for all beings.
Across Advaita, Viśiṣṭādvaita, Dvaita, BhaktiŚaṅkara · Rāmānuja · Madhva · Śrīdhara · MadhusūdanaIn Śaṅkara, Rāmānuja, and 3 others’ words
None of the six readings treats this evenness as coldness or indifference to the world. Whether the released affection is said to pour toward the Lord, to remain as compassion toward all beings, or to be reabsorbed into a wider vision of dependence, every reading insists that something warm survives the falling away of clinging fondness; only the anxious, self-implicating form of attachment is gone.
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 reads the good and bad concretely as union with the dear and separation from the dear, the two events that most disturb an ordinary heart, and reads the sage's evenness as trust that both come allotted by the Lord who governs all events. He marks this verse, however, as one rung on a graded ladder of devotional maturity rather than its summit; a lower state is described next, and fuller devotion still lies ahead.
Dvaita, in their fuller words
Madhva builds his reading on the single word sarvatra, everywhere, arguing this is what keeps the verse from merely repeating the previous verse's freedom from anger and fear; here the claim is the total absence of fondness as such, in any direction. Both the joy that fondness would produce and the hatred its disappointment would produce are read as flowing from one root defect, forgetting that all fortune is the Lord's own just allotment to a dependent soul.
Bhakti, in their fuller words
Sridhara treats the verse almost as a portrait of speech before it is a portrait of feeling: meeting the auspicious, the sage does not break into praise; meeting the inauspicious, he does not break into censure. He reads the underlying stillness as devotional rather than merely disciplined, a heart already full of its true attachment and therefore too occupied to be moved by lesser ones, with a slight compassionate warmth surviving even at the summit.
A modern reading, in their fuller words
Read against the plain grammar of pratishthita, established, a modern-facing gloss stresses that Madhusudana's wisdom is not maintained by ongoing effort against temptation, but stands firm because the underlying delusion that produces praise and censure has, in a purified mind, simply run out of material to work with. The steadiness described is less a victory continually won than a disturbance that has stopped finding anything to disturb.
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 the next time something goes well for you, and the next time something goes badly, how quickly a story starts up: I am fortunate, I am unlucky, this proves something about me. See if you can let the event arrive without letting the story attach itself to it. This is not asking you to feel less. It is asking you to notice what you are quietly claiming as evidence about yourself, and to set that claiming down.
So when fortune turns, either way, let it arrive without a story attached, and let your wisdom rest on the ground fortune cannot reach.
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 six readings anchor the verse in one word, anabhisneha, the total absence of clinging fondness. This is read as reaching to the very root: not merely toward wealth or reputation, but toward the things a person defends before all else, the body and life itself. The steady one is not described as lacking feeling in general, only as lacking this particular sticky, self-implicating attachment.
Śaṅkarācārya · Rāmānujācārya · Madhvācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
Because that clinging is absent, good and bad fortune still arrive, since none of the commentators claim the sage is shielded from the world's ordinary traffic of gain and loss. What has changed is only the reception: he neither rejoices at the favorable nor recoils at the unfavorable, and this evenness is read as the visible fruit of an inward change rather than a discipline of forced restraint.
Śaṅkarācārya · Rāmānujācārya · Madhvācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
Several readings connect this evenness specifically to speech, treating the verse as Krishna's answer to Arjuna's question about how the settled one talks. He does not gush into praise when fortune favors him and does not break into censure or curse when it turns against him. He is known, in this reading, as much by what he withholds from saying as by what he feels.
Ācārya Abhinavagupta · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
The steadiness is not read as willpower clamped over a restless mind, but as resting on a settled ground beneath the calm: identification with the Self rather than with the body and its shifting fortunes. Once that root is firm, the mind's habitual reaching toward objects has simply turned back, and the discerning insight, prajna, stands fixed rather than propped up moment to moment.
Śaṅkarācārya · Ācārya Abhinavagupta
None of the six readings treats this evenness as coldness or indifference to the world. Whether the released affection is said to pour toward the Lord, to remain as compassion toward all beings, or to be reabsorbed into a wider vision of dependence, every reading insists that something warm survives the falling away of clinging fondness; only the anxious, self-implicating form of attachment is gone.
Śaṅkarācārya · Rāmānujācārya · Madhvācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
Divergence
Advaita Vedānta
Sneha is defined technically as a tamasic modification of the mind by which another's loss and gain are superimposed onto oneself. The sage is wholly free of this affection toward all that is not the Self, but this is affection relocated rather than extinguished: toward the Blessed One, the supreme Self, he remains full of love, and it is precisely to make that love undivided that affection for the not-self is dropped. Neither praise nor censure arises because both are delusions that a mind of pure sattva has no further capacity to generate.
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
Viśiṣṭādvaita
Ramanuja reads the good and bad concretely as union with the dear and separation from the dear, the two events that most disturb an ordinary heart, and reads the sage's evenness as trust that both come allotted by the Lord who governs all events. He marks this verse, however, as one rung on a graded ladder of devotional maturity rather than its summit; a lower state is described next, and fuller devotion still lies ahead.
Rāmānujācārya
Dvaita
Madhva builds his reading on the single word sarvatra, everywhere, arguing this is what keeps the verse from merely repeating the previous verse's freedom from anger and fear; here the claim is the total absence of fondness as such, in any direction. Both the joy that fondness would produce and the hatred its disappointment would produce are read as flowing from one root defect, forgetting that all fortune is the Lord's own just allotment to a dependent soul.
Madhvācārya
Kashmir Śaiva
Abhinavagupta reads this verse as completing Krishna's answer to Arjuna's first question about the speech of the sthita-prajna. Sneha is the mechanism by which unlimited consciousness contracts around an object, treating that object's fortune as its own measure of fullness. When this contraction is absent everywhere, the good and bad that still appear to a body have nothing left to seize, since no bounded self remains standing ready to be seized; the not-rejoicing is simply what freedom looks like from outside.
Ācārya Abhinavagupta
Bhakti
Sridhara treats the verse almost as a portrait of speech before it is a portrait of feeling: meeting the auspicious, the sage does not break into praise; meeting the inauspicious, he does not break into censure. He reads the underlying stillness as devotional rather than merely disciplined, a heart already full of its true attachment and therefore too occupied to be moved by lesser ones, with a slight compassionate warmth surviving even at the summit.
Śrīdhara Svāmī
Modern
Read against the plain grammar of pratishthita, established, a modern-facing gloss stresses that Madhusudana's wisdom is not maintained by ongoing effort against temptation, but stands firm because the underlying delusion that produces praise and censure has, in a purified mind, simply run out of material to work with. The steadiness described is less a victory continually won than a disturbance that has stopped finding anything to disturb.
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
A Seeker Asks
If I stop clinging to outcomes, will I stop caring about anything, or anyone, at all?
Every reading is explicit that this is not what is being asked of you. Shankara and Madhusudana say the very same love, withdrawn from the not-self, is poured undivided toward the Self; nothing is lost, only redirected.
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
Sridhara adds that a compassionate warmth survives even at the summit of this evenness, well known to those who walk the path; what falls away is only the conditioned affection that depends on your own gain.
Śrīdhara Svāmī
Ramanuja and Madhva locate the remaining warmth in trust rather than withdrawal: what steadies you is confidence that a wiser will than yours is already governing the outcome, which frees you to meet people and events without the anxious grasping that usually passes for care.
Rāmānujācārya · Madhvācārya
Contemplation
Notice the next time something goes well for you, and the next time something goes badly, how quickly a story starts up: I am fortunate, I am unlucky, this proves something about me. See if you can let the event arrive without letting the story attach itself to it. This is not asking you to feel less. It is asking you to notice what you are quietly claiming as evidence about yourself, and to set that claiming down.
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.