Hope, work, and knowledge all run empty for those sheltered in a deluding nature.
Those who saw only a man in Krishna do not suffer one loss among many; everything they reach for goes hollow at once. Hope, work, and knowledge are the whole field of a human life, and a deluding refuge empties the entire field.
Their hopes are in vain, their actions in vain, their knowledge in vain. Senseless, they take refuge in a deluding nature, the nature of fiends and demons.
The verse before showed the deluded scorning Krishna for wearing a human body; this one counts the cost of that scorn, before the chapter turns to the great souls who see truly.
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.
Scorn the Lord in his human form and the loss is total: hope runs empty, work runs empty, and knowledge itself comes to nothing.
Across Advaita, Viśiṣṭādvaita, Dvaita, Śuddhādvaita, Bhedābheda, Kashmir Śaiva, Bhakti, and the modern voicesŚaṅkara · Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana · Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati · Rāmānuja · Vedānta Deśika · Madhva · Jayatīrtha · Vallabha · Puruṣottama · Bhāskara · Abhinavagupta · Śrīdhara · Viśvanātha · Baladeva · Jñāneśvar · Sivananda · Tilak · RamsukhdasIn Śaṅkara, Ānandagiri, and 18 others’ words
This verse describes the inner ruin of those who, in the previous verse, scorned Krishna because he wears a human form. Krishna now names the result of that contempt as a threefold collapse. Their hopes are 'mogha' (vain, empty, fruitless): whatever they long for does not come to pass. Their actions are vain: the rituals they perform, the fire-oblation (agnihotra) and the rest, become mere labor that yields no real fruit. And their knowledge is vain: whatever they study and understand leads nowhere true. The Sanskrit triples this deliberately, mogha-asha, mogha-karma, mogha-jnana, so that hope, deed, and knowing, the whole field of a human life, all run to nothing once a person slights the Lord.
This emptiness is not bad luck; the turning away is itself what hollows the work, and a reward that begins must also end.
Across Advaita, Viśiṣṭādvaita, Bhakti, Śuddhādvaita, and the modern voicesŚaṅkara · Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana · Dhanapati · Rāmānuja · Śrīdhara · Viśvanātha · Baladeva · Sivananda · Ramsukhdas · Vallabha · PuruṣottamaIn Śaṅkara, Ānandagiri, and 10 others’ words
The commentators stress that this emptiness is not a random misfortune but the direct consequence of turning away from the Lord. Their actions fail precisely because they are done in contempt of him, or apart from him, or for some other end than serving him; their hopes fail because they pin them on perishable rewards or on deities and powers taken in isolation from the Lord; their knowledge fails because it is drawn from teachings that do not present the Lord, or that point only at what is not the true Self. Several note that ritual done with selfish, fruit-seeking intent (sakama-bhava) carries a beginning and an end, so its rewards also end: one may even rise to the highest worlds and still must return to birth and death, gaining nothing lasting. The thread running through all of it is that the orientation away from the Lord is itself what hollows out the work.
And the inner instrument suffers too: contempt clouds the power that tells real from unreal, so even careful study cannot find its way to truth.
Across Advaita, Viśiṣṭādvaita, Bhedābheda, Bhakti, Śuddhādvaita, and the modern voicesŚaṅkara · Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana · Rāmānuja · Vedānta Deśika · Bhāskara · Śrīdhara · Vallabha · Puruṣottama · Tilak · Baladeva · NīlakaṇṭhaIn Śaṅkara, Ānandagiri, and 10 others’ words
Because of this, such people are 'vichetas', described as senseless, distracted, of scattered or unsettled mind, lacking the power of discrimination that would let them tell the real from the unreal. The contempt for the Lord clouds the very faculty that could have saved them. This is why their knowledge cannot help them: the instrument of discernment is already obstructed by the offense, so even study and reasoning cannot reach the truth.
Beneath it all is the refuge: a cruel, grasping, deluding nature that takes the body for the self, and whoever rests there sinks deeper.
Across Advaita, Viśiṣṭādvaita, Dvaita, Śuddhādvaita, Bhedābheda, Kashmir Śaiva, Bhakti, and the modern voicesŚaṅkara · Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana · Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati · Rāmānuja · Vedānta Deśika · Madhva · Vallabha · Puruṣottama · Bhāskara · Abhinavagupta · Śrīdhara · Viśvanātha · Baladeva · Jñāneśvar · Sivananda · TilakIn Śaṅkara, Ānandagiri, and 16 others’ words
The verse traces the cause of this state to the kind of nature these people have taken refuge in: a 'rakshasi' (demonic) and 'asuri' (ungodly) 'prakriti' that is 'mohini', deluding. Many commentators read these as the modes of rajas and tamas grown excessive, where the rakshasa side is marked by cruelty and harm to other beings (the cry 'cut, split, drink, eat') and the asura side by grasping after forbidden enjoyments and seizing what belongs to others ('do not give, do not sacrifice, take another's wealth'). This deluding nature treats the body as the self, and it is what makes a person scorn the Lord in the first place; resorting to it, they sink into cruel deeds and, several add, into still darker births and the torment of hell hereafter.
This is the shared ground; it can be carried as it is. Below is where they differ.
Where they differthe divergence
Advaita Vedānta, in their fuller words
The Advaita reading frames the failure as contempt for the Lord who is one's own Self: by slighting him, a person slights what he most truly is, so his fire-oblations and his knowledge alike turn fruitless. The deluding demonic and ungodly nature is the disposition that holds the body to be the Self. Several in this school sharpen the consequence: the obstruction of discriminating knowledge comes from a great sin born of reviling the Lord, and through the gateway of hell (desire, anger, and greed) such people undergo the suffering of hell, even said to be fit to dwell there long. One adds that knowledge which treats only of Brahman is what bears fruit, while knowledge from books that deny the Self is the empty kind named here.
Viśiṣṭādvaita, in their fuller words
This school reads the offense as a perverse misjudgment of the Lord in his human descent: the deluding nature conceals his supreme compassion and other qualities present in his manhood, so that people hold him, the Lord of all, to be merely equal to others. Because their estimate of him is wrong, their knowledge is perverse with regard to everything, the moving and unmoving world and the Lord himself, and so whatever they wish or undertake toward him becomes vain. The triple vainness, on this reading, exhausts the whole field of a life and follows as a cascade from one bad inner appraisal of who the Lord is.
Dvaita, in their fuller words
The Dvaita reading takes the failure as the settled fruit for haters of the Lord: nothing they hope for is attained, and no liberation comes to them even through devotion offered to other gods such as Brahma or Rudra; for them there is no recourse at all. This school then resolves a scriptural puzzle at length. If texts say enemies like Shishupala reached the Lord's state through hatred, this does not make hatred a path to liberation. Those figures were eternal attendants of Vishnu, devotees before their fall, who became haters only by the force of a curse; the Lord, prizing devotion, grants them the fruit of their former love, not of their hatred. That former attendantship is given as the very answer to how a hater attained liberation, which shows hatred itself is no means; the many texts prohibiting hatred, backed by reasoning and consonant with the Vedas' great purport (the supreme excellence of the Lord's qualities), outweigh the few statements of likeness. The verse then states the cause of the hatred as the rakshasa nature.
Śuddhādvaita, in their fuller words
This school presses past mere ignorance, since not-knowing is common to everyone, to a specific corruption. Hopes are vain because heaven, the deities, and even reward taken apart from the Lord are themselves empty; or because such people hold that karma alone, without the Lord, bestows fruit. Their knowledge is the 'asuri' knowledge born of the teachings of mayavada and the like, spoken in bewildering scriptures that do not have the Lord's own form for their object. The natures taken refuge in are read with precision: a rakshasi nature whose form is feeding one's own belly and genitals, an asuri nature whose form is harming others, and a deluding human nature that is maya itself, the very nature that makes one forget the Lord. It is for just this reason that, seeing him as merely a man-form, they set him at nought.
Kashmir Śaiva, in their fuller words
This reading is terse and gives a single root cause: action, knowledge, and longing are all fruitless because each has an unreal thing for its object. The 'asuric and rakshasa' natures simply name those in whom the qualities of rajas and tamas have grown excessive. The emptiness, on this account, is a matter of the object being unreal rather than of any further machinery of sin or rebirth.
Bhedābheda, in their fuller words
This reading is compact: hopes, deeds, and knowledge are vain, the deeds (fire-offering and the rest) futile and the knowledge futile because it is directed to what is not the Self. 'Vichetas' means lacking discrimination, and the nature resorted to is a fiendish, dark, tamasic one. It then turns immediately to the contrasting verse on the great souls who take refuge in the divine nature.
Bhakti, in their fuller words
The devotional reading binds the three failures tightly as cause and effect flowing from turning away from the Lord, and the Gaudiya voices add a striking point: this collapse strikes even those who outwardly look successful. Even if they are devotees, their hope of reaching the Lord's realm is vain; even if they are doers of ritual, their hope of heaven is vain; even if they are men of knowledge studying Vedanta, they do not come to know liberation, the fruit of knowledge. The reason given is the sin of disregarding the supreme Brahman who has taken a human-seeming form, thinking that form material; one cites scripture warning that whoever holds Krishna's body to be material is to be shunned. One vivid Marathi telling likens such lives to clouds in a rainless sky, a mirage, a juggler's ornaments, a tall hollow tree that bears no fruit: appearing to exist yet empty, with delusion as a demon gripping the mind so reason cannot reach it.
A modern reading, in their fuller words
The modern commentators render the verse plainly and draw out its working. Hopes are vain because they are placed in perishable, transient forms and so miss the Eternal; action is vain when not offered as sacrifice to the Lord, since deeds are insentient and cannot dispense their own rewards, only the all-knowing Lord can; knowledge from books that deny the Self bears no fruit, while only learning that treats of Brahman does. One develops the economics of it: even scripturally sanctioned acts (yajna, dana) done with selfish, fruit-seeking intent have a beginning and an end, so one rises to high worlds only to return to birth and death, spending one's time and intelligence and gaining nothing, above all missing the very purpose for which a human body was given. He carefully limits the verdict: only such selfish ritual is empty; acts done for the Lord and offered to him are not fruitless but become 'sat', truth-bearing and imperishable.
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
Look honestly at where you have placed your hope. If it rests on things that change and pass, on a reward that yields its fruit and is then gone, then even when the hope is met the meeting does not last, and you are left as empty as before. The verse is not telling you to stop acting; it is showing you what makes action stand. The same deed, even a sanctioned one, comes out vain when it is done to win some passing advantage for yourself, because what begins and ends can only give what begins and ends. But work done for the Lord, for his pleasure, and offered to him is not lost. It does not give perishable fruit; it becomes 'sat', truth-bearing and abiding. So the practice is simple to name and lifelong to live: keep offering the act and its fruit Godward, so that your hopes, your deeds, and your understanding are not spent on what cannot hold them.
What is built on the passing passes with it; what is offered to the Lord becomes true and abiding, and nothing of it is lost.
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 describes the inner ruin of those who, in the previous verse, scorned Krishna because he wears a human form. Krishna now names the result of that contempt as a threefold collapse. Their hopes are 'mogha' (vain, empty, fruitless): whatever they long for does not come to pass. Their actions are vain: the rituals they perform, the fire-oblation (agnihotra) and the rest, become mere labor that yields no real fruit. And their knowledge is vain: whatever they study and understand leads nowhere true. The Sanskrit triples this deliberately, mogha-asha, mogha-karma, mogha-jnana, so that hope, deed, and knowing, the whole field of a human life, all run to nothing once a person slights the Lord.
Braided from 20 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri · Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika · Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha · Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrī Bhāskara · Ācārya Abhinavagupta · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar · Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas
The commentators stress that this emptiness is not a random misfortune but the direct consequence of turning away from the Lord. Their actions fail precisely because they are done in contempt of him, or apart from him, or for some other end than serving him; their hopes fail because they pin them on perishable rewards or on deities and powers taken in isolation from the Lord; their knowledge fails because it is drawn from teachings that do not present the Lord, or that point only at what is not the true Self. Several note that ritual done with selfish, fruit-seeking intent (sakama-bhava) carries a beginning and an end, so its rewards also end: one may even rise to the highest worlds and still must return to birth and death, gaining nothing lasting. The thread running through all of it is that the orientation away from the Lord is itself what hollows out the work.
Braided from 12 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Dhanapati Sūri · Rāmānujācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas · Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama
Because of this, such people are 'vichetas', described as senseless, distracted, of scattered or unsettled mind, lacking the power of discrimination that would let them tell the real from the unreal. The contempt for the Lord clouds the very faculty that could have saved them. This is why their knowledge cannot help them: the instrument of discernment is already obstructed by the offense, so even study and reasoning cannot reach the truth.
Braided from 12 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika · Śrī Bhāskara · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama · Lokmanya Tilak · Śrīla Baladeva · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha
The verse traces the cause of this state to the kind of nature these people have taken refuge in: a 'rakshasi' (demonic) and 'asuri' (ungodly) 'prakriti' that is 'mohini', deluding. Many commentators read these as the modes of rajas and tamas grown excessive, where the rakshasa side is marked by cruelty and harm to other beings (the cry 'cut, split, drink, eat') and the asura side by grasping after forbidden enjoyments and seizing what belongs to others ('do not give, do not sacrifice, take another's wealth'). This deluding nature treats the body as the self, and it is what makes a person scorn the Lord in the first place; resorting to it, they sink into cruel deeds and, several add, into still darker births and the torment of hell hereafter.
Braided from 18 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri · Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika · Madhvācārya · Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrī Bhāskara · Ācārya Abhinavagupta · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar · Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak
Divergence
Advaita Vedānta
The Advaita reading frames the failure as contempt for the Lord who is one's own Self: by slighting him, a person slights what he most truly is, so his fire-oblations and his knowledge alike turn fruitless. The deluding demonic and ungodly nature is the disposition that holds the body to be the Self. Several in this school sharpen the consequence: the obstruction of discriminating knowledge comes from a great sin born of reviling the Lord, and through the gateway of hell (desire, anger, and greed) such people undergo the suffering of hell, even said to be fit to dwell there long. One adds that knowledge which treats only of Brahman is what bears fruit, while knowledge from books that deny the Self is the empty kind named here.
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Ānandagiri · Dhanapati Sūri
Viśiṣṭādvaita
This school reads the offense as a perverse misjudgment of the Lord in his human descent: the deluding nature conceals his supreme compassion and other qualities present in his manhood, so that people hold him, the Lord of all, to be merely equal to others. Because their estimate of him is wrong, their knowledge is perverse with regard to everything, the moving and unmoving world and the Lord himself, and so whatever they wish or undertake toward him becomes vain. The triple vainness, on this reading, exhausts the whole field of a life and follows as a cascade from one bad inner appraisal of who the Lord is.
Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika
Dvaita
The Dvaita reading takes the failure as the settled fruit for haters of the Lord: nothing they hope for is attained, and no liberation comes to them even through devotion offered to other gods such as Brahma or Rudra; for them there is no recourse at all. This school then resolves a scriptural puzzle at length. If texts say enemies like Shishupala reached the Lord's state through hatred, this does not make hatred a path to liberation. Those figures were eternal attendants of Vishnu, devotees before their fall, who became haters only by the force of a curse; the Lord, prizing devotion, grants them the fruit of their former love, not of their hatred. That former attendantship is given as the very answer to how a hater attained liberation, which shows hatred itself is no means; the many texts prohibiting hatred, backed by reasoning and consonant with the Vedas' great purport (the supreme excellence of the Lord's qualities), outweigh the few statements of likeness. The verse then states the cause of the hatred as the rakshasa nature.
Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha
Śuddhādvaita
This school presses past mere ignorance, since not-knowing is common to everyone, to a specific corruption. Hopes are vain because heaven, the deities, and even reward taken apart from the Lord are themselves empty; or because such people hold that karma alone, without the Lord, bestows fruit. Their knowledge is the 'asuri' knowledge born of the teachings of mayavada and the like, spoken in bewildering scriptures that do not have the Lord's own form for their object. The natures taken refuge in are read with precision: a rakshasi nature whose form is feeding one's own belly and genitals, an asuri nature whose form is harming others, and a deluding human nature that is maya itself, the very nature that makes one forget the Lord. It is for just this reason that, seeing him as merely a man-form, they set him at nought.
Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama
Kashmir Shaivism
This reading is terse and gives a single root cause: action, knowledge, and longing are all fruitless because each has an unreal thing for its object. The 'asuric and rakshasa' natures simply name those in whom the qualities of rajas and tamas have grown excessive. The emptiness, on this account, is a matter of the object being unreal rather than of any further machinery of sin or rebirth.
Ācārya Abhinavagupta
Bhedabheda
This reading is compact: hopes, deeds, and knowledge are vain, the deeds (fire-offering and the rest) futile and the knowledge futile because it is directed to what is not the Self. 'Vichetas' means lacking discrimination, and the nature resorted to is a fiendish, dark, tamasic one. It then turns immediately to the contrasting verse on the great souls who take refuge in the divine nature.
Śrī Bhāskara
Bhakti
The devotional reading binds the three failures tightly as cause and effect flowing from turning away from the Lord, and the Gaudiya voices add a striking point: this collapse strikes even those who outwardly look successful. Even if they are devotees, their hope of reaching the Lord's realm is vain; even if they are doers of ritual, their hope of heaven is vain; even if they are men of knowledge studying Vedanta, they do not come to know liberation, the fruit of knowledge. The reason given is the sin of disregarding the supreme Brahman who has taken a human-seeming form, thinking that form material; one cites scripture warning that whoever holds Krishna's body to be material is to be shunned. One vivid Marathi telling likens such lives to clouds in a rainless sky, a mirage, a juggler's ornaments, a tall hollow tree that bears no fruit: appearing to exist yet empty, with delusion as a demon gripping the mind so reason cannot reach it.
Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar
Modern
The modern commentators render the verse plainly and draw out its working. Hopes are vain because they are placed in perishable, transient forms and so miss the Eternal; action is vain when not offered as sacrifice to the Lord, since deeds are insentient and cannot dispense their own rewards, only the all-knowing Lord can; knowledge from books that deny the Self bears no fruit, while only learning that treats of Brahman does. One develops the economics of it: even scripturally sanctioned acts (yajna, dana) done with selfish, fruit-seeking intent have a beginning and an end, so one rises to high worlds only to return to birth and death, spending one's time and intelligence and gaining nothing, above all missing the very purpose for which a human body was given. He carefully limits the verdict: only such selfish ritual is empty; acts done for the Lord and offered to him are not fruitless but become 'sat', truth-bearing and imperishable.
Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas
A Seeker Asks
If even sincere ritual, study, and devotion can be called 'vain', what exactly makes the difference between a fruitful spiritual life and an empty one?
The dividing line the commentators draw is not the outward form of the act but its inner orientation. The same fire-oblation, the same study, the same effort becomes empty when it is done in contempt of the Lord, apart from him, or aimed at some other end than serving him; it bears fruit when it is offered to him. The emptiness is caused by the turning away itself, not by the deed being defective.
Śaṅkarācārya · Rāmānujācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas
What makes self-seeking work fall short is that it is built on perishable footing. Hope placed in transient forms misses the Eternal, and deeds done for a fruit that has a beginning and an end yield rewards that also end, so one rises to high worlds and must return, gaining nothing that lasts. The difference is whether the life is anchored in what passes or in what abides.
Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas
And the faculty matters: where contempt for the Lord clouds discrimination, even study and reasoning cannot reach the truth, so knowledge stays barren. A fruitful life keeps that discerning power clear by holding a true estimate of the Lord rather than treating him, or the Self, as merely one thing among others. Acts and knowledge offered to him, and rooted in him, are precisely the ones that become truth-bearing and do not perish.
Rāmānujācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Swami Ramsukhdas
Contemplation
Look honestly at where you have placed your hope. If it rests on things that change and pass, on a reward that yields its fruit and is then gone, then even when the hope is met the meeting does not last, and you are left as empty as before. The verse is not telling you to stop acting; it is showing you what makes action stand. The same deed, even a sanctioned one, comes out vain when it is done to win some passing advantage for yourself, because what begins and ends can only give what begins and ends. But work done for the Lord, for his pleasure, and offered to him is not lost. It does not give perishable fruit; it becomes 'sat', truth-bearing and abiding. So the practice is simple to name and lifelong to live: keep offering the act and its fruit Godward, so that your hopes, your deeds, and your understanding are not spent on what cannot hold them.
Sit with this · Swami Ramsukhdas
All the translations and commentary
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