Kashmir Śaiva (Trika), through the Gītā

Read inwardly: 'Kuru' means the senses, the field is where opposites meet, and the question asks which side won within.

Fully allegorical, the body as inner battlefield.

Passes over the verse; only the inner truth the Gita teaches counts, not the catalogue.

Abhinavagupta hurries past the listing of warriors.

Both senses are laid side by side: the Pandava force is unconquerable, yet also slight for our army.

Offers the senses without deciding between them.

The flaw is the possessive 'these are mine' overlaid on the men, not the fighting itself; the cure is acting as one's own dharma.

Treating the speech as the view to be refuted.

Sin is the greed-born blindness to the ruin of one's family, and that blindness is exactly what Arjuna is trying to avoid.

On what 'sin' means.

Killing becomes a great sin when done coveting a particular fruit and fixing on particular victims as one's own; withdrawal is fitting but not the final word.

On what makes killing a great sin.

Krishna deliberately begins at the ordinary worldly level of honor and reputation, holding higher knowledge in reserve.

Abhinavagupta on Krishna's teaching method.

Krishna exposes a conceit: taking unrighteousness for righteousness, with Arjuna unable to settle whether he wants victory or defeat.

Right action must be free of fixation on both the deed and its fruit.

Standing between the armies mirrors an inner standing midway between knowledge and ignorance; because he turned for help rather than fled, he is ready to be taught.

Reads the verse for Arjuna's exact inner position, not his social rank.

The Self passing into another body is no ground for grief, any more than youth giving way to age.

The perishing body cannot be grieved, and the indestructible Self does not deserve grief.

Steadiness comes easily to one who keeps no firm regard even for the present body; loosen your grip and steadiness follows.

Read as a practical pointer alongside the prior verse: therefore seek steadiness.

The contacts belong to the senses, the 'measures,' and are not direct contacts with the supreme Self at all; one simply bears what is joined with arising and passing.

Drives a wedge between the unaffected Self and the disturbances that come and go.

Rather than sorting things into real and unreal classes, neither arising nor perishing is finally coherent, so there is nothing to grieve.

The Self, having been, simply continues to be, so it is neither born nor dies.

He does not develop the slaying question further at this verse.

On every doctrine, constant birth or constant destruction, of body or of self, grief is improper.

For those who proceed by the means of knowledge.

Destruction follows birth and birth follows destruction, so the round turns like an endless wheel; no single portion of it is the proper object of grief.

Ties the verse to holding eternity and non-eternity together.

Being is unmanifest before and after, manifest only in the middle; the ever-present nature self-unfolds all arisings, leaving no ground for grief.

Removing all ground for grief.

Since one's own dharma cannot be taken away, Arjuna's trembling and hesitation about the war is simply not fitting.

Ties the verse tersely to the preceding teaching on one's own dharma.

If even reward-seeking warriors should not abandon such a war, much less should one given this higher knowledge, though heaven is not the final aim.

Argues from the lesser case to the greater.

Actions do not bind of themselves, being insentient; the self binds itself through actions taking the form of latent impressions.

Reading the line as the skill in action by which one drops the binding power of deeds.

Even a little of this steady understanding destroys the great fear of rebirth, as a grain of sandal cools boiling oil.

Emphasizes the disproportionate power of even slight understanding.

Intelligence itself is one and innate; it only appears to fragment by the various objects a scattered mind turns it toward.

The verse is read on its metaphysical edge, not as a long censure of ritualists.

The fault is the settled fixing on fruit that these people bring to the Veda's speech, not the Veda itself.

They construe the Veda-speech as a promise of future heaven.

What binds is guna-shaped, desire-driven action, not the Veda itself, which settles one's duty.

Bears on the surrounding teaching; defends the Veda.

Action binds only when one is pervaded by the turbidity of craving for fruit; to one free of such wishing, the unprayed-for fruit, knowledge, is not denied.

The attachment that takes the form of a grasping refusal to act is itself false knowledge and is simply to be given up.

By buddhi-yoga the lower, tainted, inwardly empty kind of action is set far off; so take refuge in that intellect.

A brief gloss contrasting two kinds of action.

The mark of recognition is tied to scripture: gaining the yoga-buddhi brings thorough attainment of all that is to be heard and longed for.

Does not gloss it as a question about the sage's marks in the usual way.

The verse answers a fourfold question about the steady-minded one: on what ground, how he sits, what he practices, what he attains.

Established wisdom means an eternal settledness in the Self while the mind's wandering after objects has turned away.

Completes the answer to the first of Arjuna's questions about the sthita-prajna.

The sage's steadiness lies not in withdrawing the senses but in his freedom from passion and aversion amid pleasure and pain.

Does not comment on the tortoise or sense-mechanics at all.

The yogi not only shuts the senses out but draws the whole sensory field inward and makes it his own.

Comments on the adjacent withdrawal teaching, not the warning itself.

By the very seeing of the supreme Lord no residual relish (rasa) for objects lingers, which is why the yogin, unlike the mere ascetic, is of established wisdom.

Mat-parah dissolves the inner relish itself, not just the outward act of abstaining.

Turns from the descent to the remedy: govern the senses through the mind and hold the Lord as supreme.

Emphasizes the way out rather than the chain of ruin.

Only the liking-and-aversion-free person can truly renounce, since the ascetic must dwell on objects to drop them.

That very dwelling revives attachment, so his renunciation carries its seed.

The mark of the established one is inner mastery: governing the mind even while engaging objects, not merely avoiding them.

Reads the passage as one portrait, not a ladder of denials.

Offers no distinct reading here; this source is still expounding the earlier ocean image, not the chapter's seal.

If knowledge burns action away at its very root, then action seems to have no purpose left at all.

Pressing the question to its sharpest edge.

Though the two courses look distinct in ordinary usage, Krishna tells them as one, for consciousness itself is made of both knowledge and action.

Abhinavagupta.

Knowledge and action are finally one thing; action dwelling within knowledge cannot be avoided, since body, speech, and mind always quiver into motion.

Against keeping action and knowledge as separable stages.

If you do not act with the organs of action, you necessarily act with the mind, for the mind's activity cannot be stopped; so stopping the limbs is not stopping action, only moving it inward.

While the actions are done there is no loss of knowledge; the mind stays unengaged, the body moving as though a puppet.

Doing and knowing never collide.

Actions other than the one that must necessarily be done for sacrifice are binders; but the obligatory action, done with freedom from attachment to its fruit, gives no fruit at all.

The accent falls on obligatory action performed without fruit-attachment.

Prajapati is the supreme Self, and the same action becomes either a chain or a door depending on attachment or freedom from attachment.

Bondage from grasping the fruit, release from non-attachment.

The gods are the powers of the senses; gladden them by enjoying sense-objects as far as is fitting, and they gladden you with the freedom that befits your own nature, swiftly reaching Brahman where all difference melts away.

On the inward reading.

The gods are the senses; to withhold their proper objects is itself theftlike, so serve the enjoyments as they arise, aiming only at the stilling of craving, not indulgence.

Reading the verse inwardly.

The true sacrifice is the inward gladdening of the senses, and its leftover is the bliss of resting in one's own innermost essence.

The right person desires sense-objects only as a means to that inner bliss and is released from all taints, auspicious and inauspicious alike.

Food is the enjoyable, rain the enjoyer, sacrifice the activity of enjoyment, and action that activity arising by the freedom of the power of doing, all resting on Brahman.

On reading the chain inwardly.

One who does not accept the wheel is made of sin, for he delights in the senses alone and not in the Self.

Briefest gloss, on the contrast of delights.

Having no purpose of his own, he is even toward acting and not acting, and does only what genuinely needs doing, unattached.

As a turn toward right engagement, not withdrawal.

Janaka and the rest stand simply as examples of those who reached perfection while still doing action.

If the realized one drops the familiar side of action, ordinary people lose their grip and fall adrift between action and knowledge.

The harm is psychological and developmental, not merely social.

Ignorance just is the deluded resolve 'I am the doer'; by this false conviction the person binds himself, and the binding is false through and through.

Reading the verse as Krishna naming what ignorance is.

The moment one sees the doing as nature's affair, one is freed, thinking "nature does it; what has come upon me?"

On the immediacy of release.

In the actions done by the gunas, which belong to Nature, the deluded become attached precisely by the power of those same gunas; the attachment is itself an effect of the gunas operating.

Reads the verse tersely as Krishna explaining the 'attachment to action' just mentioned.

Hold the stark determination 'I am not the doer at all; the supreme Lord alone is the doer of all,' and out of a wish to benefit the world, simply carry out the work that here takes the form of war.

Resting on this view, whatever you do does not bind you, for faith dissolves the pervading fear of birth and death.

Read together with the next verse as one contrast: the faithless are lost, pervaded without ceasing by that fear.

The elements dissolve back into nature while the self never acts at all, so the whole question of curbing birth and action does not even arise for the free self; the demand to restrain it rests on a false premise.

On the self as ever-free non-doer.

Bondage comes when, through delusion, one takes the self as sole doer; for one wholly free of attachment, walking his own dharma, no bondage of merit and sin binds him.

How bondage arises.

If one's own dharma never departs from one's own heart, then ask how unrighteousness can arise at all against the dharma no creature is ever without.

Inquiry into the nature of innate dharma.

Dharma is still lodged in the heart, only veiled by a passing cover, and desire and anger are eternally one form.

On what the upheaval covers.

The 'this' that is covered is the self directly, and the three images mark desire as hard to approach, obstructive, and disgusting.

Reads the images as three statements about desire.

Desire is a fire that can never be filled because it burns up both the seen and the unseen, both worldly and otherworldly goods; nothing it touches escapes.

The foe seen by the eye stirs the sense, passes to the mind as intention, then to the intellect as resolve, destroying knowledge.

The seat is a moving pathway inward, not a fixed address.

The foe is primarily anger, which destroys the knowledge of Brahman and the discernment that is made of the Lord.

Offers a second reading taking jnana and vijnana as instruments of warding-off (mind and intellect) rather than objects destroyed.

Beyond the intellect abides the higher I-sense whose nature is 'I am all,' so full that anger cannot arise in it to be slain.

The secret intent beyond the plain reading of separate layers.

That this handed-down knowledge is in our own day lost shows just how rare and weighty it is.

Remarks bearing on the lineage from the verses just after.

Out of compassion he sends forth a self-portioned body; his birth is divine because begun by his own power of freedom, not by past actions.

Explains how the birthless Lord takes birth.

Knowing the Lord and being made of Him, the freed are wholly full, and because they are full they are free of anger and the rest.

Their mark is acting without grasping at any result.

He takes that very form toward whoever approaches, and all alike follow His path, for even the Vedic rites are no separate road but His own ordering.

Notes a grammatical reading of 'they follow' as 'they should follow'.

Like space, he cannot be stained by any action, for the stain comes from craving, and in him there is none; the freedom this knowing brings is the seeker's.

Non-doership through the likeness to space.

Purified by this understanding, simply do the actions that must necessarily be done.

The purified intellect as ground.

The categories overlap: a tainted act sits inside an enjoined one, something auspicious inside a forbidden one, and action goes on even in stillness.

Only the later fire of discernment burns up both auspicious and inauspicious action.

In your own acts you see non-agency by being wholly at peace, and in others' acts you know them as your own by being of a full and risen form.

The realized one holds both at once: all-doing fullness and all-severing peace.

Stripped of every intention toward the fruits longed for, the deed is consciously offered into the fire of knowing, and there it is burnt up.

What persists is the bodily kind of action, the working of the senses that serves the body, not the mentally invested, intellect-driven activity that would tie the person down.

Reading engagement narrowly as bare sense-level functioning.

Insentient action has no power of its own to bind anyone; a person binds himself, by his own self, by taking on the latent impression of the fruit, so letting that go is freedom.

The metaphysics of binding itself.

The whole universe, itself made of Brahman, is offered back into the supreme awakening, the fire wholly at peace, for the increase of its blaze, and the yogin reaches Brahman alone since nothing else exists.

Dynamic self-offering, taught only through oral tradition.

Some offer outer substances to the gods, and others offer that same act into the unfillable Brahman-fire with no regard for fruit.

Even substance-sacrificers reach the supreme, since all are called knowers of sacrifice.

Restraint is the mind whose flames scorch longing, and enjoyment is sought only to dissolve the split between enjoyer and enjoyed.

Nothing enjoyed exists apart from the enjoyer.

The fire is one-pointedness lit by right knowledge; the mind gives up every other working and holds its single chosen object.

The stress falls on sustained undistracted holding, not on dissolving the world into its cause.

The breaths are the rising and setting of Om offered into the self, until every rising of the mind dissolves into objectless bliss.

Not physical breathing at all, but the inner sacrifice of self-study and knowledge.

The remnant is the gladdening of one's own senses and inner organs; the nectar is resting in the Self as objectless bliss, and those who savour it are joined with the state of Brahman.

Turns the imagery wholly inward and esoteric, withheld from the unprepared.

These sacrifices are the door, the means, of Brahman; recognizing the action-nature woven through them, one comes to release.

Substance taken alone is unilluminated; knowledge is the light that kindles and completes the offering, and every act culminates there.

On offering lit by knowledge.

The means include the full play of reasoning, and the seer of truth can be one's own awakened faculties, for yoga alone is the teacher of yoga.

One's own faculties as the seers.

Knowledge is a fire to be actively kindled into a steady blaze, by binding a firm conviction born of practice, until not even a trace of past impression remains.

Read together with the next verse's fire image of total burning.

Everything else is pure only by something borrowed from outside; knowledge alone is pure in its own nature, as you will know for yourself when well awakened.

Declines to expand the point at length, giving it an experiential turn.

Faith and self-surrender arise the moment doubt is gone, so one must honor teacher and scripture, for the doubter knows nothing at all.

Binds the verse to the warning against the doubting self that follows.

The single point is that the renunciation of actions holds good only by yoga and in no other way, the chapter gathered into a brief summary.

Reading the verse as the chapter's summary.

This is simply the bare question of one in doubt: is renunciation the chief thing, or is it yoga? No further system is built here.

It is the two joined together that give the highest good, for renunciation does not even arise without yoga; this dependence is what marks yoga's distinction.

Renunciation, itself a kind of action, is not spoken of alone here.

The perpetual renouncer is simply the one by whom the mind's longing and hatred have been renounced.

Intelligence gone forth from anger, delusion and the rest, released with ease.

There is simply no difference between Sankhya and yoga, for the two are eternally connected; knowledge is never without yoga and yoga never without knowledge.

Stated as inseparability from the start, with no talk of one being a means to the other.

Because actions are hard to renounce, reaching renunciation is painful for one without yoga, while for the yogins this same renunciation is easy to come by.

Reading 'tu' as emphatic and giving the difficulty.

Freedom rests on a firm settled conviction that one is not the doer; the senses act, nothing has come upon me.

That stance is the casting of all action upon Brahman.

The peace is of the nature of a final culmination, that from which there is no returning again, irreversible and terminal.

Comments only on the word naishthiki.

Dwelling in the house that is the body, I share no more in its properties and decay than a man shares in his house's aging.

Voiced in the first person as the realized stance itself.

For the Lord, whose nature is the freedom of light and bliss, creation flows from His mere nature, with no doership added to Him and no action or fruit apart from Him.

As a pot is nothing apart from the consciousness turning the wheel, so nothing acts apart from the supreme Lord.

Since action and its fruit never truly exist, the sins we dread were never done by the self at all; they are done by ignorance, like fearing poison in nectar on a mere suspicion.

On the terse non-existence reading.

Once ignorance is gone, knowledge's power to reveal both itself and all else stands established of itself, needing no separate help.

Remove the obstruction and true nature simply acts as its own nature.

With ignorance shattered, one sees consciousness as the single property in all bodies, so toward every being there is no thought of merit, impurity, or sin.

Carries into the next verse's equal sight; need not act on the sameness outwardly.

The verse continues the single theme already under discussion: it is this one stream of knowledge alone that is being spoken of here.

Read very briefly, as 'bringing into being' the same continuing teaching.

For one who sees all as the same, enemy and friend are mere outward dealing, not anything inward.

Steadiness is the natural way of being for one whose inner ground is undivided.

The unattached person, the one who thinks in this way, is marked as the true subject of the verse's claim.

A terse note without a further system built around it.

Hold it as one inward recognition: the joys born of outer objects are a cause of pain and, being so, are also impermanent.

Fault and fleetingness cultivated together as a single thought.

The task is not hard: bear the surge for just a moment, up to the body's end, and an absolute happiness follows.

The smallness of the required holding is set against the greatness of the result.

The happiness and light depend on nothing outer, while in worldly dealing the freed person moves about as if dull or without sense.

Outward bearing of the inwardly full.

Two knots must be undone in the one who reaches the goal: the knot of difference and the knot of doubt.

Places difference itself, not only doubt, among the bonds to be cut.

On every side and in all states the being of Brahman is supremely real; it does not wait for a time of yogic restraint but is recognized as ever-present.

Reads the verse as Brahman's constant, unconditioned presence, recognized rather than produced.

The brow-point is the place free of the leftward and rightward glances of anger and passion; the breaths to be evened are dharma and adharma, the mind steadied beyond the opposites.

The bodily instructions read as inward symbols, though the plain reading holds too.

He is the enjoyer in the fruits precisely because the doer has given them up; knowing his truth, one is released however one is placed.

Liberation does not depend on outward circumstances.

Renouncer and yogi are outright synonyms, perpetually bound together, and the second line is a marvel: not without fire, not without action, and yet a renouncer.

Holds the two negatives as a paradox to savor, not a rebuke.

Action is to be done by the knower, for mere actionless renunciation is like a kingdom without a throne; stillness is the resting once the height is reached.

Here cause functions as a defining mark, the sign by which each stage is recognized.

The mind alone is the means, the sole means; conquered it lifts you, unconquered it casts you into a fierce hell.

Laying the whole weight on conquering the mind.

Being wholly at peace is freedom from the I-sense, so the intelligence sees no difference between self and others.

The equality amid the pairs is rooted in a non-dual seeing where the self-other distinction has fallen away.

Jnana is the intellect that does not err, and vijnana is that knowledge become manifold in action.

A brief gloss defining the terms alone.

The one whose intelligence is even toward all these, and toward the good and the sinful, step by step crosses beyond the cycle of rebirth.

Equanimity framed as a graded ascent out of transmigration.

Restrain the mind upon a steady body, sitting joined and holding Me as supreme; the farthest reach of this is the attaining of Me.

Holding the Lord as supreme.

The flickering is the mind's object-driven efforts, its gaining and resting; when these fall away, the yogi is still.

The Self seen is one's very own nature, and the happiness here is absolute, free of the turbidity that objects stir.

Even the realized one may stir at first, only from residual impression and compassion, never delusion.

The senses are restrained by the mind alone, not by a ceasing of action; meditation is an inward poise, and to think of nothing whatever cannot mean a literal void, which this school does not accept.

On meditation as inward poise rather than outward stillness.

The moment the mind turns from an object it must be calmed in the Self, or having no footing it seizes the objects again; by this the happiness comes of itself with ease.

Ceasing from objects is not enough; the calming in the Self is the whole point.

He contemplates the self entering all beings as the knowing grasper, and within the self makes all beings one as the grasped; from this fusion arises seeing all as the same.

Given here in brief as a contemplative procedure; the fuller account lies in the author's other works.

To perish is to fail to shine forth. The supreme Self makes all things manifest within Him; for one who sees this all-pervading form, the Lord shines by His own form and the full seer too does not perish.

Non-loss is the fullness of luminous manifestation on both sides.

One whom this knowledge has pervaded cannot be stained, having come to be in any and every state whatsoever.

On the stress falling on non-staining.

This is description, not a fresh command. To see everyone's pleasure and pain on a par with one's own simply states the inherent nature of such a yogi; the equality is what he already is, not a duty laid on him.

On the reading that takes the verse as describing the yogi's own nature.

Brahman, though pointed out directly, stands far off and becomes only indirectly reached, because of the mind's wicked, churning unsteadiness.

Reads the two pronouns as hinting at this distance, and 'firm' as the mind's stubborn persistence in disturbance.

Dispassion destroys eagerness for objects, and practice makes release itself the mind's object, step by step.

Each means is taken up because it removes one distinct obstacle.

If faith holds, all is well; but if faith is destroyed, even gained yoga is made fruitless.

Placing faith, not effort, at the center.

Because his faith is not destroyed, his auspicious deed cannot waste away as ritual fruit does, and he does not perish.

Rests the whole assurance on the survival of faith.

The everlasting years are the three Vaishnava years of Vishnu, and the pure are those whose mind already touches a portion of the Blessed One.

An inward gloss on the span and on the purity of the rebirth-family.

This is the seeker whose release is to come by gradation, stage by stage; born among yogins, his very gradual path is why this birth is called harder to win.

Reads the verse for the seeker liberated by stages rather than at once.

Helpless and led by the sheer force of prior practice, he is carried toward yoga; perfection is the state of release, the final goal the state of Vasudeva.

Insists such a one is perfected not in a single body but through practice over many births.

The yogi excels the knowers because knowledge is itself the fruit of yoga, so the cause is honored above its product.

Gives each of the three superiorities its own brief ground.

A painful yoga without the Lord gives no perfection; the best yogin sets the Lord in his heart and worships Him alone, pervaded by the supreme Lord.

Pre-eminence of the knowledge joined with the Lord.

What is coming is just knowledge and activity, and beyond these two nothing whatever remains, for all knowables rest on them.

A terse reading of the chapter's knowledge-and-discernment in terms of knowledge and activity.

Because not everyone is fit for it, the verse is a summons to serve this knowledge with earnest effort.

The accent falls on striving rather than passive expectation.

Though divided eightfold, this prakriti is one, so the world she begins is one; even within the doctrine of Nature, non-duality is shown on the mirror of one's own self.

Non-duality shown within prakriti.

The Lord, though distinct from nature and persons, runs through them all like a hidden thread holding strung gems together.

Reads bear it home as a lived nearness through practice.

He is the common ground before differences break out: the savour before sweet and sour divide, and the unstruck sound (anahata) heard by yogins within.

A yogic reading of "sound in space" beyond ordinary struck sound.

The scent native to earth is pure by its own nature, and foulness arises only from the mixing in of another element.

Focusing narrowly on why the verse says pure, grounded in elemental physics.

The seed is the subtle, the most refined point from which manifestation first begins, the original subtle ground of all rather than a merely material origin.

Sattva and the rest are made of the Lord but the Lord is not made of them, so one who is himself made of him comes to know all things as Vasudeva.

The recognition reached only by the rare ripened soul.

The gunas are not truly distinct from pure consciousness; perceiving them as separate is the maya, and seeing the world as that one light crosses it.

Maya is the very perceiving of the gunas as separate.

Though the body fit for refuge is present, these people do not regard the Lord; this very failure is itself the glory of maya, the display of her own power.

Very compact gloss.

The lower three keep even a little difference from the Lord in the very attitude 'this I long for'; the knower takes hold of Him as not different, so the Lord alone is dear and not the fruit.

Draws the contrast in terms of difference and non-difference.

The deities are lower forms of Krishna himself, so even these worshippers take their fruit from Krishna alone, but a limited fruit measured by their own impression.

Reads the lesser gods as subordinate bodies of the Lord; the fruit ends because it is bounded by latent impression.

The fault is desire-bound perception, not the form chosen; whoever drops desire and takes any deity-form reaches release.

On worship in general.

He simply does not come within the range of all.

When the world sinks into a sleeping state, as in deep sleep, that is no release, for once that delusion ends the latent impressions resume their work and transmigration returns.

On whether dissolution brings release.

Wearing away both merit and demerit, they know all as Brahman lit by His rays, and remember the supreme Lord even at the final hour.

The questions number nine, not five or seven, including who it is that presides over sacrifice and who dwells within the body.

A different count of the questions.

Brahman is consciousness itself, holding the whole universe within; karma is its sovereign self-projection shining out as all sentient and insentient beings.

Visarga is neither ritual nor biology but the universe-creating self-expansion of free consciousness.

The Person is the Self, and that Self is the lord of the divinities since all the divinities come to rest in it; just so the supreme Person who enjoys every sacrifice is none other than I who dwell within the body.

Read with the greatest economy, settling two questions at a single stroke.

What you have been steeped in at all times is reached, whether or not it is even remembered at the last instant.

The bare last memory does not decide it; else a true knower whose mind failed would meet a dark fate.

Contemplating the Blessed One belongs to the moment after the body falls away and its pain has ceased.

On the reading that locates the contemplation past bodily affliction.

The sun-color is only an image, not a literal form, for the truth of Vasudeva has passed beyond the very darkness of imagining any shape at all.

On the sun comparison.

Krishna is not merely abbreviating but is about to declare the very method by which the imperishable state is secured.

Reads sangraha, 'in summary', in an active sense as a means of comprehension.

The breath in the head, the seat of will, restrains the body; "in the heart" names non-clinging, not a bodily seat.

Even without prior practice, a single final-moment turning by the Lord's will can undo every impression.

As far as Brahma's state, beings ceaselessly wheel and turn from every world, sideways, above and below; release is of a different order than ascent to any world at all.

Openly breaks with the standard reading.

It is these very same beings, not other ones, who wake in each cosmic day and rest as mere potency in each night; since even the Prajapatis are bounded by time, they too arise and pass away.

On the identity of beings across cosmic cycles.

It is the truth of Vasudeva, free of all reckoning by time: at once manifest, since it runs through all things, and unmanifest, since it is hard to reach.

Won by devotion; for one who reaches Him the words again and return lose their footing.

By the upward passage some desire release and some desire enjoyment; non-return is liberation, and return is for the sake of enjoyment.

The northern course is the upward one, named by light-words like 'fire' because it carries the properties of light; the opposite dark path returns for the sake of the moon's enjoyment.

A brief symbolic, contrastive reading.

By the first path there is non-return, which is liberation; by the other there is not merely return but worldly enjoyment, set against release.

On naming the dark destiny.

Know the two paths by their inner sequence, and practise the yoga whose field is those inner times, then gather it back to outer time, at all times.

A further reading from his own teachers, kept brief.

By remembrance the residues of all action are burned away, and the yogi finds the supreme Shiva with ease.

The one decisive condition for handing on this knowledge is the listener's freedom from fault-finding.

For the passing of teaching from teacher to disciple.

The knowledge that shines through all learnings; the heroic steadiness natural to kings like Janaka makes its practice easy to carry out.

For the qualified, whose firmness of temper carries the practice.

Nothing but awareness can ever be found holding things up; yet the object-face a thing presents veils the very awareness it rests on.

For the seeker who looks for the Lord among knowable objects.

The denial names our blindness: the deluded take some limited thing for the ground of knowing and miss the one awareness in which all knowing stands.

Read as a teaching about recognition, not about what exists.

The connection between the ground and what moves within it never breaks, and still the ground is never once called touched.

The nature spoken of here is the unmanifest condition of the world, not its manifest display.

Resting on his higher nature, beings in themselves inert are lit up into consciousness and life.

For the single point of how the insentient host comes alive.

His very indifference is his creative power, for his activity depends on nothing outside itself; freedom and world-making are one in him.

The deluded deny him because they let what the senses can perceive decide what exists, while he is the perceiver seated within them.

For minds that take perceptibility as the measure of what is real.

Longing, act, and knowledge all run empty for one reason: each is set upon an unreal object.

For natures in which restlessness and darkness have grown excessive.

Some worship with outer offerings and some by the sacrifice of knowledge alone; both alike have the one Lord as their goal.

Read as a charter for more than one true mode of worship.

Action seems divided among its many factors, yet when the Self is seen in each factor, the same power that binds sets free.

For the practitioner who carries direct seeing into every part of the act.

The rite truly reaches the Lord; by praying for heaven only, the worshipper cuts his own act short, and that narrowed aim turns him back.

On the reading that Vasudeva alone is worshipped even in the outer rite.

The gain is the Lord's own nature, never won before, and the keeping is a footing in it so firm that no fear of falling can arise.

Read inwardly, apart from any worldly maintenance.

By whatever rule one worships, it is the one Brahman who is worshipped; only one's own self, the supreme Lord, needs no rule, since rules produce what is not yet attained.

On the reading that not by the rule means by another rule.

Every act already has the form of His worship, for He alone is named in all things; contemplate each deed as made of His substance.

The teaching is already sound in reasoning; it becomes the firmest of all because the Lord himself has promised it.

Read together with the promise that follows, that his devotee does not perish.

Even beasts and birds are gathered in; to shrink the promise to the twice-born is to measure a compassion without measure.

Read in the plain, all-inclusive sense that blesses all beings.

The chapter speaks once more only to make plain the one meaning the first nine chapters have already carried.

All knowers are one Lord; awareness passes and expands from teacher to teacher until the lordliness of the great Lord belongs to the seers themselves.

Read less as genealogy than as the pervasion of one divine awareness.

Every named glory is the one undivided Lord under a varied form; no single name may cut him down to that thing alone.

For the one who longs to know his whole and partless pervasion.

The chapter's purpose is to turn a meaning grasped through teaching into something directly seen; the guarded eternal dharma is that of those in whom action and knowledge no longer differ, a dharma whose field is ceaseless creation and dissolution.

Read as instruction ripening into direct awareness.

The whole verse reduces to one inquiry: with what intent is this fierceness of yours such as it is. The question is wholly about the purpose behind the terrible form, nothing else.

Read as the single question of intent behind the fierce shape.

Your act is reframed inside an all-consuming movement of awareness that swallows the world of knowledge and ignorance, and this answers your earlier confession that you did not know which course weighed more.

Read against the chapter's deepest secret, sketched only in outline.

It is being because it is real, and non-being because it can never be made an object; the Lord shines precisely when both those cognitions fall away.

For the reading that turns on what can and cannot be apprehended as an object.

The doubled homage shows the surpassing height of devotion, the Lord's nature now turned into direct seeing; to explain further would only repeat what the seeing makes plain.

At the very close of the gathered-up vision the Lord bestows the standing in the truth of Brahman, whose form is supremely at peace; the recovery is a settling into that peace, not only the calming of fear.

Read as the grace given in the closing of the whole vision.

Where devotion is wholly single and no other object remains, the truth that Vasudeva is the whole universe dawns of itself, recognized as one's own awareness, without effort.

For those whose delight rests in nothing but the Lord.

The contrast is between worship that includes the Lord and worship of the bare self alone.

The most joined are those whose absorption rests on the sovereignty of the great Lord and whose state is genuine, not put on; the accent falls on real identification, not ritual worship.

Read through samavesha, absorption into the Lord's sovereign reality.

Worshippers of the imperishable Self do reach Krishna alone, but their toil is doubled: first they build the bare self up into something Lord-like, then they worship it.

For seekers who lay the Lord's qualities onto the self before worshipping it.

Laying all into the Lord is itself the highest yoga because it is unfeigned; true awareness is not kindled by technique but flows by its own savor, awakening of itself.

On the reading that values spontaneous, support-free awakening over engineered method.

Practice is the seeker's part while grace is awaited: absorption cannot be won without an intense descent of the Lord's power and the guru's grace, so since direct absorption is not in your own reach, you practice in the meantime.

On the reading that absorption finally depends on grace, not on technique alone.

When even practice is blocked by hindrances, the worship, muttered prayer, recitation and oblation are a remedy: ritual action clears away the obstacles, so the path can move forward again.

For one overcome by hindrances, where the works serve to destroy the impediments to practice.

The inability is the unlearned not knowing the scriptural order of action; the remedy is surrender as mercy, offering every deficiency and slip of one's worship to the compassionate Lord to be forgiven.

For one who does not know the sequence the rites prescribe.

Knowledge understood as absorption is foremost because it is the root of all; only when meditation becomes a being made of the Lord can the fruits truly be laid down.

Read as reversing the flat ladder, with absorption at the base.

Friendliness and compassion are simply the freedom from envy; with no 'these are mine' and no 'I am noble, I am forbearing', nothing in him can be wounded.

Holding no resolve that this alone must be done by him, he takes pleasure and pain as they come and rests his heart in the Lord.

Read through the verse on aniketa, having no fixed abode.

The same body is the field for both the bound and the awakened, but its meaning flips with the seer: for the wanderer it is the seed-bed of action, while for the awakened it wears away bondage through enjoyment, and the true knower is the one by whose grace this insentient thing becomes sentient at all.

For how the body's meaning turns on whether its knower is awakened.

In brief means without dividing the inquiry up: Krishna settles all the listed questions at once with a single common answer rather than treating each one separately.

Read as one undivided answer to the whole list at once.

All this is the seen; the conscious one over against it is the very power of seeing, the person, named apart from the catalog.

Read so the seer is held clearly distinct from the field.

The whole list is lifted toward one conviction: that there is nothing else apart from the supreme Self, the great Lord; from that undeviating conviction comes a devotion that cannot stray, since the very desires that would cause straying are themselves only modifications made of that one reality.

Read against their opposite, which is ignorance, with pride and the rest as the marks of that ignorance.

Taken with the lines that follow, the qualifying terms confirm an inference toward the very form of Brahman and point to its non-separateness from the awareness every school speaks of.

Read as stating what is to be known by the knowledge just described.

To know the triad rightly is already to be the Lord's devotee; right knowledge and genuine devotion are one qualification, and that knower attains the Lord's state.

Nature, its fourteenfold creation, and the person are all beginningless because, suffused with the truth of Brahman, none is other than Brahman; nature and person work mutually, each leaning on the other like the lame man and the blind, and the person, being the principal one, is the enjoyer.

On the reading that all three are eternal for the one reason of being non-different from Brahman.

The freeing insight is the vision of Brahman in which all difference falls away; by that one undivided seeing of self, Nature, and the qualities, however one lives, one is free.

On the reading that liberation turns on a differenceless vision.

Knowledge of this kind is the principal thing, and the Self is worshipped variously: by some directly, by some through sankhya, by some through action, by others who simply worship as they have heard. All cross over death, which is transmigration, because the truth of the Lord worshipped by any means whatever carries one across.

On the reading that any sincere means carries the seeker across.

Nothing that exists, moving or unmoving, stands apart from the knower of the field; the whole of existence is held within the knower and never outside it.

The yogin whose understanding is uniform everywhere does not let himself fall into the hard-to-cross ocean of transmigration; the harm avoided is concretely sinking into the round of birth and death.

For the yogin whose understanding is even everywhere.

A most steady understanding settles in: it is Nature alone that does this, I do nothing at all; for one fixed here, even while doing everything he does nothing.

Read as an inner conviction of non-agency held as a stable state.

Seeing all beings as within the Self and arisen from the Self, one becomes the doer of the whole manifestation, and for that very reason takes on no stain, being the supreme Self present in the body yet unstained like space.

On the reading that purity coexists with universal agency.

The sun answers a precise doubt: as one sun fills all regions, the one Self lights every field, moving and unmoving, without being multiplied.

Read as the reply to how one Self pervades many fields.

Nature is only slightly subject to change, so release follows easily; the one who so beholds attains the state of Vasudeva and wins the supreme Shiva.

Read with the unworldly, unobstructed eye marked by knowledge.

Krishna is teaching the course of transmigration so that, knowing what is to be left and how, the leaving becomes easy. The great Brahman is the form of the Lord's own power, the power that makes things grow; resting on his self-reflective awareness, the Lord out of grace sends the beginningless souls into wandering. The cosmogony is thus grounded in his own reflexive consciousness and turned toward grace.

Read as grounding creation in the Lord's reflexive awareness and grace.

The Blessed One's own generating power, whose nature is to bring the whole round of birth and rebirth around.

For the inseparable bond of power and the one who wields it.

The strands bind the embodied one to an enjoyment-experience whose reach runs all the way to release, less a sheer fetter than a journey that arrives at freedom.

Read as binding framed as an enjoyment that reaches to liberation.

Sattva is spotless, yet it is the very ground from which thirst and clinging rise. The real danger is squandering the precious human chance through heedlessness, sloth, and sleep, wasting even a single moment of a life that could not be bought with all the jewels in the world.

For one weighing the rare human opportunity for release.

The fruit follows the quality cultivated across a whole life, not whatever strand happens to be ascendant at the last breath. Unceasing clarity through the years earns the worlds of the good. Against the death-moment reading he objects that at the final moment, for everyone without exception, only delusion arises, so it cannot be the decisive thing.

On the reading that lifelong practice, not the last moment, sets the fruit.

These lines only repeat what has been said and can be set aside; what serves for release is the conduct that goes beyond the three qualities altogether.

He is asking how transcendence is possible at all, since every state of an embodied person is some movement of the mind, and every such movement is one of the three strands.

Read as a real objection raised from within embodiment.

The one who looks blank, as though without discriminating, is the very one who truly knows; what holds him unmoved is the steady aim at no fruit whatever.

On the reading that apparent blankness is the highest seeing, not ignorance.

Only the devotee who longs for no fruit at all serves truly; setting one's trust on a reward is the very straying the verse rules out.

On the reading of 'cha' as 'Me alone'.

Only because of the living, conscious Lord does Brahman come to be for the seeker; Brahman worshipped as a thing of inert form would yield a release no better than deep sleep.

On the reading that the ground must be conscious, not inert.

The verse redirects an old worship of the tree toward worship of the peaceful supreme reality that is Brahman, whose truth is read off through the scriptures as a tree is read by its leaves.

For one who has turned away from everything and so can attain the supremely peaceful root.

Cut the downward-grown roots of the tree; the state that is supremely at peace is the very imperishable goal the following verses point toward.

Read tersely, taking the cutting straight to the roots and the goal.

The abode is the knowing subject itself, which sets the instruments of knowing in motion and stands beyond them; the luminaries belong to the side of the object and cannot reach it.

Read as marking the absolute difference between the knower and all that is known.

The portion is meant only figuratively. Because of ignorance the full and complete one is not felt, yet consciousness never ceases, and it is this not-feeling of the whole together with unbroken awareness that lets us speak of a portion at all. In reality a having-of-portions does not hold, for not even a region of Brahman has passed beyond the all-form.

Read as a figure to apply wherever the occasion arises.

The self works with the senses whether abiding, departing, or enjoying; the deluded miss it, but the awakened keep awareness in view and so do not lose it.

On the difference between the unawakened and the awakened seer.

The three lights are the way the one Lord works creation, upholding, and dissolution; each light, joined with the elements, lights, nourishes, burns, and sustains the world as His lordliness.

Read as the cosmic working of the one Lord through the elemental lights.

The heart is awareness that is freedom; from the 'I' come knowledge as the shining-forth of the universe, forgetting as the breaking of the whole into limited objects, and memory as that shining once more, all his sovereign play.

Read as phases of the Lord's own power, whose nature is freedom.

The imperishable is the self still unawakened, whose all-pervadingness stays broken off until the supreme Person splits the knot of duality.

Read as the world's persistent delusion of two, and its cure.

He sees the Lord as the very truth of Brahman, all-comprising, and knows all things as made of him; worship runs through every state, of form, of action, of knowledge, so that no moment is empty of praise, since all is already the divine.

On the reading that whatever he sees, he sees as the form of the Blessed One.

One marvel. Completion ordinarily comes through something done; here it comes by mere knowing, and the word 'and' marks that wonder.

On the reading that the secret is the non-duality of all.

The qualities mark the divine, sattvic portion whose very self is knowledge; taking one's stand there, the seeker casts off the inner ignorance and carries out the action scripture ordains.

Read as the framework for understanding born of one's own reflection.

Engagement is the question from what has this arisen, and withdrawal the question where does it dissolve; the asuras never inquire into the origin and the end of things.

Read as the contemplative questioning of source and dissolution.

The world as the asura sees it is without anything beyond what is plainly seen: the visible exhausts the real, and no unseen cause or deeper ground is granted.

Read as the claim that the visible exhausts the real.

A life staked entirely on enjoying desire turns cruel the moment that enjoyment is thwarted, and the anxiety never rests until rebirth itself dissolves.

Read as one sweep into the later verses on craving and anger.

The rite is fruitless because anger and the rest have destroyed all his works; hating the worlds, he hates God who dwells in all, and is cast into demonic wombs.

On the reading that takes sacrifice in name to mean fruitlessly.

Scripture is beginningless and is itself the means of valid knowledge, no mere word of any person; whoever decides right and wrong by his own wit falls into hell.

Those who carry on faithfully but without resting on the rule of scripture: what is their course? The question is left in its barest form.

Scripture bears fruit only for those who have sattva; the one whose heart is tender with sattva fulfils it, while the one made turbid by rajas and tamas only performs its outward acts.

Read as a teaching about who can truly enact scripture.

Sattva simply means one's own nature, and the self is bound up with a faith that stands higher than all his ordinary doings; the person is made of that overarching commitment.

The list matters less than the inner intent behind it; honesty is straightness, and the cleansing that counts is the cleansing of one's disposition.

Read with the emphasis carried forward to inner intent and rightly framed speech.

Faith fires every austerity, so faith alone settles nothing; what makes it of light is that the faith is made of the austerity itself, not set on display or on harming others.

On the reading that grade tracks the object the faith rests upon.

The injunction 'it is to be given' stands mainly to point up the defects in the two gifts that follow: the grudging, reluctant rajasic gift and the dishonouring tamasic one. The sattvic gift is framed chiefly by setting it against what it is not.

Read as a contrast-marker for the three kinds of gift.

The three words teach the way beyond the gunas: take up the act for as long as embodied, aim at no particular fruit, and so it does not bind.

For one whose understanding has crossed beyond the three gunas.

The faithless act is tamasic and yields only the toil of assembling its factors. "Asat" means simply not commendable. The very same factors and the same outward act issue in release for those of clear knowledge; the difference lies not in the form but in the inner clarity and faith behind it.

On the reading that the outer act is identical and only the inner clarity differs.

Earlier verses named the relinquisher and the renouncer side by side, so naturally Arjuna asks the difference between them.

Read closely from the wording of the preceding verses.

Relinquishment colored by clarity, passion, or dullness takes on that quality, but the word truly names only carrying actions through with evenness toward success and failure; so it is well grounded only for the sage free of the three qualities.

On the reading that only the guna-free sage relinquishes in the strict sense.

The non-relinquisher is one whose very being is made of the fruit, fused with it; bondage is a matter of identity, not merely of receiving a result.

Read as locating bondage in identification rather than transaction.

All five causes are always at work, yet the ignorant bind themselves by laying sole doership on the self in thought alone.

For the one whose insight stays unsettled and so partakes of a bondage that is not really there.

Two kinds of person are marked off. For one who rests in mere unawareness when prompted, 'knowledge, knowable, knower' apply; when his understanding seizes the act as 'I shall enjoy this, since I have done it', 'instrument, act, doer' apply. For the yogin, free of that self-appropriating grasp, the second triad finds no occasion at all.

For distinguishing the fruit-seeking doer from the yogin who has left that mode behind.

The three named terms are compressed pairs that recover all six factors of the prior verse, all sorted by the difference of the gunas.

Read as a brief enumeration settled in the Sankhya conclusion.

This is the seeing of the one undivided being, set against the lower ways that follow: rajasic knowledge sees things as separate, by likes and dislikes, and tamasic knowledge clings to anger and attachment without weighing any cause. The instrumental case marks it as a kind of the instrument of knowledge.

Read within the scheme that sorts the instrument of knowledge into three.

Fixed means simply what is to be done; the plain sense of the marks is confirmed without a distinctive reading.

Read as a brief gloss across the run of three verses on the kinds of action.

What is forbidden is only the settled habit of claiming agency as one's fixed property; the ordinary 'I do' of everyday speech and dealing is left untouched.

On the reading drawn from the agent-noun form, which condemns a fixed disposition, not a single utterance.

Firmness means contentment, the settled sense that what was to be done is done; in this form it belongs to everyone and alone lets a person stop acting.

Offered as the inner sense rather than the surface word-meaning.

Correctness of discernment is the single line that divides the three kinds of intellect; to know a thing not as it truly is means simply to know it wrongly.

Read across all three intellect verses as one running passage.

Firmness is a free, self-delighting resolve: holding the faculties while thinking, let me in every way be one who delights in the self.

On the reading that obstinate, clinging gripping belongs instead to tamasic firmness.

It feels like poison at first because clinging to objects, practised through a hundred births, is hard to undo; the path is a razor's edge, and the mind's clearness rises from the self grown clear.

Read as the inner cause of the early difficulty.

From Brahma down to the worm, all stay caught in the web of the qualities; real pleasure belongs only to the mind that has passed beyond them.

Each one is compelled by his own nature, so Arjuna, whose nature is a kshatriya's, cannot escape acting; yet acting with the knowledge Krishna teaches breaks the binding tie to the deed.

For the verse turned on Arjuna as proof he cannot refuse to act.

What is handed over is the disclosure of non-dual reality; to weigh it fully is to grasp this real purport, not the surface of the words.

For the one attending to the content of the secret rather than the gesture.

The whole reflection, shown before only here and there, is now shown plainly; the offering of oneself into Brahman is in every way the principal thing, and the mind is never sated in hearing it.

Read alongside the call to keep the mind on the Lord.

Drop two notions in the mind: that you are the doer of what war brings, and that refraining from a forbidden act earns you merit; then take refuge in the Lord, the one doer of all.

Read as the abandoning of two specific mental claims about agency and merit.

The four conditions are not a checklist but one ripening ladder: austerity wears away sin, from it faith is born and faith is itself devotion, faith grown firm becomes the wish to hear, and fault-finding is the disregard that makes the Lord secondary to a craved fruit.

Read as a single inward sequence of ripening rather than four separate tests.

This is a real command to teach, not mere praise; the one who bestows it on the devotees by the prescribed procedure attains the state of being made of the Lord, His very nature.

Read as an injunction binding the qualified teacher, with the setting-out itself the doing of devotion.

The readiness to fight has arisen, but full knowership of Brahman has not yet come; this is sufficient resolution for the task at hand, not the absolute completion of realization.

On the reading that leaves room for the further teaching of the Anugita still to come.

Once its meaning ripens into a clear, thought-free experience, the mere remembrance of this dialogue bestows the supreme Brahman, and whatever such a person then does with ease becomes auspicious.

On the reading that the dialogue carries a lasting, liberating power.