BHAGAVAD-GITA 4:6

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BHAGAVAD-GITA 4:6

 

ajo 'pi sann avyayatma

bhutanam isvaro 'pi san

prakrtim svam adhisthaya

sambhavamy atma-mayaya

 

WORD FOR WORD

 

ajah--unborn; api--although; san--being so; avyaya--without

deterioration; atma--body; bhutanam--of all those who are born;

isvarah--the Supreme Lord; api--although; san--being so; prakrtim--in

the transcendental form; svam--of Myself; adhisthaya--being so

situated; sambhavami--I do incarnate; atma-mayaya--by My internal

energy.

 

TRANSLATION

 

Although I am unborn and My transcendental body never deteriorates,

and although I am the Lord of all living entities, I still appear in

every millennium in My original transcendental form.

 

PURPORT

 

The Lord has spoken about the peculiarity of His birth: although He

may appear like an ordinary person, He remembers everything of His

many, many past "births," whereas a common man cannot remember what he

has done even a few hours before. If someone is asked what he did

exactly at the same time one day earlier, it would be very difficult

for a common man to answer immediately. He would surely have to dredge

his memory to recall what he was doing exactly at the same time one

day before. And yet, men often dare claim to be God, or Krsna. One

should not be misled by such meaningless claims. Then again, the Lord

explains His prakrti, or His form. Prakrti means

"nature," as well as svarupa, or "one's own form." The Lord says that He

appears in His own body. He does not change His body, as the common

living entity changes from one body to another. The conditioned soul

may have one kind of body in the present birth, but he has a different

body in the next birth. In the material world, the living entity has

no fixed body but transmigrates from one body to another. The Lord,

however, does not do so. Whenever He appears, He does so in the same

original body, by His internal potency. In other words, Krsna appears

in this material world in His original eternal form, with two hands,

holding a flute. He appears exactly in His eternal body,

uncontaminated by this material world. Although He appears in the same

transcendental body and is Lord of the universe, it still appears that

He takes His birth like an ordinary living entity. And although His

body does not deteriorate like a material body, it still appears that

Lord Krsna grows from childhood to boyhood and from boyhood to youth.

But astonishingly enough He never ages beyond youth. At the time of

the Battle of Kuruksetra, He had many grandchildren at home; or, in

other words, He had sufficiently aged by material calculations. Still

He looked just like a young man twenty or twenty-five years old. We

never see a picture of Krsna in old age because He never grows old

like us, although He is the oldest person in the whole creation--past,

present, and future. Neither His body nor His intelligence ever

deteriorates or changes. Therefore, it is clear that in spite of His

being in the material world, He is the same unborn, eternal form of

bliss and knowledge, changeless in His transcendental body and

intelligence. Factually, His appearance and disappearance is like the

sun's rising, moving before us, and then disappearing from our

eyesight. When the sun is out of sight, we think that the sun is set,

and when the sun is before our eyes, we think that the sun is on the

horizon. Actually, the sun is always in its fixed position, but owing

to our defective, insufficient senses, we calculate the appearance and

disappearance of the sun in the sky. And because Lord Krsna's

appearance and disappearance are completely different from that of any

ordinary, common living entity, it is evident that He is eternal,

blissful knowledge by His internal potency--and He is never

contaminated by material nature. The Vedas also confirm that the

Supreme Personality of Godhead is unborn yet He still appears to take

His birth in multimanifestations. The Vedic supplementary literatures

also confirm that even though the Lord appears to be taking His birth,

He is still without change of body. In the Bhagavatam, He appears

before His mother as Narayana, with four hands and the decorations of

the six kinds of full opulences. His appearance in His original

eternal form is His causeless mercy, bestowed upon the living entities

so that they can concentrate on the Supreme Lord as He is, and not on

mental concoctions or imaginations, which the impersonalist wrongly

thinks the Lord's forms to be. The word maya, or atma-maya, refers to

the Lord's causeless mercy, according to the Visva-kosa dictionary.

The Lord is conscious of all of His previous appearances and

disappearances, but a common living entity forgets everything about

his past body as soon as he gets another body. He is the Lord of all

living entities because He performs wonderful and superhuman

activities while He is on this earth. Therefore, the Lord is always

the same Absolute Truth and is without differentiation between His

form and self, or between His quality and body. A question may now be

raised as to why the Lord appears and disappears in this world. This

is explained in the next verse.

 

Copyright 1983 The Bhaktivedanta Book Trust International. Used with

permission.