Bhagavatgita a detailed study-chapter2

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16. na asatho vidhyathe bhaavaH na abhaavo vidhaythe sathaH

ubhayoH api dhrshtaH anthaH anayoH thatthvadharSibhiH

 

Unreal can never come into being. The real can never cease to be. The wise know the real truth of this.

asath- unreal which has no real existence. sath- that which is real. bhava – existence , abhaava-non existence.

 

dhrshtaH anthah- understood in its entirety.

 

thatthvadarSbhiH- those who know the reality.

 

By the term asath the body, mind and intellect, to be exact , everything that is not self, athman , is meant. Asath has no being in the sense that its existence is not permanent and always changing. Sath is that which exists always , that is the self. . In other words, nonexistence means perishable nature and existence is imperishable. Hence Krishna says, what exists can never cease to exist and what does not exist can never come into existence. This sounds like high philosophy but this can be applied to our everyday life.

 

Most of our problems arise because we imagine something to be real when it is not. We identify ourselves with our body ,mind ,and intellect while the real `I' is different from all these. This can be verified through a simple exercise by trying to answer the question Who am I ? The obvious answer would be ` I .am so and so.' But that is only your name. You may say that I am father of so and so or husband of so and so. But it is only your relationship. Even when you say I am a professor or I am an intellectual, it only denotes your professional and intellectual status. So, who are you in reality ? We commonly speak about our body as when we say "My body aches all over." This proves that you are not your body. Similarly when we use expressions like "My mind is upset" or "My intellect has failed to grasp this" it is obvious that we are separate from our mind and intellect.

That the real self must be something different from our body, mind, and intellect we are able to perceive with no difficulty at all .But there is another `I' which we have to reckon with , and that is our ego, which is the consciousness that I am. Even this is absent when we are in deep sleep because we are not aware of ourselves then. But there is some entity who is aware of our existence even at that stage which makes us say that we had a sound sleep. This is the real `I' which is even different from our ego .This is what Krishna calls avinaasi or sariri. Except that , everything else can be termed as transitory or antavantah, as brought out in the subsequent slokas..

 

17. avinaaSi thu thath vidDhi yena sarvam idham thatham

vinaaSam avyayasya asya na kaSchith karthum arhathi

 

 

That by which all this is pervaded is indestructible. Understand this and that none can destroy this immutable self.

 

The self which alone is real pervades all, this sarvam idham thatham which is unreal. That self is avinaaSi, indestructible, It is avyaya, immutable.

 

This is elaborated in the next few slokas.

 

The term sath, actually means the Brahman, the supreme reality. In advaita, the individual self is identical with Brahman and hence the word sath means the self which is Brahman. It is immutable and indestructible. In visishtadvaita Brahman is synonymous with Narayana, the inner self of all beings, sentient and insentient , which form His sareera. and the knowledge about reality is the knowledge about Brahman. The individual self is immortal and real while the non-self is also real but not immutable or indestructible, being subjected to change. For instance the pot is made of clay and the clay alone is real and the pot is not real in the sense that it is destructible. In this meaning it is unreal. The clay is real in the sense that even when the pot is destroyed the clay remains. So asath means that which is mutable and destructible. The self is said to pervade, thatham, the non-self which is meant by `all this,' sarvam idham, when the self identifies itself with the non-self instead of the inner self, that is Brahman.