Bhagavad Gītā Chapter 2, Verse 14: Krishna to Arjuna — Sāṅkhya-Yoga
Sensations of cold, heat, pleasure, and pain come from the body's contact with the world; they rise and pass away, Arjuna, so bear them.
Bhāṣyakāra purports
- Śaṅkaraadvaita
The sense-faculties (mātrāḥ — indriyāṇi, that by which objects are measured) make contact with their objects; those contacts produce cold, heat, pleasure, and pain. Śīta (cold) and uṣṇa (heat) are named separately because their character is variable — cold is sometimes pleasant, sometimes painful — whereas sukha and duḥkha are invariant in their nature and never interchange. Because these contacts are āgamāpāyin (arising-and-departing) they are by that very fact anitya (impermanent); therefore endure them without producing hārṣa (elation) or viṣāda (dejection) in the face of them.
divergence: Śaṅkara's analysis is rigorously analytical: the grammatical parsing of mātrā as 'that by which sensibles are measured' (mīyante viṣayāḥ ābhiḥ) grounds the entire instruction in a theory of perception, not in devotion.
- Rāmānujaviśiṣṭādvaita
Sound, touch, form, taste, and smell — because they are products of the tanmātras (subtle elements), the name mātrāḥ covers all five sense-objects together with their substratum. Their contact through ear and skin and eye produces what we call śītoṣṇa (cold-hot); Kṛṣṇa names śītoṣṇa only as an illustration (pradarśanārtha), for the full range of agreeable and harsh sensation is meant. Endure them with dhairya (fortitude) through the full course of śāstrīya-karma (duty enjoined by scripture), for they are āgamāpāyin and thus worthy of being borne by the steady-hearted.
divergence: Unlike Śaṅkara, Rāmānuja does not analyse the impermanence of contacts as evidence of the ātman's nirguṇatva; impermanence here is a practical argument that makes endurance rational, not a metaphysical argument that dissolves the subject of experience.
- Madhvadvaita
Objects (mātrāḥ — mīyante, 'what is measured') make contact with the body, and through that bodily connection the ātman experiences cold, heat, pleasure, and pain — not because duḥkha originates in the ātman itself, for if it did the ātman would suffer in deep sleep (supta) and in pralaya (cosmic dissolution) as well; the anvaya-vyatireka (positive-negative concomitance) shows that suffering tracks the contact, not the ātman. The ātman's only relation to these objects is as viṣaya-viṣayī (knower-known); it has no other bond with them.
divergence: Madhva alone deploys anvaya-vyatireka as the epistemological proof of the verse's claim: were sorrow intrinsic to the ātman it would be present always; its absence in sleep clinches the case.
- Vallabhaśuddhādvaita
The question, Vallabha notes, is practical: how does one attain the dhairya (steadiness) that prevents moha (delusion)? The verse is Kṛṣṇa's answer. Mātrāḥ are rūpādayaḥ (form and the other sense-objects); their contacts — the sense-faculties themselves or their unions with the dvandvas (pairs) such as śīta-ādi (cold and its opposite) — are āgamāpāyin and anitya. Bear these dvandvas especially (viśiṣṭān eva sahasva): comprehensive endurance of all things is the necessary condition in both sāṅkhya and yoga.
divergence: Vallabha's titikṣā is the least ascetic of the six: sarvāsahana (endurance of everything) is framed as a precondition for remaining in the world as a participant in Kṛṣṇa's play, not as preparation for withdrawal.
- Śrīdharabhakti
The indriya-vṛttis (sense-modifications — that by which objects are known, hence mātrāḥ) make contact with their sense-objects; those contacts produce śītoṣṇa and so on. Just as sun and water naturally produce cold and heat in the moment of their contact, so too do favorable unions (iṣṭa-saṃyoga) and unwanted separations (viyoga) naturally produce sukha and duḥkha; neither the production nor the removal is in your hands. Since they are āgamāpāyin and asthira (unstable), endure them — for you are the dhīra (the steady one) and pāravaśya (enslavement to elation and grief) is not appropriate to you.
divergence: Śrīdhara bridges the personal and the doctrinal more explicitly than the other commentators: the verse is heard as a direct response to Arjuna's stated grief over separation, which makes titikṣā emotionally specific rather than abstractly metaphysical.
- Madhusūdanaadvaita-bhakti
The objection Madhusūdana addresses first is Vaiśeṣika: even granting the ātman is nitya (eternal) and vibhu (all-pervading), if each body has a distinct ātman endowed with the nine viśeṣa-guṇas (special attributes including pleasure-pain-desire), then Bhīṣma's death entails the loss of Arjuna's sukha and the arrival of duḥkha, making grief fully rational. Kṛṣṇa dissolves this by locating sukha-duḥkha in the antaḥkaraṇa (inner organ): it is the antaḥkaraṇa — changing, cognizable, hence dṛśya (seen) — that is āgamāpāyin, not the nirguṇa, nirvikāra (attributeless, unchanging) ātman. The śruti confirms: 'kāmaḥ saṅkalpaḥ...' — all vikāras (modifications) including desire belong to manas, not ātman.
divergence: Madhusūdana alone refutes a named philosophical school (Vaiśeṣika, and implicitly Sāṅkhya on the question of per-body ātman difference) before arriving at the verse's instruction, making this the most technically philosophical of the six renderings and the one in which the synthesis of Advaita and bhakti is most explicit.