Bhagavad Gītā Chapter 2, Verse 42: Krishna to Arjuna — Sāṅkhya-Yoga
Those without discernment, Arjuna, delight in flowery Vedic speech that promises heaven and worldly gain, insisting there is nothing beyond. Their words bloom but bear no fruit.
Bhāṣyakāra purports
- Śaṅkaraadvaita
The flowery speech (puṣpitā vāk) Kṛṣṇa condemns here is not the Veda itself but the limited intellect that takes the Veda's arthavāda passages as terminal reality. Those who are avipaścita (without discernment) cling to the karma-kāṇḍa not because the Veda is wrong but because they lack the viveka to see that svarga, paśu, and other enumerated fruits are impermanent effects produced by impermanent causes. For Śaṅkara, the error is metaphysical: to say 'there is nothing beyond these rites' (nānyad asti) is to mistake a provisional grammatical subject — the aspirant seeking svarga — for the absolute subject, which is Brahman alone.
- Rāmānujaviśiṣṭādvaita
Rāmānuja reads this verse as Bhagavān's corrective pedagogy rather than a wholesale rejection of Vedic action: the speech is puṣpita (flowering but not yet fruiting) because it targets only svarga-ādi-phala and never arrives at Bhagavān as the supreme object (param phalam). Those whose minds are kāmapravana (desire-inclined) and who take heaven as the pinnacle (svarga-parāyaṇāḥ) are not wrong to perform karma, only wrong to terminate their aspiration there — for karma offered as kainkarya (service) to Viṣṇu is the very entry into bhakti-yoga. The criticism is of the orientation of the will, not the act itself.
- Madhvadvaita
For Madhva the verse targets a specific sectarian claim: that Vedic rites produce only svarga and there is no higher phala — a position he reads as implicitly denying Hari's supremacy (nānyad asti). The Vedas speak of Bhagavān mostly parokṣa (indirectly, in veiled terms) — 'the gods prefer the indirect' — and it is precisely the failure to pierce this veil of veda-vāda that constitutes avipaścittva. The commentary's move is polemical: those 'devoted to Vedic speech' are condemned not for following the Veda but for reading it flat, missing the bhagavat-tātparya (Hari-directedness) that, for Madhva, is the Veda's only consistent referent.
- Vallabhaśuddhādvaita
*Avipaścitaḥ* (the undiscerning) — here the Jaiminīyas — declare *yām imāṃ puṣpitāṃ vācam*: all of Vedic speech, *sarvakāṇḍarūpāṃ sarvāṃ puṣpitāṃ*, saturated throughout with the *kartṛ-karma-phala-bhāva* (the agent–act–result triad). They are *veda-vāda-rataḥ* — absorbed in *phala-bodhaka-karma-vādeṣu*, the Veda's pronouncements taken purely as karma-injunctions pointing to results. Their error: they take *puṣpasthānīyeṣu svargādiṣu phalatvam*, treating what is flower — *svarga* and the like — as the fruit itself, *phalatvabuddhyā ratā bhavanti*. One might object that since the Veda itself declares these rewards, they must be *sat-phala*; Vallabha forecloses this — *arthāntareṇa vedabodhitatvāt*, for the Veda also reveals a different end entirely, as in *yan na duḥkhena sambhinnam* and cognate passages. Therefore *iyaṃ vāk puṣpitā na phalitā* — this speech flowers but bears no fruit. Those caught in it are *gandha-lobhita-cetasaḥ eva te bhrāntā* — minds seduced by the fragrance alone, and thus deluded, never reaching the real *phala* that is Kṛṣṇa's *prasāda*.
- Śrīdharabhakti
Śrīdhara brings forward the reader's phenomenology: the flowery speech is āpātaramaṇīya (pleasant at first encounter) like a poisonous vine — attractive precisely because the arthavāda passages (akṣayyaṃ ha vai cāturmāsyayājinaḥ, 'the performer of cāturmāsya earns inexhaustible merit') are quoted as if they were the Veda's last word. The person whose citta has been apahṛta (carried off) by this rhetoric loses the capacity for the vyavasāyātmikā buddhi (resolute intelligence) that BG 2.41 just established as the prerequisite for liberation. Śrīdhara's point is soteriological and psychological: the verse explains why even kāmins who theoretically understand renunciation cannot enact it — their deliberative faculty has already been colonised.
- Madhusūdanaadvaita-bhakti
Madhusūdana synthesises Śaṅkara's metaphysics with Śrīdhara's psychology over three verses (2.42–44): the vyavasāyātmikā buddhi is absent not from lack of pramāṇa (both karma-kāṇḍins and jñānins have access to the Veda) but from the presence of a positive obstruction — the mind already filled with bhoga and aiśvarya as terminal goals. The karma-kāṇḍa is condemned not as ritually wrong but as structurally self-defeating: it is a wheel (ghaṭīyantra) that reliably produces janma-karma-phala in endless sequence without ever reaching the niratiśaya (unsurpassable) phala of jñāna. Only action performed without phala-abhisandhi (fruit-intentionality) purifies the antaḥkaraṇa in a way that is actually useful for jñāna, and that is already Kṛṣṇa-bhakti under another name.