Bhagavad Gītā Chapter 2, Verse 46: Krishna to Arjuna — Sāṅkhya-Yoga
When a flood stretches in every direction, a single well adds nothing new; all the Vedas offer nothing beyond what the one who truly knows already holds.
Bhāṣyakāra purports
- Śaṅkaraadvaita
Just as all the utility a person could ever extract from a kūpa-taḍāga-ādi (well, pond, and the rest) is already contained and exceeded within a sarvataḥ-samplutodaka (a flood stretching in every direction), so too the entirety of Vedic karma-phala (the fruits produced by Veda-enjoined ritual action) is already subsumed within the vijñāna-phala (fruit of direct brahma-knowledge) available to the brāhmaṇa-saṃnyāsin who truly vijānati (knows the paramārtha-tattva, the ultimate reality). Śaṅkara is careful, however, not to render the well useless prematurely: before the adhikāra (qualification) for jñāna-niṣṭhā (establishment in knowledge) has matured, the person still karmany adhikṛta (entitled to action) must perform the well-digging — karma is obligatory until it has served its purificatory function and the flood of jñāna arrives. The śloka thus functions as a stuti (eulogy) of brahma-jñāna that simultaneously justifies, rather than cancels, the niṣkāma-karma that prepares for it.
divergence: Śaṅkara's distinctive move is to hold the tension: the well is not condemned, only superseded when the flood arrives. He explicitly refuses the antinomian reading — this verse is not permission to abandon karma prematurely but a pointer toward what awaits the karma-nirdagdha (one whose karma has been burned away). The commentarial logic runs: even a small well serves its purpose; honour it until the flood comes.
- Rāmānujaviśiṣṭādvaita
Rāmānuja reads the verse as a rule of discriminative selection: just as a piṗāsu (thirsty person) standing before a flood draws only yāvad eva prayojanaṃ pānīyam (precisely the water needed for drinking) rather than the whole flood, so the vaidika-mumukṣu (liberation-seeking Vedic practitioner) in a state of sattva-sthiti (sattvic equipoise) takes up from the Vedas only that portion which constitutes mokṣa-sādhana (the means to liberation) and leaves the rest. The śloka is Kṛṣṇa's warrant for the mumukṣu to disengage from the kāmya-karma (desire-motivated ritual) and upāsanā (meditative worship) sections of the Veda without violating their authority — their authority remains intact; they simply do not address this person's present need. The brāhmaṇa vijānataḥ (the Veda-knowing one who truly discerns) exercises this kainkarya-śodhana (purification of service by selecting its liberated portion) not as rejection but as the same discriminating wisdom a householder exercises when drawing water.
divergence: Rāmānuja uniquely centers the metaphor on the act of drawing (upādāna) rather than on containment: the flood does not absorb the well in his reading; rather, the flood renders further well-hopping unnecessary. The mumukṣu does not become the flood — he draws from it the one thing he needs. This is characteristically Viśiṣṭādvaita: Bhagavān's fullness is the flood; the jīva drinks from it precisely as jīva, never merging without remainder.
- Madhvadvaita
Madhva's commentary turns on his precise gloss of brāhmaṇa: brahma aṇatīti brāhmaṇaḥ, meaning one who goes toward Brahman — specifically the aparokṣa-jñānī (one possessing direct, non-inferential knowledge of Brahman), not merely the veda-pāṭhaka (Veda-reciter) or the caste-brāhmaṇa by birth. For this aparokṣa-jñānī, the jñāna-phala (fruit of direct knowledge) contains the entire gamut of Vedic karma-phala in the way that a flood-basin contains the utility of every well within it — the lesser fruits are not destroyed but are antarbhūta (included within) the greater fruit. The critical Dvaita insistence is that this inclusion does not produce merger: the jñānī attains Brahman (brahma gacchati), but the jīva remains a jīva, the viśeṣa (distinction) between jīva and Brahman persisting even in that attainment, just as a river entering the ocean retains the memory of its originating spring.
divergence: Madhva's gloss of brāhmaṇa as the aparokṣa-jñānī — one who reaches Brahman rather than one who merely studies the Vedas — is the sharpest lexical decision in this panel. The jñāna-phalatva (having knowledge as its fruit) that this verse establishes is, for Madhva, proof that the Gītā's goal is Viṣṇu-union with maintained distinction, not Advaita-dissolution. The flood contains the well; it does not become the well, and the well does not cease to be a well.
- Vallabhaśuddhādvaita
Vallabha reads the verse as an exercise in yāvad-artha-viveka (discernment of how much is needed and no more): all Vedic content is not simultaneously upādeya (fit to be taken up) — what is upādeya is precisely what advances ātma-saṃsiddhi-sādhana (the means to one's own perfection). The well-metaphor is a restraint-teaching, not a rejection-teaching: the pipāsu standing at a sarvataḥ-sampluta-nimna-jala (a fully flooded lowland lake) does not drink the lake but draws what quenches. The vijānataḥ (the one who genuinely knows) is therefore the yoga-sādhaka of viveka (discrimination) who has the inner clarity to select, at each moment, the specific Vedic sādhana that his current stage of the path requires. In Puṣṭi-mārga, this viveka is not independent will but Kṛṣṇa's own prasāda-guided clarity working in the sādhaka: the discernment of what to draw is itself a gift, not a personal achievement.
divergence: Vallabha's reading is the most restraint-positive in the panel: he does not read the flood as implicitly devaluing the wells but as revealing that selective, attentive drawing is the mature mode of engagement with the entire Vedic body. Rejection would be presumptuous; selective uptake by the prasāda-illumined sādhaka is humility.
- Śrīdharabhakti
Śrīdhara frames the verse as Kṛṣṇa's direct response to the āśaṅkā (apprehension) he articulates at the verse's opening: is not the renunciation of Vedic karma-phala (the various fruits enjoined by the Vedas) for the sake of niṣkāma-īśvarārādhana (desireless worship of the Lord) a foolish surrender of real value? His answer is that brahmānanda (the bliss of Brahman) subsumes all kṣudrānanda (minor bliss-states) within it, exactly as a mahāhrada (great lake, flood-lake) subsumes all the smaller water-stores — and the śruti itself confirms this at Taittirīya Upaniṣad 2.8: etasyaivānandasyānyāni bhūtāni mātrāmupajīvanti ("all beings subsist on a fraction of this very bliss"). The vyavasāyātmikā buddhi (resolute, discriminating intelligence) that disengages from Vedic karma-fruit and rests in brahma-niṣṭhā (absorbed stability in Brahman) is therefore the suvivekī-buddhi (the truly discerning intellect), not a kubi-buddhi (foolish intelligence) as the objection supposed.
divergence: Śrīdhara is the only commentator in this panel who explicitly introduces the Taittirīya Upaniṣad 2.8 citation into the verse's exposition, and who frames the whole verse as a purvapakṣa-uttara (objection and resolution) sequence rather than a simple doctrinal statement. His resolution is emphatically devotional: brahmānanda is the flood because the Lord is the source of all joy; turning toward him is not impoverishment.
- Madhusūdanaadvaita-bhakti
Madhusūdana's reading is the most technically layered in the panel. The well-collection (kūpa-taḍāga-ādi) represents the full spectrum of kāmya-karma pleasures and meditative attainments ranging from manuṣyānanda (human pleasure) up through hiraṇyagarbhānanda (the bliss of the cosmic-creator Brahmā) — every finite experiential good the Vedas promise; the sarvataḥ-samplutodaka (the flood) is brahma-ānanda (brahmic bliss) which contains them all as aṃśa (partial expressions) because kṣudrānanda is nothing other than brahma-ānanda as filtered through the upadhi-kalpanā (the superimposition of limiting adjuncts on the limitless). The avyavasthita-antaḥkaraṇa (the unsteady inner instrument) of the kāmya-karmin wanders from well to well; the niṣkāma-karmin purifies the antaḥkaraṇa through desireless action until brahma-tattva (the truth of Brahman) is directly realized — and in that realization, as Taittirīya confirms, all the minor joys are discovered to have always been fractal expressions of the one. This is why Kṛṣṇa does not say the Vedas become worthless but rather that their entire worth is antarbhūta (subsumed within) the vijñāna-phala of the brāhmaṇa-vijānataḥ.
divergence: Madhusūdana is unique in making explicit the physics of the containment relationship: the kṣudrānanda are not replaced or nullified by brahma-ānanda but are aṃśa of it, their separation from it being a function of the upadhi-kalpanā (the imposition of limiting conditions that makes the one brahma-ānanda appear as many finite joys). This makes the flood metaphor do epistemological work no other commentator explicitly assigns to it: the flood was always the truth of the wells.