BG 2.54 — Sāṅkhya-Yoga — Sūtrakṛt-Gītā

Bhagavad Gītā 2.54Chapter 2 · Sāṅkhya-Yoga · Arjuna → Krishna · Arjuna · anuṣṭubh

स्थितप्रज्ञस्य का भाषा समाधिस्थस्य केशव ।

स्थितधीः किं प्रभाषेत किमासीत व्रजेत किम् ॥

sthita-prajñasya kā bhāṣā samādhi-sthasya keśava

sthita-dhīḥ kiṃ prabhāṣeta kim āsīta vrajeta kim

spokensingle-voice recital; rendered via IndicF5 conditioned on a Sanskrit reference clip

meaning

Arjuna asks: what marks a person of steady wisdom, Keśava, one whose mind rests in samādhi? How does such a person speak, sit, and move?

ekras · bhāṣya

The question itself is precise. Bhasha means more than language; it means the identifying mark by which one is known.

Madhva reads it as the lakshana, the defining sign. Arjuna asks: what is the sign of the sthita-prajna? How would I recognize one if I met one? Madhusudana catches Arjuna's instinct exactly. Having heard 2.53's description of the buddhi achala in samadhi, Arjuna seizes the labhdhavasara — the opening — to ask about the jivanmukta, the one liberated while still alive. He correctly senses that the marks of the already-free will be the same marks the practitioner is being asked to cultivate. The question is therefore practical, not theoretical. If I am to walk this path, what does the destination look like in a body? The three verbs Arjuna lists — prabhasheta, asita, vrajeta — speak, sit, walk — cover the whole external life. Not just the meditative state, but how such a one carries himself in ordinary motion.

Krishna's answer will run for eighteen verses. The chapter that began with Arjuna's collapse closes with Arjuna's most useful question. The student is now asking the right thing.

Context

where

Chapter 2 · Sāṅkhya-Yoga · meter anuṣṭubh

who speaks

Arjuna → Krishna · vocative Arjuna

preceded by — BG 2.53

When your intellect, once pulled every direction by scripture's competing promises, grows still and settles unshaken into meditation, you will have attained yoga.

What's going on

Arjuna asks: what marks a person of steady wisdom, Keśava, one whose mind rests in samādhi? How does such a person speak, sit, and move?

Vyavahāra · try it in your life

Advaita

Before entering a difficult conversation — a confrontation, a negotiation, a hard feedback — pause and ask 'sthitaprajñasya kā bhāṣā': what would the mark of a person with settled, non-reactive intelligence look like here? This is not a performance checklist but an orienting inquiry that shifts the question from 'what should I say?' to 'who am I speaking from?' The Advaita reading makes this radical: you are not rehearsing a role but pointing attention back to the awareness that is already untouched by the outcome.

Viśiṣṭādvaita

In the Viśiṣṭādvaita application, treat each role you occupy — parent, professional, citizen — as a form of kainkarya (dedicated service) and ask Arjuna's question about your own actions: 'what is the identifying mark of how I do this?' Not to manufacture a persona but to check whether your actions genuinely express loving attentiveness to the people in your care, the way a devotee's actions express attentiveness to Bhagavān. The quality of your bhāṣā — how you speak, move, and sit with others — is the living answer to this question every day.

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Dvaita

Madhva's reading directs you to ask hard questions in public settings even when you already suspect the answer — for the benefit of others who do not yet have access to the deeper reasoning. In practice: when your team is about to make a decision based on shallow analysis, ask the foundational question aloud ('what is actually our criterion here?') even if you see it clearly. The Dvaita principle is that the mark of Hari's governance (keśavata) in your life is your willingness to name what is actually true, plainly, regardless of who in the room finds it uncomfortable.

Śuddhādvaita

Vallabha's Puṣṭi-mārga application: notice the moments when you feel most naturally yourself — neither performing competence nor suppressing feeling, simply present and alive. That state is the samādhi Arjuna is asking about, Kṛṣṇa's prasāda already operative in you. The everyday practice is to recognise these moments as you move through them rather than only in retrospect, so that gradually anuṣṭhāna-prakāra (the mode of living that flows from grace) becomes visible to you in real time rather than only in quiet reflection.

Bhakti

Śrīdhara's jijñāsu framing invites a specific daily discipline: begin any study or important conversation by explicitly naming what you want to understand, as Arjuna does here. The act of formulating a real question — not a rhetorical question, not a test, but a genuine inquiry into someone's lakṣaṇa — transforms the encounter from information exchange into a relationship. In bhakti practice this is literal: approach the text, the teacher, the interlocutor with 'I am here to understand what marks this truth, not merely to collect data about it.'

Advaita-Bhakti

Madhusūdana's two-state model (samādhi and vyutthita) gives a practical diagnostic for your own inner life: notice when you are genuinely absorbed (thoughts quiet, presence full) versus when the mind has 'emerged' and is managing stimuli. The advaita-bhakti application is to treat Kṛṣṇa — your own deepest intelligence, the sarvāntaryāmin — as the one you are really addressing in both states, not only in formal meditation. The question 'kiṃ āsīta vrajeta kiṃ' (how do you sit, how do you move?) becomes a continuous inquiry into whether your daily locomotive and relational life is oriented from that absorbed centre or from reactive mental management.

Adhiṣṭhāna · substrate signature

substratev2.6-frozen

parserByT5-Sanskrit-multitask (Nehrdich/Hellwig/Keutzer EMNLP 2024)

mūlaGRETIL e-text of the Bhagavadgītā with Śaṅkara's commentary (data entry: Gaudiya Grantha Mandira) for chapters 1-17; sanskritdocuments.org sd_bgnew.itx for chapter 18; ingested via a local Ambuda TEI build; per-verse repairs logged in post_generation_repairs

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weightsa=1 · b=0.01 · e_v=0.005 · z=0.2 · h=0 · th=0.01

anchorfit on Ramsukhdas's Sādhak Sañjīvanī (1980), frozen across the eight-commentator panel; cross-validated R@4 = 71.6% on Śaṅkara

extracted2026-04-21

methodPaper 1, Section II.B

↓ view raw per-verse object (JSON)↗ per-verse-object schema ↗ substrate code (MIT) + data (CC-BY 4.0)

The schema generalizes to any bounded-polysemy corpus with discrete primary text units, attested witness traditions, identifiable schools, and formal substrate. Port the per-verse object; refit weights on a domain-appropriate Layer-3 anchor; ship.

Bhagavad Gītā Chapter 2, Verse 54: Arjuna to Krishna — Sāṅkhya-Yoga