BG 2.63 — Sāṅkhya-Yoga — Sūtrakṛt-Gītā

Bhagavad Gītā 2.63Chapter 2 · Sāṅkhya-Yoga · Krishna → Arjuna · anuṣṭubh

क्रोधाद् भवति संमोहः संमोहात् स्मृतिविभ्रमः ।

स्मृतिभ्रंशाद् बुद्धिनाशो बुद्धिनाशात् प्रणश्यति ॥

krodhād bhavati saṃmohaḥ saṃmohāt smṛti-vibhramaḥ

smṛti-bhraṃśād buddhi-nāśo buddhi-nāśāt praṇaśyati

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

meaning

Anger breeds confusion, confusion makes you forget what you know, forgetting destroys judgment, and once judgment is gone, you are lost.

ekras · bhāṣya

Krishna closes the chain to its terminus. "From krodha comes sammoha. From sammoha comes smriti-vibhrama. From the loss of smriti, buddhi-nasha. From buddhi-nasha, one is destroyed." Five more links extending the cascade of 2.62. The chain is now eight steps long: dhyana → sanga → kama → krodha → sammoha → smriti-vibhrama → buddhi-nasha → pranashyati. Each commentator names the inner mechanics of the slide. Sammoha is read by Shankara as the loss of kritya-akritya-viveka — the discrimination between what should and should not be done; the enraged man, bewildered, even reviles his own guru.

Madhva sharpens it: sammoha is adharma-iccha, the active desire for what is against dharma. Smriti-vibhrama is the next loss. Smriti here is not just memory; it is the trained recollection of the shastra-teaching, of the guru's word, of one's own resolve. The angry-confused man cannot even bring those teachings to mind anymore. Buddhi-nasha is the destruction of the very faculty that would have caught the slide on its way down. Once buddhi is gone, the man is pranashta — utterly destroyed. Not killed; rendered incapable of living the life he was born to live. The terminal word is heavy. The chapter has been teaching the buddhi as the precious instrument; this verse names exactly how the precious instrument is lost. The protection is upstream. Block dhyana of the vishayas at the start, and the chain does not begin. By the time anger has come, the chain is most of the way to its destination.

Context

where

Chapter 2 · Sāṅkhya-Yoga · meter anuṣṭubh

who speaks

Krishna → Arjuna

preceded by — BG 2.62

When a person keeps turning sense-objects over in the mind, attachment to them grows; from attachment comes desire, and from desire, when blocked, comes anger.

What's going on

Anger breeds confusion, confusion makes you forget what you know, forgetting destroys judgment, and once judgment is gone, you are lost.

Vyavahāra · try it in your life

Advaita

Before reacting in anger, pause and ask: 'Is my antaḥkaraṇa (inner instrument) currently capable of distinguishing what should be done from what should not?' If the answer is uncertain, treat yourself as temporarily unfit for any major decision — financial, relational, professional. The Śaṅkara teaching is structural: anger does not merely distort judgment, it renders the instrument incapable. Schedule all consequential choices for after the instrument has settled, not merely after the emotion has subsided.

Viśiṣṭādvaita

Rāmānuja's smṛti-bhraṃśa is the forgetting of Bhagavān's ownership of every outcome. In professional settings where credit, recognition, or territory is contested — the precise situations that generate krodha — build a daily smaraṇa (recollective practice) that explicitly recalls 'I am doing this as kainkarya (service); the result belongs to Bhagavān.' This is not pious decoration: it is a structural inoculation against the smṛti-bhraṃśa that Rāmānuja identifies as the cascade's hinge.

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Dvaita

Madhva's framing — saṃmoha as adharma-icchā — means the danger is not confusion but active desire for what violates dharma, masked as righteous anger. When you find yourself constructing elaborate justifications for why a particular harmful action is actually warranted, recognise this as the smṛti-vibhrama stage: pratiṣedha-smṛti (the memory of prohibitions) is already being erased. The Dvaita prescription is to name the prohibition aloud before acting — restoring the smṛti by vocalising it interrupts the cascade at its most tractable point.

Śuddhādvaita

Vallabha's diagnosis targets the mind that meditates on viṣaya even after the senses are formally restrained — the person who is physically present in a bhajana but mentally rehearsing a grievance. The everyday practice is Kṛṣṇa-viṣaya dhyāna as replacement, not mere suppression: redirect the mind toward a specific remembered form, gesture, or name of Kṛṣṇa at the first sign of āsakti forming around a grievance. Āsakti → kāma → krodha is fast; the interruption must happen at the āsakti moment, before kāma consolidates.

Bhakti

Śrīdhara's image — buddhi overcome as life is overcome in a diseased tree — suggests that buddhi-nāśa is visible to observers before it is visible to the one experiencing it. Cultivate relationships with two or three people who have explicit permission to say 'your viveka is not functioning right now' — not as insult but as the Śrīdhara function: an external witness who can name the stage you have entered. The teaching of the ācārya, which is the content of the smṛti that gets lost, should ideally be recoverable through a living relationship, not just memory.

Advaita-Bhakti

Madhusūdana's specific target is aikātmyākāra-mano-vṛtti — the mental mode that perceives non-separation. In relationships, anger generates precisely the perception of the other as separate, threatening, and opposed. The synthesis practice is: after anger has passed, deliberately recall a moment of genuine connection with the same person — not to excuse their behavior, but to restore the aikātmya-vṛtti that anger destroyed. This is not sentiment; it is the specific cognitive restoration that Madhusūdana's bhāṣya identifies as what buddhi-nāśa took away.

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 63: Krishna to Arjuna — Sāṅkhya-Yoga