BG 4.10 — Jñāna-Karma-Sannyāsa-Yoga

Bhagavad Gītā 4.10Chapter 4 · Jñāna-Karma-Sannyāsa-Yoga · Krishna → Arjuna · anuṣṭubh

वीतरागभयक्रोधा मन्मया मामुपाश्रिताः ।

बहवो ज्ञानतपसा पूता मद्भावमागताः ॥

vīta-rāga-bhaya-krodhā man-mayā mām upāśritāḥ

bahavo jñāna-tapasā pūtā mad-bhāvam āgatāḥ

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

meaning

Free of attachment, fear, and anger, absorbed in Me and taking shelter in Me, many have been purified by the austerity of knowledge and reached My state.

ekras · bhāṣya

Three conditions cleared from the practitioner's interior. Raga — attachment. Bhaya — fear. Krodha — anger. The same triad named in 2.56 as the marks of the sthita-prajna.

Madhusudana adds the precise diagnosis: bhaya here is not generic fear but specifically the renunciant's anxiety — how can I survive if I abandon all objects for the jnana-marga? That fear too is gone. The middle term is the chapter's own. Man-mayah — of-my-very-substance.

Ramanuja reads it not as identity but as being thoroughly saturated with Bhagavan as the inner controller; the soul as shesha to Krishna as sheshin.

Madhva preserves the non-identity precisely: mat-prachurah — suffused with Me, seeing nothing without Me present, yet never becoming Me. Either reading lands the same picture: the practitioner's interior is so filled with Krishna that nothing else is its content.

Vallabha radically expands who counts in this verse. Even the gopis, even Kamsa, even Shishupala — those apparently overpowered by raga, bhaya, krodha — are included among those who attained mad-bhava, because what they were filled with was Krishna, even if the affect they expressed looked like the opposite. The verse closes with the assurance: bahavah — many — have already done it. The path is not theoretical; many have walked it. Jnana-tapasa putah — purified by the austerity of knowing. The closing word mad-bhavam — my own state — is what those many reached.

Context

where

Chapter 4 · Jñāna-Karma-Sannyāsa-Yoga · meter anuṣṭubh

who speaks

Krishna → Arjuna

preceded by — BG 4.9

Whoever truly knows my birth and actions to be divine leaves the body without returning to another birth and comes to me, Arjuna.

What's going on

Free of attachment, fear, and anger, absorbed in Me and taking shelter in Me, many have been purified by the austerity of knowledge and reached My state.

Vyavahāra · try it in your life

Advaita

When irritation arises toward a colleague, examine whether the trigger is an implied threat to your self-concept (ahaṃkāra). Śaṅkara's model predicts that each such examination — not suppression, but clear seeing — is jñāna-tapas in real time, incrementally dissolving the rāga-bhaya-krodha cluster. You do not need a meditation retreat; the clarity you bring to the next difficult conversation is the austerity.

Viśiṣṭādvaita

Rāmānuja's verse turns on recognition of Bhagavān's parama-kāruṇikatva (supreme compassion). Practically: when you feel unsupported or abandoned, recall that this compassion was active through every avatāra — it is not withheld from you now. This recognition is the janma-karma-tattva-jñāna that begins to dissolve fear. Begin each day by naming one specific way this care has operated in your life.

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Dvaita

Madhva's man-mayāḥ — seeing nothing anywhere without Hari — is a perceptual discipline, not a metaphysical claim. Practice: when you encounter any person or situation that triggers krodha (anger), pause and ask 'where is Hari in this?' This is not naive reframing; it is training the perceptual system to track the prasāda (grace) operating through what appears as obstruction.

Śuddhādvaita

Vallabha's inclusion of the gopīs and even Kaṃsa dissolves the requirement for 'clean' emotion. If your dominant engagement with a creative project, a relationship, or your work is intense — even anxious, even obsessive — Puṣṭi-mārga says: do not sanitize it, deepen it. Pour that intensity toward Kṛṣṇa's svarūpa in whatever form you find compelling, and the kīṭa-bhṛṅga-nyāya (wasp-and-caterpillar transformation) will do the rest.

Bhakti

Śrīdhara's dvandva-ekavat (two-as-one) framing of jñāna and svadharma as a single austerity is directly actionable: do not separate your spiritual practice from your professional responsibility. The svadharma you perform with mad-eka-citta (single-pointed mind on Bhagavān) is itself the tapas that matures self-knowledge. There is no 'spiritual life' separated from the particular calling you are already in.

Advaita-Bhakti

Madhusūdana names the renunciant's existential anxiety precisely: 'if I abandon all objects for jñāna, how will I live?' This is a real fear, not a spiritual failure. His synthesis says: take shelter through ekānta-prema (exclusive love) — the bhakti path does not require you to resolve the survival anxiety first. The love itself reorganizes the emotional field. Begin with whatever bhāva (affective disposition) is most alive in you toward Kṛṣṇa, even if it coexists with fear.

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 4, Verse 10: Krishna to Arjuna — Jñāna-Karma-Sannyāsa-Yoga