Shloka 37
अव्यक्त-गुण-पुरुषविवेकः | Avyakta, Guṇas, and Discrimination of Puruṣa
निस्तर्तव्यान्यथैतानि सर्वाणीति नराधिप । मन्यते<यं हाबुद्धत्वात् तथैव सुकृतान्यपि
vasiṣṭha uvāca |
nistartavyāny athaitāni sarvāṇīti narādhipa |
manyate ’yaṃ hābuddhatvāt tathaiva sukṛtāny api ||
Vasiṣṭha said: “O lord of men, he imagines, out of sheer lack of understanding, that all these (conditions and opposites) must be ‘crossed over’ and escaped; and he thinks the same even about his meritorious deeds. Thus, driven by Nature, the pairs of opposites—pleasure and pain and the like—keep recurring by their own momentum; yet the individual self, through ignorance, takes them to be personal assaults upon ‘me’ and strives anxiously to get beyond them. Joined to Prakṛti, the person further imagines that he will go to heavenly worlds to enjoy the fruits of all actions, and that the manifest results of past good and bad deeds must be experienced here—thereby binding himself to sorrow through misapprehension.”
वसिष्ठ उवाच
Educational Q&A
The verse critiques ignorance: a person misidentifies recurring pleasure–pain dualities and karmic outcomes as personal attacks and believes they must be forcibly ‘escaped.’ This mistaken self-notion (born of avidyā) sustains anxiety and bondage; wisdom sees these as natural recurrences within prakṛti and as karmic fruition, not as the true Self.
In Śānti Parva’s instruction on liberation-oriented ethics and metaphysics, Vasiṣṭha addresses a king and explains how the embodied person, conjoined with prakṛti, forms wrong beliefs about suffering, merit, and heavenly enjoyment—thereby perpetuating sorrow and continued wandering.