Sanskrit
महाभूतान्यहङ्कारो बुद्धिरव्यक्तमेव च । इन्द्रियाणि दशैकं च पञ्च चेन्द्रियगोचराः ॥
mahābhūtāny ahaṅkāro buddhir avyaktam eva ca indriyāṇi daśaikaṃ ca pañca cendriyagocarāḥ
Translation
The great Elements, Individuality, Reason, and also the unmanifested, the ten senses and the one, and the five pastures of the senses;
Annie Besant · The Bhagavad-Gita, translated by Annie Besant (4th ed., 1922) — Wikisource · Public Domain
Explanation
The catalogue opens with a compressed Samkhya-style ontology: the five gross elements (mahabhuta — earth, water, fire, air, ether), ahankara (the ego-sense, the faculty of individuation that manufactures “I” and “mine”), buddhi (the discriminating intellect), the unmanifest (avyakta — the unexpressed root-potential prakriti sits in before it differentiates into named things), the eleven senses (five of perception, five of action, plus mind/manas), and the five sense-objects. None of this vocabulary gets its own concept note here, so it’s worth being precise about it once: these are the instruments and raw material of experience — everything that can be observed — which is exactly why all of it belongs to the “field” side of the kshetra/kshetrajna divide, not the knower. A compressed Sāṅkhya ontology: five elements, the I-maker, the intellect, the unmanifest root, the eleven senses, the five objects. All of it belongs to the field — the instruments and raw material of experience, everything that can be observed — not the knower.
Study deeper
Word by word
- mahābhūtāny ahaṅkāroमहाभूतान्य् अहङ्कारो
- the great elements, the I-sense (mahā-bhūtāni + ahaṅkāraḥ)
- buddhir avyaktam eva caबुद्धिः अव्यक्तं एव च
- the intellect, and the unmanifest (buddhiḥ + avyaktam + eva + ca)
- indriyāṇi daśaikaṃ caइन्द्रियाणि दशैकं च
- the eleven senses (indriyāṇi + daśa + ekam + ca)
- pañca cendriyagocarāḥपञ्च चेन्द्रियगोचराः
- and the five sense-objects (pañca + ca + indriya-go-carāḥ)
Commentary
Site Commentary
This catalogue and the one that follows in verses 8-12 are both lists, but they work in opposite registers: this one is purely descriptive — elements, senses, faculties named without a hint of approval or disapproval — while the coming list of humility, non-violence, and equanimity is unmistakably normative, each item something to cultivate. The chapter doesn’t blur that line: what belongs to the field gets named neutrally, what belongs to the path toward the knower gets named as a value.
Original commentary written for this site · © Amit Singh — original commentary
Apply this verse
Lessons
Personal
- When you take stock of your situation — what resources, constraints, and raw material you're working with — resist the urge to moralize the inventory; save the language of 'should' for the separate list of qualities you're actually choosing to cultivate.
Professional
- Keep your inventory of a system's actual components and constraints strictly descriptive, with no editorializing about what should exist, and keep it separate from your team's normative list of engineering principles; conflating the two turns an honest architecture assessment into an argument.
Family & Social
- When listing out your family's actual circumstances — income, health, obligations — keep it neutral and factual, and keep a separate, explicit list for the values you're choosing to live by; treating the facts as verdicts on your character just adds guilt to an inventory that was only ever meant to describe.
Ask yourself
A few ways to take this verse past reading. Ticks and the note stay in this browser.