Sanskrit
इन्द्रियार्थेषु वैराग्यमनहङ्कार एव च । जन्ममृत्युजराव्याधिदुःखदोषानुदर्शनम् ॥
indriyārtheṣu vairāgyam anahaṅkāra eva ca janmamṛtyujarāvyādhiduḥkhadoṣānudarśanam
Translation
Dispassion towards the objects of the senses, and also absence of egoism, insight into the pain and evil of birth, death, old age and sickness,
Annie Besant · The Bhagavad-Gita, translated by Annie Besant (4th ed., 1922) — Wikisource · Public Domain
Explanation
Dispassion toward sense objects and freedom from ego continue the list, followed by something more specific: clear-eyed awareness of the suffering built into birth, death, old age, and sickness. This is close in spirit to the four sights that triggered the Buddha’s renunciation, though here it arrives as one item in a longer inventory rather than as the trigger for withdrawal from the world — in the Gita’s framing it’s an ingredient of jnana, not the whole of it, and the chapter never asks Arjuna to leave the battlefield over it. Vairāgya toward sense-objects, plus clear-eyed awareness of the suffering built into birth, death, age, and sickness — close in spirit to the four sights that triggered the Buddha’s renunciation, but here it is one ingredient of jñāna, not a trigger to leave the world. The Gita never asks Arjuna to quit the field.
Study deeper
Word by word
- indriyārtheṣu vairāgyamइन्द्रियार्थेषु वैराग्यं
- dispassion toward sense-objects (indriya-artheṣu + vairāgyam)
- anahaṅkāra eva caअनहङ्कार एव च
- and freedom from egoism (an-ahaṅkāraḥ + eva + ca)
- janmamṛtyujarāvyādhiduḥkhadoṣānudarśanamजन्ममृत्युजराव्याधिदुःखदोषानुदर्शनं
- keeping in view the suffering and evil of birth, death, old age, and sickness (janma-mṛtyu-jarā-vyādhi-duḥkha-doṣa-anudarśanam)
Commentary
Site Commentary
The word here, anudarshana, means something like “seeing again and again” — not a single dramatic epiphany about mortality, but a repeated, ongoing act of looking clearly at birth, death, old age, and sickness. That distinction matters: the verse isn’t asking for a one-time shock of realization but for an unglamorous habit of clear seeing, maintained alongside the other items on this list rather than eclipsing them.
Original commentary written for this site · © Amit Singh — original commentary
Concepts
Apply this verse
Lessons
Personal
- Don't wait for one dramatic wake-up moment to make peace with mortality, aging, or loss — build a quiet, repeated habit of looking at those realities clearly instead, since ongoing clear-sightedness does more for you than a single intense epiphany you can't sustain.
Professional
- Don't wait for an outage to force a hard look at your system's failure modes — build a repeated, unglamorous habit of reviewing what could go wrong, on a cadence, so clear-sightedness about risk becomes routine instead of something only a crisis produces.
Family & Social
- Rather than waiting for a health crisis to force one big, dramatic conversation about aging parents, build a habit of smaller, regular, honest check-ins about their situation — repeated clear seeing beats a single overdue reckoning.
Ask yourself
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