Sanskrit
तानहं द्विषतः क्रूरान्संसारेषु नराधमान् । क्षिपाम्यजस्रमशुभानासुरीष्वेव योनिषु ॥
tān ahaṃ dviṣataḥ krūrān saṃsāreṣu narādhamān kṣipāmy ajasram aśubhān āsurīṣv eva yoniṣu
Translation
These haters, evil, pitiless, vilest among men in the world, I ever throw down into demoniacal wombs.
Annie Besant · The Bhagavad-Gita, translated by Annie Besant (4th ed., 1922) — Wikisource · Public Domain
Explanation
Krishna’s response to this hatred is rebirth as consequence: these cruel haters are cast, again and again, into demoniacal wombs. This is the chapter’s clearest statement of its punitive mechanism — not eternal damnation in the way later Western theology frames hell, but repeated re-embodiment into conditions that match one’s own inner nature, consistent with the rebirth cosmology assumed throughout the text. Read plainly, it’s a claim that character is inherited into future lives rather than simply judged and closed out. The one place in the Gita Krishna describes himself acting against someone. Read against BG 9.29 (“I am the same to all beings, none hateful or dear”), this is best taken as the mechanism of self-selection: the hating disposition reproduces its own conditions, life after life, and “I hurl them” names that consequence.
Study deeper
Word by word
- tān ahaṃ dviṣataḥ krūrānतान् अहं द्विषतः क्रूरान्
- those hateful, cruel ones (tān + aham + dviṣataḥ + krūrān)
- saṃsāreṣu narādhamānसंसारेषु नराधमान्
- lowest of men, in the rounds of rebirth (saṃsāreṣu + nara-adhamān)
- kṣipāmy ajasram aśubhānक्षिपांय् अजस्रं अशुभान्
- I hurl unceasingly, the unholy (kṣipāmi + ajasram + aśubhān)
- āsurīṣv eva yoniṣuआसुरीष्व् एव योनिषु
- into demonic wombs alone (āsurīṣu + eva + yoniṣu)
Commentary
Site Commentary
Elsewhere the Gita tends to describe consequence as the impersonal working-out of one’s own action — karma bearing its own fruit, not a sentence handed down by anyone. Here the verb is first person and active: “I cast them.” That’s a genuine shift in how the text attributes consequence, agentive divine punishment rather than impersonal law, and the chapter doesn’t pause to reconcile the two pictures it’s using.
Original commentary written for this site · © Amit Singh — original commentary
Concepts
Apply this verse
Lessons
Personal
- Notice whether you experience the natural consequences of a pattern in your own life as something you're doing to yourself or something being done to you from outside — this verse itself shifts between both framings without resolving them, a fair reminder that both can be true descriptions of the same mechanism at once.
Professional
- When a team faces the fallout of a pattern of bad decisions, resist collapsing the explanation into either pure 'the market punished us' or pure 'leadership caused this' — both framings, impersonal consequence and agentive responsibility, can be simultaneously true, the way this verse holds both without forcing a choice.
Family & Social
- When a strained relationship reaches a breaking point, it can be both an impersonal consequence of accumulated patterns and something a specific person actively did — you don't have to pick only one framing to make sense of what happened, any more than this verse does.
Ask yourself
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