Sanskrit
यदा यदा हि धर्मस्य ग्लानिर्भवति भारत । अभ्युत्थानमधर्मस्य तदाऽऽत्मानं सृजाम्यहम् ॥
yadā yadā hi dharmasya glānir bhavati bhārata abhyutthānam adharmasya tadātmānaṃ sṛjāmy aham
Translation
Whenever there is decay of righteousness, O Bhârata, and there is exaltation of unrighteousness, then I Myself come forth;
Annie Besant · The Bhagavad-Gita, translated by Annie Besant (4th ed., 1922) — Wikisource · Public Domain
Explanation
This is the verse most readers know as the Gita’s statement of avatâra: whenever dharma decays and adharma rises, “I Myself come forth.” Paired with verse 8’s threefold purpose and its refrain “yuge yuge,” age after age, it turns the personal claim of verses 5-6 into a general law about how the divine relates to history — repeated intervention, not a single incarnation. It also reads as a direct answer to the crisis Arjuna is standing in the middle of: the moral collapse he described in Chapter 1 is exactly the kind of decay this doctrine addresses. Glāni — “wasting, going slack” — describes dharma losing tension rather than being actively attacked; the descent is a response to erosion, not only to assault. Read against BG 1.40–BG 1.43, the Kurukṣetra field is presented as one such moment.
Study deeper
Word by word
- yadā yadā hiयदा यदा हि
- whenever (yadā + yadā + hi)
- dharmasya glānir bhavatiधर्मस्य ग्लानिः भवति
- there is a decline of dharma (dharmasya + glāniḥ + bhavati)
- bhārataभारत
- O Bhārata
- abhyutthānam adharmasyaअभ्युत्थानं अधर्मस्य
- a rise of adharma (abhyutthānam + adharmasya)
- tadātmānaṃ sṛjāmy ahamतदात्मानं सृजांय् अहं
- then I send forth myself (tadā + ātmānam + sṛjāmi + aham)
Commentary
Site Commentary
The verse is stated as a general law — whenever dharma decays, intervention follows — but its immediate rhetorical force comes from how precisely it answers one particular person’s crisis in this exact moment. Krishna never says “and this applies to you, right now,” yet the whole weight of the verse depends on Arjuna hearing it that way; the universal claim only lands because a specific application is implied underneath it.
Original commentary written for this site · © Amit Singh — original commentary
Site Commentary — Second Reading
Sṛjāmi — “I bring forth myself” — describes a recurring mechanism rather than a single biographical event, confirmed by the next verse’s “yuge yuge,” age after age. Stripped of its theology, the claim is structural: a system oriented around a governing principle generates its own corrective response only after that principle has decayed past some threshold, never before. That pattern is recognizable outside any battlefield or scripture — the failure that finally forces the fix, the neglected process nobody touches until it breaks.
Original commentary written for this site · © Amit Singh — original commentary
Concepts
Apply this verse
Lessons
Personal
- A principle you believe in stays abstract until you can see it answering your actual situation right now — don't just recite the general truth, trace the specific line from it to what you're facing today.
Professional
- When you communicate a strategic principle to your team, don't leave the application implicit — state the general idea, then explicitly connect it to the specific problem in front of them, the way this verse's force depends on Arjuna making that connection himself.
Family & Social
- When reassuring someone in crisis with a general truth, make the connection to their exact situation explicit rather than leaving them to infer it — an abstraction they have to translate themselves lands far weaker than one you've already applied for them.
Ask yourself
A few ways to take this verse past reading. Ticks and the note stay in this browser.
Reflect on this verse
Keep exploring
Topics