Sanskrit
ये हि संस्पर्शजा भोगा दुःखयोनय एव ते । आद्यन्तवन्तः कौन्तेय न तेषु रमते बुधः ॥
ye hi saṃsparśajā bhogā duḥkhayonaya eva te ādyantavantaḥ kaunteya na teṣu ramate budhaḥ
Translation
The delights that are contact-born, they are verily wombs of pain, for they have beginning and ending, O Kaunteya; not in them may rejoice the wise.
Annie Besant · The Bhagavad-Gita, translated by Annie Besant (4th ed., 1922) — Wikisource · Public Domain
Explanation
Pleasures born of sensory contact get an unusually blunt label here — wombs of pain — not merely disappointing eventually but pain-generating by their very nature, since anything with a beginning and an end necessarily carries the anxiety of anticipated loss even while it’s being enjoyed. The wise one declines them not out of asceticism for its own sake but because the arithmetic doesn’t work out: a pleasure that must end was always partly grief, arriving early. It’s the same impermanence logic behind the previous verse’s claim of imperishable bliss, argued now from the losing side of the ledger. Duḥkha-yoni — “the womb of pain,” what pain is born from — is a strong claim: contact-pleasures don’t merely fade, they generate suffering, because the wanting they feed is the kāma that BG 2.62 put at the head of the chain of ruin.
Study deeper
Word by word
- ye hi saṃsparśajā bhogāये हि संस्पर्शजा भोगा
- for enjoyments born of contact (ye + hi + saṃsparśa-jāḥ + bhogāḥ)
- duḥkhayonaya eva teदुःखयोनय एव ते
- are only wombs of pain (duḥkha-yonayaḥ + eva + te)
- ādyantavantaḥ kaunteyaआद्यन्तवन्तः कौन्तेय
- having a beginning and an end, O son of Kuntī (ādi-anta-vantaḥ + kaunteya)
- na teṣu ramate budhaḥन तेषु रमते बुधः
- the wise one does not delight in them (na + teṣu + ramate + budhaḥ)
Commentary
Site Commentary
“Wombs of pain” is a stranger image than it first appears — not that pleasure leads to pain afterward, the way an effect follows a cause, but that pleasure is pain’s point of origin, the thing that literally births it. That’s a tighter, more intimate relationship than mere sequence. The claim isn’t “enjoy carefully, because pain often follows” but something closer to “the enjoyment already carries the pain inside it as its origin,” present from the start, not waiting at the far end.
Original commentary written for this site · © Amit Singh — original commentary
Concepts
Apply this verse
Lessons
Personal
- When you're mid-enjoyment of something you know won't last, notice that the coming loss isn't a separate event waiting at the end — it's already quietly present in the pleasure itself, worth feeling honestly rather than pretending the ending is unrelated to the having.
Professional
- When your team celebrates a win you know is temporary — a good quarter, a successful launch — build in the awareness that the next dip is already implicit in the shape of the win, not a separate, unrelated event to be dealt with later.
Family & Social
- When savoring a fleeting stage with your family — young kids, a parent who's still healthy — let yourself feel that its endpoint is already quietly built into its finiteness now, rather than treating the coming loss as a wholly separate future event.
Ask yourself
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