Sanskrit
न च मत्स्थानि भूतानि पश्य मे योगमैश्वरम् । भूतभृन्न च भूतस्थो ममात्मा भूतभावनः ॥
na ca matsthāni bhūtāni paśya me yogam aiśvaram bhūtabhṛn na ca bhūtastho mamātmā bhūtabhāvanaḥ
Translation
Nor have beings root in Me; behold My sovereign Yoga! The support of beings, yet not rooted in beings, My Self their efficient cause.
Annie Besant · The Bhagavad-Gita, translated by Annie Besant (4th ed., 1922) — Wikisource · Public Domain
Explanation
Continuing directly from verse 4, Krishna restates the paradox and then names it: this ungraspable relationship between the pervading source and the things pervaded is itself “sovereign yoga” (yogam aiśvaram) — mystic dominion, a different sense of the word from the disciplined-action meaning it carries in Chapter 2’s karma yoga. He is beings’ support and their efficient cause without being contained by them, closer to a Vedantic ground-of-being than to ordinary cause-and-effect. Yoga aiśvara — “the yoga of lordship” — is a third sense of yoga in the poem: not discipline and not evenness, but sovereign power over the terms of one’s own manifestation. It is what BG 11 asks to see directly.
Study deeper
Word by word
- na ca matsthāni bhūtāniन च मत्स्थानि भूतानि
- and yet beings do not rest in Me (na + ca + mat-sthāni + bhūtāni)
- paśya me yogam aiśvaramपश्य मे योगं ऐश्वरं
- behold My sovereign yoga (paśya + me + yogam + aiśvaram)
- bhūtabhṛn na ca bhūtasthoभूतभृन् न च भूतस्थो
- sustaining beings, yet not dwelling in them (bhūta-bhṛt + na + ca + bhūta-sthaḥ)
- mamātmā bhūtabhāvanaḥममात्मा भूतभावनः
- My Self is the source of beings (mama + ātmā + bhūta-bhāvanaḥ)
Commentary
Site Commentary
When the paradox from verse 4 doesn’t resolve on a second telling, Krishna doesn’t offer a third argument — he says “behold” (paśya), switching from explanation to direct pointing. That’s a tell: some contradictions aren’t puzzles waiting on the right argument, they’re descriptions of something that has to be seen rather than reasoned into consistency, and one more clever explanation would miss what the verse is actually asking of the listener.
Original commentary written for this site · © Amit Singh — original commentary
Concepts
Apply this verse
Lessons
Personal
- When you've explained something to yourself three different ways and it still won't resolve into a tidy logical shape, consider that you may be trying to argue your way into something that only becomes clear through direct experience — stop reasoning and go observe instead.
Professional
- When a technical trade-off keeps resisting a clean explanation to stakeholders, sometimes the fix isn't a better argument — it's showing them the system behaving, a demo or a dashboard, rather than one more slide of reasoning.
Family & Social
- If you keep trying to explain your way out of a disagreement and the explanation keeps not landing, try showing rather than arguing — understanding sometimes arrives through witnessing a thing together, not through one more attempt at persuasion.
Ask yourself
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