Sanskrit
मात्रास्पर्शास्तु कौन्तेय शीतोष्णसुखदुःखदाः । आगमापायिनोऽनित्यास्तांस्तितिक्षस्व भारत ॥
mātrāsparśās tu kaunteya śītoṣṇasukhaduḥkhadāḥ āgamāpāyino'nityās tāṃs titikṣasva bhārata
Translation
The contacts of matter, O son of Kuntî, giving cold and heat, pleasure and pain, they come and go, impermanent; endure them bravely, O Bhârata.
Annie Besant · The Bhagavad-Gita, translated by Annie Besant (4th ed., 1922) — Wikisource · Public Domain
Explanation
A shift in register — Krishna concedes that sensation (cold and heat, pleasure and pain) is real and does come and go, but frames it as something to be endured, not evidence against the deeper argument. This is the seed of the equanimity teaching verse 38 will state explicitly: transient things don’t refute what’s permanent, they’re just what a steady mind has to tolerate along the way. Titikṣā — bearing without being moved — is a smaller, more practical virtue than the immortality claim around it, and the one Arjuna can actually start practising now. The instruction is not to stop feeling cold and heat, only to stop treating them as the point.
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Word by word
- mātrāsparśāsमात्रास्पर्शास्
- contacts of the senses with their objects (mātrā-sparśāḥ)
- tuतु
- but
- kaunteyaकौन्तेय
- O son of Kuntī
- śītoṣṇasukhaduḥkhadāḥशीतोष्णसुखदुःखदाः
- givers of cold and heat, pleasure and pain (śīta-uṣṇa-sukha-duḥkha-dāḥ)
- āgamāpāyino'nityāsआगमापायिनोऽनित्यास्
- coming and going, impermanent (āgama-apāyinaḥ + anityāḥ)
- tāṃsतांस्
- them
- titikṣasvaतितिक्षस्व
- endure, bear with
- bhārataभारत
- O descendant of Bharata
Commentary
Site Commentary
It would be easy to read this teaching as denial — pretend the pain and cold don’t register. This verse rules that reading out explicitly: sensation is granted as real, it’s just denied the status of counter-evidence. The instruction is endurance, titikṣā, not numbness — a distinction that matters, because a teaching that asked Arjuna to stop feeling would be a different, much less honest, teaching than one asking him to keep feeling and act anyway.
Original commentary written for this site · © Amit Singh — original commentary
Site Commentary — Second Reading
“Mātrā” — the “matter” in contact with the senses — is narrower than it looks: this verse isn’t making a claim about emotion or suffering in general, only about sensation generated by contact with physical conditions, cold, heat, the stuff a body registers automatically. That’s the same territory covered by any discipline built on sustained discomfort — a long run, a punishing stretch at work, months of interrupted sleep with a newborn — where the actual skill isn’t feeling less, it’s declining to promote a passing sensation into a verdict on how the whole effort is going. Titikṣā, in that light, is less a spiritual virtue than a working method: let the signal arrive, note it, keep moving.
Original commentary written for this site · © Amit Singh — original commentary
Concepts
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Lessons
Personal
- When you're told to be resilient, check whether that's being framed as 'don't feel it' or 'feel it and act anyway' — this verse insists on the second. Denying the sensation is a worse strategy than acknowledging it and refusing to let it be the final word.
Professional
- When coaching a team through a hard stretch, don't ask people to pretend the difficulty isn't real — ask them to register it honestly and keep functioning anyway. Denial reads as dishonest; endurance reads as strength, and only one of them is sustainable.
Family & Social
- When someone close to you is going through something hard, don't suggest they shouldn't feel it — that's a harder ask than the honest one, which is to feel it fully and still keep moving through it.
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