A Study of the Bhagavadgita :63 - Swami Krishnananda.

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Sunday 19, January 2025, 08:00.
A Study of the Bhagavadgita:
Chapter 10: The Hidden Meaning of the Seventh Chapter of the Gita-4
Swami Krishnananda
Post-63.

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The Gita tells us that there are varieties of devotees. Your devotion to God is not a uniform attitude commonly discoverable in everybody at the same time. You are placed in a different context on account of your karmas and the nature of your personality. Even when you love or hate a thing, you differ from another person who has a love and hate for different things. The quality or intensity of love and hatred varies in different individuals according to the nature of the object as they conceive it or according to their own psychological circumstance.

Caturvidha bhajante mam janah sukrtinorjuna, 

arto jijnsur artharthi jnani ca bharatarshabha (Gita 7.16). 

The Bhagavadgita distinguishes four kinds of devotees. Many people run to God, offer prayers to God every day, but for what is this prayer? What do you want from God? There are people who want something from God. If you want nothing, you will not approach anything. People are distressed in life. There is great sorrow, poverty, ignorance, disease, tension, conflict, and what not. They cry, “God, come and help me.” These devotees who cry for help from God because they are in a state of distress are called arthas, distressed devotees. They want nothing else from God except freedom from distress. Sorrow and pain must be removed; that is all they expect from God. Inasmuch as the expectation is so small, it may even look silly to ask God Almighty for that. But yet, many devotees are of that type, and the Almighty incarnated as Bhagavan Sri Krishna says, “They are also beloved. They are devoted to me.”

But there are other devotees who do not seek this kind of blessing. They say, “Give me wisdom, knowledge, enlightenment.” For instance, Panini did meditation on Lord Siva for wisdom, and Lord Siva appeared before him, and with the sound of his damaru gave him knowledge of all Sanskrit literature. The scriptures contain many examples of these kinds of devotees. “I am ignorant. I understand nothing. Please bless me with knowledge.” These are a higher kind of devotees – jijnasu, they are called. One who wants to know is a jijnasu. One who wants to be free from distress is an artha. So artha and jijnasu are the first two categories.

Artharthi is the third type – one who wants material prosperity. “I would like to be materially rich, socially highly placed. I would like to be even a king, if God is so pleased. Lord, condescend to make me an emperor of this world.” And God will make you an emperor. If not in this world, in the next birth at least you will be born as the son of an emperor. You may be a ruler of a large kingdom. God is not unable to grant even this wish.

This is one interpretation of the word 'artha' according to certain commentators of the Gita. Artha is material, an object, prosperity which is visible, tangible, connected with this world, this earth. But certain other commentators say it is not necessary for us to confine the meaning of this word artha only to material prosperity. There may be some other meaning also, inasmuch as there seems to be a gradation of ascent in the order of renunciation of the devotees, finally consummating in jnani, or the highest devotee. If the jijnasu, or the disciple of knowledge, is to be considered superior to the one who asks only for freedom from distress, and you are actually being taken to the highest level of the jnani state, the third type should not be something less than the second because the one who asks for material gains cannot be regarded as superior to the one who asks for knowledge. So perhaps the intention of the Lord may be a little different from the meaning that we are trying to associate with the word artha. Maybe it is prosperity; there is nothing wrong with it. Perhaps it is purushartha. Purushartha means the aims of existence.

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Continued

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