Three Readings of One Verse
Essays  ·  15

Three readings of one verse

Three teachers built entire schools on this text — Śaṅkara's non-dual reading, Rāmānuja's qualified non-dual reading, Madhva's dual reading. Rather than picking a side, here are six places where they read the identical Sanskrit and arrive somewhere genuinely different, side by side.

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One correction, kept
Yogeśvara — a title easy to misread
व्यासप्रसादाच्छ्रुतवानेतद्गुह्यमहं परम् । योगं योगेश्वरात्कृष्णात्साक्षात्कथयतः स्वयम् ॥
vyāsa-prasādāt śrutavān etad guhyam ahaṃ param | yogaṃ yogeśvarāt kṛṣṇāt sākṣāt kathayataḥ svayam ||
18.75 — "By Vyāsa's grace I have heard this, the supreme secret — the yoga told directly, in person, by Kṛṣṇa, Lord of yoga."
Yogeśvara looks, at a glance, like a title for the greatest practitioner of yoga who ever lived — the seeker who mastered the discipline every other seeker is still working at. That reading runs backwards. A seeker's yoga is a means toward something not yet reached; nothing is missing from the one this title names. What the word points to instead is the coming-together of every auspicious quality — power, knowledge, sovereignty, and more — in a single being: a different sense of "union" than the effortful joining of a scattered mind. Sañjaya has just watched a farmer's son argue a point of duty with the possessor of everything there is, and the closing verse still calls him Yogeśvara. Read it as the seeker's word for a technique, and the book quietly demotes its own teacher to its own best student.
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