Lord Krishna
Divine TeacherThe Supreme Lord, the charioteer and divine guide of Arjuna. Krishna delivers the eternal wisdom of the Gita, revealing the nature of the soul, duty, and the path to liberation.
Speaking: Chapter 15, Verse 12
Verse 12
The Yoga of the Supreme Person
Know that the light in the sun that illuminates the entire world, the light in the moon, and the light in fire — that light is Mine.
Context & Meaning
After establishing the supreme abode as self-luminous (verse 6), Krishna now reveals himself as the source of all the light that does exist in the manifest world. The light of the sun that illuminates all creation, the soft light of the moon that governs tides and moods, the heat and light of fire that sustains life — all of it is the effulgence of the Divine flowing through these cosmic instruments. This is not pantheism — God is not the sun. Rather, the sun is a focused expression of God's light, as a lamp is an expression of electricity. To see the sun and be moved by its beauty is, for the person of wisdom, to see a ray of the Divine. The entire phenomenal world is a theophany — a showing-forth of God.
Scholar Commentaries
1 commentary · Public domainAdi Shankaracharya
AdvaitaThe light that the sun emits is ultimately not the sun's own; the sun shines by the light of Brahman. The Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upanishad asks: when the sun has set, what is the light by which beings see? And answers: the Self. God's light is the ground-luminosity of all perceivable light. The mystic who perceives this — who sees God in the sunbeam, in the flame, in the moonrise — has begun to read the universe as scripture.