Lord Krishna

Divine Teacher

The 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 16, Verse 13

Verse 13

The Yoga of the Divine and Demonic Natures

"This has been gained by me today; this desire I shall also fulfil. This wealth is mine, and this too shall be mine in the future."

Context & Meaning

Krishna quotes the inner monologue of the demonic mind directly — a literary technique that makes the teaching visceral and recognisable. The internal voice of greed is rendered with precision: "This I have gained today... this desire I will also fulfil... this is mine... and this too will be mine." The tense structure is revealing: past acquisition, present possession, future accumulation — all of it centred on a single personal pronoun: me, mine. The demonic consciousness collapses the entire universe into the gravitational field of the self, turning everything into a potential acquisition or a present holding. This is the voice not of extraordinary evil but of ordinary greed — and its ordinariness is what makes it so dangerous.

Scholar Commentaries

1 commentary · Public domain

Adi Shankaracharya

Advaita

Idam adya mayā labdham — this has been gained by me today. The personal pronoun maya (by me) is the philosophical root of the disorder: the deep identification with a separate, claiming self that stands against the world and measures its existence by what it can acquire. The Vedantic diagnosis is that this separate self is itself a superimposition — and the accumulated possessions around it are the superimposition's architecture. The teaching of non-self (anātman discourse) is the dismantling of precisely this inner monologue.