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 16, Verse 23
Verse 23
The Yoga of the Divine and Demonic Natures
One who, having cast aside the injunctions of scripture, acts under the impulse of desire, attains neither perfection, nor happiness, nor the supreme goal.
Context & Meaning
Having established the positive path — following scriptural guidance and abandoning the three gates — Krishna now closes with its negation. The person who discards scriptural injunctions (śāstra-vidhi) and acts purely from kāma-kārata (the impulse of desire, the dictation of personal appetite) achieves nothing of lasting value: not siddhi (perfection, accomplishment), not sukha (genuine happiness), and not parā gati (the supreme destination). The three negations mirror the three things the freed person attains. Śāstra here is not arbitrary religious law but the accumulated wisdom of countless generations of seers who discovered, through experience and practice, how human beings can live with least suffering and greatest flourishing. To discard it in favour of raw desire is to choose navigating by mood rather than by map.
Scholar Commentaries
1 commentary · Public domainRamanujacharya
VishishtadvaitaŚāstravidhim utsṛjya — having discarded scriptural injunction. The śāstra is not a cage but a map — one drawn by those who have traversed the territory and know where the treacherous ground lies. To cast it aside is not freedom but a form of wilful blindness. Ramanuja sees the scriptural tradition as the accumulated grace of God, communicated through the seers to successive generations. To abandon it for the sake of personal desire is to prefer the ego's confusion to the Divine's guidance.