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 18, Verse 35
Verse 35
The Yoga of Liberation through Renunciation
That fortitude by which a dull-witted person does not give up sleep, fear, grief, depression, and pride — that fortitude, O Partha, is tamasic.
Context & Meaning
The bitter irony of tamasic dhṛti is that its "fortitude" is actually a tenacious clinging to the very states that enslave: svapna (sleep — excessive sleeping, the escape of consciousness into unconsciousness), bhaya (fear — the chronic low-grade fear that governs the tamasic life), śoka (grief), viṣāda (depression, despondency), and mada (pride — the coarse ego-inflation of the unreflective person). The durmedhā — the dull-witted person — does not release these states. Their "holding on" is the holding on of the self-destructive habit, the inability to let go of suffering. This is the deepest form of bondage: the fortitude that sustains one's own prison.
Scholar Commentaries
1 commentary · Public domainRamanujacharya
VishishtadvaitaNa vimuñcati — does not give up, does not release. The Vishishtadvaita teaching sees tamasic dhṛti as the most poignant expression of the soul's lostness: it holds on, with apparent persistence, to the very things that cause it pain. This is the human face of saṃsāra at its most contracted. The prescription is not a willful effort to release (which the tamasic mind cannot generate) but the touch of grace — the divine love that does not require worthiness. Bhagavān reaches toward the tamasic soul precisely because it cannot reach toward itself. The first movement of grace — the gift of sattva — comes as a gift, not an achievement.