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 61
Verse 61
The Yoga of Liberation through Renunciation
The Lord dwells in the hearts of all beings, O Arjuna, causing all beings to revolve by his power of illusion, as if mounted on a machine.
Context & Meaning
One of the most profound images in the entire Gita: God dwelling in the heart of every being, while simultaneously being the force that causes them to revolve — to move through the cycles of existence — as if they were mounted on a machine (yantra) powered by maya. The machine image is not reductive but illuminating: it shows the interplay of divine presence and natural law. God does not override nature's mechanism — he dwells within it, sustaining it, pervading it — while each being rides their particular yantra of body-mind-nature, spinning through the pattern that their own nature and karma have shaped. The invitation is to turn toward the one who dwells within.
Scholar Commentaries
1 commentary · Public domainAdi Shankaracharya
AdvaitaHṛddeśe tiṣṭhati — dwells in the region of the heart. The Advaita reading sees the "heart" here not as a physical organ but as the hṛt — the centre of consciousness, the innermost ground of the person. This is where Brahman is to be discovered — not in the external world, not in scripture alone, but in the depths of one's own awareness. The yantra image shows that the ego-self is the machine, revolving helplessly through māyā. The way off the machine is to turn inward to the one who dwells in the heart — who is simultaneously the witness of all the machine's movements and the awareness that has never moved at all.