— Bhagavad Gita 7.26 (tr. Swami Swarupananda, 1909)
About this quote
हिन्दी में
हे अर्जुन! भूत, वर्तमान और भविष्य—तीनों कालों के समस्त प्राणियों को मैं जानता हूँ, किन्तु मुझे कोई नहीं जानता।
What it means
The sentence is built on an asymmetry, and the asymmetry is the whole point. Krishna’s knowing covers beings — countable things, spread across three tenses — and then the second clause reverses direction and finds nothing coming back. He is the one position in the sentence that never appears as an object.
It is usually quoted as a declaration of omniscience, but the harder half is the second: but Me none knoweth. That is less a boast about capacity than a statement about what sort of thing can be known at all. Whatever can be listed, dated and placed in a past or a future is a being. The knower doing the listing never turns up inside the list.
What it teaches you
Try actually stating who you are and watch what comes out: memories, roles, preferences, a body with a date on it — all of it material that can be catalogued, none of it the one doing the cataloguing. The verse’s claim is that this gap is not a lapse of introspection you could close with more effort; it is how the arrangement is built. Worth noticing the next time you are confident you have yourself accurately summed up.
अर्थ और सीख
कृष्ण कहते हैं कि तीनों कालों के सारे प्राणी उनके जानने में हैं, पर उन्हें कोई नहीं जानता। ध्यान देने की बात दूसरा हिस्सा है: जो कुछ गिना, नापा और समय में रखा जा सकता है, वही ‘प्राणी’ है; जो जान रहा है, वह उस सूची में कभी नहीं आता। इसीलिए अपने आप को पूरी तरह समझ लेने का दावा हर बार अधूरा रहता है—यह कमी कोशिश की नहीं, बनावट की है।
Where it comes from
This verse comes from Chapter 7 of the Bhagavad Gita, Jnana Vijnana Yoga (The Yoga of Knowledge and Realisation) — Krishna as the essence within all things — the taste in water, the light in sun and moon — and the rarity of those who truly seek.
The Bhagavad Gita — ‘the Song of the Lord’ — is the dialogue between Krishna and the warrior Arjuna set within the Mahabharata, and one of the most influential spiritual texts ever composed. English translation by Swami Swarupananda (1909), a public-domain rendering from the Sanskrit; the exact chapter and verse are cited with this quote.
