— Modern rendering associated with the Bhagavad Gita; not a translation of any specific verse
About this quote
हिन्दी में
सुख मन की अवस्था है, बाहरी संसार से उसका कोई लेना-देना नहीं।
What it means
This is a strong claim — stronger than most people who quote it would defend. Nothing to do with the external world is absolute: read literally it denies that hunger, illness, debt or bereavement bear on happiness at all, which is hard to hold and not what most readers actually believe.
What survives the pressure is the weaker and more useful version: identical circumstances produce very different states in different people, so the largest remaining variable is internal. Keep it with that correction, and keep an eye on it too, because in its absolute form the line is often used to recast somebody else’s hardship as an attitude problem.
What it teaches you
Apply it inward only. On your own behalf, test it by naming one thing you have been treating as a precondition for feeling settled — a figure in the bank, a title, an apology owed to you — and checking whether the people you know who have it are in fact settled. On someone else’s behalf, leave the line alone: if a person is short of money or sleep or medicine, the external world is precisely what is wrong.
अर्थ और सीख
यह दावा जितना बड़ा कहा गया है, उतना निभाना मुश्किल है — बाहरी संसार से कोई लेना-देना नहीं का मतलब होगा कि भूख, बीमारी, कर्ज़ या किसी अपने का बिछड़ना सुख पर असर ही नहीं डालता, जो सच नहीं है। जो हिस्सा टिकता है वह यह है कि एक जैसे हालात में भी लोग बहुत अलग-अलग महसूस करते हैं, इसलिए सबसे बड़ा बचा हुआ कारण भीतर का है। सीख यह है कि इसे अपने ऊपर आज़माइए, और दूसरे की तकलीफ़ को उसका नज़रिया बताकर टालने के लिए इसका इस्तेमाल मत कीजिए।
Where it comes from
This is a popular modern rendering associated with the Bhagavad Gita rather than a literal translation of a specific verse. The Gita — Krishna’s dialogue with Arjuna within the Mahabharata — reaches most readers today through such free renderings.
For word-for-word translations with chapter-and-verse citations, see the sourced Gita quotes on this site, drawn from Swami Swarupananda’s 1909 public-domain translation.
