— Bhagavad Gita 6.32 (tr. Swami Swarupananda, 1909)
About this quote
हिन्दी में
जो सुख और दुख को हर जगह उसी मापदंड से आँकता है जो वह अपने लिए लगाता है — हे अर्जुन, वही योगी सर्वश्रेष्ठ माना गया है।
What it means
This is stricter and narrower than the Golden Rule it gets flattened into. The verse is not about treating others as you would be treated; it is about measurement — judges of pleasure or pain by the same standard. The test is whether a given pain registers at the same weight when it lands on someone else as when it lands on you, before any question of how to act arises.
What makes its placement matter is that it is offered as the top of the scale, and the word is everywhere. There is no clause exempting strangers, enemies or people whose suffering is inconvenient to notice. A chapter of interior instruction closes with a criterion that is entirely about other beings, which means the practice is checked from outside, not from how absorbed the practitioner feels.
What it teaches you
The gap is usually visible in numbers, so use them: the delay you would call unacceptable in your own case and reasonable in someone else’s, the pain you would take a day off for and expect another person to work through, the loss that is a tragedy in your family and a statistic elsewhere. The verse does not ask you to feel more; it asks you to notice that you are running two different scales and to check what makes the second one lighter.
अर्थ और सीख
यह श्लोक ‘जैसा व्यवहार अपने लिए चाहो वैसा दूसरों से करो’ से ज़्यादा कड़ा है — यहाँ बात व्यवहार की नहीं, माप की है: क्या दूसरे का दुख आपके तराज़ू में उतना ही भारी तुलता है जितना अपना। ‘सर्वत्र’ शब्द ध्यान देने योग्य है, इसमें अजनबी और विरोधी भी शामिल हैं, कोई छूट नहीं। और ध्यान के पूरे अध्याय की कसौटी अंत में बाहर रखी गई है — योगी की परख उसकी समाधि से नहीं, दूसरों के दुख को तौलने के उसके पैमाने से होती है।
Where it comes from
This verse comes from Chapter 6 of the Bhagavad Gita, Dhyana Yoga (The Yoga of Meditation) — the Gita’s manual of meditation: posture, moderation, the restless mind patiently reined in, and the vision of the Self in all beings.
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.
