51. Circumambulation of shrines, temples, holy objects, and the like is always undertaken in a clockwise direction.
52. The symbolism here should be clear: Dhruva had transcended death.
53. The commentaries take this to be sapta-ṛṣis, the seven sages. See V.22.17 for reference to this (and chapters 16–26 of the fifth canto in general for Bhāgavata cosmology).
54. According to the Bhāgavata, the four Kumāras were born from Brahmā, as was Śiva (III:12).
55. Śrīdhara takes these to be the five kleśas of Yoga Sūtras II.3ff.—ignorance, ego, desire, aversion, and clinging to life. But there are also five kośas first mentioned in the Taittirīya Upaniṣad II.2.1 as food, life air, mind, intelligence, and bliss.
56. Compare with Gītā II.62–63.
57. Compare with Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad I.4.8.
58. The commentaries take this to be the Antaryāmī, a form of Viṣṇu who permeates and sustains each individual ātman. See “The Object of Bhakti: Īśvara, Bhagavān, Brahman, and Divine Hierarchies,” note 78.
59. Here, the king, in his humility, is indicating that everything belongs to the true brāhmaṇas, such as Sanat-kumāra. Needless to say, a true brāhmaṇa, by definition, is one who knows brahman, as indicated in verse 41, and hence is indifferent to all material possessions.
60. Karma yoga, giving up attachments to the fruits (results) of one’s actions and acting either from a place of pure selfless duty, dharma, or, higher still, by offering all one’s activities to Kṛṣṇa, is one of the main teachings of the Bhagavad Gītā (for similar language, see II.47–48).
61. The idea here is that realized souls understand that all action is performed by the prakṛtic mind and senses; the ātman is simply the witness, not the “doer” of deeds.
62. There are four stages of life (āśramas), each lasting twenty-five years: brahmacarya, celibate studentship; gṛhastha, householder; vānaprastha, forest dweller; and sannyāsa, full ascetic renunciant.
63. In this form of austerity, the yogī sits in the middle of four fires placed in each of the cardinal directions, with the fifth, the sun itself, blazing down from above. The idea is to develop detachment from the sensations of the body.
64. Doubt is a function of the intelligence, buddhi, associated here with jñāna, one of the five kośas found in the Taittirīya Upaniṣad.
65. The idea here is that even liberating insight is a state of mind and hence it, too, must ultimately be transcended.
66. This type of practice involving the manipulation of the prāṇa, life airs, is more typical of the Śākta traditions.
67. In Sāṅkhya metaphysics, the subtler elements produce grosser ones sequentially, and the order is reversed when the universe is dissolved, as Pṛthu is here doing on a micro level with the elements of his own body.
68. The mahat is the first evolved stage of prakṛti after it has been agitated into creativity. In these verses, Pṛthu is progressively involuting, or dissolving every aspect of his material self back into its progressively subtler source, such that only his pure ātman remains in its original uncovered nature.
69. The benedictions outlined in the next few verses are not uncommon in the Bhāgavata. While they are materialistic in scope, they are clearly a form of “skillful means”: enticing those with materialistic ambitions to read the story and thereby become infected with the seed of bhakti. The real intended boon is noted in the last verse of the chapter.
70. For the four goals of life, see previous citation.
71. Karma here refers to ritualistic activities. The signification of the term covers any form of religiosity that has materialistic (body/mind) benefits as its aim.
72. A subterranean city of celestial serpents, renowned for its beauty (literally “the place of enjoyment”).
73. In the aesthetics of Sanskrit poetics, walking like an elephant is a sign of beauty (one needs to consider the graceful sway of an elephant’s gait, despite its size, to appreciate this).
74. Śrī, the Goddess of Fortune, holds a lotus in one of her hands.
75. One can recognize celestials, as their feet never touch the ground (they also do not blink, and their garlands never fade!).
76. Kāma, the God of Love, like his Indo-European counterpart, Cupid, shoots arrows of love from his bow. He is “mind-born” because he was born from the mind of Brahmā.
77. It is anathema for a kṣatriya, warrior, to beg for anything.
78. Brāhmaṇas are exempt from, or receive significantly reduced, punishments (Manusmṛti 8.379–81).
79. This refers to the story of Yayāti, whose youngest son accepted his old age from him (Bhāgavata IX.18–19).
80. Mamatā: from the ultimate perspective, nothing belongs to the real self, the ātman, so all notions of ownership (such as “my family”) are illusory.
81. As Kṛṣṇa states in the Gītā, the state of mind at the moment of death determines the next life (VIII.6).
82. Time is relative in Purāṇic cosmography (see the story of Brahmā in part 3).
83. This is likely a reference to the Bhagavad Gītā and/or Uddhava Gītā (where Kṛṣṇa imparts a lengthy discourse to Uddhava in the eleventh book of the Bhāgavata).
84. We are reminded of I.2.6 in the setting of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa chapter, where the highest dharma is defined as uninterrupted bhakti to Hari that is free of all motives.
85. See note 92 below for the karmendriyas of Sāṅkhya.
86. Here (as throughout), I follow the commentators in translating śakti as intelligence (buddhi).
87. The ātman is sometimes metaphorically called “swan.”
88. See discussion in “A Three-Tiered Hierarchy of Brahman” pertaining to the ātman as a part, aṁśa, of Īśvara.
89. The sense here is that there is only one person, even though he or she may appear to be two—the person looking in the mirror and the face reflected back.
90. Some beings have no legs, such as plants, or one or more, depending on the bodily form.
91. In Sāṅkhya, the five jñānendriyas are the organs of hearing, seeing, touching, smelling, and tasting; and the karmendriyas are those of speaking, grasping, moving, excreting, and procreation.
92. These are the five prāṇas, life airs (prāṇa, samāna, apāna, vyāna, udāna).
93. As we find in Gītā IX.25, if one worships the gods, one attains the realms of the gods; if one worships the forefathers, one attains that realm. The scriptures teach all manner of things in accordance with the different proclivities and understandings of living beings, so in accordance with what one hears and follows from the scriptures, one attains a corresponding destination.
94. This is an extension of the chariot analogy of the Kaṭha Upaniṣad (III.9).
95. These are the standard three types of suffering recognized in many soteriological traditions of ancient India that are inflicted on all beings (see Yoga Sūtras II.15 and commentaries).
96. When in ignorance of one’s true self, the ātman, one thinks one is one’s material body and that one actually owns one’s possessions.
97. Compare with the black and white karma of the Yoga Sūtras (IV.7).
98. See Gīta (II.42–46) and Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad (I.7–11) for similar deprecation of Vedic ritualism.
99. It is only the gross body made of the five elements that is discarded at death. The same subtle body accompanies the ātman birth after birth; it is discarded only after the life in which one becomes enlightened. Hence, despite the change of bodies, it is the same entity in the next life who enjoys the fruit of actions performed in a different body by that same agent in a previous life, and not a different person.
100. Dreams, in Yoga psychology, are experiences patched together from imprints (saṁskāras) of actions performed when awake. So in dreaming, one may appear to inhabit a different body, but that dream body is made up of imprints gathered while awake in the physical body. The idea is that just as the experiencer of a dream is the same agent who previously planted the seeds of actions when awake, so the mind of a being in a future body experiences the fruit of action performed by the same mind in a previous birth.
101. As has been noted previously, this phraseology reflecting false notions of the self is common. When one thinks of the self as the body, one thinks in terms of “mine” and “other.”
102. Thus, according to this verse, a case (for example) of déjà vu, where one feels a sense of familiarity with, say, a place where one has never been in this life, is explained by dint of the fact that one has been to that place in a previous life and hence there is a subconscious imprint of that place in the mind.
103. The mind might conjure up impossible things in dream or fantasy—the commentators give the examples of a sea on a mountaintop (place), stars in the day (time), or beheading oneself (action), which are in fact experiences that have never taken place—but what the mind is doing is patching together imprints of two things that have been experienced (an imprint of a sea from one place superimposed upon a separate imprint of a mountain from another and so forth). Put differently, they are the confusion of—or, better, fusion of—incompatible times, places, and actions.
104. The commentators take these five parts variously: we have followed Viśvanātha here.
105. This metaphor is probably left truncated because it would have been well-known from its source (Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad IV.43).
106. Here termed tat-sāmyatām. See “The Liberated Bhakta: Different Types of Mokṣa in the Bhāgavata” on the five types of devotional liberation.