The verse and its meaning · Bhagavad Gita · Chapter 15 · The Tree and the Highest Person

Sustaining Earth and Plants

Bhagavad Gita 15.13

गामाविश्य च भूतानि धारयाम्यहमोजसा।पुष्णामि चौषधीः सर्वाः सोमो भूत्वा रसात्मकः

Meaning · English

Entering the earth, I sustain all living beings with my energy. Becoming the moon, the giver of the juice of life, I nourish all the plants.

Three words carry the verse. Go is the earth, the ground under every creature. Ojas is energy, a steady strength that holds things up. Rasa is juice, the sap and taste that make food worth eating, and rasa-atmaka means having that juice as one's very nature. Krishna tells Arjuna that he enters the earth and holds living beings up by his energy. He says he becomes the moon and, as the moon, supplies the juice that feeds every plant. The plain sense is that the support under the world and the nourishment inside food are his presence, and he does not stand outside them. He gives the reason just before this: the light of sun, moon and fire is already his, yet many people do not see him. So he points to what everyone touches daily, soil and what grows from it. He asks Arjuna to recognise the giver in the gift. Shankara reads these lines as the one Lord working as the power behind nature's ordinary functions. Ramanuja reads the world as the Lord's body, so that he indwells and sustains it. Madhva stresses that beings and nature depend entirely on the Lord, who is separate from them and holds them up.

Think of sap rising through a tree in spring. Nobody sees it move, and the leaves and fruit get all the praise. Take the sap away and the whole tree droops. Krishna says he is that hidden rising juice, and the ground, the plants and the eaters are what it keeps alive.

1. At your next meal, before the first bite, look at the food for ten seconds and name where it grew: soil, field, tree. 2. Eat the first few bites slowly and notice the taste, the juice of the food, without a screen. 3. This week, stand barefoot on bare earth or grass for one minute and notice that it holds your whole weight without effort. 4. Tonight, step outside, look at the moon if it is up, and remember that the verse names it as a giver of nourishment.

An old man, a month after his wife's funeral, presses three bean seeds into a pot of soil on his balcony because she always grew them. He waters it and wonders why he bothers. Krishna's words give that small act a different weight. The soil that holds the pot, the sap that will climb the stem and the juice in the beans are, in the Gita's teaching, his sustaining work. The man need not feel he is tending something alone. Each morning he checks the pot, and the checking becomes a way of attending to what holds life up. Ordinary experience agrees on one point: a plant visibly depends on what it is rooted in. Today's plant biology names sunlight, water and soil, and gives the moon no part in feeding plants, so the moon's role here is the text's own teaching and has no counterpart in nutrition. The verse does not promise that the beans will sprout, and it does not lift his grief. It offers him a way to see the pot, the earth and the daily care as held by something larger.

अर्थ · हिन्दी

In this book

• Before: Light Borrowed From Him · Bhagavad Gita 15.12
• Next: The Fire Within the Body · Bhagavad Gita 15.14
• All of Bhagavad Gita · Ask Krishna about it

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