Sarva-pāpebhyo: The Scope of the Word 'All'

You can recite Bhagavad-gītā 18.66 from memory. You have heard it explained from a dozen platforms, you have written it in the front of your copy, and you believe it. Then you lie down at night and a particular thing you did returns to you: one act, one season of your life, one person you damaged, and you find that the verse has quietly stopped applying. Everything else, yes. That, no. Notice what you have just done. You have not doubted Kṛṣṇa's kindness; you have amended His grammar. He said sarva, all. You have been reading it as most, and you have never once said so out loud, because said out loud it would sound like what it is. This is not a small emotional matter to be soothed. It is a doctrinal error, and it is the reason your guilt outlives your surrender.

The Word You Keep Making Smaller

Look carefully at how the exception is made, because it is never made openly. You never say to yourself that Kṛṣṇa's word fails. You say instead that you have not properly repented, that you did it knowing better, that others were harmed and are still harmed, that the promise is meant for sinners of an ordinary kind and yours was of a different order. Every one of those sentences is a way of writing a footnote onto a verse that carries no footnote. Kṛṣṇa anticipated exactly this manoeuvre. In Bhagavad-gītā 4.36 He says that even if you are considered the most sinful of all sinners, when you are situated in the boat of transcendental knowledge you will cross over the ocean of miseries. He does not say the moderately sinful. He goes to the extreme end of the scale and plants His promise there, on purpose, so that no one can stand at that end and claim to be beyond the reach of the boat. And in Bhagavad-gītā 10.3 He states that one who knows Him as unborn and beginningless, as the Supreme Lord of all the worlds, is undeluded among men and freed from all sins. Again sarva. Not a category of sins. The category itself.

sarva-dharmān parityajya mām ekaṁ śaraṇaṁ vraja ahaṁ tvāṁ sarva-pāpebhyo mokṣayiṣyāmi mā śucaḥ

— Bhagavad-gītā 18.66

Translation: Abandon all varieties of religion and just surrender unto Me. I shall deliver you from all sinful reactions. Do not fear.

Purport: Count the word. Sarva appears twice in this single verse, and the two occurrences are locked to each other. Sarva-dharmān parityajya, abandon all varieties of religion. Ahaṁ tvāṁ sarva-pāpebhyo mokṣayiṣyāmi, I shall deliver you from all sinful reactions. Kṛṣṇa is proposing an exchange, and He has made the two sides of it the same size. He does not ask you to give up most of your dharmas and offer in return deliverance from most of your reactions. The demand is unrestricted and the deliverance is unrestricted, and the second sarva is the exact measure of the first. So when you hold one deed back from the deliverance, you have also, without noticing, held something back from the surrender. The two scopes cannot be separated. He then adds mā śucaḥ, do not fear, which is an instruction and not a sentiment.

Sarva-pāpebhyo Mokṣayiṣyāmi — I Shall Deliver You

You will want to test the scope, so test it at its limit. The Sixth Canto of Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam gives the account of Ajāmila, a brāhmaṇa who abandoned his training, his wife and his character, and passed his life in theft, drink and the company of a prostitute. At the moment of death, with the servants of Yamarāja standing over him, he called out the name of his youngest son, Nārāyaṇa. He meant the child, not the Lord. The Viṣṇudūtas came and stopped the arrest. He had not repented. He had not undone anything. He had not even intended to chant. That account is preserved in the Bhāgavatam precisely so that you cannot say your case is worse, because the case has already been set as low as it can go and the promise still held. Kṛṣṇa states the same principle directly in Bhagavad-gītā 9.30: even if a person commits the most abominable action, if he is engaged in devotional service he is to be considered saintly, because he is properly situated. And He does not leave it there as consolation. In Bhagavad-gītā 9.31 He continues that such a devotee quickly becomes righteous and attains lasting peace, and He tells Arjuna to declare it boldly that His devotee never perishes.

Guilt as a Refusal of the Promise

Now take the part that will be uncomfortable. To hold your case outside the scope of the promise is not modesty; it is a refusal to hear, and Kṛṣṇa treats refusal to hear as a serious matter. In Bhagavad-gītā 18.58 He tells Arjuna that by His grace he will pass over sarva-durgāṇi, all the obstacles of conditioned life. Sarva again. And He warns in the same verse that if through false ego Arjuna does not hear Him, he will be lost. Consider what you are actually asserting when you say your sin is too heavy for sarva-pāpebhyo mokṣayiṣyāmi. You are not confessing something about yourself. You are stating something about Him: that His declared capacity stops just short of your biography. That is pride in the costume of remorse. And in Bhagavad-gītā 4.40 He is blunt: the doubting soul has happiness neither in this world nor in the next. Understand clearly what I am not saying. If your self-condemnation is crushing and unrelenting, present when you wake and present when you lie down, that is a medical matter as well as a spiritual one, and you should go to a qualified doctor and be examined properly. Depression and obsessive guilt are treated with medicine and competent care, and needing that treatment is not a spiritual failure of any kind. What is written here addresses the dimension of the soul. It does not substitute for a physician, and you must not ask it to.

ananyāś cintayanto māṁ ye janāḥ paryupāsate teṣāṁ nityābhiyuktānāṁ yoga-kṣemaṁ vahāmy aham

— Bhagavad-gītā 9.22

Translation: But those who always worship Me with exclusive devotion, meditating on My transcendental form – to them I carry what they lack, and I preserve what they have.

Purport: Read what Kṛṣṇa undertakes in Bhagavad-gītā 9.22. To those who worship Him with exclusive devotion, He says yoga-kṣemaṁ vahāmy aham: I carry what they lack and I preserve what they have. Vahāmi means He does the carrying, personally. The load is transferred off you and onto Him; that is the whole content of the promise. Now watch what a guilty devotee does with it. He takes shelter, he accepts the cart, and then he lifts his trunk back onto his own head and walks along beside the cart, sweating, all the way home. Ask him why and he will call it responsibility, or seriousness, or not wanting to take forgiveness cheaply. It is none of those. He has engaged a porter and then declined to hand over the luggage, and the porter is Kṛṣṇa.

Accepting an Absolution Already Given

So what is to be done, practically, with a deed that will not stop returning to your mind? Not more remorse. You have tried remorse for years and it has produced nothing but exhaustion. The work is not to feel worse; the work is to accept, deliberately and repeatedly, something that has already been granted. Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 1.2.17 describes the actual mechanism: Kṛṣṇa, the Personality of Godhead, seated within the heart of everyone, cleanses away what is inauspicious from the heart of the devotee who has developed the urge to hear His messages. Note who does the cleansing. Not you, by grinding at yourself. He does it, from inside, and He does it in proportion to your hearing and chanting, not in proportion to your suffering. So when the memory arrives, do not sit down with it and re-litigate it. Answer it with the verse and return to your service. If harm was done that can still be repaired, repair it. That is service, not penance, and it is done for the other person's sake, not to buy back your own standing. And take Bhagavad-gītā 2.40 seriously: on this path there is no loss and no diminution, and even a little advancement on it protects one from the most dangerous type of fear. Nothing you have done has cancelled your account.

So return to the verse and read it once more without your amendment. Sarva-dharmān parityajya mām ekaṁ śaraṇaṁ vraja. Ahaṁ tvāṁ sarva-pāpebhyo mokṣayiṣyāmi. Both scopes are total, and the second is total because the first is. Kṛṣṇa is not unaware of what you did. He is seated in the heart of everyone, and from Him come remembrance, knowledge and forgetfulness, as He tells Arjuna in Bhagavad-gītā 15.15. He made the promise knowing everything. The one thing left for you to do is to stop making the word smaller than He wrote it. Put the trunk down on the cart. It was never your strength that was going to carry it, and the porter has been walking beside you the whole way, waiting.