There is something you have done that you have never told anyone completely. You may have told it in pieces, to a priest, to a friend, to a doctor, in a version edited enough to survive the telling. And you have quietly built your whole spiritual life around it. You do not pray, or you pray from a distance, the way a man with no money reads a menu. Somewhere in you a sentence has been running for years: first I must become clean, and then I may approach Him. I want to tell you at the outset that this sentence is not from the Bhagavad-gītā. Kṛṣṇa never spoke it. Somebody else spoke it, and you have been obeying it as though it were scripture. In the ninth chapter Kṛṣṇa says the opposite, and He says it so plainly that men have been softening it ever since.
Your Past Does Not Disqualify You
See where your sentence came from, because it did not come from nowhere. Every religious system you have encountered sets a threshold at its door, and it is right to do so. The Bhagavad-gītā itself is severe about conduct. Kṛṣṇa says in Bhagavad-gītā 16.23 that one who discards scriptural injunctions and acts on his own whims attains neither perfection nor happiness nor the supreme destination, and He follows it in Bhagavad-gītā 16.24 by instructing that duty must be learned from the regulations of scripture. So you concluded that the door has a lock and your history is the wrong key. Then your own mind took up the work of the gatekeeper. Kṛṣṇa warns in Bhagavad-gītā 6.5 that the mind is the friend of the conditioned soul and also his enemy, and there is no crueller enemy than a mind that has memorised your worst hour and recites it whenever you turn toward God. Yet Kṛṣṇa nowhere describes only the qualified as coming to Him. In Bhagavad-gītā 7.16 He lists four kinds of men who begin devotional service, and the first He names is the distressed. You already know Bhagavad-gītā 4.36 and 4.37, the boat that carries the worst sinner and the fire that burns karma to ashes; set it aside, because the ninth chapter, which Kṛṣṇa calls in Bhagavad-gītā 9.2 the king of education and the most secret of all secrets, makes a sharper claim than that.
api cet su-durācāro bhajate mām ananya-bhāk sādhur eva sa mantavyaḥ samyag vyavasito hi saḥ
— Bhagavad-gītā 9.30
Translation: Even if one commits the most abominable action, if he is engaged in devotional service he is to be considered saintly because he is properly situated in his determination.
Purport: Take the words apart. Su-durācāraḥ is not a small lapse. Durācāra is bad conduct, su intensifies it, and Kṛṣṇa is naming the worst behaviour a man is capable of, in the present tense, still going on. Then comes the hinge of the verse: samyag vyavasito hi saḥ, because he is properly situated in his determination. Vyavasāya is the same word Kṛṣṇa uses in Bhagavad-gītā 2.41, where those on this path are resolute in purpose while the intelligence of the irresolute is many-branched. The qualification He names is not a clean record. It is a settled direction of the will. Now mark the grammar of the other line. Sādhur eva sa mantavyaḥ means he is to be considered saintly. Mantavyaḥ is an instruction issued to somebody, and that somebody is not the man with the record.
The Verse Nobody Expects Krishna to Speak
Who is being instructed, then? The people watching him. Kṛṣṇa is legislating for the observing community, telling them how to regard a person whose conduct is still disordered while his direction has already turned. He knows exactly how a congregation behaves, because He states in Bhagavad-gītā 3.21 that whatever a prominent man does the common man imitates, and whatever standard he sets by his acts the world pursues. A community that keeps score will drive out the very people this verse protects. So Kṛṣṇa takes the scoreboard out of their hands. He does not then hand it to the man himself. This is the second error, and it is the exact mirror of your despair. There are people who hold up Bhagavad-gītā 9.30 as a document of exemption, as though Kṛṣṇa had issued them a standing permission and their conduct had therefore stopped mattering. They are reading a verse addressed to their neighbours as a verse addressed to themselves. They are also forgetting that Kṛṣṇa is never partial. He declares in Bhagavad-gītā 9.29 that He envies no one and favours no one and is equal to all, and that devotional service alone makes the difference. Whatever 9.30 is, it is not favouritism. The very next verse settles the matter, and it is almost never quoted beside the first.
“Kṛṣṇa does not ask what you have done. He asks which way you are now facing. Your record is what you are walking away from, your determination is the direction of the walking, and only the direction was ever the qualification.”
Direction of Will Versus Record of Deeds
The Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam gives the case. Ajāmila was a trained brāhmaṇa who abandoned his wife and his duty for a prostitute and lived by theft for decades. At the end, seeing Yamarāja's servants arrive with ropes, he called out in terror to his youngest son, whose name was Nārāyaṇa. Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 6.1.28-29 records that he chanted with tears in his eyes and with no religious intention, and Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 6.1.30 that the Viṣṇudūtas came at once. Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 6.2.14 states the principle plainly: one who chants the holy name is freed from unlimited sinful reactions even if he chants indirectly, jokingly, for entertainment, or neglectfully. Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 6.2.19 gives the reason in a physician's language: medicine acts whether or not the patient understands it. Vālmīki was a highway robber before he wrote the Rāmāyaṇa. Now something to be said plainly. Where guilt has stopped being conscience and become a condition, persistent, disabling, breaking your sleep or your appetite, or bringing thoughts of harming yourself, competent medical help is warranted exactly as it is for a fever or a fracture, and you should obtain it. What I place before you concerns the soul's dimension and does not stand in place of that treatment. Then begin, today, unrepaired. Kṛṣṇa's instruction in Bhagavad-gītā 9.34 is to think of Him, become His devotee, and offer obeisances, and in Bhagavad-gītā 2.47 that your right extends to the work and never to its result.
kṣipraṁ bhavati dharmātmā śaśvac-chāntiṁ nigacchati kaunteya pratijānīhi na me bhaktaḥ praṇaśyati
— Bhagavad-gītā 9.31
Translation: He quickly becomes righteous and attains lasting peace. O son of Kuntī, declare it boldly that My devotee never perishes.
Purport: Kṣipraṁ bhavati dharmātmā. He quickly becomes righteous. Read that as a description of motion. The abominable conduct of the previous verse is not being accommodated, it is being left behind, and Kṛṣṇa is telling you the speed at which it goes. He does not say the devotee stays as he was and is called saintly by legal fiction. He says the direction produces the change, and produces it fast. Then He does something extraordinary. He does not make the guarantee Himself. He orders Arjuna to make it: kaunteya pratijānīhi, O son of Kuntī, declare it boldly, My devotee never perishes. He places His own word in the mouth of a man who could not hold his bow. It is the same assurance He gives in Bhagavad-gītā 6.40, that one who does good is never overcome by evil, and in Bhagavad-gītā 2.40, that on this path there is no loss.
Where This Verse Must Not Be Misused
Now the place where this verse becomes dangerous, and I will name the danger exactly. Bhagavad-gītā 9.30 cannot be used in advance. A man who reasons that he will continue his abominable conduct because this verse covers it has, in that reasoning, destroyed the one thing the verse requires. Samyag vyavasitaḥ is a direction of the will. An intention to persist is also a direction of the will, pointing the other way. You cannot claim a verse about determination by means of a determination to keep sinning. Kṛṣṇa shuts this door in Bhagavad-gītā 16.23, where acting on one's own whim against scripture yields no perfection and no happiness, and again in Bhagavad-gītā 9.12, where the hopes of the bewildered are defeated. Understand what I have said and what I have not. The warning is against complacency. It is not a warning against you. Nothing in it reopens your eligibility, because Kṛṣṇa closed it two verses later, declaring in Bhagavad-gītā 9.32 that even those of lower birth attain the supreme destination by taking shelter in Him, and in Bhagavad-gītā 9.33 telling you, having arrived in this miserable world, to engage in His service now. Falling while walking toward Him is not the same act as walking away. Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 6.1.15 says one who takes to complete, unalloyed devotional service uproots the weeds of sinful action with no possibility of their reviving, as the sun dissipates fog.
Abandon the repair work you planned to finish before you began. There is nothing to finish. Take shelter now, in the condition this day has left you in, with your history intact and unedited, and let Kṛṣṇa do the cleaning, which He has said in Bhagavad-gītā 18.66 He will do for one who abandons all varieties of religion and surrenders to Him, telling you in that same verse not to fear. He repeats the promise personally in Bhagavad-gītā 18.65, telling Arjuna that He gives it because Arjuna is dear to Him. Then chant His holy names, Hare Kṛṣṇa Hare Kṛṣṇa, Kṛṣṇa Kṛṣṇa Hare Hare, Hare Rāma Hare Rāma, Rāma Rāma Hare Hare, today, with the memory still sitting inside you while you chant. Arjuna's last words in Bhagavad-gītā 18.73 are that his illusion is gone. Yours will go the same way. Kṛṣṇa has told you to declare it boldly.
From the Book
This article draws on the Feeling Sinful chapter of Bhagavad Gita for Everyday Life, my forthcoming book applying Kṛṣṇa’s instruction to the specific afflictions of ordinary life. The chapter treats every verse the Gītā assigns to feeling sinful, verse by verse, with the word-by-word meaning and its application to work and family.
Go deeper now: The Three Ladders.
