The Boat That Carries the Worst Sinner

Introduction — The Hour When the Account Reopens

There is a particular hour of the night when the thing you did comes back. Not as an idea, as a picture. You see the face of the person you deceived, or the money you took, or the sentence you said to your mother that cannot now be recalled. You have apologised, where apology was possible. You have resolved. You have kept the resolution for a season and broken it again. And still, at that hour, the accounting reopens, and the total never comes down.

That answer is spoken by Śrī Kṛṣṇa, the Supreme Personality of Godhead, to His friend and disciple Arjuna in the fourth chapter of the Bhagavad-gītā, the chapter of transcendental knowledge. It occupies two verses, 4.36 and 4.37. In the first, Kṛṣṇa says that even the worst of all sinners will cross the ocean of miseries in the boat of transcendental knowledge. In the second, He says that the fire of that knowledge burns all reactions to ashes, as a blazing fire burns firewood.

Bhagavad-gītā 4.36

api ced asi pāpebhyaḥ sarvebhyaḥ pāpa-kṛt-tamaḥ
sarvaṃ jñāna-plavenaiva vṛjinaṃ santariṣyasi

Translation: Even if you are considered to be the most sinful of all sinners, when you are situated in the boat of transcendental knowledge you will be able to cross over the ocean of miseries.

Inside the full e-book: why atonement alone cannot finish (the elephant's bath), the two verses of Bhagavad-gītā 4.36–37 taken word by word, the testimony of the Śrīmad Bhāgavatam, the story of Ajāmila and of Jagāi-Mādhai who crossed despite everything, the two ditches on either side of the boat, the hardest question of what is owed to those we have harmed, and six things to do tonight to keep the fire lit.