(Bhagavad Gita 2.16 Revisited)
It started with boiling some vegetables.
Just an everyday moment at the stove — pan on heat, vegetables simmering — until a quiet recollection of Bhagavad Gita 2.16 reframed the scene:
nāsato vidyate bhāvo nābhāvo vidyate sataḥ
ubhayor api dṛṣṭo ’ntaḥ tvanayos tattva-darśibhiḥ
“There is no existence for the unreal. There is no non-existence for the Real. The seers of truth have seen the boundary between both.”
A line packed with metaphysical depth.
Swami Paramarthananda, in his Gita classes, unfolds this verse with a beautifully down-to-earth metaphor: when you boil vegetables, the heat in the vegetable isn’t its own. It’s borrowed from the water… which borrows from the pan… which borrows from the fire. Only the fire is intrinsically hot. Everything else is incidentally hot — it becomes hot and cools down later.
That’s the key insight:
What is intrinsic remains. What is incidental comes and goes.
And suddenly, it wasn’t just about cooking.
What Landed for Me
The Self — Ātma — exists by its very nature. Everything else — body, thoughts, roles, possessions — borrows its sense of existence from something deeper. These are not non-existent, but they’re not self-sustaining either. They are impermanent, dependent — asat.
And once this clicked, it landed hard.
Everything I consider “real” in daily life — body, mind, roles, even personality — is asat in this sense. It feels alive, vibrant… but only because it borrows existence. It comes, it goes. It’s mithyā.
The real isn’t what appears permanent. The real is what lends permanence — without borrowing it from anywhere else. That, Vedanta says, is Sat — intrinsic existence.
And that, says the tradition, is you.
A Case for the Maligned Forms
At first glance, it seems brutal.
A total takedown of nāma-rūpa — names and forms — by Vedanta’s scalpel:
Clay is real, not the pot.
Gold is real, not the ornament.
Water is real, not the wave.
You are Brahman, not the body-mind.
But standing at the stove, watching steam rise, something softened the starkness.
Yes, these names and forms — the pan, the water, the vegetables, and yes, “me” — are mithyā. Transient, borrowed, dependent. But why do we so often treat them as though they were the problem?
What if it’s a compliment in disguise?
When Vedanta says “You are not the pot,” it doesn’t erase the pot.
It elevates it.
It says: “You’re not only the pot. You are the very clay — unborn, unbreaking.”
Vedanta doesn’t malign the world. It recontextualizes it.
The mistake is not appreciating names and forms — it’s mistaking them for the whole.
The illusion isn’t that they exist — it’s that they exist independently or permanently.
Without the Pot, the Clay Stays Hidden
And perhaps this is what moved me most:
We often talk about realizing the Self despite the world.
But perhaps we also realize the Self through it.
So yes, nāma-rūpa is mithyā.
But let’s not malign the mithyā.
It might just be what wakes us up to Sat.
A Meeting Point with Other Views
While I’m no scholar of the theistic Vedantic schools, a glance at their commentaries on this very verse brought a surprising resonance. Ramanuja and Madhva don’t call the world mithyā. They interpret asat here as impermanent — not illusory.
Forms are real, even sacred — just not ultimate.
That morning, I found myself arriving at a more compassionate seeing — one where Advaita’s clarity and theistic reverence quietly shook hands.
Final Reflection
Does this reinforce duality — the very thing Advaita seeks to dissolve?
Or is it, perhaps, a glimpse of its deepest message:
That even the fleeting is Brahman in playful disguise?
Maybe the greatest honour to names and forms… is to use them to discover what lies beyond.
👉 Listen to a gentle chant of the verse that sparked this reflection → See References below.
🔗 References
- Swami Paramarthananda Talks on Bhagavad Gita
- Swami Sarapriyananda Bhagavad Gita | Chapter 2 | Verse 16
- 🎧 Audio Recitation: Chinmaya Mission Bhagavad Gita 2.16 – nāsato vidyate bhāvo…
Simply Vedanta 