By Ritambhara
The sixth chapter of the Bhagavad Gita sets out the discipline of meditation. Its sixteenth and seventeenth verses give the Bhagavad Gita on moderation in its plainest form. Krishna tells Arjuna that yoga depends on a measured intake of food and a measured use of sleep and effort.
nātyaśnatas tu yogo’sti na caikāntam anaśnataḥ
na cātisvapnaśīlasya jāgrato naiva cārjuna
yuktāhāravihārasya yuktaceṣṭasya karmasu
yuktasvapnāvabodhasya yogo bhavati duḥkhahā
“Yoga is not for one who eats too much, nor for one who goes wholly without food, nor for one given to too much sleep, nor for one who stays awake, Arjuna. For one measured in food and recreation, measured in effort at work, measured in sleep and waking, yoga becomes the destroyer of sorrow.” (6.16–6.17)
What the verses claim
Atyaśnataḥ joins the prefix ati, beyond, to the root aś, to eat. It names one who eats past the limit. The governing word of the second verse is yukta, from the root yuj, to yoke or join. Applied to food, it means fitted to the need. Āhāra, from ā and hṛ, means whatever a person takes in. The verses make the measured life the condition of yoga. The person who keeps that measure reaches the discipline that the text calls duḥkhahā, the slayer of sorrow.
Shankara’s measure
Shankara glosses atyaśnataḥ as one who eats more food than his capacity, and quotes a Vedic text. Food within one’s capacity sustains a person and does him no harm; a larger quantity harms him; a smaller quantity fails to sustain him. He adds a second reading from the yoga manuals. Half the stomach is for food, a quarter is for water, and the last quarter is left for the movement of air. The body’s need sets this proportion, and appetite has no part in it.
The verse and the food system
A study in Nature Food in 2021, prepared with the Food and Agriculture Organization and the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, found that food systems produced 18 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2015. That was 34 per cent of all human greenhouse gas emissions, the FAO reported. In developing countries the food share reached 39 per cent. Every meal therefore carries a climate cost, and food eaten or bought past the body’s measure adds emissions that nourish nobody.
The Gita asks each person to eat to the measure of the body and to stop there. Shankara fixes that measure in plain physical terms and cites the Veda to call excess a harm. Applied to a food system that produces a third of global emissions, the verse requires households and societies to set their food supply by bodily need and to treat everything beyond it as injury.
