By Ritambhara
The sixteenth chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, in the Bhishma Parva of the Mahabharata, sorts human dispositions into the divine and the demonic, daivī and āsurī sampad. Its twelfth verse sets out the Gita on hoarding wealth, and Shankara’s commentary gives the verse a sharper edge.
āśāpāśaśatair baddhāḥ kāmakrodhaparāyaṇāḥ
īhante kāmabhogārtham anyāyenārthasañcayān
“Bound by hundreds of nooses of hope, given over to desire and anger, they strive by unjust means to amass hoards of wealth for the enjoyment of their desires.”
What the verse claims
The verse describes a person held by āśā, hope or expectation, tied as if by a hundred pāśas, nooses or fetters. Desire and anger are this person’s final resort, the sense of parāyaṇa. The verb īhante means they strive or exert themselves. The object is arthasañcaya, a heaped store of wealth. Sañcaya joins the prefix sam, together, to the root ci, to pile up or gather. The manner is anyāyena, against nyāya, the rule of right conduct. The purpose is kāmabhoga, the enjoyment of what is desired.
Shankara’s reading of unjust means
Shankara glosses anyāyena as robbing other men’s wealth. In his reading the hoarder grows rich by taking what belongs to others. He adds that the wealth is gathered for sensual enjoyment alone, with no part of it directed to dharma. The next verse gives the hoarder’s own voice: “This has been gained by me today; this desire I shall attain; this is mine, and this wealth also shall be mine in future.” Shankara reads “in future” as the coming year, when the man expects to be known for his riches.
The verse and carbon inequality
Oxfam’s Climate Plunder report, published in October 2025 with data from the Stockholm Environment Institute, measured emissions by income group. It found that a person in the world’s richest 0.1 per cent emits over 800 kg of carbon dioxide a day. A person in the poorest half of the world emits about 2 kg a day. The atmosphere’s capacity to absorb carbon is finite and held in common. Emissions on that scale draw down a share that belongs to others, which is the act Shankara names in his gloss.
Nine verses later the chapter gives its instruction: trividhaṃ narakasyedaṃ dvāraṃ nāśanam ātmanaḥ / kāmaḥ krodhas tathā lobhas tasmād etat trayaṃ tyajet. Desire, anger and greed form the gate to ruin, and a person must abandon them. Read with Shankara, the text requires that wealth be gathered by just means and that no one’s store be built from another’s share.
