By Ritambhara
The Gita on eightfold nature appears in the seventh chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, verses 4 and 5. Krishna has just promised Arjuna knowledge together with realisation, and he begins by naming the parts of his own nature.
bh?mir ?po ‘nalo v?yu? kha? mano buddhir eva ca
aha?k?ra it?ya? me bhinn? prak?tir a??adh? (7.4)
apareyam itas tv any?? prak?ti? viddhi me par?m
j?vabh?t?? mah?b?ho yayeda? dh?ryate jagat (7.5)
“Earth, water, fire, air, space, mind, intellect and the sense of ‘I’: this is my nature, divided eightfold. This is the lower. Know my other, higher nature, O mighty-armed one, which has become the living being and by which this world is sustained.”
What the verses claim
The list runs without a break from the elements to the mind. Bh?mi, ?pa?, anala, v?yu and kha are the five great elements, and manas, buddhi and aha?k?ra are the inner faculties. Prak?ti comes from pra and the root k?, to make, and names the material cause of things. Bhinn?, from the root bhid, to split, says that one nature appears in eight parts. The small word me, “my”, governs the whole list, so every element belongs to the speaker.
How Shankara reads the list
Shankara takes bh?mi here as the subtle element of earth, since the verse speaks of a nature divided into eight. He reads each faculty as a cause. Mind stands for its source, ego; intellect stands for mahat, the cosmic intelligence; ego stands for the unmanifest, joined to ignorance. On verse 5 he calls the lower nature impure and the cause of worldly bondage. The higher nature takes the form of individual souls, the knower of the field. The verb dh?ryate, from dh?, to bear, says the world is sustained by it, and Shankara adds that it sustains the world by pervading it.
The verses and the planetary boundaries
The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research tracks nine boundaries of the earth system. Its Planetary Health Check of September 2025 found seven of them breached, including land-system change, freshwater use, climate change and ocean acidification. Surface ocean pH has fallen by about 0.1 units since industrialisation, a 30 to 40 per cent rise in acidity, the report found. In the Gita’s terms, earth, water and the air that carries heat are each past a safe limit. Only aerosol loading and stratospheric ozone remain within theirs.
The Gita places the five elements in the same nature as the mind that uses them, and calls that whole nature the Lord’s own. On Shankara’s reading the one knower pervades every part of it. The text therefore requires a person to use earth, water and air as property belonging to another, taking only what the measure of that trust allows.
