“Again birth, again death, again rest in the mother's womb: this worldly ocean is hard to cross.”
— Adi Shankara[commonly attributed] Bhaja Govindam, verse 21 (attributed)
Commentary
This verse describes the cycle of samsara as an endless succession of birth, death, and gestation, and it presents the worldly life as a sea that the soul must cross. The image of the ocean of existence is a standard figure in Indian religious literature, and Shankara's school adopted it to describe the bondage from which knowledge of the Self liberates. Eliot Deutsch explains that Advaita treats samsara as the consequence of ignorance rather than as an ultimate reality, so that its end is the dawning of knowledge. Sengaku Mayeda's study of Shankara's soteriology emphasises that the cycle of rebirth is overcome through the removal of avidya rather than through ritual action. Richard King argues that the doctrine of rebirth was a shared premise of Shankara's debates with Buddhist and other opponents. Paul Hacker observes that the poetic formulation of the verse is characteristic of the devotional literature attributed to the tradition. The verse is a popular statement of a doctrine that Shankara treats systematically in his commentaries.
Commentary
This verse describes the cycle of samsara as an endless succession of birth, death, and gestation, and it presents the worldly life as a sea that the soul must cross. The image of the ocean of existence is a standard figure in Indian religious literature, and Shankara's school adopted it to describe the bondage from which knowledge of the Self liberates. Eliot Deutsch explains that Advaita treats samsara as the consequence of ignorance rather than as an ultimate reality, so that its end is the dawning of knowledge. Sengaku Mayeda's study of Shankara's soteriology emphasises that the cycle of rebirth is overcome through the removal of avidya rather than through ritual action. Richard King argues that the doctrine of rebirth was a shared premise of Shankara's debates with Buddhist and other opponents. Paul Hacker observes that the poetic formulation of the verse is characteristic of the devotional literature attributed to the tradition. The verse is a popular statement of a doctrine that Shankara treats systematically in his commentaries.