Bg. 4.11

BG 4.11
Srila Prabhupada 200+

Devanagari

ये यथा मां प्रपद्यन्ते तांस्तथैव भजाम्यहम् । मम वर्त्मानुवर्तन्ते मनुष्याः पार्थ सर्वशः ॥ ११ ॥

Verse text

ye yathā māṁ prapadyante tāṁs tathaiva bhajāmy aham mama vartmānuvartante manuṣyāḥ pārtha sarvaśaḥ

Synonyms

ye all who ; yathā as ; mām unto Me ; prapadyante surrender ; tān them ; tathā so ; eva certainly ; bhajāmi reward ; aham I ; mama My ; vartma path ; anuvartante follow ; manuṣyāḥ all men ; pārtha O son of Pṛthā ; sarvaśaḥ in all respects.

Translation

As all surrender unto Me, I reward them accordingly. Everyone follows My path in all respects, O son of Pṛthā.

Translation (Visvanatha Cakravarti Thakura)

11. I respond to persons according to the amount that they surrender to Me. All men follow My path, O son of Pṛthā.

Translation (Baladeva Vidyabhusana)

11. I respond to persons according to the manner and mood in which they surrender to Me. All blessed men follow these various paths of worship, of Me, the one Lord, O son of Pṛthā.

Purport

Everyone is searching for Kṛṣṇa in the different aspects of His manifestations. Kṛṣṇa, the Supreme Personality of Godhead, is partially realized in His impersonal brahma-jyotir effulgence and as the all-pervading Supersoul dwelling within everything, including the particles of atoms. But Kṛṣṇa is fully realized only by His pure devotees. Consequently, Kṛṣṇa is the object of everyone’s realization, and thus anyone and everyone is satisfied according to one’s desire to have Him. In the transcendental world also, Kṛṣṇa reciprocates with His pure devotees in the transcendental attitude, just as the devotee wants Him. One devotee may want Kṛṣṇa as supreme master, another as his personal friend, another as his son and still another as his lover. Kṛṣṇa rewards all the devotees equally, according to their different intensities of love for Him. In the material world, the same reciprocations of feelings are there, and they are equally exchanged by the Lord with the different types of worshipers. The pure devotees both here and in the transcendental abode associate with Him in person and are able to render personal service to the Lord and thus derive transcendental bliss in His loving service. As for those who are impersonalists and who want to commit spiritual suicide by annihilating the individual existence of the living entity, Kṛṣṇa helps also by absorbing them into His effulgence. Such impersonalists do not agree to accept the eternal, blissful Personality of Godhead; consequently they cannot relish the bliss of transcendental personal service to the Lord, having extinguished their individuality. Some of them, who are not firmly situated even in the impersonal existence, return to this material field to exhibit their dormant desires for activities. They are not admitted into the spiritual planets, but they are again given a chance to act on the material planets. For those who are fruitive workers, the Lord awards the desired results of their prescribed duties, as the yajṣeśvara; and those who are yogīs seeking mystic powers are awarded such powers. In other words, everyone is dependent for success upon His mercy alone, and all kinds of spiritual processes are but different degrees of success on the same path. Unless, therefore, one comes to the highest perfection of Kṛṣṇa consciousness, all attempts remain imperfect, as is stated in the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam (2.3.10) : akāmaḥ sarva-kāmo vā mokṣa-kāma udāra-dhīḥ tīvreṇa bhakti-yogena yajeta puruṣaṁ param “Whether one is without desire [the condition of the devotees], or is desirous of all fruitive results or is after liberation, one should with all efforts try to worship the Supreme Personality of Godhead for complete perfection, culminating in Kṛṣṇa consciousness.”

Purport (Visvanatha Cakravarti Thakura)

”Your dedicated devotees consider Your birth and activities to be eternal, but others such as jṣānīs, surrendering to You for the purpose of perfecting jṣāna or other goals, do not consider Your birth and activities to be eternal.” “In whatever way they worship Me (prapadyante), I also give them the fruits of their worship (bhajāmi) in an appropriate manner.” The meaning is this. Those who think that My birth and activities are eternal and, having a particular desire for those pastimes, worship and please Me. And I, because I am the Lord, can respond, or not respond, or respond in a different way than they expect. But, making them My associates, I appear and disappear with them in this world at the appropriate time, in order to give My birth and pastimes their eternal nature. Favoring them at every moment, I bestow upon them the fruit of their worship. The jṣānīs and others who surrender unto Me while thinking of My birth and activities as temporary, and thinking of My deity forms as material—I throw those jṣānīs again and again into the noose of māyā with its temporary births and action, and bestow upon them the sorrows of birth and death. This is the appropriate fruit of their worship (They receive temporary bodies because they think My body is temporary.) But those jṣānīs who accept the eternal nature of My birth and activities, consider My deity form to be sac-cid-ānanda, and surrender to Me for perfection of their jṣāna— I liberate those jṣānīs, since they desire the destruction of their gross and subtle bodies, and I give them the bliss of Brahman. I bestow upon them the desired result of their worship: the destruction of birth and death born from ignorance. Therefore, not only devotees surrender to Me, but rather everyone (sarvaśaḥ), all men, jṣānīs, karmīs, yogīs, and worshippers of the devatās, follow My path (they surrender either directly or indirectly). Jṣāna, karma and other processes are all My path, since I am the essence of all those paths.

Purport (Baladeva Vidyabhusana)

“I have to some degree understood that you are the Supreme Lord with attractive eternal birth and activities. And I have heard from scriptures that You, though the size of a thumb, [Note: Aṅguṣṭha mātraḥ puruṣas Madhya ātmani tiṣṭhati. Kaṭha Upaniṣad 4.12] are indeed the Lord without birth. Therefore, You should have various forms and there must be various methods of worshipping you.” “Yes, with whatever type of mood (yathā) the devotees worship (prapadyante) Me, the one Lord of all beings, but who possesses many forms like the vaidurya gem, [Note: The vaidūrya gem is often translated as cat’s eye and sometimes as lapis lazuli, an opaque blue stone. However, neither seems to fit the quality of vaidūrya referred to here. This vaidūrya emits a variety of colors from one stone. Among possibilities is alexandrite, another form of the same mineral (chrysoberl) as cat’s eye, which changes color with different types of light, usually shades of violet and green. Another possibility would be the opal.] I certainly (eva) respond (bhajāmi)—I am merciful to them, appearing before them correspondingly, with form and mood appropriate to their type of mood (tathā eva). (The word eva excludes probability.) All these men (manuṣyāḥ sarvaśaḥ), blessed with their lineages for worship which have no beginning, follow the path of worship (vartma) which has many types for the many different forms of Me, the one form (mama).

Surrender Unto Me

The devotees who worship Krsna with love who want Krsna, who love Krsna ‑ they go to Goloka‑Vrndavana. And the mayavadis who think that Krsna's form and activities are not eternal, but they worship Him ‑ they are given to Mayadevi for repeated birth and death (according to Viswanath C. Thakura). And the brahmavadis who are different from the mayavadis, because they worship Krsna, they accept Krsna's form as eternal, but they worship Him to get to Brahman which they think it is higher then Krsna ‑ by Krsna's mercy they go to the Brahman. Knowing all these factors,that Krsna is the Supreme Lord and He can give one what he wants, why is it that some people don't surrender to Krsna? Why don't they worship Krsna?