BG-2.22 — The Worn Garment Discarded for a New One
BG-2.22
वासांसि जीर्णानि यथा विहाय नवानि गृह्णाति नरोऽपराणि । तथा शरीराणि विहाय जीर्णान्यन्यानि संयाति नवानि देही ॥२२॥
"Just as a man casts off worn-out garments and takes up other new ones, so the embodied-Self casts off worn-out bodies and enters other new ones."
This is the second of the two great death-images in Kṛṣṇa's Sānkhya-consolation (BG-2.11-30). Having argued that the ātman is unborn and undying (BG-2.20) and that the man who knows it indestructible can neither kill nor be killed (BG-2.21), Kṛṣṇa now hands Arjuna a household image so that the doctrine stops being abstract and becomes tactile: you have changed clothes a thousand times and were never once diminished by it; the deha changes bodies in exactly the same way. The yathā...tathā simile is airtight — every term on the cloth-side has its answer on the body-side, and only the subject changes: a man (naraḥ) changes clothes, the embodied-Self (dehī) changes bodies. Jñāneśvar compresses the whole verse into a single dense ovi — and makes one decisive move: he renames the colorless dehī as चैतन्यनाथ, the Lord-of-Consciousness, so that the one who changes bodies is not a metaphysical abstraction but the indwelling conscious Lord himself.
Ovi 2.144
Original (Marathi): जैसें जीर्ण वस्त्र सांडिजे । मग नूतन वेढिजे । तैसें देहांतरातें स्वीकारिजे । चैतन्यनाथें ॥१४४॥ Voice: krishna-to-arjuna (rendering BG-2.22 directly; the body-changing agent named चैतन्यनाथ — Jñāneśvar's substitution for the Sanskrit देही)
Word-by-word gloss
| Marathi | Meaning |
|---|---|
| जैसें | just as (the यथा-side of the simile) |
| जीर्ण वस्त्र | a worn-out garment (jīrṇa vastra) |
| सांडिजे | is discarded / cast off (impersonal passive) |
| मग नूतन वेढिजे | then a new one is wrapped-around / donned |
| तैसें | so, in just that way (the तथा-side) |
| देहांतरातें | the other-body / the passage-into-another-body (deha-antara) |
| स्वीकारिजे | is accepted / taken on |
| चैतन्यनाथें | by the Lord-of-Consciousness (Caitanya-nātha) — Jñāneśvar's rendering of the Sanskrit देही |
Literal translation
English: Just as a worn-out garment is cast off and then a new one is wrapped on — in just that way, the passage into another body is accepted by the Lord-of-Consciousness (चैतन्यनाथ).
मराठी (आधुनिक): जसं जुनं, जीर्ण झालेलं वस्त्र टाकून दिलं जातं आणि मग नवं वस्त्र अंगावर घेतलं जातं — अगदी तसंच, चैतन्यनाथ (अंतरीचा चैतन्यरूप ईश्वर) दुसरा देह स्वीकारतो.
Sanskrit-root note
deha-antara = deha (body) + antara (other/inner) — literally "another body," the technical term for the body-taken-at-rebirth; स्वीकारिजे renders the Sanskrit संयाति (sam-√yā, "goes fully toward / enters"). The substituted चैतन्यनाथ (caitanya, consciousness + nātha, lord) stands for the Sanskrit देही (deha + possessive -in, "body-bearer") — Jñāneśvar trades the neutral Sānkhya term for a bhakti-vocative.
Metaphor-unfold
| Literal image | Philosophical referent | Modern equivalent |
|---|---|---|
| A worn-out garment (जीर्ण वस्त्र) cast off | The aged / spent body at death | The body you have outgrown — the worn coat you finally take off without grief because it was never you |
| A new garment wrapped on (नूतन वेढिजे) | The next body the Self enters | The continuity of the wearer across the change — you are the same person in the new coat as in the old |
| The wearer who does the changing (चैतन्यनाथ / देही) | The deathless embodied-Self, the ātman that transmigrates | The conscious "I" that was present before this garment, will be present after it, and is never identical with any garment it wears |
Metaphor-family: worn-garment-and-new-garment (body-as-discardable-clothing). This is the Gītā verse's own simile, carried whole. The image's force is its very ordinariness: changing clothes is the most banal act there is, and the verse weaponizes that banality against the terror of death — death is demoted from annihilation to a wardrobe change. Jñāneśvar's one addition is the wearer's name: not a faceless dehin but चैतन्यनाथ, the Lord-of-Consciousness, so the changeless wearer beneath the garments is recognizably the indwelling Lord.
Nāth-yogic layer
No Nāth-yogic referent in this ovi. चैतन्यनाथ ("Lord-of-Consciousness") is a bhakti-vocative for the indwelling Self/Lord — not a Nāth-yogic technical term (it names no cakra-seat, suṣumnā-channel, or kuṇḍalinī-stage). This is the household garment-simile of the Sānkhya-consolation; reading suṣumnā or cakra esotericism into it would be fabrication.
Cross-references
- Internal: (none confidently identified — single-ovi cluster; no defensible cross-ovi image-match asserted)
- Tukaram parallel: Abhang 1211 — जीव न देखे मरण । धरी नवी सांडी जीर्ण ("the jīva does not see its own death; picks up a new [body], sheds the worn/jīrṇa one"). This restates BG-2.22's exact take-new/shed-worn doctrine and — strikingly — reuses the śloka's own word जीर्ण (jīrṇa, "worn-out") for the discarded body, the very word Jñāneśvar renders here as the worn garment (जीर्ण वस्त्र). Tukārām's धरी नवी सांडी जीर्ण and Jñāneśvar's जीर्ण वस्त्र सांडिजे — नूतन वेढिजे carry the identical transmigration-structure, the shared jīrṇa-vocabulary making the parallel verbatim-substantive, not merely topical. (Verified on-disk at corpus/1211.md.)
- Source citation: Bhagavad Gītā 2.22 — the cluster's own śloka, rendered as direct-paraphrase. (The Upaniṣadic background for the deathless-self / body-replacement doctrine — Bṛhadāraṇyaka 4.4.4 goldsmith, Kaṭha 1.2.22 aśarīram — is deliberately NOT cited: both use non-garment images, and the garment-image's textual parent is BG-2.22 itself.)
Modern application
- When you grieve a person as though they were the failing body. Standing beside the bed of someone whose body has become a worn garment — wasted, no longer holding them — and feeling the death as the erasure of them. The verse's claim is that the wearer is not the worn cloth; the one you loved was never identical with the body now being set down.
- When you cling to an identity-garment long past its wear. The role, the self-image, the version of yourself that fit ten years ago and now hangs threadbare on you — and you keep wearing it because taking it off feels like dying. The ovi reframes the change: you are not losing yourself, you are changing clothes, and the wearer continues.
- When an ending arrives and your body registers it as annihilation. The job ends, the marriage ends, the chapter ends, and something in you reacts as if you are ending — pure animal terror of erasure. BG-2.22 inserts a wedge between the garment and the wearer: a form is being shed; the one who wears forms is not.
Sādhanā
Today, find one literal garment you have genuinely outgrown — worn, ill-fitting, no longer you — and hold it for thirty seconds before you set it aside. Say to yourself, plainly: I am the one who wore this, not the cloth itself; I outlasted it and was not diminished. Let the small, undramatic fact of changing a coat carry, for one moment, the weight of the deathlessness the verse is teaching.
Arc
2.144 closes this single-ovi cluster by compressing the whole garment-exchange simile of BG-2.22 into one image of the deathless चैतन्यनाथ changing bodies; the next śloka (BG-2.23 — नैनं छिन्दन्ति शस्त्राणि) extends the same deathlessness into the four-element-immunity catalog — no weapon cuts, no fire burns, no water wets, no wind dries the Self — showing why no weapon on Kurukṣetra can ever touch the wearer beneath the garment.
Cluster summary
Core teaching: Death is not annihilation but a change of clothes. As a person casts off a worn-out garment and dons a new one, so the deathless embodied-Self casts off a worn-out body and enters another — and Jñāneśvar, compressing the entire BG-2.22 यथा...तथा simile into his single dense ovi 2.144, makes one decisive move: he names that body-changing Self not as the neutral Sānkhya dehī but as चैतन्यनाथ, the Lord-of-Consciousness, so the changeless wearer beneath the garments is recognizably the indwelling Lord.
Chapter arc position: BG-2.22 sits in the Sānkhya-consolation block of adhyāya 2 (BG-2.11-30), Kṛṣṇa's answer to Arjuna's grief-collapse. It is the second great death-image of the section — following the childhood-youth-old-age body-passage of BG-2.13 and crowning the unborn-undying (BG-2.20) and unkillable (BG-2.21) arguments — translating the abstract non-killability of the Self into the tactile household experience of changing worn clothes for new.
Connects to BG-2.23: नैनं छिन्दन्ति शस्त्राणि नैनं दहति पावकः — where BG-2.22 shows the Self merely changing its garment, BG-2.23 shows why no instrument can ever reach the wearer: weapons do not cut it, fire does not burn it, water does not wet it, wind does not dry it. The garment-exchange consolation flows directly into the four-element-immunity catalog that makes the deathlessness total.