Chapter 2 Verse 22

The body as a suit of clothes

vasamsi jirnani yatha vihaya
navani grhnati naro parani

tatha sarirani vihaya jirnani
yanyani samyati navani dehi

Just as a person gives up old clothes and takes up new ones, so does the self who dwells in the body, gives up old bodies and takes others which are new.

The dehi is the dweller inside our deha. Deha refers to our sthoola sharira where as the dehi is the sukshma sharira.

Just as a car needs spark plug engine etc to operate so does the dehi requires a body to reside and do the karma. If the body gets ruptured where would the dehi go?

Then a question arises as to why people die at young age while some live longer. The answer to this lies in the dehi. If we accept that there is a dehi other than this body who survives death then that dehi has survived not just this death but previous ones as well. The dehi then must have come due to the karma from past life.

Prarabdha karma is the reason why a person , a dehi with a particular deha which dies when the body is done.

But who decides the body it should take. It us the dehi that decides which in turn ties back to our karma. So if a person lives long or short it purely depends upon the dehi that resided in that body.

Therefore for the dehi there is no death but for the deha there is no escape. deha means that which is subject to change while dehi does not change.

We cannot stop the deha from dying and you cannot destroy the dehi. When you don’t have control over both why grieve is the teaching for this.

The cause for rebirth is firmly attached to the ‘I’ I.e doership. If there is no doer then where is the question of karma. If there is no karma then where does prarabdha comes.

So krishna says that when you understand that through self enquiry that you are just not the body but you are the world and the world is you, you won’t get affected by anything. Hence there is no karma and you get liberation from samsara.

In karma yoga krishna beautifully presents how we should approach doing karma.

Verse 23 to 27 also covers a few topics about birth and death, so also chapter 8 has some topics.