Recognition

Dhāraṇā 99 · Equal to friend and enemy

The same toward enemy and friend, in honour and in dishonour — not by discipline, but because the fullness of Brahman leaves no vantage from which to prefer.

The words are almost identical to a famous line of the Bhagavad Gītā on the devotee who is the same to foe and friend, in honour and disgrace. The borrowing — or shared inheritance — is surely deliberate. What this text changes is the ground: equality here is not a virtue to be cultivated but a conclusion that follows from fullness.

Read the reason-clause first

The verse's engine is its third quarter: brahmaṇaḥ paripūrṇatvāt — because of the complete fullness of Brahman. Everything else hangs from that ablative. If the one reality is completely full, it is as present in the enemy as in the friend, as much itself in your disgrace as in your acclaim; there is no thinner region of it to rank lower. Preference requires a difference in being, and fullness has abolished the difference. So the practitioner is not asked to feel warm toward an enemy — an instruction that mostly produces pretence — but to know something (iti jñātvā, the verse says: having known thus) from which the old rankings simply fail to follow.

The practice

Work with real cases, not abstractions. Bring to mind a person who has injured you. The habitual perception presents them as a diminished site of reality — that is what an enemy is, experientially. Against that, hold the verse's fact: Brahman is paripūrṇa there, undiminished, complete in that person as in your teacher. Do the same with the last insult you received and the last praise: two events, one fullness, neither adding to it nor denting it. You are not manufacturing equanimity; you are repeatedly confronting the perception of unequal being with the knowledge of equal being until the perception gives way.

The verse ends where dhāraṇā 97 ended: sukhī bhavet — one becomes happy. The repetition is worth noticing. In this stretch of the text, happiness is treated as diagnostic: the mark that a division the mind was maintaining has actually dropped. Maintained divisions cost; equality is experienced first as the end of an expense.