• āyuḥ — life-span
  Neuter — 'longevity'. The first item destroyed by offense to the great. Even the body's allotted years shrink. The Gauḍīya note: bhakti can prolong what is necessary for service; mahad-aparādha shortens it inversely.
• śriyam — fortune / beauty / prosperity
  Accusative of śrī — 'fortune'. Śrī is also Lakṣmī, the Lord's consort; to attack a Vaiṣṇava is to lose the protection of Śrī Herself. The Gauḍīya layered reading: material fortune is a glimpse of Śrī's mercy; offense withdraws it.
• yaśaḥ — fame
  Neuter — 'fame'. The good name of the offender perishes. Bhagavān's own yaśas spreads through bhakti; the offender's vanishes through aparādha.
• dharmam — religious merit
  Accusative of dharma. Not just one's reputation as religious, but the actual phala (fruit) of one's previous dharmic acts. All consumed at one stroke when a great soul is offended.
• lokān — the higher worlds
  Accusative plural — 'the planets'. Pitṛ-loka, svarga-loka, brahma-loka — all the upward destinations are barred. The Gauḍīya note: only Vaikuṇṭha-loka is approached not by puṇya but by bhakti, and aparādha is the one obstacle bhakti itself cannot cross until forgiven.
• mahat-atikramaḥ — transgression against great souls
  Compound — 'great-soul over-stepping'. Atikrama is going-past, transgressing. Mahat-atikrama is the over-stepping of the bounds owed to mahā-bhāgavatas. The Bhāgavatam treats this as the single most destructive act a soul can perform — and closes the chapter on its name.

• MG SB 10-04-46 - For good cause please renounce - 2008-12-07 Rajkot
  His Holiness Mahavishnu Goswami· 2008-12-07· English
• PrahladAnS SB 10-04-46 - Advent of Krishna - 2023-07-30 ISKCON Slovenia
  His Holiness Prahladananada Swami· 2023-07-30· English
• RGS SB 10-04-46 Hindi - 2016-10-16 ISKCON Vrindavan
  His Holiness Radha Govinda Swami· 2016-10-16· English
• RGS SB 10-04-46 Hindi - 2016-10-16 ISKCON Vrindavan
  His Holiness Radha Govinda Swami· 2016-10-16· English

• Identify one Vaiṣṇava you have privately criticized or dismissed, and today offer a sincere mental praṇāma asking forgiveness.
• Refuse to participate in any conversation that mocks or belittles a devotee — change the subject or walk away, even at social cost.
• Before bed, audit the day for any subtle mahad-atikrama in thought, word, or deed, and beg Kṛṣṇa to protect you from this most ruinous of offenses.

• Which mahad — a devotee, an elder, a teacher — have I quietly belittled or dismissed in recent memory, and what subtle benediction in my life (health, reputation, steadiness, faith) has begun to fray as a consequence?
• When a great soul says something that bruises my ahaṅkāra, do I treat the bruise as injury or as medicine — and what does my honest answer reveal about my actual relationship to śreyas (real welfare) versus preyas (immediate comfort)?

• Reading this verse as cosmic threat against 'other people' (kings, demons, enemies of the faith) while overlooking one's own daily mahad-atikrama: gossip about a Vaiṣṇava, eye-rolling at a guru's instruction, casual contempt for a senior devotee.
• Reducing 'great souls' to a narrow institutional category (only my guru, only formally initiated devotees) and thereby giving oneself permission to disrespect sādhus outside one's circle — forgetting that the offense operates by the soul's actual stature, not by one's recognition of it.
• Treating the loss of āyuḥ, śrī, yaśas, dharma as the real tragedy and bhakti merely as the means to preserve them — inverting the verse, which warns that even these benedictions are destroyed precisely so the offender will not mistake material prosperity for spiritual progress.

• Share a time you watched someone (a peer, a public figure, even yourself) mock or undermine a genuine sādhu or devotee. What did you observe about that person's life — their āyuḥ, śrī, yaśas, dharma — in the months and years that followed? Where do you disagree with the others in your group about whether the connection was real or coincidence?
• The verse says mahad-atikrama destroys six benedictions: longevity, beauty, fame, religion, blessings, and higher planets. If you had to rank these in the order you yourself fear losing — most-feared first — what would your list look like? Compare lists in your pair and argue for why your top item is the most ruinous loss.
• Kaṁsa was born into devotional surroundings, given every advantage, and still became the persecutor of mahātmās. Where in our own lives do we see the seed of Kaṁsa-bhāva — the impulse to silence, dismiss, or 'manage' a great soul whose presence inconveniences us? Push back on each other's polite answers.

Two students sit at a family dinner. The father (played by one student) is a respected professional who has just learned that his college-aged son (played by another student) has begun seriously associating with a Vaiṣṇava sādhu at the local temple — chanting, attending classes, considering simpler life choices. The father, worried about career and reputation, begins to ridicule the sādhu by name at the table: 'These so-called swamis, they just want your money and your youth.' A third student plays the son's younger sister, who is silently watching and absorbing it all. Run the scene twice: once where the son stays silent out of respect for his father; once where the son speaks up, knowing this verse — āyuḥ śriyaṁ yaśo dharmaṁ hanti puṁso mahad-atikramaḥ. After each run, the group debriefs: what was protected, what was lost, and what the sister learned in each version.

• This sounds like spiritual blackmail — 'criticize a holy person and your life will fall apart.' It's the same fear-based mechanism every cult uses to insulate its leaders from accountability. What about genuinely fraudulent gurus who deserve criticism?
  The verse speaks specifically of mahad-atikrama — offense to an actual mahātmā, a great soul fixed in service to Kṛṣṇa — not to anyone wearing robes. Gauḍīya tradition itself is rigorous about distinguishing a sādhu from a cheater; Prabhupāda repeatedly told students to test a guru by śāstra and by the disciplic line. Honest discrimination is not atikrama. What the verse warns against is the Kaṁsa-pattern: persecuting a soul precisely because their purity exposes our compromise. The test is internal — am I critiquing to protect dharma, or to protect my comfort from someone whose life rebukes mine? The first is duty; the second is the offense that quietly hollows out āyuḥ, śrī, yaśas, dharma.
• Plenty of people who mistreat saintly figures seem to do just fine — wealthy, famous, long-lived, even celebrated. The empirical claim of the verse simply doesn't hold up.
  Notice what the verse actually lists: longevity, beauty, fame, dharma, blessings, and elevation to higher lokas. We see only the first three from the outside, and even those over a finite window. Dharma — the inner capacity to act rightly — and the trajectory of consciousness at death are invisible to the news cycle. Kaṁsa kept his throne, his wealth, his name, and his palace right up to the moment Kṛṣṇa walked in. The Bhāgavatam is not predicting visible misfortune in the next quarter; it is describing the slow, certain erosion of the things that actually carry a soul forward. A practitioner is asked to take this on the authority of guru, sādhu, and śāstra — and to test it by watching not headlines but the inner life of the offender, and one's own.

A man chops at the very branch on which he sits and is surprised when the fall begins. To persecute a great soul is to chop the branch of one's own āyus, śrī, yaśas, dharma, loka, āśiṣ — the verse names them in order. The Bhāgavatam closes the chapter on this warning, and the Gauḍīya tradition takes it as the gravest sentence in the corpus: mahad-aparādha consumes everything.