Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 11.8.13
पदापि युवतीं भिक्षुर्न स्पृशेद् दारवीमपि ।
स्पृशन् करीव बध्येत करिण्या अङ्गसङ्गत: ॥ १३ ॥
padāpi yuvatīṁ bhikṣur
[padaapi yuvateem bhikshur]
na spṛśed dāravīm api
[na sprished daaraveem api]
spṛśan karīva badhyeta
[sprishan kareeva badhyeta]
kariṇyā aṅga-saṅgataḥ
[karinyaa anga-sangatah]
Word-for-word
padā
—
with the foot
api
—
even
yuvatīm
—
a young girl
bhikṣuḥ
—
a saintly mendicant
na
—
not
spṛśet
—
should touch
dāravīm
—
made of wood
api
—
even
spṛśan
—
touching
karī
—
the elephant
iva
—
like
badhyeta
—
becomes captured
kariṇyāḥ
—
of the she-elephant
aṅga-saṅgataḥ
—
by contact with the body.
Blended reading (Sanskrit + English inline)
padāpi yuvatīṁ bhikṣur
padā
with the foot
api
even
yuvatīm
a young girl
bhikṣuḥ
a saintly mendicant
na spṛśed dāravīm api
na
not
spṛśet
should touch
dāravīm
made of wood
api
even
spṛśan karīva badhyeta
spṛśan
touching
karī
the elephant
iva
like
badhyeta
becomes captured
kariṇyā aṅga-saṅgataḥ
kariṇyāḥ
of the she-elephant
aṅga-saṅgataḥ
by contact with the body.
A saintly person should never touch a young girl. In fact, he should not even let his foot touch a wooden doll in the shape of a woman. By bodily contact with a woman he will surely be captured by illusion, just as the elephant is captured by the she-elephant due to his desire to touch her body.
Purport
Elephants are captured in the jungle in the following way. A large hole is dug and then covered over with grass, leaves, mud and so on. Then a she-elephant is exhibited in front of the male elephant, who chases after her with lusty desire, falls into the hole and is captured. The lesson to be learned from the elephant is that the desire to relish the touch sensation is certainly the cause of ruining one’s life. An intelligent person, noting the elephant’s great propensity to sport with the she-elephant, will take this excellent example to heart. Therefore, somehow or other one should avoid being cheated by allurement to the sensuous form of woman. One should not allow one’s mind to be lost in lusty dreams of sex pleasure. There are various types of sense gratification to be enjoyed between men and women, including speaking, contemplating, touching, sexual intercourse, etc., and all of these constitute the network of illusion by which one is helplessly bound like an animal. Somehow or other one should remain aloof from sense gratification in the form of sex pleasure; otherwise, there is no possibility of understanding the spiritual world.
— A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda
Gauḍīya Ācāryas
Viśvanātha Cakravartī Ṭhākura
Gauḍīya
Translation
A saintly person should never touch a young girl even with his foot. In fact, he should not even let his foot touch a wooden doll in the shape of a woman. He will be captured by illusion, just as the elephant is captured by desire to touch the she-elephant’s body.
Attachment to touch is a cause of destruction. This he learned from the elephant. This is explained in two verses. One should not touch a young woman even with one’s foot, and should not even touch a wooden form of a woman. The elephant, seeing the female elephant, falls into a hole covered with grass and is trapped.
Related lectures
Personal Guidance
Sense-gratification through contact with the opposite sex binds the soul like the bull elephant lured into the pit — for the renunciant, even symbolic contact is too close.
Practical Applications
- Notice today every small impulse to seek physical proximity or charged contact, and refuse the first move rather than negotiating with the tenth.
- Set one concrete boundary around sight, speech, or touch that you have been quietly relaxing, and hold it for the rest of the day.
- When the mind drifts into lusty rehearsal, immediately redirect it to Kṛṣṇa's name or form rather than arguing with the fantasy.
Reflection Questions
- Where in my life am I behaving like the elephant — chasing a small sensory pleasure that is steadily digging a pit beneath my sādhana?
- Which 'wooden doll' — a harmless-looking proxy for desire — am I telling myself does not really count?
For Each Age Group
youth
- Decide in advance — not in the moment — what you will and will not do on dates, in DMs, and at parties, because the elephant never plans his fall.
- Curate your feed today: unfollow the accounts that exist mainly to bait the touch-impulse the verse warns about, even the ones you tell yourself are 'just aesthetic'.
- When a flirtation starts to feel charged, name it honestly to one trusted friend within twenty-four hours instead of letting it grow in private.
householder
- Audit the small 'wooden doll' habits — lingering chats, private messaging, suggestive media consumed alone — that you would not want your spouse to see, and end one of them today.
- Treat your marriage vow as the householder's version of this verse: protect it not only in gross action but in speech, attention, and contemplation, beginning with how you speak about colleagues at home tonight.
- Teach your children, by what you refuse as much as by what you say, that bodily contact carries real karmic weight and is not a casual currency.
senior
- At this stage, take the verse as permission to formally retire from arenas of subtle flirtation — tone, attention, charm — that you have carried by habit for decades.
- Mentor a younger practitioner specifically on this teaching, sharing where you yourself were the elephant, so the lesson is transmitted from experience rather than theory.
- Use the loosening grip of bodily desire as an opportunity to deepen vairāgya rather than to mourn it, redirecting freed attention into japa, study, and service.
Common Pitfalls
- Reading the verse as anti-woman moralism rather than as a precise diagnosis of how viṣaya hijacks the renunciant's mind.
- Assuming the warning applies only to formal sannyāsīs while ignoring its force for any serious student cultivating vairāgya.
- Congratulating oneself on avoiding the gross act while freely indulging the subtle forms — gazing, contemplating, conversing — that the purport explicitly names.
Discussion Prompts
- Where is the honest line between healthy interaction with the opposite sex in modern life and the 'bodily contact' the verse warns against — and who in the room disagrees?
- Prabhupāda lists speaking, contemplating, and touching as parts of one network of illusion; which of these does our group most underestimate, and why?
- If the elephant's ruin begins with a desire to touch, what is the earliest internal signal each of us could learn to catch before the pit opens?
Role Play
A brahmacārī student tells his senior that a female classmate has been asking to study one-on-one in her room because the library is closed; she is sincere, the project is genuine, and refusing feels rude. Two students play the brahmacārī and the senior, working through how to apply this verse without becoming either reckless or self-righteous.
Objections & Responses
- This is a medieval, fear-based view of women that has no place in a mature spiritual life — surely a self-aware practitioner can manage ordinary contact.
The verse is not about women; it is about the practitioner's own mind, which Kṛṣṇa's devotee Uddhava is being warned is not as managed as he believes. The elephant also thought he was in control until the moment he fell. Gauḍīya teachers honor women as souls precisely by refusing to use them as objects of one's untested confidence. - If even a wooden doll is too dangerous, the instruction is impossible for anyone living in society — it can only mean something symbolic.
The strictness is calibrated to the bhikṣu — the renunciant whose whole life is staked on undivided absorption in Kṛṣṇa. For the householder the same principle scales down to fidelity, guarded association, and disciplined senses; the teaching is not abolished, it is proportioned to one's āśrama.
My note
Source: vedabase.io