Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 11.7.58
ప్రజా: పుపుషతు: ప్రీతౌ దమ్పతీ పుత్రవత్సలౌ ।
శృణ్వన్తౌ కూజితం తాసాం నివృతౌ కలభాషితై: ॥ ౫౯ ॥
teṣu kāle vyajāyanta
[teshu kaale vyajaayanta]
racitāvayavā hareḥ
[rachitaavayavaa hareh]
śaktibhir durvibhāvyābhiḥ
[shaktibhir durvibhaavyaabhih]
komalāṅga-tanūruhāḥ
[komalaanga-tanooruhaah]
Word-for-word
teṣu
—
from those eggs
kāle
—
in time
vyajāyanta
—
were born
racita
—
produced
avayavāḥ
—
(children) whose limbs
hareḥ
—
of the Supreme Lord, Hari
śaktibhiḥ
—
by the potencies
durvibhāvyābhiḥ
—
which are inconceivable
komala
—
tender
aṅga
—
whose limbs
tanūruhāḥ
—
and feathers.
Blended reading (Sanskrit + English inline)
teṣu kāle vyajāyanta
teṣu
from those eggs
kāle
in time
vyajāyanta
were born
racitāvayavā hareḥ
racita
produced
avayavāḥ
(children) whose limbs
hareḥ
of the Supreme Lord, Hari
śaktibhir durvibhāvyābhiḥ
śaktibhiḥ
by the potencies
durvibhāvyābhiḥ
which are inconceivable
komalāṅga-tanūruhāḥ
komala
tender
aṅga
whose limbs
tanūruhāḥ
and feathers.
When the time was ripe, baby pigeons, with tender limbs and feathers created by the inconceivable potencies of the Lord, were born from those eggs.
Gauḍīya Ācāryas
Viśvanātha Cakravartī Ṭhākura
Gauḍīya
Translation
When the time was ripe, baby pigeons, with tender limbs and feathers created by the inconceivable potencies of the Lord, were born from those eggs.
Personal Guidance
When the time ripens, the Lord's inconceivable potencies form tender new life inside what looked inert — trust His unseen śakti shaping your work.
Practical Applications
- Identify one project or relationship that feels lifeless and refuse to abandon it today; instead, keep doing your quiet duty as the avadhūta watched the pigeons.
- Each morning, name one outcome you cannot engineer and explicitly hand it to Kṛṣṇa's durvibhāvya-śakti before beginning your work.
- Notice the next time you take credit for something delicate maturing — a child, a skill, a healing — and audibly reassign that credit to Hari.
Reflection Questions
- What in my life am I trying to force open before kāla has ripened it, because I cannot tolerate the appearance of stillness?
- Where do I quietly assume my own potency is the cause, when the verse insists the formative power belongs to Hari's inconceivable śakti?
For Each Age Group
youth
- Stop refreshing your results, DMs, or follower count today; do the next concrete piece of study or service and let the ripening happen out of sight.
- When a friendship or application seems to be going nowhere, refuse to declare it dead this week — keep showing up with sincerity and watch what kāla does.
- Name one talent you assume you 'built yourself' and, before sleeping, acknowledge to Kṛṣṇa that the underlying capacity was fashioned by Him.
householder
- With your child or spouse, drop one 'fix-it' intervention this week that is really impatience in disguise, and trust the slower formative work of Hari's śakti.
- Before a major career or money decision, write down what you can actually control versus what depends on durvibhāvya-śakti, and act only on the first column.
- When a long-running family project (a home, a savings goal, a child's education) finally bears fruit, speak aloud at the family altar that the limbs were fashioned by the Lord, not by you alone.
senior
- Look at the grown lives around you — children, students, institutions you helped seed — and consciously reassign their flowering from your résumé to Hari's potency.
- As the body weakens, refuse the despair that says 'nothing is forming anymore'; identify one inner quality still being shaped in you and cooperate with that ripening.
- Mentor someone younger by telling them one story of a result that took decades to ripen in your own life, framing it explicitly as the work of the Lord's inconceivable śakti, not your cleverness.
Common Pitfalls
- Mistaking 'inconceivable potency' as license for passivity — refusing to do one's own duty under the cover of 'Kṛṣṇa will arrange it'.
- Reducing the verse to a generic 'trust the process' sentiment, severing it from the personal Hari whose śakti is actually at work.
- Treating the tender new life as merely biological development and missing that the limbs were racita — deliberately fashioned — by the Lord.
Discussion Prompts
- Share one situation where you waited and Kṛṣṇa's timing produced something you could not have engineered — and one where waiting felt like wasted years. How do you tell them apart in the moment?
- The verse says the potencies are durvibhāvya — inconceivable. Where in your sādhana do you secretly demand to understand the mechanism before you will trust it?
- If the same Lord who fashions a pigeon's limbs is fashioning your circumstances, what specific complaint of yours would you have to drop today?
Role Play
Two devotees, A and B, are co-leading a small temple program that has had almost no attendance for six months. A wants to shut it down as a failed venture; B wants to keep showing up, arguing that the Lord's potency forms results in His own time. Enact the conversation, then have a third student playing a senior Vaiṣṇava intervene — neither rubber-stamping B's passivity nor endorsing A's result-attachment.
Objections & Responses
- This is just a poetic way of describing embryology — calling natural development 'inconceivable potency' is pre-scientific dressing on ordinary biology.
The verse does not deny the mechanism; it names the agent. Biology describes how limbs form; the verse identifies whose śakti orders that 'how'. A devotee can study embryology in full detail and still recognize that the lawful unfolding itself is Hari's arrangement — durvibhāvya not because we lack a microscope, but because no quantity of mechanism explains why there is lawful formation at all. - If everything is being shaped by the Lord's potency anyway, my effort is irrelevant — I may as well sit back.
Notice the verse does not say the eggs hatched themselves; it says śakti acted in them at the ripe time. Your effort is one of those śaktis in operation, not a competitor to it. Sva-dharma performed without attachment is precisely how the Lord's inconceivable potency works through you; withdrawing effort is not surrender, it is tamas wearing surrender's clothes.
My note
Source: vedabase.io