Śrīmad Bhāgavatam 1.11.37

tam ayaḿ manyate loko

hy asańgam api sańginam

ātmaupamyena manujaḿ

vyāpṛṇvānaḿ yato 'budhaḥ

SYNONYMS

tam — unto Lord Kṛṣṇa; ayam — all these (common men); manyate — do speculate within the mind; lokaḥ — the conditioned souls; hi — certainly; asańgam — unattached; api — in spite of; sańginam — affected; ātma — self; aupamyena — by comparison with the self; manujam — ordinary man; vyāpṛṇvānam — being engaged in; yataḥ — because; abudhaḥ — foolish because of ignorance.

TRANSLATION

The common materialistic conditioned souls speculate that the Lord is one of them. Out of their ignorance they think that the Lord is affected by matter, although He is unattached.

PURPORT

The word abudhaḥ is significant here. Due to ignorance only, the foolish mundane wranglers misunderstand the Supreme Lord and spread their foolish imaginations amongst innocent persons by propaganda. The Supreme Lord Śrī Kṛṣṇa is the original primeval Personality of Godhead, and when He was personally present before the eyes of everyone, He displayed full-fledged divine potency in every field of activities. As we have already explained in the first verse of Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam, He is completely independent to act however He likes, but all His actions are full of bliss, knowledge and eternity. Only the foolish mundaners misunderstand Him, unaware of His eternal form of knowledge and bliss, which is confirmed in the Bhagavad-gītā and Upaniṣads. His different potencies work in a perfect plan of natural sequence, and doing everything by the agency of His different potencies, He remains eternally the supreme independent. When He descends on the material world by His causeless mercy to different living beings, He does so by His own potency. He is not subject to any condition of the material modes of nature, and He descends as He is originally. The mental speculators misunderstand Him as the Supreme Person, and they consider His impersonal features as inexplicable Brahman to be all. Such a conception is also the product of conditioned life because they cannot go beyond their own personal capacity. Therefore, one who considers the Lord on the level of one's limited potency is only a common man. Such a man cannot be convinced that the Personality of Godhead is always unaffected by the modes of material nature. He cannot understand that the sun is always unaffected by infectious matter. The mental speculators compare everything from the standpoint of experimental knowledge of their own selves. Thus when the Lord is found to act like an ordinary person in matrimonial bondage, they consider Him to be like one of them, without considering that the Lord can at once marry sixteen thousand wives or more. Due to a poor fund of knowledge they accept one side of the picture while disbelieving the other. This means that due to ignorance only they always think of Lord Kṛṣṇa as like themselves and make their own conclusions, which are absurd and unauthentic from the version of the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam.