Sense Gratification An Essay in Pathology

The Sanskrit word bhoga (with the long “a” of the plural) means “pleasures” or “enjoyments.” What kinds? The pleasures born (ja) from samsparsa, “the bringing into contact” implicitly, the contact of the senses with their appropriate objects. This is what we mean by “sense gratification”: enjoying the pleasures that arise when the eyes, nose, or tongue, the hands, skin, or genitals, come together with their particular objects. Krishna says something about those pleasures startlingly counter-intuitive: the enjoyments thus obtained (te) are the birthplaces or origins (yonaya) of suffering (duhkha). There seems to be an allusion to sexual enjoyment contained in this line. The word yonaya literally means “vaginas” or “wombs” and connects with the word ja, birth, earlier in the line. The allusion would be appropriate, for sexual pleasure is, as Freud pointed out, “the prototype of all pleasure.”