The soul is eternal and the body is changing. That is explained in this Bhagavad-gītā. Most of you are well known to this book, Bhagavad-gītā. It is widely read book all over the world. So the first instruction given in the Bhagavad-gītā is this:
- dehino 'smin yathā dehe
- kaumāraṁ yauvanaṁ jarā
- tathā dehāntara-prāptir
- dhīras tatra na muhyati
- (BG 2.13)
These two lines of Bhagavad-gītā, that how the soul is transmigrating from one body to another, if we simply study these two lines, then our life becomes different. But nobody cares to understand that the soul is eternal. It is changing, transmigrating from one type of body to another body. And there are 8,400,000 species or types of body, and we have been entrapped in this cycle of birth, death, old age and disease. This is our real problem.
But in the university or any educational institution, there is no department of knowledge to find out what is that thing which is entrapped within this body. We get this information from Bhagavad-gītā: dehinaḥ asmin dehe. Deha means this body, and dehinaḥ, the possessor of the body. Just like your shirt and coat. You are the possessor of the shirt and coat. The shirt and coat is not you. You are different from the shirt and coat. Similarly, we have got our two kinds of body—the gross body and the subtle body. The gross body is made of material elements—earth, water, fire, air, sky—and the subtle body is made of mind, intelligence and ego.