Actually, if you soberly analyze this body, what is this body? Actually, it is lump of matter. It is a combination of bone and blood, flesh, urine, stool, nails and hairs. Otherwise, what you can find in it? Do you mean to say by combining these ingredients, bones and flesh and urine and stool, you can manufacture a very learned scholar? Is there any science that you can manu . . . ingredients . . . if the bodily ingredients is the man, you take this. In a dead body you take all these ingredients, again manufacture a similar man. But that is not possible. That is not possible.
So this is our ignorance. Therefore Kṛṣṇa said that "You are lamenting on a thing which is not at all subject matter. It is a dead matter. It was dead matter, and it will remain dead matter." Just like this apartment. I am living in this apartment; you are living in this apartment. I am not this apartment. When I vacate, when you vacate this apartment, the apartment remains; we go to another apartment. Similarly, it will be explained in the later verses,
- dehino 'smin yathā dehe
- kaumāraṁ yauvanaṁ jarā
- tathā dehāntara-prāptir
- dhīras tatra na muhyati
- (BG 2.13)
(As the embodied soul continually passes, in this body, from boyhood to youth to old age, the soul similarly passes into another body at death. The self-realized soul is not bewildered by such a change.)
Asmin dehe, "In this body, there is the proprietor, the soul." Dehino 'smin yathā dehe. That, on account of the proprietor, he is changing body. Changing body means . . . so long the soul is there. Suppose a child is born. If the child is born dead, then this body will never grow. You can apply any chemicals or any science; the body will remain the same. But so long the soul is there within the body, the child from the babyhood will come to childhood, then childhood to boyhood, boyhood to youthhood. In this way the body will change. We have changed so many bodies, every one of us. I knew . . . I know that I had a childish body, I had a boyhood body, but those bodies are no more existing. But I am existing. Therefore the conclusion should be that I, you, as soul, we are eternal. The body is changing.