The 'mātrās' are the senses, hearing and the rest, by which sounds and other things are measured (mīyante). Their contacts, the joinings with sound and the rest, give cold, heat, pleasure and pain. Or else the 'sparśas' are the objects, sound and the rest, that are touched; both the senses and the objects give cold, heat, pleasure and pain. Cold is sometimes pleasant, sometimes painful, and heat too is of no fixed nature; pleasure and pain, however, are of fixed nature, since they do not vary, and so are mentioned apart from cold and heat. Since these contacts of the senses come and go, they are impermanent; therefore endure them, bear with them, and feel neither joy nor dejection in them. That is the meaning. Hear what comes to one who endures cold, heat and the rest.

Sound, touch, form, taste, and smell, together with their substrata, are called the elemental measures (matra), because they are the effects of the subtle elements. Their contacts with the ear and the other senses bring pleasure and pain in the forms of cold and heat, soft and harsh, and so on; the words 'cold' and 'heat' stand for the whole range. Endure them with steadiness until the scriptural action, war and the rest, is completed. Because they come and go, they can be borne by the steady. And they are impermanent: when the karma that is the cause of bondage is destroyed, they too, by their very nature of coming and going, cease. What is the purpose of enduring them? To this the next verse speaks.

Suppose someone says that even so, grief arises from the pain of not seeing the departed. Not so, Krishna answers with 'the contacts of the senses with their objects' (matra-sparsa). 'Measures' (matra) are the sense-objects, since they are measured out; their 'contacts' are the connections with them, and these are what give cold and heat, pleasure and pain. It is from the body's connection with cold, heat and the rest that the self has the experience of cold and heat, and from that, of pleasure and pain. Pain and the like do not belong to the self of itself. Why? Because they come and go. If they belonged to the self of itself, they would be present even in sleep. Since those sense-contacts are present only in waking and the like and do not arise otherwise, being concomitant with waking they are caused by it alone and do not belong to the self of itself; and the self has no connection with them other than that of subject to object. Nor, despite their coming and going, do they have any permanence even as a continuous stream, since they are absent in deep sleep, dissolution and the like; and so Krishna calls them 'impermanent'. Hence it is the self's confused identification with the body and the rest that is the cause of pain, and so, for one freed from that, there is no pain at the death of kinsmen and the rest. Therefore, give up that false identification, and endure those touches of cold, heat and the rest.