Chapter 1: Arjuna's Despair

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Symbolic illustration for Chapter 1: Arjuna’s Despair — Visual threshold · Chapter 1: Arjuna’s Despair

The field of Kurukshetra. Two armies stand face to face, and in the narrow ground between them waits the moment from which the entire Gita is born. The teaching will come later. This first chapter belongs to a human being cracking open from within, and that very crack becomes the door through which every word Krishna will speak must enter. The collapse it portrays is one each of us has met, in one form or another.

The blind king’s question

The scene unfolds on the battlefield, yet the one listening sits far away in a palace. Dhritarashtra was born blind, and before the fighting began the sage Vyasa had come to him and offered to make his eyes see, for this war alone, so he could watch it with his own eyes. The old king said no. He could not bear to watch his own family cut itself down. He asked only to hear it. So Vyasa gave that gift of sight instead to Sanjaya, the king’s charioteer and trusted counselor, who could now take in everything on that distant field, near or far, spoken aloud or held silent, and carry it back in words. It is to Sanjaya that the blind king turns.

धर्मक्षेत्रे कुरुक्षेत्रे समवेता युयुत्सवः।
मामकाः पाण्डवाश्चैव किमकुर्वत सञ्जय॥

Dhritarashtra asked, Sanjaya, gathered and hungry for battle on this field of dharma, this Kurukshetra, what did my sons and the sons of Pandu do? The very first word of the whole Gita is dharma, and that one word will keep lighting the road all the way to its end. There is something hidden inside the question. Kurukshetra was old holy ground, a tract where kings and even the gods had once done their austerities, and the blind king half hoped its sanctity had worked on his sons, that standing on such soil they had softened, made peace, and handed the Pandavas back their kingdom. The man asking is blind on the outside; the man answering can see all the way within.

With that sight Sanjaya begins his account of the field. The first great blast came from the Kaurava side. Bhishma, the grand old man of the line, raised a roar like a lion to lift Duryodhana’s heart and blew his conch, and at once kettledrums, tabors, and trumpets crashed in answer across his whole army. Then came the reply. Seated in a chariot drawn by white horses, its tall banner carrying the figure of Hanuman, Krishna lifted his conch, the Panchajanya, and Arjuna his Devadatta. Bhima of the terrible deeds followed on his great Paundra, and Yudhishthira, Nakula, and Sahadeva on theirs, the Anantavijaya, the Sughosha, and the Manipushpaka. One by one the conches of every great warrior filled earth and sky, and that sound reached into the hearts of Dhritarashtra’s sons until the men on the far side shuddered where they stood. Yet through all that noise the story tightens toward a single chariot, the one whose reins rest in the hands of Krishna himself.

The chariot between the two armies

At exactly that moment Arjuna makes his request of the charioteer, Sri Krishna. Achyuta, he says, take my chariot into the middle ground between the two armies and hold it there, so I can look clearly at the men I have to face, and see who has come to fight on the side of Duryodhana. Krishna, who as Hrishikesha is the silent knower of every heart, brings the chariot to rest at dead center, directly before Bhishma, Drona, and all the assembled kings. Then he speaks the words that will decide everything: Partha, behold these Kauravas gathered here. The word he chooses is kinsmen, your own blood, and it reaches straight into a tenderness Arjuna had kept folded away out of sight. That word is the seed from which the whole collapse will grow. Arjuna had asked only to see. What he saw next broke him.

The faces of his own

Arjuna’s gaze sweeps the field, and everywhere it lands it finds his own, standing in both armies, on his side and against him. Fathers and uncles, grandfathers and great-grandfathers, the teachers who raised him, his mother’s brothers, his cousins, his sons and his grandsons, fathers-in-law, the friends of his boyhood. On one flank the grandsire Bhishma, in whose lap he had once played as a child. On the other the teacher Drona, who had set the first bow in his hands and taught him every use of it. The men from whom the kingdom must be won are his own, and the men he must strike down to win it are his own as well.

Before that sight the whole warrior in Arjuna comes apart. The body gives way first, then the mind.

दृष्ट्वेमं स्वजनं कृष्ण युयुत्सुं समुपस्थितम्।
सीदन्ति मम गात्राणि मुखं च परिशुष्यति॥

He says, Krishna, at the sight of these kinsmen of mine come together for war, my limbs are failing and my mouth has gone dry. The hair rises on my body. Every word of it is the body telling the plain truth. His legs will not hold him, the Gandiva slides from his grip, his skin burns as if from within, and his mind turns like something caught in an unseen whirlpool. He can no longer stand upright.

The unraveling of the family

Arjuna’s dread runs past the deaths themselves and keeps going, down the generations. When a family is destroyed, he says, its oldest traditions die with it, the quiet customs handed down for ages that keep a house on the path and its people from going astray. Once those are gone, adharma floods in and takes hold of the whole house. The women lose their footing and their honor, the settled order of the varnas comes apart, and the bloodlines run together. The dead suffer for it too. Cut off from the rice-and-water offerings their descendants once made for them, the shraddha and the tarpana, the ancestors slip and fall from the resting place they had earned. And those who bring all this about, he has heard, dwell in hell themselves for an age with no fixed end. At the root of a ruin that vast, Arjuna sees himself standing, bow in hand, and the thought shakes him to the marrow.

Defeat even in victory

Arguments crowd up inside him, one on the heels of the next. He does not want victory, he tells Krishna, nor a kingdom, nor the pleasures a kingdom brings. What would he do with any of it once the people he would share it with are dead? A throne won by killing his own would reach him soaked in their blood, and no joy could live in a prize like that. He knows the charge against Duryodhana’s men, that by the old law they are aggressors who have earned death: they set the house of lac on fire, they fed Bhima poison, they cheated at the dice, they dragged Draupadi into the open court. Even so, Arjuna cannot find a way in which killing his own blood ends in anything but sin. Not for this earth, he says, and not even for lordship over all three worlds, would he strike them down. He would sooner let the armed sons of Dhritarashtra cut him down where he stands, unarmed, lifting no hand against them, than win the world this way. The war the Pandavas had tried so hard to avoid, right down to Krishna’s own errand of peace to Hastinapura, now holds Arjuna at its exact center, and no way out will show itself.

This is a moment every one of us knows in some form. A duty stands plainly in front of you, and a voice inside keeps repeating that this one is beyond you. Tradition has a name for the breakdown, vishada, a word that reaches deeper than sadness, down to that dead stop where even the ground a person has always leaned on begins to feel false. And tradition does something stranger with it. It calls this whole chapter a yoga, the Yoga of Arjuna’s Dejection, because a collapse like this, when it happens in front of the right teacher, turns into the first step of the climb.

The falling of the bow

And then comes the moment on which this whole chapter turns.

एवमुक्त्वार्जुनः सङ्ख्ये रथोपस्थ उपाविशत्।
विसृज्य सशरं चापं शोकसंविग्नमानसः॥

Sanjaya reports that with these words Arjuna set his bow and arrows down in the middle of the battlefield and sank back into the rear of the chariot, his mind churning with grief. The hand that had once found the hardest marks in the world simply let the Gandiva go. A heavy gloom settled over his face and his eyes filled. That is the first and final truth of the first chapter.

The gist

The first chapter keeps every answer out of reach and stands the question up at its full depth. Arjuna’s breaking is itself the doorway to all the teaching ahead. Until this crack opens within, no high word finds a place to settle. One day each of us stands on that chariot in the middle, face to face with our own people, hands trembling, and from exactly there the Gita begins to speak to us. This chapter is the mirror in which your own fear shows itself clearly for the first time. And where Arjuna’s bow falls, from that very spot, Krishna’s first answer will rise in the next chapter.

Source: Srimad Bhagavad Gita

Verse by verse

All 47 verses of this chapter: Devanagari, Roman transliteration, word by word, prose order, and a plain rendering. Every verse has its own link, such as lulla.net/en/bhagwad-gita/1/1/. Read the chapter above first, then come down to the source.

1.1धर्मक्षेत्रे कुरुक्षेत्रे समवेता युयुत्सवः

धृतराष्ट्र उवाच

धर्मक्षेत्रे कुरुक्षेत्रे समवेता युयुत्सवः ।
मामकाः पाण्डवाश्चैव किमकुर्वत संजय ॥1॥

dharmakṣetre kurukṣetre samavetā yuyutsavaḥ |
māmakāḥ pāṇḍavāś caiva kim akurvata saṃjaya

धर्मक्षेत्रे: धर्मभूमि में
कुरुक्षेत्रे: कुरुक्षेत्र में
समवेताः: एकत्र हुए
युयुत्सवः: युद्ध की इच्छा वाले
मामकाः: मेरे पुत्रों ने
पाण्डवाः: पाण्डु के पुत्रों ने
च: और
एव: भी
किम्: क्या
अकुर्वत: किया
संजय: हे संजय

Prose order: संजय, धर्मक्षेत्रे कुरुक्षेत्रे समवेताः युयुत्सवः मामकाः पाण्डवाः च एव किम् अकुर्वत।

saṃjaya, dharmakṣetre kurukṣetre samavetāḥ yuyutsavaḥ māmakāḥ pāṇḍavāḥ ca eva kim akurvata|

Sanjaya, what did my sons and the sons of Pandu do when they had gathered on the holy field of Kurukshetra, eager for battle?