अर्जुनविषादयोग
Chapter 1
Arjuna Visada Yoga
Arjuna's Dilemma · 47 verses
This first chapter sets the scene for the whole Gita. It is traditionally called Arjuna Vishada Yoga, the yoga of Arjuna's sorrow.
Read the full overview
The blind king Dhritarashtra asks his aide Sanjaya what happened on the field of Kurukshetra, where two armies have gathered to fight. Sanjaya narrates. Duryodhana, the Kaurava king, surveys the Pandava army and names the leading warriors on both sides. Conches are blown, first by Bhishma, then by the Kauravas, then by Krishna, Arjuna, and the Pandava leaders. The sound is huge and terrifying. Arjuna asks Krishna to drive his chariot into the space between the armies so he can see who has come to fight. There he sees his own relatives, teachers, and elders standing on both sides. His body fails him: his limbs give way, his mouth goes dry, he trembles, and his bow slips from his hand. He refuses victory, kingdom, and pleasure. He argues that killing his kinsmen will destroy the family's lasting duties, called kula-dharma, and bring great wrong. He sinks down in grief. The schools differ on how to read this collapse; Advaita Vedanta and the Modern reading, for example, frame his crisis in their own ways. The chapter ends with Arjuna silent, the question still open.
Contentsश्लोकाः
- 1Before Krishna speaks a word, a blind king's question already shows what needs to be healed.
- 2This is Sanjaya's plain report, but for some, even a plain report was worth reading closely, for others, it was worth simply staying silent about.
- 3Before the teaching begins, watch how carefully a frightened man chooses his words.
- 4Duryodhana names his own army's champions, so that no one on his side can imagine an easy war.
- 5A roster of names, and a tradition mostly content to let them stand as names.
- 6Duryodhana finishes his count: these too, he says, are great chariot-warriors.
- 7Duryodhana turns to his own ranks, and the tradition mostly lets this verse pass in silence.
- 8Duryodhana keeps naming his champions, and one classical commentator's silence says as much as another's words.
- 9Duryodhana folds his whole remaining army into one line: countless heroes, every kind of weapon, and all of them skilled in war.
- 10One word, held two ways at once: Duryodhana calls his army boundless, or he calls it barely enough, and the tradition will not choose for you.
- 11Duryodhana orders every warrior to hold his post and, above all else, guard Bhishma at the army's center.
- 12Bhishma answers a frightened king's silence with a lion's roar and a conch, and most of the tradition lets the gesture speak for itself.
- 13One conch answered by every drum and horn on the field: a single, total burst of sound before a single blow is struck.
- 14Krishna and Arjuna answer the enemy's clamor from a chariot no power can conquer.
- 15Sanjaya answers the Kaurava blast with the Pandava one: Krishna's Panchajanya, Arjuna's Devadatta, and Bhima's great Paundra.
- 16Three more conches sound: Yudhishthira's Anantavijaya, and Nakula's and Sahadeva's Sughosha and Manipushpaka.
- 17Sanjaya names five more warriors standing with the Pandavas: the master archer king of Kashi, the great chariot-warrior Shikhandi, Dhrishtadyumna, Virata, and the never-defeated Satyaki.
- 18Drupada, Draupadi's five sons, and Abhimanyu sound the last conches, and most of the tradition lets the moment pass in near silence.
- 19One sound, sent from one side of the field, tears open hearts on the other, and the tradition mostly lets the asymmetry stand unexplained.
- 20Arjuna lifts his bow as the weapons begin to fly, and most of the tradition lets this exact moment pass in near silence.
- 21Arjuna asks Krishna to stand the chariot exactly between the two armies, so that before anything else happens, he can see.
- 22Arjuna asks not to fight blindly, but to see, clearly and specifically, exactly who stands against him.
- 23Arjuna asks, in his own words, to see clearly the men who have gathered to please a king of evil mind.
- 24Before a word of teaching, Krishna simply places the chariot where Arjuna will have to see clearly.
- 25Krishna halts the chariot before Bhishma and Drona, and speaks one plain command: look at these Kurus.
- 26The moment Arjuna's gaze lands on his own family standing in arms, and the tradition splits on what to make of what happens next in him.
- 27Sanjaya reports that Arjuna, having seen every kinsman arrayed on both sides, is overcome by compassion and speaks in sorrow.
- 28Seeing his own people arrayed for war, Arjuna's body gives out before his mind can decide what to think.
- 29Arjuna reports his own collapse reaching his hands: the bow itself will no longer stay in his grip.
- 30The Gandiva slips, the skin burns, the legs give way: the body finishes what the mind has already begun.
- 31Arjuna names his verdict: every sign, inside and out, says this can bring no good.
- 32He refuses the very things a won war would hand him: victory, kingdom, and every pleasure kingdom brings.
- 33Arjuna finds that his own wanting was never for himself at all, and that those he wanted it for now stand ready to die.
- 34Arjuna turns a wish for a kingdom into a list of the very people its winning would cost.
- 35Arjuna will not kill these kinsmen, even to save his own life, even for the rule of three worlds.
- 36Arjuna grants that the Kauravas are deadly aggressors, and still refuses the killing as sin.
- 37Arjuna's verdict lands here, but most of the classical commentators pass it by in silence.
- 38Arjuna grants that greed has blinded the other side, then quietly claims his own sight is clear.
- 39Arjuna turns what he sees clearly into a demand: if the harm is plain, why act at all?
- 40Arjuna warns that a family's eternal customs die with the family, and that lawlessness moves into the space they leave.
- 41Arjuna traces one collapse spreading outward: from broken conduct, to a family's women, to the blurring of the whole social order.
- 42Arjuna names the gravest cost he can find: a broken family drags the living and the dead down together.
- 43Arjuna names the end result of the collapse he has been tracing: caste-mixing wipes out the eternal duties of family and birth-group alike.
- 44We have heard that hell awaits the destroyer of family duty, Arjuna says, and treats the hearing as settled fact.
- 45For the first time, Arjuna turns the charge of sin onto himself, and names greed for a kingdom as its cause.
- 46Arjuna would rather be killed than fight, and the chapter closes with his bow falling from his hand.
- 47A chapter of argument ends not in a conclusion but in a body that sits down.