Arjuna sinks in grief that looks like compassion; Madhusūdana begins to answer it.

This verse is spoken by Sanjaya, the narrator, reporting back to the blind king Dhritarashtra. It answers the unspoken question that hangs over the end of the first chapter, where Arjuna had thrown down his bow and sunk onto the seat of his chariot: and then what happened? Sanjaya picks up the thread with the word 'thus' (tatha), meaning 'in just the state already described', and tells the king that into that collapse the Lord, here called Madhusudana, now spoke. So the verse is a hinge. It closes the scene of breakdown and opens the scene of teaching.

Sanjaya paints Arjuna's condition in three strokes, and the commentators dwell on each. Arjuna is 'overcome by kripa', a word usually rendered pity or compassion, so that he is pervaded, taken over, by tender feeling. His eyes are 'full of tears and clouded', literally so brimming that he can no longer see clearly; the organ of sight has been made unfit for seeing. And he is 'sinking' (visidantam), which the commentators gloss as grief, a sinking of the mind in which, as Arjuna himself had said, the very limbs go slack. Several add the bodily signs from chapter one: the mouth dries, the hair bristles, the body trembles, the bow slips from the hand. The picture is of a great warrior unstrung.

The commentators agree that this is not a noble grief but a grief born of attachment, and they locate its root in the sense of 'these are mine'. The feeling that overwhelms Arjuna is affection for his own kinsmen, stirred by the fear of their dying and of being separated from them. One Advaita reading defines the kripa precisely as a particular affection occasioned by the delusion 'these are mine', so that it is something adventitious, laid over Arjuna rather than belonging to his true nature. Others describe it as family-bound delusion (moha) that has crept even into so brave a man, or as the heart 'melting' at the sight of his own people. The shared verdict is that what looks like compassion is really grief rooted in 'mine-ness'.

Almost every commentator stops on the name Sanjaya chooses for Krishna here: Madhusūdana, 'the slayer of the demon Madhu'. They agree the name is not idle. Sanjaya picks it deliberately, and it carries a hint about what is coming: the one who once destroyed a demon will now destroy something here too. Exactly what he will destroy is read differently by the schools, but the common point is that the very name promises that this grief, or its cause, will not be allowed to stand. The Lord who subdues what is destructive is about to act.

Finally, the commentators read this verse as the doorway into the whole second chapter and stress that the Lord did not ignore the broken Arjuna but spoke the very words that were needed. They note that Krishna here begins the teaching that will lift Arjuna out of the ocean of sorrow: the discernment of the Self from the not-Self, the wisdom of Sankhya and Yoga, and the marks of one whose wisdom is steady. One commentator observes that the phrase 'these words' (idam vakyam) is added on purpose, to flag that the utterance about to come is extraordinary, a word aimed straight at the fault and able to awaken genuine self-inquiry. So the verse is the threshold of the cure, not merely a description of the disease.