The wise grieve neither for the dead nor for the living.

Advaita Vedānta

On this reading prajnavada, 'words of wisdom,' means the actual utterances of wise and discerning people, which Arjuna is merely repeating. The contradiction is that he speaks like a knower of the Self while grieving like one who does not know. These commentators add a second ground for the persons being ungrievable: Bhishma, Drona and the rest are not to be grieved for not only because their true Self is eternal, but also because they are men of good conduct, virtuous, who need no one's sorrow. One source here also reads a single verse as carrying both senses at once: the persons named are ungrievable because they are of good conduct, and the Self denoted in its primary sense is ungrievable because of its reality. This same school mounts a long argument that the Gita teaches liberation through knowledge of the Self alone, preceded by renunciation of all works, and rejects the view that knowledge must be combined with action: unlike a sacrifice, knowledge needs no co-operating apparatus, since like the recognition that a thing is mother-of-pearl it works simply by removing error. On this basis the whole Gita is divided into three sets of six chapters, unfolding the meaning of 'thou,' the meaning of 'that,' and the unity of the two.

Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Dhanapati Sūri

Advaita Vedānta

These commentators frame the verse through Arjuna's two distinct delusions. One is common to all beings: in the Self, which is self-luminous and of the nature of supreme bliss, the false appearance of transmigration shows up as if real, through failure to discriminate the Self from its limiting adjuncts, the gross and subtle bodies and their cause, ignorance. The other delusion is peculiar to Arjuna and springs from his fault of compassion: his own duty, war, appears to him as wrong because of the killing it involves. The first delusion is removed by knowledge of the pure Self; the second by seeing that war, though it involves injury, is not wrong since it is one's own duty; and grief simply ceases when its cause ceases. One of these readings also takes the phrase about the dead and the living straightforwardly as bodies imagined to be kinsmen, and answers a likely worry: that great men such as Vasishtha have been seen to grieve. Their grief, driven by their already-operating karma, is not of this world and so does not make grief a duty for others, any more than their spitting would.

Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha

Advaita Vedānta

This commentator gives a distinctive reading of why the wise 'do not grieve for those whose breath has gone.' He takes it to mean that the wise do not grieve for the breathless bodies; on the contrary, they carry them off to be cremated. This shows that what is truly loved is the breath, the living principle, not the mere body, and he cites the saying that breath itself is father, mother and teacher. Ordinary worldly judgment agrees: a person is blamed as a parent-killer for neglecting parents while they live, but not for cremating their breathless bodies. From this he argues that the Self must be other than the body because it is sentient, just as a pot is other than the insentient thing seen; if the body were itself sentient, sentience would remain even in the corpse. So whoever supposes the Self perishes with the body is simply a fool.

Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha

Viśiṣṭādvaita

Here prajnavada means words that rest on a knowledge that the self is distinct from the body, even while Arjuna wrongly takes the body to be the self. The very example is Arjuna's worry that ancestors will fall, robbed of the rice-ball and water offerings: such a fear only makes sense if there is a self that survives the body and can be helped or harmed by these rites. So Arjuna's own talk of merit and demerit secretly presupposes a self distinct from the body, which is exactly the knowledge his grief contradicts. These commentators read the verse as showing Arjuna ignorant on three fronts at once: the nature of the body, the nature of the eternal self other than it, and the nature of his duty, war, which is in fact the very means of attaining the self when undertaken with no eye to its fruit. One source adds careful grammatical analysis: the opening must be read as 'with respect to those not to be grieved for' so it is not misread as if the dead were the ones grieving; the past-tense verb stands for a long-continued present; and 'paṇḍita' is not read narrowly, since elsewhere even the wise are seen grieving, so here it means those whose understanding is fit to weigh that both body and self, for opposite reasons, are undeserving of grief.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Dvaita

This school explicitly rejects the reading that 'words of wisdom' means the utterances of the wise or intelligent. They argue that nothing in Arjuna's speeches, such as 'seeing these my own kinsmen,' is the utterance of an intelligent man, for the intelligent do not call it unrighteous to restrain one who hates the Lord and his followers; nor does mere talk about right and wrong make speech wise, or else even a Buddhist's talk would qualify. So prajnavada is taken instead as utterances sprung from Arjuna's own mere conceit, his own opinion, not drawn from scripture and teacher; the wording carries a built-in restriction, like calling someone 'one who feeds on water only.' These commentators also leave the long opening of the text uncommented because its meaning is already plain, stating only its purport; and they read the line about the dead and the not-yet-dead as a genuine challenge: those on the very verge of destruction, on what ground are they to be understood as not fit for grief? The sense is that the ones grieved for are not to be grieved for, so no grief should be made, and the words spoken are mere conceit, so they should not be spoken.

Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha

Śuddhādvaita

These commentators read the verse as the discriminative opening that must come before the later teaching of devotion: steady understanding through scriptural knowledge has to be established first. One states the bare frame, that the inner self is eternal, real and distinct from the body, so the body's loss is not the self's loss and the candidate's grief is misplaced. The other gives a strongly theological reading of who the ungrievable are: the Kauravas are possessed by demonic forces, brought into being for the very purpose of relieving the burden of the earth, and so are simply to be slain by the Lord; they are not his devotees. On this reading the genuinely wise are those who know that everything happens only by the Lord's will, and so they neither grieve over the departed, wondering what will become of them, nor over the living, wondering how their welfare will be secured. He grounds this in scripture, that the Lord alone makes a man do good whom he wishes to raise and do evil whom he wishes to cast down (Kausitaki Upanishad 3.9): since all is done by the Lord, how can there be grief over it?

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Bhakti

These commentators stress that the verse is given precisely to display the discernment of body from embodied that removes grief by removing its presupposition. They identify the exact words Arjuna is parroting: he grieves with lines like 'I see this kinsfolk eager for war,' and then, after being told 'whence has this faintness come over you,' merely repeats the speech of the truly wise, sentences such as 'how shall I in battle against Bhishma,' words apt only if real wisdom were present. One source presses the point in vivid devotional terms: he marvels that Arjuna claims a vision of truth yet remains a slave of ignorance, running about like one born blind and maddened, presuming to teach wisdom while blind to it; and he asks whether the universe owes its existence to Arjuna, whether birth and death will vanish at the fiat of his will, urging him to see birth and death as parts of an eternal order of nature over which it is senseless to sorrow.

Śrīdhara Svāmī · Sant Jñāneśvar

Bhakti

These Gaudiya commentators give the most layered reading of 'the dead' and 'the living.' They take 'those whose breath has gone' to mean the gross bodies, and 'those whose breath has not gone' to mean the subtle bodies. The wise grieve for neither: not for gross bodies, because they are perishable, and not for subtle bodies, because before liberation these too are perishable, so the nature of both is impossible to set aside. Fools, by contrast, grieve only when breath has left the gross bodies of fathers and the like, and do not even reckon the subtle bodies. By implication the wise also do not grieve for the Self, which, possessing both bodies and free of the six transformations of existence, is eternal. These commentators draw a closing lesson about scripture: Arjuna had earlier held the scripture of duty to be weightier than the scripture of statecraft, but Krishna now overrules even the scripture of duty by the still more powerful scripture of knowledge.

Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva

Modern

This commentator deliberately refuses the fine-grained debate over how one could possibly lament someone who is not dead, a question over which, he notes, commentators have spilled much ink, some even saying it is lamentable that fools should go on living. Instead of such hairsplitting he reads 'lament' broadly, as meaning to feel happy or unhappy, to mind. On this reading the single point of the verse is that the knower looks upon both the dead and the not-dead as one and the same, neither case being an occasion for being glad or sorry.

Lokmanya Tilak

Modern

These non-sectarian devotional-Vedanta commentators develop the verse into plain practical teaching about why grief arises and how it is unfounded. One explains that the Self is immortal and unborn, that there is really no such thing as death but only a separation of the subtle body from the physical and a return of the body's five elements to their source; Arjuna forgot the eternal nature of the soul and the changing nature of the body, and treated temporary relations born of past actions as if permanent, when in fact such relations end as their karma is exhausted and new ones arise with a new body. The other traces grief to its root in dividing the world into 'mine' and 'not mine,' which breeds attachment and craving and from these every kind of sorrow, fear and turmoil; he points out that Arjuna's very arguments, his fear that ancestors deprived of offerings will fall, themselves prove that the body is perishable and its indweller eternal, since there would be no such fear if the body itself never perished. Both stress that what comes as birth and death, gain and loss, is only the fruit of one's own past deeds (prarabdha), and to be glad or sorry over such passing circumstance is mere foolishness.

Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas