The Teaching on the Battlefield: When Krishna Spoke to Arjuna

The Bhagavad Gītā, “the Song of the Lord,” is a conversation between two people standing in a chariot between two armies. One is Arjuna, the greatest archer of his age, who has just refused to fight. The other is his charioteer, friend and cousin Krishna (Kṛṣṇa), revered in the tradition as God himself in human form. What Krishna tells him in that moment became one of the most widely read and commented-on texts in Hindu tradition. This page tells the story of how that conversation came about, what happens in it, and why it outlasted the war it was spoken in.

Where the story comes from

The Gītā is not a separate book. It runs to seven hundred verses in eighteen chapters and sits inside the Bhīṣma Parva, the sixth of the eighteen books of the Mahābhārata, the great Sanskrit epic of the Bharata dynasty. It is a discourse embedded in an epic rather than a work written on its own. The background — the quarrel, the exile, the preparations for war — is told in the books of the Mahābhārata that come before it.

The Gītā also has an unusual frame. It is not narrated by Arjuna or Krishna but by Sañjaya, the adviser of the blind Kuru king Dhṛtarāṣṭra. The sage Vyāsa gave Sañjaya the ability to see the distant battlefield, and he describes everything to the king as it happens. The very first verse is the old king’s question about what his sons and the sons of Pāṇḍu did on the “field of dharma,” Kurukṣetra.

Who is who

• The Pāṇḍavas — the five sons of King Pāṇḍu: Yudhiṣṭhira, Bhīma, Arjuna, Nakula and Sahadeva.
• The Kauravas — their cousins, the hundred sons of Dhṛtarāṣṭra, led by the eldest, Duryodhana.
• Krishna — prince of the Yādavas, cousin and close friend of the Pāṇḍavas, worshipped as an avatāra (descent) of Vishnu.
• Bhīṣma — the grand-uncle of both sides, called “grandfather,” the senior warrior of the Kuru house.
• Droṇa — the teacher who trained both sets of princes in arms, and Arjuna’s own guru in archery.
• Dharma — a word with no single English equivalent: right order, duty, what one ought to do in one’s particular place in life.

How it came to war

The two families were cousins separated by a throne. The Kauravas, led by Duryodhana, had cheated the Pāṇḍavas of their share of the kingdom in a rigged game of dice and sent them into years of exile. When the Pāṇḍavas returned and asked for their land back, Duryodhana refused them even a handful of villages. Every attempt at peace failed, including an embassy by Krishna himself.

Before the war, both Arjuna and Duryodhana came to Krishna for help. Krishna offered a choice: on one side his whole army, on the other himself alone, and he would not take up weapons in the battle. Duryodhana gladly took the army. Arjuna chose Krishna, who agreed to serve as his charioteer.

The tradition often dwells on this choice: that Krishna, who could have commanded armies, agreed to drive a chariot in a war he had the power to end before it started. The divine choosing to serve; the infinite offering to hold the reins and go where the archer directed.

The morning of the battle

The two armies had drawn up facing each other on the plain of Kurukṣetra, sacred ground where this war was always going to be fought. The conches had blown. The horses were ready. The archers had their quivers full.

Arjuna had earned his reputation through decades of discipline and a quality of attention few warriors possessed. In a well-known retelling of the contest for Draupadī’s hand, he struck the eye of a revolving fish by looking only at its reflection in the water below. He had never turned back from a fight that needed to be fought.

He asked Krishna to drive the chariot out between the two armies so he could see who he would be fighting.

What he saw

Arjuna looked across the field. He saw his teacher Droṇa, who had taught him everything he knew about archery. He saw Bhīṣma, who had loved him since childhood. He saw uncles, cousins, in-laws and friends, standing ready in the ranks of the army he was about to fight.

His limbs gave way, his mouth went dry, and the great bow Gāṇḍīva slipped from his hand. He argued that no kingdom was worth the blood of his own family, that killing elders and teachers could only be wrong, and that a war like this would tear apart the families and customs that held society together. Then he sat down in the chariot and said he would not fight.

This was not cowardice. It was a genuine moral crisis, the kind that arrives when two things you believe completely turn out to contradict each other. Arjuna believed in dharma, and as a warrior his dharma was to fight a just war. He also believed he should not kill his teachers and his family. He could not find a way to hold both beliefs and still pick up his bow.

What Krishna said

Krishna answered, and he spoke for a long time. His answer is the Gītā proper: chapters on the nature of the self, of action, of devotion, of the cosmos and of liberation. It begins with a very specific question from a very specific person in a very specific crisis, and it widens until it takes in everything.

The self does not die

The first teaching, in the second chapter, is about the body and the self. “You are grieving for those who should not be grieved for,” Krishna says. “The wise grieve neither for the living nor for the dead.” The self — the ātman — is not born and does not die. Weapons cannot cut it. Fire cannot burn it. Water cannot wet it. Wind cannot dry it. That which dwells in every body is eternal. Bodies are put on and set aside the way clothes are.

Act without grasping at the result

The second teaching is about action, and it became the Gītā’s most famous idea. You have a right to your work, Krishna says, but not to its fruits. Do what is yours to do because it is right, not because of what you hope to gain from it; do it with an even mind in success and failure. This steadiness in action is what he calls yoga — a word that here means disciplined, integrated living rather than a set of postures. Doing nothing, he adds, is not an escape, because no one can stop acting even for a moment.

Three ways, one goal

Then, chapter after chapter, the conversation circles the same reality from different angles. It sets out three routes that do not compete: karma, action performed without grasping at its result; jñāna, discriminating knowledge of what is lasting and what is not; and bhakti, loving devotion to God. It describes the three guṇas — the qualities of clarity (sattva), restless activity (rajas) and inertia (tamas) — that make up all material existence and colour every person’s nature. Krishna explains that he takes form age after age whenever dharma declines, and he invites Arjuna to take refuge in him. The Gītā declines to rank the three paths for every reader, and the great commentators have weighted them differently.

The form he asked to see

In the eleventh chapter Arjuna asks to see Krishna’s universal form.

The ordinary human eye cannot perceive it, so Krishna grants him a divine eye. What Arjuna sees is all of existence contained in a single body: countless mouths and eyes, the sun and moon as its eyes, the fire of destruction and the source of creation, a form so vast that it has no beginning, middle or end that the eye can find. The gods themselves stand in it in awe. And he sees the warriors of both armies — his teachers, his cousins, his friends — rushing into its blazing mouths, already consumed.

Trembling, Arjuna asks who this terrible being is.

“I am Time,” Krishna says, “the mighty destroyer of worlds. Even without you, these warriors arrayed against you will not survive. Be only the instrument.”

Overwhelmed, Arjuna begs him to take back his familiar form, because no ordinary person can hold such a vision for long. Krishna shows him first the four-armed form of Vishnu and then his gentle human face again.

The end of the conversation

The vision is not the end of the Gītā. Seven more chapters follow, on devotion, on the knower and the field of knowledge, on the three guṇas, on the supreme Person, on the difference between divine and demonic natures, on faith, and finally on renunciation and freedom. In the eighteenth chapter Krishna tells Arjuna to reflect on everything he has heard and then do as he chooses. Arjuna replies that his confusion is gone and his memory restored, and that he will do as Krishna says.

Arjuna picks up his bow.

Why the conversation outlasted the war

Its structure is the reason the Gītā survived detachment from its setting. Although it is spoken on a battlefield, the question it answers is not really about warfare. Many readers in the tradition take the battle itself as a picture of the inner struggle every person faces, while others insist on the literal setting and a warrior’s real duty; both readings have long histories.

What matters more than the war that followed is the conversation that came before it. The Gītā was addressed to one man in one crisis on one morning, and it has been read by every kind of person in every kind of crisis since, because the crisis on the field of Kurukṣetra — how to act rightly when rightness seems to pull in two directions — is a human crisis. The answer offered — act with full commitment, act without attachment to the outcome, act in devotion — is not only the answer of that one morning.

That is why the great teachers of the Vedānta schools, including Śaṅkara, Rāmānuja and Madhva, each wrote commentaries on it, reading it in quite different ways. It is recited daily in homes and temples, and many communities mark Gītā Jayantī, a day remembering the teaching, in the month of Mārgaśīrṣa.

Editions and translations AdiVeda lists are gathered under Bhagavad Gita.

Read on AdiVeda

• Gita Chalisa — a devotional hymn on the Gītā in the chālīsā (forty-verse) form.
• Uddhava Gita — Krishna’s later teaching to his friend Uddhava, preserved in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa.
• Bhishma Stuti — the hymn to Krishna spoken by Bhīṣma as he lay on his bed of arrows after the war.
• Vishnu Sahasranamam — the thousand names of Vishnu, another text from the Mahābhārata.
• Krishna texts on AdiVeda — hymns, prayers and readings gathered in one place.