Bhagavad Gita Chapter 1: Arjuna's Despair

In the palace at Hastinapura the old king sat in a room he had never seen. Dhritarashtra had been born blind, and now, with his hundred sons drawn up for war eighty leagues away, he was blind to that also. Beside him sat Sanjaya, his charioteer and counsellor, upon whom the sage Vyasa had laid a strange gift: eyes that could look across the distance and see the field entire, and a tongue that could not lie about what they saw.

"Sanjaya," said the king, "on the field of dharma, on the field of Kuru, gathered together and eager to fight, what did my people and the sons of Pandu do?"

The question carried its own wound inside it. My people, and the sons of Pandu. Even now, with the armies facing one another, the blind king could not bring himself to say that all of them were his.

Sanjaya answered as a man reads from a page held close to his face. He said that Duryodhana, seeing the Pandava host drawn into its battle order, had gone to his teacher Drona and spoken with the brittle brightness of a man reassuring himself. Behold this great army of the sons of Pandu, the prince had said, arrayed by your own clever pupil, the son of Drupada. Here are heroes, mighty archers, equal in war to Bhima and Arjuna. Here are Yuyudhana and Virata and Drupada of the great chariot, Dhrishtaketu, Chekitana, the valiant king of Kashi, and Abhimanyu, and the sons of Draupadi, every one of them a great chariot-warrior.

Then he had named his own: Drona himself, and Bhishma, and Karna, and Kripa ever victorious in battle, Ashvatthama, Vikarna, and many another hero who had given up his life for Duryodhana's sake, all skilled in war and armed with many weapons. Our strength, guarded by Bhishma, is beyond measure, said the prince, while theirs, guarded by Bhima, is easily measured. Therefore let every man of you, holding to his station in the ranks, protect the grandsire above all.

And Bhishma, the eldest of the Kurus, hearing him, roared like a lion and blew his conch to gladden the prince's heart.

The grandsire's conch was the first sound of the war, and after it nothing on that plain was ever quiet again. Drums answered, and kettledrums, tabors and cow-horns and trumpets, and the noise of them together was a tumult without shape, a wall of sound rolling across the sand.

Then, from the other side, one chariot moved a little forward. It was yoked with white horses, and in it stood Arjuna, and holding the reins before him sat Krishna. The dark lord lifted the conch Panchajanya to his lips, and Arjuna lifted Devadatta, and Bhima of terrible deeds blew the great conch Paundra. Yudhishthira the king, son of Kunti, sounded Anantavijaya, and Nakula and Sahadeva sounded Sughosha and Manipushpaka.

After them the king of Kashi, the mighty archer, and Shikhandi of the great chariot, and Dhrishtadyumna, and Virata, and Satyaki the unconquered, Drupada and the sons of Draupadi and the strong-armed son of Subhadra, all of them together blew their conches on every side.

That sound was not like the Kaurava tumult. It had no shape either, but it went a different way. It filled the earth and the sky, and Sanjaya, watching from far off with his borrowed eyes, saw what it did: it tore the hearts of Dhritarashtra's sons. The old king in his dark room heard his counsellor say so, and said nothing.

Then, as the weapons were about to fall, as the armies leaned toward one another the way water leans before it breaks, Arjuna, whose banner bore the sign of the monkey, lifted his bow. He looked at the sons of Dhritarashtra drawn up in their ranks and made ready to loose the first arrow of the war.

And before he loosed it, he spoke to his charioteer.

"Krishna," said Arjuna, "halt my chariot between the two armies."

Krishna did not answer at once. The reins lay easy in his hands, the white horses stood trembling with the noise, and the whole field waited on a word.

"Let it stand there," Arjuna said, "in the open ground between them, until I have looked at these men who stand here longing for battle, and seen with whom I must fight when this work of war begins. I would see them gathered, the men who have come here to do a service to the evil-minded son of Dhritarashtra."

So Krishna took the splendid chariot forward and brought it to rest in the space between the hosts, in front of Bhishma and Drona and all the kings of the earth. It was a small thing, that movement, no more than a hundred paces. Afterward men would say that the whole of the world's wisdom turned upon it.

"Partha," Krishna said quietly, "behold these Kurus gathered together."

Arjuna looked. Because the chariot stood at the very center, he could not look at an army; he had to look at men, one after another, and their faces were close enough to know.

He saw fathers there, and grandfathers. He saw teachers, uncles, brothers, sons and grandsons. He saw comrades of his boyhood, fathers-in-law, and men who had wished him well all his life. He saw them in both armies, and in both armies they were his own.

Something in him gave way. It was not fear. He had faced Bhishma before, and gods before that, and had never known his hand to shake. What came upon him now came from the other side of courage: a great and helpless pity, the sight of everything he loved standing in armor, waiting for the signal to begin killing everything else he loved.

His breath went out of him. He turned to Krishna, and when he spoke, his voice was not the voice that had asked for the chariot to be moved.

"Krishna," he said, "seeing my own people here, come together and eager to fight, my limbs fail and my mouth goes dry. My body trembles and the hair stands up on my skin. The Gandiva slips from my hand, my very skin burns, I cannot stand, and my mind wanders as though it were unhoused.

"I see omens against us. I see no good in killing my own kinsmen in battle. I do not want victory, Krishna, nor a kingdom, nor pleasures. What is a kingdom to us, what are enjoyments, what is life itself, when those for whose sake we would want a kingdom and enjoyment and pleasure stand here in the ranks with their lives and their wealth given up already?

"Teachers, fathers, sons, grandfathers, uncles, fathers-in-law, grandsons, brothers-in-law and kinsmen: these I do not wish to kill, though they kill me, not for the lordship of the three worlds, and how much less for the earth. What sweetness could there be for us in the death of Dhritarashtra's sons? Sin alone would take hold of us if we struck down these men who stand with weapons raised against us.

"They are our own. Having killed our own people, how could we be happy? Their minds are overpowered by greed, and they do not see the evil in destroying a family or the crime in betraying a friend. But we see it. We who see it, should we not turn back from this sin?"

Krishna held the reins and said nothing. The two armies stood waiting on either side of them, and the wind moved the banners, and the man who was the finest archer in the world went on talking because he could not stop.

"When a family is destroyed," Arjuna said, "the ancient laws of the family perish with it, and when the law perishes, lawlessness overcomes the whole house. When lawlessness prevails, the women of the family are corrupted, and when the women are corrupted there comes a confusion of all order. That confusion drags the destroyers of the family and the family itself into misery. The offerings of rice and water fail, and the fathers of the fathers fall from their place. By these crimes of the family-slayers the eternal laws of the clan and the caste are overthrown, and for men whose family law is destroyed, Krishna, a dwelling in hell is certain. So we have been taught.

"Alas, we have set ourselves to commit a great sin, ready to kill our own people out of greed for the pleasure of a kingdom. It would be better for me if the sons of Dhritarashtra, weapons in hand, were to kill me in the battle, unresisting and unarmed."

He had come to the end of what he could say. He had begun the morning as the man on whom the whole Pandava cause rested, and he ended it with an argument for lying down.

Then, in the sight of both armies, in the sight of Bhishma and Drona and every king who had come to Kurukshetra to see who was the greater man, Arjuna let fall his bow and his arrows and sat down on the seat of the chariot, his mind overwhelmed with grief.

Sanjaya, far away in the dark room, told the blind king what he saw: that the son of Kunti, filled with pity, his eyes troubled and full of tears, sank down there and would not fight.

The sages who came afterward gave that hour a name. They called it Arjuna Vishada Yoga, the yoga of Arjuna's despair, and counted it the first chapter of the song, because everything Krishna said after it was said to a man who had already put his weapon down.