Bhagavad Gītā Chapter 1, Verse 23: Arjuna to Krishna — Arjuna-Viṣāda-Yoga
I want to look over the warriors assembled here, those who have come to fight for the pleasure of Dhritarashtra's corrupt-minded son.
Bhāṣyakāra purports
- Śaṅkaraadvaita
Arjuna's impulse here — to survey (avekṣaṇa) those assembled for Duryodhana's pleasure — is not yet a fully elaborated act of discernment; it is the looking of a man about to be overwhelmed by moha (delusion). The word durbuddheḥ (of corrupt intellect) applied to Duryodhana already contains the seed of the entire inquiry: intellect (buddhi) can be durbaddha (corrupted) or viveka-yukta (joined to discrimination). That the warriors are priya-cikīrṣavaḥ — wishing to do what pleases — signals the karma-phala (result of action) orientation Śaṅkara will later diagnose as bondage; genuine action must arise without such desire for pleasing.
- Rāmānujaviśiṣṭādvaita
Rāmānuja reads this verse as the moment Arjuna enacts immediate, unquestioning obedience (tatkṣaṇāt eva) to Hṛṣīkeśa's direction — itself a model of kainkarya (service) that the text is quietly teaching even before the formal upadeśa begins. The great kings (mahīkṣitāḥ) bear witness precisely because such service-oriented action must be publicly visible as a demonstration of what bhakti-yoga looks like in the body. Duryodhana is named durbuddheḥ because his intellect is severed from śeṣatva (the relationship of belonging-to-Bhagavān), and those who serve his pleasure share that severance — the contrast with Arjuna's obedient positioning of the chariot could not be sharper.
- Madhvadvaita
*Yotsyamānān avekṣe 'haṃ ya ete 'tra samāgatāḥ | dhārtarāṣṭrasya durbuddher yuddhe priya-cikīrṣavaḥ* — Arjuna proposes to survey the combatants assembled here, those wishing (*priya-cikīrṣavaḥ*) to gratify Duryodhana's corrupt intellect (*durbuddhi*) in battle. The surveying (*avekṣaṇa*) is not mere military reconnaissance: each warrior present is a *paratantra* *jīva* (eternally dependent individual self), whose station within the *taratamya* (graded ontological hierarchy) is fixed by *Hari*'s sovereign will. *Priya-cikīrṣavaḥ* marks these jīvas as having bound their allegiance to a *jīva* — Duryodhana — who is himself *paratantra* and incapable of being any final object of service. To seek to please one *paratantra* at the cost of one's duty to the *svatantra* (the independently real, self-sufficient) Hari is the precise shape of *tāmasa* misdirection. *Durbuddheḥ* is the mūla's own testimony to Duryodhana's *tāmasa-jīva* nature: corrupt intelligence (*durbaddhi*) names a *jīva* whose orientation is away from Hari. The *pañca-bheda* (the five-fold real distinction — Lord from *jīva*, *jīva* from *jīva*, and so on) is presupposed in Arjuna's very grammar: the camp of Dhṛtarāṣṭra's son is a gathering of *jīvas* bound to a *jīva*, arrayed against those whose *bhakti* (devotion) orients them, however obscurely, toward the *svatantra* Lord.
divergence: Bucket corrected from B to C: both Madhva's bhāṣya and Jayatīrtha's Tīkā are absent for this verse. The reading is voiced directly from Dvaita siddhānta primitives applied to the mūla.
- Vallabhaśuddhādvaita
Vallabha reads the entire scene from 1.20 onward as Kṛṣṇa's own līlā-praśāda (grace-play): it is Hṛṣīkeśa — the lord of the senses, present as sārathi — who has arranged that Arjuna will see exactly what is needed for the great grace-event of the Gītā to unfold. Arjuna's instruction to position the chariot (yāvad etān nirīkṣe'ham) is not an act of autonomous military strategy; it is the soul's movement toward the center, drawn by Kṛṣṇa's own desire that the teaching be given. Those assembled for Duryodhana's pleasure serve, in Vallabha's reading, as the dark background against which Kṛṣṇa's radiance as charioteer will shine — their priya-cikīrṣā (desire to please) a corrupt echo of the true prīti (delight) that puṣṭi-bhaktas feel toward Kṛṣṇa.
- Śrīdharabhakti
Śrīdhara reads this verse as a straightforward statement of Arjuna's scouting intention within the narrative, but the bhakti inflection lies in the preposition: Arjuna's survey is directed outward at warriors who serve another's pleasure (priya-cikīrṣavaḥ), and this outward orientation will shortly become the source of his collapse. The traditional bhakti reading notes that Arjuna has not yet asked to see Kṛṣṇa — he wishes to see (avekṣe) the warriors; true darśana (vision) in bhakti is of Bhagavān, and Arjuna is here still practicing the lesser, worldly form of seeing. Duryodhana's durbuddhi (corrupt intellect) is not merely personal failing but the condition of any mind that places a finite king at the center of its desire.
- Madhusūdanaadvaita-bhakti
Madhusūdana raises and dissolves the question that haunts the whole first chapter: could these kinsmen not simply make peace? His answer draws directly on the mūla — they are priya-cikīrṣavaḥ in yuddhe, not in sandhi-kāma (desire for reconciliation). The qualification durbuddheḥ is thus not only Duryodhana's personal defect; it is the structural name for the cognitive state that makes war inevitable: a mind (buddhi) that has collapsed from its universal function into the service of ahaṃkāra (ego-identification). Arjuna's avekṣe (I will survey) is the last moment before the dissolution of his own buddhi into the same moha — Madhusūdana reads the coming grief not as weakness but as the necessary shattering through which jñāna-bhakti can enter.