Bhagavad Gītā Chapter 1, Verse 30: Arjuna to Krishna — Arjuna-Viṣāda-Yoga

Bhāṣyakāra purports

• Śaṅkaraadvaita

  The Gāṇḍīva (*gāṇḍīvaṃ sraṃsate hastāt* — the bow slips from the hand) and the burning of the skin (*tvak caiva paridahyate*) are already signs that *adhairya* (loss of steadiness) has taken hold — *kiṃ ca adhairyam api saṃvṛttam*, as Ānandagiri marks. The spinning of the mind — *bhramatīva ca me manaḥ* — is *moha* (delusion), and a great one at that: *moho 'pi mahān bhavatīti*. Deepening the diagnosis, the omen-reading itself has gone inverted — *vipariīta-nimitta-pratīteḥ* — for Arjuna now reads the twitching of the left eye and such signs (*vāma-netra-sphuranādīni*) as portents of calamity, when their proper valence belongs to victory. From the advaita standpoint, this *moha* is the uproar of *avidyā* (ignorance) speaking through the body-mind: the hand that cannot hold the bow, the skin that burns, the mind that whirls — each is *adhyāsa* (superimposition) of body upon *ātman* experienced as personal catastrophe. The enquiry that will dissolve it opens only at 2.11.

  divergence: Śaṅkara's own bhāṣya begins at 2.10 and is absent here. The advaita reading rests on Ānandagiri's sub-commentary, which names *adhairya*, *moha*, and *vipariīta-nimitta-pratīti* as the operative terms for this verse. The advaita frame — *avidyā*, *adhyāsa* — is siddhānta drawn forward from that commentary, not attributed to a Śaṅkara bhāṣya on this śloka.

• Rāmānujaviśiṣṭādvaita

  Rāmānuja sees in this verse the culminating disclosure of Arjuna's inner collapse: the great-souled Pārtha — long-suffering (dīrgha-bandhu), supremely compassionate (parama-kāruṇika), the most dharmic of Pāṇḍavas — now surveys the very kinsmen who tried to burn him alive in the house of lac, and is undone by bandhu-sneha (love of kin) conjoined with dharma-adharma-bhaya (fear of committing wrong). His entire body pours sweat (atimātra-svinna-sarva-gātra); he drops arrow and bow; he sits down on the chariot floor. Rāmānuja insists this collapse is not weakness but the signature of a high-toned soul: only one capable of genuine kainkarya toward Bhagavān can be broken by genuine karuṇā for fellow creatures.

• Madhvadvaita

  From Dvaita first principles: Arjuna's physical symptoms — the Gāṇḍīva slipping, skin burning, inability to stand — are read as the jīva's radical dependence on Hari made visible. The jīva never holds the bow by its own power; it holds it only by Hari's parātantrya-śakti. When that divine sustaining energy withdraws momentarily — as it does here in the theatre of Bhagavān's own pedagogical plan — the limbs fail, the mind whirls. Arjuna's prostration is not a moral failure; it is a demonstration that without Hari's anugraha no jīva can even stand.

• Vallabhaśuddhādvaita

  Vallabha's joint commentary names what is happening as deha-dharma-abhimāna (identification with the body's nature) meeting viṣaya-darśana (the sight of sense-objects — here, beloved kinsmen as objects of grief). Arjuna, bound to the skin-body and seeing the beloved as āśraya (refuge), is performing a kind of inverted surrender: he is disclosing his dependency, laying bare that he has no ground except Kṛṣṇa's prasāda. In Puṣṭi-mārga this is not failure but the precise posture that opens the channel of grace — the devotee who admits he cannot stand is the one Kṛṣṇa lifts.

• Śrīdharabhakti

  Śrīdhara reads the verse through the register of śakuna-śāstra: Arjuna is not merely reporting physical symptoms but disclosing that he sees viparīta-nimittāni — inauspicious, contra-normal omens — that portend aniṣṭa, the undesired catastrophe about to unfold. The Gāṇḍīva slipping and the burning skin are themselves among these omens, signs in the body as legible as a crow crying from the left. For Śrīdhara the devotional weight falls here: Arjuna's senses are turned prophetic by his love; his very skin announces what his intellect cannot yet accept.

• Madhusūdanaadvaita-bhakti

  Madhusūdana identifies the precise psycho-physical sequence: the mind's bhramaṇa (spinning, whirling — a specific vikāra distinct from mere distraction) is the pre-stage of mūrcchā (near-faint), which is why Arjuna cannot avasthātu (hold his body steady). The two causal chains run in parallel — bhramaṇa explaining the swoon, viparīta-nimittāni explaining the dread — both converging on the inability to stand. Then Madhusūdana turns the address 'Kṛṣṇa' and 'Keśava' into theological pivots: Kṛṣṇa (from the root that means 'one who draws devotees' grief toward himself,' kṛṣṇa-karṣitā) signals that Arjuna's suffering is already being drawn into the Lord; Keśava ('one by whose will Brahmā and Rudra move') signals that the very power needed to cure grief resides in the one addressed. Arjuna's naming of the Lord in his collapse is thus not mere vocative convention but the first involuntary act of surrender.