BG 1.37 — Arjuna-Viṣāda-Yoga

Bhagavad Gītā 1.37Chapter 1 · Arjuna-Viṣāda-Yoga · Arjuna → Krishna · Mādhava · anuṣṭubh

तस्मान् नार्हा वयं हन्तुं धार्तराष्ट्रान् स्वबान्धवान् ।

स्वजनं हि कथं हत्वा सुखिनः स्याम माधव ॥

tasmān nārhā vayaṃ hantuṃ dhārtarāṣṭrān sva-bāndhavān

svajanaṃ hi kathaṃ hatvā sukhinaḥ syāma mādhava

spokensingle-voice recital; rendered via IndicF5 conditioned on a Sanskrit reference clip

meaning

We have no right to kill the sons of Dhritarashtra, who are our own kin. How could we ever be happy, Madhava, having slain our own people?

ekras · bhāṣya

Arjuna draws the conclusion. "Therefore we have no right to kill the sons of Dhritarashtra, our own kinsmen. How could we ever be happy after killing our own people, Madhava?" The argument from the last several verses lands here. Tasmat — therefore. The argument has been: the kingdom is for the family; the family is here; killing them produces sin even when the law permits the killing; even the act of contemplating it brings grief. Therefore we should not. Sva-bandhavan — our own kinsmen. Bandhavan is the warm word for relations — those who are bound to us, who hold us. Even hostile, the Kauravas are still bandhavah. Katham hatva sukhinah syama — how could we be happy after killing? The verse is asking a real question. Arjuna is canvassing a future he cannot picture — himself, alive, in a kingdom built on the deaths of his own teachers and grandfathers. The picture refuses to render.

Ramsukhdas Maharaj points to the structural problem. Arjuna has been overrun by mamata-janita-moha — the delusion born of attachment. Attachment looks like love and feels like clarity. But when it runs strong it suppresses viveka, the discrimination that distinguishes one kind of action from another. Without viveka, the kshatriya's duty becomes invisible. Arjuna cannot see what he is supposed to do because he can only see whom he is supposed to do it to.

Context

where

Chapter 1 · Arjuna-Viṣāda-Yoga · meter anuṣṭubh

who speaks

Arjuna → Krishna · vocative Mādhava

preceded by — BG 1.36

What joy could come to us from killing the Dhārtarāṣṭras, O Janārdana? Sin alone would cling to us for slaying these aggressors.

What's going on

We have no right to kill the sons of Dhritarashtra, who are our own kin. How could we ever be happy, Madhava, having slain our own people?

Vyavahāra · try it in your life

Advaita

Before refusing a difficult decision by naming it 'too costly to those I love,' inquire whether the category 'those I love' is tracking a real distinction in the world or is itself a cognitive boundary your mind has drawn and then mistaken for a fact. The Advaita discipline is to catch the moment you say 'sva-bāndhavān' — my own kin — and ask whose construction 'sva' is. This does not dissolve care; it exposes when care is being used as a reason-stopper rather than a guide.

Viśiṣṭādvaita

Rāmānuja's Arjuna is not cruel but misaligned: his compassion, loyalty, and moral seriousness are genuine excellences directed at the wrong axis. The everyday application is to audit not whether you care, but whether your care is structured around the right ultimate — whether your 'great-souledness' (mahāmanastā) is tethered to something that can bear it. Virtues pointing inward at a family circle exhaust themselves; virtues that pass through persons toward Bhagavān are inexhaustible.

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Dvaita

Madhva's framework asks: in a contested situation, are you acting as the primary agent of your own compassion or as a dependent executor of what Hari requires? The practical move is to disentangle 'what I feel is right' from 'what is actually required of me by the order I serve.' Arjuna's error is that he has promoted his emotional calculus — 'we cannot be happy after slaying kin' — to the rank of a dharmic argument without checking it against the will of the one to whom he is answerable.

Śuddhādvaita

Puṣṭi-mārga sees Arjuna's collapse not as a problem to solve but as part of Kṛṣṇa's design: the darkness before disclosure is built into the līlā. The everyday application is to resist the impulse to resolve anguish by force of will alone. Sometimes the fact that you are stuck — that all your relationships feel like obligations that pull against one another — is the exact configuration Kṛṣṇa uses to bring you to a listening posture. Sit with the collapse long enough to hear what comes next.

Bhakti

Śrīdhara's specific discipline: when someone else is doing the thing you believe is wrong, and doing it without apparent guilt, do not take their ease as evidence that it is permitted. Their ease may be the product of 'lobhopahata-viveka' — greed-damaged discernment. Clarity of vision is not a reason to follow the comfortable majority; it is a reason to hold a different line. The person who still sees the doṣa has a greater obligation, not a lesser one, to refrain.

Advaita-Bhakti

Madhusūdana's 'hetudaśanācca' maxim has a direct professional and ethical application: when precedent is cited to justify an action, ask what motivated the precedent-setter. If the answer is greed, fear, or self-interest, the precedent carries no normative weight regardless of how senior the person was. 'Bhīṣma did it' is only a valid argument if Bhīṣma's reason was untainted. The discipline is to trace the root cause, not just the surface behavior, before deciding whether an example is worth following.

Adhiṣṭhāna · substrate signature

substratev2.6-frozen

parserByT5-Sanskrit-multitask (Nehrdich/Hellwig/Keutzer EMNLP 2024)

mūlaGRETIL e-text of the Bhagavadgītā with Śaṅkara's commentary (data entry: Gaudiya Grantha Mandira) for chapters 1-17; sanskritdocuments.org sd_bgnew.itx for chapter 18; ingested via a local Ambuda TEI build; per-verse repairs logged in post_generation_repairs

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weightsa=1 · b=0.01 · e_v=0.005 · z=0.2 · h=0 · th=0.01

anchorfit on Ramsukhdas's Sādhak Sañjīvanī (1980), frozen across the eight-commentator panel; cross-validated R@4 = 71.6% on Śaṅkara

extracted2026-04-21

methodPaper 1, Section II.B

↓ view raw per-verse object (JSON)↗ per-verse-object schema ↗ substrate code (MIT) + data (CC-BY 4.0)

The schema generalizes to any bounded-polysemy corpus with discrete primary text units, attested witness traditions, identifiable schools, and formal substrate. Port the per-verse object; refit weights on a domain-appropriate Layer-3 anchor; ship.

Bhagavad Gītā Chapter 1, Verse 37: Arjuna to Krishna — Arjuna-Viṣāda-Yoga