Bhagavad Gītā Chapter 2, Verse 18: Krishna to Arjuna — Sāṅkhya-Yoga

Bhāṣyakāra purports

• Śaṅkaraadvaita

  These bodies are declared finite — like the mirage that appears real until inquiry dissolves it, the body arises and falls within a field of appearance (māyā), not touching the ātman (self) who wears it. Śaṅkara insists on two senses of destruction: the body becomes ash and is gone, or it deteriorates through disease and is said to have 'perished' while still standing — in neither sense does the nityaḥ (eternal), anāśī (indestructible) witness-self participate. The command 'yudhyasva' (fight) is not a new injunction but merely the removal of the obstruction; Arjuna was already a warrior — grief and delusion alone held him still.

• Rāmānujaviśiṣṭādvaita

  Rāmānuja reads 'deha' (body) through the root 'dih' meaning 'to accumulate': the body is essentially an upacaya (aggregate), built up and worn down like a pot, and karma-scriptures confirm it perishes when the fruit-cycle it was fashioned to complete is exhausted. The ātman by contrast is never found as an object but always as the pramātā (knower-subject) — it is apprehended as the single invariant 'I who know this,' persisting unchanged across all changes of body and place, which is why it is nityaḥ (eternal) and aprameya (not available as an object of measurement). Therefore, enduring the unavoidable contacts of battle with fortitude, and fighting without attachment to outcome, is itself the path toward amṛtatva (immortality-realization).

• Madhvadvaita

  Madhva frames the verse as a rapid three-step refutation: objection — perhaps some body is itself eternal; reply — 'antavantaḥ' (having an end) closes that; second objection — then perhaps the ātman perishes when the body is destroyed, as a reflection perishes when the mirror breaks; reply — 'nityasya śariṇaḥ' (the eternal embodied one), whose eternity is not borrowed from any upādhi (limiting adjunct). The jīva is not a mere reflection collapsing with its substrate, but a cit (conscious being) that is itself the self-illumining medium — and that cit is eternally distinct from Bhagavān yet shaped in His form, as the verse 'pratipattau vimokṣasya' confirms. 'Yudhyasva' thus means: fight as an eternal, dependent, conscious being in the service of Hari, with no illusion that the bodies involved are real participants in ultimate identity.

• Vallabhaśuddhādvaita

  Vallabha reads this verse as Kṛṣṇa's closing summary of the prior argument — 'uktaṃ sarvaṃ nigamayati' ('he sums up all that has been said'). The bodies are unstable whether one grieves or not, and grief itself changes nothing in the field of Kṛṣṇa's līlā (play). The cid-ātman (conscious self) is anāśī and aprameya — it cannot be grasped because it is not an object; it is Kṛṣṇa's own radiance expressed through a finite form. 'Yudhyasva' is therefore not moral counsel but participation in the Lord's own play: the warrior who truly sees this fights without the fiction that the bodies around him belong to anyone other than Kṛṣṇa.

• Śrīdharabhakti

  Śrīdhara introduces the verse with 'āgamāpāyadharmakam' — the bodies have the characteristic (dharma) of coming and going; this is not a deficiency but simply their nature as described by tattva-darśins (those who see reality as it is). The ātman is 'sarvadā ekarūpasya' — always of one form, never accumulating or diminishing — and therefore anāśī (indestructible) and aprameya (beyond the grasp of finite perception). The inference drawn by Śrīdhara is pastoral rather than dialectical: since the ātman neither perishes nor carries sorrow as an attribute, the grief Arjuna feels is moha-ja (born of confusion about what is real), and 'yudhyasva' means: fulfill your svadharma (own duty) having laid that confusion down.

• Madhusūdanaadvaita-bhakti

  Madhusūdana's reading is architecturally the most layered: the plural 'dehāḥ' (bodies) refers not merely to individual gross bodies but to all five kośas (sheaths) at both the individual (vyaṣṭi) and cosmic (samaṣṭi) levels — the Virāṭ (gross cosmic body), Hiraṇyagarbha (subtle cosmic body), and the Avyākṛta (causal unmanifest) are all bodies of the single ātman, as the Taittirīya and Bṛhadāraṇyaka confirm. The ātman is 'anāśī' in the strongest Advaita sense: not merely long-lasting but free from all three kinds of limitation (deśa, kāla, vastu — space, time, and individuation); it is svaprakāśa (self-luminous), requiring no external pramāṇa (means of knowledge) to establish it, since it is the very ground of all pramāṇas. 'Yudhyasva' is therefore addressed to one who is, at the level of ultimate identity, already the bhāsaka (illuminator) of the entire battlefield — and simultaneously, for Madhusūdana, that bhāsaka is Kṛṣṇa Himself, the devotional ground completing the jñāna arc.