Bhagavad Gītā Chapter 2, Verse 27: Krishna to Arjuna — Sāṅkhya-Yoga
Death is certain for whatever is born, and birth is certain for whatever dies, so you should not grieve over what cannot be avoided.
Bhāṣyakāra purports
- Śaṅkaraadvaita
For whatever has taken birth, death is invariant — avyabhicārī (without deviation); for whatever has died, birth is equally invariant. Śaṅkara presses the logic tightly: even the aggregate of body, sense-organs, and faculties — the kārya-karaṇa-saṅghāta (the instrument-complex that is wrongly taken to be the self) — follows this iron sequence, so grief over its dissolution is as senseless as weeping over a lamp's extinction when the oil runs out. The wise man does not mourn what was never a real locus of selfhood; śoka (grief) arises only when the not-self is mistaken for the self, and this verse dismantles that mistaking by showing the sequence is simply the nature of conditioned appearance.
- Rāmānujaviśiṣṭādvaita
Rāmānuja locates the verse's force in the doctrine that birth and death are not annihilations but avasthā-viśeṣāḥ — particular states of a persisting real substance (sat-dravya), exactly as a lump of clay passes through pot-state and shard-state without the underlying clay ceasing to be. The pariṇāma-paramparā (sequence of transformations) of a pariṇāmi-dravya (transforming substance) is avarjanīyā — unavoidable and therefore not a cause for grief. Even the asatkārya-vādin who denies prior existence of the effect must concede that nothing beyond the specific arrangement of threads accounts for the cloth; no entirely new entity arises, so what is called death is merely the substance entering the state that opposes its current configuration. Arjuna, seeing only a surface-level loss, should recognise he is grieving a transformation that Bhagavān has structured into the very fabric of sva-svāmī-bhāva (the servant-Lord relationship), and thus grief here is a failure of darśana (vision), not a sign of sensitivity.
- Madhvadvaita
Madhva answers with a single taut lemma: niyatatvāt — because it is fixed. The absence of grief (aśoka) is warranted precisely because the death of the born and the birth of the dead are not accidents but the niyata (regulated) decree of Hari, who as sarvottama (supremely highest) dispenses each jīva‘s (individual soul's) course according to its svabhāva (intrinsic nature) and dependence. There is no logical space for Arjuna's grief once he recognises that every soul's career — including the enemies on the field — unfolds under Hari's direct ordinance; to grieve the regulated is to impugn the regulator. The jīva eternally distinct from Brahman neither creates death nor can avert it; Arjuna's role is dependent action (paratantra-karma) offered to Hari, not autonomous mourning.
- Vallabhaśuddhādvaita
Vallabha reads the verse inside the key of prasāda (grace-dispensation): avarjanīyam (unavoidable) is not a cold logical necessity but the shape of Kṛṣṇa's own līlā — the play in which birth and death are the recurring rhythms of Kṛṣṇa's delight in creation. The beloved's departure and return are not tragedies but the dynamic of sevā (service-love) in which the puṣṭi-jīva (the soul nourished by grace) participates; to mourn a death is to misread the score of a rāga (musical mode) as noise. Arjuna is not called to stoic acceptance but to the rapturous recognition that Kṛṣṇa's hand moves in every dhruva-mṛtyu (certain death) and every dhruva-janma (certain birth), so what is aparihārya (unavoidable) is simultaneously Kṛṣṇa-abhiprāya (Kṛṣṇa's own intention) — and what is Kṛṣṇa's intention is the ground of joy, not sorrow.
- Śrīdharabhakti
Śrīdhara Svāmī supplies the causal mechanism that the other commentators leave implicit: death is certain for the born because the svārambhaka-karma (the karma that initiated this embodiment) is eventually exhausted, and when that momentum ends the body-instrument falls; janma (birth) is equally certain for the dead because tattad-deha-kṛta-karma (the karma accumulated by the actions of each successive body) creates the conditions for the next embodiment. This is not fatalism but a precise pedagogical point aimed at Arjuna as a vidvān (a learned person): you, who know this causal chain, have no basis for grief over what the chain itself makes both inevitable and purposive. Śocitum na arhasi (you are not fit to grieve) is framed as a statement of adhikāra — grieving over what karma mechanics make necessary is beneath the dignity of genuine spiritual understanding.
- Madhusūdanaadvaita-bhakti
Madhusūdana interweaves the Advaita logic of impermanence with the specifically devotional duty of the kṣatriya: saṃyogasya viyogāvasānatvāt (because every union ends in separation), Arjuna cannot save these men by abstaining — their deaths are the karmakṣaya (exhaustion of their generating karma), not his act of aggression. The battle (yuddha) is the kṣatriya's niyata-karma (obligatory action), analogous to the Brahmin's agnihotra (fire-offering), as Gautama-smṛti confirms: there is no doṣa (fault) in righteous battle-killing. Even if one imagines the ātman as embodied-and-mortal rather than eternal, the verse still holds: the prārabdha-karma (karma already in motion) must run to completion (avasya-parisamāpanīya), so the battle is aparihārya (not to be set aside) on both the metaphysical and the prescriptive reading. Madhusūdana's distinctive synthesis is that grief here fails doubly — both as a misreading of cosmic inevitability and as a dereliction of svadharma (one's own duty) before Kṛṣṇa.