Bhagavad Gītā Chapter 2, Verse 27: Krishna to Arjuna — Sāṅkhya-Yoga

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.