Bhagavad Gītā Chapter 2, Verse 35: Krishna to Arjuna — Sāṅkhya-Yoga

Bhāṣyakāra purports

• Śaṅkaraadvaita

  The mahārathās (great chariot-warriors) — Duryodhana and his company — will not suppose you have withdrawn from battle out of compassion; they will conclude, without qualification, that you have fled from fear of Karṇa and his peers. You who were held in the highest regard among them — esteemed as possessed of many virtues — will descend, in their reckoning, into a state of lāghava (lightness, triviality). For Śaṅkara the sting here is epistemological: the world's misreading is not the real harm, but the āsakti (attachment) to reputation that makes Arjuna hesitate is itself the bondage from which jñāna must free him.

• Rāmānujaviśiṣṭādvaita

  Those mahārathās — Karṇa, Duryodhana and the rest — who had previously honored you as a valorous enemy (śūro vairiṇām) will now, seeing you withdraw as if your purpose has ceased (nivṛttavyāpāratayā), regard you as easy to grasp (sugrahatā) — something lightly dismissible. The fall from bahumata (being held in high regard) to lāghava is not merely social disgrace but a rupture of the kainkarya-relation: a servant of Bhagavān is dishonored when he fails the dharma of his station. Rāmānuja stresses that warriors recognize only fear of enemy-swords as a legitimate ground for withdrawal; familial grief (bandhu-sneha) does not qualify — the world reads it as weakness regardless of Arjuna's inner rationale.

• Madhvadvaita

  The *mahārathāḥ* (great chariot-warriors) — those very ones before whom Arjuna had stood as a figure of honor — will judge him *bhayād raṇād uparataṃ* (withdrawn from battle out of fear). From *bahumata* (high esteem) he descends to *lāghava* (lightness, smallness): the reversal is total and public. For the *paratantra* *jīva* whose station in battle is assigned by *svatantra* Hari, withdrawal without divine sanction is not restraint but a breach of *dāsya* (servanthood). The *pañca-bheda* order is not suspended by sentiment: Arjuna's distinction from Hari, from the other *jīva*s opposing him, and from the material field of battle are all real, and each *bheda* (real distinction) carries binding obligation. The contempt of the *mahārathāḥ* is the natural, *karmically* appropriate fruit of abandoning the role Hari's providential order has placed upon him. *Lāghava* is not merely social dishonor; it names the ontological diminishment that follows when a *paratantra* being acts against the grain of *taratamya* (the graded hierarchy of being) by refusing the subordinate function *bhakti* would have fulfilled.

• Vallabhaśuddhādvaita

  Vallabha draws a sharp distinction: although Arjuna's inward motive is fear of the sin of slaying kinsmen (svabandhu-hiṃsā-doṣa-bhīyā), these mahārathās do not know this — they simply see a man who has stopped (uparata) at the threshold of battle and they will conclude he stopped from fear of death (maraṇa-bhayāt). The outer world misreads the inner reality; this is the nature of the unregenerate gaze. Thus Arjuna will arrive at lāghava — diminishment — not because he is in fact diminished but because he has allowed a motive rooted in attachment to masquerade as scruple, and Kṛṣṇa's līlā (divine play) now uses the world's scorn as the instrument to dislodge that attachment and draw Arjuna back into prasāda (divine grace-action).

• Śrīdharabhakti

  Those very mahārathās who had previously honored you for your many virtues (bahugūṇatva) — who held you in the highest esteem — will now suppose that you have withdrawn from the battle out of fear (bhayena saṃgrāmāt). The movement from bahumata (honored) to lāghava (lightness) is calibrated: the fall in reputation is proportional to the height of the prior regard. Śrīdhara's reading is spare and precise — no elaborate metaphysics, only the clean statement that the same company of warriors who elevated Arjuna will be the witnesses of his disgrace, because they will misread his grief-born hesitation as cowardice.

• Madhusūdanaadvaita-bhakti

  Madhusūdana closes off the consoling fantasy Arjuna has silently nursed: perhaps Bhīṣma and Droṇa, knowing his compassionate nature, will praise him for laying down arms. The answer is categorical — even those great teachers, even Duryodhana, even all the mahārathās will read the withdrawal not as compassion but as fear of Karṇa and his peers. And the cut is keener because of the prior regard: it is precisely because Bhīṣma and Droṇa had considered Arjuna to be possessed of extraordinary virtues (bahubhir guṇair yukta ayam arjuna iti mataḥ) that their new verdict — that he fled in fear — will carry the full weight of lāghava (universal disesteem). Madhusūdana thus collapses both the Advaita diagnosis of ahaṃkāra-based consolation and the bhakti insistence that the Lord's reproof is a form of grace-correction.