Bhagavad Gītā Chapter 2, Verse 4: Krishna to Arjuna — Sāṅkhya-Yoga

Bhāṣyakāra purports

• Śaṅkaraadvaita

  Arjuna, confounded by the appearance of distinct persons as enemies, asks: 'How can I, Madhusūdana (slayer of Madhu), lift arrows against Bhīṣma and Droṇa — those worthy of pūjā (worship), not battle?' The very question betrays avidyā (nescience): the grief that treats the bodies before him as ultimately real is the same ignorance Kṛṣṇa will later diagnose. Śaṅkara's silence on this verse is itself instructive — the lamentation of the undiscriminating mind has no dialectical foothold until Kṛṣṇa intervenes at 2.10 to establish the ground on which jñāna (knowledge) can operate.

  divergence: Advaita reads Arjuna's paralysis as epistemological failure (avidyā), not ethical sensitivity. The elders' apparent worthiness for worship is itself a superimposition — real in vyavahāra (conventional transaction), dissolved in paramārtha (ultimate truth). Śaṅkara withholds commentary because the question does not yet contain the terms in which its answer can be given.

• Rāmānujaviśiṣṭādvaita

  Rāmānuja reads the verse as Arjuna's second wave of confusion — snehā (affection), kāruṇya (compassion), and fear of adharma (unrighteousness) tangled together, preventing him from receiving what Bhagavān has already declared as most beneficial. The image Rāmānuja lingers on is visceral: how could I eat food spattered with the blood of these very gurus, seated in chairs they once occupied? Arjuna's confusion is not cowardice but misplaced kainkarya (service-love) — the śeṣa (dependent being) who cannot yet see that his true service is to the Śeṣin (the Lord), not to kin.

  divergence: Viśiṣṭādvaita foregrounds the relational texture of the verse: Arjuna is not rejecting war in the abstract but cannot stomach the thought of prospering through his teachers' deaths. Rāmānuja's distinctive move is that this confused loyalty still contains bhakti's seed — it is redirected, not erased, by Kṛṣṇa's teaching.

• Madhvadvaita

  For Madhva's school, the verse presents a jīva (individual soul) who is utterly dependent on Hari's will yet acts as though his own relational assessments are authoritative — a classic instance of jīva-svātantrya-abhimāna (false independence of the individual soul). Droṇa and Bhīṣma are indeed worthy of reverence; but reverence offered in defiance of Hari's direct command inverts the order of reality. Madhva withholds direct commentary until 2.11, where the metaphysical ground is laid, but the Dvaita reading requires that Arjuna's 'how can I fight them' be heard as a jīva claiming to override his niyantā (controller).

  divergence: Dvaita's sharpest divergence: Arjuna's emotional logic — these men deserve flowers, not arrows — is not wrong in a conventional sense, but it constitutes a category error when Hari's will is already disclosed. No created dharma (duty) can overrule the Lord's direct appointment. Madhva's silence until 2.11 is programmatic: lament has no doctrine; only Kṛṣṇa's teaching does.

• Vallabhaśuddhādvaita

  Arjuna — *snehakāruṇyadharmākulaḥ* (agitated by affection, compassion, and a sense of duty) and not truly understanding *bhagavadvākyam* (the Lord's word) — utters *katham* (how?). The epithet *arisūdana* (slayer of enemies) quietly rebukes: *śatrumāraṇe tvayāpi kvacin naivaṃ kṛtam* — 'not even you, when slaying enemies, have ever acted thus.' Arjuna addresses Kṛṣṇa as destroyer of foes while declaring that destroying foes is impossible; the address itself exposes a failure to abide in Kṛṣṇa's own nature. In *puṣṭi-mārga* (the path of grace), the Bhagavān's every epithet carries the force of his *svarūpa* (essential nature), and Arjuna, calling upon that name, unknowingly calls upon the very power whose grace alone can dissolve the paralysis *snehakāruṇyadharma* has produced.

  divergence: Śuddhādvaita alone treats the epithet *arisūdana* as the doctrinal hinge. Vallabha's bhāṣya quotes *śatrumāraṇe tvayāpi kvacin naivaṃ kṛtam* as a gentle challenge embedded in the vocative itself: Arjuna's paralysis is not an ethical impasse but a failure to recognise Kṛṣṇa's *svarūpa* in the very name he pronounces. Other schools attend to the ethical tension; Vallabha attends to the name.

• Śrīdharabhakti

  Śrīdhara Svāmī carefully parses Arjuna's self-defense: this is not mere cowardice, Arjuna insists — it is the injustice (anyāyatva) of the war itself that stops him. Bhīṣma and Droṇa are pūjārhau (worthy of worship) — those whom one would not fight even in play, even with words, even in sport; to meet them with arrows in lethal battle is a different order of violation entirely. Śrīdhara's devotional lens sees here not a paralyzed warrior but a man whose moral perception is exquisitely calibrated to relationship — the same sensitivity that, when redirected by Kṛṣṇa's grace, becomes the bhakta's (devotee's) capacity to love the Lord without reserve.

  divergence: Śrīdhara is the only commentator here who explicitly validates Arjuna's stated reason ('not cowardice but injustice') as a genuine moral claim worth addressing on its own terms. Where Advaita reads avidyā and Dvaita reads svātantrya-abhimāna, Śrīdhara reads a real ethical perception — which is why bhakti-philology treats the verse as pastoral care, not philosophical refutation.

• Madhusūdanaadvaita-bhakti

  Madhusūdana Sarasvatī reads the double address — Madhusūdana, then Arisūdana — as a symptom of grief's cognitive damage: Arjuna invokes the same name twice in different forms because his capacity to hold past and present together (pūrvāpara-parāmarśa) has broken down. More than any other commentator, Madhusūdana presses the social logic: these men are not merely elders but pūjārhau — worthy of flowers and sandalwood, not swords; even play-fighting with them would be improper, let alone battle aimed at their deaths. He adds a pointed argument about Duryodhana's dependency on Bhīṣma and Droṇa: the Kaurava army cannot even take the field without them, so to fight them is to fight dharma's own upholders in the service of its violators.

  divergence: Madhusūdana Sarasvatī is alone in offering a socio-political reading: the Kauravas are constitutively dependent on Bhīṣma and Droṇa, so Arjuna's refusal to fight is — from one angle — a refusal to legitimize Duryodhana's war at all. This synthesis of Advaita epistemology with Kṛṣṇa-bhakti's relational sensitivity produces the most dialectically layered reading of the four available commentaries on this verse.