Before the Teaching Begins: Returning to the First Chapter of the Gita

For years, I neglected the first chapter of the Bhagavad Gita.

I thought there was not much there beyond poetry, atmosphere, and the setting of the stage. The real Gita, I believed, began in the second chapter, when Arjuna finally turned to Krishna and surrendered himself as a disciple:

I am your disciple. I take refuge in you. Tell me what I ought to do.

Perhaps this was only natural for me. I have always had a strange tendency to begin from the second rather than the first.

But lately I have wondered: before asking what one ought to do, should one not first understand where one is standing?

And so I returned to the first chapter.

Not to Krishna’s answers yet, but to Arjuna’s bewilderment.

The Battlefield Before the Battle🌸

I should say at the beginning that I am trying to look at the Gita from Arjuna’s side.

Perhaps because I recognise something of my own ethical conflicts in his.

And Krishna—I love him in one particular way here, though outside the Gita I love him in many others.

I think of Arjuna as someone who has had to break himself, again and again, in order to arrive at the place from which he must lead. His journey has not always been morally uncomplicated. At times, he has had to accept paths that, seen in isolation, might appear questionable.

But Krishna does not look at him through the narrow lens of isolated acts.

Govinda, who sees the whole, opens the whole before him.

And perhaps it is only when the larger picture is revealed that Arjuna can finally afford to be truthful about the conflict within himself. It was this negotiation—between loyalty and conscience, action and doubt, the self and the collective—that led me back into the first chapter I had once abandoned.

The Gita begins at Dharmakshetra, Kurukshetra.

A field of dharma.

A field of war.

But I have begun to imagine this Dharmakshetra as something more intimate: the temple within the heart, the inner ground where reason and conscience meet.

And sometimes collide.

There stands Arjuna, a warrior who has come prepared for battle. Yet just before the battle begins, certainty abandons him.

The warrior becomes hesitant.

The man who came to fight begins to question whether he should fight at all.

And that hesitation, strangely enough, becomes the doorway to truth.

Which Side Are We On?🪷

Which side we stand on matters.

Or does it?

Some sides are chosen for us long before we become capable of choosing anything ourselves. We are born into families, communities, histories, relationships, loyalties. They arrive with birth, almost like names.

How long, then, are we obliged to stand with them?

And when we cross over to another side, how much of that crossing is really our own decision?

Can human beings truly be separated by clean lines—this side and that, ours and theirs, righteous and unrighteous?

How much of life do we control at all?

And even when we say, I belong to no side, have we not already taken a position?

How far can a person walk entirely alone?

There is another difficulty.

The people on our side are never entirely good.

What do we do with them?

For anyone entrusted with leadership, there is an even more dangerous question: where does caring for a community end and interfering with an individual’s freedom begin?

The line is painfully thin.

And what are we to make of a community that can turn someone into its hero today and trample the same person tomorrow?

Is there a way to belong without surrendering oneself?

A way to act without becoming false to one’s own conscience?

Perhaps there is.

But it is a subtle road.

To walk it, one must become a yogi.

And perhaps not everyone can.

That may be why the person walking such a path sometimes appears strange to everyone else. Around us, people seem to move together, one following another. Yet there may be no single road to the destination.

Sometimes, on this battlefield, we may even find ourselves outnumbered—like the Pandavas.

Those without scruple may appear to be moving ahead.

But appearance is not always strength.

Numbers are not always strength.

Victory is not always strength.

There is another kind of strength: the strength of an intention directed toward kalyan—toward what is ultimately good.

When the Enemy Has a Familiar Face🌺

Perhaps an unknown enemy is easier to destroy.

There is no shared afternoon with an unknown enemy. No remembered kindness. No old affection waiting quietly in the mind.

But what happens when the person standing across the battlefield is someone who once loved us?

Someone we have loved?

Someone whose presence belongs to our own history?

Before we can become hard enough to stand against such a person, does the memory of their love not first break something inside us?

This, to me, is the terrible beauty of Arjuna’s collapse in the first chapter.

He does not look across the battlefield and see simply enemies.

He sees faces.

And once the enemy has a face, morality becomes much more difficult.

Arjuna knows many things. Yet all that acquired knowledge cannot give him a clear view of life as a whole. Instead, fragments of knowledge gather like broken clouds across his vision. He knows enough to argue with himself, but not yet enough to escape the argument.

Knowledge has brought him not certainty, but paralysis.

Perhaps there comes a point when knowledge alone cannot carry us any further.

And this is where surrender begins.

Not the surrender of thought.

Not obedience without question.

But the surrender of the illusion that our fragmented knowledge is large enough to contain the whole.

Arjuna Still Questions🌿

There is something about Arjuna’s surrender that I find especially beautiful.

He questions Krishna.

He questions his Guru. And when an answer does not satisfy him, he questions again.

So surrender does not silence him.

It makes a deeper conversation possible.

To surrender, then, is not necessarily to stop thinking. Nor is faith the refusal to ask difficult questions. Arjuna’s relationship with Krishna seems to suggest almost the opposite: ask properly. Listen carefully. Question again if you must.

The Guru’s words are not meant to become another rigid wall around the mind.

And then Krishna tells him:

You speak like a,pandita, learned man, Arjuna, yet you grieve for those for whom the wise do not grieve.

I keep returning to the vocabulary surrounding this moment.

Pandit. Gyani. Murkha.

Buddhiman. Prayavan. Mohavishta.

Learned. Knowing. Foolish.

Intelligent. Wise. Deluded.

In the Gita, these do not feel like simple opposites to me. They seem almost like stations of consciousness through which a person travels.

Perhaps one can be learned and still bewildered.

Intelligent and still deluded.

Knowledgeable and still unable to see.

The journey of the yogi, then, is not merely from ignorance to information. It is a movement through different ways of knowing until knowledge itself is transformed.

How Many Times Do We Die?🌱

Krishna tells Arjuna that even if he believes the self to be born with the body and to die with it, grief cannot be the final truth:

What is born must die; what dies is born again.

But whenever I encounter this idea, another question comes to me.

Are birth and death only events of the body?

Must rebirth wait until after physical death?

I don’t think it does.

I think a human being can be born many times within a single life.

And die many times too.

There are selves we once thought permanent that one day simply cease to exist.

A belief dies.

A certainty dies.

A relationship dies.

A version of the future dies.

Sometimes an entire way of understanding ourselves disappears, and for a while we do not know who has survived it.

Yet something does.

And slowly, from the ruins of one self, another begins to take shape.

Perhaps this too is a kind of rebirth.

Perhaps our lives contain many small deaths before the death of the body, and many births before whatever birth may—or may not—come afterward. A person may be born and die repeatedly within one lifetime, and that mokshayoga lies somewhere in the journey toward one’s deepest self.

And perhaps this is why I no longer think of the first chapter as merely an introduction.

The Gita could not have begun with Krishna’s answers.

It had to begin with Arjuna’s collapse.

Before there can be wisdom, there must be bewilderment.

Before there can be instruction, there must be a question.

Before surrender, there must be that terrible moment when everything we know proves insufficient.

And before Krishna can show Arjuna the path, Arjuna must first stand still in the middle of the battlefield and admit:

I do not know which way to go.

Perhaps every ‘Gita‘ begins there.

Not in Kurukshetra alone,

but in that quiet and frightening Dharmakshetra within us.