Chapter 1 · Verse 29·Spoken by Arjuna
सीदन्ति मम गात्राणि मुखं च परिशुष्यति। वेपथुश्च शरीरे मे रोमहर्षश्च जायते
sīdanti mama gātrāṇi mukhaṁ cha pariśhuṣhyati vepathuśh cha śharīre me roma-harṣhaśh cha jāyate
My body trembles and my hair stands on end. My limbs give way and my mouth is parched.
Word by Word
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Sanskrit recitation by Swami Brahmānanda
Audio from the Gītā Supersite, IIT Kanpur
Synthesis · a glossed leaf
machine-assisted draft, pending review
Convergence
rjuna is naming, in plain bodily terms, the physical collapse that overtakes him as he looks at the armies. His limbs sink or grow slack, his mouth dries up, his body trembles, and the hair on his body stands on end. The commentators read this as a literal, almost clinical catalogue of symptoms: 'sidanti' (sink down) is glossed as the limbs loosening or becoming motionless, 'vepathu' as shaking or trembling, and 'roma-harsha' as horripilation, the bristling or thrilling of the body-hair. Nothing here is yet argument or philosophy. It is a man reporting what is happening to his own body.
Braided from 9 commentators
Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrī Bhāskara · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas
These outward signs have an inward cause. The trembling and the gooseflesh are not random; they are the body's response to what is happening in Arjuna's mind. He is looking at his own kinsmen assembled and eager to fight, and the thought 'these will die' floods him with grief. That grief then spreads outward and settles into every part of the body. The symptoms are, in other words, the visible print of an invisible sorrow and dread.
Dhanapati Sūri · Swami Ramsukhdas · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
The commentators tend to read the symptoms as belonging to a recognizable cluster of distress rather than as isolated tics. Several treat the failing of the limbs and the inner burning and the slipping of his weapon as parts of one breakdown: loss of courage and steadiness on the one side, inner anguish on the other. The whole verse, on this reading, is the opening of a description of a warrior unstrung, his strength and resolve draining out of him just when the fight is about to begin.
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Ānandagiri · Swami Ramsukhdas
Divergence
Advaita Vedānta
This reading sorts the symptoms into two distinct emotional states. The trembling of the limbs and the drying of the mouth are taken as the marks of sorrow, already set out in the previous verse. The shudder and the standing-up of the hair, by contrast, are the marks of fear. So the verse is not simply piling up signs of upset; it is moving from grief into dread, and the body registers each in its own way.
Śrī Ānandagiri
Advaita Vedānta
This reading draws out the meaning of the larger symptom-cluster. The weapon slipping from the hand is taken to show weakness whose distinguishing mark is the loss of courage, and the burning of the skin is taken to show the inner anguish. The point is to read the physical signs as a precise index of two different failures at once: the outward collapse of fighting-strength and the inward torment of the mind.
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
Advaita Vedānta
This reading traces the grief back to its deepest root. The 'I-ness' and 'mine-ness' that make Arjuna call these warriors his own, and so make their death unbearable, are themselves said to arise from not knowing the truth of the Self. The collapse described here is therefore the surface of a spiritual ignorance, not merely a passing emotion. This reading also hears a hidden note in the address 'O Krishna': as if Arjuna were half-saying, 'for the uplift of the world you are causing this decline of my clear knowledge, I have understood.'
Dhanapati Sūri
Modern
This reading frames the symptoms as omens and stresses what kind of grief they spring from. Arjuna's word for those before him is 'svajana,' our own people, which covers the men of both sides without division; this is set against the divided 'my sons' and 'sons of Pandu' of the blind king, who fears only for his own. So Arjuna grieves not for one camp but for all the kinsmen who must die, of whichever side. The trembling and the rest are then read as the body's anxiety over the future consequence of the war, and as inauspicious signs that foretell that coming ruin, by which Arjuna means to declare the war itself improper.
Swami Ramsukhdas
A Seeker Asks
Why does the Gita pause to catalogue Arjuna's trembling and gooseflesh in such physical detail, instead of moving straight to his argument against fighting?
Because the body is the honest register of the mind, and the verse wants us to see the breakdown before we hear the reasoning. The commentators read each symptom as the visible proof of an invisible state: the sinking limbs, the dry mouth, the shudder, the standing hair are grief and fear made physical. We meet a man genuinely unstrung, not a debater coolly laying out a case.
Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Swami Ramsukhdas
And the physical detail points back to a cause the arguments alone would hide. The whole collapse springs from the thought that his own kinsmen are about to die, a grief that for one reading reaches all the way down to the false sense of 'I' and 'mine' rooted in not knowing the Self. So the catalogue of symptoms is not a digression before the real point; it is the real point shown first in the flesh, the diagnosis the rest of the Gita will answer.
Dhanapati Sūri · Swami Ramsukhdas
Contemplation
Notice how exactly the body keeps the mind's accounts. Arjuna's dread is not in some private inner chamber sealed off from the world; it is in his slack limbs, his dry mouth, his shaking, the hair rising on his skin. The anxiety in his mind over what is coming is, quite literally, falling upon his whole body. When you next find yourself unstrung before something you fear, you can read your own body the way these commentators read Arjuna's: the trembling and the tight throat are honest messengers telling you where your mind has gone. They are worth listening to, not because the body has the final word, but because it shows you plainly the sorrow or fear you may not yet have admitted you are carrying.
Sit with this · Swami Ramsukhdas
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