Chapter 1 · Verse 30·Spoken by Arjuna
गाण्डीवं स्रंसते हस्तात्त्वक्चैव परिदह्यते। न च शक्नोम्यवस्थातुं भ्रमतीव च मे मनः
gāṇḍīvaṁ sraṁsate hastāt tvak chaiva paridahyate na cha śhaknomy avasthātuṁ bhramatīva cha me manaḥ
The Gandiva slips from my hand and my skin burns all over. I cannot stand steady. My mind is reeling.
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Sanskrit recitation by Swami Brahmānanda
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machine-assisted draft, pending review
Convergence
ead plainly, this verse is the bottom of Arjuna's collapse on the battlefield. He reports four things happening to him at once: the Gandiva, his great bow, is slipping from his hand; his skin is burning all over; he cannot keep standing; and his mind is whirling. The commentators take these almost word for word, simply restating them as a sequence of bodily and mental symptoms. Gandiva is the proper name of Arjuna's bow, so the line is vivid: the very weapon whose bowstring's twang terrifies his enemies is now falling from his grip. This is not poetic exaggeration to them. It is a literal description of a warrior coming apart.
Braided from 6 commentators
Śrīdhara Svāmī · Dhanapati Sūri · Śrī Puruṣottama · Lokmanya Tilak · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Swami Ramsukhdas
The deeper claim several commentators draw out is that 'I cannot stand' and 'my mind is whirling' together point to an oncoming faint, a swoon. The inability to stand means the inability to hold the body up at all. The whirling of the mind is read as the particular state of consciousness that comes just before fainting, the mind losing its hold like a person who is reeling. On this reading the two clauses are linked as cause and effect: because the mind is reeling, therefore the body can no longer stand. So the verse is not just listing symptoms but tracing how grief is shutting Arjuna's body down from the inside, mind first, then legs.
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Swami Ramsukhdas · Śrī Ānandagiri
These commentators are careful to root the whole breakdown in the mind, not in the body alone. The trembling, the burning skin, the slipping bow, the reeling head are all named as effects of an inner anxiety and grief over what the war will bring. The cause is mental; the body is only where that grief shows up. This matters for how the Gita as a whole will treat Arjuna's crisis: his problem is a confusion and sorrow in the mind, and the cure Krishna gives will be addressed to the mind, not to Arjuna's fighting ability, which is intact.
Swami Ramsukhdas · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Ānandagiri
Some commentators connect this collapse to the next thing Arjuna will say, that he sees adverse omens. Several read the burning, the sinking limbs, and the loss of steadiness as themselves the kind of contrary signs that foretell coming sorrow, things like the twitching of the left eye, taken in tradition as bad portents. On this view Arjuna's breakdown is doing double duty: it is both his suffering and, to his own mind, an omen of disaster ahead, deepening his refusal to fight.
Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Bhāskara · Swami Ramsukhdas
Two commentators step back and frame this whole speech as the prima facie position, the purvapaksha, that Krishna's teaching will go on to answer. Arjuna's despair rests on a particular way of seeing: he looks at the men before him as 'these are my teachers, my kinsmen' and concludes that killing them must bring sin, and he sees the war as fought merely for kingdom and pleasure, a seen, selfish end, which again seems to make it sinful. These commentators note that the reply, when it comes, will not deny the facts but will change how Arjuna acts: do your duty simply as your own dharma, not for a personal end and not under the spell of 'these are mine'.
Ācārya Abhinavagupta · Śrī Bhāskara
Divergence
Advaita Vedānta
These commentators read the verse as a precise clinical picture of a swoon and dwell on the address 'Krishna' and 'Keshava' to expose the spiritual root of Arjuna's state. One draws a sharp contrast hidden in the name 'Krishna': Arjuna, not yet a knower of the Self, is unhappy and so suffers the affliction of grief, whereas Krishna is by nature constant bliss and is untouched by grief, even though both are looking at the same kinsmen. The very fact that the same sight devastates one and leaves the other serene is offered as evidence that grief belongs to the deluded view of the self, not to reality. Arjuna is read as unconsciously begging: make me, who am sunk in grief, free of grief as you are. The name 'Keshava' is then read as a sign of Krishna's power to do exactly that, glossed through the derivation that Brahma the creator and Isha the destroyer both come to him; and 'Krishna' is also taken to mean the one who draws away the sorrow of his devotees. The other commentator simply notes that this verse adds the loss of steadiness and the onset of great delusion, confirmed by the omens, to Arjuna's earlier symptoms.
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Ānandagiri
Bhedabheda
This commentator reads the omen-clause carefully and offers two ways to take it. Either Arjuna sees the signs usually thought to foretell victory, such as enthusiasm, now reversed and turned unfavorable; or he simply sees plainly inauspicious signs like the sinking of his own limbs. Either way the point is that Arjuna foresees no benefit from killing his kinsmen. This commentator then flags the obvious objection that will be raised next, that a Pandava victory would in fact yield the good of a kingdom, and notes that Arjuna's coming words are meant to head off that very objection, setting up the case that no worldly gain could justify the slaughter.
Śrī Bhāskara
Kashmir Shaivism
This commentator treats Arjuna's words strictly as the prima facie view to be refuted, and locates the error precisely in a 'particular cognition'. When the mind superimposes the thought 'these are my teachers, my own people' onto the men before it, killing them is felt to incur sin; likewise, killing in a war fought with the cognition 'this is for a seen end, my own enjoyment and pleasure' incurs sin. The flaw is not the act of fighting but the self-referring, possessive way of construing it. For just this reason, this commentator says, the answer will be to act with no such particular cognition at all: perform your action simply as your own dharma, without the overlay of 'mine' and without aiming at personal enjoyment.
Ācārya Abhinavagupta
Modern
This commentator reads the collapse with unusual psychological detail and ties it to Arjuna's distinctive way of seeing. Every limb is going slack, the mouth is drying so that speech itself is hard, the body trembles, the hairs stand on end, and even the dreaded Gandiva slips, because anxiety over the war's future consequences has spread from the mind into the whole body; the whirling of the mind means that what he ought to do does not even occur to him, and he feels he will faint and fall. Crucially this commentator stresses that Arjuna's grief is wider and nobler than Dhritarashtra's: where the blind king feared only for 'his own sons' against 'the sons of Pandu', Arjuna says 'svajana', kinsmen, which covers both armies, grieving that whoever dies of whatever side is still his own. The address 'Krishna', dearest of names to Arjuna and used nine times in the Gita, is noted as the sign of their intimate mutual love. And the breakdown is read as Arjuna's way of declaring, through these omens of coming ruin, the sheer impropriety of waging this war, so that even to stand on the battlefield feels to him like a sin.
Swami Ramsukhdas
A Seeker Asks
Is Arjuna's total physical and mental collapse a failing to be overcome, or is it the honest, even noble, response of a compassionate person facing the slaughter of people he loves?
The commentators treat it as both at once, and that is the key. The breakdown is genuinely a state to be cured: the slipping bow, the burning skin, the inability to stand, the whirling mind are all named as effects of an inner grief and anxiety that has clouded Arjuna's judgment, so that, in one commentator's words, what he ought to do no longer even occurs to him. A mind reeling toward a faint is not a mind seeing clearly.
Swami Ramsukhdas · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
Yet the feeling underneath the collapse is not dismissed as mere weakness. One commentator carefully distinguishes Arjuna's grief from the blind king's: Arjuna says 'svajana', kinsmen, taking in both armies, sorrowing that anyone at all should die, where the king feared only for his own side. That width of compassion is honest and is taken seriously.
Swami Ramsukhdas
What the commentators locate as the real flaw is not the compassion but the particular way of seeing fused to it. The mind superimposes 'these are my teachers, my own people' and concludes that to fight must be sin; it also frames the war as fought for a selfish, seen end, personal kingdom and pleasure, which seems sinful too. The error is this self-referring overlay of 'mine' and of private gain, not the tenderness itself.
Ācārya Abhinavagupta
So the answer the Gita is preparing does not shame Arjuna's heart and does not deny the facts. It changes the ground of action: do your duty simply as your own dharma, without the spell of 'these are mine' and without aiming at personal enjoyment. The collapse is to be outgrown, but by clarifying Arjuna's seeing, not by hardening his heart.
Ācārya Abhinavagupta · Śrī Bhāskara
Contemplation
Notice the quiet dignity this commentator finds in Arjuna's very breakdown. The difference between Arjuna and the blind king Dhritarashtra is not in how much each loves; it is in how wide that love reaches. Dhritarashtra trembled only for his own sons and saw the other side as enemies. Arjuna, looking at the same field, says 'svajana', my own people, and means both armies; whoever falls on whatever side, he grieves, because all of them are kin. So when you find your own heart shaking before a hard duty, it is worth asking which kind of seeing is shaking it. Is it the narrow fear of losing what is mine, or the wider ache that no one should be harmed? The first is the grief the Gita will gently dismantle. The second is closer to the compassion the whole teaching means to mature. The collapse here is not yet wisdom. But the breadth of feeling underneath it is the soil wisdom can grow in, once Arjuna learns to act from his own dharma rather than from the spell of 'mine'.
Sit with this · Swami Ramsukhdas
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