Chapter 1 · Verse 34·Spoken by Arjuna
आचार्याः पितरः पुत्रास्तथैव च पितामहाः। मातुलाः श्चशुराः पौत्राः श्यालाः सम्बन्धिनस्तथा
āchāryāḥ pitaraḥ putrās tathaiva cha pitāmahāḥ mātulāḥ śhvaśhurāḥ pautrāḥ śhyālāḥ sambandhinas tathā
Teachers, fathers, sons, and grandfathers; uncles, fathers-in-law, grandsons, brothers-in-law, and other kinsmen.
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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
his verse is Arjuna naming, one by one, exactly who stands on the battlefield against him. He lists them as relationships, not enemies: teachers (acharyas), fathers, sons, grandfathers, maternal uncles (the mother's brothers), fathers-in-law, grandsons, brothers-in-law (shyalas, the brothers of the wives), and other kinsmen. Several commentators simply walk through this list and confirm each term, which keeps the point concrete: every face in the opposing army is bound to Arjuna by blood or by the duties of kinship. The horror he is about to voice is not abstract; it has names.
Braided from 6 commentators
Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrī Puruṣottama · Dhanapati Sūri · Lokmanya Tilak · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Śrī Ānandagiri
The verse answers a hidden objection. Earlier Arjuna spoke of wanting kingdom, pleasures, and happiness; one could ask, where are the very people for whose sake a kingdom would be worth having? This verse is his reply: they are right here, arrayed to be killed. The kingdom is wanted for the sake of kin, yet winning it would mean destroying those same kin. So the listing is not a digression. It exposes the contradiction at the heart of the war and sets up his refusal.
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
Arjuna confronts head-on the argument that killing here would carry no blame. The reasoning he is resisting runs: these men are aggressors, the intending slayers; by the accepted principle that one may kill an attacker who means to kill you, striking them would be no fault, and besides, if you spare them out of compassion they will kill you anyway and seize the kingdom, so kill them first and enjoy it. Arjuna grants the premise and still refuses. Even if they are attacking, even if they mean to kill us, even if our sparing them costs us our lives, I will not slay them.
Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Bhāskara · Swami Ramsukhdas
His refusal is then pushed to its furthest limit by scale. He says he would not kill them even to win the sovereignty of the three worlds, let alone for mere rule of the earth. The point of naming the largest conceivable prize is to show that no reward, however vast, could justify the act for him. The word api ('even') doing this work twice, on their attacking and on the three-worlds prize, drives home that nothing on either side, neither their aggression nor any gain, moves him to kill these particular men.
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Bhāskara · Swami Ramsukhdas
Divergence
Modern
This source reads the verse through the inner machinery of desire. It points forward to the Gita's later teaching that lust (kama), anger (krodha), and greed (lobha) are the three gates of hell, and argues all three are really forms of kama, desire, alone. Desire works two ways: grasping the wanted and warding off the unwanted. Greed is the wish to hoard; lust is the wish to enjoy; anger flares when something blocks the warding-off of the unwanted. In war, then, a person is driven only two ways: by anger, to repel what he does not want, and by greed, to seize what he does. On this reading Arjuna here refuses both at once. Even if the kinsmen, in their own anger, strike to kill him, he will not, in his own anger, kill them back; even if they, in greed for the kingdom, seek his death, he will not, in his own greed, slay them for the kingdom. The sense drawn out is that to kill here would be to purchase the very gates of hell, and Arjuna will not buy them.
Swami Ramsukhdas
Advaita Vedānta
Rather than interpret the refusal, this source pauses on a single word, shyala ('brother-in-law'), to settle its correct form and derivation. It notes the word begins with a dental sound, citing a mantra-line in which 'one is unwilling, like the bride's brother-in-law,' and offers an alternative grammatical derivation following the old etymologist Yaska, glossing the parts in terms of parched grain that shoots up and the winnowing fan that scatters. This is a grammarian's note on the kin-list itself, not a reading of Arjuna's argument, and it shows part of the commentarial tradition's care for fixing the exact words of the verse before any meaning is built on them.
Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha
A Seeker Asks
Is Arjuna's refusal to kill his kinsmen, even in self-defense and even for the highest reward, the right response that the Gita affirms, or the confusion it has to undo?
Take seriously what is genuinely admirable in his stand before judging it. Arjuna refuses the easy justifications: that the other side are the aggressors, that the law permits killing an attacker, that they will kill him anyway if he hesitates. He grants every one of those and still will not raise his weapon, even if it costs him his life and even for the sovereignty of all three worlds. As a recoil from killing one's own for the sake of gain, this is not small-mindedness; it is a real refusal to let any prize buy the act.
Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Bhāskara
But notice what the verse exposes about the motive underneath. One voice in the tradition shows that in war a person is moved only two ways, by anger pushing away the unwanted and by greed grasping the wanted, and Arjuna here is refusing precisely to act from anger or from greed. That is the worthy part. The unresolved part, which this same reading sets up rather than settles, is that Arjuna frames the whole choice as only killing-for-gain versus not-killing. The possibility that an act might be required as duty, owed regardless of any reward and free of both anger and greed, is exactly what he cannot yet see here and what the Gita will open for him afterward.
Swami Ramsukhdas
Contemplation
Sit for a moment with the X-ray this verse invites. Look at the next hard thing you feel pulled to do to someone, and ask what is really driving it. Is it anger, the urge to push away what you do not want, or is it greed, the urge to grab and keep what you do? These are named here as the same root: desire wearing two faces. Arjuna's whole stand in this verse is to refuse to act from either one. Even when the other person is in the wrong, even when refusing seems to cost you, notice the moment your anger wants to strike back or your wanting wants to seize. To act from those, this voice warns, is to purchase the gates of hell. The discipline is small and exact: catch the impulse, name it as anger or as greed, and decline to be moved by it.
Sit with this · Swami Ramsukhdas
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