Chapter 1 · Verse 40·Spoken by Arjuna
कुलक्षये प्रणश्यन्ति कुलधर्माः सनातनाः। धर्मे नष्टे कुलं कृत्स्नमधर्मोऽभिभवत्युत
kula-kṣhaye praṇaśhyanti kula-dharmāḥ sanātanāḥ dharme naṣhṭe kulaṁ kṛitsnam adharmo ’bhibhavaty uta
When a family is destroyed, its eternal traditions perish. When tradition is lost, lawlessness overwhelms the whole family.
Word by Word
Saved for this reading session
Three movements · tap a label to switch
Sanskrit recitation by Swami Brahmānanda
Audio from the Gītā Supersite, IIT Kanpur
Synthesis · a glossed leaf
machine-assisted draft, pending review
Convergence
rjuna is still building his case against fighting, and here he names a specific dread: the death of the family. He uses the word kula, which means the family line or clan, the whole continuous lineage and not just the people alive right now. His fear is that war will wipe out this line. Most commentators simply restate the verse's logic in their own words to make the chain of consequences plain: when the family is destroyed, what follows is the collapse of the family's dharma.
Braided from 6 commentators
Dhanapati Sūri · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas · Sant Jñāneśvar
The phrase kula-dharmah sanatanah means the eternal duties of the family. Commentators stress both halves. Dharma here is concrete: it is the body of duties, rites, and ceremonies that a family performs in keeping with the injunctions of scripture. Several spell this out as the holy customs and observances handed down through the generations, the sacraments that mark a life from birth through the rite of the twice-born, through marriage, through death, and the rites for the dead afterward. These are called eternal (sanatanah) because they have come down from the very origin of the line and have always lived alongside it.
Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas · Dhanapati Sūri · Śrī Puruṣottama
The reason the dharma dies with the family is mechanical, not mysterious. These rites do not float free; they depend on living people to perform them. When the clan itself is destroyed, the doers of the rites are gone, and so the rites simply have no one left to carry them out. As one commentator puts it directly: when the clan that the duties depended on is destroyed, on whom are those duties to depend? So the eternal customs lapse for the plain reason that their performers have been killed.
Dhanapati Sūri · Swami Ramsukhdas
Once the family's dharma has lapsed, the vacuum does not stay neutral; adharma, meaning lawlessness or unrighteousness, moves in and overcomes the whole surviving family. The verse says this plainly and the commentators echo it. One adds a vivid picture: just as fire kindled by rubbing two pieces of wood goes on to consume the whole log, so the jealousy that drives kinsmen to kill one another breeds great sin, burns up the family, and lets anti-religious tendencies grow up where the old observances used to stand.
Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Dhanapati Sūri · Sant Jñāneśvar
Several commentators read this verse as the opening link in a longer chain of ruin that the next verses unfold. They take the lawlessness named here to lead next to the corruption of the family's women, and from there to a confusion of castes. One understands corruption concretely as women turning to men of another caste for the sake of children; another explains how fallen husbands who destroyed the line in war would themselves drag the women down. The Vishishtadvaita reading notes that the master commentary marks the words about adharma overcoming the family as pointing to an inner, mental fault, not merely an outer disorder.
Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Śrī Bhāskara · Vedānta Deśika
Divergence
Here the commentators are of one mind.
A Seeker Asks
Is Arjuna giving a sound moral teaching here about the value of family and tradition, or is this the very fear-driven reasoning that Krishna will go on to correct?
Taken on its own terms, the verse is internally coherent and the commentators treat its logic as real: families do carry eternal customs, those customs do depend on living people to keep them, and when the people are gone the customs lapse and disorder can follow. So Arjuna is not speaking nonsense; he is pointing at a genuine good, the unbroken sacramental life of a lineage from birth to the rites for the dead.
Swami Ramsukhdas · Swami Sivananda · Dhanapati Sūri
But notice that this is still Arjuna speaking, and the commentators present it as the first link in a cascade of dreaded consequences he is piling up to justify not fighting. The vivid image of jealousy as a fire that consumes the whole family shows the heat behind the argument; this is grief reasoning forward into worst-case ruin, caste-confusion and the fall of the women, not yet the steadier vision the teaching will offer. So both readings hold at once: the value he names is real, and the use he is making of it, to talk himself out of his duty, is exactly what the dialogue will go on to examine.
Sant Jñāneśvar · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha
Pull up a chair.
You have come to sit with this verse. When you are ready to hear the translators and the commentators in full, tap a name in The seating.