Chapter 2 · Verse 12·Spoken by Krishna
न त्वेवाहं जातु नासं न त्वं नेमे जनाधिपाः। न चैव न भविष्यामः सर्वे वयमतः परम्
na tvevāhaṁ jātu nāsaṁ na tvaṁ neme janādhipāḥ na chaiva na bhaviṣhyāmaḥ sarve vayamataḥ param
There was never a time when I did not exist, nor you, nor any of these kings. And there will never be a time when we cease to be.
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Sanskrit recitation by Swami Brahmānanda
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Convergence
rishna's first reason for not grieving is that the Self never had a beginning and will never have an end. He states it for three persons across all three times: I never failed to exist, you never failed to exist, these kings never failed to exist, and none of us will ever cease to be. The doubled negative ('it is not that I was not') is deliberate. It is stronger than simply saying 'I always was,' because denying any past or future non-existence pins down the Self as something that has no prior absence to come out of and no destruction to fall into. Several commentators draw the technical point: the Self is not the 'counter-correlate' of a prior non-existence (it is unborn) and not the counter-correlate of destruction (it is imperishable). Having being in all three times, it is eternal.
Braided from 15 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Dhanapati Sūri · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Rāmānujācārya · Madhvācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Swami Ramsukhdas · Swami Sivananda · Śrī Puruṣottama · Vallabhācārya · Ācārya Abhinavagupta · Śrī Ānandagiri
This eternity is the answer to the grief of the previous verse. Krishna had said the wise do not grieve for the dead or the living; here he gives the ground. Since Bhishma, Drona, and the other warriors are, in their true nature as Self, indestructible, there is no real loss to mourn. The body comes and goes, but the one who wears it does not. Many commentators frame the verse as drawing a clean line between the perishable body and the imperishable Self: the body is the thing that arises and dies, the Self is what persists through that arising and dying, so grief aimed at the death of the body has mistaken its object.
Braided from 11 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Ācārya Abhinavagupta · Śrī Bhāskara · Śrī Jayatīrtha · Swami Ramsukhdas · Swami Sivananda · Śrī Puruṣottama
Krishna includes his own eternity in the list, but several commentators note he does so as an illustration, not as the main lesson. The Lord's own eternity is taken as already settled and beyond dispute throughout the Vedanta; he leans on that agreed fact to establish the point actually in question, which is the eternity of the ordinary souls, Arjuna and the kings. The unstated logic is 'just as I am eternal, so are you.' This is why the second half of the verse, which has only one continuous clause, is read by supplying 'just as' and splitting it: the certain case (the Lord) carries the doubtful case (the souls).
Braided from 6 commentators
Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha · Rāmānujācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Vedānta Deśika
Krishna uses plural and personal words: I, you, these, all, we. The whole tradition agrees this language is doing real work, but it agrees on little else about it, and this is the verse's main fault line. One side reads the plural as merely following the difference of bodies, since from the highest standpoint there is only one Self appearing as many through ignorance-made limiting conditions. The other side reads the very same plural, spoken at the moment of teaching the truth, as proof that the distinctness of selves from each other and from the Lord is real and permanent. Both sides take the wording with full seriousness; they divide on what it ultimately establishes.
Braided from 11 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Dhanapati Sūri · Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika · Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha · Śrīla Baladeva · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Vallabhācārya · Lokmanya Tilak
Divergence
Advaita Vedānta
The Self is one, and the plural ('I, you, these kings, we') follows only the difference of bodies, not any difference of Selves. The standing image is space and pots: as one space appears divided by many pots and persists unbroken through their making and breaking, so the one Self appears as many embodied selves yet stays single and eternal. The plurality is set up by limiting conditions fashioned by ignorance; it is not ultimate. From the absolute standpoint there is no plurality, only one Self, and this is said to accord with the reading of the Brahma Sutras. Within this school the argument is also sharpened logically: the Self is unborn because it is free of any prior non-existence, like a hare's horn that never comes to be; and being existent, it is also imperishable, like the negative concomitance shown by the example of a pot. Birth and death belong only to the conditioned, body-bound Self; the unconditioned Self has neither. One source adds that the verse shows the Self as eternal even when viewed, by ordinary reckoning, as still carrying the subtle body, and supports the continuity of life across bodies by past karma, so that the body's destruction never entails the Self's destruction.
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Dhanapati Sūri · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
Viśiṣṭādvaita
The verse states a real, natural, permanent difference, of the souls from the Lord and of the souls from one another. The decisive point is the setting: these difference-marking words ('I,' 'you,' 'these,' 'all,' 'we') are spoken at the very moment the Lord is teaching the truth to remove delusion, so the difference cannot be a mere appearance that the teaching is meant to dissolve. If the difference of selves were only adventitious, resting on limiting conditions and therefore unreal, then pointing it out precisely while teaching reality would make no sense. The reading is backed by revelation: 'eternal among eternals, conscious among the conscious, the one who, being one, grants the desires of the many,' which names many eternal conscious beings and one among them who fulfils their desires. This school presses a long objection against the rival view: if the perception of difference were the work of ignorance, then the Lord, whose vision is of the highest truth and who already has direct realization, would have no such ignorance and so could neither perceive difference nor teach; and the escape that difference lingers as a harmless 'sublated remnant' (like a burnt cloth keeping its shape, or mirage-water seen after one knows it is false) fails, because here the object of the difference-cognition is held to be unreal with its very cause, so nothing of it can remain to ground real teaching of real pupils. Scripture calling the Lord all-knowing forbids ascribing any earlier ignorance to him. Therefore the difference the Lord states is the souls' own nature.
Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika
Dvaita
The Lord's own eternity is not the topic; he brings it in only as an illustration ('just as I am eternal, established throughout the Vedanta, so are you and these kings'). The point being proved is the eternity of the souls, and it is established by inference with the Lord as the example, the second half of the verse being read by supplying 'just so' and splitting the single clause. This school explains carefully why such teaching is even needed: some, hearing 'eternal among the eternals,' reason that since 'eternal' means absence of destruction and absence admits no degrees, only the Lord can be truly eternal and the soul's eternity must be merely figurative; against them the soul's real eternity is demonstrated, with the Lord as the undisputed instance. The Lord's instruction takes Arjuna as the occasion but is given for the benefit of the world. The school also notes, against the rival who says the plural refers to bodies and not to selves, that the Lord here has actually taught the difference of souls from one another and from the Lord, and reads 'the Lord' (not the proper name 'Krishna') into the construction precisely to mark that the soul's eternity is the thing being established.
Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha
Bhedabheda
This source comments on the cluster rather than parsing the plural pronouns. Its emphasis falls on why Bhishma and the others are not to be grieved: being engaged in their own duty, the threefold aim of life is accomplished for them and the result to come is everlasting, so mourning them does not become Arjuna. The wise, whose knowledge of reality is fully matured and who hold the true nature of the Self in view, see the Self's indestructibility and so feel no grief. The applied conclusion is drawn directly: since you too attain that same indestructibility, you ought to abandon delusion and grief. (On the metaphysical status of difference, the school that grounds distinction in real limiting conditions is engaged only by the opposing Vishishtadvaita source, which extends its objection to it, noting that a partial unreality of difference would remain a doctrinal hurdle.)
Śrī Bhāskara
Śuddhādvaita
The verse fastens an eternal plurality of selves that is real: the many selves are the Lord's own emanations and keep their distinctness, the soul-Lord relation being pure-non-dual. One source develops the play (lila) dimension: Krishna is not a being who once was not and has now come to be; he has always been just as he is, and because all of it is a form of his play, the others too are eternal, so even the dying of demonic forces is part of an eternal play. On this reading the warriors are appearances within that play and so not occasions for grief; and the worry 'if I die I shall be parted from your feet or fall into wrongdoing' is answered by 'nor shall any of us ever cease to be,' a pledge that from this moment on all most certainly continue.
Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama
Kashmir Shaivism
The body, ever perishing, cannot be grieved for, and the Self, which does not deserve grief, you wrongly grieve for. Neither the dead nor the living is to be grieved for, because the Self is indestructible: what grief can there be for it as it passes through its many bodies? This source adds a pointed argument that the mere fact of moving into another body is no ground for grief, for if it were, then youth giving way to age and the other ordinary passages of one body would equally be occasions for grief, which no one accepts.
Ācārya Abhinavagupta
Bhakti
These devotional commentators affirm the eternity of both the Supreme Self and the individual souls, but they color the verse in distinct ways. One, with a Bhagavata leaning, reads even the kings as portions of the Lord (mad-amsha) and reads Krishna's own changelessness through the manifesting and withdrawing of his lila-body: the grief-defeating point is that, being free of birth and death, the warriors are simply not fit objects of grief. One frames the whole verse as testing the object of love: grief arises at the death of what one loves; but if, as scripture says, the Self is the most beloved, then since the Self, whether as soul or as Lord, is eternal and never dies, the beloved is never lost and grief has no footing. Two of these voices, who hold the difference of soul and Lord to be real, cite 'eternal among the eternal, conscious among the conscious, the one who fulfils the desires of the many' and argue strongly that the soul-Lord distinction is no mere product of ignorance: there is no ignorance in the all-knowing Lord; the distinction is even said to persist in liberation; the harmless-remnant defense fails just as for the rival above; and far from being barren, the very difference (marked by opposed properties such as all-pervadingness and atomicity, lordship and servitude, knowable only through scripture) carries the declared fruit of immortality, while non-difference is called fruitless and, like a hare's horn, unreal. One Marathi voice goes the other way entirely, reading the verse as Advaita: it is a delusion to feel certain that we will either live forever as these persons or be dissolved into nothing; both are unrealities, for creation and decay are appearances caused by Maya while Brahman alone is indestructible, just as no real thing is born when wind ripples water and nothing real is destroyed when the ripples subside.
Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar
Modern
These voices keep close to the plain teaching and mostly stay out of the school-quarrel. One reads it simply: Krishna here teaches the immortality of the soul; the soul exists in past, present, and future; a person continues after the death of the body; there is life beyond. One unfolds the doubled negative: it would have been enough to say 'we existed before,' but saying 'it is not that we did not exist' makes the truth firm, that the eternal reality is always eternal and has never for an instant been absent, in any place, condition, or state; he also distinguishes appearing in a given form (Krishna's, Arjuna's, a king's) from existing, so that not being manifest in this body earlier does not mean not existing. One notes the live doctrinal dispute only to set it aside: the claim that, because the Lord and the souls both existed in the past and will be born again, they are therefore separate and independent permanent entities, is treated as a partisan reading; this verse means only that both are permanent, and the question of how they are inter-related is not raised here but is settled later in the Gita on non-dualist lines.
Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas
A Seeker Asks
If my true Self never began and never ends, why does the death of someone I love feel like a real and total loss rather than a mere change of clothing?
The verse answers by relocating where the loss actually falls. What ends at death is the body, the thing that was always arising and perishing; what does not end is the one who wore it. As one image has it, the dweller passes through many bodies as space persists through the making and breaking of many pots. So the feeling of total loss has, in truth, fastened onto the part that was never going to stay, not onto the person, who in their real nature does not die.
Śaṅkarācārya · Ācārya Abhinavagupta · Swami Ramsukhdas
The grief feels total because we love the person, but consider what in them we love. If the most beloved is the Self, then since the Self is eternal whether viewed as the individual soul or as the Lord, the beloved is precisely the thing that never dies; what is lost is only the visible form, not the one we loved. One voice presses the point further: if simply moving to another body were a genuine ground for grief, then the passage from youth to age within a single life would equally call for grief, which no one accepts.
Śrīla Viśvanātha · Ācārya Abhinavagupta
This is not offered as cold logic. The doubled 'it is not that they were not' is meant to make the truth firm and steady against the very force of the grief. And whether the schools read the continuing self as one Self appearing as many or as truly many selves that persist, they meet on the consoling core: the one you grieve for has not been annihilated. He was, across past and present, and he will be, hereafter; not being visible to you in this form is not the same as not existing.
Swami Ramsukhdas · Swami Sivananda · Śrīla Baladeva · Śrī Puruṣottama
Contemplation
Sit with the strange double negative of this verse. Krishna does not just say 'we existed before' and 'we shall be'; he says it is not the case that we were not, and not the case that we shall not be. That extra fold is the consolation. Saying 'it is not so that we were not' makes firm the truth that we surely were, that the eternal reality has never, for even an instant, been absent, in any place, condition, state, or circumstance. When grief tells you someone has been erased, hold this distinction: there is a difference between appearing in a particular form and existing. Krishna was not manifest in this Krishna-form before the avatara, Arjuna was not manifest in this Arjuna-form before his birth, the kings were not visible as kings before theirs; yet it was never true that they were not. So with the one you mourn. The form has gone out of sight; the one who wore it has not gone out of existence. Let that be the thing you return to: the eternal reality cannot in the slightest be absent.
Sit with this · Swami Ramsukhdas
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