Chapter 2 · Verse 35·Spoken by Krishna
भयाद्रणादुपरतं मंस्यन्ते त्वां महारथाः। येषां च त्वं बहुमतो भूत्वा यास्यसि लाघवम्
bhayād raṇād uparataṁ mansyante tvāṁ mahā-rathāḥ yeṣhāṁ cha tvaṁ bahu-mato bhūtvā yāsyasi lāghavam
The great warriors will think you left the battle out of fear. Those who once held you in high esteem will think little of you.
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Sanskrit recitation by Swami Brahmānanda
Audio from the Gītā Supersite, IIT Kanpur
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machine-assisted draft, pending review
Convergence
rishna keeps pressing the same point and now turns to how the warriors watching Arjuna will read his withdrawal. The 'great chariot-warriors' (maha-rathas, the elite fighters of the battlefield) will not see his stepping back as compassion. They will conclude he quit out of fear. The whole force of the verse is this misreading: Arjuna's inner motive and the outer interpretation will not match, and on a battlefield it is the outer interpretation that lands.
Braided from 14 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri · Rāmānujācārya · Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrī Bhāskara · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Sant Jñāneśvar · Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas
The reversal of standing is what the second half drives home. Until now these warriors held Arjuna in high esteem (bahu-mata, 'much regarded'), valuing him for his courage and skill. That very esteem makes the fall sharper. The man they ranked as a great hero will sink to 'laghava', a word that means lightness or littleness: he becomes someone treated as small, of no account, fit for contempt. The higher the earlier regard, the lower the contempt that replaces it.
Braided from 11 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri · Rāmānujācārya · Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas
Several commentators read this verse as Krishna answering an unspoken objection from Arjuna. Arjuna might think: let the petty or neutral onlookers sneer, but the noble warriors, or those who have actually seen my prowess, will understand my motive and even praise me. Krishna closes that escape. Even the great warriors, the very ones whose good opinion would matter most, will join the verdict of fear. There is no audience left whose respect Arjuna can keep by withdrawing.
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Ānandagiri · Śrī Puruṣottama
The commentators name the warriors concretely, and a real distinction surfaces in who is meant. Some point to the hostile camp (Duryodhana, Karna and the rest), the foes who once respected Arjuna as a formidable enemy. Others include the revered elders on the field (Bhishma, Drona, Krpa, Shalya). The verse works either way: whether the judge is an enemy or an honored teacher, the same false verdict of cowardice falls on Arjuna, so no quarter of the field offers him a sympathetic reading.
Braided from 6 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Rāmānujācārya · Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas · Vedānta Deśika
Divergence
Viśiṣṭādvaita
These commentators ground the misreading in a principle of the warrior world rather than mere gossip. Among heroic foes, a fighter's withdrawal from battle is credited to only one cause: fear of the enemy. No honorable motive, such as love for kinsmen, is ever accepted as the reason a warrior stops fighting. So the foes who once rated Arjuna a hero and a dangerous adversary must, by the logic of their own code, now read his retreat as cowardice. One of these commentators adds a further point: even if the wisest among them could grasp Arjuna's true heart, the foes who matter here do not know it, so the verdict of fear stands among exactly the warriors whose esteem Arjuna prizes.
Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika
Bhedabheda
This commentator draws out a stronger conclusion the verse implies for a man of honor. For one esteemed for qualities like valor, disgrace is worse than death itself. He reads this together with the surrounding argument: lasting infamy outweighs being killed, and therefore death in battle is actually preferable to the contempt that follows withdrawal. The ruin of reputation is treated not as a lesser harm but as the heavier loss.
Śrī Bhāskara
Modern
This commentator exposes Arjuna's stated motive by testing it against his own conduct. If Arjuna truly believed fighting was a sin and had withdrawn for his own spiritual welfare, he would have stayed apart from the start, living in solitude doing remembrance of God, and never come to the battlefield at all. But he did come, armed and ready. Given that, a late withdrawal can only be read one way by the great warriors: fear of being killed. A man fighting for dharma would not retreat, because fighting is the kshatriya's duty; so retreat now signals fear of death, not principle.
Swami Ramsukhdas
A Seeker Asks
Isn't Krishna here just appealing to ego and fear of disgrace, the very worldly motives the Gita tells us to renounce?
Notice first what Krishna is actually doing: he is meeting Arjuna exactly where Arjuna stands. Arjuna has not yet absorbed the teaching on the deathless Self; he is still a warrior reasoning from a warrior's world. So Krishna shows him, on his own terms, that his withdrawal will not even achieve what he imagines. It will not read as compassion to anyone watching; it will read as fear.
Śaṅkarācārya · Rāmānujācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
The verse is also a mirror held up to a self-deception. Arjuna frames his retreat as compassion, but the commentators point out the motive will not survive scrutiny, because his own prior conduct contradicts it. By forcing him to see how the act looks from outside, Krishna is really helping him see the fear he has hidden from himself; the reputation argument is the lever, but the target is honesty about his real motive.
Swami Ramsukhdas · Rāmānujācārya
And for a man of honor the loss at stake is not trivial vanity. One commentator weighs it directly: for one esteemed for valor, disgrace is heavier than death. Krishna is not flattering Arjuna's ego; he is showing him that the escape he is reaching for costs more, even by ordinary worldly accounting, than the duty he is trying to flee.
Śrī Bhāskara
Contemplation
Sit honestly with the gap between what you tell yourself and what your life actually shows. Arjuna says he is withdrawing for a higher reason, but he came to the field armed and resolved; the story he tells now does not fit the path he has already walked. The quiet test offered here is this: if your reason for stepping back from a hard duty were truly principled, your earlier choices would already reflect it. Where they do not, look gently for the real motive underneath, which is often plain fear wearing the costume of virtue. Naming that fear as fear, rather than dressing it as compassion or wisdom, is the first honest step.
Sit with this · Swami Ramsukhdas
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