Chapter 2 · Verse 36·Spoken by Krishna
अवाच्यवादांश्च बहून् वदिष्यन्ति तवाहिताः। निन्दन्तस्तव सामर्थ्यं ततो दुःखतरं नु किम्
avāchya-vādānśh cha bahūn vadiṣhyanti tavāhitāḥ nindantastava sāmarthyaṁ tato duḥkhataraṁ nu kim
And your enemies will speak many cruel words, mocking your strength. What could be more painful than that?
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Sanskrit recitation by Swami Brahmānanda
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Convergence
rishna keeps pressing the same practical point: if Arjuna walks away from the battle, his enemies will not respect him for it; they will mock him. The verse names these people as his ahita, his ill-wishers or foes, the ones who actively wish him harm. Commentators identify them concretely as the sons of Dhritarashtra and their allies: Duryodhana, Duhshasana, Karna and the rest. Krishna's point is that these are not neutral judges. They already bear enmity toward Arjuna, so they will seize on his withdrawal and twist it, not honor it.
Braided from 8 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Rāmānujācārya · Śrīla Baladeva · Swami Ramsukhdas · Dhanapati Sūri · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrī Bhāskara
What they will speak is avachya-vada: words that should not be uttered at all, harsh and degrading. The commentators are unusually specific about the content. The taunts will attack his manhood and courage: calling him impotent, calling him feeble, jeering that he fled out of fear of Bhishma and the rest. The phrasing 'unspeakable' does not mean vague; it means words so coarse and shaming that decent speech would not contain them. Several commentators quote the kind of jibe directly, such as the mocking 'Arjuna got frightened and went away,' so the reader feels the exact sting Krishna is warning about.
Braided from 9 commentators
Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Swami Ramsukhdas · Sant Jñāneśvar · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śaṅkarācārya
The target of the mockery is precisely Arjuna's samarthya, his strength, prowess, or established power. This is the bitter irony Krishna sharpens. Arjuna is genuinely a great hero; his renown is already won and famous, recalling feats such as his victory over Nivatakavaca. The enemies know this perfectly well. Yet, knowing it, they will still revile that very power, decrying and belittling the one thing he is most respected for. So the slander is not just insult; it is the deliberate inversion of his greatest distinction, turning his glory into a target.
Braided from 8 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Swami Ramsukhdas · Śrīla Baladeva · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Lokmanya Tilak · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrī Bhāskara · Rāmānujācārya
Krishna's closing question, 'what could be more painful than that?', is a settled conclusion, not an open query. The answer the commentators draw out is unanimous: there is no pain harder to bear than this. To incur such contemptuous slander is grief worse than death itself. The 'nu' in the verse marks this as certain. So the verse measures one suffering against another: the grief Arjuna fears in fighting is real, but the lasting disgrace of being branded a coward by his enemies is the greater and more unbearable wound.
Braided from 8 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri · Śrī Puruṣottama · Swami Sivananda · Rāmānujācārya · Sant Jñāneśvar
Read together with the verses just before it, this completes a sustained argument. Krishna has been answering an unspoken objection from Arjuna's side: that by withdrawing he could at least avoid the harsher grief of killing elders like Bhishma and Drona, and might even be left in peace by his foes. Krishna's reply closes that escape: the foes will not esteem the withdrawal; they will despise it, and the resulting reviling is a sorrow heavier than the one he hoped to dodge. With this, the commentators note, the whole sweep of these verses has shown how Arjuna's aversion to battle would bring him both dishonor and a fall from honor.
Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrīla Baladeva · Vedānta Deśika
Divergence
Viśiṣṭādvaita
This school carries the verse past mere worldly shame to a settled teaching about the hero's good. It first dramatizes the exact taunt: the enemies will sneer that Partha could not stand even a moment before true heroes, that his power is real only when he is safely away from them. Hearing such words about himself, Arjuna would come to think death the better thing. From this the school draws its distinctive conclusion: for a hero, both slaying others and being slain by others are alike for his good, and the Lord is teaching this. One source adds a fine point on the word avachya itself: these words are 'unspeakable' only in relation to the listener. To a brave man such mockery is not truly unspeakable, since he can answer it; it becomes unspeakable, unbearable, only to one who has shrunk into cowardice. The same source reasons that the pain will not crush Arjuna but goad him: stung past endurance, he will rise to fight, so the very sorrow Krishna predicts becomes the force that drives him back to his duty.
Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika
Bhedabheda
This reading frames the coming insult against the high regard Arjuna currently enjoys, and so measures the fall, not just the blow. The great warriors will assume he withdrew out of fear of Karna and the others. The sharpness, on this account, is that a man held in esteem for many fine qualities, praised as righteous in disposition and as truly valiant, will now be made light of. The grief is the contrast between the reputation he holds and the contempt that would replace it; that downfall in standing is itself called more grievous still, layered on top of the unspeakable words his enemies will speak.
Śrī Bhāskara
A Seeker Asks
Why would the spiritual teacher of the Gita motivate his student with the fear of public shame and what people will say, when so much of the rest of the text points away from caring about reputation?
It helps to see where this verse sits. Krishna is still meeting Arjuna exactly where he stands at this moment: a warrior whose collapse is dressed up as high-minded reluctance to fight. So Krishna answers on that level first, showing that the withdrawal Arjuna imagines as noble would in fact be read by his own enemies as cowardice, and would earn not peace but contempt. The honor argument is aimed at the rationalization, puncturing the idea that quitting is the clean and virtuous choice.
Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śaṅkarācārya
The taunt is also sharpened to expose a specific self-deception. The enemies will mock the very prowess Arjuna actually possesses, jeering that his strength is real only when he is far from real heroes. By holding up that gibe, Krishna forces Arjuna to feel that running away does not protect his self-image at all; it hands his enemies the truth they want to claim. The point is less 'protect your reputation' and more 'do not mistake flight for integrity.'
Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika
And the deepest reading turns the fear of shame into something self-undoing. One commentator notes that these words are unbearable only to a coward; to a steady person they have no real grip. Another shows that the enemies speak precisely to inflame Arjuna from within, which exposes that the sting lives in his own reaction, not in their mouths. So the verse is not finally asking Arjuna to live for praise. It is using the most painful worldly motive he still feels to push him to act, while quietly pointing toward the equanimity, later taught directly, in which such words can no longer move him at all.
Vedānta Deśika · Swami Ramsukhdas
Contemplation
Sit for a moment with how exactly this hits home. The people who will mock you are not strangers guessing at your worth; they know your strength, they know you are a great hero, and they will revile it anyway, purely to give you pain and inflame you from within. That is the design of their words: to provoke. Notice, then, that the unbearable part is not really their opinion but your own reaction to it, the heat that rises inside when honor is touched. The honest question Krishna leaves you with, 'how will you endure their words?', is worth carrying into your own life. Where someone aims to needle you into reacting, the first work is to see the provocation for what it is, so that their words lose the power to govern what you do next.
Sit with this · Swami Ramsukhdas
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