Ch. 1, Verse 1: Dhṛtarāṣṭra’s curiosity

The opening of the Bhagavad-Gītā

Introduction

On this most auspicious day of Ratha Saptamī, the seventh day in the waxing fortnight of the month of Māgha, let us begin with the first verse of the Śrīmad-Bhagavad-Gītā. This is particularly appropriate for the Gītā, since the whole discourse between Lord Kṛṣṇa and Arjuna occurs on a chariot (ratha).

The eighteen chapters of the Gītā are all given distinct titles, all ending in the word yoga. The first chapter, for reasons that will become clear very quickly as we go through the text, is known as Arjuna-viṣāda-yoga, for it deals with Arjuna’s depression. But that is not where the first chapter begins.

The Gītā opens neither with the discourse of the Blessed Lord Kṛṣṇa nor with the plaint of Arjuna, but with the curiosity of the blind king Dhṛtarāṣṭra. Unable to partake in combat, unable even to see the brutal violence that would eventually devour virtually every single individual he knew, Dhṛtarāṣṭra was left behind in the royal palace, wholly dependent on his advisor and charioteer Sañjaya. Sañjaya was granted divya-dṛṣṭi, extraordinary vision, that allowed him to see everything happening on the battlefield with infinite fidelity. He then narrated what he saw—truthfully, we are told—so that his lord and master Dhṛtarāṣṭra might “see” with his own ears the carnage that would ultimately yield the extinction of his lineage.

But why should the holy text begin in the voice of Dhṛtarāṣṭra? Could there be no better beginning? And when you ask the question that way, the answer is then quite obvious: There could be no better beginning to the text! At the start of the Gītā, we are all Dhṛtarāṣṭra: psychologically blinded by our egos, metaphysically blinded by our limited insight into reality, spiritually blinded by our materialist cloaks. We are remotely aware of the cosmic struggle between right and wrong, but unable to discern the difference between them for ourselves.

And yet, we are not so blind as to be completely unaware that there is a conflict going on; after all, we have chosen to engage with the Gītā! Curiosity pulls us closer to the voice of the Blessed Lord Kṛṣṇa, whose words spoken in privacy on that dusty battlefield millennia ago still retain the power to rip off our blindfolds and propel us towards our svadharma.

The verse

    Dhṛtarāṣṭra uvāca:
    Dharma-kṣetre Kuru-kṣetre samavetā yuyutsavaḥ |
    māmakāḥ Pāṇḍavāś caîva kim akurvata? Sañjaya! || (BhG I.1)

Dhṛtarāṣṭra’s one-verse opening to the Gītā appears to be very simple:

O Sañjaya, what were the belligerents—my folks as well as the Pāṇḍavas—doing, gathered at Kurukṣetra, the field of dharma?

But of course every piece of this verse is packed with meaning! Let us go through the whole verse now to understand how everything comes together.

The importance of dharma

Start with the opening words of the verse: Dharma-kṣetre Kuru-kṣetre, “on the field of dharma, on the field of the Kurus”. The surface-level meaning is that Kurukṣetra is a place of dharma, a holy  place. This is true in two different ways, neither of which bode well for Dhṛtarāṣṭra’s side. The first is that Kurukṣetra has been sanctified by the sacred rituals of holy men and mighty kings. The second is that Kurukṣetra is going to be sanctified by the performance of a terrible ritual: the raṇa-yajña, or battle-sacrifice. In either case, this is a holy space, where victory will ultimately belong to dharma. Dhṛtarāṣṭra may not realize it, but he has effectively foretold the conclusion of the war with his words here.

But there is a deeper way to look at things here. When the verse is recited, it is of course the word dharma-kṣetre that first lodges in our ears, only subsequently followed by the name of the place. Thus, the primary  characteristic of the battlefield is that it is a field of dharma: it is the space within which the conflict of right and wrong will be settled definitively. The fact that the action is happening in Kurukṣetra is a matter of secondary importance: this is but one instantiation of the cosmic conflict between right and wrong that rages within every human heart and within every society. It is this that elevates the Gītā from being a context-specific motivational speech to a universally relevant spiritual guide.

The will to fight

The next two words, samavetā(ḥ) yuyutsavaḥ “the gathered belligerents”, is the first indication that the conflict is already in motion. The combatants are already on the battlefield: they have already assembled and are already facing off against each other. They are all yuyutsu: hungering for a fight, though not yet fighting.

This gap is the deep breath before a dive into the ocean, the silence before the roar, the instant when we step out of the mad rush of blind action to reflect upon our deeds to ask ourselves if all of this even makes sense.

But yuyutsu is also ironic here in light of what will happen to Arjuna later in this chapter: he loses his yuyutsā, his desire to fight, and must be convinced by Kṛṣṇa to get back in the game. Thus, yuyutsu is not necessarily a negative term in the Gītā, despite what we might be led to think in our prevailing culture today.

“Us” versus “Them”

The next quarter-verse is a further elaboration upon these belligerents: māmakāḥ Pāṇḍavāś caîva “my folks and the Pāṇḍavas”. Dhṛtarāṣṭra is unable to take a neutral or unbiased stand here. He could just as easily have said «Kauravāḥ Pāṇḍavāś caîva» and that would have fit the poetic meter of the Gītā; the choice to say māmakāḥ is thus a deliberate one. It indicates the partisanship of Dhṛtarāṣṭra, his principal vice that indeed is one of the factors that escalates the conflict. The Pāṇḍavas, as their very name indicates, are his nephews—and yet he is unable to recognize them as his own.

This failure of Dhṛtarāṣṭra is not something we can get too snooty about, though, for we are just as prone to it in our own lives. Dhṛtarāṣṭra’s inability to overcome his overly narrow view of the world is mirrored in our incapacity—whether as individuals or as collectives—to get out of our narrow, local prisoners’ dilemmas. We are unable to take a God’s-eye view of things, even when forewarned by God!

The desire to know (jijñāsā)

Thus arises our paralysis and our curiosity: we don’t know what is right, we don’t know what is good, we don’t know our svadharma, and we need to inquire deeply. We want to know how our team played, whether our side won or not. And certainly for some people that is all that matters: it is the winning that is key. But there are others for whom the spirit in which the game is played is as important, if not more so, than the specific outcome of the game itself. The question kim akurvata? “what were they doing?” is applicable to both.

Superficially, it is a straightforward question: Dhṛtarāṣṭra wants to know what his side is doing, and what his opponents are doing. He is on the sidelines, of course, and can do nothing to affect the outcome, but he is driven by his misguided, blind affection for his son. He must know, even if he cannot intervene. This desire to know, jijñāsā, is the starting-point of philosophical inquiry in the Hindu traditions.

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A grammatical interlude

And now comes a tiny detail about Sanskrit grammar, yet one of great interpretive significance.¹ (I would suggest skipping this section down to the next divider unless you are very interested in these technical details.)

The specific verb that Dhṛtarāṣṭra uses here is akurvata. Formed from the root kṛ “doing”, this verb is constructed with what is known as the ātmanepada ending. To clarify: Sanskrit verbs convey information not just about person and number, but also an additional category (sometimes called voice) that distinguishes between two kinds of endings called parasmaipada and ātmanepada. The specific change in meaning between the parasmaipada form of a verb and the ātmanepada form can depend on different factors, including the verbal root.² In the case of the root kṛ, one of the key reasons for using ātmanepada is to indicate that the result of the action is meant to accrue to the agent.³

A few English verbs accidentally and unsystematically capture this distinction, as we can see in the following two sentences:⁴

• “Jack married Jill”. This means that Jack and Jill are now husband and wife. A Sanskrit grammarian would say that the verb married is being used here as an ātmanepada verb, because the agent of marrying (Jack) is the one who gains Jill as a wife.

• “Father Brown married Jack and Jill”. In this case, our Sanskrit grammarian would say that the verb married is being used here as a parasmaipada verb, for Father Brown, who is the agent of marrying, is performing the ritual in order to make Jack and Jill husband and wife.

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When we incorporate this additional nuance into our reading of the Gītā, we see that Dhṛtarāṣṭra is really asking: “what were they doing that was intended to benefit themselves?” In other words, how are they acting to further their self-interest, their team’s interest?

But we can dig deeper still, to uncover a layer of meaning that Dhṛtarāṣṭra likely did not intend, but which the text undoubtedly intends: “what were they doing that would benefit their Self?” After all, that is what ātmanepada literally means: “a word directed towards ātman”, where ātman means “self”, not just in a shallow sense but also in the deepest and most interior of senses. This difference between the simple reflexive meaning of ātman (“themselves”) and the deeper spiritual sense of the Ātman (“their Self”) is the difference between our everyday selves and our inner Self. This is ultimately what the Gītā is striving for us to understand—even if Dhṛtarāṣṭra himself still does not realize it!

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The call to action

One more thing sticks out in this verse: the sonic echo of the name Kuru in the first half with the verb kurvata (which is in fact analyzed as kuru-ata as per Sanskrit grammar) in the second half. This isn’t a mere ornament of sound (śabdâlaṅkāra) that serves to beautify the verse; rather, it tells us yet another way to understand the word Kuru-kṣetre. We may be conditioned to thinking of Kurukṣetra simply as a place, the land of the Kuru dynasty. But the hint seems to be that we should also be thinking of the verbal imperative «kuru!» “do!” here. This is a place of action, a place of doing, a place where you will be impelled to do your dharma. There can be no resting in passivity, no withdrawal into inaction when dharma is at stake. Thus the conclusion of the verse brings us back to its beginning and to a reiteration of the core theme of the Gītā.

The anubandha-catuṣṭaya of the Gītā

As I mentioned in my introductory post, it is traditional for a Sanskrit philosophical text to declare its anubandha-catuṣṭaya in its very first verse. Generations of Sanskrit commentators on the Gītā have all sought to identify their desired topics and purposes in this verse, for that then helps them substantiate their programs for using the Gītā as a guide to self-transformation. I mention this because different Hindu traditions may describe the anubandha-catuṣṭaya of the Gītā differently than I do here.

Nevertheless, in keeping with my call to make the Gītā our own (svīkāra), I’m going to outline my own personal, work-in-progress, interpretation of its anubandha-catuṣṭaya.

• In understanding why the Gītā opens with Dhṛtarāṣṭra’s voice, we come to recognize the adhikārin of the text, or its intended audience: belligerents, whether for right or wrong, whether direct or indirect.

• Dhṛtarāṣṭra’s very first word, Dharma-, is an indication of the viṣaya, topic, of the Gītā: this is going to be an exploration of dharma (though what—or who!—that refers to precisely is left unstated for now, only finding its resolution by the end of the text).

• Dhṛtarāṣṭra’s question kim akurvata? “what were they doing?” encapsulates the prayojana, purpose, of the text: What should we be doing when it comes to dharma? What should we be doing that is really directed towards our Ātman, our innermost sense of Self?

• Dhṛtarāṣṭra’s final word, a call-out to Sañjaya, is the sambandha or interconnection among all of these: when we are lost and confused as to what to do, we need a friend’s guiding words to help us reorient towards Reality.

That friend could certainly be a real-life companion, but it can also be the Bhagavad-Gītā: the Song of the Blessed Lord Kṛṣṇa, the Universal Friend (jagat-sakha), the Universal Teacher (jagad-guru).

|| Sarvaṃ Śrī-Kṛṣṇârpaṇam astu ||

1. I initially took great pride in uncovering this point on my own. This deepened when I went through the masterful commentaries of Śaṅkarâcārya and Rāmānujâcārya on this verse, for neither of them brings it up either. But when I turned to Vedânta Deśikar’s Tātparya-candrikā subcommentary on Rāmānujâcārya’s Gītā-bhāṣya, I found that he makes this very same point. It is humbling, yet exhilarating, to follow in the footsteps of the Masters of Yore.

2. All of this is explained in glorious detail in Book 1, Chapter 3 of the Aṣṭâdhyāyī grammar of Sanskrit composed by Pāṇini.

3. In Pāṇini’s grammar, the governing rule that authorizes this formation is
svarita-ñ-itaḥ kartr-abhiprāye kriyā-phale (Aṣṭādhyāyī 1.3.72).

4. An equivalent example in Sanskrit can be constructed using the two verbs yajati “he performs a sacrifice [for another’s sake]” and yajate “he performs a sacrifice [for his own sake]”.