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Background
The Bhagavad Gita, and the five men whose choices frame it.
Seven hundred verses spoken between two armies, in the pause before the first arrow. Arjuna asks the questions any honest person would ask; Krishna answers across eighteen chapters that move from grief, through duty and action, to devotion.
This chapter is the longest in the library by a wide margin, and it approaches the Gita through the people around it — Arjuna, who cannot lift his bow; Bhishma, bound by a vow made for someone else's happiness; Drona, a teacher on the wrong side; Karna, who knows the truth of his birth too late to act on it; and Shakuni, who spent a lifetime on a revenge nobody else remembered.
Each is a different answer to the same question: what do you do when your duty, your loyalty and your conscience point in three directions?
- Nishkama karma
- Action without attachment to its result — the Gita's central practical teaching.
- Sthitaprajna
- One of settled wisdom; the Gita's portrait of a mind that fear and craving no longer move.