“When a person speaks a fact even while fear remains, that is what is called truth.”
Surely such an occasion comes into everyone's life: the heart resolves to speak the truth, yet the truth will not pass the lips, for some fear takes hold of the mind. To speak about some event, or to say something about a mistake one has made oneself — is this hard? No; this is only fact — to say only what happened, exactly as it happened, is a simple thing.
Chapter 10 of 35 — a single teaching, 2 min in total.
The Mahabharata is less a story with a moral than a very long argument about how to act. Its characters are given impossible situations and are judged not on the outcome but on the quality of their reasoning and the honesty of their motives.
Krishna's role throughout is the counsellor who refuses easy answers. He does not remove the difficulty; he changes what the person is able to bring to it.