“If you give love, happiness will come to you; if you take a life, the punishment of death will be yours.”
When a person receives the punishment for his offense, sometimes, on seeing that justice, the mind is pierced with unease. A question rises in the heart: when that offense was committed the person was one man; afterward he repented so deeply and changed himself so greatly — then why should he still be punished? But wherever there is a blow, there follows a counter-blow.
Chapter 13 of 35 — a single teaching, 1 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.