“Until that day I shall surely protect the soldiers of Hastinapura; but by your hand not a single soldier shall fall — for this is my duty, and no one's command.”
He would lay down his very life. But it is for this reason that today the maiden Amba has returned, reborn in the form of Shikhandini; let her alone be granted the satisfaction of slaying me, Vasudeva. I give you my word, Vasudeva: I shall wait for her, and on the day she stands before me upon the field of battle, I shall set down all my weapons.
Chapter 32 of 35 — 6 parts, 2 h 03 m in total.
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?