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What Krishna Thinks of Shakuni
“In this game of Dharma and Adharma I have never, to this day, seen so able a player as you.”
About this teaching
I shall await your next move, King of Gandhar. In this game of Dharma and Adharma I have never, to this day, seen so able a player as you. It is the mark of the finest of men that he does not cease striving until the very end — and you are surely such a man.
Chapter 32 — Bhagavad Gita
Chapter 32 of 35 — 6 parts, 2 h 03 m in total.
Tags
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?
