The One Truth No One Lives By

Shri Krishna has just told Arjun that the Soul is eternal, unborn, indestructible and beyond the reach of every force in creation. But he is also a teacher who knows his disciple and he knows that Arjun, standing on a battlefield with his bow fallen and his eyes filled, is not yet ready to fully receive the teaching of the immortal Self. The knowledge is being given, but grief does not surrender to philosophy in a single moment.

So Shri Krishna said to Arjun, “Even if you do not accept what I have said about the Soul, even if you insist on seeing these bodies as real and their death as final, even then, your grief makes no sense.”

Because death is real and also inevitable, and what is inevitable cannot be the cause of sorrow.

जातस्य हि ध्रुवो मृत्युर्ध्रुवं जन्म मृतस्य च ।
तस्मादपरिहार्येऽर्थे न त्वं शोचितुमर्हसि ॥

Bhagavad Gita 2.27

“For one who is born, death is certain. And for one who has died, birth is certain. Therefore, for what is unavoidable, you should not grieve.”

The logic is clean, almost mathematical in its precision. Birth leads to death and death leads to birth. This is not a misfortune or punishment. It is the nature of embodied existence, the cycle through which every being who takes a body must pass, without exception, appeal or possibility of a different outcome.

There is a moment in the Mahabharata, long before the war, where this same truth is spoken by a Yaksha, a divine being who stands beside a forest lake and puts questions to Yudhishthira, the eldest Pandava.

The Yaksha’s questions are famous. They pierce through ordinary knowledge to something deeper. And among them, he asks what is perhaps the most devastating question ever put to a human being:

किमाश्चर्यमतः परम् ।

Mahabharata — Yaksha Praśna

“What is the greatest wonder in the world?”

Yudhishthira answers without hesitation:

अहन्यहनि भूतानि गच्छन्तीह यमालयम् ।
शेषाः स्थावरमिच्छन्ति किमाश्चर्यमतः परम् ॥

Mahabharata — Yaksha Praśna

“Day after day, countless beings go to the abode of Yamraj, the realm of death. And yet those who remain behind live as though they will live forever. What greater wonder than this?”

Every single day, without exception, living beings die. We have all seen it. We have all known it. We have all, at some point, stood beside the body of someone we loved and understood, with sudden and terrible clarity, that this is what happens. This is where every life goes.

And then we walk back into our own lives and live as though it will not happen to us.

It is something so deeply wired into the human condition that even the wisest among us, even those who know the teaching, even those who have sat with scripture and contemplated death, they also wake up the next morning and make plans as though they have unlimited time.

The greatest wonder is the gap between what every human being knows and how every human being lives.