The story

The armies were drawn up and the conches had already been blown when Arjuna asked his charioteer to do something strange: take me out into the gap between them, and stop.

He wanted to see who he was about to fight. Krishna drove the chariot forward and halted it in the open ground between the two lines, and Arjuna looked.

What he saw was his own family. Bhishma, who had raised him. Drona, who had taught him to hold the bow he was carrying. Uncles, cousins, the fathers of his friends, the sons of men he had eaten beside. The armies were not two nations. They were one household, sorted into two halves and issued weapons.

The epic describes what happens to his body before it describes what happens to his argument. His limbs give way. His mouth dries. He begins to tremble, his skin burns, and Gandiva — the bow that is practically a part of him — slips out of his hand. Then he sits down on the floor of the chariot, in the middle of the field, in full view of both armies, and says he will not fight.

His reasons are not weak ones, and this matters for everything that follows. He argues that killing his teachers and elders is a sin whatever the provocation; that a victory bought this way is worth nothing, since the people the kingdom was for will be dead; that the destruction of a family destroys the practices that hold it together, and that when those go, the disorder does not stop with the generation that caused it. He is not asking to be excused. He is making a case that fighting is the wrong thing to do, and it is a serious case.

It is also a case nobody has been able to answer for five books. The rigged dice game, the assembly that would not rule on Draupadi's question, the thirteen years, the embassy that failed — every ordinary way out has already been tried and closed. Arjuna is not raising an objection at the start of a dispute. He is raising it at the end of one, with the weapons already drawn.

Two things are worth keeping straight about the scene before Krishna answers it.

The first is that we are not watching it. We are hearing Sanjaya, in a palace far from Kurukshetra, describing the field to the blind king Dhritarashtra — a father asking what his sons are doing, and being told. The most widely read passage in the entire epic reaches us, inside the text itself, as a report to a man who could not see it.

The second is where it sits. This is the sixth book, the Bhishma Parva, and the war it opens will run ten days under the grandsire's command before he falls on a bed of arrows. The conversation in the chariot happens before the first of those days.

Then Krishna answers him — and what he says occupies chapters 23 to 40 of this parva in the constituted Critical Edition.

That answer is the Bhagavad Gita. It is not a separate scripture the Mahabharata happens to contain; it is this moment, in this book, on this morning, and it works as an answer because of everything the five preceding books have already done to close every other door. Read on its own it is a teaching. Read in place, it is what one man says to another when there is nothing left to try.

This page is the frame. The counsel itself is one tap away.

Who appears, and what it argues

• Krishna — Cousin, envoy and charioteer — the one who shapes the war's course without ever lifting a weapon in it.
• Arjuna — The archer the whole war is arranged around, who arrives at its opening unable to lift his bow because of who is standing on the other side.
• Theme: Divine counsel
• Theme: The impossible choice

Questions to explore

• Why does Arjuna's refusal to fight need an answer this long?
• Is the Gita's teaching addressed to a warrior on a battlefield, or to anyone facing a duty they cannot bear?
• What does Krishna mean by acting without attachment to the fruit of the act?