Bhagavad Gita

The Justification of Warfare in the Bhagavad Gita

The Bhagavad Gita, translated from Sanskrit as “The Lord’s Song”, is the dialogue between Lord Krishna and Prince Arjuna as the charioteer and archer enter battle in the Mahabharata. Arjuna tells Lord Krishna that he feels emotionally conflicted entering into this war since it requires him to kill his own blood, and engage in actions that he feels go against his beliefs as a Hindu. At this point, the two stop in the middle of the battlefield, and Lord Krishna launches into a narrative that enlightens Arjuna on human nature and the purpose of human life as defined by one’s duties, actions, and knowledge. Arjuna’s main conflicts from engaging in the war were rooted in the fact that he would be spilling the blood of his own relatives, and that killing his relatives in order regain control of his family’s kingdom would be just as sinful as would his relatives killing him in order to keep control of their lands. Arjuna could not understand how the needs of one could warrant the death of another, and because of this questioned his friend, Lord Krishna. This paper will analyze the ways that Lord Krishna justified war and death by giving the knowledge of the cycle of reincarnation, atman, and Brahman, and by necessitating them as one’s duty based on Arjuna’s Kshatriya status.

In Lord Krishna’s orations to Arjuna, Krishna’s words shed understanding to Arjuna on the cycle of incarnation and the idea of atman and Brahman.

You grieve for those beyond grief / and you speak words of insight; / but learned men do not grieve / for the dead or the living. / Never have I not existed / nor you, nor these kings; / and never in the future / shall we cease to exist. / Just as the embodied self / enters childhood, youth and old age, / so does it enter another body; / this does not confound a steadfast man. (Vyasa 33).

Lord Krishna reminds Arjuna that in the Hindu cycle of reincarnation, samsara, no atman ever goes away until it...