War As a Last Resort

Why does the story of the Bhagavad Gita take place on a field of battle during the course of a war? Is the Gita advocating war as a valid means of settling a dispute?

This is a serious inquiry when conflict between various peoples and nations is often in the news. The answer has many related threads.

First of, the war between the cousins was morally justified. The Pandav brothers had declared war on their cousins, the Kaurav brothers, because the latter refused to give them their rightful half of their grandfather’s kingdom.

To further aggravate the Pandavs, the Kauravs used deceit to cheat them out of their wealth. They had even hatched a plot to have the Pandavs assassinated.

In spite of all this, the Pandavs, including Krishna himself, had attempted to convince the Kauravs through diplomacy to return to the Pandavs what was rightfully theirs. Having failed to convince their cousins, the Pandavs had only declared war as a last resort.

Thus the Gita does not suggest that war be undertaken lightly or indiscriminately, but be resorted to only when all other means have been exhausted.

As the leader of the Pandav army, Arjun as a seasoned warrior deeply respected the righteousness of war, but wondered how to approach this particular battle in which he had to fight against his own relatives and friends.

Krishna uses this crisis to teach Arjun about his own deathless nature and about the nature of the immortal Self which resides within one and all.

In times of war people are stretched to their limits and seek the ultimate answers to ultimate questions about birth, life and death.

For Arjun and Krishna found themselves between two armies whose weapons were at the ready and who were bent on annihilating each other.

Krishna’s teachings about birth and death, deathlessness and immortality, and killing and non-killing were entirely appropriate in that context.

The war in the Gita may also be viewed as symbolic, representing the battle in the mind of a sentient being between knowledge and ignorance of one’s true nature; between individual consciousness and universal consciousness; between darkness and light.

Each sentient being struggles to realize his or her highest nature, but is pulled back, by the force of human habit, towards limited thinking that is body-centered (egosense).

In this symbolic tug-of-war, Krishna represents the divine understanding that is ever pure, free, and forever, while Arjun represents humanity which strives to know its divinity.

In the war between knowledge and ignorance, knowledge will always be victorious in the end.