The Gita opens upon an outer scene of war, but Sri Aurobindo reads that scene as the precise condition the teaching requires. This is not a quiet dialogue withdrawn from the world nor a metaphysical debate detached from life, but a word of the Divine spoken in the most difficult of all fields, the field of action. Kurukshetra is a real battlefield and at the same time a typical one: the human soul is set amid forces that have gathered and moved long before the moment of choice and now demand a decisive act.
Arjuna asks Krishna to drive the chariot between the two armies. At first this is the gesture of the heroic man who wishes to look upon those he must meet in battle. But when he sees teachers, elders, kinsmen, friends and companions arrayed on both sides, his consciousness changes. What had been an abstract cause becomes a human catastrophe; he no longer sees justice opposed to injustice, but the imminent destruction of family, social order, memory, affection, reverence and the very civilisation he is fighting to protect.
Sri Aurobindo insists that this recoil is not the weakness of a coward or the softness of a sentimentalist. Arjuna is a sattwic warrior, trained in self-control, honour and duty, and his crisis comes precisely because the dharma by which he has lived now appears to command an act that violates other sacred claims. The warrior’s law says he must fight for the right; the moral and social sense says that to slay his kindred and teachers is to ruin the order he defends. The conflict is therefore not simply between right and wrong, but between partial rights that the ordinary ethical intelligence cannot harmonise.
Arjuna then rejects the vital aims of action altogether: victory, kingdom, enjoyment, power, all lose their meaning if bought by the slaughter of those for whose sake life is valued. He reasons from family duty, social stability, sin, compassion and prudence; but beneath every argument lies the collapse of his confidence in the mental law that has guided him. He no longer knows what action means, and he casts down the bow because the human will, standing on its own resources, has reached its limit.
For Sri Aurobindo this breakdown is the indispensable starting point. The Gita is given not to a soul already detached from the world but to a representative man whose active nature has been brought to a standstill by the contradiction of life. The question is not finally whether Arjuna should fight; it is whether spiritual truth can solve the whole difficulty of action in the world. The first chapter thus creates the need for a teaching that must pass beyond social duty, emotional morality and ascetic refusal alike, without denying the partial truth that each of them holds.
