The two armies were drawn up at Kurukshetra, the field of dharma, eighteen vast divisions of men and horses and elephants facing one another in the cold light before battle. The conches sounded — Krishna's Panchajanya, Arjuna's Devadatta — and the noise rent the sky. Then Arjuna, the supreme archer of the age, made a simple request of his charioteer and friend Krishna: drive my chariot into the space between the two hosts, that I may see those I have come to fight.

Krishna drew the chariot to a halt in the middle of the field, before Bhishma and Drona and all the assembled kings, and said, simply: behold. And Arjuna beheld. This is the opening of the Bhagavad Gita, and its first chapter bears the name Arjuna-vishada-yoga — "the yoga of Arjuna's despair." It is a remarkable beginning for a scripture, for it opens not with a vision of glory but with a collapse.

For Arjuna, looking, saw no enemy. He saw fathers and grandfathers, teachers and uncles, brothers, sons, and friends, ranged on both sides and ready to kill one another. The grandsire Bhishma who had cradled him; Drona who had made him an archer; cousins he had grown up beside. Overcome, he described his symptoms with unflinching honesty: his limbs give way, his mouth goes dry, his body trembles, his hair stands on end, his skin burns, his mind reels, and the great bow Gandiva slips from his hand. "I cannot stand," he says. "I see only evil omens."

His argument is not cowardice but a genuine moral crisis. What victory, he asks, is worth the slaughter of one's own kin? When families are destroyed, their ancient duties perish; when duties perish, lawlessness overtakes the survivors; the very fabric of society unravels. Better, he concludes, to be killed unresisting than to win a kingdom over the corpses of his elders. And so, in the closing lines of the first chapter, Arjuna casts aside his bow and arrows and sinks down on the seat of the chariot, his mind overwhelmed with grief.

Krishna lets the silence hold. He does not rush to comfort. The despair is allowed to be complete, the question allowed to be real — for only a question asked from the very bottom can receive the answer that follows. Arjuna's breakdown, far from being a flaw in the hero, is the necessary doorway: the human heart, honest about its anguish, turning at last to ask not "how do I win?" but "what is right, and how shall I live?" The teaching that answers him is the Bhagavad Gita.