Lord Krishna
Divine TeacherThe Supreme Lord, the charioteer and divine guide of Arjuna. Krishna delivers the eternal wisdom of the Gita, revealing the nature of the soul, duty, and the path to liberation.
Speaking: Chapter 16, Verse 5
Verse 5
The Yoga of the Divine and Demonic Natures
The divine endowment is said to lead to liberation; the demonic to bondage. Do not grieve, O Pandava — you are born to the divine nature.
Context & Meaning
The stakes are made explicit: divine qualities lead toward liberation (vimokṣa), demonic qualities toward bondage (nibandha). These are not arbitrary moral preferences but descriptions of spiritual mechanics — the divine qualities loosen the grip of ego, desire, and delusion, opening the person toward freedom; the demonic qualities tighten every knot of conditioning, driving the person deeper into the prison of their own compulsions. Then Krishna does something tender: he reassures Arjuna. Do not grieve — you are born to the divine nature. This is not flattery but diagnosis. Arjuna's paralysis on the battlefield arose from an excess of sensitivity, compassion, and attachment — not from cruelty, greed, or hypocrisy. His problem was an overdeveloped heart, not an absent one. He is on the right side of this fundamental division.
Scholar Commentaries
1 commentary · Public domainRamanujacharya
VishishtadvaitaMā śucaḥ — do not grieve. This is Krishna consoling Arjuna not about the battle but about his own character. Arjuna feared he was doing something wrong, that his hesitation indicated a deep moral failure. Krishna here clarifies: his hesitation came from divine qualities — compassion, sensitivity to consequences, unwillingness to harm — which are marks of his divine inheritance. The real danger would have been no hesitation at all.