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 2, Verse 19
Verse 19
Hard VerseSānkhya Yoga — The Yoga of Discernment
Neither of them is in knowledge—the one who thinks the soul can slay and the one who thinks the soul can be slain. For truly, the soul neither kills nor can be killed.
Context & Meaning
The soul neither kills nor can be killed. Those who think it does are in ignorance.
Scholar Commentaries
2 commentaries · Public domainAdi Shankaracharya
Advaita VedantaThe Atman is neither an agent nor an object of action. Action requires a doer, and the pure Self, being witness-consciousness, is no doer. Those who attribute slaying or being slain to the Self are under the fundamental illusion of identifying the Self with the body and mind, which are the actual locus of action.
Bal Gangadhar Tilak
Gita Rahasya — B.G. TilakThe verse removes both guilt and fear from Arjuna: guilt of being a slayer and fear of being slain. Since the Self is beyond the reach of weapons, his reluctance to fight on grounds of killing his kinsmen rests on a metaphysical error. The Self of those relatives is no more killed by the arrow than it is born when they were born.