66. Whoever thinks he slays this,
And whoever thinks this is slain,
Both of them know not that there
Neither slayer nor slain. – 2.19
Krishṇa is speaking about the immortality of the soul. He explains that the notion that humans die or can be killed arises from ignorance of the deeper nature of what is real. It is true that the body we interact with dies and can be put to death, but the vital principle that is the true experiencer (i.e., the soul) is immortal. This is a clear articulation of the view that the physical body is no more than a vehicle for the inner core of existence, which is witness to all.
The notion of a soul as an immortal dimension of human life is not unique to any particular religion. It was there in ancient Egypt and China, in ancient Greece and Rome, and elsewhere. The Avesta of Zoroastrianism speaks of the urvan (soul) that leaves the body at death and eventually goes back to God. The Book of the Dead mentions a ba, which left the dead person’s body and lived on for millions of years. Herodotus informs us in his Second Book of History that the “Egyptians were the first to assert that the soul of man is immortal.” His view was based on his lack of acquaintance with Indian thought. Whether as psyche or as pneuma (πνύμα), the Greeks had their own idea of soul. Pythagoras introduced and Plato reaffirmed the idea of an immortal soul. In Plato’s Phaedo (The Republic), we read that on the eve of his death Socrates said: “When you lay me down in my grave, say that you are burying only my body, and not my soul.” Plato adds that “Death is merely the separation of the soul and body.” This sounds like an echo from the Gītā. We also read in Book X of the Republic: “The soul of man is immortal and imperishable.”
The idea of an immortal soul hovering somewhere after death is absent in Judeo-Christianity, although some individual Christian thinkers like Tertullian and Augustine subscribed to the idea of an immortal soul. The belief is that after Judgment Day in the distant future, the buried body will be resurrected, and then will arise the spirit (soul) that will be dispatched to heaven or hell for good. In later centuries, there were arguments about whether animals also had souls. In the eighteenth century, Isaac Hawkins Browne wrote a Latin poem on The immortality of the Soul. William Wordsworth, in his Intimations of Immortality, wrote (lines 58–61):
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
One way to interpret Krishṇa’s answer could be this: Krishṇa is speaking, not so much to Arjuna, as to all of us. He is not talking about the slaughter to come, but of the postmortem existence of souls. Taken as a sermon on the soul this becomes very meaningful.
Then again, one may have difficulty understanding the point Krishṇa is making here. The soul may be immortal, but its association with the body is what results in all the experiences and conflicts in the world. The souls of the Kauravas and the Pāṇḍavās may all be immortal, but their embodiment makes some of them evil and some good.
Spurts of Thought 