Krishna continued His discourse: "Arjuna! Think for a while who you are and what you are proposing to do. You declare you know everything but yet you weep like a helpless woman. Your words proclaim that you are a Pundit, but your acts reveal you as a simpleton. Hearing you, one would infer you are a Jnani; but seeing you, one would find that you are an Ajnani! Your condition is disgusting, to say the least. Well, if I take you to be a Pundit, I cannot reconcile that view with your tears; for Pundits do not grieve over life and death. If they grieve, they are no Pundits. Pundits have the capacity to discover what is fundamentally true. Those who know the secret of the physical, and the mystery of the spiritual, such alone can be called Pundits. How then can they weep over either the embodied or the disembodied? They will not forgo their inner calm, whatever the stress or distress."

The fully ignorant and the fully wise - both will have no grief over the living or the dead. Do you weep because the bodies of Bhishma and Drona will fall, or is it because the Atma of those two will be destroyed? For the bodies, do you say? Well. Are tears any good? If they are, certainly, people would have kept the corpses of their dead and revived them by their weeping. No, it can never be. Immerse the body in vessels of Amritha; it cannot come back to life. Why then weep over the inevitable, the unavoidable?

"You might say that you are weeping for the Atma, the spiritual core. That reveals greater foolishness. Death can never even approach the Atma. It is eternal, self-evident, pure. It is evident that you have no Atma-jnana at all."

"Again, for the Kshatriya, fighting is Swadharma. Do your duty regardless of other considerations. You ask, 'How can I cause the death of Bhishma in war? But they have all come to get killed and to kill; you are not killing them in their homes. Of course, it is A-dharma to kill them in their homes; but on the battlefield, how can it be against Dharma? I am sorry you have not got this much of Viveka."

"It is enough. Get up and get ready for the fray. Why slide to the ground under the weight of all this useless ego? The Lord is the cause of all, not you. There is a higher power that moves everything. Know this and bend your will to it."