Take Meena, whose grandfather died in the spring. Every morning she still lays out two cups of tea, and then puts one back. She keeps asking herself where he went. Is everything gone?
Missing someone is real, and nothing here asks it to stop. The Gita's answer is that the one who lived in the body is never lost. What ends is the body, and the life we shared with it. Here we go through what the Lord says, slowly, and what it does not say.
The first thing the Lord says
अशोच्यानन्वशोचस्त्वं प्रज्ञावादांश्च भाषसे ।
गतासूनगतासूंश्च नानुशोचन्ति पण्डिताः ॥ २.११ ॥
The Blessed Lord said: You grieve for those who are not worthy of grief, yet you speak words of wisdom. The wise grieve neither for the dead nor for the living.
The Lord tells Arjuna that the wise grieve neither for the dead nor for the living (Gita 2.11). This was said to a man in tears, and the Lord does not scold the tears (Gita 2.1). He speaks to the idea inside them: that the person is wholly gone. The verse names the living too, so it is also about how we hold the people we love today. Arjuna's despondency is where the story begins, in Arjuna's Despondency.
What stays the same through every change
तथा देहान्तरप्राप्तिर्धीरस्तत्र न मुह्यति ॥ २.१३ ॥
Just as the embodied soul passes in this body through childhood, youth and old age, in the same way it attains another body. The wise person is not deluded about this.
You were once a child, then a young person, and now you are older. Your body changed at every stage, and yet you say "I" for all of them. The Lord points to just this. The self lives in the body through childhood, youth and old age, and takes another body in the same way. The steady person is not lost in bewilderment about it (Gita 2.13).
Clothes and bodies
तथा शरीराणि विहाय जीर्णान्यन्यानि संयाति नवानि देही ॥ २.२२ ॥
Just as a person puts on new garments, giving up old ones, the soul similarly accepts new bodies, giving up the old and worn-out ones.
As a person puts on new clothes and leaves the old, worn ones, so the self takes up new bodies and leaves the worn-out ones (Gita 2.22). What wears out is the clothing. The verse says no more than this about where he is, and it does not tell anyone how to feel. It also does not say that the person was nothing, or that loving them was a mistake.
Pain that comes in waves
Anyone who has lost someone knows that the missing does not stay at one level. It comes in waves: a quiet morning, then a sudden wave at the sight of a cup. The Lord speaks of this ordinary fact. The contacts of the senses bring cold and heat, pleasure and pain, and they come and go and do not last. He asks Arjuna to bear them patiently (Gita 2.14). The one who is not shaken by them, and who stays steady in pain and pleasure, is called fit for immortality (Gita 2.15). That is what the verse holds out. It is not an order to stop feeling. Each wave of missing returns, and each time it also passes. The fuller reading of these two verses is in Equanimity.
Why it still hurts
It hurts because we knew them as a person with a voice, a walk, a way of laughing. The loss of that shared life is real, and the Gita never calls it unreal. What it says is that the one we loved is never born and never dies (Gita 2.20). Both are true. The pain has its place, and the seeing grows slowly beside it. It cannot be pushed.
That evening Meena thinks of what she loved most in her grandfather: the way he listened. She sees that it was never only in his body. The tea is still one cup too many. But the missing now has something beside it.
| What ends | What the Gita says does not end |
|---|---|
| The body | The one who lived in the body (Gita 2.20) |
| The shared routines, such as the two cups of tea | The love that was never made of the body |
| The voice and the walk | What we loved in the person beyond voice and walk |
When the fear is of losing someone
Some of us are not grieving yet. We are afraid. A parent is ill, or a child is far away, and the fear sits in every ordinary day. The first verse speaks to this as well, because it names the living along with the dead (Gita 2.11). The Lord says that there was never a time when he, Arjuna and all those kings were not, and that none of them will cease to be (Gita 2.12). He also says that beings are unseen before, seen in the middle and unseen again after, and asks what there is to lament in that (Gita 2.28).
None of this tells a frightened person to stop caring. It changes what the caring stands on. Meena's love for her grandfather did not begin with his body, and it does not end with it. If we can hold the people we love as the ones who live in their bodies and not as their bodies, the fear of losing them loosens a little, and the love stays.
If it does not feel true yet
The Lord himself says that this is a wonder. One looks on the self as a wonder, another speaks of it as a wonder, another hears of it as a wonder, and yet another, even after hearing, does not understand it (Gita 2.29). So if these words do not yet feel true to you, nothing has gone wrong. Arjuna was in tears first, and the teaching began only after he asked to be taught (Gita 2.7). The seeing grows slowly beside the grief, and no date is set for it.
A practice for today
Choose a quiet time. Say the name of the person once. Think of one thing you loved in them that is hard to place in a body: how they listened, or their patience. Stay with it for a minute. Let the missing be there too. You do not need to feel anything in particular.
Questions readers ask
Does the Gita say I should not cry?
No. The Lord does not scold Arjuna's tears. He speaks to what the tears assume (Gita 2.1, Gita 2.11). Nothing in these verses forbids missing someone.
Why does it still hurt if the self is not lost?
We loved a person we saw, heard and lived with, and that life has ended. The verses speak of the one who lived in the body, who is not ended (Gita 2.20). Both are true, and the pain has a place.
Where does the self go?
The verses say that the self takes up another body, as a person changes clothes, and that it is never destroyed (Gita 2.22). They say no more than this.
Is this only about people who have died?
No. The first verse says the wise grieve neither for the dead nor for the living (Gita 2.11). Seeing the self in the living changes how we hold the people we love now, and the last verse of the passage widens it to every being (Gita 2.30).
Going deeper
For the verses in order, see the detailed reading. For the finer points and the objections, see the deeper reading. This is the first stop on The Self and the Body.