BG2.12

The Eleventh sloka of Chapter 2, starts with the words of Sri Krishna:

sri-bhagavan uvaca
asocyan anvasocas tvam
prajna-vadams ca bhasase
gatasun agatasums ca
nanusocanti panditah

“ Bhagavan [Sri Krishna] said [to Arjuna]: you speak like a learned and at the same time your words show ignorance”

Sri Krishna refers to Pundit, which means learned. It is not mere worldly knowledge, but the person possessing the knowledge about body and soul is referred to as pundit He is also called a vedanhi. Like a pundit, Arjuna appears to know the difference between soul [atman] and body [sareeram]. But he also says words, which show that he thinks both atman and sareeram are same. Asu means prana or imperishable. Gathasu means perishable or without asu or only body without soul. Agathasu is opposite of gathasu or with asu or prana, which means the body with soul. Pundits know about the destroyable and the indestroyable. Let us see whether Arjuna acts like a pundit. When he says that he did not want to destroy a family or dynasty, as that will result in the pithrus [deceased forefathers’ souls] falling down from their world [pithrulok], he seems to be aware that when a person dies his soul departs to distant world and only the body remains and so the body and soul are not one and the same. At the same time, when Arjuna says he does not want to kill Bheeshma or Drona, he seems to be not aware that he is only killing the bodies of Bheeshma, Drona and that he can not harm the souls residing in those bodies. Names are there to denote bodies only. So here Arjuna behaves like uneducated. The word ‘ I ‘ normally denotes the soul while the word ‘my’ indicates body. This is commonly seen in our conversations. Also when someone says ‘I’ he invariably points his finger to the heart and not to any other part of the body. According to the Vedas in a Lotus bud structure the soul resides in the heart. The soul is very small and atomic in size. We say ‘my book’ and the word ‘my’ clearly indicates that the book is different from the soul ‘I’. Similarly when a person says ‘my head’ we should understand that the ‘head’ referred to is not ‘I’. Thus all parts of the body or the entire body do not represent the soul ‘I’. We have also seen that persons losing organs like fingers, etc. live and these also indicate that body and soul are not the same. If body and soul were one, we should say ‘ I head is aching’ and not ‘my head is aching’. But it is common to see that in our daily routines we are regarding the soul and the body as separate entities, knowingly or unknowingly.