Whenever fighting breaks out between two sides, we may naturally ask: “What is the cause?” While a particular issue may be stated as the cause, it may well just be the tip of the iceberg. Just as a huge part of the iceberg lies invisible below the water, the bigger cause of the fighting may be unstated and unapparent. And frequently, that cause is: people with issues. 

This reality is indicated in the Bhagavad-gita’s first verse (01.01), which was spoken just before the catastrophic fratricidal war at Kurukshetra. In this verse, the blind king Dhritarashtra refers to one side as his side and the other as the side of the Pandavas. Given that one side was led by his sons, such a reference might seem innocuous; however, it was insidious because Dhritarashtra was meant to be a father figure for both sides. The other side was led by his nephews, who had lost their father in their childhood and who had thereafter come under his care. Though they respected him like a surrogate father, he treated them as worse than stepsons. When his wicked Duryodhana claimed sole inheritance of the kingdom and tried repeatedly to assassinate the Pandavas whom he saw as rival claimants, Dhritarashtra covertly assented and sometimes even overtly approved. The issue at hand — a territorial dispute over the kingdom — was resolvable, given that the Pandavas were astonishingly accommodating: they had never claimed more than half of the kingdom and they had expressed readiness to settle for something far less: just five villages. 

But the Pandavas’ conciliatory overtures bore no fruit because Dhritarashtra was blindly attached to Duryodhana, who was incorrigibly impudent and irrationally intransigent. While a father’s attachment to his son is understandable, Dhritarashtra had let his attachment grow like a cancer that destroyed his sense of duty, fairness, rationality and even basic survival instinct. Being paralyzed by attachment, he let an intra-family conflict snowball into a world war. 

One-sentence summary: 

Fights are caused not so much by issues as by people with issues. 

Think it over: 

  • What is the actual cause of fights?
  • How does the Gita’s first verse reveal Dhritarashtra’s mentality?
  • What caused the Kurukshetra war? 

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01.01: Dhritarashtra said: O Sanjaya, after my sons and the sons of Panḍu assembled in the place of pilgrimage at Kurukṣetra, desiring to fight, what did they do?

To know more about this verse, please click on the image