Na Tv Evaham Jatu Nasam

Krishna begins laying the foundation. There was never a time, he says, when I did not exist. Nor you. Nor any of these kings standing on this field. And there will never be a time when any of us cease to exist. The soul is not something that appeared at birth and disappears at death. It has always been. It will always be.

Consider how radical this statement is in the context of a battlefield. Arjuna is terrified of causing death. Krishna responds: death, as you understand it, does not exist. You cannot destroy what has always been. These kings, these warriors, these elders you fear for — their essential being is beyond the reach of any arrow.

Krishna includes himself in this declaration — 'I too have always existed.' He is not speaking from above the human condition. He is placing himself within the same eternal framework as Arjuna and every other being present. The teaching applies to all, without exception.

According to the Bhagavad Gita, this shloka establishes the doctrine of the soul's eternity — the philosophical bedrock of Sankhya Yoga. If the soul has always existed and will always exist, then grief over the body's destruction is misplaced.

This verse also distinguishes the Gita's position from philosophies that view the self as a temporary product of material processes. The soul, Krishna says, is not created at birth — it predates every body it has inhabited.