Gita 01.09 Duryodhana’s slip of tongue leads to his speaking the truth unintentionally

Thank you here Duryodhana is continuing his assessment of the forces on two sides and while assessing the forces supporting him he makes this statement he makes a list he lists some of the warriors in the previous verse and then he says this was unnature there are many others many who are there are many others who are heroes, heroic for my sake they have worked they are ready to lay down their lives for me and they are expert in different weapons and all of them are overall expert in fighting so here the crucial point is that he makes a list of warriors and he wants to be inclusive so there are many others so what are the characteristics of many others there are many others who are heroic they are all expert in various weapons they are all experienced in warfare so you could say each line describes a characteristic so they are expert, experienced and heroic, courageous and what is the extent of their courage in war there is a fear of death and if a warrior is ready to fight to the point of death that means that they are totally dedicated that they have given their cause that they have given their life for a particular cause and no matter what happens they are going to fight in a committed way so similarly here when he is speaking his focus is on recognizing that there is no easy way ahead there is no shortcut by which one can advance and escape at war is often fought in the trenches and it's harsh and it's demanding and it's ugly and it's cruel but that's what it takes and that's what all of them are ready to do for me he conveys their experience their expertise their courage and their dedication these are all laudable qualities in a warrior and all of them can prove to be decisive or at least very significant in the fate of a war it's interesting that mad arthe tatt jeevita what that means is that mad arthe for my sake ready to lay down their lives so that is the mood in which he is saying this but the way the word comes out is for my sake tatt jeevita they have laid down their life so the future becomes what is meant to be said in a future tense comes out in a past tense and that at one level signifies a Freudian slip of the tongue normally when we have a slip of the tongue we say certain thing that we didn't intend to say sometimes a slip of tongue may make us speak a falsehood or inaccuracy but sometimes when our normal speech was meant to conceal something then if at that time we speak something which is not normal in the sense that we speak something which we did not want to speak through that unintentional slip of the tongue we reveal something which we wanted to conceal so rather than slip of the tongue leading to the speaking of something incorrect slip of the tongue leads to speaking of something unintentionally the correct one, the correct truth the truth comes out we can have intentional untruth and there we can have unintentional truth coming out so if we consider the status of statement and the intention behind the statement so we could have intentional truth, intentional untruth, we could have unintentional truth and unintentional untruth if we consider these four categories of statements among these four we will realize that the key is recognizing that there is no universality in terms of the nature of our intention and the nature of the our expression the nature of what we say and the nature of what we wanted to say so if we want to speak the truth and we speak the truth that will be intentional truth and if you want to speak the untruth and we speak the untruth those are straight forward possibilities where there is agreement between what we wanted to say and what we actually say but in this case so there is our intention, there is a situation and there is our statement about the situation so slip of the tongue can be where we accidentally speak something that we didn't intend to speak or and now in that case when we accidentally speak like that either we may speak the truth unintentionally or we may speak the untruth unintentionally so now here he of course his whole tone is laudatory self congratulatory and laudatory he is saying that all these warriors are so dedicated to me that they are ready to lay down their life for me but the Bhagavad Gita is a divine text and all those Duryodhana's words are not directly divine but in this context by divine arrangement he ends up speaking the truth although he did not want to speak the truth that means he ends up speaking something which is the reality that all those who committed to fighting on Duryodhana's side they committed to their own death because to be against Krishna to be against Dharma is to court death so the Pandavas were on the side of Dharma and thus they were going to be successful and that is what happened to them eventually they were successful and their opponents were unsuccessful in fact Krishna later will show in 11.33-34 that section that by my arrangement your opponents have already been killed by previous arrangement they have been killed so by that previous arrangement which is the will of destiny that also orchestrates Duryodhana's tongue to speak something which he did not intend to speak and thus his slip of tongue ends up speaking an unintentional truth or speaks a truth unintentionally thank you.