What is the significance of Duryodhana’s use of the past tense in Gita 01.09?
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Thank you. Question in Bhagavad Gita 1.9 How exactly is the sentence in the past sent? And what does it signify? Answer 1.9 is Guru Granth Sahib So, he is speaking that So, we could put it as there are many other heroic people who have is in the past tense. Now, it could be a grammatical or slip of the tongue.
He intended to say that they are ready to lay down their lives for me. But he ended up saying that they have laid down their lives for me. So, So, it would be the word they are prepared to lay down their lives there is no no that’s the English translation but in the Sanskrit there is no equivalent for prepared.
All that it says is for my purpose that they have given up their life. That using various weapons an expert in using various weapons they are expert in fighting also. They are now of course Duryodhana would not say that they are ready to lay down their lives.
They have laid down their lives. That would not be his intention but that is the implication of the Sanskrit word that he has used. And that implication is critical for us to understand to understand the issue over there.
At one level in psychology there is a concept called a Freudian slip of the tongue. Therein we all have slips of the tongue but if normally when there is a slip of the tongue the overall point is that we sleep we speak something which we are not meant to speak, which we didn’t want to speak and sometimes something which is true we might something which is false we might just speak it like that because of a slip of the tongue. But sometimes in a slip of a tongue we speak something that is true but something that we didn’t intend to speak.
When that happens that is when the slip of tongue is called the Freudian slip of the tongue. So Freudian is the adjective for Sigmund Freud who is considered one of the prominent pioneers of modern psychology. It’s not his finding, it’s just his observation.
This happened in the past also. So in this case he had no intention of saying that our soldiers have already laid down their lives. He simply is praising their commitment to his cause by saying that they are ready to lay down their lives.
But the way the words come out it appears as if he is saying they have laid down their lives for me. And thus his words come out in that sense as speaking something which is a truth but which he didn’t intend that to be. So for us what we can focus on is the principle that in this case there is a war happening and it’s a divine war and ultimately it’s a dharmic war and whatever happens in this war will ultimately be a part of the plan of the Lord.
So therein by a Freudian slip of the tongue ends up speaking the truth that those who chose to fight against Krishna they were all doomed to die. In 11.33 11.31, 32 33 where Krishna was living and he says that all the warriors in Kurukshetra battlefield are already dead because of their animosity towards Krishna and because of their being in that battlefield by the will of destiny they were killed. It’s not the will of destiny forced them to die it is rather that they forced him to that they by their free will chose to act in a particular way that caused their death.