The Mouth of the Universe: Arjuna Sees What Krishna Really Is

Arjuna has been listening to Krishna for nine chapters. He has heard about the soul's indestructibility, about the three paths of yoga, about the nature of God. Now he asks the question that has been building: if all of this is true, if you are what you say you are — show me. Show me the imperishable self. Show me what you actually are.

Krishna grants divine sight. Arjuna's ordinary eyes cannot see this; God must give him new ones.

What Arjuna sees cannot be assembled into a coherent image because it is not an image — it is totality. Countless mouths and eyes, countless divine ornaments, divine weapons, endless forms of blazing radiance, all facing in every direction simultaneously. Everything in the universe is there: all the gods, all the seers, the serpents, the wonders. The light is like a thousand suns rising at once. All of creation is gathered in one place, in the body of the divine.

Arjuna is terrified. He sees the warriors of both armies — his kinsmen on one side, his enemies on the other — rushing into Krishna's mouths like moths into a flame, ground between his teeth, consumed. The world is being eaten. He sees that the battles have already been fought; the men who stand living on the field of Kurukshetra are, in some sense, already dead.

Who are you? Arjuna asks, trembling. Tell me.

I am Time, the destroyer of worlds, Krishna says. I have come here to consume these warriors. The battle's result is already decided. You will be only the instrument.

Arjuna cannot hold this. He asks Krishna to return to his human form — four-armed, gentle, familiar. He cannot look at the cosmic form without terror; he cannot eat, he cannot find his balance, he cannot think. God nods and becomes again the beautiful dark young man at the reins.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, watching the first nuclear test at Trinity in 1945, quoted this moment: Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. He saw in the Gita something the ancient text had always held: the terrifying beauty of the force that underlies creation, the face of the universe that human minds cannot look at directly and survive with their ordinary sanity intact.