“You grieve for those who need no grief, and yet you speak as the wise do. The wise grieve for neither the living nor the dead.”

Krishna's first teaching lands like cold water. Arjuna's grief, he says, is aimed at what can never really be lost, and wisdom means learning where loss can actually reach.

It sounds severe until the next verses widen the view. What follows is comfort of a deeper kind: a patient case that the essential part of every person is beyond harm.