Krishna stepped down from the chariot.
Arjuna watched, surprised. In the middle of a conversation about the
nature of existence, his charioteer had simply climbed down, walked
a few paces forward to a patch of bare earth between the chariot
wheels, and crouched.
With one finger, Krishna drew a line in the dust.
"Come," he said.
Arjuna leaned over the railing. The line was straight, about the
length of his arm, scratched into the red earth of Kurukshetra.
"This side," Krishna said, pointing to the left of the line, "is
everything that changes. Your body. Your thoughts. The clouds. That
banner over Bhishma's army. The breakfast you ate this morning. The
fear in your chest right now. Every feeling, every object, every
moment that begins and ends."
He pointed to the right side of the line.
"This side is the one thing that does not change. The one thing that
was here before the sun rose and will be here after the sun sets. The
one thing that cannot be created and cannot be destroyed — because it
simply is."
"What is it?" Arjuna asked.
Krishna looked up, and in the morning light his eyes were deeper
than any eyes Arjuna had ever seen — as though behind them lay not
a mind but a sky.
"You already know," Krishna said. "You have felt it. When everything
around you is spinning — grief, anger, fear, joy — there is something
inside you that watches. Something that does not spin. That is the
real. Everything on this side" — he swept his hand across the left
— "comes and goes like waves. It appears for a while, then vanishes.
The unreal can never become real. And the real — the watcher, the
witness — can never become unreal."
A gust of wind blew across the plain, erasing the line in the dust.
Krishna stood up.
"See?" he said softly. "The line is gone. But what the line pointed
to — that has not moved."
Arjuna stared at the smooth, unmarked earth where the line had been.
Something in his mind shifted, the way a heavy door swings on its
hinge when you push it just hard enough. The line was gone. The truth
it carried was not.
He was beginning to understand.
