Krishna shifted the image. He had been speaking in ideas — now he painted a picture.

"Imagine a wheel, Arjuna."

Not a chariot wheel. A potter's wheel. Spinning and spinning, the same circle traced over and over. Each turn was a life — born, living, dying, born again — and what kept the wheel spinning was not muscle but wanting. Each life reached toward the next because the last one had left something unfinished. A desire unfulfilled. A result not achieved. A fruit still hanging on a branch the hand could not quite reach.

"A farmer performs a fire ritual because he wants rain. The rain comes, and now he wants a good harvest. The harvest comes, and now he wants a bigger farm. The farm grows, and now he wants his son to inherit it. The son inherits, and the farmer dies still wanting — wanting to see the grandson, wanting to know the land is safe, wanting one more season. And so he is born again, into another body, with another set of wants, and the wheel turns once more."

Arjuna looked at the armies spread across Kurukshetra and, for a moment, saw them differently. Not as warriors but as figures on a wheel. Each one had come here because of something wanted — glory, revenge, duty, honor, land. Each one was spinning the wheel faster with every desire that drove his sword arm.

"Now imagine," Krishna said, "a different kind of person."

The image shifted. A woman at an actual potter's wheel. Her hands shaped the clay with extraordinary care — pressing, turning, smoothing — but her eyes were quiet. She did not lean forward to inspect the pot. She did not glance at the shelf where the finished pieces waited to be sold. Her attention was in her palms, in the cool wet earth spinning between them, in the shape that was emerging not because she demanded it but because her skill and the clay were having a conversation.

When the pot was done, she set it in the sun to dry and walked away. Not carelessly. Not coldly. But freely. The pot would sell or it would crack. Either way, she would sit at the wheel tomorrow and shape another, because the shaping was the point.

"That woman," Krishna said, "has stepped off the wheel. Each action she performs without grasping at its fruit slows it a little more, until one day it goes still and she steps into a river that has no banks and no end."

He paused. "That river is what the sages call the state beyond sorrow. Not happiness — happiness comes and goes. Beyond sorrow. A place where suffering cannot reach, because there is nothing left to grab onto."