Bhīṣma, Droṇa and the others are not to be grieved for, since they are of good conduct and, in their ultimate true nature, eternal. Yet for these, who should not be grieved for, you have grieved, thinking 'they die because of me; bereft of them, what shall I do with kingdom and its pleasures?' And at the same time you speak words of the kind that wise and discerning men speak. So you show in yourself both foolishness and learning, two things at odds, like a madman. For the learned, the knowers of the Self, do not grieve either for the dead, whose breath is gone, or for the living, whose breath is not gone. The learned (paṇḍita) are those whose understanding (paṇḍā) is directed to the Self, by the scripture 'having known the Self, let him live as a sage'. But in truth those very ones are eternal and not to be grieved for, and you grieve for them; therefore you are deluded. That is the intent. Why are they not to be grieved for? Because they are eternal. And how are they eternal?

The Blessed Lord spoke. You grieve for those not to be grieved for, and you speak words that arise from a wisdom which takes the body to be the self, words like 'their forefathers fall, robbed of the rites of rice-ball and water'. For those who know the true natures of the body and the self there is here no occasion for grief at all. Those who know the truth of the natures of the dead, namely the bodies, and of the undying, namely the selves, do not grieve over either. So in you a contradiction is found: the grieving 'I shall slay these', and the talk of merit and demerit which itself rests on a knowledge of a self distinct from the body. Therefore you know neither the nature of the body, nor the self, eternal and other than it, nor the duty, war and the rest, that is the means of attaining the self; and this war, undertaken with no eye to its fruit, is the means of attaining the self as it truly is. For the self does not have its being dependent on birth, nor its destruction dependent on death, since for it there is neither birth nor death; so it is no occasion for grief. The body, being insentient and by nature subject to transformation, has the connection with origination and destruction as its own nature; so it too is no occasion for grief. First, then, hear the nature of the selves.

There, between the two armies, the Blessed One spoke to Arjuna, who sat down in grief, wrapped in the net of delusion about his kinsmen and the rest. The 'words of wisdom' (prajnavada) Arjuna had uttered are sentences sprung from his own opinion. And the question why those persons are 'not to be grieved for' is answered by the verse's own terms, the dead and the not-yet-dead.