Krishna Teaches Arjuna About Attachment Through His Own Example

One evening, by the banks of a river, Arjuna asked a question he had wondered about for years.

Arjuna: "Keshava, in the Gita you told me to act without attachment. But I've seen you — you laugh with Sudama, you tease Rukmini, you cry when a devotee suffers. How is that not attachment?"

Krishna: "You think detachment means feeling nothing?"

Arjuna: "Isn't it? You said to treat gold and stone equally, success and failure the same."

Krishna: "I said to treat them equally — not to feel nothing about them. Watch the river, Arjuna. Does it love these banks?"

Arjuna: "I suppose... it flows between them."

Krishna: "It touches them completely. It gives them everything — water, life, beauty. And then it moves on. It doesn't stop and say 'These are MY banks, I will never leave them.' It loves them fully in the moment and releases them completely in the next moment. That is the secret."

Krishna: "But you stayed with the Pandavas for years. You helped us, guided us, protected us."

Arjuna: ""And if tomorrow the Divine will asked me to leave and never return, I would go. With a full heart, not an empty one. The pain of separation would be real. The love is real. But the CLINGING is not there."

Do you understand the difference? Attachment says: 'I cannot live without this.' Love says: 'I give fully while I am here, and I release fully when it is time to go.'

When you cling, you suffer twice — once when you fear losing, and again when you actually lose. When you love without clinging, you suffer once — only at the natural moment of parting. And even that suffering is clean, not complicated by regret or anger."

Arjuna: "How do you reach that state?"

Krishna: "By remembering who you really are. You are not Arjuna the warrior who will lose his family. You are the eternal Self, playing the role of Arjuna. The Self cannot lose anything because it never really owned anything. All relationships are like actors in a play — we love each other genuinely on stage, but when the play ends, we don't carry the props home."

Arjuna: "That sounds lonely."

Krishna: "It's the opposite. When you're free from the fear of loss, you can finally love fully. Most people hold back in love because they're afraid of getting hurt. They keep one foot out the door. But when you know that nothing can truly be taken from you — that the essence of your loved ones exists eternally — you can finally give yourself completely."

Krishna: "So you love Radha fully even though you left Vrindavan?"

Arjuna: "Radha is in every breath I take. Leaving Vrindavan was one of the hardest things I've ever done. But I did not leave HER — I left only a physical location. And because I left freely, without clinging, she exists in my heart more purely than if I had stayed and gradually taken her for granted. Distance purified our love instead of diminishing it."