“Now I am become Death”: the Gita verse Oppenheimer remembered

Jungk’s account pairs the line with an earlier verse of the same chapter. Krishna has just given Arjuna divine sight (11.8), and Sanjaya, who narrates the battle to the blind king Dhritarashtra, describes what Arjuna sees:

Ryder set it in rhyme: “A thousand simultaneous suns / Arising in the sky / Might equal that great radiance, / With that great glory vie.” The image gave Jungk the title of his book.

The Sanskrit word is kāla. Monier-Williams’s dictionary derives it from kal, to count or calculate, and lists its senses from a fixed point of time, to time in general, to “time (as destroying all things), death”. The Gita uses the word across that whole range. In chapter 10 Krishna says that among those who reckon he is Time, and that he is Time without end. In the very next verse he says he is mṛtyu, death that takes everything.

The Gita had a plain word for death and used it a chapter earlier. In 11.32 it chose kāla.

The old commentators read the word through its root. Ramanuja glosses kāla as the one who counts: Krishna has reckoned the end of the lifespans of the kings gathered on the field. Madhusudana Sarasvati, in Shankara’s Advaita school, calls kāla the Supreme Lord joined to his power of action, the one who draws all things back into himself. Shankara, whose commentary is the oldest to survive, reads the line plainly: Time, grown mighty, brings about the end of the worlds, and has set to work here, at this moment, to gather them in.

Death is a fair reading, since time grown vast implies death. Hijiya calls Ryder’s choice “peculiar but defensible”, and notes that Franklin Edgerton’s 1944 translation printed both words, Time and Death. Time is the larger claim. The ending Arjuna dreads is already under way, and it will arrive with him or without him.

Two more words in Oppenheimer’s English are his own. The Sanskrit says asmi, I am, with no “now” and no “become”. “Am become” is an old English perfect, like “I am come”, and it lends the line its weight of something that has just happened. The nearest thing in the Sanskrit is pravṛddhaḥ, grown, swollen to full size.

1. Arjuna, moved by what Krishna has taught him, asks to see his divine form (11.3 to 11.4).
2. Krishna gives him divine sight, since ordinary eyes cannot see it (11.8).
3. Sanjaya describes a radiance like a thousand suns rising at once (11.12).
4. Arjuna sees arms, mouths and eyes without number, with no beginning, middle or end (11.16).
5. Shaken, he twice calls the form Vishnu (11.24, 11.30).
6. He watches Bhishma, Drona, Karna and the sons of Dhritarashtra rushing into its blazing mouths (11.26 to 11.27).
7. He asks: who are you, in this fierce form? I do not understand what you are doing (11.31).
8. Krishna answers with 11.32, and goes on in 11.33: they are already slain by me; be only the instrument.
9. Arjuna, glad and afraid at once, asks to see the familiar four-armed form again, and Krishna returns to his gentle shape and comforts him (11.45 to 11.50).

Oppenheimer’s “multi-armed form” is this vision. Some writers count “Vishnu” as his slip, since the speaker is Krishna. The name fits the scene better than that: Arjuna himself uses it, and in Hindu tradition Krishna is an avatar of Vishnu.

Ramanuja’s note on 11.33 adds a detail the famous line leaves out. The warriors Krishna has already slain are, in his words, those who have done wrong. The verse speaks of a war already declared and of a reckoning already made, and Arjuna is asked to act within it.

Hijiya argues that Oppenheimer took three ideas from the Gita: that a person has a duty to do, that he should do it without clinging to its results, and that devotion matters most of all. The middle one is the teaching of 2.47, the Gita’s best known verse. Read in its own chapter, 11.32 belongs with that teaching. Arjuna is asked to act, and the outcome rests elsewhere.

Whether that lightened the weight for Oppenheimer, or only named it, is a question his life kept open. The verse, read slowly, asks something of every reader who has had to act inside events far larger than one person.