According to Osho, when conflict and grief strike the battlefield, a conscious mind feels torn: thought creates dilemma and pain. This tension is both wound and doorway—if one passes through it, moving from thought to no-mind, surrender and detachment arise; if not, one becomes split or defeated by half-hearted action. One must choose: blind zeal like Duryodhana, or inner light like Krishna.
Feeling upset and confused in a fight means you’re aware; use that pain to find clear, calm understanding instead of acting half-heartedly or blindly.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
That is why the Gita is now about to begin. The stage is set. However, looking at this sutra it seems that even if nothing is known about what happens next in the Gita. one who understands the meaning of observation can very well say, merely on the basis of this sutra, that it would be very difficult for Arjuna to fight; that this man would not be able to fight, he would certainly have difficulties in fighting his enemy. One who is interested in observation will find difficulty in fighting. He would not be able to fight if he sees; in order to fight one's eyes have to be closed. One has to go wild for fighting; there should not be any room for observation.
A friend has asked: Osho, even before the Mahabharata war began, Arjuna saw that within the Divine’s cosmic form all the warriors were entering the jaws of death. Then was that great war, in that very moment, an unavoidable destiny that everyone was compelled to fulfill?
In trying to drive the future, man becomes disordered. After many experiences India decided: leave the future to God. It is inevitable. What is to be will be. You are nothing in between. Its direct result is that you are instantly freed from the future. No worries remain. Whether happiness comes or sorrow, good or bad, whether you survive or not—it is no longer in your hands. You can live in the present—here and now. Many teachers—Krishnamurti, for instance—go on saying, “Live in the present.” But man cannot live in the present so long as he believes the future can be made. How can he? The teaching is correct but incomplete. How can he live in the present if he knows that, should he wish, tomorrow could be different—and if he does nothing, something else will happen? The notion that tomorrow can be changed will agitate today. If tomorrow cannot…
Osho, you just said that sannyasins like Buddha and Mahavira are sorrow-centered. But their sannyas arose out of a life of great splendor; renunciation was the next phase of their opulence. So you can’t put sorrow at the base of it.
But Gandhi was far removed in time; there are five thousand years between Krishna and Gandhi. So calling a five-thousand-year-old story “myth” is not hard. The Jains did not have such distance, so they could not call the story a tale—the event happened. Jain thought is as ancient as the Vedas; the first Jain Tirthankara is mentioned in the Vedas. The antiquity of Hindus and Jains is equal. The Jains could not deny the war, nor that Krishna had it fought. So what could they do? Had they had Gandhi’s convenience, they would have done what Gandhi did—who, in the body a Hindu but in mind deeply Jain—dismissed it as myth. The Jains could not; it was contemporaneous. They had to consign Krishna to hell. Their scriptures had to say that Krishna went to hell. If someone causes so great a violence and does not go to hell, then what…
But those who study life deeply say a warrior, when utterly absorbed in battle, is immersed just as a musician is in his music, just as a dancer is in his dance. When a warrior wields a sword, he becomes one with it—there is only the sword; the warrior is gone. Battle has its own music, its own poetry, its own rhythm. In Japan there are the samurai, the warrior class—Japan’s counterpart to India’s kshatriya, but their discipline went even deeper. A samurai is taught swordsmanship, dance, and meditation. Until he is skilled in all three, he is not considered a true warrior. Because dance means every limb is alive; the body is no longer led by the head alone; every fiber is conscious. A dancer might still have some inert part, but on the battlefield where life is at stake, not a single limb may be dull.