रूपं महत्ते बहुवक्त्रनेत्रं महाबाहो बहुबाहूरुपादम्।बहूदरं बहुदंष्ट्राकरालं दृष्ट्वा लोकाः प्रव्यथितास्तथाऽहम्॥
rūpaṃ mahat te bahu-vaktra-netraṃmahā-bāho bahu-bāhūru-pādambahūdaraṃ bahu-danṣṭrā-karālaṃdṛṣṭvā lokāḥ pravyathitās tathāham
Word by word
The verse says
Seeing your great form, with its many mouths and eyes, many arms and thighs and feet, many bellies, terrible with many teeth — the worlds are shaking, and so am I.
In plain words
Tathāham — and so am I. Two words at the end of the line.
He has spent three verses describing everyone else's fear. Here he includes himself, and it reads like an admission.
The teeth are mentioned for the first time.
Where you've felt this · in relationships
You see a parent genuinely furious for the first time — not irritated, not raising their voice at you, but white with it about something else entirely. The face is the one that has read to you and checked your homework for fifteen years. It is still that face. That is what makes it hard to watch.
Going deeper
Recognition and strangeness arriving together is the specific horror of this part of the chapter.
Arjuna is not looking at a monster. He is looking at somebody he knows extremely well — the man who has been driving his chariot, with whom he has eaten and joked — in a form that has teeth and no edges. Nothing has been swapped. The thing that is terrifying is the same thing that was familiar an hour ago.
That is why his apology later, at verses 41 and 42, is about having been casual rather than about having done anything wrong.
And it names a fear most people have met at small scale. The most unsettling discoveries are rarely about strangers. They are the moments when something you had completely placed turns out to have more in it than your picture allowed, and the picture cannot be repaired.