यदा यदा हि धर्मस्य ग्लानिर्भवति भारत।अभ्युत्थानमधर्मस्य तदाऽऽत्मानं सृजाम्यहम्॥
yadā yadā hi dharmasya glānir bhavati bhārataabhyutthānam adharmasya tadātmānaṃ sṛjāmyaham
Word by word
The verse says
Whenever what is right grows weak, Bharata, and what is wrong rises up, then I send myself forth.
In plain words
This is a promise, and it is the most quoted promise in the book.
Krishna has just told Arjuna that he has taught this before, long ago. Arjuna has pointed out the obvious problem: you were born after me, so how could you have? This verse is the answer, and it turns out to be much larger than the question.
Read the shape of it carefully. Krishna does not say he arrives when people pray hard enough, or when enough of them deserve it. He says he comes when things tip - when what holds a world together starts giving way. The trigger is not merit. It is need.
Where you've felt this · in community
A street starts to slide. The lamp stays broken for eight months, people stop walking home the long way, the corner lot fills with rubbish. Then somebody with no particular authority starts clearing that lot on Sundays, learning names, turning up. They were always living there. Something in the decline called them out of the background, and it was not the loudest person on the street.
Going deeper
Krishna is not describing something that happens to him. He is describing something he does.
His own phrase is ātmānaṁ sṛjāmi aham - I send myself forth, or more literally I emit myself. Not I am born. The word people reach for here is avatāra, a descent; it does not appear in this verse, but this is where the idea lives.
The first two words carry the rest: yadā yadā - whenever, whenever. The doubling makes it repeating. This is not a single rescue at one point in history, after which the matter is settled. It is a rhythm. Things decay, something arrives, things are set right, and in time they decay again.
That has a consequence worth sitting with. If decline is part of the rhythm rather than a failure of the system, then despair at a bad age is a mistake about what kind of thing is happening. A dark stretch is not evidence that nobody is coming. On this account it is the precondition for it.
And the pairing matters. The weakening of what is right is set against the rising up of what is not. Good does not simply fade on its own - something moves into the space it leaves. That is a sharper observation about how things go wrong than most accounts manage.