What the Bhagavad Gita says about death
More of the Gita is about death than about any other single subject, because the question is put to it directly. Arjuna is being asked to fight people he loves, and his objection is that they will die and he will have killed them.
Krishna's first answer is the most famous passage in the book. What is real in a person is not born and does not die; it changes bodies the way a person changes worn-out clothes. The argument is not that you are indestructible in any way you could test, but that the thing being described is not the kind of thing those verbs apply to.
It is worth reading 2.22 next to 8.6, which says the last thought of a life carries weight. Taken together they make a claim that is less comforting and more practical than it first looks: death is not an interruption, and what you have been practising is what will be there when the pressure is highest.
The verses 21
2.11
Krishna said: You grieve for those who need no grieving, and you talk like a wise man while you do it.
2.12
There was never a time when I did not exist, nor you, nor these kings.
2.13
Just as the one who lives in this body passes through childhood, youth and old age, so it passes into another body.
2.16
What is not, never comes to be.
2.17
Know that what spreads through all of this cannot be destroyed.
2.18
These bodies end.
2.19
Whoever thinks this kills, and whoever thinks this is killed, have both misunderstood.
2.20
It is not born and it does not die.
2.22
As a person puts aside worn-out clothes and takes new ones, so the one who lives in a body puts aside worn-out bodies and goes into new ones.
2.23
Weapons do not cut it.
2.25
It is called unshowable, unthinkable, unchangeable.
2.27
Whatever is born will certainly die, and whatever dies will certainly be born.
2.28
Beings are unseen before they begin, seen in the middle, and unseen again at the end.
2.30
The one who lives in the body - in everyone's body - can never be killed.
2.72
This is what it is to stand in the infinite, Arjuna.
8.5
And whoever leaves the body at the very end while remembering me alone, goes to my own nature.
8.6
Whatever state a person is remembering as he lets go of the body at the end - that is the state he goes to, having been shaped by it all along.
8.13
Saying Om, the single syllable that is Brahman, keeping me in mind - whoever leaves, giving up the body, goes the highest way.
14.14
When one who has a body comes to the end while clarity has grown strong, that person reaches the clean worlds of those who know the highest.
14.15
Coming to the end while drive is strong, one is born among those attached to action.
15.8
When the lord of the body takes a body up, and when he leaves one behind, he carries these with him, as the wind carries scents from where they sit.