Who is who in the Gita
Bhima
Second Pandava; formidable warrior and brother of Arjuna.
Who is Bhima in the Bhagavad Gita?
Second Pandava; formidable warrior and brother of Arjuna. His presence reminds the reader that the same war is experienced differently by different Pandavas. Arjuna’s paralysis is not automatically the emotional state of everyone on his side.
Hansi Gita Bhawan Trust · The Gita for Life
Where this person stands in the house
Second of Pandu’s sons, and the one with a personal quarrel: the Mahabharata gives him vows against Duryodhana and Duhshasana taken in the assembly hall, and the war settles them. He is Kunti’s second son. On this field he is the standard by which strength is measured — 1.4 describes other warriors as भीमार्जुनसमा, equal to Bhima and Arjuna.
Relationship
Second Pandava and Arjuna’s brother; a warrior whose rivalry with Duryodhana is intensely personal.
Why he matters
Bhima demonstrates that Arjuna’s response is not simply “the Pandava response.” People standing in the same cause can encounter duty, injury and impending violence differently.
In the text
What the Gita calls Bhima
Three names, across three verses. Every reference below was checked against the Devanagari of the verse it cites, and the build fails if one of them stops matching.
भीम Bhīma2
The fearsome one. At 1.4 he is the measure others are compared to.
भीमकर्मा Bhīmakarmā1
Of terrible deeds. The Gita puts it next to Vrikodara in the same line.
वृकोदर Vṛkodara1
Wolf-bellied — for an appetite, not for cruelty.
Three verses, all in Chapter 1, and one of them (1.10) is Duryodhana’s: “our strength, guarded by Bhishma, is not enough; theirs, guarded by Bhima, is.” The Gita’s only measurement of Bhima is made by the man he will kill.
The verse this presence makes hard
Bhagavad Gita 1.10
अपर्याप्तं तदस्माकं बलं भीष्माभिरक्षितम् ।
Duryodhana’s own estimate: our strength, guarded by Bhishma, is unlimited — or insufficient; the verse can be read both ways and has been for centuries — while theirs, guarded by Bhima, is the other. The Gita’s only measurement of Bhima is made by the man who has sworn to kill him and who is at this moment frightened of him. The verse is hard because the ambiguity is genuine and no honest edition can remove it: the grammar allows both readings, and what Duryodhana is confessing depends on which one you take.
What this page will not say
The Trust does not write Bhima as appetite and rage. वृकोदर, wolf-bellied, is a name about hunger and the Gita prints it beside भीमकर्मा, of terrible deeds, in the same half-line — that is the whole of the Gita’s portrait and it is not a character study. The vows, the mace, the thirteen years, the assembly hall: Mahabharata, and marked as such.