Krishna has just established that the self neither kills nor is killed. Now he offers the most vivid image in the entire second chapter: the body as clothing, worn and discarded, the wearer unchanged.
vāsāṃsi jīrṇāni yathā vihāya nāvāni gṛhṇāti naro 'parāṇi | tathā śarīrāṇi vihāya jīrṇāny anyāni saṃyāti navāni dehī ||
Just as a person discards worn-out garments and takes on new ones, so too the embodied self (dehin) casts off worn-out bodies and moves into new ones.
Arjuna is devastated at the prospect of these specific bodies dying. Krishna's response is to question the premise. The grief only makes sense if the person and the body are the same thing. The clothing analogy is designed to interrupt that identification at the level of felt intuition, not just argument. You cannot grieve your old shirt the way you grieve a person. That difference in emotional response is the data point.
Notice Krishna does not begin with scripture or esoteric claim. He begins with something everyone does every morning: they put on clothes. The philosophical movement is from the undeniable (you are not your shirt) toward the less obvious (you are not your body). This is inductive, not dogmatic. He meets Arjuna, and the reader, inside ordinary life.
The whole verse turns on dehī. This is not 'body' but 'the one who wears the body.' Sanskrit grammar encodes the distinction directly in the suffix. The language itself insists that the wearer and the worn are different categories of thing. The moment you hear dehī instead of deha, the grammar has already made the point.
Krishna does not say death is beautiful, or that the next body will be better. There is no comfort being offered here, and that is intentional. Comfort would only reinforce the fear by taking it seriously on its own terms. Instead the verse offers a re-framing: the thing you fear losing is the clothing, and you were never the clothing.
Person A is someone whose entire identity is bound to their current role: their title, their team, their particular skills at this moment in their career. When the company is restructured or the body starts to fail or the decade turns, the grief is total, because the covering was taken to be the person. Person B has also inhabited these forms fully, has worked and built and cared inside them. But there is a small gap, some interior space, between 'what I am doing right now' and 'what I am.' When the role ends or the body changes, it is not painless. But it is not an annihilation, because the part that watches, decides, and cares has not been equated with the form it currently occupies.
Verse 2.23 follows immediately with what Krishna calls the indestructible quality of the self: weapons cannot cut it, fire cannot burn it, water cannot wet it, wind cannot dry it. The analogy gets its philosophical ground. When ready, say: "2.23"