Bhagavatam · Ashvatthama

Shukadeva’s voice came to rest, and Parikshit folded his palms. “Bhagavan, the line whose story you are telling is my own. They tell me that a weapon reached me before I was ever born, while I still lay in my mother’s womb. I want to know what happened that night, and whose hand it was that carried me out of the fire.”

Shukadeva was quiet for a moment. “Rajan,” he said, “this is a story of hatred, and of where hatred is made to end. Listen.”

The war of eighteen days was over.

The great hosts of both armies had gone down into a warrior’s death. Bhimasena’s mace had shattered Duryodhana’s thigh, and the prince lay broken on the field. Out of all that ruin, one name still moved through the wreckage of the Kaurava cause. Ashvatthama.

Dronacharya’s son. Born a Brahmana, a warrior to the marrow. So complete a master of arms that even the Brahmastra answered to his hand, the missile presided over by Brahma that few men living could so much as summon. His father had been brought down by deceit in the war, and the grief of it had banked itself inside him and turned to fire.

That night he did a thing the whole world would come to condemn, imagining it a gift that would please his master Duryodhana. He stole into the Pandava camp where the fires had burned low and, with his sword, cut off the heads of Draupadi’s five sleeping sons, the Upapandavas, boys still. He carried the heads to the broken Duryodhana. Even Duryodhana turned from the sight of them.

When the Pandavas came back to the camp, Draupadi saw the five small bodies of her sons.

Her eyes filled until she could no longer see, and she wept without stopping. Arjuna came to her, and to steady her he made a vow.

“Kalyani, only then will these tears be wiped away, when I have cut the head from that fallen Brahmana, that killer, with arrows loosed from the Gandiva, and laid it in front of you. When your sons’ last rites are done, you shall set your foot upon it, and only then bathe.”

With these strange, tender words Arjuna comforted her. Then he fastened on his armor, took up the terrible Gandiva, and with his friend Bhagavan Shri Krishna holding the reins mounted the chariot and drove hard after the teacher’s son.

When Ashvatthama saw from far off that Arjuna was bearing down on him, he ran, ran for his life as far as the earth would carry him, the way the sun once fled across the sky before the wrath of Rudra. But his chariot horses gave out under him, and he found himself alone, and he judged that a single means of escape was left to him. The Brahmastra.

He did not know how to call the weapon back once it was loosed. Even so, with his own death rushing at him, he sipped the ritual water, fixed his mind, fitted the Brahmastra to his bow, and let it fly.

A fierce light burst from the weapon and ran out to every quarter, as though the fire of the world’s last dissolution had stood up at once from all ten directions. Arjuna saw that he was a breath away from death, and he turned to Shri Krishna. “Krishna, Krishna, mighty of arm, you who take away the fear of those who love you. You alone lift out the souls who burn without rest in the fire of birth after birth. You are God himself, the first Person, standing beyond all matter, and by the power of your own wisdom you rest, whole, in your own being. It is you who grant dharma and every other blessing to the soul your maya has clouded. This descent of yours has come to lighten the burden of the earth and to be the one thought held by those who are wholly yours. Lord of your own light, this most terrible flame is closing on me from every side, and I do not know what it is, or where it comes from.”

Bhagavan answered him. “Arjuna, this is the Brahmastra, the missile presided over by Brahma, loosed by Ashvatthama in his terror. He has fired it and does not know how to bring it back. No other weapon can master it. You know the science of arms as well as any man alive. Meet the fire of this Brahmastra with a counter-fire of the same weapon, and quench it.”

Arjuna sipped the ritual water, walked once around Bhagavan in reverence, and fitted his own Brahmastra to the bow to answer the first. The two flames, ringed about with arrows, ran together and rose filling the heavens and all the space between heaven and earth, swelling like the sun and the fire of the last day. The blaze reached down into all three worlds. The people below, scorched by its heat, were certain the samvartaka fire of the dissolution had come to end them.

Seeing the people and the worlds beginning to burn away, Arjuna, with Bhagavan’s leave, drew both weapons back.

Now Arjuna’s eyes were red with rage. He sprang on the hard-hearted son of Kripi, seized him, and roped him the way a man ropes a beast set aside for sacrifice, and began to drag him back toward the camp by force.

As Arjuna made to haul him in, the lotus-eyed Bhagavan Shri Krishna spoke, and there was anger in it. “Arjuna, you must not let this fallen Brahmana go. Kill him. He murdered innocent boys buried in sleep, in the dead of night. A man who knows dharma never strikes an enemy who is off his guard, or drunk, or out of his senses, or asleep, or a child, or a woman, or one who has come for refuge, or one whose chariot is gone, or one who is afraid. But for the wretch who keeps his own life going by taking the lives of others, killing him is the one kindness left, for otherwise he will do the same again and drag himself lower still. Before my own eyes you gave your word to Draupadi that you would bring her his head. This sinner is the killer of your sons. So kill him, Arjuna. Kill him.”

Bhagavan pressed him only to test where Arjuna’s dharma stood. Arjuna’s heart was too large for it. Ashvatthama had killed his sons, and still no wish rose in him to take the life of his teacher’s son.

So he brought the prisoner back to camp, Shri Krishna his friend and charioteer beside him, and there he set Ashvatthama before Draupadi, who had not stopped grieving for her dead sons.

Draupadi looked at Ashvatthama a long moment, bound like a sacrificial beast, his face bent to the ground under the shame of what he had done. Tender by nature, she could not bear to see the teacher’s son dragged in like this. She bowed to him and said, “Let him go, let him go. He is a Brahmana, worthy of the deepest reverence from every one of us.

The teacher by whose grace you learned the whole of the Dhanurveda with its secrets, and the knowledge of every weapon, how to loose it and how to call it back, that same Acharya Drona stands before you now in the person of his son. Kripi, his wife, the sister of Kripa, is alive yet. She did not follow Drona onto his funeral pyre, and it was her brave son alone who held her back from it. You of all men know dharma. The house of your teacher is to be honored and bowed to every day of your life, and to bring it grief does not become you. We are broken today, weeping for our children. Do not let his mother, the devoted Gautami, who worshipped her husband as a god, weep as we weep now.”

Her words stood square with dharma and with justice, free of guile, full of compassion, even-handed toward all. King Yudhishthira, son of Dharma, welcomed the queen’s words for the good that was in them. Nakula and Sahadeva, Satyaki, Arjuna, Bhagavan Shri Krishna himself, and every man and woman standing there agreed with what Draupadi had said.

Bhimasena alone could not bear it. “He butchered sleeping boys, and it won nothing, not for himself, not for his master. It was for nothing at all. For a man like that, death is the only fit sentence.”

Bhagavan Shri Krishna, four arms upon him, heard out both Draupadi and Bhimasena, turned his eyes to Arjuna’s face, and spoke as though a smile lay behind the words.

“A Brahmana who turns aggressor deserves death. A fallen Brahmana must never be killed. Both of these rulings in the shastras are mine. So carry out both of my commands at once. Keep the vow you made while you were consoling Draupadi, and at the same time do what is dear to Bhimasena, to Draupadi, and to me.”

Arjuna caught what was in Bhagavan’s heart at once. With his sword he cut the gem from Ashvatthama’s head and took the hair away with it. The killing of the boys had already drained the luster from him. Now the gem was gone, and with it the brahma-tejas, the fire of his priesthood. Arjuna loosed the rope and drove him out of the camp.

To shave the head, to seize the wealth, to drive him from the place where he stands: this is the capital sentence laid down for a fallen Brahmana, and the shastras name no other death for the body beyond it. Ashvatthama lived on. The fire and the honor and the name he had lived by went out of him.

Draupadi and the Pandavas, all of them still sunk in grief for their dead, performed the cremation and the last rites for their fallen kin.

Shukadeva paused. “Now hear the story, Rajan,” he said, “of how you yourself were saved.”

The days went on. The Pandavas offered water to their departed on the bank of the Ganga, spoke aloud of what each of them had been, wept for them long, and bathed again in the river. Bhagavan Shri Krishna gave back to Yudhishthira, the king so good that no man could be his enemy, the kingdom that gamblers had stripped from him by deceit. The wicked kings who had cut short their own span of days by laying hands on Draupadi’s hair were destroyed, and Krishna had Yudhishthira perform three Ashvamedha yajnas, one after another, until his good name spread to every quarter like the fame of Indra himself.

When it was time, Bhagavan Shri Krishna took his leave of the sons of Pandu and paid his respects to the holy Brahmanas, Dwaipayana Vyasa among them, who returned his homage. Then he mounted his chariot with Satyaki and Uddhava, meaning to set out for Dwarka. At that very moment he saw Uttara, Abhimanyu’s young widow, the daughter of King Virata, running toward him, out of her mind with fear.

The Brahmastra that Ashvatthama had loosed had turned now toward Uttara’s womb, where the one surviving shoot of the Pandava line lay growing. She felt the heat of it sink deep inside her, as though a burning arrow were searching out her womb.

“God of gods, Lord of the world, save me, save me. In all this world, where every creature is a death waiting for another, I can see no refuge but you. This dart of burning steel is racing straight at me. Master, let it burn me if it must, but grant me this one grace. Let it never touch the child in my womb.”

Bhagavan, who holds his devotees close, understood the instant he heard her. Ashvatthama had loosed the Brahmastra to leave the line of Pandu without seed.

In that same instant the sons of Pandu saw five burning shafts speeding toward them, and their hands went to their own weapons. Shri Krishna, the Yogeshwara, the one atman seated alike within and without every living thing, sent his discus, the Sudarshana, to guard his own people, and he wrapped Uttara’s womb in the armor of his maya so that the line of Kuru would not fail. The Brahmastra, the weapon presided over by Brahma that never misses and cannot be turned aside, came up against the radiance of Vishnu, and there it failed and went still. Count this no wonder in Acyuta, who is the ground of every wonder, who, unborn himself, makes and keeps and unmakes the whole universe by his own power.

The womb was saved. When the months had run their course, from that same womb a boy was born, who in time would be called the rajarshi Parikshit.

“Rajan, that boy is you. The hand that kept watch around you in that dark womb belongs to the one whose story you have been hearing all these seven days. You were taken into his lap in your mother’s womb itself, long before the mouth of death ever opened toward you.”

Parikshit sat listening in silence for a while.