Bhagavatam · Bhishma’s Final Teaching

Parikshit looked at the sage Shukadeva. A question had been sitting in his mind for a long while.

“Lord,” Parikshit said softly, “I have only a few days left, and I am a king. I do not know how a king dies. Tell me this. In my own line there was a man who lay upon arrows and waited out the hour of his death, and who left his body at the last with Shri Krishna standing before him. In that hour, what was in his mind?”

Shukadeva was quiet for a time. Then a warmth entered his voice. “Rajan, you are asking about the grandsire of your own line, the elder they all called Pitamah. Listen to what happened that day at Kurukshetra.”

The war of the Mahabharata was over.

Dharma had won. The Kauravas were gone. The Pandavas sat upon the throne. Yet one man was still breathing, and as he breathed he was waiting for the hour of uttarayana.

Bhishma.

Arjuna’s arrows had brought him to the ground. His body lay covered with shafts from end to end. On that bed of arrows he waited for uttarayana, because that was the hour he had chosen for leaving his body.

Then one day, the sun changed its road. Dakshinayana passed, and uttarayana arrived.

Now it was time.

King Yudhishthira came to him with his brothers, all riding chariots worked with gold, fine horses in the yoke. Bhima, Arjuna, Nakula, Sahadeva.

Krishna too rode among them in his chariot. In their midst Yudhishthira shone the way Kubera himself might travel, ringed by his yakshas. When they reached the field, Bhishma lay before them on the bare ground like a god fallen out of the sky, and Krishna, the brothers, and everyone who had come with them bowed low to him.

Sages of every kind came to see him: seers born as brahmanas, seers who dwelt among the gods, and seers who had once been kings. Parvata, Narada, and Dhaumya; Badarayana, who is Vyasa himself; Brihadashva, Bharadvaja, and Parashurama with his disciples; Vasishtha, Indrapramada, Trita, Gritsamada, and Asita; Kakshivan, Gautama, Atri, and Vishvamitra; Sudarshana, Kashyapa, Angirasa, and many more besides, each with his own pupils. A whole caravan of sages.

Bhishma opened his eyes. At the sight of them the tears came, tears of love, and he greeted each sage with the honor the moment and the place deserved. Then he turned to Krishna. Bhishma knew what Krishna was. He knew the human shape seated before him was a form the Lord of all the worlds had taken on of his own accord, and he knew that same Lord was seated inside his own heart. He worshipped him in both places at once, the Krishna before his eyes and the Krishna within.

Yudhishthira’s mind carried a great weight. He had won the war, yes, and he had won it by killing his own kin. At night, sleep would not come to him.

Bhishma looked at them with love, his eyes still brimming, and it was Yudhishthira’s burden he lifted first.

“Son, it has been a hard and unjust thing that men like you, who lived under the shelter of dharma and of the Lord himself, still had to pass through so much pain, pain you never earned. When the great Pandu died, you were all young, and your mother Kunti, my own daughter-in-law, carried one hardship after another for your sake, and carried them more than once. But listen carefully. All these events lie under the sway of Time; they are the will of Shri Hari himself. As clouds move at the wind’s bidding, so this whole world, its guardian deities included, moves under Shri Krishna, who is Time itself.”

“Consider it. Where Yudhishthira, dharma’s own son, is present; where Bhima with his mace and Arjuna with his bow stand guard; where the Gandiva is strung and Shri Krishna himself is your well-wisher, what room could calamity find? And still, no one knows what Shri Krishna in his form as Time means to do next. The greatest of the wise set out to know it, and are left bewildered.”

“So take all of this, son, as the Lord’s own ordinance, and care for these people who have no other protector. You are their master now.”

Bhishma paused, and his voice dropped. There was one thing he wanted Yudhishthira to hold onto before anything else.

“You think of Krishna as your cousin, your mother’s brother’s son. Your dearest friend. The one who wishes you well beyond anyone. Out of that love you made him your counselor, you sent him as your envoy to the Kauravas, you let him hold the reins of Arjuna’s chariot. Hear me now. This Krishna is the Lord himself. He is the primeval person, Narayana. He has covered the world over with his own maya and moves among the Vrishnis as though he were only one more man of the Yadu house, and his deepest glory is known to almost no one. Shiva knows it. Narada knows it. Kapila knows it. Past those three, who?”

“He is the Self of everything that lives. He looks on all of it with one even gaze. He is one, with no second beside him, with no trace of I or mine in him, and without a single flaw. So never imagine that the many parts he plays for you, cousin, friend, envoy, charioteer, divide him or reach him. They leave him exactly as he is.”

“And see what his love for his own can do. Here I lie at the very hour of leaving my body, and he has come and taken his stand in front of me. A man who gives up his body with his mind fixed on Krishna and his name on his tongue walks out free of every last craving, loosed from the long chain of his own deeds. So this is the one thing I ask. Let this Lord, whom even the gods hold in worship, who carries the four arms, whose face opens like a lotus with its quiet smile and its reddened eyes, who shows himself to other men only far inside their meditation, let him stay here before me until I have set this body down.”

Yudhishthira listened, and the weight on him began to lift. There, in front of the gathered sages, he laid his questions before Bhishma one after another: the duties a man is born to, the way a king should rule, the road that leads to release. Bhishma saw the truth of things plainly, and only a little daylight was left to him, and he chose to spend it answering.

And Bhishma described each in turn: the natural duties of a man according to varna and ashrama; the twin paths of withdrawal and engagement, matched to dispassion and to desire; the dharma of giving, the dharma of kings, the dharma of moksha, the dharma of women, and the dharma of devotion to the Lord. He recounted the four aims of human life, dharma, artha, kama, and moksha, and the means of attaining them, telling history after history, episode after episode.

The Pandavas sat and listened.

But what the Bhagavata treasures is the part that comes after the teaching.

Bhishma was still discoursing on dharma when the hour of uttarayana arrived, the very hour that yogis who hold death in their own power keep longing for.

Bhishma paused for a moment. His attention turned inward.

He stilled his speech. He gathered his mind in from every direction and fixed it on the primeval person, Shri Krishna, standing before him. Then he stopped the movements of all his senses.

The pain of the arrow wounds on his body left him at the mere sight of the Lord, through that pure and unbroken concentration. Whatever inauspicious residue remained in him was destroyed.

He opened his eyes. And now he saw one alone, no one else.

Krishna.

Over Shri Krishna’s beautiful four-armed form the yellow pitambara was rippling. Bhishma’s gaze fastened on it and did not move.

With great love, palms joined, Bhishma began his hymn to the Lord.

“O Lord,” his voice low but clear.

“Now, at the hour of death, I offer this intellect of mine, made utterly pure and free of desire by the long practice of many disciplines, at the feet of the infinite Lord Shri Krishna, crown of the Yadu line. You rest always in your own blissful nature, and yet, out of the wish for play, you accept prakriti, and from that acceptance the stream of creation flows on.”

“May my love, free of all guile, rest in Arjuna’s friend Shri Krishna, whose body, dark as the tamala tree, is the loveliest thing in the three worlds, over which the finest yellow cloth ripples like rays of the sun, and whose lotus face is framed by curling locks.”

And then, from that same bed of arrows, the scene of the war opened before Bhishma once more, the scene in which he had been able to make Shri Krishna his single aim.

“On the field of battle the dust flung up by the horses’ hooves settled on his curling hair and his face, beads of sweat stood on it, and my sharp arrows were cutting into his skin. To that Shri Krishna in his shining armor let this body, this inner being, and this soul of mine be given.”

“At Arjuna’s word he drove the chariot straight between the two armies, and standing there he drew the very life-span out of the enemy soldiers with his glance alone. In that friend of Partha, Shri Krishna, let my highest love rest.”

“When Arjuna looked upon the leaders of the Kaurava host and turned away from slaying his own people, counting it a sin, it was he who destroyed that delusion with the teaching of self-knowledge that became the Gita. At the feet of that supreme person, Shri Krishna, let my love remain.”

“I had vowed that I would make Shri Krishna take up a weapon before the war was done. To make my word come true, he broke his own. He sprang down from the chariot, caught up one of its wheels, and came at me the way a lion springs at an elephant, the ground shaking under his feet, his upper cloth slipping loose behind him.”

“My arrows had already found him. His skin was torn, his body running with blood, his armor broken open, and still he came on to kill me, the aggressor, brushing past Arjuna who ran to hold him back. Let that Krishna, who hands the blessed their freedom, be my one refuge.”

“In these last moments let my love go to the Lord who took up the plain work of a charioteer for Arjuna, the whip in one hand and the reins gathered in the other, and stood there so beautiful in that humble office that the warriors who fell on that field, looking on him with their last breath, left their bodies and rose into a form like his own.”

“The gopis, honored by his graceful gliding walk, his playful gestures, his sweet smile, and his glances full of love, were so carried away in the madness of that love when he vanished from the rasa dance that they lost themselves in imitating his lilas. In that same Shri Krishna let my supreme love rest.”

“At Yudhishthira’s rajasuya yajna, in a full assembly of munis and great kings, it was he who received the first worship of all, before my own eyes. That same Lord, the soul of every being, stands before me today at the hour of my death.”

“As one sun appears in many forms to many eyes, so the unborn Shri Krishna appears in many forms in the hearts of the many embodied beings he himself has made. In truth he is one, and he dwells in every heart. Him I have now reached, free of the delusion of difference.”

So Bhishma merged himself into Shri Krishna, the Self of all, with every movement of mind, speech, and sight.

His life-breath dissolved there and then, and he grew still.

That was the end. On a bed of arrows. The pride of the Bharata line, that elephant among warriors, Bhishma the grandsire, went at the last as a simple devotee, merged into the infinite Brahman.

Knowing that he had passed into the infinite Brahman, everyone fell silent, the way birdsong dies down when the day is done.

Then gods and men sounded their drums. Kings of saintly nature sang his praise, and flowers rained from the sky.

Yudhishthira had the funeral rites performed for his body and sank for a time into grief. The munis, in great joy, praised the Lord by his mysterious names and returned each to his own ashram.

Then Yudhishthira went back to Hastinapura with Shri Krishna and consoled his uncle Dhritarashtra and the ascetic Gandhari. With his uncle’s permission and Shri Krishna’s consent, that capable king began to rule his ancestral empire according to dharma.

Shukadeva paused for a moment.

Parikshit said nothing for a long while. Then he spoke. “Lord, I had been afraid of what to say at the moment of death, what to recite. My grandsire asked for nothing at all. He simply looked, and said that his mind was in him.”

“That is the whole of it, Rajan,” Shukadeva smiled. “The last hour is no examination where the right mantra must be recalled. The love of a whole lifetime rises on its own in that one hour. What Bhishma had kept behind the veil of duty all his life stepped forward the moment the veil fell. Shri Hari.”

Parikshit bowed his head. One more day had gone from his count, and today, for the first time, he watched it pass without fear.