Bhishma

The tenth day at Kurukshetra is sinking toward dusk. For nine days one man had burned through the Pandava army like the sun of the world’s dissolution, and now he is falling from his chariot, pierced by the countless arrows Arjuna loosed from behind the screen of Shikhandi. And then comes the thing that never happened again in the history of war. The image from Vyasa’s Mahabharata stands untouched on this site’s Bhishma Parva page, “but his body could not touch the earth; that dense mesh of arrows became his bed.” Both armies halt their fighting and stand still. The man who never once in his life lay on any couch of comfort was given even by death a couch of arrows, and given it only when he himself wished it.

To understand the story of Bhishma you have to go far back into the Adi Parva of the Mahabharata, back to where King Shantanu, on the bank of the Ganga, accepts a woman’s condition for marriage: that he will never question anything she does. Seven sons are set adrift in the water; at the eighth the king’s patience breaks, and Ganga, on that very breaking of the promise, takes her son and leaves. That eighth Vasu, Gangadatta Devavrata, comes back grown, and then a second longing of his father decides the direction of his life. Shantanu wants Satyavati, the fisherman’s daughter, and Satyavati’s father wants the promise that the kingdom will pass to her sons. The father is sunk in hesitation, and the son goes himself and takes the vow that made him Bhishma: he renounces the kingdom, and takes lifelong celibacy, so that his own children too would never ask for the throne. Flowers rained from the sky, his father granted him death at will, and Hastinapura gained its lifelong sentinel. On this whole episode the site’s page says one line that lodges deep inside you, “in the Mahabharata a curse and a vow are often two ends of a single destiny.”

The watch of a vow, the service of a throne

After that day the whole of Bhishma’s life turns on a single axis: the throne of Hastinapura, whoever sits upon it. He never became king, yet every king was made in his shadow. He won brides for Satyavati’s sons; when the line began to fail he opened the way of niyoga (union by proxy to carry on a line); Dhritarashtra and Pandu grew up under his care. And then came that assembly, the one with the dice, where Draupadi asked her question before the full court and the greatest knower of dharma in the Kuru line, soaked in his own sweat, could say only that the way of dharma is subtle. This moment gives Bhishma more pain than his bed of arrows, because here the thing that pierced him was his own vow, and it cut deeper than any shaft. The man who had taken a lifelong vow to guard the throne could not, on that day, stand against the throne’s own adharma.

When war came he became the first commander of the Kaurava army, knowing all the while that dharma stood on the far side. He fought for ten days, and fought so fiercely that Krishna himself forgot his own promise, dropped the reins, took up his discus, and ran at him. And in that moment Bhishma folded his hands and said, come, Madhava; if death reaches me from your hand, that is my blessing. He had let go of any wish to win; his one aim was to reach his end with his vow unbroken. In the end it was he himself who told the Pandavas how to bring him down: put Shikhandi in front, and I will not lift an arrow against him.

And then the Mahabharata does what no other text would do. It makes the fallen Bhishma its greatest teacher. In the Shanti Parva and the Anushasana Parva, lying on his bed of arrows, waiting for the sun to turn north, Bhishma teaches Yudhishthira the dharma of kings, speaks the dharma of distress and the dharma of liberation, opens the glory of giving, and tells story after story. The man who had stayed bound to his word his whole life became, on his last bed, such a spring of knowledge that two entire parvas of the Mahabharata are his voice. The sun turned north, and he released his life by his own resolve, the way a man rises after finishing his work, straightening his chair, putting out the lamp.

His path

Shantanu, Ganga, and the vow of Bhishma · The birth of the eighth Vasu, and the terrible vow that turned Devavrata into Bhishma.

Satyavati and the thread of the line · The lifelong labor of saving the line that sprang from the very marriage his vow had secured.

The dice hall · Draupadi’s question and Bhishma’s heaviest silence, the way of dharma is subtle.

The war begins, the armies in view · A white parasol, white horses, a commander like a snow peak, the Kuru army’s first front.

The fall of Bhishma · Arrows loosed from behind the cover of Shikhandi, and the body that never reached the ground.

The dharma of kings on a bed of arrows · A fallen warrior, a seated king, and a school of statecraft convened upon arrows.

The gist of the dharma of liberation and the dharma of distress · What to hold on to when the rules give out, Bhishma’s subtlest teaching.

The final teaching and the ascent to heaven · The glory of giving, the wait for the sun’s northward turn, and a departure by his own resolve.

The weight of a word

Reading Bhishma, one question closes in on us again and again: how did a man so capable stay so powerless? The answer is in his vow. A single decision, taken in youth, for a father’s happiness, in one breath, and then never altered through changing circumstances to the last day of his life. For anyone who makes decisions, Bhishma is a warning: a promise that was firm at the moment of giving can turn just as blind at the moment of keeping, if it is never tested against time. In Draupadi’s assembly, dharma was asking only one thing of Bhishma, that he change the definition of his loyalty, lift it off the throne and set it on justice, and he could not change. Yet the other face of this same story is just as true: in his last days he made even his own defeat into a lesson. To go on teaching after the fall, to hand everything, his errors included, to the next generation, this was Bhishma’s penance and also his greatest gift. To keep a word is a great thing. To choose which word is worth living for is a greater thing still. In the first, Bhishma had no equal; the worth of the second we must learn from his life itself.