Dhritarashtra

The Man Who Said the Right Thing First, and Then Said Yes

Duryodhana comes home from the Rajasuya pale and thin, and it is Shakuni who tells the father what is eating his eldest son. Dhritarashtra reasons with him, and the first words out of his mouth are the right ones. “You are my eldest son, born of my eldest wife. Do not be jealous of the Pandavas.” Then the sentence that shows he has understood everything: “To covet what belongs to another is a mean thing, child. The sons of Pandu are your arms. Do not cut off your own arms.” Shakuni offers the one battle he is sure of winning, a game of dice against a man who loves the game and cannot play it, and the father says he will consult Vidura first. Duryodhana answers that Vidura will make him give it up, and that if he gives it up his son will kill himself. The king gives way, and says so aloud as he does it: “What you say does not please me. Do what you like. You will repent it, because words so far from what is right bring no good afterward.” In the same breath he orders a hall built, the palace of the crystal arches, a thousand columns and a hundred gates, two miles on a side. Vidura bows at his feet and asks him to act so that no quarrel rises among his children over this match, and the answer comes back wrapped in fate: “Kshatta, if the gods are kind to us, no quarrel will ever rise among my sons. So let this friendly challenge at dice go forward, lucky or unlucky, good for us or bad.” In private he calls his son back once more. “My son, have nothing to do with dice. Vidura speaks against it, and with his wisdom he will never give me advice that is bad for me.” And: “Dice sows division, and division is the ruin of a kingdom.” Then, with the hall finished, he sends Vidura out behind fast horses: “Go to Khandavaprastha and bring Prince Yudhishthira here without delay. Let him come with his brothers and look at this handsome hall of mine, with its countless gems and its costly beds and carpets, and let a friendly match at dice begin here.” The right thing first, and then yes: that is the shape of this king, and it repeats to the end of his life. The hall holds one more thing, which Bhima will still be carrying fifteen years later: while the dice fell, this same king kept turning to Vidura and asking, “What has been won?” Then Draupadi is dragged in by her hair, and a jackal howls in the chamber where the palace fire is kept, and asses and birds of ill omen answer it from every side, and the king wakes. “Duryodhana, you wretch with a wicked mind. Destruction has already overtaken you, when you insult in language like this the wife of the greatest men among the Kurus, and Draupadi above all, their wedded wife.” He gives Draupadi three boons, and she takes two. Then, sending Yudhishthira home with his wealth, he writes his own defense in his own words: “I allowed this match at dice to go forward for reasons of policy. I wanted to see our friends, and I wanted to measure the strength and the weakness of my children.” The Pandavas have barely started for Indraprastha when Duryodhana asks his father for a second game, and Drona, Bhishma, and the rest tell him there must be no such game. Gandhari comes to him and hands back the warning Vidura spoke on the day Duryodhana was born, and the king’s answer is one of the most exhausted sentences in the poem. “If the destruction of our race has come, let it come freely. I am in no condition to prevent it. Let it be as these sons of mine wish.” A messenger overtakes the Pandavas on the road, and a single throw costs them thirteen years.

I Am Not My Own Master

Thirteen years later Sanjaya comes back from the Pandavas carrying their message and says he will deliver it in the morning, before the court. That night the king sends for Vidura. “So my body is burning, and the burning has taken my sleep. You know both righteousness and advantage, Vidura. Tell me what would help a man who is sleepless and burning.” Vidura asks whether he is grieving because he covets the wealth of others, and then says the thing Satyavati said on the day of his birth, in gentler words: virtuous as he is, and versed in duty, his blindness gives him no right to a share of the kingdom. “You have handed the management of the empire to Duryodhana, to Shakuni the son of Subala, to Karna and Duhshasana. How can you hope for prosperity?” All night Vidura lays out the marks of the wise man and the marks of the fool, and the morning comes exactly as it was going to come. Then Krishna arrives as the envoy of peace. Narada‘s long tale ends, the hall goes quiet, and the blind king turns his face toward Krishna’s voice and says, in front of every king in the room, what few fathers have ever said in open court. “Keshava, you have told me what leads to heaven, what does good to the world, what agrees with virtue and is full of reason. But I am not my own master. Duryodhana never does what pleases me.” He asks Krishna to counsel the boy himself, and Krishna gives the king no answer at all; he turns to Duryodhana and from that moment speaks only to the man who holds the decision. Duryodhana refuses to yield as much land as the point of a needle could cover and walks out of the court breathing like a great snake. In an outer room his friends plan to seize the envoy, and Krishna laughs in the hall and shows the form from which gods pour out of his body, none of them larger than a thumb. At the gate, with Krishna already on the step of his white chariot, the king who cannot see him speaks to him one more time. “You have seen, Janardana, how much power I have over my sons.” And: “I have no sinful feeling toward the Pandavas, Keshava.” Krishna’s answer goes past him to Bhishma, Drona, and Vidura: they have all seen for themselves what happened in the assembly, how Duryodhana walked out in anger, “and how King Dhritarashtra describes himself as powerless.”

Then, Sanjaya, I Had No Hope of Victory

For eighteen days Sanjaya tells him the war, and when all of it is over, the first chapter of the Adi Parva sets down the king’s long lament. “My inclination was never toward war, and I took no delight in the destruction of my race. I made no distinction between my own children and the children of Pandu.” Then the admission in which the whole man stands: “Blind as I am, because of my miserable condition and through a father’s affection, I bore it all. I was a fool trailing after the thoughtless Duryodhana, whose folly grew and grew.” And the count begins, link after link, every one of them a thing he was told at the time and let pass: Arjuna’s arrow through the mark, Bhima killing Jarasandha with his bare arms, Draupadi dragged into the court in a single garment, the Pashupata, Krishna going home from the Kurus with nothing, the bed of arrows, Abhimanyu, the blood of Duhshasana; and at the end of every link the same sentence, “then, Sanjaya, I had no hope of victory.” Near the end the links run close to home. “When I heard that Duryodhana, spent with fatigue, had gone to a lake and made a refuge for himself within its waters, and was lying there alone, his strength gone, without a chariot, then, Sanjaya, I had no hope of victory.” He tells Sanjaya, “All around me is utter darkness. A fit of fainting comes over me,” and when he revives, “After what has come to pass, Sanjaya, I wish to put an end to my life without delay.” On the bank of the Ganga, Yudhishthira bows at his feet, and the old man puts his arms around the cause of the slaughter, unwillingly, and then goes looking for Bhima, like a fire standing ready to burn whatever comes near it. Krishna has read him from the first and has something ready. He pulls the real Bhima out of the way and sets in front of the king an iron statue of the second son of Pandu; the king, believing he holds Bhima in flesh and blood, crushes it to pieces with the strength of ten thousand elephants, bruises his own chest on it, vomits blood, and weeps, “Alas, Bhima! Alas, Bhima!” Krishna tells him what he has broken, and when the serving women have washed him, says what everyone had been saying for years. “I spoke to you before the battle. Bhishma and Drona did the same, and Vidura, and Sanjaya. You did not follow our advice then.” The king’s answer is one sentence long: “It was a father’s love that made me fall away from righteousness.” Vyasa comes and tells him the secret of fate, that Duryodhana was a portion of Kali, born for a slaughter the gods had promised the Earth, and in the same breath says the other half: “Your sons were destroyed through their own faults. Do not grieve for them.” And the king who has fainted and come back all day asks Yudhishthira how many died in this war and how many lived, and hears a number: one billion, six hundred and sixty million, and twenty thousand dead.

Fifteen Years in the City, Three in the Forest

For fifteen years after the war the Pandavas carry him on their heads like a king. Yudhishthira does nothing without his leave; the old man keeps the same cooks and the same table, and he rises at dawn, purifies himself, and blesses with victory the very Pandavas who killed his sons. Inside him the dice hall goes on burning. One day Bhima stands where the king can hear him and slaps his armpits like a wrestler stepping onto the ground, and says that these two arms sent every son of the blind king to the other world. Fifteen years of those darts, and one day Dhritarashtra calls his well-wishers together with tears standing in his sightless eyes and makes the plainest confession of his life. “Fool that I was, I installed the wicked-minded Duryodhana, that enhancer of his kinsmen’s terrors, to rule over the Kurus. Vasudeva said to me, ‘Let this sinful wretch of wicked understanding be killed along with all his friends and counselors.’ I did not listen to those words, grave as they were.” Then a secret. For fifteen years, at the fourth division of the day or sometimes at the eighth, he has eaten only enough to conquer thirst, has slept on kusha grass in a deerskin, and has told no one. “It was through fear of Yudhishthira alone that I hid what I was doing, for if the eldest son of Pandu learned of my vow he would feel great pain.” Even as he speaks he sinks against Gandhari like a man from whom the life has gone, and Yudhishthira cries out that the king whose strength equaled a hundred thousand elephants, who ground the iron Bhima to fragments, sits today leaning on a weak woman. Before he goes, the old king lays his hand on Yudhishthira’s back and hands him the whole science of holding a kingdom, and one sentence of it is the account of his own life: “Keep your senses as you keep your horses; then they will serve you like wealth that is never wasted.” For ten days he gives gifts for the dead, naming them one by one, Drona and Bhishma and Duryodhana and each of his other sons. On the day of leaving, Kunti walks in front with Gandhari’s hand on her shoulder, and Dhritarashtra walks behind with his hand on Gandhari’s, blind led by one who will not see, led by the one who can. In the forest Narada tells the assembled sages that he has heard from Indra’s own lips that three years remain of this king’s life, and that after them he will go with Gandhari to the regions of Kubera. A year on, the Pandavas come to visit, and on a night by the Bhagirathi, Vyasa, through the power of his penance, gives Dhritarashtra celestial sight. The man who refused to watch Kurukshetra watches its dead instead, and the boon he handed back before the war he accepts now: Bhishma, Drona, Karna, Duryodhana, all of them in celestial robes, free of enmity and pride, rise out of the river, and the old king is filled with joy. When it is time to part he tells Yudhishthira, “Meeting with you slackens my penance. This body of mine, given to penance, I have been able to sustain only because of this meeting with you.” And: “I want now to set myself to the practice of the harshest penances.” In the forest at Gangadwara, where the river comes down out of the mountains, he holds pebbles in his mouth, lives on air, and in six months is reduced to a skeleton. A forest fire closes in, and he turns to the one man who has been his eyes for eighteen days. “Go, Sanjaya, to some place where the fire cannot burn you. As for us, we will let our bodies be destroyed by this fire and attain the highest goal.” Sanjaya answers that a death by a fire that is not sacred will prove calamitous, and the king says, “This death cannot be calamitous to us, for we left our home of our own accord.” He sits down facing east with Gandhari and Kunti, and stays like a post of wood. Narada says afterward that the fire had sprung from the king’s own sacrificial fire, cast off in the woods by his priests; and so, after three years in the forest and fifteen in the city, Dhritarashtra went out of this world.

His Path

The Second Game, and the Road to Exile · A jackal’s cry, three boons for Draupadi, and leave for a second game on the same day.

Dhritarashtra’s Night and Vidura’s Counsel · A burning body that cannot sleep, and the marks of the wise man and the fool counted out until morning.

The Test of Heaven and Hell, and the Last Reunion · The blind king in the regions of Kubera, and his hundred sons seated in heaven with their human anger gone.

The Man Who Would Not See, and Heard Everything

The right thing keeps arriving in Dhritarashtra’s life, and every time it arrives from his own mouth. The sons of Pandu are your arms; dice sows division; the kingdom of the Kurus belongs to Pandu’s sons as well; and then, every time, from the same mouth, yes. The poem gives one reason for it, and the king gives it himself, in the Adi Parva, in the Stri Parva, and again before he leaves for the woods: a father’s love made him fall away from righteousness. The second thread is sight. He was born blind because his mother shut her eyes, and Satyavati said in that same hour that a blind man could not be king; Vyasa gave him eyes before the war and he handed them back, because he had no wish to see his kinsmen slaughtered and every wish to hear it; and in the forest, by that same Vyasa’s gift, he looked at those same dead, and was glad. Between those two gifts lie eighteen days of Sanjaya’s voice, and after them the count at every link of which his hope of victory died, every link a thing that had been told to him on the day it happened. Krishna tells him that what came upon him was his own fault, and Vyasa tells him the slaughter was decreed; the poem sets the two side by side and lets the king off from neither. For fifteen years he lives in the house of the men whose sons killed his sons, and for those fifteen years he goes quietly hungry, so that Yudhishthira will not be hurt. The man who refused to look at Kurukshetra sits down at the end, facing east, in a fire he had kindled himself, and this time hands nothing back.