A dry well outside Hastinapura, and a ring of Kuru princes bent over its mouth, their ball lying somewhere in the dark below. They are looking at one another in embarrassment when a Brahmin walks past, lean and worn and dark of skin, a man who has just finished his morning fire rite. The Adi Parva of Vyasa’s Mahabharata gives him a slight smile and an opening line that stings: “Shame on your Kshatriya strength and your skill in arms, that, born in the race of Bharata, you cannot lift a single ball.” Then a wager. “If you will promise me a dinner this day, I will bring up your ball with these blades of grass, and this ring besides, which I now throw into the well.” The ring drops. Blades of grass charged with mantra go down one after another, each piercing the last, and the ball comes up on a chain of straw; the ring comes up on the point of an arrow. Yudhishthira tells the stranger that a dinner is a trifle and offers something that will last him his whole life, and the stranger answers with the only thing he wants. “Go to Bhishma and describe my likeness and my skill,” he tells them, “and that great man will know me.” The whole story of Drona begins at the edge of that well, where a man who can lift anything out of the dark with a blade of grass stands remembering a child who cried for milk.
Bhishma knew the Brahmin from the princes’ description, fetched him himself, and asked why he had come, and Drona told him everything. At the source of the Ganga the sage Bharadwaja had caught his seed in a drona, a pot, and the child who came out of it carried the pot’s name. A king named Prishata was Bharadwaja’s friend, and his son Drupada came to the hermitage every day to play and study with the boy, two children sharing what a hermitage has, which is very little. To please his friend Drupada used to say, “When I am made king of the Panchalas, my kingdom and my wealth and my happiness shall all be yours.” Drona married Kripi, the sister of Kripa, and the son she bore him neighed at birth like the horse of heaven, so that a voice out of the sky named him Ashvatthama. When Rama of the Bhrigu line gave away his wealth on Mount Mahendra, Drona went to him and said, “I have come in hope of your wealth,” and found that the gold and the earth itself were already given away; he asked for all the weapons that remained, with the mantras for hurling them and for calling them back. Then came the day Drona did not hide from Bhishma. The boy Ashvatthama saw rich men’s sons drinking milk and began to cry, and his father went from country to country for one cow and came home with nothing. While he was gone the boy’s playmates mixed powdered rice in water, and the child drank it and danced, calling out, “I have taken milk, I have taken milk.” The laughter cut Drona through. He took his wife and son to the friend who had promised him a kingdom, said “Know me for your friend,” and watched the king’s brows draw together. “There is no friendship between a poor man and a rich one, between the unlettered and the learned, between a coward and a hero. One who is not a king can never have a king for a friend.” “I remember no promise of friendship,” Drupada added, “though I can spare you a single night’s food and shelter.” Drona said nothing in reply, fixed his course, and walked to Hastinapura. Bhishma heard it all and answered as a king answers. “Brahmin, string your bow and make the Kuru princes masters of arms,” he said. “Whatever wealth and sovereignty and kingdom the Kurus hold, you are its lord, and by your coming we are blessed beyond measure.”
Pupils, and the Teacher’s Fee
Settled in a clean house full of paddy, the teacher one day called the princes aside, had them touch his feet, and told them that he carried a purpose in his heart and wanted their word that they would accomplish it once they were skilled. The others kept silent. Arjuna alone promised, without asking what the purpose was, and Drona held him and wept. One evening a wind put out the lamp at dinner and the boy noticed that his hand still found his mouth; he began to shoot in the dark, and the twang of the bowstring brought Drona out into the night to hold him and say, “I tell you truly, I will make you such that there shall be no archer in this world to equal you.” The epic records what that promise cost. Ekalavya, a Nishada king’s son, came to be taught and was turned away for his birth; he made a clay image of Drona in the forest and practiced before it until he could fill a barking dog’s mouth with seven arrows before it closed. Arjuna went to his teacher in private and leaned on his affection, and Drona took him to the forest, where the boy touched his feet and asked for his command. “If you truly mean to give me something,” Drona said, “give me the thumb of your right hand.” The thumb came off without a word, and the text itself calls the demand cruel.
When the training was done, Drona entered the arena all in white, white robe, white thread, white hair and beard, white sandal paste, with his son beside him like Mars beside the moon, and when the mace bout had split the crowd he stopped the musicians, and said in a voice like thunder, “Now look on Partha, who is dearer to me than my own son, the master of every weapon, the son of Indra himself, and like Vishnu, Indra’s younger brother.” That same afternoon Karna walked in, bowed to Drona and Kripa as if it were nothing, and repeated every feat Arjuna had performed. Then came the day of the fee. “Capture Drupada, the king of Panchala, in battle and bring him to me. That is the payment I would value most.” Duryodhana and Karna went in first and broke against one man on one chariot, and Arjuna, who had waited a mile outside the city with Bhima for his vanguard, leaped sword in hand onto Drupada’s chariot and seized the king as Garuda seizes a snake from the sea. Drona looked at his prisoner and smiled a little. “We Brahmins are always forgiving. My affection for you has grown with me, from the days when we played together as children in the hermitage.” And then the sentence he had carried all those years: “You once told me that a man who was no king could never be a king’s friend. So, Yajnasena, I will keep the other half.” The land north of the Ganga became Drona’s, with Ahicchatra for his seat, and Drupada went home to the south and began looking for a son who could kill a Brahmin. Before the assembled princes Drona handed Arjuna the Brahmashira he had received from Agnivesha, with Agnivesha’s own warning never to release it against a human being, and asked a second fee for it: “When I fight against you, you must fight against me.”
The Slave of Wealth
That second fee was paid first by the cattle pens of Virata. Arjuna, out of Brihannala’s dress and back on a chariot, drew up beside his teacher, saluted him, and said what no one else on that field would have said: “You cannot be beaten in battle, and it would not be like you to be angry with us. I will not strike you unless you strike me first. That is what I intend. Do as you think best.” Drona’s answer was twenty arrows, and then a thousand, and the Kuru warriors watching said to one another, “Who except Phalguna is fit to fight Drona? A Kshatriya’s duty is a hard one. Here is Arjuna fighting his own teacher.” A voice out of the sky praised the old man for taking on a pupil who had beaten gods, and when Ashvatthama drove in between them Arjuna turned his horses toward the son, and the turn gave the father his chance to leave the field. In the court at Hastinapura, when Krishna came as the envoy of peace, Drona spoke after Bhishma, to a Duryodhana who was breathing hard with held rage. “The men who keep encouraging you cannot give you victory. When the fighting comes they will shift the burden of the quarrel onto other men’s necks. Do not slaughter the population of the earth. Do not kill your sons and your brothers. Know that an army with Vasudeva and Arjuna in the middle of it cannot be defeated.” And at the end, “I do not want to say anything more to you.”
On the first morning at Kurukshetra, after the Gita had been spoken, Yudhishthira took off his armor and walked on foot into the Kaurava lines, and after Bhishma he came to his teacher’s chariot, walked around it, and asked how he might fight without sin. Drona told him that he was pleased, and then said the thing four elders would repeat to the king that morning, one after another: “A man is the slave of wealth, and wealth is no man’s slave. The Kauravas have bound me with their money, and so I will fight for the Kauravas like a man unmanned, and I will pray for your victory.” “Where righteousness is, there Krishna is, and where Krishna is, there is victory.” Yudhishthira asked the last question prostrate: how do we defeat you? The teacher gave his pupil the plainest answer spoken on that field all day. “As long as I am fighting, victory can never be yours. Seek my death, you and your brothers, and seek it quickly.” Then he described the door. “No enemy can kill me while I stand in battle in my anger, pouring out arrows without stopping. Only when I have set myself for death, when I have thrown down my weapons and drawn my mind in from everything around me and sat in meditation, only then can anyone kill me.” And one sentence more: “I will throw down my weapons in battle on the day I hear something unbearable from a man whose word I trust.”
Five Days in Command
When Bhishma fell, Karna declined the command for himself and named the teacher of them all, and Duryodhana asked Drona, in front of eleven akshauhinis, to lead them as Indra leads the gods. Drona accepted, and in accepting he named the man made to kill him. “One thing I will be unable to do. I cannot kill the son of Prishata. He was made to be my death. I will fight the Pandavas and I will kill the Somakas. As for the Pandavas, they will not fight me with glad hearts.” The new commander offered the king a boon, and the king asked for Yudhishthira taken alive. Drona read the request before Duryodhana finished it. “It is a great wonder that the just king Yudhishthira has no enemy who wants his death.” And then: “They call him Ajatashatru, the man without an enemy, and the name is true, since even you have affection for him.” Duryodhana’s face gave the rest away, another game of dice and the forest again, and Drona put a fence around the boon. “If Arjuna, hero that he is, does not protect Yudhishthira in battle,” he said, “you may count the eldest Pandava as already in your hands.” That fence brought the Samshaptakas to their fires and their oath, and on the twelfth day the old man stood in front of Yudhishthira’s chariot like death itself, until Arjuna‘s arrows brought on the dark.
On the thirteenth day he built the wheel array, and a boy of sixteen broke it with Drona looking on and fought his way through the inside of it toward Drona himself. Karna asked how the boy might be killed, and the teacher answered first with praise. “He delights me, this son of Subhadra, though he is wearing down the breath in my body and stunning me with his shafts.” And more: “I see no difference in battle between the bearer of Gandiva himself and this boy with his quick hand, who is filling every point of the horizon with his arrows.” Then, slowly and with a smile, the same mouth gave the method: the bow, the string, the reins, the horses, the two flank drivers. “With his bow in his hand he cannot be beaten by the gods and the Asuras together. If you wish it, take his chariot from him, and take away his bow.” When Abhimanyu was down to a sword, it was Drona’s arrow that cut the jeweled hilt out of his hand. At sunrise on the fifteenth day, after both armies had stood with joined hands for the morning prayer, Drona drew off to the north and stood there like a fire without smoke, killed Drupada’s three grandsons with three arrows, and sent Drupada and Virata to Yama’s house with two more; and Dhrishtadyumna swore before every chariot warrior on the field that Drona would not leave it alive.
The slaughter of the Panchalas that followed drove Krishna to say aloud that virtue must be set aside, since the old man would stop fighting if he believed his son dead. Arjuna would have none of it. Yudhishthira accepted it with great difficulty. Bhima killed an elephant named Ashvatthama with his mace, went to Drona with some bashfulness, and shouted that Ashvatthama had been killed; Drona’s limbs seemed to dissolve like sand in water, and then he remembered what his son was, decided the news was false, and killed twenty thousand Panchala chariot warriors. Then the sky opened and the rishis came down, his own father Bharadwaja among them, to tell him that he was fighting unrighteously, that the hour of his death had come, and to lay his weapons down and look at them standing there. He turned to the one man from whose mouth he could not imagine a lie. Yudhishthira said distinctly that Ashvatthama was dead and added, under his breath, the word elephant, and the chariot that had run four fingers above the ground by the power of his truth touched the earth. Bhima took hold of the teacher’s chariot and said in a low voice, “He for whom you took up weapons, he for whom you live, lies today lifeless on the field behind your back, unknown to you. King Yudhishthira the just has told you this. It does not become you to doubt it.” Drona laid his bow aside and called out, “Karna, O Karna! Great bowman! Kripa! Duryodhana! I tell you all again and again, exert your prowess in battle with care. Let no harm come to you from the Pandavas. As for me, I am laying aside my weapons.” He called his son’s name aloud, sat down on the terrace of his chariot, closed his eyes, and did exactly what he had told Yudhishthira on the first morning he would do. “It seemed to us there were two suns in the sky,” Sanjaya says. Dhrishtadyumna came over the side with a sword while Arjuna cried out, “Bring the teacher alive, do not slay him, he must not be killed,” and the head the sword took belonged to a body that had already been left. The Kaurava army saw the head and ran. On the field afterward Gandhari showed Krishna where he lay, “Look at Drona, the great Brahmin, the teacher of Arjuna, of Satyaki, and of the Kurus, lying on the ground,” with Kripi beside him out of her senses, and his disciples building his pyre out of bows and chariot boxes. In heaven Yudhishthira was told, “Know that the one beside Brihaspati is Drona, your teacher,” and on the last page of the poem, “Drona entered Brihaspati, the first of the descendants of Angiras.”
His Path
Three Stops, Three Questions
Three places where he asks for something, admits something, or opens his own door. Pause at each one.
- One promise, one thumb. Read the training in arms and Ekalavya, first the bowstring in the night and the teacher’s promise, then the clay image in the forest. Ask: what may be taken from one pupil to keep a promise made to another, and who pays for it?
- The slave of wealth, praying for the other side. Read Yudhishthira‘s walk on foot in the armies drawn up, and set Drona’s answer beside his words in the court. Ask: a man who names the thing that binds him and fights for it anyway, whose man is he?
- Half a truth, a whole surrender. Read the fall of Drona, from the rishis coming down to the two suns. Ask: when a man who described the means of his own death on the first morning lays down his weapons, is that defeat, or the keeping of his word?
At the end, go back to the first scene, where a ring is dropping into a dry well. Was the Brahmin only lifting a ball, or was he practicing for something much larger that he meant to bring up out of the dark?
The Training in Arms and Ekalavya · A birth in a pot, a child dancing for milk, a king’s door shut, and a Nishada boy’s thumb.
The Tournament, and the Coming of Karna · A teacher all in white, the music stopped, and a pupil introduced as dearer than a son.
Drona’s Fee, and a Kingdom Divided · A smile over a captive king, and one kingdom cut in two along the Ganga.
The Cattle Raid at Virata · Teacher and pupil on facing chariots for the first time, and a pupil waiting to be struck first.
Drona in Command, and the Samshaptakas · A command accepted with the name of his killer in the same breath, and a boon with a fence around it.
Abhimanyu and the Wheel Array · Praise for a boy, and in the same breath the list of what could be cut.
The Fall of Drona · An elephant named Ashvatthama, rishis out of the sky, yoga on the terrace of a chariot, and Dhrishtadyumna’s sword.
The Man Who Named His Own Door
Skill never runs short in Drona’s life; what runs short is everything skill was supposed to buy. One night’s food at Drupada’s door, a house full of paddy at Hastinapura, and the price of that house spoken by its owner on the first morning of the war, a man is the slave of wealth. Four elders say that sentence to Yudhishthira that day, and Drona is the only one who hands his pupil the means of his death in the same breath. The thumb taken from Ekalavya and the method given to Karna for cutting a boy’s bow are children of one promise, made to a boy practicing in the dark, and both times the poem says plainly who paid. What remains is an old man of eighty five on the terrace of a chariot, calling his son’s name and closing his eyes, and two suns in Sanjaya’s sky. Dhrishtadyumna’s sword came down on a head whose owner was no longer there; he had gone exactly where he had said, on the first morning, that he could be sent.
Edition and source passages
Main edition: the Gita Press Mahabharata, Sanskrit with Hindi translation; quoted speech follows K. M. Ganguli’s English translation of the same text.
Passages for this reading: the ball in the well, the birth, Drupada’s insult, Bhishma’s welcome, the training in arms and Ekalavya: Gita Press Adi 109 to 134 (Ganguli Adi 129 to 134). The arena: Gita Press Adi 135 to 138. The teacher’s fee, Ahicchatra and the Brahmashira: Adi Parva, the later Sambhava sections. The cattle raid: Virata Parva, Go-harana section (Ganguli 41 to 72). Drona’s words in the court: Udyoga Parva, Bhagavad-yana section. Yudhishthira’s walk: Bhishma Parva, the opening of the Bhishma-vadha section. The command and the boon: Drona Parva, Dronabhisheka and Samshaptaka-vadha sections (Ganguli 1 to 19). The wheel array: Drona Parva, Abhimanyu-vadha section (Ganguli 31 to 50). The fifteenth day and the fall of Drona: Drona Parva, Drona-vadha section (Ganguli 184 to 193). The pyre: Stri Parva, Stri-vilapa section. Beside Brihaspati: Svargarohana Parva.
What this edition covers: a character portrait drawn from the whole Mahabharata, with three marked reading questions.
Limits and differences: the episodes rest on the Mahabharata chapters in this library; some of those chapters follow Ganguli’s section numbering, so the Gita Press chapter numbers can differ there. The test of the vulture’s head and the crocodile in the Ganga are told in no chapter of this library and are left out here; the Brahmashira appears as the Ahicchatra chapter gives it, in Agnivesha’s name. The sentence calling the demand for the thumb cruel is the chapter’s own. Drona’s age on the fifteenth day is the chapter’s own figure. Sentences in quotation marks follow the English of those chapters.