Duryodhana

Discontent Is the Root of Prosperity

In the courtyards of Hastinapura the citizens began saying that the kingdom should go to Pandu’s son, and Duryodhana could not bear to hear it. He went to his father and found him alone. “They want Pandu’s son as their king, passing over both you and Bhishma.” And: “Find a way to prevent us from living in perpetual misery, dependent on others for our food.” Then he summoned his counselor Purochana in private, took his right hand, and gave him the house, four-sided, by the arsenal, its walls plastered with lac and ghee and oil, and the last line of the order was the only one that mattered: “Once you are certain they are sleeping inside, confident and unafraid, start the fire at the outer door. They will burn to death, and the people will believe their house caught fire by accident.” The fire was lit. Purochana burned in it, and a Nishada woman who had come on some errand with her children, and the Pandavas went out through a tunnel. Then came Maya’s hall, and the burning with which this story opened. Shakuni offers the one battle he is sure of winning, since Yudhishthira loves dice and cannot play them, and Duryodhana tells his father, “I eat and I dress like a wretch, and I pass my days the prey of a fierce jealousy.” Dhritarashtra answers that the sons of Pandu are his arms, and asks to consult Vidura first, and the son cuts across him. “Vidura works for the good of Pandu’s sons, and what he feels for us is something else. If you consult him he will make you give this up. And if you give it up, I will certainly kill myself. Then you can be happy with Vidura when I am dead.” The hall of a thousand columns goes up, and Yudhishthira is sent for.

At every throw Shakuni says the same two words, and the kingdom goes, and the brothers, and the king himself, and then Draupadi. Dragged into the hall by her hair, she asks whom the king lost first, himself or her, and Yudhishthira sits like a man who has lost his senses, and it is Duryodhana who presses him. “King, Bhima and Arjuna are under your rule, and so are the twins. Answer the question Draupadi has asked. Say whether you hold Krishna to be unwon.” He does not wait for the answer. To encourage Karna and to insult Bhima he pulls the cloth back from his left thigh, a thigh like the stem of a plantain tree, marked with every sign of good fortune, and shows it to Draupadi where she cannot help seeing it. Bhima’s red eyes open wide. “May Bhima never reach the worlds his ancestors have reached, if he does not break that thigh of yours in the great battle.” Every thigh in this poem is counted from that moment. Then a jackal howls, the old king wakes, and Draupadi takes her two boons and walks her husbands out of slavery. Duryodhana goes to his father with the plan. “Which of them will ever forgive the insult to Draupadi? Bless you, Father. We will gamble with the son of Pandu again, and this time the game will send them into exile. In that way we can bring them under our rule.” The stake this time is time itself, twelve years in the forest and a thirteenth unrecognized. Every man of weight in the court says let there be no play, and there is play, and one throw costs thirteen years. As the Pandavas walk out in deerskins, Duhshasana dances among the Kurus crying “Cow! Cow!” and Duryodhana, wild with joy, mimics with his own steps the easy lion’s tread of Bhima. Bhima counts that too.

A Thigh Slapped, and a Night in Patala

The Pandavas have hardly gone when the rishi Maitreya comes to Hastinapura from the Kamyaka forest, where he saw Yudhishthira, and speaks to Duryodhana gently, for his own good: make peace with the Pandavas. Duryodhana says nothing. He begins to slap his thigh, which is like the trunk of an elephant, and with a smile on his face he scratches the ground with his foot, his head hanging down, without a word. The sage knows what the gesture means. He touches water, as a Brahmin does before a rite, and speaks the curse over the son of Dhritarashtra. “Since you slight me and refuse to act on my words, you will soon reap the fruit of this insolence of yours. In the great war that will spring from the wrongs you have done, the mighty Bhima will smash that thigh of yours with a blow of his mace.” The old king begs, and the sage leaves him one door: if the son makes peace with the Pandavas, the curse will not take effect. That door was never opened. Some years later Shakuni and Karna talk him into the forest, to show the exiles his wealth, and a city on the move goes out toward Dvaitavana and finds the Gandharva king Chitrasena already camped at the lake. Duryodhana’s men order the Gandharvas aside, the Gandharvas laugh, and the fight goes the way of fights against beings who can rise into the sky by illusion: Karna holds the field alone until his chariot is broken under him, and the chariotless Duryodhana is pounced on by Chitrasena and seized as though his very life were being taken, with his brothers and every woman of the royal household. His own soldiers run to the Pandavas, and Arjuna holds the Gandharvas with weapons of the gods, Chitrasena turns out to be his friend, and in front of the Pandavas the Gandharva king lays out the whole purpose of the expedition: these men came to mock them. On the road home Karna congratulates the king on beating the Gandharvas, and Duryodhana answers in a voice choked with tears, with the one piece of plain truth he speaks in the whole poem. “And while that Gandharva was laying out our schemes, I was so overcome with shame that I wished the earth would split open and swallow me.” Then: “The men I always tormented, who were always my enemies, are the ones who freed me from my bonds, and I, base as I am, owe them my very life.” And he decides. “So I will give up my life by fasting.” To Duhshasana: “Become king in my place.” Karna and Shakuni argue with him, and shame closes over his soul; he spreads kusha grass and sits down to die. Far below, in Patala, the Daityas and Danavas who were beaten by the gods in ancient days learn of his resolve. They perform a fire rite, and a goddess rises from the fire with her mouth gaping wide, and in a moment she has carried him down to them. In the night the Danavas tell him who he is: that in ancient times they obtained him from Shiva by their austerities. “If you die our side grows weak. As the Pandavas are the refuge of the gods, so you are always our refuge.” They send him back with “Go, and win victory!” and the same goddess sets him down on the same grass. When she has gone, Duryodhana takes all of it for a dream, and thinks to himself that he will defeat the Pandavas in battle, and his hope hardens. The poem adds one line: King Suyodhana told no one of this. After that night there is no door left in him through which peace could come.

Land the Size of a Needle’s Point

The thirteen years run out, and on the same day Duryodhana and Arjuna reach Dwarka. Krishna is asleep. Duryodhana enters first and takes a fine seat at the head of the bed; Arjuna comes in after him and stands behind the bed with his hands joined; and when Krishna wakes, his eyes fall first on Arjuna. Duryodhana states his case cheerfully: “I reached you first today. Honorable people support the person who comes to them first.” Krishna grants the fact of his arrival, and gives the younger man the first choice: on one side the Narayanas, ten crore of cowherds who rival Krishna in strength, on the other Krishna alone, resolved to lift no weapon. Arjuna chooses Krishna, and Duryodhana takes the entire body of Narayana troops and goes home delighted, certain that he has been given everything and his enemy nothing. Then Krishna comes to Hastinapura as the envoy of peace. Dhritarashtra speaks, Bhishma speaks, Drona and Vidura speak, all in one direction, and Duryodhana answers none of the elders; he answers Keshava. “I do not find the least fault in myself. And yet all of you, the old king included, hate me.” And then the oldest word his house possesses: “We cannot bow down to Indra himself, let alone the sons of Pandu.” He quotes Matanga, that a Kshatriya should break at the knots sooner than bend. And at the end, in a voice he does not lower, the sentence the whole war would afterward be remembered by: “At present, Keshava, as long as I am alive, not even as much of our land as the point of a sharp needle could cover shall be given by us to the Pandavas.” Yudhishthira had sent Krishna willing to accept five villages. Krishna counts off his offenses one by one, the house of lac, the poison, the dice, the dragging of Draupadi, and when Duhshasana says aloud that Bhishma and Drona and their own father mean to bind the three of them and hand them to the Pandavas, Duryodhana rises in anger, breathing heavily like a great snake, and walks out of the court paying no regard to anyone in it. His mother is sent for, and he lets her words fall to the floor without picking one of them up. Outside the hall four men make a decision, Duryodhana, Karna, Shakuni, and Duhshasana the fourth. “So we will seize Keshava here, whatever Dhritarashtra cries out, and then we will fight the enemy.” Krishna laughs in the hall and shows the form from which gods pour out of his body, none of them larger than a thumb. Duryodhana looks at that form and does not bend. Five voices had gone one way in that court; one came back, and it was the answer to all five.

Who Is So Fortunate as I

At Kurukshetra, having seen the army of the Pandavas drawn up in formation, King Duryodhana approaches his teacher Drona and speaks, and the first chapter of the Gita opens in his voice. Eleven akshauhinis stand behind him. On the tenth day Bhishma goes down onto the bed of arrows; on the thirteenth, many great chariot fighters join together and kill the boy Abhimanyu; on the fifteenth Drona falls, on the seventeenth Karna, and on the eighteenth Shalya and Shakuni and all his brothers, Duhshasana among them. The man who had been master of eleven akshauhinis takes up his mace and goes on foot toward a lake, and he has not gone far before he remembers the words of Vidura, who had surely seen all of this long ago. On the way he meets Sanjaya, touches him with his hand, and gives him a message. “Except for you, Sanjaya, not one of those who fought in this battle is alive. I see no other man of mine, and the Pandavas still have their allies living. Go to the blind king, Sanjaya, to my lord Dhritarashtra, and tell him that his son Duryodhana has gone down into the depths of a lake.” And: “Who, in my place, would want to live?” He goes into the lake Dvaipayana, charms its waters by his power of illusion, and makes a space for himself inside them. Hunters bringing meat to Bhima see where he went, and the Pandavas come to the bank with Krishna and call him out. Yudhishthira grants the wish that will make Krishna angry. “Fight any one of us, and take whatever weapon you like. The rest of us will stand here and watch. I grant you this other wish of your heart as well, hero: if you kill any one of us, you shall be king. Otherwise, be killed by us and go to heaven.” From under the water comes the answer. “If you grant me the choice of fighting only one of you, then this mace I hold in my hand is the weapon I choose.” He adds that it is not proper for many to fight one man, and Yudhishthira asks him the question he has no answer for: “How is it, Duryodhana, that you did not know this when many great chariot fighters joined together and killed Abhimanyu in battle?” Krishna turns on Yudhishthira for the rash words, and gives the reason: “For thirteen years, wanting to kill Bhimasena, Duryodhana has practiced with the mace on a statue of iron.” Duryodhana breaks up through the solid water with the mace on his shoulder and stands on the bank bleeding, calling the Pandavas to battle. Krishna tells Arjuna how it will go: “The two have had equal training. But Bhima has more strength, while the son of Dhritarashtra has more skill and has toiled harder. If Bhima fights by the rules of fair combat, he will never win.” Arjuna slaps his own left thigh where Bhima can see it. Duryodhana leaps up to baffle a blow, and in the instant he is in the air Bhima’s mace, thrown below the waist, breaks both his thighs.

He falls making the earth ring. Bhima walks up to him. “O wretch, once you laughed at the disrobed Draupadi in the assembly and called us, fool, “Cow, Cow!” Bear now the fruit of that insult!” And he touches the head of the fallen king with his left foot. Yudhishthira stops him. Balarama, who taught both men the mace, cries that a blow has been struck below the navel, lifts his plow, and rushes at Bhima, and Krishna holds him in his arms and reminds him of the vow sworn in the dice hall and of Maitreya’s curse. Then the fallen man sits up on his haunches, supported on both arms, and fixes his eyes on Krishna. “You have, it seems, no shame! Have you forgotten that by the rules of the mace-duel I was struck down most unfairly?” He counts off every wrong of the war, Bhishma behind Shikhandi, Drona and the dead elephant, Karna with his wheel in the mire. Krishna’s answer is a count of its own, the poison, the house of lac, the dice, Draupadi in the crowded assembly. “Abhimanyu, a child and alone, you surrounded with many and killed that hero. For that fault, sinful man, you have been slain! All the unrighteous deeds you charge to us were in truth done by you, out of your own sinful nature!” Then comes the declaration in which this man is wholly himself to the end. “I have studied the Vedas, I have made gifts by the ordinance, I have ruled the earth to her seas, I have stood upon the heads of my foes! Who is so fortunate as I? And that end which Kshatriyas faithful to their dharma desire, death in battle, has become mine. Who then is so fortunate as I?” As the words end, a thick shower of fragrant flowers falls from the sky, the Apsaras sing his fame, the Siddhas cry “Victory to king Duryodhana!” and the Pandavas, with Vasudeva beside them, are ashamed. At evening Kripa, Kritavarma, and Ashvatthama find him writhing on the bare ground, and at his command Kripa consecrates the son of Drona to the post of commander. That night Ashvatthama kills the Panchalas and the sons of Draupadi in their sleep, and at dawn the three ride back to the place where the king lies keeping the wolves and hyenas off his body, and tell him. The words are welcome to his heart, and he comes back to his senses to answer them. “Because of this I count myself the equal of Indra himself. Good be with you all. May you prosper. All of us will meet again in heaven.” The king of the Kurus says that and is silent; he puts away his grief for his slain kinsmen and gives up his breath, and his soul goes up to heaven while only his body stays on the earth. At the very end of the poem Yudhishthira arrives in heaven, and the first thing he sees is this: Duryodhana on a splendid seat, blazing like the sun, with the gods and the Sadhyas around him. Yudhishthira turns away. “Gods, I do not want even to look at Suyodhana. I want to go where my brothers are.” Narada is standing there, and he smiles. “Enmities end for those who live in heaven.” Duryodhana poured his own body as an offering into the fire of battle, he says, and so has won the end that is kept for heroes; “Where there was every cause for terror, this king felt none.” Narada says it, and offers no excuse for anything else.

His Path

The Tournament, and the Coming of Karna · An archer stopped by a question about his father, a king crowned on the spot, and nothing asked in return except friendship.

The House of Lac · Purochana’s right hand, walls of lac and ghee, and a fire to be started at the outer door.

Two Petitioners at Dwarka · A seat at the head of the bed, ten crore of Narayana cowherds, and a king going home delighted with an army.

Ashvatthama’s Night Massacre · An army of three men, a night falling on the sleeping Panchalas, and news pleasant to hear brought to a dying king.

The Man Who Would Not Bend, and Broke

Laughter keeps arriving in Duryodhana’s life, and every time it belongs to someone else. Bhima laughs in Maya’s hall, the Gandharvas laugh at the lake, and looking at Yudhishthira‘s fortune he tells his father that he eats and dresses like a wretch. The poem names the burning in his own voice, discontent, and he calls it the root of his prosperity. The second thread is bending. A thigh slapped in front of Maitreya, a refusal to bow even to Indra spoken in front of Krishna, Matanga’s saying that a Kshatriya breaks at the knots sooner than bend, and then the sentence with a needle’s point of land in it; at the end the thigh that was slapped is the thigh that breaks, and the poem does not hide that the blow was against the rules. Once, and once only, he bends: after the cattle expedition, owing his life to his enemies, he sits down on the grass to die, and the night in Patala stands him up again, and after that there is no door in him through which peace could pass. Sitting on his broken thighs he calls himself fortunate, and the sky takes his side with flowers; Krishna tells him he was slain by his own deeds, and Narada tells Yudhishthira that where there was every cause for terror this king felt none. The poem keeps both and cancels neither. The prince who stood stunned at a crystal door sits at the end on a seat in heaven, and Yudhishthira turns away at the sight; enmities end there, Narada says, and in that turning away the poem has its own last word as well.