Vidura

A Warning in a Foreign Tongue

When the Pandavas set out for Varanavata the citizens walked some way behind them and turned back, and then Vidura spoke to Yudhishthira in the Mlechchha tongue, which the two of them knew and no one else around them did. “There are sharp weapons that can cut a body even though they are not made of steel. The man who recognizes them and knows how to ward them off cannot be harmed by his enemies.” And then the shape of the escape itself: “If you must accept a weapon made of something other than steel from your enemies, make your dwelling like a jackal’s, with several ways out, and escape the fire.” Yudhishthira answered with three words, “I have understood you,” and Vidura circled the brothers in reverence and went home. On the road Kunti asked her son what his uncle had said so obscurely in front of everyone that it seemed he had said nothing, and the son told his mother that the house waiting for them had been built of combustible materials. At Varanavata a man skilled in digging came to them in secret. “Vidura sent me to serve you,” he said, and proved it by repeating the words of the foreign tongue. Through his tunnel five brothers and their mother went under the fire; a boatman sent by Vidura put them across the Ganga; and when Hastinapura wept for them, Vidura did not weep much, because he knew the truth. After the winning of Draupadi it was Vidura whom Dhritarashtra sent to Panchala loaded with jewels, and in Drupada’s palace, the chapter says, he saw the Pandavas and Vasudeva with them, and the formality went out of him.

Sell the Jackal, Buy the Tigers

The moment Vidura heard of the dice he knew that Kali, the spirit of discord, was at the door. He bowed at his elder brother’s feet. “I do not approve of what you have decided. Act so that no quarrel rises among your children over this gambling match.” Fate was the answer, and when the hall was finished it was Vidura who was sent to fetch Yudhishthira. “Do not do this,” he said once more before he went. “I fear it will destroy our family. When your sons lose their unity they will quarrel, and I see that quarrel coming out of this match.” At Indraprastha he delivered the invitation and the truth with it, the names of the men waiting to play. While the dice were falling he turned to the blind king in the middle of the hall. “King, hear what I have to say, though you will like it as little as a dying man likes his medicine.” Then the bitterest dose of that day: “A jackal is living in your house in the shape of Duryodhana, and in your folly you do not see it.” “Sell a crow, King, and buy these peacocks, the Pandavas. Sell a jackal and buy these tigers.” Duryodhana turned on him. “We have nursed you like a serpent in our lap, and like a cat you wish harm to the hand that feeds you.” “So go wherever you please, Vidura.” Vidura spoke past him to the king, and what he said is the rule he lived by: “A man who will say what is unpleasant and wholesome is very rare, and so is the man who will listen to him. A king’s true ally says what is bitter and necessary and does not ask whether his master will like it.”

When Draupadi was staked, Vidura took his head between his hands and sat with his breath coming like the hiss of a snake. Duryodhana ordered him, of all men, to go and fetch her. “You wretch,” Vidura said. “Do you not know that with words like these you are tying yourself up in cords? Do you not understand that you are hanging over the edge of a precipice? You are a deer, and you are baiting tigers.” And his ruling, before anyone else had given one: “In my judgment Krishna has not become a slave. The king staked her after he had lost himself, when he was no longer his own master.” When Draupadi’s question lay unanswered in the hall, he waved his hands until it was quiet. “A man who knows the rules of dharma, who has taken his seat in an assembly, and who then gives no answer when a question is put, takes on half the guilt that belongs to a lie. A man who knows those rules, who has joined an assembly, and who answers falsely, takes on the whole sin of a lie.” He told them the history of Prahlada, who judged against his own son, and the kings answered him with not one word. When a jackal howled in the fire chamber of the palace that night, it was Vidura and Gandhari who carried the omen to the king. And as the brothers left for the forest he gave Yudhishthira a sentence to carry: “Yudhishthira,” Vidura said, “know that this is my opinion: a man who has been beaten by sinful means has no need to be pained by the defeat.” Kunti, too old for the forest, he kept in his own house.

Stay or Go

With the Pandavas gone, Dhritarashtra asked his brother how to keep the goodwill of the citizens, and Vidura gave him the only answer there was. “Let the sons of Pandu have what you gave them.” Disgrace Shakuni. And the thing he had been saying for the whole of Duryodhana’s life: “When your son was born I told you: abandon this ill-omened child; the good of your race lies in that. You did not do it.” If the son would not share the throne, then “for your own happiness, give up your child. Set Duryodhana aside and install the son of Pandu in the sovereignty.” The king heard him out. “Everything you say is crooked, Vidura, though I hold you in high esteem. Stay or go, as you like. However much she is humored, an unchaste wife leaves her husband in the end.” The comparison was aimed at the servant woman’s son, and it landed. Vidura said, “This race is doomed,” and drove alone in a single chariot to the Kamyaka forest, where Yudhishthira first feared another summons to dice. “As medicine does not commend itself to a sick man, my words did not please the king,” he told them. “As water dropped on a lotus leaf does not stay there, my counsel will have no effect on him.” Then he gave the brothers the same teaching he had given the court, to the only listener who would use it: bide your time, build slowly, share everything with your followers, never boast. In Hastinapura the king’s anger lasted about as long as it took that chariot to leave the city. He collapsed at the door of his own hall and sent Sanjaya to find out whether the brother he had driven out in anger was alive at all. When Vidura came back, Dhritarashtra said, “It is by my good luck alone, Vidura, that you have come here remembering me. In your absence I lay sleepless day and night and saw myself as a man lost on the earth.” He took his younger brother on his lap and smelled his head, the gesture of an elder to a child. “Forgive me the words in which I addressed you.” Vidura’s answer is the sentence that explains his whole life. “I have forgiven you. You are my superior, worthy of the highest reverence. Here I am, come back, eager to see you. All virtuous men are partial by instinct toward those in distress; this is scarcely the result of deliberation, and my partiality to the Pandavas comes from nothing else. Your sons are as dear to me as the sons of Pandu.”

The Night the King Could Not Sleep

Thirteen years later Sanjaya came back from Upaplavya, rebuked the king, and went home, and in the dead of night Dhritarashtra sent for his brother. “So my body is burning, and the burning has taken my sleep.” Vidura began with an observation. “Sleep deserts a thief,” Vidura said, “a man eaten by lust, a man who has lost all his wealth, a man whose efforts have failed, and a weak man attacked by the strong. I hope none of these grave misfortunes has come upon you. I hope you do not grieve, coveting the wealth of others.” The king flinched from the question and asked for words full of dharma, and so the flow began that the world calls the Vidura Niti: the marks of the wise man and of the fool, forgiveness as the choice of the strong, Prahlada and Sudhanvan told once more, and at the end of the night the plainest thing in it. “Two things only go with him to the other world: his merits and his sins.” “The man cast onto the pyre is followed only by his own acts.” Before dawn the king admitted everything. “It is just as you always teach me,” Dhritarashtra said. “My heart too inclines the way you tell me. Yet though my mind leans toward the Pandavas as you teach, as soon as I come into Duryodhana’s company it turns another way. No creature can avert fate.” Then Krishna set out as the envoy of peace, and Dhritarashtra recited to Vidura a list of gifts for him, sixteen golden chariots, eight elephants, a hundred maidservants, and waited to be told it was well done. Vidura swore by his own soul that none of it was offered out of virtue; all of it, he said, was nothing but deceit, falsehood, and insincerity. “The five Pandavas ask for five villages, and you will not give them even that. So you do not want peace.” “A vessel of water, water for his feet, and the customary questions after everyone’s health: beyond those three things Janardana will accept no hospitality and will not so much as look at anything else.” Krishna refused Duryodhana’s food and ate at Vidura’s house from the dish Kunti served, and that night Vidura told him what he had been holding all day. “Keshava, this coming of yours was not well judged.” “Where words good or bad have the same effect, slayer of Madhu, no wise man spends his breath for nothing, like a singer before the deaf.” “Madhava, the love I bear you is equal to the love I bear the sons of Pandu. I say these words to you, therefore, out of affection, regard and friendship.” Krishna granted him everything, and said that what Vidura had told him was what a father and a mother would say, and the starlit night passed in talk, against Vidura’s wishes, because he could not be filled. Into the court Krishna walked with Vidura on one arm and Satyaki on the other, and when Bhishma and Drona had finished, Vidura turned his eyes on Duryodhana and said the coldest thing said in that hall all day. “Duryodhana, I do not grieve for you. I grieve for this old couple, for Gandhari and for your father.”

A King on the Ground, a Brother Against a Tree

Eighteen days later Sanjaya’s news put Dhritarashtra on the floor, and Vidura’s words were meant to get him off it. “Get up,” he said. “Why are you stretched out on the earth? Hold yourself up by your own self. This is where every living creature ends. Everything that is heaped up comes apart. Everything that rises is certain to fall. Every meeting ends in parting, and life ends in death.” Of the dead he said, “They are not yours and you are not theirs.” On the field, the men who had come from distant realms and had no one were gathered into thousands of heaps, and at Yudhishthira‘s command it was Vidura who had them burned. Fifteen years later the old king went to the forest, and Vidura and Sanjaya went with him in bark and rags. When the Pandavas came to the retreat and Yudhishthira asked where his uncle was, Dhritarashtra answered, “He is performing austere penance, living on air alone, for he has given up all other food.” At that moment Vidura came into sight at a distance, matted locks, gravel in his mouth, naked, wasted, smeared with the dust of wild flowers, and at the sight of the crowd he turned and ran into the trees. Yudhishthira ran after him alone. “Vidura! Vidura!” he called. “I am King Yudhishthira, your favorite!” In a lonely place Vidura stopped and leaned against a tree, fixed his eyes on the king, stood motionless in yoga, and passed into Yudhishthira’s body limb by limb, his life breaths into the king’s life breaths, his senses into the king’s senses. The body stayed against the tree with the eyes still fixed in that gaze, and the king felt himself grow stronger. He wished to burn it, and a voice came from nowhere. “This body that belonged to him called Vidura should not be cremated. In him is your body too. He is the eternal deity of Righteousness.” Vyasa untied the knot for Dhritarashtra afterward: “He who is Dharma is Vidura, and he who is Vidura is the eldest son of Pandu.” And on the last page of the poem, “Kshattri, who is Vidura, and King Yudhishthira both entered the god of righteousness.”

His Path

Satyavati, the Levirate, and Three Births · A maid who neither flinched nor paled, and Vyasa’s word that her child would be the foremost of wise men.

The Plot of the House of Lac · A jackal’s den with many doors, spoken in a foreign tongue, a miner sent by Vidura, and a boat waiting on the Ganga.

Half a Kingdom, and Vidura’s Embassy · The formality that left him at the sight of the Pandavas in Drupada’s hall.

The Game of Dice · A serpent nursed in the lap, and the counsel to sell a crow and buy peacocks.

Vidura Banished and Recalled · The insult of the unchaste wife, a single chariot to Kamyaka, and a brother’s head smelled on a brother’s lap.

Dhritarashtra’s Night · Whose sleep deserts them, and a king’s confession before dawn.

Krishna at Vidura’s House · Three kinds of water that Janardana would accept, the dish Kunti served, and the advice not to sing before the deaf.

The Forest Retreat · An ascetic living on air, a body left against a tree, and the voice that forbade the pyre.

The Man Who Spoke Like Medicine

Truth arrives in Vidura’s life carrying its own comparison every time: a dying man’s medicine, a song before the deaf, water on a lotus leaf. Every time he knows he will go unheard, and every time he speaks, because in the history of Prahlada he himself laid down that a man who knows and keeps silent takes on half the guilt of a lie. He was thrown out of the house twice, once by a nephew who called him a serpent in the lap and once by a brother who called him an unchaste wife, and both times he went where the trouble was and then came back, because leaning toward the suffering was, by his own account, no decision of his. What remains is a body left against a tree, out of which Dharma walked into the king he had hoped for truth from since the boy was a child. In the house where he could never be king, the dharma of the house was finally called by his name.