Yudhishthira

The first morning at Kurukshetra. Two armies stand facing each other and move without advancing, the way two oceans move, and out of the Pandava line one man takes off his armor, sets his weapon aside, steps down from his chariot, puts his palms together, turns his face to the east, and begins to walk, on foot and unarmed, toward the army that has come to kill him. In the Bhishma Parva of Vyasa’s Mahabharata, Arjuna is off his chariot before he has finished thinking, asking what this is, that the king leaves his brothers and walks east on foot into the enemy; Bhima comes up on the other side, and Nakula says plainly that the sight puts fear in his chest. The man answers none of them and keeps walking. Along the Kaurava line a laugh goes up that this king is coming in terror to beg Bhishma for mercy, and Krishna smiles and tells the brothers that he will salute his elders first and fight afterward. Yudhishthira reaches the old man standing ready for battle, takes his feet in both hands, and says: “I salute you. You cannot be defeated, and we are going to fight you. Give us your permission for it. Give us your blessing as well.” Bhishma looks down at him and answers like a man who has waited years to be asked, and then his voice changes and he says the sentence that four men will say to Yudhishthira that morning: “A man is the slave of wealth, and wealth is no man’s slave.” From Bhishma, from Drona, from Kripa, and from Shalya he takes a blessing for his victory and the means of their deaths, and walks back, and puts his golden armor on again. The whole of his story moves in that gait: a salute before the fight, and the fight even after the salute.

He was born on the mountain of a hundred peaks. Pandu lived under a curse that forbade him a son, and at his urging Kunti repeated the formula Durvasa had given her and called on the god of dharma. The Adi Parva says the god came seated in a chariot bright as the sun, asked “What do you wish?” with a smile, and that she smiled back and asked for a child. The boy was born at noon on the fifth day of the bright fortnight of Kartika, and the moment he was born a voice from the sky said: “This child will be foremost among the virtuous, a king renowned throughout the three worlds, and his name shall be Yudhishthira.” Seventeen days after Pandu’s death the ascetics left the five boys and their mother at the gate of Hastinapura, and the city learned their names in one breath. Then came the training in arms, the flight from the house of lacquer, Draupadi, half a kingdom, and the Rajasuya at Indraprastha, where the kings of the earth stood at this man’s door with tribute in their arms. Duryodhana went home to Hastinapura scorched by that splendor, and the Sabha Parva’s invitation followed, carried by Vidura against his own will. Yudhishthira asked who the gamblers in that hall would be, and Vidura named them, from Shakuni to Jaya, and the answer he gave is the axis of his whole story. “I have no wish to gamble because King Dhritarashtra orders it. I am unwilling, and I will not play unless that wicked Shakuni challenges me in the assembly. If he does challenge me, I will never refuse. I settled that long ago, and it is my vow for life.” Seated in the hall, he said to Shakuni first, “Gambling by deceit is a sin. There is no Kshatriya courage in it, and there is certainly nothing right in it,” and then he laid the first stake. The jewels went, the treasury, the chariots, the serving women, the elephants, the kingdom; then Nakula, Sahadeva, Arjuna, Bhima; then himself; then Draupadi. Dhritarashtra gave it all back, and a second summons came, and he went again, because the vow was the same vow. One throw of the dice laid twelve years of forest on him and a thirteenth year in hiding.

Where Is Your Anger

One evening at Dvaitavana Draupadi asked him the thing a wife of five Kshatriyas can barely ask her eldest husband. She held up each brother in turn, Bhima living on what the woods yield, Arjuna in bark, Nakula and Sahadeva in grief, and asked over and over: “Why does your anger not blaze up?” She brought in the old conversation of Prahlada and Bali as her witness, in which Prahlada tells his grandson that forgiveness has its season and might has its season, and she ended by saying that the season for might had come. Yudhishthira’s answer set off in exactly the opposite direction. “Anger is the slayer of men,” he said, “and their prosperer too.” The angry man commits sin; “The angry man kills even his teachers.” And then the sentence that holds his whole argument: “If there were no men on earth as forgiving as the earth itself, there would be no peace among men, only endless strife born of anger.” In that exchange he looks like the loser, because Draupadi has the insult of the assembly hall on her side and he has only a principle. The Mahabharata then sets him alone in the same forest for another test, where the principle is the only thing that saves anyone.

A deer ran off with a Brahmin’s fire sticks caught in its antlers, the five brothers followed it, and, worn out with thirst, they sat down under a banyan. Nakula went for water and did not come back; Sahadeva went and did not come back; Arjuna and Bhima went and did not come back. Yudhishthira reached the lake alone and found his four brothers dead on the bank, and from the sky came the voice the four of them had ignored: “I am a crane, and I live on tiny fish. It is I who have sent your younger brothers into the power of the lord of the departed.” He did not step toward the water. He said, “Yaksha, I have no wish for what is already yours,” and asked for the questions. What is weightier than the earth, higher than the heavens, swifter than the wind, more numerous than grass? “The mother is weightier than the earth. The father is higher than heaven. The mind is swifter than the wind. And our thoughts are more numerous than grass.” What is most wonderful? That day after day countless creatures go to the house of Yama, and those who remain behind believe themselves immortal. Every answer stood, and the Yaksha offered the life of one brother, whichever he wished. Yudhishthira asked for Nakula. The Yaksha wanted to know why he passed over Bhima, who had the strength of ten thousand elephants, and Arjuna, on whom all of them depended, for a half-brother, and two reasons came back. The first: “To do no injury is the highest virtue.” The second: “My father had two wives, Kunti and Madri. Let both of them have children. That is what I wish.” The Yaksha gave all four back and showed himself. “Child, I am your father. I am the lord of justice, and my power is great.” The man who had seemed to have no answer to Draupadi’s question passed every question his father put to him.

In the year of hiding the same man sat in Virata’s court as a Brahmin named Kanka, a thrower of dice who passed the king’s hours for him. As the thirteenth year ran out, Prince Uttara drove off the whole Kuru host alone and recovered the cattle, and Virata, at play with Kanka, praised his son. Kanka said, “Why should he fail, with Brihannala for his charioteer?” The king, blazing, struck Yudhishthira full in the face with a die. Blood ran from his nose, and he cupped both hands under it before a drop could reach the floor; Draupadi, standing at his side, knew his wishes without being told, brought a golden vessel filled with water, and held it under his face, so that the blood fell into the water and nowhere else. When the prince frightened his father into asking pardon, the answer came: “I forgave it long ago. There is no anger in me. Had this blood from my nose fallen on the ground, you would have been destroyed, and your kingdom with you.” The refusal of anger and the knowledge of what his anger weighs sit together in a single sentence.

Four Fingers

On the fifteenth day of the war Drona was going through the Panchalas the way a spring fire goes through dry grass. Krishna named the one way: if Drona heard that his son Ashvatthama was dead, he would lay his weapons down. Arjuna would have none of it, the rest agreed, and the Drona Parva records that Yudhishthira accepted it with great difficulty. Bhima killed with his mace an elephant named Ashvatthama that belonged to Indravarman, the chief of the Malavas, and went before Drona shouting that Ashvatthama was dead. Drona did not believe him. He asked Yudhishthira and no one else, because “Drona firmly believed that Yudhishthira would not speak an untruth even for the sovereignty of the three worlds.” And the text’s own sentence is this: “Afraid of uttering an untruth, and earnestly wanting victory, he said distinctly that Ashvatthama was dead, and added indistinctly, after the name, the word elephant. Until that moment Yudhishthira’s chariot had traveled four fingers’ breadth above the surface of the earth.” After the half-truth its wheels and its horses touched the ground. Drona laid down his weapons, sat in yoga, and Dhrishtadyumna cut off his head. Two days later the same Yudhishthira, wounded by Karna and bitter with it, told Arjuna in anger to give his Gandiva to someone else, and the sentence brought his brother’s sword out of its scabbard; that hour belongs to Arjuna’s story.

On the eighteenth day the Kaurava commander was Shalya, Madri’s brother, uncle to Nakula and Sahadeva. The night before, Krishna had told Yudhishthira that no one except him could kill Shalya, and that there was no call for compassion toward an uncle. By midday the two of them were so bloodied by each other’s arrows that they looked like shalmali and kimshuka trees in flower, and Sanjaya told Dhritarashtra that he saw a wonderful thing in Kunti’s son: “He had always been mild and soft, and now he was savage.” Standing on a chariot that had lost its horses and its driver, Yudhishthira took up the spear that Tvashtri, the craftsman of the gods, had forged for Shiva, the weapon the sons of Pandu had kept and worshiped with perfumes and garlands. “You are dead, wretch!” he cried as it left him, his strong right arm stretched out, and he seemed to be dancing in his wrath. Shalya reached for it as a fire leaps up to take a stream of clarified butter poured on it, and it went through his broad chest and on into the earth as easily as into water. The ruler of the Madras fell like a mountaintop split by thunder, and Sanjaya added that he fell with his arms stretched out and his face toward the man who had killed him.

The reckonings after the war were harder than the war. When the Pandavas came before Gandhari, Yudhishthira stepped forward trembling, with his hands joined, and spoke softly: “Here is Yudhishthira, goddess, the cruel slayer of your sons. Curse me.” Gandhari drew a long breath and said nothing; but from inside the folds of her cloth her eyes went down to the tip of his toe as he bent to her feet, and the nail, which had been beautiful until that moment, became a sore. Arjuna stepped behind Krishna. Then, at the water rite on the bank of the Ganga, Kunti said: “Offer the water to that eldest brother of yours, who was born of me by the god of day.” Yudhishthira, sighing like a snake, asked his mother, “How could you hide him, mother, as a person hides a fire in the folds of his cloth?” and later told Narada that the thing “burns my limbs the way fire burns a heap of cotton.” He remembered that in the gambling hall his anger had flared and gone cold whenever his eyes fell on Karna’s feet, because they looked to him like the feet of their mother. Kunti said that she and Surya both had tried to turn Karna and that he would not be turned. Yudhishthira’s eyes filled. “You hid your counsel,” he said, “and this is the suffering it has brought on me.” And in his sorrow he cursed all the women of the world: “From this day no woman will be able to keep a secret.” The man who had called anger the destroyer of the world at Dvaitavana uttered his one curse in that moment. He wanted to leave the kingdom for the forest; his brothers, Draupadi, Vyasa, and Krishna held him, and Bhishma, lying on his bed of arrows, gave him the law of kings, the law of distress, and the law of release, which fill two whole parvas of the Mahabharata.

Thirty-six years later, at the news that Krishna was gone and Dwarka drowned, he said that Time cooks every creature in its own pot, gave the kingdom to Parikshit, and left Hastinapura: five brothers, Draupadi the sixth, and a dog the seventh. Beyond the Himalaya Draupadi fell, then Sahadeva, Nakula, Arjuna, and Bhima, and each time Bhima asked the reason and the eldest gave it and walked on without turning. Then Indra’s chariot came. Yudhishthira asked first for his brothers and Draupadi, and heard that they had reached heaven before him. Then he said: “This dog is deeply devoted to me. He should go with me. My heart is full of compassion for him.” Indra answered that there is no place in heaven for those who come with dogs, that the deities called the Krodhavasas carry off such people’s merit, and that a man who had left his brothers and Draupadi on the road had no reason to cling to a dog. Yudhishthira replied that he had no power to bring the dead back to life, and that “to abandon one who is devoted is a sin without end, equal to the sin of killing a Brahmin,” and “I will never give up such a one until my own life is at an end.” The dog was gone, and where it had stood was Dharma, who said that in the Dvaita woods his son had passed over Bhima and Arjuna and asked for a son of Madri, and that now he had given up the very chariot of the gods and kept the dog: “For that there is no one in heaven who is your equal.” In heaven he saw Duryodhana enthroned in splendor and did not see his brothers. A messenger led him down a road of stench, boiling oil, and trees whose leaves were swords, and where the messenger stopped, voices came out of the dark, Karna, Bhima, Arjuna, Draupadi, and her sons, begging him to stay a moment longer because the breeze that came with him had eased their torment. Dharma’s son grew angry and condemned the gods, and Dharma with them. To the messenger he said: “Go back to those who sent you. Tell them I will not return to where they are. I will stay here, because my company brings comfort to these suffering brothers of mine.” Within a moment the gods came, the darkness lifted, the Vaitarani and the iron jars vanished, and Indra told him that every king must look upon hell once, and that this one had been shown by deception “because once, by a pretense, you deceived Drona in the matter of his son.” Dharma called it the third test, after the lake and after the dog. He bathed in the heavenly Ganga, put off his human body, and came, with every enmity and every grief washed from him, to where Karna stood in the place that was his own.

His Path

Dvaitavana: the debate of Draupadi, Yudhishthira, and Bhima · The story of Prahlada and Bali, the answer that calls anger the destroyer of the world, and Bhima’s patience giving way.

The Cattle-Raid, and the Unmasking at Virata · A die flung in Kanka’s face, blood held in two palms, and Draupadi with a golden vessel.

The Lament of Gandhari, and the Grief of the Women · A glance from under a cloth, one nail turned to a sore, and Kunti’s secret opened on the bank of the Ganga.

When Summoned

Every hard turn in Yudhishthira’s story arrives as a summons, and he turns his back on none of them. At Shakuni’s challenge he sat down to dice, and sat down a second time; at the Yaksha’s voice he stopped and answered; at Drona’s question he said one word clearly and one under his breath; at Indra’s chariot he stayed on the ground, and he sent heaven’s messenger away. Some of these answers lost him everything, and one of them bought four brothers their lives, and still the manner of answering is one and the same in every place: listen first, then ask the vow, then speak. The chariot four fingers above the earth is the most honest measure in the story. The Mahabharata calls him the king of dharma and brings his chariot down to the ground anyway, and that is the worth of this figure read whole: truth was never a gift of his birth; it was the day’s work, dropped on one afternoon and never put down for good. At the gate of heaven all his answers gather into a single sentence, that no happiness is worth having if it means leaving behind whoever is meant to walk beside him, whether that is a dog or brothers calling out of the dark. In the first scene he took off his armor and walked toward his elders; in the last he took off his body and walked toward his own people, and the whole Mahabharata in between is the account of that one gait.