Our Oriental Heritage

by Will Durant

  III. THE EPICS

  The “Mahabharata”—Its story—Its form—The “Bhagavad-Gita”—The metaphysics of war—The price of freedom—The “Ramayana”—A forest idyl—The rape of Sita—The Hindu epics and the Greek

  The schools and the universities were only a part of the educational system of India. Since writing was less highly valued than in other civilizations, and oral instruction preserved and disseminated the nation’s history and poetry, the habit of public recitation spread among the people the most precious portions of their cultural heritage. As nameless raconteurs among the Greeks transmitted and expanded the Iliad and the Odyssey, so the reciters and declaimers of India carried down from generation to generation, and from court to people, the ever-growing epics into which the Brahmans crowded their legendary lore.

  A Hindu scholar has rated the Mahabharata as “the greatest work of imagination that Asia has produced”;20 and Sir Charles Eliot has called it “a greater poem than the Iliad”21 In one sense there is no doubt about the latter judgment. Beginning (ca. 500 B.C.) as a brief narrative poem of reasonable length, the Mahabharata took on, with every century, additional episodes and homilies, and absorbed the Bhagavad-Gita as well as parts of the story of Rama, until at last it measured 107,000 octameter couplets—seven times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined. The name of the author was legion; “Vyasa,” to whom tradition assigns it, means “the arranger.”22 A hundred poets wrote it, a thousand singers moulded it, until, under the Gupta kings (ca. 400 A.D.), the Brahmans poured their own religious and moral ideas into a work originally Kshatriyan, and gave the poem the gigantic form in which we find it today.

  The central subject was not precisely adapted to religious instruction, for it told a tale of violence, gambling and war. Book One presents the fair Shakuntala (destined to be the heroine of India’s most famous drama) and her mighty son Bharata; from his loins come those “great Bharata” (Maha-Bharata) tribes, the Kurus and the Pandavas, whose bloody strife constitutes the oft-broken thread of the tale. Yudhishthira, King of the Pandavas, gambles away his wealth, his army, his kingdom, his brothers, at last his wife Draupadi, in a game in which his Kuru enemy plays with loaded dice. By agreement the Pandavas are to receive their kingdom back after enduring a twelve-year banishment from their native soil. The twelve years pass; the Pandavas call upon the Kurus to restore their land; they receive no answer, and declare war. Allies are brought in on either side, until almost all northern India is engaged.* The battle rages for eighteen days and five books; all the Kurus are slain, and nearly all the Pandavas; the heroic Bhishma alone slays 100,000 men in ten days; altogether, the poet-statistician reports, the fallen numbered several hundred million men.23 Amid this bloody scene of death Gandhari, queen consort of the blind Kuru king, Dhrita-rashtra, wails with horror at the sight of vultures hovering greedily over the corpse of Prince Duryodhan, her son.

  Stainless Queen and stainless woman, ever righteous, ever good,

  Stately in her mighty sorrow on the field Gandhari stood.

  Strewn with skulls and clotted tresses, darkened by the stream of gore,

  With the limbs of countless warriors is the red field covered o’er. . . .

  And the long-drawn howl of jackals o’er the scene of carnage rings,

  And the vulture and the raven flap their dark and loathsome wings.

  Feasting on the blood of warriors foul Pishachas fill the air,

  Viewless forms of hungry Rakshas limb from limb the corpses tear.

  Through this scene of death and carnage was the ancient monarch led,

  Kuru dames with faltering footsteps stepped amidst the countless dead,

  And a piercing wail of anguish burst upon the echoing plain,

  As they saw their sons or fathers, brothers, lords, amidst the slain,

  As they saw the wolves of jungle feed upon the destined prey,

  Darksome wanderers of the midnight prowling in the light of day.

  Shriek of pain and wail of anguish o’er the ghastly field resound,

  And their feeble footsteps falter and they sink upon the ground,

  Sense and life desert the mourners as they faint in common grief,

  Death-like swoon succeeding sorrow yields a moment’s short relief.

  Then a mighty sigh of anguish from Gandhari’s bosom broke,

  Gazing on her anguished daughters unto Krishna thus she spoke:

  “Mark my unconsoled daughters, widowed queens of Kuru’s house,

  Wailing for their dear departed, like the osprey for her spouse;

  How each cold and fading feature wakes in them a woman’s love,

  How amidst the lifeless warriors still with restless steps they rove;

  Mothers hug their slaughtered children all unconscious in their sleep,

  Widows bend upon their husbands and in ceaseless sorrow weep. . . .”

  Thus to Krishna Queen Gandhari strove her woeful thoughts to tell,

  When, alas, her wandering vision on her son Duryodhan fell.

  Sudden anguish smote her bosom, and her senses seemed to stray;

  Like a tree by tempest shaken, senseless on the earth she lay.

  Once again she waked in sorrow, once again she cast her eye

  Where her son in blood empurpled slept beneath the open sky.

  And she clasped her dear Duryodhan, held him close unto her breast,

  Sobs convulsive shook her bosom as the lifeless form she prest,

  And her tears like rains of summer fell and washed his noble head,

  Decked with garlands still untarnished, graced with nishkas bright and red.

  “‘Mother,’ said my dear Duryodhan, when he went unto the war,

  ‘Wish me joy and wish me triumph as I mount the battle-car.’

  ‘Son,’ I said to dear Duryodhan, ‘Heaven avert a cruel fate,

  Yato dharma stato jayah—triumph doth on virtue wait.’

  But he set his heart on battle, by his valor wiped his sins;

  Now he dwells in realms celestial which the faithful warrior wins.

  And I weep not for Duryodhan, like a prince he fought and fell,

  But my sorrow-stricken husband, who can his misfortunes tell? . . .

  “Hark the loathsome cry of jackals, how the wolves their vigils keep—

  Maidens rich in song and beauty erst were wont to watch his sleep.

  Hark the foul and blood-beaked vultures flap their wings upon the dead-

  Maidens waved their feathery pankhas round Duryodhan’s royal bed. . . .

  Mark Duryodhan’s noble widow, mother proud of Lakshman bold,

  Queenly in her youth and beauty, like an altar of bright gold,

  Torn from husband’s sweet embraces, from her son’s entwining arms,

  Doomed to life-long woe and anguish in her youth and in her charms.

  Rend my hard and stony bosom crushed beneath this cruel pain,

  Should Gandhari live to witness noble son and grandson slain?

  Mark again Duryodhan’s widow, how she hugs his gory head,

  How with gentle hands and tender softly holds him on his bed;

  How from dear departed husband turns she to her dearest son,

  And the tear-drops of the mother choke the widow’s bitter groan;

  Like the fibre of the lotus tender-golden is her frame.

  O my lotus, O my daughter, Bharat’s pride and Kuru’s fame!

  If the truth resides in Vedas, brave Duryodhan dwells above;

  Wherefore linger we in sadness severed from his cherished love?

  If the truth resides in Shastra, dwells in sky my hero son;

  Wherefore linger we in sorrow since their earthly task is done?”23a

  Upon this theme of love and battle a thousand interpolations have been hung. The god Krishna interrupts the slaughter for a canto to discourse on the nobility of war and Krishna; the dying Bhishma postpones his death to expound the laws of caste, bequest, marriage, gifts and funeral rites, to ex
plain the philosophy of the Sankhya and the Upanishads, to narrate a mass of legends, traditions and myths, and to lecture Yudishthira at great length on the duties of a king; dusty stretches of genealogy and geography, of theology and metaphysics, separate the oases of drama and action; fables and fairy-tales, love-stories and lives of the saints contribute to give the Mahabharata a formlessness worse, and a body of thought richer, than can be found in either the Iliad or the Odyssey. What was evidently a Kshatriyan enthronement of action, heroism and war becomes, in the hands of the Brahmans, a vehicle for teaching the people the laws of Manu, the principles of Yoga, the precepts of morality, and the beauty of Nirvana. The Golden Rule is expressed in many forms;* moral aphorisms of beauty and wisdom abound;† and pretty stories of marital fidelity (Nala and Damayanti, Savitri) convey to women listeners the Brahman ideal of the faithful and patient wife.

  Embedded in the narrative of the great battle is the loftiest philosophical poem in the world’s literature—the Bhagavad-Gita, or Lord’s Song. This is the New Testament of India, revered next to the Vedas themselves, and used in the law-courts, like our Bible or the Koran, for the administration of oaths.28 Wilhelm von Humboldt pronounced it “the most beautiful, perhaps the only true, philosophical song existing in any known tongue; . . . perhaps the deepest and loftiest thing the world has to show.”29 Sharing the anonymity that India, careless of the individual and the particular, wraps around her creations, the Gita comes to us without the author’s name, and without date. It may be as old as 400 B.C.,30 or as young as 200 A.D.31

  The mise-en-scène of the poem is the battle between the Kurus and the Pandavas; the occasion is the reluctance of the Pandava warrior Arjuna to attack in mortal combat his own near relatives in the opposing force. To Lord Krishna, fighting by his side like some Homeric god, Arjuna speaks the philosophy of Gandhi and Christ:

  “As I behold—come here to shed

  Their common blood—yon concourse of our kin,

  My members fail, my tongue dries in my mouth. . . .

  It is not good, O Keshav! Naught of good

  Can spring from mutual slaughter! Lo, I hate

  Triumph and domination, wealth and ease

  Thus sadly won! Alas, what victory

  Can bring delight, Govinda, what rich spoils

  Could profit, what rule recompense, what span

  Of life itself seem sweet, bought with such blood? . . .

  Thus if we slay

  Kinsfolk and friends for love of earthly power,

  Ahovat! what an evil fault it were!

  Better I deem it, if my kinsmen strike,

  To face them weaponless, and bare my breast

  To shaft and spear, than answer blow with blow.”32

  Thereupon Krishna, whose divinity does not detract from his joy in battle, explains, with all the authority of a son of Vishnu, that according to the Scriptures, and the best orthodox opinion, it is meet and just to kill one’s relatives in war; that Arjuna’s duty is to follow the rules of his Kshatriya caste, to fight and slay with a good conscience and a good will; that after all, only the body is slain, while the soul survives. And he expounds the imperishable Purusha of Sankhya, the unchanging Atman of the Upanishads:

  “Indestructible,

  Learn thou, the Life is, spreading life through all;

  It cannot anywhere, by any means,

  Be anywise diminished, stayed or changed.

  But for these fleeting frames which it informs

  With spirit deathless, endless, infinite—

  They perish. Let them perish, Prince, and fight!

  He who shall say, ‘Lo, I have slain a man!’

  He who shall think, ‘Lo, I am slain!’ those both

  Know naught. Life cannot slay! Life is not slain!

  Never the spirit was born; the spirit shall cease to be never;

  Never was time it was not; End and Beginning are dreams!

  Birthless and deathless and changeless remaineth the spirit forever;

  Death hath not touched it at all, dead though the house of it seems.”33

  Krishna proceeds to instruct Arjuna in metaphysics, blending Sankhya and Vedanta in the peculiar synthesis accepted by the Vaishnavite sect. All things, he says, identifying himself with the Supreme Being,

  “hang on me

  As hangs a row of pearls upon its string.

  I am the fresh taste of the water; I

  The silver of the moon, the gold o’ the sun,

  The word of worship in the Veds, the thrill

  That passeth in the ether, and the strength

  Of man’s shed seed. I am the good sweet smell

  Of the moistened earth, I am the fire’s red light,

  The vital air moving in all which moves,

  The holiness of hallowed souls, the root

  Undying, whence hath sprung whatever is;

  The wisdom of the wise, the intellect

  Of the informed, the greatness of the great,

  The splendor of the splendid. . . .

  To him who wisely sees,

  The Brahman with his scrolls and sanctities,

  The cow, the elephant, the unclean dog,

  The outcaste gorging dog’s meat, all are one.”34

  It is a poem rich in complementary colors, in metaphysical and ethical contradictions that reflect the contrariness and complexity of life. We are a little shocked to find the man taking what might seem to be the higher moral stand, while the god argues for war and slaughter on the shifty ground that life is unkillable and individuality unreal. What the author had in mind to do, apparently, was to shake the Hindu soul out of the enervating quietism of Buddhist piety into a willingness to fight for India; it was the rebellion of a Kshatriya who felt that religion was weakening his country, and who proudly reckoned that many things were more precious than peace. All in all it was a good lesson which, if India had learned it, might have kept her free.

  The second of the Indian epics is the most famous and best beloved of all Hindu books,35 and lends itself more readily than the Mahabharata to Occidental understanding. The Ramayana is briefer, merely running to a thousand pages of forty-eight lines each; and though it, too, grew by accretion from the third century B.C. to the second century A.D., the interpolations are fewer, and do not much disturb the central theme. Tradition attributes the poem to one Valmiki, who, like the supposed author of the larger epic, appears as a character in the tale; but more probably it is the product of many wayside bards like those who still recite these epics, sometimes for ninety consecutive evenings, to fascinated audiences.36

  As the Mahabharata resembles the Iliad in being the story of a great war fought by gods and men, and partly occasioned by the loss of a beautiful woman from one nation to another, so the Ramayana resembles the Odyssey, and tells of a hero’s hardships and wanderings, and of his wife’s patient waiting for reunion with him.37 At the outset we get a picture of a Golden Age, when Dasa-ratha, from his capital Ayodhya, ruled the kingdom of Kosala (now Oudh).

  Rich in royal worth and valor, rich in holy Vedic lore,

  Dasa-ratha ruled his empire in the happy days of yore. . . .

  Peaceful lived the righteous people, rich in wealth, in merit high;

  Envy dwelt not in their bosoms, and their accents shaped no lie.

  Fathers with their happy households owned their cattle, corn and gold;

  Galling penury and famine in Ayodhya had no hold.38

  Nearby was another happy kingdom, Videha, over which King Janak ruled. He himself “held the plough and tilled the earth” like some doughty Cincinnatus; and one day, at the touch of his plough, a lovely daughter, Sita, sprang up from a furrow of the soil. Soon Sita had to be married, and Janak held a contest for her suitors: he who could unbend Janak’s bow of war should win the bride. To the contest came the oldest son of Dasaratha—Rama “lion-chested, mighty arméd, lotus-eyed, stately as the jungle tusker, with his crown of tresses tied.”39 Only Rama bent the bow; and Janak offered him
his daughter with the characteristic formula of Hindu marriage:

  This is Sita, child of Janak, dearer unto him than life;

  Henceforth sharer of thy virtue, be she, prince, thy faithful wife;

  Of thy weal and woe partaker, be she thine in every land;

  Cherish her in joy and sorrow, clasp her hand within thy hand;

  As the shadow to the substance, to her lord is faithful wife,