Mahabharata, passim
THE SUBTLETY OF DHARMA
Some Hindus will tell you that the Mahabharata is about the five Pandava brothers, some that it is about the incarnate god Krishna. But most Hindu traditions will tell you that it is about dharma; sometimes they call it a history (itihasa), but sometimes a dharma text (dharma-shastra). To say that the long sermons on dharma are a digression from the story, a late and intrusive padding awkwardly stuck onto a zippy epic plot, would be like saying that the arias in a Verdi opera are unwelcome interruptions of the libretto; dharma, like the aria, is the centerpiece, for which the narration (the recitative) is merely the frame.
Time and again when a character finds that every available moral choice is the wrong choice, or when one of the good guys does something obviously very wrong, he will mutter or be told, “Dharma is subtle” (sukshma), thin and slippery as a fine silk sari, elusive as a will-o’-the-wisp, internally inconsistent as well as disguised, hidden, masked. People try again and again to do the right thing, and fail and fail, until they no longer know what the right thing is. “What is dharma?” asked Yudhishthira, and did not stay for an answer. As one of the early dharma texts put it, “Right and wrong [dharma and adharma] do not go about saying, ‘Here we are’; nor do gods, Gandharvas, or ancestors say, ‘This is right, that is wrong.’”1 The Mahabharata deconstructs dharma, exposing the inevitable chaos of the moral life.
Dharma had already been somewhat codified from between the third and first centuries BCE, when the dharma-sutras set forth, in prose, the rules of social life and religious observance.2 By now the Brahmins were circling the wagons against the multiple challenges of Buddhist dhamma (the teachings of the Buddha), Ashokan Dhamma (the code carved on inscriptions and preserved in legends), Upanishadic moksha, yoga, and the wildfire growth of Hindu sects. Buddhists presented their own ideas about what they called (in Pali) dhamma, ideas that overlapped with but were certainly not the same as Hindu ideas about dharma. Before Buddhism became an issue, there had been no need to define dharma in great detail. But now there was such a need, for the Buddha called his own religion the dhamma, and eventually dharma came to mean, among other things, one’s religion (so that Hindus would later speak of Christianity as the Christian dharma).
Dharma continued to denote the sort of human activity that leads to human prosperity, victory, and glory, but now it also had much more to do. For now the text was often forced to acknowledge the impossibility of maintaining any sort of dharma at all in a world where every rule seemed to be canceled out by another. The narrators kept painting themselves into a corner with the brush of dharma. Their backs to the wall, they could only reach for another story.
THE KARMA OF DHARMA
Dharma is not merely challenged in the abstract; as a god he is also called to account, for even Dharma has karma, in the sense of the moral consequences of his actions. Dharma (which can often best be translated as “justice”) at this time was clearly being assailed on all sides by competing agendas that challenged the justice of justice, as this story does:
MANDAVYA AT THE STAKE
There was once a Brahmin named Mandavya, an expert on dharma, who had kept a vow of silence for a long time. One day robbers hid in his house, and when he refused to break his vow to tell the police where they were, and the police then found the robbers hiding there, the king passed judgment on Mandavya along with the thieves: “Kill him.” The executioners impaled the great ascetic on a stake. The Brahmin, who was the very soul of dharma, remained on the stake for a long time. Though he had no food, he did not die; he willed his life’s breaths to remain within him, until the king came to him and said, “Greatest of sages, please forgive me for the mistake that I made in my delusion and ignorance.” The sage forgave him, and the king had him taken down from the stake. But he was unable to pull the stake out, and so he cut it off at its base, thinking it might come in useful for carrying things like flower baskets. And so he went about with the stake still inside him, in his neck, ribs, and entrails, and people used to call him “Tip-of-the-Stake” Mandavya.
Mandavya went to the house of Dharma and scolded him, saying, “What did I do, without knowing what I had done, something so bad that it earned me such retribution?” Dharma said, “You stuck blades of grass up the tails of little butterflies when you were a child, and this is the fruit of that karma.” Then Mandavya said, “For a rather small offense you have given me an enormous punishment. Because of that, Dharma, you will be born as a man, in the womb of a Shudra. And I will establish a moral boundary for the fruition of dharma in the world: no sin will be counted against anyone until the age of fourteen (1.101; cf. 1.57.78-71).”
That the Brahmin who knows dharma is mightier than the king should not surprise anyone who has been following the Vedic texts, but that a man who trots around cheerfully with a stake through his intestines is mightier even than the god Dharma himself is worthy of note. The moral law is stupid—children should not be so grotesquely punished for their mischief, even when it involves cruelty to insects—and so the moral law must undergo its own expiation. Dharma, the god, must undergo the curse for miscarriage of dharma. Being born as a human is different both from fathering a child (as Dharma fathers Yudhishthira) and from spinning off an incarnation (as Vishnu does for Rama and Krishna), for when Dharma is born on earth (as Vidura; see below), he ceases to exist in heaven until Vidura dies; that is the nature of the curse. That being born of a Shudra is a terrible curse, one from which you cannot escape in this life, is an attitude that endorses the extant class system. On the other hand, the Mahabharata challenges that system by imagining that the moral law might become incarnate in a person born of a woman of the lowest class, a Shudra mother. It also implicitly challenges the ideal of nonviolence toward animals, implying that you can take it too far; people are not the same as animals, and so impaling a butterfly (anally) is not as serious as impaling a man (also anally, by implication).
THE TRANSFER OF KARMA
That even Dharma has karma is an indication of how powerful a force karma had become. Buddhism in this period was already preaching the transfer of merit from one person to another, and early Hindu texts too had hinted at such a possibility. The Mahabharata totters on the brink of a full-fledged concept of the transfer of karma, in a passage that takes up the story after Yudhishthira has entered heaven (with Dharma, no longer incarnate as a dog). There he was in for an unpleasant surprise:
YUDHISHTHIRA IN HEAVEN AND HELL
When Yudhishthira, the dharma king, reached the triple-tiered heaven, he did not see his brothers or Draupadi. He asked where his brothers were, and Draupadi, and the gods commanded their messenger to take him to them. The messenger took Yudhishthira to hell, where he saw hideous tortures. Unable to abide the heat and the stench of corpses, he turned to go, but then he heard the voices of his brothers and Draupadi crying, “Stay here, as a favor to us, just for a little while. A sweet breeze from your body wafts over us and brings us relief.” Yudhishthira wondered if he was dreaming or out of his mind, but he determined to stay there, to help them.
The gods, with Dharma himself, came to him, and everything disappeared—the darkness, the tortures, everything. Indra said to Yudhishthira, “My son, inevitably all kings must see hell. People who have a record of mostly bad deeds enjoy the fruits of their good deeds first, in heaven, and go to hell afterward. Others experience hell first and go afterward to heaven. You saw hell, and your brothers and Draupadi all went to hell, just in the form of a deception. Come now to heaven.” And Dharma said, “I tested you before by taking on the form of a dog, and now this was another test, for you chose to stay in hell for the sake of your brothers.” And so Yudhishthira went with Dharma and the gods, and plunged into the heavenly Ganges, and shed his human body. And then he stayed there with his brothers and Draupadi. Eventually, they all reached the worlds beyond which there is nothing (18.1-5).
Yudhishthira’s ability to ease his brothers’ torments takes the form of a cool, sweet
breeze that counteracts the hot, putrid air of hell, through a kind of transfer of merit.fr He therefore wants to stay with his brothers in hell, even though he himself does not belong there, just as he wanted to stay with the dog outside heaven, again where he did not belong. Elsewhere in the Mahabharata (3.128), when a king wants to take over the guilt of his priest in hell (an interesting role reversal: The priest had sacrificed a child so that the king could get a hundred sons), Dharma protests, “No one ever experiences the fruit of another person’s deed.” The king, however, insists on living in hell along with the priest for the same term, and eventually both he and the priest go to heaven. He does not save the priest from suffering, but he suffers with him. In the case of Yudhishthira in hell, this time no one tries to persuade him; they all learned how stubborn he was the last time. What, then, is the solution? A sure sign of a moral impasse in any narrative is the invocation of the “it was just a dream” motif at the end, erasing the aporia entirely. Another is the deus ex machina. The Mahabharata invokes both here, a double red flag (triple if we count the two gods plus the illusion).
But the illusory cop-out—it wasn’t really a dog; it wasn’t really hell—is contradicted by the need for people to expiate their sins in a real hell. The heroes go to hell, go to heaven, and in the end go on to worlds “beyond which there is nothing,” a phrase that speaks in the tantalizing negatives of the Upanishads and leaves us in the dark about the nature of those worlds. Janamejaya, to whom the story is told, asks a set of questions about the “levels of existence” (gatis)—that is, the various sorts of lives into which one can be reborn: “How long did the Pandavas remain in heaven? Or did they perhaps have a place there that would last forever? Or at the end of their karma what level of existence did they reach? (18.5.4-5).” The bard does not really answer these questions, but the reference to the worlds “beyond which there is nothing” and the fact that they are not said to be reborn on earth imply that their karma did come to an end, in worlds that are the equivalent of moksha. The authors of the Mahabharata are thinking out loud, still trying to work it all out. They are keeping their minds open, refusing to reach a final verdict on a subject—the complex function of karma—on which the jury is still out.
DHARMA, MOKSHA, AND BHAKTI IN THE GITA
Dharma needed all the subtlety it could muster to meet the challenges of Buddhism but even more those of moksha, which had made major headway since the early Upanishads. Ideas about both dharma and moksha had been in the air for centuries, but now they were brought into direct confrontation with each other, in the Bhagavad Gita.
The Gita is a conversation between Krishna and Arjuna on the brink of the great battle. Krishna had been gracious enough to offer to be Arjuna’s charioteer, an inferior position, though appropriate to Krishna’s quasi-Brahmin nature. fs Arjuna, assailed by many of the doubts that plagued Ashoka,3 asks Krishna a lot of difficult, indeed unanswerable age-old questions about violence and nonviolence, this time in the context of the battlefield, questioning the necessity of violence for warriors. The sheer number of different reasons that Krishna gives to Arjuna, including the argument that since you cannot kill the soul, killing the body in war (like killing an animal in sacrifice) is not really killing, is evidence for the author’s deep disquiet about killing and the need to justify it. The moral impasse is not so much resolved as blasted away when after Krishna has given a series of complex and rather abstract answers, Arjuna asks him to show him his true cosmic nature. Krishna shows him his doomsday form, and Arjuna cries out, “I see your mouths with jagged tusks, and I see all of these warriors rushing blindly into your gaping mouths, like moths rushing to their death in a blazing fire. Some stick in the gaps between your teeth, and their heads are ground to powder (11.25-290).” And right in the middle of the terrifying epiphany, Arjuna apologizes to Krishna for all the times that he had rashly and casually called out to him, saying, “Hey, Krishna! Hey, pal!” He begs the god to turn back into his pal Krishna, which the god consents to do.
The worshiper (represented by Arjuna) is comforted by the banality, the familiarity of human life, but inside the text, the warrior with ethical misgivings has been persuaded to kill, just as the god kills, and outside the text, the reader or hearer has been persuaded that since war is unreal, it is not evil. And this political message is made palatable by the god’s resumption of his role as an intimate human companion. The Mahabharata as a whole is passionately against war, vividly aware of the tragedy of war, despite the many statements that violence is necessary. Nor, despite the way that Krishna persuades Arjuna to fight, is the Gita used in India to justify war; it is generally taken out of context and used only for its philosophy, which can be used to support arguments for peace, as, notably, in the hands of Gandhi.
Krishna’s broader teaching in the Gita resolves the tension between dharma and moksha by forming a triad with bhakti (worship, love, devotion) as the third member, mediating between the other two terms of the dialectic. When Arjuna can choose neither dharma (he doesn’t want to kill his relatives) nor renunciation (he is a Kshatriya), Krishna offers him a third alternative, devotion. The Gita sets out a paradigm of three paths (margas) to salvation, also called three yogas: karma (works, rituals), jnana (cognate with “knowledge” and “gnosis”), and bhakti (2.49, 3.3). Karma contains within it the worldly Vedic path of rebirth, the world of dharma (here, as elsewhere, functioning as the equivalent of sva-dharma), in contrast with jnana, which represents the meditational, transcendent Vedantic path of Release, the world of moksha.ft Bhakti bridges the conflicting claims of the original binary opposition between what Luther would have called works (karma) and faith (jnana). But each member of the triad of jnana, karma, and bhakti was regarded by its adherents as the best, if not the only, path to salvation. One way in which bhakti modifies moksha is by introducing into the Upanishadic formula—that you are brahman (the divine substance of the universe)—a god with qualities (sa-guna) who allows you to love the god without qualities (nir-guna). By acting with devotion to Krishna, Arjuna is freed from the hellish consequences of his actions.
The Gita employs some Buddhist terminology (“nirvana,” for instance, the blowing out of a flame, which is a more Buddhist way of saying moksha), and Arjuna starts out with what might appear to be a quasi-Buddhist attitude that Krishna demolishes. But “nirvana” is also a Hindu word (found, for example, in the Upanishads), and it is the tension within Hinduism itself that the Gita is addressing, the challenge to assimilate the ascetic ideal into the ideology of an upper-class householder.4 The Gita’s brilliant solution to this problem is to urge Arjuna (and the reader/hearer of the Gita) to renounce not the actions but their fruits, to live with “karma without kama,” actions without desires. This is a way to maintain a renouncer’s state of mind, a spiritual state of mind, in the midst of material life, a kind of moral Teflon that blocks the consequences of actions. “Karma without kama” means not that one should not desire certain results from one’s actions, but merely that one should not expect the results (for so much is out of our control) or, more important, regard the results as the point; it’s the journey that counts, not where you end up.fu In the Gita, this means that each of us must perform our own sva-dharma—in Arjuna’s case, to kill his kinsmen in battle—with the attitude of a renunciant. This is a far cry from the social ethics of Buddhism. “Had the Buddha been the charioteer,” says Romila Thapar, “the message would have been different.”5
CASTE AND CLASS CONFLICTS
The adherence to one’s own dharma that the Gita preaches is part of a new social system that was taking shape at this time,6 the system of castes, which could not be neatly and automatically subsumed as subcategories of classes (though Manu tried to do it [10.8-12]). Class (varna) and caste (jati) began to form a single, though not yet a unified, social system. New communities were beginning to coalesce, their identities defined by a shared occupation and caste status, or by religious sectarian affiliation, or by the use of a particular language.7
Most of the castes probably derived from clans or guilds, in which, increasingly, families specialized in professions. (The Sanskrit word for caste, jati, means “birth.”) But other castes might have consisted of alien sects, tribes, and professions, of people of various geographical, sectarian, and economic factions. Now invaders like the Shakas or Kushanas and tribal forest dwellers like the Nishadas, as well as other groups on the margins of settled society, could also be absorbed into a specific caste (jati), often of uncertain class (varna), or sometimes into a class, mainly Kshatriya for rulers, seldom Brahmins. Tribes such as Nishadas and Chandalas sometimes seem to have amounted to a fifth varna of their own.8
The division of society into castes facilitated the inclusion of new cultures and groups of people who could eventually be filed away in the open shelving of the caste system, “slotted into the caste hierarchy, their position being dependent on their occupation and social origins, and on the reason for the induction.” 9 This was an effective way to harness the energies and loyalties of skilled indigenous people who were conquered, subordinated, or encroached upon by a society that already observed class distinctions. For while the system of classes (varnas) was already a theoretical mechanism for assimilation,10 the system of castes (jatis) now offered the practical reality of a form of integration,11 from outside the system to inside it. Caste thus paved the way for other conversions, such as that of Hindus to Buddhism or Jainism or to the new non-Vedic forms of Hinduism—renunciant or sectarian.
Many of the assimilated castes were Shudras, who were excluded from participating in the Vedic rituals but often had their own rituals and worshiped their own gods.12 Below the Shudras were the so-called polluted castes; beside, rather than below them, were the tribals and unassimilated aliens (mlecchas). The logic of class placed some tribal groups in a castelike category, albeit one standing outside the caste hierarchy; tribals are relegated not to a distinct level within a vertical structure, but rather to a horizontal annex that could not be integrated into any cubbyhole in the system.13 But some tribals are peculiarly intimate outsiders, recognized as neighbors whom the system can ultimately assimilate within the system more easily than alien invaders like Turks or Europeans. The system of castes was rationalized through an ideology of purity and pollution that was applied to the subgroups, both ethnic and professional, within the four classes. As some professions were defined as purer than others, the hierarchy took over.
The Hindus Page 36