The Hindus (48 page)

But the success of the sacrifice is undermined by a story told right after it ends and the guests depart. A mongoose came out of his hole there and declared, in a human voice, “This whole sacrifice is not equal to one of the grains of barley that were given by a Brahmin who lived by observing the vow of gleaning.”
^fq
He then told a story about this Brahmin: During a famine he gave his few remaining grains of barley to a guest who turned out to be Dharma in disguise; the gleaner promptly went to heaven, with his family. When the mongoose finished telling this tale, he vanished (14.92-93), and the storyteller concluded, “Indeed, nonhostility [
adroha
] to all creatures, contentment, clean conduct,
tapas
, self-restraint, truthfulness, and generosity all are regarded as equal (14.94.1).” King Janamejaya, listening to the story, then replied, “Kings are addicted to sacrifice, and sages are addicted to inner heat. The Brahmins busy themselves with pacification, tranquilization, and restraint.” He went on to argue that since Indra had become ruler of heaven through sacrifice, surely Yudhishthira, who (with Bhima and Arjuna) resembled Indra in wealth and power, was right to perform the horse sacrifice, and the mongoose was wrong to criticize him. The storyteller then told him another story:

Indra presumably completes his sacrifice, since he disregards the sages’ words. But we are told that he did this not out of wisdom but out of his pride and delusion; King Vasu too is punished for disregarding the sages’ question. Janamejaya’s pluralism (some people have one addiction; others have another) is not the right answer, but the text never tells us what the right answer would be, because there
is
no right answer. These stories cast a serious shadow of doubt on the glory of the horse sacrifice.

So too the unofficial “black” ritual of witchcraft, the snake sacrifice, shadows both of Yudhishthira’s official, “white” rituals, the consecration and the horse sacrifice. The
Mahabharata
sees a vice behind every virtue, a snake behind every horse, and a doomsday behind every victory.

CHAPTER 11

Dharma is subtle.

Mahabharata
, passim

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.

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:

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).

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’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.