Ten Things to Know about the Mahabharata: #3
Singapore. Statue of Krishna as Vishnu in his divine form.
#3. The problem of violence and responsibility. To regain their kingdom, the Pandava brothers go to war.
At the close of the 18-day battle, the dead include their sons, cousins, guru, and a brother they never knew they had. Some didn’t even die a clean death. They were distracted by imitations of their son’s voices, shot while trying to free a chariot from the mud.
How does a reader come to terms with the carnage of the Kurukshetra War? Even the heroes have their doubts.
Overwhelmed by the prospect of killing his relatives, Arjuna lost the will to fight. He dropped his bow and turned to his chariot driver. “How can we be happy after killing our kinsmen, O Krishna?” In fighting for his country, he would lose the very people for whom he wanted to win it.
Little does he know that his chariot driver is an incarnation of the god Vishnu. The divine Krishna responds with a meditation on faith, right action, and the eternal soul.
Do your duty to the best of your ability, O Arjuna, with your mind attached to the Lord, abandoning worry and attachment to the results, and remaining calm in both success and failure.
His speech is known as the Bhagavad Gita, or Song of God, and is readily available as a book as in its own right. The 700-verse treatise, possibly a later addition to the Mahabharata, is a seminal work of Hindu philosophy. Along with the Vishnu Sahasranamam, a prayer spoken by a dying warrior, it forms the religious core of the epic.
The Mahabharata helps the reader see the cosmic forces at work on the battlefield. Dying there is the result of a series of actions in a man’s life, or a previous one. Some enemies were actually demons in human form that the gods wanted killed. Warriors are merely instruments of fate.
On a cosmic level, it all makes sense. Yet as the wives of the dead search the battlefield, the suffering doesn’t seem any less real.
