Roberto Calasso - Ka

Now every pore of Kṛṣṇa’s skin was covered. Only the soles of his feet on the cold floor had not been spread with cream of rice. Durvāsas’s eyes were veiled, absent. In a hoarse voice he ordered Rukminī to undress. Rukminī couldn’t help sneaking a resigned glance at Kṛṣṇa, who paid no attention. He stood beside her like a puppet. One by one Rukmiṇī removed her delicate, sumptuous clothes. Durvāsas didn’t even look at her body. Meticulously, he began to spread the pāyasa over her. The cream was still dripping from her nipples when Durvāsas ordered a cart to be prepared. The servants obeyed. Then Durvāsas yoked up Rukmiṇī, cracked his whip, and set off south. Kṛṣṇa walked behind. Now and then Durvāsas would yell out like a rude cart driver and bring down his whip on Rukmiṇī’s shoulders, leaving pink welts that mingled with the white of the rice and trickles of sweat. Then he got off the cart and started walking in the same direction. Naked, white, impassive, Kṛṣṇa and Rukmiṇī followed him. All at once Durvāsas stopped and turned to them. He saw they were bowing slightly in his direction. He said: “Now go back. You will find everything I broke is whole again. You”—this to Rukmiṇī—“will ever give off a fragrant odor. Your beauty shall not wither. You will follow Kṛṣṇa even after death.” Then he spoke to Kṛṣṇa: “You will die like any other man, because you didn’t smear the soles of your feet. But what does it matter? You have understood. Go in the company of this mantra , which you must recite in silence.” He murmured some formula or other. “As long as there is food, you will be loved. As long as there is a just man, you will have glory.” They were his last words. Already he was veiled in flame. Then he disappeared.

Kṛṣṇa and Rukmiṇī walked back to the palace in silence, their bodies encrusted with dust and rice. They found everything intact, as if Durvāsas had never stayed with them.

The approach of the last age began to make itself felt. This was the Age of the Losing Throw, the kaliyuga , when one development became clear to all: sacrifice was no longer effective. Risk par excellence, first of all voyages, and hence with every chance of becoming first of all shipwrecks, sacrifice, this undertaking within which exactitude and truth might be measured, could no longer hold up on its own, in its keen-edged abstraction. It turned into war. But that wasn’t all. War and sacrifice easily become two sides of the same coin. Sacrifice became the failed war. An inexact, fraudulent war, and necessarily so, a war that ended up looking like pure massacre. That was what took place between the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas.

What used to happen before an avatāra , before these “descents” of the god upon the earth in time of disorder? The rites. And they were enough. But what were they? Reality elaborated in thought to the point of exhaustion, everything, every moment, every nook and cranny, articulated in the mind. A constant preoccupation that distracted one from any other conquest. But clearly something eluded this thinking. Something bubbled over. Or sifted down like some poisoned, indestructible dregs. So it was that one day gods or men or the earth itself, oppressed by the sheer weight of too many creatures, went to Brahmā to ask for help. Upon which Brahmā declared himself impotent. Impotence had dogged him from the beginning — perhaps precisely because he was a creator god. Brahmā relied too much on thought, thought was his element, as other gods had their elements in some power of nature. And what Brahmā thought immediately became ritual formula. But that didn’t mean its effectiveness was assured. Brahmā was the first to have doubts about the efficacy of the rites. His mind frequently dwelled on the problem. He realized that he tended to associate it with certain episodes of his life: the flight of his born-of-the-mind children, his desire for a girl’s body, Śiva’s severed fifth head. All stories that made a mockery of him. He looked on those seeking his help, and they were many, with feelings of detached sympathy. He felt sorry for them, petitioners to a helpless king. Then one day he gestured toward Viṣṇu and said: “Ask him. He will find a way to do what I cannot.” Then he fell back into his lucid melancholy.

During the first seven avatāras , events followed a coherent sequence: an evil king (though he might just as well be a saint) achieved excessive power, disturbed Indra’s lovemaking, and hounded him out of heaven. Order was overturned. A figure of even greater power had to come to establish a new order. The avatāra . The repertory of possible events offered a great variety of plots, but the decisive steps were always duels, challenges, curses, boons, escapes, exile. Only when one arrives at Kṛṣṇa, and then the Buddha, in the eighth and ninth avatāra , does everything become irrevocably complicated and far more ambiguous. There are still duels and cosmic contests. But they are no longer decisive. What is decisive is what takes place in the spectator of the duels, that is Kṛṣṇa, with Arjuna fastened to him. And with the Buddha a further and more disquieting level is reached. Now, seen from without, nothing happens at all. Life goes on in all its mediocrity, a mere succession of unimportant events. There is no longer a cosmos, nor even an empire, just a provincial backwater. There is the usual grating comedy between rich and poor. Some begging monk or other in the midst of it. Of duels and wars not a mention now. Everything seems to be portrayed in the mind of a monk, the Buddha, whom one may come across in the shade of a tree or walking some beaten track along with everybody else. Yet the duel goes on with new names, different gestures — in the sealed chamber of that mind.

Thus began the age of Kṛṣṇa: men yearned for stories, interwoven stories, characters who needn’t always be the Devas, the Asuras, and the ṛṣis . They could no longer sustain Vedic abstraction, nor the fact that the entire world and everything that happened in it should end up as glosses on an everlasting ritual. Not everything, they thought, frightened almost by their own blasphemous boldness, could converge in the construction of the altar of fire. Now the bricks would be so many stories, and to bake them, to give them substance, the gods agreed to come down to the earth again, injecting a “portion,” aṃśa , of themselves into those heroes who would fight at Kurukṣetra, on that great open space, that battlefield that reminded the gods of something else, for in a remote past they had held a sacrifice there. Or was it from there perhaps that they had ascended to heaven, and won their immortality? They couldn’t rightly remember, so much time had gone by.

“Ritual is dangerous,” Vyāsa reminded Yudhiṣṭhira before the ceremony that would consecrate him as king. It was a warning that might seem pointless, obvious. The ṛṣis had always spoken of ritual as a voyage over which shipwreck ever loomed. But that danger had to do with some eventual shortcoming in precision of thought and gesture. Whereas now Vyāsa was alluding to a new danger: in one phase of the rājasūya , the regal consecration, there was a game of dice that the king had to win, by cheating if necessary. In a game one is aware of tension, yet the rite is still, as always, detached from the world of fact, as if keeping itself two palm breadths above the ground. It cannot allow itself to be invaded. But with Yudhiṣṭhira the opposite happened. He lost his game and everything else with it. Or rather: he really lost twice. What went wrong? Like capricious demons, the dice had smashed the ritual order from within. They were no longer a prescribed act, but agents of the invading daiva , of that “fate” that operates wherever and however it will, both outside and inside the rite. No finery of thought could stop it. It was a wild horse. Now the daiva acted alone: all it needed were those tiny, rolling nuts. One day, in a sudden rage, King Virāṭa hurled the dice in Yudhiṣṭhira’s face. Blood began to drip from his nose. Draupadī hurried to collect it in a golden cup to prevent it from touching the ground. But this was the warning that soon blood would touch the ground, and drench it too. The last barrier between game and blood was down now.