Roberto Calasso - Ka

In the immensity of its structure the Mahābhārata can be seen as an overwhelming demonstration of the futility of conflict. Of every conflict. Was the dharma really renewed when the Pāṇḍavas at last, and at a cost of countless dead, succeeded in defeating the Kauravas? Hardly. Peace was a half life, still oppressed by memory. The dharma did reign again, but as it were for a fleeting interval. There was still something brooding that would have to burst out. Thirty years after the end of the war, the Vṛṣṇis, Kṛṣṇa’s people, wiped themselves out in a massacre that began as the merest drunken brawl. It was as though the war that had come before, conducted as it was along the lines and rhythms of a complex ceremony, had only served to offer a pretext for this stupid slaughter.

Throughout, the Mahābhārata is the story of the dharma ’s being sick, exhausted, weighed down by the impediments that history accumulates along its way. It is not the victory of the dharma over the adharma but their near equality and convergence in a disaster that is prelude to the world’s taking a new breath, in a desert scenario, where only the tiniest residue will testify, through the word, to past vicissitudes. Every victory of Hero over Monster or Order over Disorder or Good over Evil is ingenuous when set against this vision, because this alone accommodates Kāla, Time, which generates constant inequalities, but only as a stratagem for arriving later at a leveling on a vast scale. While the only irreversible inequality is the one that only now became clear: detachment, the doctrine that Kṛṣṇa passed on to Arjuna before his hostile relatives, lined up for battle.

“The Law is subtle, great king, and we do not know its course,” said Yudhiṣṭhira when obliged to persuade Draupadī’s father that his daughter be shared equally among the five Pāṇḍava brothers instead of belonging to the one, Arjuna, whom Draupadī had chosen at the svayaṃvara . And how many more times, later on, and on how many other occasions, many of them bloody, would he return to that observation concerning the subtlety of the dharma . Excessively subtle, hard to follow, or even simply to recognize, and this for the man who was Dharma’s son: Yudhiṣṭhira. It was as if the dharma were being woven, thread after thread, since time began — and now those threads entangled everyone, on every side, like an oppressive net. Once caught in the net, anyone who moved too brusquely risked being strangled by its threads. Yudhiṣṭhira’s normal state of mind was this: he was always speaking of the dharma , but he was always thinking of something that lay beyond it: death or liberation. Which was why his remarks about the dharma were so often the prelude to Yama’s devastations, as if for him law and death tended to merge, to the point of coinciding. There was something distant and melancholy about Yudhiṣṭhira — something that was never more obvious than when he eagerly joined in the fatal game of dice with the Kauravas, loving to play but not knowing how. That game was the “lesion,” bheda , that would never be healed: the proof that fate may not only ignore the dharma but even hold it in contempt. Perhaps all Yudhiṣṭhira wanted was to arrive at that irreparable evidence.

In the war of the enemy cousins, the heartrending figures, those who generate the most pathos, are the ones who abandoned the roles assigned to them by birth: Bhīṣma, the kṣatriya who behaved like a brahman, pronouncing the loftiest of thoughts while stretched on a bed of arrows; Droṇa, the brahman who became master of arms to both the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas and taught them how to eliminate all around them, hence the world, so as to concentrate on one tiny point, the target; and Karṇa, the obscure sūta , the charioteer who didn’t know he was the son of Sūrya, the Sun, and who became an invincible warrior, the only one who was a match for Arjuna. They had been the first to sense that delicate distortion of the dharma which ushers in every new era and is sealed by every new avatāra . For order to continue to have a sense, they had to be the first to damage it. There was something in their behavior that went beyond occasion and passions. An unspoken imperative compelled them to make manifest, in what they did, something nobody else had dared point to, a form, an uncommon combination of elements. Each invented his own style. They were artists of the gesture, who ended up — and there was a subtle cruelty to it — suffering the consequences of their artistry, as though a surplus of torture necessarily went hand in hand with those new forms they had chosen to experiment in.

Bībhatsu, He-who-feels-repugnance: of all Arjuna’s many epithets, this one stands out on its own. offers decisive significance. The figure of the kṣatriyas , those determined, powerful warriors who do not even know what doubt is. who smash through every obstacle, who fight with wild beasts — men who can only affirm, ever avid of new strength, men who breathe fire, was seen for the last time and most perfectly of all in Arjuna. Yet he never managed to free himself from a feeling of nausea. About what? The monotonous duty of killing? Or something else too? Arjuna was eaten up with repugnance for the world: not for certain aspects of the world but for its very existence. This creeping nausea gripped him as soon as he passed the peak of affirmation — and from that moment on it spread a delicate, irreversible coloring over everything. It showed in his eyes as a sporadic absence, a perennial distance from whatever was happening to him. Arjuna said nothing of all this, except in his secret conversations with his charioteer, with Kṛṣṇa. Others knew nothing about it. They saw him as the exemplary warrior, the seductive young man, the just man. Yet very often the ringing, authoritative words he would find himself pronouncing sounded vacuous and worn out to Arjuna.

It was difficult to be flexible, on the Island of the Jambū. Every path was lined with vows, boons, curses. Every step was a precept. If life was to become more fluid again, more diffuse and confused, then a god was required, an avatāra , an unclouded, far-seeing mind: Kṛṣṇa.

Nothing could be more subtly contrary to the law than some of Kṛṣṇa’s shrewd counsels, betrayals, and deceptions during the war between the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas. Nothing could be more subtly damaging to people’s faith in the gods than some of the Buddha’s doctrines. Yet Kṛṣṇa and the Buddha were both Viṣṇu’s avatāras , come down to earth to heal the wounded dharma , reduced as it was to a quarter of itself. Nothing of the kind had happened with the previous avatāra : the Dwarf, the Boar, the Man-Lion had appeared, done what they were supposed to do, and then melted away, leaving the world ready for another cycle. But in the last cycles, when the smell of the pralaya , the general dissolution, was already in the air, everything got mixed up and the rules were turned upside down. Defeating an Asura who had in his turn defeated Indra was no longer enough. There was something infantile and empty about those sovereignty games now. Rather than beating one’s enemy, the important thing these days was to imitate him, to assume some of his gestures: but this had to be done in a certain way , superimposing this new knowledge over the old and allowing the two to live together in the energy of their collision. This, perhaps, was the peculiar mystery of the kaliyuga , the obscure age much favored by women and those without caste, who, in the general confusion, might seize a chance for liberation otherwise denied them. In the flagrancy of contradiction, there was no longer any cult that could act as axis and lodestone, only bhakti , the heart’s devotion, that addresses itself to anything, is ready for anything, a perennial emotion whose first messengers were Kṛṣṇa’s gopīs , wandering around alone with their herds.