Dr. Dosti Regmi
Gurcharan Das was the CEO of a company. He took an early retirement, learned Sanskrit, and delved into the ancient Indian epic Mahabharata for the answers of morality and dharma. Just like reality, morality and dharma are also ambiguous and subtle. The concept of dharma is not static and can be adapted to the myriad challenges of life. Dharma has many meanings. It can mean law, duty, and doing the right thing. And it is not written in the stone. There are no commandments or references to turn to. You are left to your own devices for that. The answers we have to search for ourselves. Das highlights that good moral reasoning leads to good moral action, rather than an absolute path. So the burden of good reasoning is on the reader. I do believe the best books do not give a reader gimmicks, quick fixes, and promises. Neither does this book claim anything as such nor I love this book for the same reason. It did not come to me as a surprise when I learned that a lady once asked the author for her money back because the book did not offer her the absolute answer of dharma.
Mahabharata is a pretty straightforward story. It’s a rivalry between the cousins for the throne. To contain that rivalry the kingdom is divided. The good guys, Pandavas, get the worse half of the kingdom and the bad guys, Kauravas, get the better part. The Pandavas are diligent and hard-working. They cleared the forest, built a beautiful capital, expanded their territories and they used great diplomatic skills to make alliances and they became the most powerful rulers of then India. The eldest brother among the Pandavas, Yudhisthir is told that now it’s time for him to have a Rajasuya ceremony consecrating him Emperor King of the kings. At this ceremony, all the rulers and nobles were invited. The eldest brother of the Kauravas, Dhuryodhan, was also invited. Seeing the pomp and glory of his rival cousins, he grows envious. His uncle Shakuni, who was visiting with him, looks at him and says, “My lord you grow pale and sick”. Duryodhan says, “What man of metal will stand to see his neighbor prosper and himself declined?”
In these words, he has captured the awful truth about envy, a disease that inflicts all of us without exception. A study was done in the Harvard University graduating class and they asked, “Would you rather earn $100,000 a year or $50,000?” They all said a hundred thousand but then they put a condition that if you were earning a hundred thousand, your friends would be earning two hundred thousand but if you chose to earn fifty then your friends would be earning twenty-five thousand. 83% of the people switched their answer that they would rather earn fifty thousand. For us, fulfilling our greed is not enough; we envious of others progress. That is our nature. It was the same envy in the middle-class Germans of the 1930s who allowed them to be swayed by Hitler to do awful things to the Jews because at that time 50% of the professionals of Berlin and Vienna were Jews when they only represented around 3% of the population. The German society must have been seething with envy and it has its political consequences anyway.
Back to Mahabharata, Sakuni says to Duryodhana,” These guys have become too powerful. We are not going to take over them in a straight contest. So we will have to use strategy. I am the greatest dice player in the world and Yudhisthir is a compulsive gambler. Moreover, I can cheat and nobody can catch me cheating.” They play the dice game and Yudhisthir loses everything – his armies, his horses, his slaves, his wealth, his kingdom, his brothers, himself, and his queen at last. To humiliate the Pandavas, the Kauravas drag the Queen, Draupadi, to the courtroom as a slave. But Draupadi has a question, “Did my husband lose me first or himself first in this game of dice.” The Kauravas realized they’d fallen into a trap because if he had lost himself first before staking her how could he still own Draupadi? But Kauravas are not going to these legal niceties so the Kauravas start to disrobe her. But dharma or cosmic justice or Krishna’s grace saved her. Draupadi is furious and she looks at all the assembled kings and nobles who have come to see this gambling match and she says how could you allow this to happen. You kings tell me what is the dharma of a king. Half the punishment for a crime goes to the person who commits the crime, a quarter goes to the ally but a quarter goes to the persons who remain silent. So she looks at these silent people. The grandfather, the epitome of selflessness – Bhishma, is also silent. Upon further questioning, he replies, “The course of the dharma is subtle.” Dhritarastra regrets for the incident and gives 3 boons to Draupati. She uses the two to free herself and the Pandavas. She could have asked the kingdom back in her third boon and everything would have gone back to normal. But she did not, so that the posterity won’t remember her as miser and the thoughtless gambling of Yudhisthir also had to be penalized.
Now the Pandavas are in exile in a forest. Draupadi now says to Yudhisthir that you are a Kshatriya, a warrior, and it’s your dharma to set up an army and go and reclaim his lost kingdom. But Yudhisthir replies he had given a word to remain in exile in the forest for 13 years so his dharma was to remain in the forest. This showed the clash of what is dharma that continually created the conflict in the lives of Draupadi and Yudhisthir. Draupadi is continuously depicted as a nagging wife and Yudhisthir as a fed-up husband.
After 13 years of exile, the Pandavas go back to reclaim their kingdom and the Kauravas refuse. There are peace negotiations but it fails and war becomes inevitable. On the first day of the war, the leading warrior of the Pandavas, Arjuna looks at the armies arrayed on the enemy side, he sees his cousins, teachers, uncles, and grandfather and he says, “I can’t kill all these people who are my own and he puts down his bow and tells his charioteer that I am not going to fight. The charioteer is Krishna, the God who spends the next seven hundred verses trying to persuade him to get that it’s his dharma/duty to fight and kill.
Karna is another strong character in the Mahabharata. He was born the eldest of the Pandava illegitimately to the unmarried Kunti. She is horrified so puts the baby in a basket and floats him down the river the baby is picked up by a charioteer and so Karna who is a royal prince grows up as a charioteer’s son, Sutaputra. Karna is a very talented and ambitious warrior but he’s constantly treated as a low caste. Karna falls in love with Draupadi and even wins her over Arjuna in a contest but she abandons him for being a low caste and chooses Arjuna instead. He lives in status anxiety. Kauravas befriend him in his time of need so he is fighting for them. Krishna talks to Karna to persuade him not to fight against Pandavas. He reveals the truth about Karna´s birth and lineage and says,” You are not a charioteer son. You are Kshatriya which you’ve always yearned to be. You are the eldest of the Pandavas and if you win the war from Pandava’s side you will be king and Draupadi will be your queen.”Karna is being offered everything that he always wanted but he refuses to switch sides. He says the mother is not the one who gives birth to you but the one who brings you up and his dharma is to stand for his friend Duryodhana, who stood for him during his time of need and recognition.
The war lasts for 18 days. Everybody dies in this war and the victors, the Pandavas have to rule over an empty kingdom. At the end of the epic, the Pandavas give their kingdom to their grandchildren and go towards heaven. Draupadi is the first to fall off her way to heaven. Yudhisthir asks no one to wait for her. Maybe he had a nagging relationship with her since the exile and maybe he thought she loved Arjuna more than him. But in fact, only Bhim stops to help her when she falls. One by one all of the Pandavas except Yudhisthir fall. A stray dog attaches itself to Yudhisthira. They reach heaven and the heaven-keeper, God Indra welcomes Yudhisthir but says he won’t let the dog into heaven. Yudhisthir’s dharma did not allow him to enter the heaven alone. His act of dharma pleased Indra and he let Yudhisthir and the stray dog enter heaven. The rest of the Pandavas and even Draupadi could not reach heaven due to their own faults.
Mahabharata is a dark story. It does not deliver straightforward dharma yet it concludes by saying “Dharma Rakshyato Rakshyata”, meaning one who follows dharma is protected by the dharma itself. So I believe the burden is on us to recognize our dharma and morality.
(The article is based on the book “The Difficulty of Being Good” by Gurcharan Das and his talk on the same book given at Berkley University.)
