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Skandha 1, adhyayas 16-17 · Saptah day 1
A bull on one leg, a weeping cow, and a man dressed as a king beating them both: the Kali age arrives in Parikshit's realm.
Parikshit ruled well. He had married Iravati, daughter of his mother's brother Uttara, and had four sons, the eldest Janamejaya. With Kripa as his teacher he performed three horse sacrifices on the bank of the Ganga. Then, while he was away on campaign, word reached his camp that Kali had entered the land he ruled.
Before the Suta tells us what Parikshit did, he steps back and describes a meeting the king had not seen.
A bull stood on one leg. He was Dharma. Near him wandered a cow, thin, with tears running from her eyes, like a mother who has lost her calf. She was the Earth. Dharma asked her what grieved her. Was it him, left standing on a single leg? Was it that she would now be ruled by men without dharma, that the gods would go without their share of sacrifice, that people would neglect their duties?
The Earth answered that she grieved for all of these, and for one thing more. Krishna had left the world. For years his feet had marked her surface and she had been proud of it. She lists the qualities that had lived in him: truth, purity, compassion, patience, renunciation, contentment, straightforwardness, calm, self-control, and a long list of others, nearly forty in all. Those had gone with him, and she was left to Kali.
Into that scene Parikshit came on his chariot, near the Sarasvati. He saw a man dressed as a king beating the cow and the bull with a club. The bull, white as a lotus, trembled so badly that he passed water in fear. The cow, already wretched, was being kicked.
Parikshit spoke to the man first. You wear a king's dress, he said, and act like a low criminal. Do you think that because Krishna and Arjuna have gone far away, you can strike the innocent where no one sees? For that you deserve death. Then he turned to the bull and asked who had cut off his three legs.
The bull's answer is careful and strange. Some thinkers, he says, hold that a person's suffering comes from himself, others say fate, others karma, others nature, and some say its cause is beyond words and reason. He will not name the one who hurt him.
Parikshit understood. You speak like one who knows dharma, he said, and you are Dharma in a bull's form, for the one who points out a wrongdoer shares the wrongdoer's fate. Then he named the legs himself. In the first age, Dharma stood on four: austerity, purity, compassion and truth. Pride had broken the first, attachment the second, intoxication the third. Only truth was left, and Kali, who grows strong on falsehood, meant to break that too.
Parikshit raised his sword to kill Kali. Kali threw off the royal dress and fell at his feet, head bowed in fear.
That was enough to stop him. Parikshit was known for protecting anyone who took refuge with him, and he would not kill a man lying at his feet. But he would not let him stay. You are the friend of adharma, he told Kali; you have no place in a land where the Lord of sacrifice is worshipped with sacrifices. Kali pleaded that wherever he went, he would see this king standing with his bow drawn. Tell me where to live, he said.
Parikshit gave him four places: gambling, drink, sexual license and slaughter, where four kinds of adharma live. The text's word for the third is simply "women", and the vices it stands among show what is meant. When Kali asked for more, the king gave him a fifth: gold, which houses falsehood, intoxication, lust, hostility and passion. In these five places, given by the king, Kali settled.
The fifth is the one people remember. Gambling, drink, lust and violence were already understood as vices. Gold was not. It was the ornament of kings and the substance of gifts to brahmanas. To name it as Kali's house is to say that wealth carries the same faults the vices carry, whatever good it can also do.
Then Parikshit restored the bull's three legs and made the Earth flourish again.
The Suta adds, at the start of the next chapter, why the king bore Kali no hatred. In this age, he says, good acts bear fruit quickly, while bad ones bear fruit only when they are actually done. Kali is a wolf among the careless and is afraid of the steady. The king, like a bee that takes only the nectar, took what was good in the age.
That is the shape this episode gives to the coming age. Kali does not invade from outside. He is given a lease, with exact boundaries, and the boundaries run through ordinary human appetite. Parikshit cannot abolish him. He can only keep him from the throne, for a while, and the next chapter shows how short that while will be.
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