The story

Bhishma chose the season of his own death, and the whole Kuru house waited for it.

He had lain on the bed of arrows since the tenth day of the war, and from it he had taught Yudhishthira everything a king should know. When the teaching was done, Vyasa asked him to let the king go home to the city. Bhishma did. Let the fever in your mind cool, he told Yudhishthira. Sacrifice, keep your people content, honour your friends, so that those who love you can live off you the way birds live off a fruiting tree beside a shrine. And come back to me when the sun has turned and begun its journey north.

Yudhishthira went back to Hastinapura with Dhritarashtra and Gandhari at the head of the procession. He set the kingdom in order, and he comforted the widows of the war with gifts as well as words. After fifty nights he saw that the sun had turned, remembered his promise, and set out with the priests, sending ahead what a funeral would need: ghee, garlands, perfumes, linen, sandalwood and dark aloe. The elders, Kunti, his brothers, Krishna and Vidura went with him, and so did Bhishma's own sacred fires.

They found him at Kurukshetra as they had left him, with Vyasa, Narada and Devala at his side and guards all round.

Yudhishthira bowed. It is Yudhishthira, he said. If you can hear me, tell me what I can do for you. I have come at the time you set, with your fires, and your son Dhritarashtra is here, and Krishna, and the kings who are left. Open your eyes and look at them.

Bhishma opened his eyes and saw the Bharatas standing round him. When his voice came, it was as deep as a rain cloud. It is good that you have come, he said. The sun has turned. I have lain here fifty-eight nights on these sharp points, and they have felt like a hundred years. The holy month of Magha has arrived.

He spoke to Dhritarashtra first, and softened nothing. Do not grieve, he said, because what was to be has been. The sons of Pandu are your sons by dharma, as they are his. Protect them; this king is kind and will obey you. Your own sons were wicked, ruled by anger, greed and envy. You should not grieve for them.

Then he turned to Krishna, bearer of the conch, the discus and the mace. Give me leave, he said, and protect the Pandavas, for you are their refuge. He reminded them all of what he had told Duryodhana long before the war: yatah krishnas tato dharmo, yato dharmas tato jayah — where Krishna is, there is dharma, and where dharma is, there is victory. Duryodhana had not listened, and had brought the earth to ruin before he died. I know you, he told Krishna, as the ancient seer Narayana, who lived for ages at Badari with Nara.

Krishna gave him the leave he asked for. Go to the Vasus, he said. I see no wrong in you. You honoured your father as faithfully as Markandeya, and that is why death waits on you like a servant with bowed head.

Bhishma asked leave of everyone there to let his life go. Always strive for truth, because truth is the greatest strength — satyam hi paramam balam. Be kind, keep yourselves in check, hold to dharma and to austerity. He embraced his friends, and his last words were to Yudhishthira: always honour the brahmanas, the wise, your teachers and your priests.

Then he fell silent. He held himself in the yogic concentrations one after another, and his restrained breaths rose upward. The text records a wonder here. Whatever part of his body he released was at once free of its arrows, and in a moment, while everyone watched, not one shaft remained in him. Krishna and the sages stared. Then his life broke through the crown of his head and rose like a great meteor into the sky, and in an instant it was gone.

The Pandavas built the pyre with Vidura and Yuyutsu. Yudhishthira and Vidura wrapped him in linen and garlands. Yuyutsu held the royal parasol over him and Bhima and Arjuna the white fly-whisks, and the women of the Kuru house fanned him with palm leaves. The priests performed the rites for the dead and the singers chanted the Sama hymns. They covered him with sandalwood and fragrant woods and lit the fire, and Dhritarashtra and the kings walked round it with the pyre on their left, as the rites for the dead require.

Then they went down to the Ganga and offered water for him. As they did, the river goddess rose out of her own water, weeping. This was her son, she cried, whom Rama Jamadagnya could not defeat, who carried off the princesses at Kashi on a single chariot against all the kings gathered there — and he had been killed by Shikhandi. My heart must be made of stone, she said, if it does not break.

Krishna comforted her. Your son was a Vasu, he told her, born human through a curse, and he has reached the highest state. He was not brought down by Shikhandi. Arjuna killed him, fighting by the warrior's law, and not even Indra could have killed Bhishma with his bow raised. He went to heaven by his own choice. Comforted by Krishna and Vyasa, Ganga let her grief go and returned into the river.

The question does not stay settled; during the horse sacrifice it will come back to Arjuna. But this chapter closes an age. The grandsire of the Kurus, who gave up a throne and a family for his father, ends by choosing his own hour, telling the truth to a blind king about his sons, and asking leave of the god he had defended to Duryodhana. After this the Kuru house has no grandfather. It has only Yudhishthira.

Who appears, and what it argues

• Bhishma — The grand-uncle whose vow of celibacy was meant to secure the succession and instead left it disputed for three generations.
• Yudhishthira — The eldest Pandava, called the king of dharma, who gambles away his brothers, his wife and himself without anyone forcing his hand.
• Krishna — Cousin, envoy and charioteer — the one who shapes the war's course without ever lifting a weapon in it.
• Dhritarashtra — The blind elder brother passed over for the throne and left holding it anyway, who can always see what his son is doing and never stops him.
• Vyasa — The poet of the epic and the father of its two kings, who keeps walking into his own story to tell its people what is coming.
• Vidura — The half-brother kept from the throne by his mother's rank, who gives the correct advice at every turn and is overruled at every turn.
• Theme: The binding vow
• Theme: Renunciation and release
• Theme: Curse and consequence

Elsewhere in this parva

• Bhishma and the thousand names — Asked which single dharma stands highest, the grandsire who once called dharma too subtle to judge answers without hedging

Questions to explore

• Why did Bhishma wait for the sun to turn north before he died?
• What did Bhishma say to Dhritarashtra and to Krishna at the very end?
• Why does Ganga blame Shikhandi for her son's death while Krishna insists it was Arjuna?