The story

On the ninth night, the Pandavas went to the enemy's commander and asked him how he could be killed.

The idea came out of Yudhishthira's despair. Bhishma, he told Krishna, was trampling his army as an elephant tramples reeds; better to go back to the forest. Krishna offered to kill Bhishma himself if Arjuna would not. Yudhishthira refused to make Krishna's word false. Before the war Bhishma had promised to counsel him while fighting for Duryodhana, so they would ask him. He had raised them as fatherless children, Yudhishthira added; shame on a warrior's life that must kill him.

They went to Bhishma's tent without weapons or armour and bowed their heads to the ground. He welcomed each by name and asked what he could do for them. Your bow is always drawn into a circle, Yudhishthira said; we never see you take an arrow, fit it or draw it. Tell us how to overcome you.

Bhishma answered at once. While he lived, they would not win. With a weapon in his hand, not even the gods with Indra could defeat him. But there were those he would not fight: a man who had laid down his weapons, or fallen, or surrendered, a woman, or one who bore a woman's name. Shikhandi, the son of Drupada, had been born a woman and later became a man; they all knew it. Let Arjuna put Shikhandi in front of him and come at me, Bhishma said. I will not strike at that one. In that opening let Arjuna bring me down. No one in the world can kill me in battle except Krishna or Arjuna.

On the way back Arjuna broke down. When he was a small boy, dusty from play, he had climbed into Bhishma's lap and called him father. I am not your father, Bhishma had told him, I am your father's father. How could he kill such a man? Let his army be destroyed instead. Krishna reminded him of his vow, and that a kshatriya may strike even an elder who comes to kill him. Arjuna accepted it: Shikhandi would be Bhishma's death, and Arjuna would hold off everyone else.

On the tenth day Bhishma was weary of life. He told Yudhishthira on the field that he was sick of his body and of the killing, and asked him to send Arjuna against him. Shikhandi struck him in the chest with three arrows. Bhishma laughed at him: strike or do not strike, I will not fight you; you are still the Shikhandini the creator made. Shikhandi swore to kill him that day, and Arjuna urged him on, promising to guard his back.

With one bow, Bhishma thought, he could have killed all the Pandavas, if Krishna were not protecting them. But there were two reasons he would not fight them: the Pandavas were not to be killed, and Shikhandi had been a woman. His father had given him the power to die when he chose, and he judged the time had come. Seers and the Vasus in the sky approved, a cool fragrant wind blew, and flowers fell on him.

Shikhandi put nine arrows into his chest, and Bhishma did not even tremble. Arjuna, with Shikhandi before him, cut bow after bow from Bhishma's hands and drove arrows into every vital part. Bhishma turned to Duhshasana and said the famous line. These are not Shikhandi's arrows. They cut into me like thunderbolts, like the rod of Brahma, like angry snakes. These are Arjuna's arrows, not Shikhandi's.

His shield was shot to pieces before he could step down from the chariot with his sword. By the end there was not a finger's breadth of his body without a wound. A little before sunset he fell, head toward the east, like a great banner cut loose. He did not touch the ground. He lay on the arrows.

A voice from the sky asked how so great a man could die while the sun was in its southern course. Bhishma said: I am still here. He would keep his life, he said, until the sun turned north; his father's boon let him choose his time. His mother Ganga sent sages to him in the form of swans, and he told them the same.

The fighting stopped. Both armies took off their armour and came to stand around him. His head hung down. He refused soft pillows as unfit for a warrior's bed and asked Arjuna for one. Arjuna, eyes full of tears, propped up his head with three arrows. Had you done anything else, Bhishma told him, I would have cursed you. He had a trench dug round him, sent away the surgeons who came to draw the arrows, and said he would be burned with those arrows still in him.

The next morning he asked for water. He refused the jars they brought, being past human comforts, and turned to Arjuna again. Arjuna circled him in his chariot, fixed the weapon of Parjanya, the rain god, to an arrow, and drove it into the earth at Bhishma's right side. A stream of cold, clear, fragrant water leapt up, and Bhishma drank. Then he asked Duryodhana one last time to make peace: let my end be the end of this war. The war went on.

So the grandsire lies on his bed of arrows, waiting for the sun. The man who could not be killed has chosen how and when he dies. And it is from this bed, in the books that follow, that he will teach Yudhishthira how to be a king.

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.
• Arjuna — The archer the whole war is arranged around, who arrives at its opening unable to lift his bow because of who is standing on the other side.
• Shikhandi — Born a daughter, raised as a son, made a man by a yaksha's exchange, and the one warrior Bhishma would not raise his bow against.
• 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.
• Duryodhana — The eldest Kaurava, who never disputes that the kingdom is contested and never concedes that this makes the Pandavas' claim equal to his.
• Theme: The binding vow
• Theme: The impossible choice
• Theme: Kinship and enmity

Elsewhere in this parva

• Krishna's counsel to Arjuna — Arjuna asks to be driven between the two armies, sees his own family waiting on both sides, and puts down his bow.
• Krishna takes up the wheel — Twice Krishna leaps from the chariot to kill Bhishma himself, and twice Bhishma lowers his bow and welcomes him

Questions to explore

• Why did Bhishma tell the Pandavas how he could be killed?
• Why would Bhishma not fight Shikhandi?
• Why did Bhishma wait on the bed of arrows for the sun's northern course?