The story

The man Yudhishthira had to ask about kingship was lying on a bed of arrows, and Yudhishthira was the one who had put him there.

Krishna took the brothers to Kurukshetra and spoke to Bhishma first, asking him to teach the new king. Bhishma said he could not. The arrows burned in him like poison, his limbs were failing, his mind would not clear. And how could anyone teach about dharma with Krishna standing beside him? Let Krishna teach. Krishna gave him a gift instead. From that moment Bhishma would feel no fatigue, no fainting, no burning, no pain, no hunger or thirst, and all he had ever learned would come back to him clearly. Why not teach the king yourself, Bhishma asked. Krishna answered that no one is surprised to hear the moon called cool. He wanted the fame of this teaching to be Bhishma's, and to last as long as the earth.

Bhishma told the king to come and ask. Yudhishthira hung back, and Krishna explained that he was ashamed, and afraid of being cursed by the grandfather whose death he had brought about. Bhishma answered that fear. Giving, study and austerity are a brahmin's duty, he said, and a kshatriya's is to lay down his body in battle. A warrior who kills even elders and teachers when they stand on the wrong side in war has not left his dharma. So Yudhishthira came, bowed, and asked his question. Kingship, he said, is to the world what the reins are to a horse and the goad to an elephant. If it fails, everything falls into confusion. Tell me what it is.

Bhishma began with effort. A king must exert himself, he said, because fate alone accomplishes nothing for a ruler. Then he gave the image that holds much of what comes after. A king should live like a pregnant woman. She gives up what she herself likes for the good of the child she carries, and a king must give up his own pleasures for the good of his people.

Yudhishthira then asked the question underneath all the others. Why should one man rule a whole world full of people as brave and clever as he is? Bhishma answered with a history. In the first age there was no king, no kingdom, no danda, the rod of punishment, and no one to wield it. People protected each other by dharma alone. But protecting each other wore them out, and confusion entered them. Greed came, then desire, then passion, until they no longer knew what should be done or said, eaten or avoided, and the Veda itself was lost. The frightened gods went to Brahma, who composed a vast treatise on dharma, wealth and pleasure, and the whole science of the rod.

The kingship that came out of this was bound from the start. One early ruler, Vena, was a slave to love and hatred and acted against dharma, and the sages killed him with blades of consecrated grass. From his right hand they brought forth Prithu, armed and learned, and the gods made him swear to protect dharma without fear and to restrain anyone who strayed from it. He made the earth level and it yielded its wealth. Because he delighted the people, Bhishma says, he was called raja, the one who pleases.

Then Bhishma described the world with no king at all. Of all evils, he said, none is worse than anarchy. Without a ruler holding the rod, the strong would roast the weak like fish on a spit. A thief would be robbed by two others, and those two by many more. The free would be made slaves and women carried off. Long ago, he said, people did try to live without a king. They ate each other like fish in water. They made compacts among themselves, and could not keep them. So they went to Brahma, who sent them Manu, and Manu did not want the work. I fear a cruel task, he said; ruling is hard, above all among men who lie. The people made him an offer. They would give him a fiftieth of their cattle and gold and a tenth of their grain, and a quarter of all the merit they earned under his protection would be his. Only then did he go out.

Is the age the cause of the king, or the king the cause of the age? Bhishma would not let the question stand. The king makes the age, he said. When he governs fully and rightly by the rod, the golden age itself returns.

The rod is never the whole of the teaching, though, and Bhishma's images for its use are gentle. A king should take wealth from his realm the way one gathers honey, without killing the bees. He should milk it like a cow while minding the calf, and never bruise the udder. He should draw from it softly, the way a leech drinks, and carry it the way a tigress carries her cub in her teeth, firmly, so that it does not fall, and without biting.

This is what the epic means by rajadharma, the duty of the king. It does not paint the king as a god or as a master. He exists because without him the strong eat the weak, and he holds power on terms: the people pay him so that he will protect them. A king who does not protect, Bhishma quotes from Manu, should be abandoned like a leaking boat at sea. Yudhishthira, who had wanted to give up the kingdom because of the blood it cost, hears from the man whose death he caused that refusing to rule would cost even more. When the teaching on kingship is done, the old man will turn to harder ground: what a ruler may do in times of disaster, and then what lies beyond all ruling.

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.
• Theme: The king's duty
• Theme: Divine counsel

Elsewhere in this parva

• Yudhishthira's grief — The victor wants to give the kingdom away and live in the forest, and his brothers, his wife, Vyasa and Krishna argue him onto the throne.
• The teaching on release — A courtesan who stops hoping, a farmer whose last bullocks hang from a camel, and Vyasa's son who answers his father as an echo.

Questions to explore

• According to Bhishma, why did the first people need a king at all?
• What does Bhishma mean by danda, the rod of punishment?
• How should a king tax his people, according to the Shanti Parva?