The story

For fifteen years after the war, the man whose sons had started it lived as a king in the house of the men who had killed them.

The Ashramavasika Parva opens on that arrangement, and the text takes care to show it as a kind one. Yudhishthira kept Dhritarashtra at the head of the family. The brothers went to him every day, touched his feet and asked his leave before they acted. Kunti served Gandhari as her elder, and Draupadi and Subhadra served both old women as daughters-in-law. Yudhishthira gave his brothers one standing order: the old king, who had lost a hundred sons, must never be made to feel it.

Everyone obeyed, the text says, except Bhima.

He could not let go of the dice. So he did small unkind things that no one saw, and had his men quietly undo the old king's orders. Once, among friends and within Dhritarashtra's and Gandhari's hearing, he slapped his own arms and said these were the arms, now smeared with sandal-paste and fit for honour, between which the blind king's sons had gone to the next world. Gandhari heard it. Yudhishthira never knew. In the fifteenth year the old king, wounded by Bhima's words as if by arrows, lost his will to stay.

What he told the family was a confession. The ruin of the Kurus, Dhritarashtra said, was his own doing. He had made a wicked son king. He had not listened when Krishna, Vidura, Bhishma, Drona, Kripa, Vyasa, Sanjaya and Gandhari told him what to do. Then he admitted a secret: for some time he and Gandhari had been eating only at every fourth mealtime, sometimes every eighth, and sleeping on darbha grass on the floor, while the household told Yudhishthira he ate well. Now he asked to do openly what he was already doing in secret — to go to the forest in bark cloth, as the kings of his line had done at the end of their lives.

Yudhishthira refused, and then offered the opposite. Let Yuyutsu, Dhritarashtra's one surviving son, be king, or anyone the old man chose; Yudhishthira himself would go to the forest. The old king, who had once crushed an iron image of Bhima to powder in his arms, fainted from the strain of the argument and slumped against Gandhari. Yudhishthira brought him round by stroking his face and chest with a hand cooled in water. It took Vyasa to settle it. A royal sage, he said, dies either in battle or in the forest, by rule. Let him go.

Before he left, Dhritarashtra did three things. He gave Yudhishthira a long lesson in statecraft. He stood before the citizens and asked pardon for his sons, and an old brahmana answered for them all that the slaughter had been fate, not any one man's crime. And he asked for wealth to give in memory of the dead. Bhima objected. The Pandavas would make the offerings for Bhishma and Drona themselves, he said, and Kunti for Karna; Duryodhana's people could go from bad to worse. Yudhishthira told him to be quiet. Arjuna said that good men remember kindnesses, not injuries, and offered his own treasury. For ten days the old king gave without stopping.

He left on the full moon of Kartika. Kunti walked in front with Gandhari's hand on her shoulder, and Dhritarashtra's hand rested on Gandhari's — three old people in a line, going out through the gate.

Then the Pandavas understood that their mother was not turning back.

Yudhishthira pleaded. Bhima asked why she had driven them to destroy the earth if she meant to walk away from it. Kunti's answer is one of the clearest speeches she makes. She had roused them, she said, when the dice had stripped them of everything and their own kin despised them — so that Pandu's line would not die out, and her sons would not go through life looking up at other men's faces; and because she had seen Duhshasana drag Draupadi by the hair. She had not done it to enjoy a kingdom her sons had won. She had enjoyed her husband's kingdom long ago. What she wanted now was her husband's world, and she would reach it by tapas, austerity, serving his elder brother and his wife. To Yudhishthira she left two charges: look after Sahadeva, and remember Karna, whom she had cast away. Her sons turned back, ashamed.

Vidura and Sanjaya went too; Kripa and Yuyutsu were sent home. The old couple settled at Kurukshetra, at the hermitage of the royal sage Shatayupa, and gave themselves to austerity until they were skin and bone. Narada, visiting, told them what was coming. Dhritarashtra had three years left. Kunti would join Pandu. Sanjaya would reach heaven. And Vidura would enter Yudhishthira.

That last came true when the Pandavas visited the hermitage. Vidura had been living on air, naked, with a pebble in his mouth. He was glimpsed at the edge of the clearing and turned back into the forest, and Yudhishthira ran after him alone, calling out his own name. Vidura stopped and leaned against a tree, and fixed his eyes on him without blinking. Then, by the power of yoga, he entered him — limbs into limbs, breath into breath, senses into senses. Yudhishthira felt himself grow stronger. When he moved to cremate the body left standing against the tree, a voice told him not to: Vidura had taken the ascetic's path and was not to be mourned.

The epic said long ago that Vidura was Dharma born as a man, and Yudhishthira is Dharma's son. Here the two become one. It is the gentlest end anyone in the Mahabharata is given, and it goes to the counsellor whose warnings were refused at every turn. It also marks the turn of the whole book: the elders have stopped advising the world and begun to leave it.

Who appears, and what it argues

• 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.
• Gandhari — The queen who covered her eyes for life to share her husband's blindness, lost a hundred sons, and cursed the god who let it happen.
• Kunti — Mother of three Pandavas and, before any of them, of the son she set adrift on a river and had to watch her other children fight.
• 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.
• Yudhishthira — The eldest Pandava, called the king of dharma, who gambles away his brothers, his wife and himself without anyone forcing his hand.
• Bhima — The strongest of the brothers, whose two vows in the assembly hall turn a property dispute into something that can only end in bodies.
• 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.
• 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.
• Theme: Renunciation and release
• Theme: Kinship and enmity
• Theme: The king's duty

Elsewhere in this parva

• The night the dead came back — Vyasa calls the dead of Kurukshetra out of the Ganga for a single night, and they come without anger, Karna and the Pandavas among them

Questions to explore

• Why did Kunti, who urged her sons to war, refuse to share the kingdom they won?
• Was Dhritarashtra's withdrawal to the forest a penance, or the old royal custom he claimed it was?
• What does it mean that Vidura entered Yudhishthira's body when he died?