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Adi Parva · Episode 1 · Chapters 1, 3, 36–56
The Mahabharata is first recited at a king's rite of revenge, while snakes fall into the fire for his father's death.
The Mahabharata does not begin with the Kurus. It begins with a fire into which snakes are falling.
In the Naimisha forest, the sage Shaunaka is holding a sacrifice meant to last twelve years, and a storyteller named Ugrashravas, son of the bard Lomaharshana, walks into the hermitage. Asked where he has been, he says he has come from King Janamejaya's snake sacrifice, where he heard Vaishampayana recite the stories that Krishna Dvaipayana Vyasa had composed. Everything else in the epic, including the war, is a story Ugrashravas is retelling about a story he heard told at a sacrifice.
That sacrifice has its own story, and it starts with an insult.
Parikshit, grandson of Arjuna and son of Abhimanyu, was born when the Kuru line had been almost wiped out at Kurukshetra, and he ruled well for sixty years. He protected widows and the helpless, he was dear to Krishna, and no one hated him. Then one day, old, hungry and alone, he lost a deer he had wounded and came upon a sage named Shamika sitting among the cattle. He asked the sage where the deer had gone, again and again, but Shamika was keeping a vow of silence and did not answer. In a flash of anger Parikshit lifted a dead snake on the tip of his bow, draped it over the sage's shoulder, and went home. The sage did not move.
His son was another matter. Shringin, young and quick to rage, heard from a friend that his father was sitting with a corpse on his shoulder, and he cursed the king: within seven nights, Takshaka, king of the serpents, would burn Parikshit with his venom. Shamika was dismayed: a king who protects the land deserves forbearance, he told his son, and anger destroys an ascetic's merit. But a curse once spoken could not be called back. So he did the only thing left and sent a disciple to warn the king.
Parikshit was ashamed, and the text says the shame hurt him more than the news of his death. He built a tower on a single pillar, filled it with physicians and men skilled in charms, and waited. On the seventh day a healer named Kashyapa set out to save him. Takshaka met him on the road disguised as an old brahmana, bit a banyan tree to ash in front of him, and watched Kashyapa bring it back to leaf. Then the serpent asked him what he hoped to earn, paid him more, and Kashyapa turned home. Takshaka sent snakes disguised as ascetics to the tower with gifts of fruit. As the sun set, the king found a tiny copper-coloured insect in one fruit, laughed, set it on his neck and said, let it bite me, and let the sage's word come true. It became Takshaka, and the coil of the serpent closed round him.
Janamejaya was crowned as a boy. Years later the sage Uttanka, who had his own grievance against Takshaka, told him how his father had died. The young king asked his ministers for the full account, and what stung him most was the bribe on the road: a healer had been coming, and Takshaka had paid him to turn back. So Janamejaya vowed revenge, and his priests told him of a rite made for exactly this: a sarpasatra, a sacrifice of serpents.
The priests dressed in black, their eyes red from the smoke, and called the snakes into the fire by name. They came because they had to, writhing and crying out to each other, white and black and blue, old and young, by the hundred thousand. Takshaka himself fled to Indra, who hid him in his upper garment.
The snakes, it turns out, had been doomed long before. Their own mother, Kadru, had cursed them when they refused to help her cheat in a wager, and the creator had let the curse stand. He had also left one way out: a boy born to the sage Jaratkaru and the serpent woman Jaratkaru, sister of the serpent king Vasuki, would one day stop the rite. That boy was Astika. Vasuki, fainting in the heat of the fire, sent him.
Astika was refused at the gate, because the king had ordered that no stranger should enter. So the boy stood outside and praised the sacrifice so well that Janamejaya, delighted, offered him any boon. At that moment Janamejaya's priests were chanting Takshaka and Indra together toward the flames, and Indra let the serpent go. As Takshaka fell, Astika called out three times, tishtha, stay, and the serpent hung in the air. Then the boy named his boon: let the sacrifice end. The king offered gold, silver and cattle instead. Astika refused them, and the assembly told the king to keep his word. The fire was put out.
Vyasa himself had come to that rite, and Janamejaya asked him the question the whole epic answers: how did the break between my great-grandfathers come about, and how was the war that destroyed them fought? Vyasa turned to his pupil Vaishampayana and told him to tell it all. Later tellings add that Ganesha wrote the poem down as Vyasa dictated; the Critical Edition does not include that scene. What it does keep is the epic's claim about itself: on duty, wealth, desire and release, what is found here may be found elsewhere, and what is not here is nowhere.
That is why the serpent sacrifice belongs at the front. The text says the epic was recited in the pauses of this rite, so the story of how insult, vow and curse grew into a war that nearly ended a family is first told to that family's heir while he is burning a whole race of creatures to avenge his father. Every listener after him hears it the same way, with the smoke of a vengeance still in the air, and with the memory of a boy who asked for nothing except that it stop.
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