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Sabha Parva · Episode 1 · Chapters 1–22
A king gathering a hundred kings for sacrifice cannot be hurt by weapons, so Bhima kills him bare-handed on a hint from Krishna.
The road to the Pandavas' greatest sacrifice ran through a wrestling match that lasted two weeks.
It began with a gift. Maya, the architect of the asuras, owed Arjuna his life after the burning of the Khandava forest, and Krishna told him how to repay it: build Yudhishthira a hall such as no human being could copy. Maya fetched crystal and treasure from a lake far to the north beyond Kailasa, worked for fourteen months, and produced a palace of gold-leaved trees and jewelled walls. Inside it lay a lotus pool so cunningly paved with gems that visiting kings walked straight into it. Remember the pool.
Then the sage Narada came to the new hall and described the assembly halls of the gods. In Indra's hall, he said, sat King Harishchandra, honoured above other kings because he had performed the Rajasuya, the royal consecration that makes a king paramount over kings. And Narada had seen Pandu among the ancestors. Pandu sent his son a message: you can conquer the earth, your brothers obey you, perform the Rajasuya. Narada added a warning that is easy to miss. This rite, he said, attracts obstacles, and it has been known to end in a war that ruins the earth.
Yudhishthira consulted his brothers, his ministers and his priests, and all of them urged him on. He still did not trust praise from people who loved him, so he sent to Dvaraka for Krishna.
Krishna agreed that he was worthy, and then named the difficulty. Jarasandha, king of Magadha, had made himself overlord by force. Shishupala of Chedi served as his general. The Yadavas themselves had abandoned Mathura and moved west to Dvaraka out of fear of him. Worse, Jarasandha had been defeating kings and penning them in his mountain capital, Girivraja, like elephants shut in a cave by a lion. He held eighty-six already and wanted fourteen more, so that he could offer a hundred kings to Shiva as sacrificial victims. While he lived, Krishna said, no one else could claim to be the king of kings.
Yudhishthira's first instinct was to give the whole plan up. Bhima and Arjuna were his eyes, he said, and Krishna his mind; he would not risk them for a title. Bhima answered that a king who never acts crumbles like an anthill, and offered a formula: policy in Krishna, strength in me, victory in Arjuna. Arjuna was blunter. The ochre robe of a renouncer, he said, is easy to come by later.
Krishna then told them who Jarasandha was. His father Brihadratha had no son. A sage gave him a single mango, which the king shared between his two wives, and each queen bore half a child: one eye, one arm, one leg, half a face. The horrified women had the halves thrown out at a crossroads. A rakshasi named Jara picked them up, pressed them together to carry them more easily, and the halves became one roaring boy. Hence his name, Jara-sandha, "joined by Jara". The sage foretold that no weapon, not even one loosed by a god, would hurt him.
So weapons were useless. Krishna's plan was to make him fight with bare hands. The three of them went to Magadha disguised as snatakas, young brahmins who have finished their Vedic studies. They did not use the city gate. They broke the peak of an ancient hill shrine above the city, walked in, took garlands by force from the flower-sellers, and presented themselves to the king.
Jarasandha had a famous vow: he would rise to receive snatakas even at midnight. He welcomed them, and then looked closely. Brahmins did not wear garlands and sandal paste, he said, and their arms carried the scars of bowstrings. Why had they come in without a door, and why would they not accept his hospitality? Krishna replied that a friend's house is entered by the door and an enemy's by no door, and that they took no honours from an enemy. When Jarasandha protested that he had done them no wrong, Krishna named it: kings held to be killed for Rudra. Human sacrifice, he said, had never been seen, and they had come to stop it. Then he told the king who they were and offered him a choice: fight, or free the kings.
Jarasandha refused to release prisoners out of fear. He installed his son Sahadeva as king first, and chose to fight Bhima. The text says Krishna did not want to kill him himself, because this death had been assigned to another.
The two men fought from the first day of the month of Karttika, day and night without rest. On the night of the fourteenth, Jarasandha stopped from exhaustion. Krishna then remarked, as if to wake Bhima up, that an exhausted opponent should not be pressed, because if he were pressed fully he would die. Bhima understood the opening. He lifted Jarasandha, whirled him a hundred times, broke his back and roared, and the Magadhans thought the Himalaya had split. Later tellings have Krishna split a blade of grass to show Bhima how to tear Jarasandha apart along his old seam; the constituted text has no such sign.
They left the body at the palace gate in the night. Krishna yoked Jarasandha's own chariot, a divine car that Indra had once given to a king of that line, and released the imprisoned kings. When they asked what they could do for him, he asked them to support Yudhishthira's Rajasuya. Jarasandha's son came out humbly with treasure, and Krishna promised him safety and consecrated him king of Magadha on the spot.
The epic sums it up in one line: Krishna had Jarasandha killed by the Pandavas. That is the pattern the whole war will follow. Krishna plans, a Pandava does the work, and a hint at the right moment does more than a weapon. The freed kings became the guests at Yudhishthira's consecration. Jarasandha's general, Shishupala, would be there too.
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