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Shanti Parva · Episode 3 · Chapters 168–171, 268, 310–320
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.
When Bhishma had finished with the duties of kings and with what a ruler may do in times of disaster, Yudhishthira asked him for something else. You have told me the dharma of kings, he said. Now tell me the highest dharma of those who walk the stages of life.
What Bhishma gives him is the Mokshadharma, the teaching on moksha, release from the round of birth and death. It is long, and much of it is philosophy. But Bhishma rarely argues in the abstract. He tells stories about ordinary people who stopped wanting things, and each of them is aimed at the grieving king in front of him.
The first is about a courtesan named Pingala. She had arranged to meet a lover, and she waited at the appointed place, and he did not come. Somewhere in that long wait she woke up. She had been mad, she said, waiting all this time on lovers, when the one truly dear to her had been near her all along and she had never found him. She would shut the little house of one pillar and nine doors, her own body, and no false lover would fool her again. Then she said the line Bhishma wants the king to remember: the one without hope sleeps happily, and to have no hope is the highest happiness. Having turned her hope into no hope, Pingala slept in peace.
The second is about a man named Manki, who kept trying to make money and kept failing. With the last of what he had he bought a pair of young bullocks to train for the plough. On their first day of training, still yoked together, they ran at a camel lying on the ground. The camel stood up in alarm and ran off with the two bullocks hanging from its neck, one on each side, like a pair of jewels, until they died. Manki stood and watched his last chance swing away. Then he spoke to his own desire. Desire, he said, I know your root. You are born from intention. I will not intend you, and you will be gone, root and all. Gaining wealth brings worry, losing it is like death, and having it is never enough. Manki gave up his desires, and the text says he found the great happiness of brahman.
Bhishma follows this with a verse that King Janaka of Mithila was remembered for. My wealth is endless, he said, because nothing is mine. If Mithila burns, nothing of mine burns. In the Critical Edition this is a saying. Bhishma quotes it more than once, and once tells it as Janaka's answer to a sage named Mandavya. Yudhishthira had asked him then how to turn back the thirst for wealth that had driven them to kill their own kin. The text does not stage a fire. The famous story in which the city really burns while the king sits calm belongs to later tellings. In the epic the fire is only a measure. A man who could watch his capital burn and lose nothing has already lost everything that can be lost. Thirst for wealth, Janaka tells Mandavya, grows with wealth the way a calf's horns grow as the calf grows.
Yudhishthira had quoted that same verse himself, earlier, when he was begging his brothers to let him go to the forest. Now he hears it from the other side: Janaka said it while he still ruled Mithila.
The story that carries all of this furthest belongs to Vyasa's own son. Shuka had been born from the fire-sticks while Vyasa was kindling a sacred fire, and from childhood he wanted only release. His father sent him to Janaka to learn. At the palace gates the guards turned him away, and he stood in the sun without hunger, thirst or anger until someone let him in. The king's servants put him in a pleasure garden among lovely women who sang and played and waited on him all day, and he sat among them meditating, neither pleased nor annoyed.
When Shuka was ready, he climbed a mountain and left the world. He rose into the air, the text says, and passed through a mountain peak, splitting it in two. Below him, on the bank of the Mandakini river, apsarases were bathing naked, and they did not trouble to cover themselves as he went by. He was already beyond being looked at. Vyasa followed his son, grieving, and the same women saw him coming and hurried to hide in the water and the bushes and pull on their clothes. The father saw it and understood. His son was free and he was not, and he was both glad and ashamed.
Vyasa called after him, "Shuka!", in a long cry that filled the three worlds. Shuka had become one with everything, and he answered through everything at once with a single syllable, "bho!" The text says that the echo that answers a voice in mountain caves is Shuka's reply, even now. Then Shiva came to Vyasa and comforted him. His son had gone where even the gods hardly go. Why grieve? Vyasa would always have a shadow beside him that looked like his son.
Bhishma ends the story there, and it may be the most personal answer he gives Yudhishthira. Here is the author of the whole epic, the man who knew all of it, grieving for a son who had gone where he could not follow. Release, the Mokshadharma says, is real, and some people reach it. But the people they leave behind still call after them. Yudhishthira, who has just lost every son of his house, is meant to hear both things: that the way out exists, and that even the wisest feel the loss of those who take it.
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