The story

Near the end of the longest lesson in the epic, the student asked a question small enough to carry home.

The teacher was Bhishma, lying on his bed of arrows at Kurukshetra, and the student was Yudhishthira, now king of a country he had emptied of kings. Most of the Shanti Parva and nearly all of the Anushasana Parva — the book of instruction — are this one conversation between a dying grandfather and the grandson whose war had put him there.

The Anushasana opens with Yudhishthira admitting that none of it has worked. He has been taught every kind of peace, he says, and has none. He looks at the old man's body, stuck through with shafts and running with blood, and sees his own doing in it. Bhishma answers him with a story. A brahmana woman named Gautami found her son dead of a snakebite. A hunter, Arjunaka, caught the snake in a cord and brought it to her to choose its death. The snake said Death had sent it. Death said Time had moved him. Time said the boy had come to his end through his own past deeds. Gautami had the hunter let the snake go. It was not you who did this, Bhishma told his grandson, and not Duryodhana either. Time did it.

What follows fills well over a hundred chapters, and it is teaching, not story. A great deal of it is about gifts — dana, giving as a religious act. What to give: food, water, cows, land, gold, lamps. To whom, and when, and why an honest gift to a worthy person outweighs a larger careless one. Around the gifts runs teaching on conduct, the everyday discipline of a householder and a king: whom to honour, how to eat, how to fast, how to speak. There is also a long dialogue between Shiva and his wife Uma on the nature of dharma. Early in the book Yudhishthira asks for the names of Shiva, and Bhishma turns to Krishna, who recites a thousand names of Shiva as the sage Upamanyu once taught them to him. Late in the book, the same kind of question comes back, pointed at Vishnu, and this time Bhishma answers it himself.

The chapter that holds it is short. Yudhishthira had heard, the text says, all the teachings on dharma and on what purifies. Then he asked again, and his questions are not a scholar's questions. Who is the one god in the world? What is the one final refuge? Praising whom, and worshipping whom, would people reach what is good? Which of all dharmas did Bhishma himself hold to be the highest? And by reciting what is a living being set free from the bonds of birth and the round of rebirth?

Bhishma's answer comes in one breath. A person who is tireless in praising the lord of the world — the god of gods, without end, the highest person — with a thousand names; who worships him with devotion, meditates on him, bows to him; such a person passes beyond all sorrow. And then the line that answers the fourth question directly: this, he says, is in my view the highest dharma of all, that a person should always worship the lotus-eyed one with hymns, in devotion.

He describes who it is that he means. The highest light, the highest austerity, the highest brahman, the final refuge. The purest of the things that purify, the most auspicious of the auspicious, the god of the gods, the undying father of every creature. The one from whom all beings come at the dawn of an age and into whom they return when the age ends. Hear from me, Bhishma says, the thousand names of Vishnu, which take away sin and fear — the names drawn from his qualities, famous, sung by the seers.

Then come the names, which fill most of the chapter. They are meant to be recited, not summarised, and are not retold here.

After them the chapter says what the recitation brings. A brahmana who recites it masters the Vedanta, a kshatriya wins, a vaishya prospers, a shudra finds happiness. The sick are freed from sickness, the bound from bonds, the frightened from fear. Whoever wants dharma gets dharma, and whoever wants children gets children. And among these promises sits a sentence that ties the hymn back to the book around it: acaraprabhavo dharmo, dharmasya prabhur acyutah — dharma springs from conduct, and the lord of dharma is Achyuta, the one who never falls. In its last verses the chapter calls this the hymn of Vishnu proclaimed by Vyasa.

The Sahasranama as it is chanted in homes and temples today carries more than this chapter. The meditation verses recited before the names, and the closing exchange in which Parvati asks Shiva for a shorter way and is given the name of Rama, belong to later liturgical tradition and are not part of the constituted text. The questions, the answer and the names are the epic's own.

Notice who is speaking: the man who, in the dice hall, told Draupadi that the way of dharma was too subtle for him to judge. Asked now what the highest dharma is, he does not hedge. The answer is devotion, offered every day, and the chapter will not let devotion float free of behaviour: conduct is where dharma comes from, and Achyuta is its lord.

That is what this short chapter establishes. The Mahabharata has argued for many books that dharma is hard to see, and it has shown good people failing to see it. Near the end of Bhishma's teaching it offers a practice that does not depend on seeing everything first: a set of names, said daily. The grandsire gives it to the king as one of the last things he teaches, and before long, with the sun turning north, he will ask the same Krishna for leave to die.

Who appears, and what it argues

• Yudhishthira — The eldest Pandava, called the king of dharma, who gambles away his brothers, his wife and himself without anyone forcing his hand.
• Bhishma — The grand-uncle whose vow of celibacy was meant to secure the succession and instead left it disputed for three generations.
• Krishna — Cousin, envoy and charioteer — the one who shapes the war's course without ever lifting a weapon in it.
• Theme: Renunciation and release
• Theme: The king's duty

Elsewhere in this parva

• The death of Bhishma — After fifty-eight nights on arrows Bhishma waits for the northern sun, takes leave of Krishna and rises out of his own body

Questions to explore

• Why does Bhishma name devotion as the highest dharma after teaching Yudhishthira so much about gifts and conduct?
• What does Yudhishthira actually ask before the thousand names begin, and what is he looking for?
• Which parts of the Vishnu Sahasranama as it is chanted today belong to the epic, and which were added later?