The story

Yudhishthira had won the war, and now he wanted to leave.

He said it first to Arjuna, still thinking of Karna. If they had lived by begging in the city of the Vrishnis, he said, they would never have come to this. Shame on the warrior's way, shame on strength and pride. They had killed men who should never have been killed, for a scrap of land, and they were like dogs fighting over a piece of meat: the meat was gone, and so were the dogs who wanted it. He would give the kingdom to Arjuna and go into the forest, free of possessions, and leave the world's grief behind.

What follows is one of the longest arguments in the epic, and everyone who loves him speaks in character.

Arjuna was angry. A king who throws away a kingdom won by his own dharma is weak, he said. Poverty is not holy. Dharma and every good act flow from wealth, and the poor man is looked at as if he were already guilty. Why should a king choose the begging bowl? Bhima was blunter. Yudhishthira's mind, he said, was like a reciter's who has repeated the scripture so often that he no longer sees what it means. If they had known he would think like this, they would never have taken up weapons at all. Nakula and Sahadeva argued too. Sahadeva put the whole matter in a riddle of syllables. Mama, mine, has two syllables and is death; na mama, not mine, has three and is the eternal. Giving up outward things is not enough. The real work is giving up the self that says mine, and a king can do that while he rules.

Then Draupadi spoke, and she did not soften anything. Look at your brothers, she said. They are like chataka birds crying for rain, and you give them nothing. In the forest you promised them that once Duryodhana was dead they would enjoy the earth together. A weak man does not hold the earth, and a king without the rod of punishment does not shine. Your mother, who sees everything, once told me you would set me in the highest happiness, and now I see that promise wasted. Then she said the thing no brother could. The eldest is mad, she said, and the rest follow him into it. If they were sane, they would tie him up with the unbelievers and rule the earth themselves.

Yudhishthira was not moved by argument, because argument was not his trouble. When Vyasa came and spoke, he opened the wound itself. He had played in Bhishma's lap as a child, he said, and he had killed him for a kingdom. He had lied to his own teacher, wearing the truth like a cloak, and said Ashvatthama was dead when it was an elephant. He had killed Karna, his elder brother. He had sent the boy Abhimanyu into Drona's formation, and since that day he could not look Arjuna or Krishna in the face. He would sit there and starve himself to death.

Vyasa refused. Protecting the people is the king's dharma, he said, and a king who fails to stop the destroyers of dharma becomes its destroyer himself. Then he went through every account of who really acts in the world. If God moves men, the deed is no more theirs than the felling of a tree is the axe's. If a man is the true doer of his deeds, then let a man who has done harm do good to answer it. At Arjuna's request Krishna spoke as well. The fallen were like riches found in a dream, he said, gone on waking, and every one of them had died facing the enemy. Then he told how Narada had once comforted a king grieving for his son, by naming sixteen great kings of old, each greater than that king and his son, and each of them dead.

Slowly Yudhishthira came round. He asked Vyasa to teach him the duties of kings. Go to Bhishma, Vyasa said. Bhishma knows them all, and he will not live much longer. Yudhishthira flinched. How could he question the man he had killed by a trick? Krishna answered him. The brahmins and his brothers were waiting on him, he said, like people parched in summer waiting for rain. Do this for them. And Yudhishthira stood up.

He entered Hastinapura on a new white chariot drawn by sixteen white oxen. Bhima held the reins. Arjuna held the white umbrella over him, and the twins carried the fly whisks. Dhritarashtra went ahead of him in a litter with Gandhari. The city was hung with garlands and banners.

Even then, one voice was waiting for him. In the palace, a man in a mendicant's robes stepped out of the crowd of brahmins and cried that they all said the same thing: shame on this king, this killer of his kin. It would be better for him to die. Yudhishthira did not defend himself. He bowed his head and begged them not to curse a man already in such distress. The brahmins were shocked. These were not their words, they said. They saw with their inner sight that the speaker was the rakshasa Charvaka, Duryodhana's friend, in disguise, and their furious cries burned him where he stood.

Then Yudhishthira sat on a golden seat facing east, and the priest Dhaumya, with Krishna's leave, consecrated him king beside Draupadi.

The grief does not end here, and the epic does not pretend it does. What changes is what the grief is for. Yudhishthira's wish to escape the kingdom is turned into a wish to rule it well, and his next question is not how to leave but how to govern. That question takes him to a dying man on a bed of arrows, and to the longest teaching in the Mahabharata.

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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Draupadi — Won in a contest she had no say in, married to five men on a careless word, and the only person in the hall who asks a question of law.
• Sahadeva — The youngest Pandava, Madri's other son, who serves Virata as a cowherd and is the first of the brothers to fall on the road north.
• Nakula — The fourth Pandava, Madri's son, whom Yudhishthira chooses to bring back to life ahead of his own full brothers at the yaksha's lake.
• 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.
• 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
• Theme: The impossible choice

Elsewhere in this parva

• The duties of a king — From his bed of arrows Bhishma explains why the world needs a king at all, and why the people paid Manu to take the job.
• The teaching on release — 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.

Questions to explore

• Why did Yudhishthira want to renounce the kingdom after winning the war?
• What did Draupadi say to convince Yudhishthira to rule?
• Who was the rakshasa Charvaka and why did he accuse Yudhishthira?