Satya (satya)

Satya is truth, both as accurate speech and as fidelity between word and reality, and it is the virtue the Mahabharata guards most jealously and complicates most often. Harishchandra loses kingdom, family and freedom rather than break a promise, while Yudhishthira, whose chariot is said to ride above the ground because he has never lied, brings it down by a single equivocation about Ashvatthama. Krishna's teaching to Arjuna about the ascetic Kaushika argues that truth spoken to a murderer is not truth at all but complicity.