The Weapon That Could Not Be Faced

This is the tale of the Narayanastra, the irresistible weapon, and of how it was met not by force but by submission - one of the great lessons of the war. On the fifteenth day, after Drona the teacher had been slain, his son Ashwatthama was consumed with grief and rage. For Drona had been brought down by a stratagem: a false report that Ashwatthama was dead, which made the old warrior lay down his arms in despair, whereupon he was beheaded as he sat unresisting in meditation upon the field. When Ashwatthama learned the truth - that his father had been undone by a lie about his own death and slain while defenseless - his sorrow turned to a terrible fury, and he resolved to take a fearful vengeance upon the whole Pandava host.

For his vengeance, Ashwatthama reached for the most dreadful of all the weapons he possessed: the Narayanastra, the weapon of Narayana, the Lord Vishnu himself, which his father had given him. This was a celestial weapon of overwhelming and irresistible power, against which no force could prevail; and it had a terrible nature, that it grew fiercer and more deadly the more it was resisted, raining destruction in proportion to the opposition offered it, so that to fight against it was only to feed its fury and to be destroyed. Ashwatthama, blind with grief and wrath, invoked this weapon to annihilate the entire Pandava army in revenge for his father's death.

Ashwatthama invoked the Narayanastra with the dreadful rites, and at once the whole sky and field were filled with its power. There appeared a storm of annihilation: countless blazing weapons, arrows and discs and missiles and tongues of fire, manifesting in the air on every side and raining down upon the Pandava host, a tempest of celestial destruction that filled all directions, growing thicker and fiercer by the moment, threatening to consume the entire army utterly. There seemed no escape from it, for it covered the whole field, and it could not be countered by any opposing weapon, but only grew stronger against all resistance.

The Pandava warriors, seeing this irresistible storm of fire descending upon them, were filled with terror; and in their fear many did as warriors do - they took up their weapons and began to fight back against the astra, loosing their own arrows and weapons against it, struggling to resist and to defend themselves. But this was the very worst thing they could do; for the nature of the Narayanastra was to grow fiercer in exact measure as it was opposed, so that every weapon raised against it, every act of resistance, only fed its fury and turned its power more deadly upon the resister. The more they fought, the more terrible it became; and the whole army stood on the brink of total annihilation, made worse by their own desperate efforts to resist.

Then Krishna, who knew the secret nature of the Narayanastra, cried out a command to the whole Pandava host, the one thing that could save them. 'Throw down your weapons!' he called. 'All of you - cast away your arms at once, dismount from your chariots and your horses and your elephants, and stand or sit upon the ground in complete submission, with no thought of resistance and no weapon in your hands. Make no opposition to the weapon, none at all; offer it no fight, no resistance, not even in your minds; but yield to it utterly, bow before it, and it will pass you by and do you no harm. For this weapon destroys only those who resist it, and grows fierce only against opposition; to the one who offers no resistance at all, who submits completely, it does nothing. Lay down your arms and your pride, and live!'

It was a hard and a strange command to give to warriors in the midst of battle - to throw down their weapons before an oncoming foe, to abandon all resistance, to bow in submission rather than fight. Everything in a warrior's nature and training rebelled against it; to lay down arms and yield seemed the very opposite of courage and of the warrior's code. Yet Krishna, knowing the secret of the weapon, insisted: that here was a force that could not be overcome by resistance, but only by the complete laying down of resistance; that the way to survive it was not to fight but to yield; and that pride and the warrior's instinct to resist would here be fatal, while humble submission alone would save.

Trusting in Krishna's wisdom, the Pandava warriors obeyed. All across the host, the warriors cast away their weapons - their bows and swords and maces and shields - dismounted from their chariots and their war-beasts, and stood or sat upon the ground in complete submission, unarmed and unresisting, bowing before the oncoming storm of the Narayanastra, offering it no opposition at all, emptying their minds even of the thought of resistance, yielding to it utterly. The whole army laid down its arms and its pride together, and bowed.

And as the warriors submitted, the Narayanastra, finding no resistance to feed upon, passed harmlessly over them. Where the storm of celestial weapons descended upon the unarmed and unresisting, it did them no harm; finding no opposition, no fight, no pride raised against it, its fury found nothing to seize upon, and it passed by the submissive host without slaying them. The irresistible weapon, that would have annihilated an army fighting back, was rendered powerless against an army that simply yielded; and the warriors who had thrown down their arms and bowed were spared, while those who had begun to resist were saved only by ceasing. So the whole host was delivered, not by the strength of its resistance, but by the completeness of its submission.

But there was one who would not bow. Bhima, the mighty and proud, his blood up with the battle, refused to throw down his arms and submit; for it seemed to him a shameful thing, against all the honor of a warrior, to yield and bow before any weapon or any foe. 'I will not cast away my weapons and bow like a coward,' he declared; 'I will meet this weapon as a warrior should, and resist it with all my strength.' And so, while all the rest of the host submitted, Bhima alone stood his ground and fought on against the Narayanastra, loosing his weapons against it in proud defiance.

But this was exactly the folly that the weapon fed upon; and at once the whole fury of the Narayanastra, finding in Bhima the only resistance on all the field, concentrated upon him, blazing against him with redoubled force, the celestial fire and weapons gathering to consume the one proud warrior who would not yield. The more Bhima fought, the fiercer the weapon grew against him, until he stood wrapped in a storm of fire that would surely have destroyed him in moments. His pride and his warrior's refusal to submit had brought him to the very edge of annihilation, the one man on the field in mortal peril, and that by his own defiance.

Seeing Bhima alone wrapped in the gathering fury of the weapon and about to be destroyed by his own defiance, Krishna and Arjuna rushed to save him. They seized the proud warrior bodily, wrestling with him, and forcibly tore the weapons from his hands and dragged him down from his chariot to the ground, overpowering his resistance and compelling him, against his will, to abandon the fight and submit like the rest. Only by thus forcing submission upon him did they save him; for as soon as Bhima was disarmed and made to yield, even against his will, the weapon's fury found no more resistance to feed upon, and passed him by at last.

So Bhima too was saved, but only by being forced to do what his pride refused - to lay down his arms and submit. The moment his resistance ceased, perforce, the Narayanastra spared him as it had spared the rest. Had Krishna and Arjuna not overpowered him and compelled his submission, his pride would have destroyed him; for against this weapon, resistance was death and submission alone was life, and Bhima's warrior's refusal to yield would have been his ruin. The one man who would not bow had to be made to bow, for his own salvation; and so the whole host, the willing and the unwilling alike, was brought through the storm by submission.

Finding no resistance anywhere upon the field - the whole Pandava host having thrown down its arms and bowed, and even proud Bhima forced at last to submit - the Narayanastra had nothing to feed upon, and its fury subsided. The storm of celestial weapons faded and was spent, having claimed only a few who had resisted before the submission was complete, but failing utterly of its purpose to annihilate the army; for an army that would not fight back could not be destroyed by it. The irresistible weapon was rendered harmless, not by being countered, but by being given nothing to oppose.

Ashwatthama, watching from afar, was dismayed and grieved to see his terrible vengeance come to nothing. For the Narayanastra could be invoked but once; and now it was spent, foiled by the wisdom of Krishna, who had known that the way to defeat the undefeatable weapon was not to fight it but to yield to it. Ashwatthama's grief and wrath were doubled, that his greatest weapon, the weapon of Narayana himself, had been turned aside by mere submission, and that the Pandavas, whom he had meant to annihilate, stood unharmed by the very means of their humility. The weapon was gone; the army was saved; and Krishna's wisdom had triumphed over the irresistible by the strange power of yielding.

The tale of the Narayanastra carries a lesson found nowhere else so plainly in all the war: the strange power of yielding, and the wisdom of knowing when not to resist.

See, first, that there are some forces that cannot be overcome by resistance, but only by submission. The Narayanastra grew fiercer in exact measure as it was opposed, so that to fight it was to be destroyed by it, and the only escape was to lay down all resistance and yield. The tale teaches that not every foe and not every force is to be met with resistance and struggle; that there are powers in life against which the harder we fight, the worse we fare; and that wisdom lies in discerning these, and meeting them not with the pride of resistance but with the humility of submission. To know when to yield, and not to fight, is sometimes the highest wisdom and the only safety.

And see how pride invites destruction where humility brings deliverance. The whole host was saved by bowing; only Bhima, in his warrior's pride, refused to yield, and so drew the weapon's whole fury upon himself, and had to be forced into the submission that saved him. The tale teaches that pride and the refusal to yield, which seem like courage, may be folly and ruin; that humility and submission, which seem like weakness, may be wisdom and salvation; and that there are times when to bow is braver and wiser than to stand. Above all it teaches the supremacy of Krishna's wisdom over brute force: that the irresistible was overcome not by a greater weapon but by the humble laying down of all weapons; and that the deepest victories are sometimes won not by resistance, but by yielding.