Theme of the Mahabharata
Forgiveness
क्षमा
The hardest virtue in a book about revenge, and the one it finally recommends.
How the Epic Treats Forgiveness
Kshama, forgiveness or forbearance, is the virtue the Mahabharata argues for hardest and portrays least often, which is exactly why the argument has weight. This is a poem in which a woman keeps her hair unbound for thirteen years to hold a debt open, a man drinks his enemy's blood in front of two armies, and a rejected princess burns herself alive in order to return in another body and finish the job. The epic knows precisely what revenge feels like from the inside. It also knows where it ends, because it has shown us: eighteen days, eighteen armies, and a victory with nobody left to enjoy it.
Its argument for forgiveness is therefore not sentimental. Bhishma, teaching from the arrow-bed, treats forbearance as strength rather than as weakness, the quality by which a person holds a position rather than surrenders it, and he pairs it with the warning that endless forgiveness in a ruler invites contempt. Vidura says much the same in another key. The epic is interested in forgiveness as a discipline that a strong person can afford and a weak one cannot even attempt, which is a very different thing from being nice.
The place it lands hardest is the night after the war. Ashwatthama has murdered the five sons of Draupadi in their sleep, along with her brother and everyone else in the camp. He is dragged to her bound, and Bhima wants him dead. Draupadi, who has spent the entire epic refusing to let a wrong be forgotten, is the one who says let him go, because she knows what it is to be a mother and will not do to Drona's widow what has been done to her. He is not acquitted; the jewel is cut from his head and the curse stands. But the woman with the strongest claim in the poem is the one who declines to collect it, and the epic gives her the decision.
The last movement of the story keeps making the same demand. Gandhari, standing among a hundred dead sons, is asked by Vyasa to consider whose choices brought them there. Yudhishthira takes care of the blind uncle who tried to destroy his family, and escorts him to the forest to die well. And at the very end, offered a heaven that contains his enemy and not his brothers, he refuses to be separated from the people who suffered rather than gloating over the one who is comfortable. The epic's final image of forgiveness is not a warm feeling. It is a decision to stop the accounting and stay with the living.
Defining Moments
7 scenes in which the epic decides what it thinks about forgiveness.
Draupadi Spares Ashwatthama
Sauptika Parva
The man who cut the throats of her five sleeping sons is brought to her in ropes, and the epic gives her the verdict. Bhima wants him killed. She refuses, saying that Drona's widow should not be made to feel what she is feeling now, and asks that he be released. The gem is taken from his forehead and Krishna's curse stands, so this is not absolution. It is the person with the greatest right to revenge in the whole poem declining to exercise it.
Read the story: The Night of BloodGandhari on the Battlefield
Stri Parva
The blindfolded queen walks the field among her hundred sons, and the grief turns outward: she curses Krishna to watch his own clan destroy itself, which he accepts without defence. Vyasa then asks her to look at her own counsel and her own silences. The scene is the epic's honest account of how hard forgiveness is at the exact moment it is most needed, and it lets the curse stand rather than tidying it away.
Read the story: The Aftermath of WarGautami Sets the Snake Free
Anushasana Parva
Offered the snake that killed her son, with a fowler ready to do the killing, an old woman says no. What follows is an argument in which Death and Time each pass the blame along until the last speaker says the boy died of his own ripened deeds and no hand present is truly the cause. She lets the snake go. Bhishma tells the story to a king who has just won a war, which is not an accident.
Read the story: The Old Woman, the Snake, and DeathThe Pigeon Who Fed the Fowler
Shanti Parva
A hunter who has caged a dove is caught by a freezing storm under the tree where her mate lives, and the caged bird tells her husband to treat him as a guest. The pigeon lights a fire for the man who took his wife and, having no food to offer, flies into it. The hunter frees the dove and abandons his trade. The epic puts its most extreme picture of forgiveness in the mouths of birds, where the arithmetic of honour does not apply.
Read the story: The Dove and the HunterA King Who Did Not Want the Throne
Shanti Parva
Yudhishthira, having won, wants to walk into the forest rather than rule over the graves of his teachers and cousins. What follows is a long argument by Krishna, Vyasa and finally Bhishma that grief indulged is another form of self-regard, that the dead are not served by his abdication, and that the living need a king. Forgiveness here is turned inward, and it is the hardest direction: he has to stop prosecuting himself before he can govern.
Read the story: Bhishma on the Bed of ArrowsCaring for the Uncle Who Ruined Him
Ashramavasika Parva
For fifteen years after the war Yudhishthira keeps Dhritarashtra in honour, defers to him, and holds his brothers in check, while Bhima cannot stop making remarks about who killed whom. When the old king and Gandhari and Kunti finally leave for the forest, Yudhishthira escorts them and grieves. The epic measures forgiveness in years of ordinary courtesy to someone you have every reason to hate, which is harder than any single act of mercy.
Read the story: The Forest RetreatRefusing a Heaven Without Them
Svargarohana Parva
Yudhishthira reaches heaven, finds Duryodhana enthroned there, and is furious. Taken instead to a reeking hell where he hears Karna and Draupadi and his brothers calling out, he tells the gods he will stay. The illusion breaks; it was the last test. His anger at his enemy's comfort is allowed to be real, and what the epic asks of him in the end is not that he stop feeling it but that he choose the suffering over the grievance.
Read the story: The Ascent to Heaven
In the Bhagavad Gita
Chapters 12 and 16
The Gita names forgiveness twice in ways that matter. In its catalogue of the divine endowment, kshama stands among fearlessness, non-violence, truthfulness and freedom from anger, while the opposing list is headed by arrogance and wrath, which Krishna calls a gate to ruin. Earlier he describes the devotee dearest to him as the one who bears no ill will toward any being, who is friendly and compassionate and forgiving, and who is unmoved alike by praise and blame. Anger, in his account, is not a feeling to be managed but a chain in a sequence: attachment produces anger, anger produces confusion, and confusion destroys the person.
Read the Bhagavad GitaQuestions to Sit With
- Draupadi forgives without acquitting: the killer lives and the curse stands. Is that forgiveness, or something else that deserves its own name?
- Bhishma teaches that a ruler who always forgives invites contempt. Where is your own line between forbearance and permitting harm?
- Yudhishthira spends fifteen years being courteous to the man who destroyed his family. Which is harder, one great act of mercy or a decade of small ones?