Theme of the Mahabharata
Sacrifice
त्याग
The epic keeps asking what a person will give up, and then it asks for more.
How the Epic Treats Sacrifice
Two words sit behind this theme and the Mahabharata uses both. Yajna is the sacrificial rite, fire and offering and formula, the machinery by which the ancient world did business with the gods. Tyaga is renunciation, the plain act of letting go of something you want. The epic spends a great deal of its length showing that the first is worth very little without the second, and its most famous sacrifices are not performed at altars at all.
Bhishma sets the standard in the first book. A young prince gives up a throne he was born to and any possibility of children, permanently and in public, to buy his father a marriage. Flowers fall from the sky and he is granted death at his own choosing. It is the largest renunciation in the poem and it is also, as the epic patiently demonstrates over the following seventeen books, a catastrophe: the line has no heirs, the succession passes through borrowed seed, and the man who gave up everything spends his last decades fighting for people he cannot respect. The poem holds both facts at once without resolving them.
The war then produces a series of offerings that are simply lives. Iravan, Arjuna's son by a Naga princess, arrives uninvited at Kurukshetra and gives himself to the goddess of the battlefield before he fights. Barbarika, who could have finished the war in a moment, hands over his own head when a disguised Krishna asks for it in charity, and asks only to be allowed to watch. Ghatotkacha is sent into a night battle so that Karna will be forced to spend the weapon he was saving for Arjuna. Karna, warned exactly what will happen, cuts the armour he was born with out of his own skin because a brahmin asked and he has never refused a brahmin. In each case the giver knows the price, which is what makes it an offering rather than a loss.
Against all this the epic sets one small animal with a very sharp point to make. At Yudhishthira's horse sacrifice, the most magnificent rite the poem describes, a mongoose with half its body turned to gold rolls in the leavings, fails to turn the rest of itself gold, and announces that the whole imperial ceremony is worth less than a handful of barley flour given by a starving family to a guest. The epic's final position on sacrifice is stated by a rodent in the middle of a royal ritual: the measure of a gift is what it costs the giver, and grandeur has nothing to do with it.
Defining Moments
7 scenes in which the epic decides what it thinks about sacrifice.
Devavrata Becomes Bhishma
Adi Parva
To let his father marry a fisher chief's daughter, the crown prince renounces the throne, and then, when the chief points out that his sons could still claim it, renounces marriage and children as well. The gods rain flowers and give him death at his own choosing, and the epic gives him the name that means the terrible one. The greatest single act of renunciation in the poem is also the wound the dynasty never recovers from.
Read the story: The Terrible VowThe Armour Cut from the Skin
Vana Parva
Karna is born wearing golden armour and earrings that make him unkillable, and he has a standing rule that he will refuse no brahmin who asks at his morning prayers. Indra comes in that disguise for the sake of his own son. Warned in a dream by Surya, Karna gives them anyway, cutting them out of his body, and takes a single-use spear in exchange. The generosity is deliberate and self-destructive and the epic never once suggests he should have chosen otherwise.
Read the story: The Fall of Bhishma and the EarringsThe Serpent Prince at the Altar
Bhishma Parva
Iravan, son of Arjuna and the Naga princess Ulupi, is raised in his mother's underwater kingdom and comes unsummoned to Kurukshetra to fight for a father who barely knows him. He offers himself to the battlefield goddess before the fighting, holds the field like a storm, and dies on the eighth day to a shape-shifting rakshasa. He is the first of Arjuna's sons to be spent for the Pandava cause, and he volunteers.
Read the story: The Serpent Prince's SacrificeThe Head That Watched the War
Folk and regional tradition
Bhima's grandson comes to Kurukshetra with three arrows that could end the war in a moment and a vow to fight always for the losing side, which Krishna sees would grind both armies to nothing. Disguised as a brahmin, he asks the boy for the strongest thing he has, and Barbarika gives his own head without argument, asking only to be allowed to watch. Set on a hill, the living head becomes the war's one uninvolved witness.
Read the story: The Head That Watched the WarA Son Spent to Draw a Spear
Drona Parva
Ghatotkacha is unleashed on the fourteenth night because rakshasa strength grows after dark, and he does so much damage that Duryodhana forces Karna to use the infallible weapon reserved for Arjuna. The giant dies crushing thousands under his falling body, and Arjuna lives. Krishna knew exactly what would happen. The epic lets the strategy be sound and lets Bhima grieve, and does not pretend that the two cancel out.
Read the story: The Spear Meant for ArjunaThe Hawk and the Dove
Vana Parva
A dove drops into King Shibi's lap begging protection and a hawk claims it as lawful food. Shibi offers his own flesh instead, and the scale will not balance, so he keeps cutting until he steps onto it whole. The two birds are gods testing him. The tale is the epic's clearest statement that refuge, once granted, is absolute, and that the price of protection is paid by the protector rather than negotiated down.
Read the story: The Hawk and the DoveThe Mongoose at the Horse Sacrifice
Ashvamedhika Parva
At the grandest rite of Yudhishthira's reign a mongoose with one golden flank rolls in the remains and stays half brown. It explains that it turned gold once before, in the dust of a famine-struck house where a starving family gave a guest the last barley flour they had and died of it. The whole imperial sacrifice, it says, does not weigh as much as that handful. The epic ends its argument about giving with a deliberate anticlimax.
Read the story: The Mongoose and the Sacrifice
In the Bhagavad Gita
Chapters 3, 4 and 18
Krishna reworks sacrifice from a ritual into a way of doing anything at all. The whole world, he says, is bound by action except action performed as yajna, so the point is not the fire but the offering: work done and released rather than clutched. He then separates two words that sound alike. Sannyasa is the abandoning of actions themselves, which he does not recommend; tyaga is the abandoning of any claim on their fruits, which he calls the real thing. Acts of sacrifice, giving and discipline are never to be given up, because they purify the person who performs them, and giving in particular counts only when it is offered to the right person at the right time without expecting anything back.
Read the Bhagavad GitaQuestions to Sit With
- Bhishma's renunciation is magnificent and it ruins his house. Can a sacrifice be both admirable and wrong?
- The mongoose says a gift counts only by what it costs the giver. Measured that way, what have you actually given?
- Karna is warned exactly what giving away his armour will cost him and gives it anyway. Is that integrity or vanity?