Study Of Mahabharata

Author(s): J W De Jong
Publisher: J W De Jong

Page 17

THE STUDY OF THE MAHĀBHĀRATA instructs Arjuna, the initiate, as to the place man occupies in the universe about him and the true purport of all human action. The battle is a rite and the scene of the battle is not an earthly field of war but a seat of strife in the sacred world, where the initiate, as yet ignorant of the cosmic significance of the conflict, is to be released by his initiator from the bandages that blindfold him and given an insight into the cosmic order (p. 335).
Kșşņa and Arjuna are on the side of the Pāņdavas. In them the idea of initiation is concentrated. On the side of the Kauravas there is Rudra-Siva, the heavenly gambler. The two functions embodied in those two parts are not mutually exclusive, nor are they diametrically opposed to each other, but they are complements the one of the other just as are the rival moieties of a tribe one of which is more engaged in religious activity and the other more in social activities. The game of dice in the epic is not a game of luck or of ability, because it is won by the Kauravas by deceit just as the asura-s were deprived of the amyta by fraud on the part of the deva-s. Yudhișthira is the Dharmarāja not in spite of, but exactly because of, his passion for dice. The game of dice in the epic is a potlatch; and the prestige of the players is the prize played for. That is why the Dharmarāja accepted the challenge with becoming pride (p. 327). The deceit practised by Duryodhana's uncle, Sakuni, is not a psychological or historical problem. Held remarks that deceit occurs whenever the poet feels called upon to credit either of the two groups, related to one another as are two phratries, with enjoying a position of superiority in respect of the other (p. 306). The mutual spirit of emulation and the deceit practised by both parties alike are the concomitants of a phratry-relationship (p. 331),
In his final remarks Held points out that the didactic and epic elements belong to each other genetically because the task of instruction is part and parcel of the process of initiation. The two elements were not artificially brought together and fused by a diaskeuast as maintained by Dahlmann. The logical connection between the didactic and the epical elements is founded upon the internal unity of the culture represented by the epic. The unity still perceptible in the epic is the unity of the form of the society with which the epic is genetically connected. Held believes that the form of human society with which the epic is genetically connected, is probably to be found in the period of the Brāhmaṇas. He adds that if by the so-called "epic" period is meant the entire period in which the Mahā. bhārata assumed its present shape, the time round about the rise of Buddhism must be taken as the terminus a quo.