Nara and Nārāyaṇa were two ṛṣis unlike others but very like each other. Brahmā saw them pass by one day, side by side. “Those two are older than I am,” he thought — and already they had gone. “But how can it be that I, who am progenitor of everything, feel that I come after someone else?” Gnawed by doubt, he turned to Kaśyapa, who said: “Whether the existent world be made of mind or fire or some aggregate called matter is, in the end, hardly important. It only exists if consciousness perceives it as existing. And if a consciousness perceives it, within that consciousness there must be another consciousness that perceives the consciousness that perceives. They are inseparable friends. They are Nara and Nārāyaṇa. You can spread yourself across ten thousand worlds, but without them you don’t exist. One day Śiva said of them: ‘The world is held up by the splendor of the two of you.’ That is why they are continually appearing and disappearing. They were the two birds on the aśvattha tree. They will be Kṛṣṇa and Arjuna. Nara is Man and Water, as his name suggests. He is the one and the other, when he is not torn apart, when he is the single wave. It is through Nara that we have knowledge, but our knowledge would be limited, no greater than the knowledge of a muscle that contracts and relaxes, if it were not reflected in Nārāyaṇa’s eye. In which, what’s more, we lose ourselves: to pass from one eye to the other is to pass from a river to the sea. Thus true knowledge is cloaked in uncertainty. But that is enough to live with. The supreme, ultimate relief is to know that Nara is indissolubly tied to Nārāyaṇa. And it was Nārāyaṇa, Kṛṣṇa at the time, who when granted a boon by Indra asked for the perennial friendship of Nara, Arjuna at the time. The boon was asked of Arjuna’s father, against whom, together with Arjuna, Kṛṣṇa had fought and won. Friendship prevails over kinship. Every family dies out, but the tie between the mind and his Guest does not. When men feel dumb and afflicted, they remember what Nārāyaṇa once said through Kṛṣṇa: ‘I cannot look at this world even for the briefest instant without Arjuna.’ Then there is a detail that betrays all the kindness, the almost studied carelessness of the god: Nārāyaṇa is a patronymic. As if the god who has no name had, in choosing a provisional name, decided to give precedence to man, to the point of having himself pass for his son. You, with all your children born-of-the-mind, would not have been capable of this.”
When the five Pāṇḍavas showed themselves, they dazzled the eye. But only so long as they had Kṛṣṇa beside them, that relative, friend, counselor who never bore arms himself. As soon as Kṛṣṇa left them, a veil of dust fell on their faces. Their words became dull, lifeless. They would launch into redundant oratory, like actors who have played a part once too often. One day, Arjuna realized he could no longer bend his bow. He thought of time and how it corrodes. He didn’t know that at that very moment Kṛṣṇa lay dying.
This is how Kṛṣṇa died: he was lying down, eyes closed, back resting on a tree trunk. The soles of his feet were propped up on a clump of grass. Jara, an Asura hunter, was chasing an antelope. Dazzled by the sudden light of the clearing, he shot an arrow at the soles of Kṛṣṇa’s feet, which he had mistaken for the antelope’s ears. It was the only part of his body on which, one day long ago, while obeying the orders of the brahman Durvāsas, Kṛṣṇa had not spread the cream of rice.
Everything begins with an arrow shot in perfect consciousness at two copulating antelopes: everything ends with an arrow shot in perfect unconsciousness at the sole of a foot mistaken for an antelope. In the beginning: everything emerged from the indistinct wave. Later: everything was suddenly submerged by another indistinct wave. In the middle: a devastating war, won by the five Pāṇḍavas, only in name sons of Pāndu, who had been cursed by a brahman he had shot in the hunt while, in the form of an antelope, the brahman was copulating. “As soon as you penetrate a woman, you will die” were the brahman’s last words. From that moment on Pāṇḍu committed himself to a life of chastity. One day he was in the forest with Mādrī, his favorite wife. He lifted his eyes in a look of desire and farewell. He died the moment he penetrated her.
When Pāṇḍu’s funeral rites were over, Vyāsa went to his mother, Satyavatī, who was “blinded by the pain of sorrow.” He delivered a lofty speech, full of pathos, which he would later insert in the Mahābhārata: “The happy days are gone, now there are horrors in store. Tomorrow after tomorrow, each day will be worse. The earth has lost its youth.” This epitaph for Pāṇḍu was also an epitaph in advance for the Pāṇḍavas, and it resounds throughout the poem like the tolling of a bell. Yet Ānandavardhana, who knew more than anyone of dhrani, of “poetic suggestion,” maintained that the dominant rasa—the flavor, the taste, the tonality — of the Mahābhārata was the śāntarasa, the “peace rasa.” To many this claim seemed paradoxical and provocative. Where was peace to be found in that appalling chain of events? None of the poem’s protagonists could be considered an appropriate bearer of such a rasa. Who could feel peaceful upon hearing of a succession of slaughters framed by a general disaster? Yudhiṣṭhira himself, who was the very stuff of dharma, would remain unappeased, even in Indra’s heaven. But Ānandavardhana was right. Peace was there, in the tone of the narrative voice that never wavered, never buckled. A voice as willing to reveal the “most secret knowledge of the secret” as to list the members of a Nāga dynasty, or press on with a story told within a story and creating a frame for other stories, or to give us the most minute details of a massacre. The most immediate objection to Ānandavardhana’s theory might be this: the introduction to the poem “expressly states that the Mahābhārata gives instruction on all purposes of life and contains all the rasa.” How could anyone deny it? And how can we subordinate the many rasa of the Mahābhārata to that “peace rasa” which, what’s more, was not included in the original list of the rasa, written down in the Nāṭyaśāstra of Bharata? Ānandavardhana was aware that the fate of his whole theory, according to which the noblest poetry does not admit of mixture but is based on one dominant rasa, depended on the answer to that question. And he wrote: “An essential meaning generates even greater beauty if made manifest without being directly explicit. This is common custom when refined and cultured people meet together: the thought they have most at heart is made manifest implicitly, not directly and explicitly.”